The bottom of the barrel

In WSJ’s Washington Wire, Gerald Seib and Sara Murray quote Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker preaching to the Democrats about how they can fool the American public on domestic drilling who has hit the bottom of the barrel as far as excuses go against drilling;

The point is easy to understand. We take all the risks. We pay all the costs. But we don’t get all the benefits, such as they are. Once the oil comes out, some time in the far future, it gets sold to whoever’s buying at that day’s price. The impact on price will be spread across the globe—which is why, as even the Bush Administration’s Department of Energy admits, that impact will be “insignificant.”

It’s a drop in the bucket, and it’s not even our bucket. It’s China’s, India’s, Europe’s—everybody’s. We get a thimbleful. But our wind and our sunlight aren’t going anywhere. Aren’t we better off putting our efforts into encouraging and harnessing them? When we’re thinking long term, when we’re planning for twenty years from now, shouldn’t we be looking to get away from carbon-belching, icecap-melting, coast-destroying oil?

Yeah, do that, you idiots. Make the discussion about not lowering oil costs because it would benefit some guy riding a Moto-Guzzi in Beijing. More “us vs them” rhetoric from the Left. We’ll continue paying high gas prices and buying lavish palaces and skyscrapers in Dubai because we don’t want to lower the cost of gasoline in Tibet. Cheezum crow, these guys are morons.

To illustrate his point, he uses tiny Denmark as an example;

…most of what [Danes] pay [for gas] goes for taxes that have financed an energy policy so effective that Denmark now gets 20 per cent of its electricity from wind (we get one per cent) and zero per cent of its fuel from the Middle East (down from 99 per cent twenty-five years ago). Now the Danes are getting ready to jack up gasoline taxes even more and use the proceeds to cut personal income taxes. They have this crazy idea that they should tax things they want to discourage, like gas guzzling, and ease up on taxing things they want to encourage, like people working.

I wonder how our founding fathers would like the idea of government influencing the behavior of people with taxes. Hertzberg talks about Denmark like it’s the same size as the United States and has the same GDP. Just like the imbecilic comparisons to socialist Sweden, the truth is in the proportions of the two countries.

I had a discussion the other day with a workmate who was of the same mind as the rest of intentionally moronic on the Left. I discovered that her problem is that she’d never lived outside of the Beltway and she couldn’t understand why people couldn’t just take the bus or ride a bicycle to work no matter where they live in the country. It was the same when I encountered the MoveOn protesters from trendy Bethesda last week. They have no idea what it’s like in the rest of the country, and they don’t care. They want to make lofty statements about how everyone should be “sacrificing”…when we don’t have to sacrifice. All we have to do is drill and pump oil and burn coal until we find an alternative source.

If we’re spending double on fuel than we have to spend, that’s R&D money we could be using on developing the new source. And whatever this new source is, they better not make a profit at it or the Left will turn them into the new demons.