Yesterday Senator Harry “We’ve Lost the War” Reid… raised the hopes of just about everyone when he offered the Senate Republicans four amendments to the Oil Speculation bill the Democrats are pushing in Congress.
    To briefly review, the Democrats believe its evil oil futures buyers, like California public employee union pension funds, that are responsible for the rise in the price of oil (and $4 a gallon gasoline) rather than supply and demand, like the Republicans believe. The Republicans and about ¾ of the adult population of the United States, wants us to explore and drill on the outer continental shelf and desolate places like ANWR. The Democrats oppose this.
   And when it became certain yesterday morning that the GOP amendments to the Speculation Bill would be about allowing new exploration and drilling, Reid hastily took the offer of Amendments off the table. The Republicans in their turn blocked a media protection bill and a bill offering tax breaks for the development of alternative energy and a shield for middle class taxpayers against the hated alternative minimum tax.
     The Republicans are going to make an issue of oil drilling whether or not Bush decides to call Congress into an August session to deal with the problem. “The only thing standing now between the American people and these vast oil resources is the United States Congress,'' Bush said yesterday, striking a theme for the campaign.
     Meanwhile, in the House, the membership voted to adjourn for the summer on Friday. All the republicans and a pack of blue-dog Democrats kept the vote close, giving the adjournment a one-vote majority. In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is finding something less than unanimity among her party when it comes to drilling, but she seems to be holding the line against any party insurgents. The Democrats have too much to lose this fall to show a disintegrating front on energy.

      We must all be prepared to continue to shell out north of $4 a gallon…  for gasoline. That’s the cost of saving the plant…as well as a doubled electric bill and a trebled fuel-oil bill.
     You know, if you were to scratch the surface of a congressional Democrat, like Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, you would find that they really believe outrageously expensive gasoline is a good thing. Until last month the Democrats were ready to present us with a 500-page global warming bill that would have raised the tax on gasoline anyway as a measure more or less forcing fuel conservation. Why? To reduce the rate of emission of greenhouse gasses, which many believe, are dangerously warming the climate –or which may not be dangerously warming the climate, depending on whose research you believe.
     Actually, the research on global warming is complex and contradictory. Both proponents and skeptics believe their data is irreproachable, definitive and settled. Both side mock the intelligence of the other, leaving in doubt such trivial matters as: Is global warming happening at all? How bad will the warming be if it is happening? Is it man made or a solar/cosmic ray phenomena? What would we have to sacrifice to turn it around? Can we turn it around? Can we turn it around if China and India don’t want to help?

     It is highly politically incorrect for me to say this... but these questions still require an answer. For many of us unscientific types, being presented with a mass of speculative facts and figures about what is going to happen to the climate by the end of the century is not of much cheer when we have the concrete problem of paying our bills by the end of the month.
     Most of us haven’t got the leisure to worry about the fate of the polar bear, the thickness of the Greenland ice cap, or a prospective 12 or 16 or 30” rise in the level of the sea. We are worried about keeping our jobs, paying our bills and maintaining a decent standard of living. If the Republicans want to adopt that rhetoric in the upcoming energy wars, they might just do well with it.