Today a shipment of toys is leaving a warehouse in California. In the retail world preparations for the Christmas season are well under way. Toys at this warehouse that have made the long trip from factories in China are about to go on the final leg of their journeys, to retailers all over the western United States. Freight companies are moving them by the case, the palette and the trailer-load.
     And the freight company taking today’s shipment to market is charging 73 percent of the normal hauling fee as a surtax to pay for fuel, which has gone through the roof.
     This time last year, west coast diesel averaged about $1.58 a gallon and the fuel surcharge that UPS applied was equal to about 11.80% of the volume or truckload freight hauling charge for the shipment. Now west coast diesel is at $4.66, an increase of $3.07 a gallon, and UPS’s fuel surcharge at that price is 75.40 percent.

     That is going to add a lot to the price of toys... because someone has to pay for that diesel fuel. The manufacturer is shelling out more for the shipping, of course, but those costs will have to show up in the wholesale price the toy retailer pays. He or she will have to pass that along to the consumer.
      And what the consumer is going to do is pass along the price increase, in the form of fewer or less expensive toys, to his children on Christmas morning. Since everything retailers sell has to be shipped, that means everything else that people buy at Christmas will be affected, from clothes and food to fuel and travel.
     Oil is the foundation of the entire economy. We use it for fuel and lubricant and we make plastics, pharmaceuticals, fabric and a score other useful and necessary things from it. Not only is there no Christmas, there is no daily life without it.

     Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi doesn’t get this. She doesn’t get that U.S. wells are drying up and that the undeveloped leases are not likely to produce oil. She doesn’t know that just to replace existing oil stocks, we have to resume exploration and drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf. She does not understand what you and I are going through, trying to pay heating bills, electricity bills, buying groceries, filling the gas tank –because she is a rich and powerful person who does not have to do those things herself.
     Does anyone seriously believe that the fashionable and elegantly coiffed Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, sits at her kitchen table late at night, bills spread out, her head in her hands, wondering how she is going to pay the light bill? Does she have to make the choice between sweltering in the heat without air conditioning or gassing up her car to get to work? Does she have to make the humiliating decision to ignore a bill this month, so she will have enough cash left over from her paycheck to buy groceries for her kids?

     Pelosi is the classic example of a rich liberal who feels free to prescribe social policies for all us lesser beings... causing us real hardship, because she is a superior individual, who knows better than we do what is in our own best interests.
     Unalterably, Pelosi refuses to allow a house vote on new drilling because, as she told The Politico, “I am trying to save the planet; I am trying to save the planet!” How grandiose a purpose, how noble a mission! Meanwhile people who do not enjoy the pay and perks of Speaker of the House are going to do without this Christmas. They are starting to do without right now, in fact.

     Speaker Pelosi had been telling her fellow congressional Democrats…  that if they want to publicly support drilling, in order to get re-elected, that she will permit them to blame her for not letting drilling come to a House vote (The Politico, August 5, 2008).
     What a cynical exercise on the part of the Speaker. She fully believes that after November, with a Democratic Congress and Obama in the White House, all the political pressure to allow drilling will be off and she can get down to her real agenda, which is global warming. That will mean either a carbon tax (and higher energy prices) or carbon rationing (restrictions on the use of energy). This would install the government in every home as a decision maker: Fuel for the car or heat for February? Lights on after 8 or an early bedtime? This is a nightmare.