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.

"NOPE" stands for…  “Not on Planet Earth,” and it is the motto of that wing of the Democratic Party that refuses to consider drilling for more oil. It is not, by any means, the motto of the whole party.
     It is the rallying cry however for Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the congressional Democrats, whose position on drilling for oil is beginning to look more and more like a dusty little hill in Montana where George Custer probably said something like, “We’ll hold 'em here,” as thousands of unhappy Native Americans poured out of the villages along the Little Big Horn to see what the bluecoats were up to now.

     For the first time in recent memory…  the Democrats are bucking the public on a major issue. Most polls place support for new oil drilling around 75 percent.
     It’s not just $4 gas that has captured the public’s imagination. Heating bills have doubled and trebled in the Northeast. My personal monthly budget fuel oil payment for my small house went from $120 a month to $241. My electricity is generated by burning oil. That has gone from about $180 a month to $400. A budget plan I worked on all year so that we could get by was blown to bits and I did the only sane thing a reasonable man could.
     I had a heart attack Thursday night.
    
     I’m back home now... 20 pounds lighter, a bit weaker and none the better off financially for the experience.
     What will give you your heart attack?
     Maybe it will be that first bill from the electric company this summer. I have to have at least some AC on, or I have trouble breathing our polluted Connecticut atmosphere. Maybe you can turn off the AC and avoid a myocardial infarction anyway.
     Maybe it will be the letter from your heating company stating what they intend to ask for fuel oil this winter. If you have an extra $3,000 or $4,000 maybe you can install natural gas heat and avoid atrial fibrillation….

     Look, there are a lot of good reasons…  to resume exploration and drilling. I can think of several off hand:

1. We don’t have to send troops overseas to defend oil we drill for in the U.S.
2. We don’t have to come hat-in-hand to ask a king, sheik or emir for extra oil.
3. Oil drilled offshore does not have to travel thousands of miles at risk of spilling.
4. The current oil leases don’t have very much oil. We have to find new oil fields.
5. Although some wells will take 10 years to produce, others will take as little as one.
6. We are running out of oil in the wells we already have open and we’ll have to start drilling new wells soon just to stay even.
7. Dollars are not exported out of the U.S. for domestic oil. This will strengthen the dollar.
8. The new oil will buy us a little breathing space to bring wind power on line for 20 percent of our electricity generation.

     What drilling will not do is make oil companies “rich.”  …Most oil companies are not the private domain of a Rockefeller. The owners of Exxon Mobil are investors in mutual funds and institutions. Vanguard Fund is prominent as is College Retirement Equities, Washington Mutual Investors Fund, and so forth. These represent thousands of people, all with a share of equity in the business. The profits pay their retirement bills and are plowed back into the business.
     I suppose hitting the oil companies with a windfall profits tax will make some people feel good. But as with all such taxes, the people paying the tax will be the people who buy gas and oil for fuel: you and me.

     Just to be fair… oil prices did not give me a heart attack. Lots of things did. The timing was just …very apt.

In a recent puff piece about her in The Politico, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi --fan of longitude (“‘I have always loved longitude,’ Nancy Pelosi says before breaking into laughter. ‘I love latitude; it’s in the stars. But longitude, it’s about time…’”) and future chair of the Democratic Convention in Denver—declares it simply, “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.”
     To Pelosi, “saving the planet,” means fighting any Republican attempts to lift the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy,” Pelosi says. So there. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/12122.html.
     So let us redefine our terms. By “save” Nancy Pelosi means stopping offshore oil exploration and drilling and by “planet” she means the ritzy beaches of Santa Barbara and vicinity in California which were soiled in an oil spill 35 years ago that helped to launch the careers of politicians like …Nancy Pelosi.

     I’m all for Pelosi sticking to her guns… and sticking it to the Republicans on this issue –and for all the usual ulterior motives. Frankly the GOP hasn’t any other strong issues to save its legislative bacon this fall besides $4 a gallon gasoline. Pelosi and the Democrats are handing this issue to the Republicans on a platter.
     A very strong wave of anti-Bush feeling is about to drastically cut down Republican membership in the House and Senate, making those bodies, perhaps, veto-proof for the Democrats.
     Then along comes the oil price crisis, which the public believes (correctly) can be relieved by a commitment to drill and explore for more oil, the current untapped leases to which the Democrats constantly point having no –-for want of a better word—oil.
     There is oil on our continental shelves. There is oil in the bleak wastes… Sorry. I mean “pristine beauty” of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And if Nancy Pelosi has anything to say about it, that oil is going to stay there.
     Instead of the massive and immediate relief in oil price futures that the announcement of drilling and exploration would bring, Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid of the Senate offer us –revenge against the speculators.

     You know the speculators, don’t you? They are retired public employees, pension fund holders and former teachers who have invested in funds that trade futures in oil. The U.S. output of oil is dwindling, and the remaining oil supply offers a slim surplus of just 2 million barrels a day worldwide. This (and demand from China and India) makes oil scarcer than it used to be, thus raising the price. The futures buyers pay the price –thus guaranteeing the future supply of oil.
     The public is not exactly thirsting for the blood of former school nurses who are getting by in their Golden Years on earnings from their investments. But Senator Reid refuses to entertain Republican amendments to the anti-speculation bill that would allow drilling. And Nancy Pelosi would see to it such amendments aren’t even heard in the House.
     This makes the Democratic Congress the Bad Guys in this controversy, in which the public supports drilling (74 percent of likely voters support drilling, 18 Percent oppose, 8 percent not sure – Zogby International 26 June, 2008 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/257903)--but the Democrats are willing to adjourn the Congress for the Summer at the end of this week, rather than to allow drilling.   
     DigitalJournal.com put it aptly: “A vast majority of likely voters, across the political spectrum are in support of offshore drilling, which pits the Democratic leadership against the will of the people.”

     What President Bush should do, if he is smart, is to call Congress back into session in August and let them try –and again fail—to pass energy legislation. Then he and Senator McCain can label this a “do-nothing Congress,” taking a page from Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook. Obama will have to take a stand on the issue –and of course he will not desert his party—then the Republicans will have an issue that might save the White House for them and perhaps cut the losses in Congress.