Blogs / Better Planet

The Democrats have been gradually retreating from their anti-off-shore-drilling stance ever since polls started to indicate that drilling is a winning issue for the GOP. Now they’re transitioning into all-out surrender. The bipartisan “Gang of 10″ congresspeople pushing for an energy bill that includes off-shore drilling has become the Gang of At Minimum 20. Even Pelosi has said she’ll let the oil companies drill near the southeastern US (far from her own California).

Pelosi has also been trying to find a way to partially salvage this apparently FUBAR piece of legislation. And she is being appropriately sneaky in her proposed compromise. Which is: in return for the ability to excavate for oil off-shore, oil companies have to contribute billions to the development of non-oil energy sources (wind, solar, etc). That allows America to try to fuel itself insofar as possible, but still forces Big Oil to contribute to its own obsolesence.

And the GOP can’t really oppose that aspect of a bill without looking completely in the pocket of Big Oil. Has that ever stopped them? Not that I know of. But it will at least force them to take the bait and lose face.

 Image: flickr/barbwire55

When I was a teenager, my mom lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and my dad lived in New York City. I was a Northeast Corridor kid; I’d get on the Vermonter at the one-room 19th-century train station in downtown Amherst, or the impersonal post-apocalyptic one in nearby Springfield, and emerge into Penn Station with my most “urban” outfit on, hoping to pass.

The bummer of it was, it took at least five hours, and often more than six. By car, it was three and a half. The train showed up late, or it got stuck in New Haven for an hour switching power sources, or it had to slow down between Palmer and Windsor Locks because of track repairs. The sandwiches were sub-Quizno’s muck. There were a lot of empty seats.

Now Amtrak—the Northeast corridor in particular—is blowing up. Gas prices, blah blah blah. Congress is considering more than $30 million in new funding. As crappy as our national financial situation might be we should do it; this is our chance to become more of a rail society, in which trains run on time and the food isn’t bilge. This may be a pipe dream for now—Amtrak estimates it needs a billion dollars for track and bridge repairs alone—but if we could pull it off in a few years we’d be doing ourselves a favor foreign-oil-consumtion wise by getting cars off the road.

I’ve got the new slogan, by the way, congress. Amtrak: Not Just for Children of Divorce Anymore.

Image: flickr/jpmueller99 

Yesterday, congressional Republicans killed a Dem oil-drilling bill dead. Bush said earlier this week that he’d veto it if it came to his desk, so the Dems needed two-thirds of the vote and couldn’t get it. The bill would have made oil companies like the ultra-profitable Exxon explore for oil on land they’d already acquired before they started drilling on unexplored land.

The Republicans took an evil-looking position servicing their great donor, the energy industry. But they were able to get away with it in terms of PR fallout because all they had to do was say, “you really want to mess with where people can drill for oil when gas is at $4/gallon?” Democrats tried to get them with a “use it or lose it” motto. It’ll be interesting to see how each party tries to use the gas-prices issue to bludgeon the other this election year.

Image: flickr/Kanaka’s Paradise Life