Blogs / Better Planet

Everything that happens in congress now is assumed to bear on the crazily tight presidential race. So it makes sense that the House Dems just smashed through a compromise off-shore drilling bill, thus undermining a GOP line of attack. And it makes sense that the GOP lampooned it as a “figment of the imagination” (Rep. Don Young, Republican of Alaska).

Also predictable: Bush just vowed to veto it. Harder to predict is whether Senate Republicans will filibuster. They’ve been shouting “Drill baby drill” at conventions. Will they be able to get away with reading from a telephone book on the floor to block a bill that enables oil companies to do just that?

Image: flickr/PhillipC 

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

PBS has an interesting story online about how evangelical Christians are starting to behave as if they’d be up for an alliance with greens.

Their national assocation has been asking churches to get their energy consumption down, quoting scripture about how you shouldn’t let anything go to waste. Since evangelicals are about a quarter of the electorate this is good news. The only reason not to get too excited is that there is one marginally green party in the US right now, and it’s the Dems. Will climate change override school prayer and gun control and gay marriage and all the other “values” issues that tend to keep evangelicals in the GOP?

The alternative, I guess, would be to hope evangelicals will help to forge a greener Republican party. But as long as said party’s funding comes from the energy industry… Well, may the Lord be with them. But, as my own, more cynical, American subculture would say, like, good luck with that.

Image: flickr/gruntzooki 

Two smaller stories combined to make this weekend interesting.

Saturday, Nancy Pelosi presented her compromise version of an energy bill permitting offshore drilling. Even Obama has been publically supporting offshore drilling these days, and the general consensus is the GOP’s been gaining some fans by saying, we drill offshore, your gas prices go down.

Tellingly,  the part of the compromise bill the GOP got huffy about was the repeal of tex credits for oil companies. They hold it down for their friends, consistently.

The bright spot is more and more info circulated about the new animated comedy series about environmentalists by Mike Judge (the man who brought us Office Space). It’s called The Goode Family. It’s airing in November, and apparently the dog kept on a vegan diet attempts to eat other pets. Judge has hired the two King of the Hill writers who wrote Blades of Glory, a decision I support; a script that drops a reference to the Detroit underground figure-skating scene reflects the correct sensibility for lampooning my demographic.

Image: flickr/fluzo 

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