I get close to violent when anti-drilling advocates say, "Well, it'll take 10 years before we see any oil." As if in 10 years all the Chevy Suburbans and Dodge Ram trucks are going to cubed and piled in the scrapyard and replaced by a nationwide fleet of Smart Cars and Prius's running on hydrogen cells and soy milk.

When Biden marched out the tired slogan last night, Palin missed a great opportunity to remind him that, more than 30 years ago, he was one of only five senators to vote against the construction of the Alaskan pipeline, the same pipeline that now provides the U.S. with some 20% of its oil. Three times 10 years later, we cannot imagine how much more dire our energy situation would be without the product of Prudhoe Bay. Thirty years later, Joe Biden, our newest agent of change, hasn't changed much at all on this issue. He was anti-drilling then; he's anti-drilling now. He was wrong then; he is wrong now. Moreover, Palin would have been politically wise to bring it up, because voters want the gas. They want it plentiful and they want it cheap and they don't care how they get it.

She couldn't seize the opportunity - her brain was too full of canned responses.

Biden's point is that we should be striving to have a gas-free vehicle population within ten years by investing in research and manufacturing innovation to free America's dependence not just on foreign oil, but oil in general. It's good foreign policy and it's good environmental policy. Europe already has an electric car with a range of 150KM, within ten years R&D should be able to make that ten times as far, and if we're proactive enough to equip our plants here to produce those vehicles, we're tackling many issues at once and not just the oil issue.

America needs big picture thinking to reclaim its status as the world's superpower, the McCain/Palin "vision" is basically stay the course - and we've all seen what that's brought us over the last eight years.

well said

naczu:

I get close to violent when anti-drilling advocates say, "Well, it'll take 10 years before we see any oil." As if in 10 years all the Chevy Suburbans and Dodge Ram trucks are going to cubed and piled in the scrapyard and replaced by a nationwide fleet of Smart Cars and Prius's running on hydrogen cells and soy milk.

If you had a brain you'd realize that the anti-drilling advocates say that because drilling is being advocated as a fix for a present problem.

And if you had even half a brain, you'd realize that the ONLY long term solution is energy alternatives, not increasing the dosage of our petrol addiction.

When you say Europe has a car, I assume you mean a European company has developed the car. There is nothing stopping that company from selling that car in the US, assuming it would pass safety standards.

As for your claim that R&D can make the range of the car 10 times as great in 10 years, what are you basing that on? Did you just pull that out of the air or are you actually looking at trends in battery development? Since I'm not sure what vehicle you're referring to I don't know what technology it uses, but modern batteries have seen a lot of development from the mobile electronics industry and I would be surprised if just 10 years more development would see a 10 fold increase in capacity. If I had to guess what technologies are needed to make electric cars mainstream, I'd say fast recharge batteries and infrastructure to support them, making recharging your battery just like filling up your tank, but then again I freely admit I'm not an expert in this area.

What exactly do you mean by equip our plants to produce those vehicles? Do you mean that particular european vehicle? If so, what proactive steps do you expect to get it manufactured here? Obviously it would not be manufactured here unless there was a market here for it first, why is the European company not selling it here? Toyota and Honda are pressing quite hard on hybrids and have quite a few plants in the states, and Detroit has turned towards electric technologies as well (Chevy Volt slated for release in 2010 for instance). Is that good enough for you?

I see government's role less as funding particular technologies (essentially betting on the "winning" technology) and more as increasing CAFE standards or adding a tax to gasoline to try to account for the externalities imposed by the emissions. Most members of congress are painfully under informed when it comes to energy, and too beholden to local interests (such as midwesterners pushing for corn based ethanol). It's much better I think to just put incentives in place to reduce emissions (in this case, CO2 from gasoline combustion) and let knowledgeable people invest in what they see fit. This is what happened with SO2 and NOx regulation and I think it was an enormous success.

"the same pipeline that now provides the U.S. with some 20% of its oil"

You are repeating one of Palin's gaffes as truth. It isn't. Get your facts straight. Palin claims Alaska "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." That's not true.

Alaska's share of domestic energy production was 3.5 percent, according to the official figures kept by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

And if by "supply" Palin meant all the energy consumed in the U.S., and not just produced here, then Alaska's production accounted for only 2.4 percent.

excellent post Liberty. When I hear Obama speak of retooling plants it burns me. Since when do the tax payers have the job of making sure private industry are responding adequately to the demands of the marketplace. Ford should have seen the writing on the wall years ago when their SUV's were raking in record profits and reinvest profits into infrastructure for just this kind of occurance. That was their fiduciary duty, not ours. Now the Japanese are once again the innovators and the tops sellers, just like they were in the late seventies and early eighties and suddenly US automakers can't succeed without the tax payer coming to the rescue. Chrysler is planning to have all its cars built in China. Are we supposed to fund that as well? How appropriate, because we appear to be the only country in the world right now who thinks being more like Communists would make good economic sense.

Jiggs,

The OP actually got it more correct than Palin did, specifying oil rather than energy. Alaska accounts for over 14% of US oil production. It is a bit intellectually dishonest to ignore imports and bordering on a lie to go ahead and round up to 20%, but your critique is somewhat unfair as you take an additional caveat of Palin's and attribute it to the OP, when he makes no reference to "energy".