Dark Star

I've had the pleasure to attend a lecture and Q&A with New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman. It was just after 9/11. He spoke about Middle Eastern affairs, terrorism, and his experiences engaging everyman Muslims all over the Middle East.

I found him intelligent, engaging, respectful, and very personable.

Having said that, I'm getting very tired of his doom-and-gloom. In almost every column it's all about how dumb President Bush is, how badly he has handled - quite literally - everything since the decision to invade Iraq.

In this column, Friedman is confused about something:

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from what he called our “addiction to oil.”

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

It's not the president's - nor the government's - job to produce a scalable alternative to oil. It's the market's. And with oil at $130 a barrel, the president doesn't have to ask anybody to do anything. Fewer people can afford to drive an SUV, so they won't. Fewer people can afford to spend gas the way they normally would, so they will change their behavior.

As I've said before, what the government can do, and what the President has tried to do, is to remove government regulations and restrictions on domestic drilling to reduce our dependence on the "petro-authoritarian states". We have oil, but the Liberals won't let us go get it.

Rush Limbaugh made the point today that whenever domestic drilling is brought up, naysayers always point out that even if we started drilling today it would take ten years for that to have any affect on the market. His response: So what? We have to start somewhere. And if we had started ten years ago, we wouldn't be in this situation now.

But I would like to amplify this point. It might take ten years for new domestic drilling to have an affect on the market. (I'm not convinced that's true. If as we're told, much of this run-up in oil prices is due to oil market speculators, then the news that American has tapped its own well will surely give the speculators something to think about. But, for the sake of this argument, I'll cede the point). If it takes ten years for domestic oil drilling to have an affect on the market, how long would it take for a new scalable oil alternative to really take hold on the U.S. economy and free us from the grasp of the petro-authoritarians?

Currently, everybody's car runs on gas. Even the Prius. Let's say that over the next five years we come up with that oil alternative. And it works well enough to replace gasoline. How long will it take to replace even one quarter of he vehicles in the U.S. that run on gas with ones that run on the new fuel?

Let's even assume that the new vehicles are affordable, say, the price of a new Honda Civic (which is highly unlikely, by the way, considering it would be new technology and expensive for manufacturers to produce due to lack of industrial infrastructure). Let's also say that everybody who can afford one, buys one, and uses it.

What does Friedman think is a good estimate for all that? Ten years? If so, he's deluded. My best case estimate is thirty years for that kind of seismic shift in technology. And to get the entire country switched over? At least twice that long.

So does Mr. Friedman think that these crises that he's so concerned and baffled about will just wait on us? Not likely. So what are we supposed to do in the meantime? The answer, of course, is drill and refine. President Bush knows this and has been raising the alarm for at least six years.

And it's not like the market hasn't already started to work on the issue. Most car companies already offer a hybrid. The Prius has been a popular choice for a lot of people. Is the hybrid the final solution? No, but, it's the market moving in the right direction, and most importantly, moving in the right direction in the right way. Making something that people want, can afford, and will use. The government solution, ethanol, is a bad pipe-dream which will never work and wreak more havoc (on the economy and the environment) than it's worth. The only reason it's still even being considered is because of the massive government subsidies being flushed, like so much undigested corn, right down the drain. We're already seeing signs of the economic effects.

Now, if I understand him correctly, Tom Friedman is no fan of the ethanol mandate, but, Tom, ethanol is beside the point. It's the government's subsidies. It's an example of what the government's limitations are. And investment in new innovation is way, way out of the government's scope and function. Investing or encouraging (in the form of subsidies) market tested and proven technologies, may be a necessary function, and that's a reasonable point for discussion.

People not only don't like paying high gas prices - they can't after a certain point. That's what prices are for, to regulate supply and demand. Price goes up, less people can afford the scarce resource. Hence, less people get the scarce resource, hence, less is used.

People sell their SUVs. And if they can't afford a Prius, they can at least buy a used Civic. And they will if they get tired of eating Beenie Weenies and their cable gets turned off.

The market needs time to work, Tom. We should let it. And, pardon him, but President Bush takes his economic cues from another Mr. Friedman.
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