Trading Big Oil for... Big Corn?
Via QandO, Nancy Pelosi said this:
"It is important to our children's health and their global competitiveness to rid this nation of our dependence on foreign oil and Big Oil interests"
So Nancy Pelosi wishes to rid the nation of American oil companies. Hoping that this country has come too far to consider something so insane as nationalization, this presumably means replacing oil with some other substitute. But since energy consumption still will be huge in the future, presumably we are just replacing big oil with big ... something else. I would never say that oil companies are completely free of rent-seeking impulses, but they are paragons of free market reason compared to companies like ADM, aka big Ethanol, whom Pelosi is likely to favor.
John Wilkins:
I believe Pelosi said she wished to rid the nation of "Big Oil interests", not Big Oil companies. Meaning she wishes to end the influence those companies have in actively delaying (even preventing) the US from switching to local non-pretruleum based energy production.
Undoubtedly there will be big companies in whatever future energy production technologies this country uses. The danger is in those companies using it's dominance to squash innovation and development of cleaner and more efficient technologies.
As an aside, I shudder to think that ADM or Cargill would be dominate players in America's energy future.
January 22, 2007, 11:56 pmMr. Dart:
Petrophobia is the hip, new, modern phobia. All the cool kids have it.
January 24, 2007, 1:49 pmGreg Morgan:
Energy being energy, despite the commodity that carries it, we will be forever in thrall of the enteties that produce it. The hope is that we can develop a source that is highly immune to the influence of forces outside our national control: fission in the intermediate run, solar or fusion in the long run. Until that happens our path toward energy sufficiency will be a tight rope that is becoming progressively more slack. Terrorism poses a lesser threat to America than a future of rationed energy.
February 4, 2007, 1:54 pm