Gas Attack

Review and Outlook
Copyright 2000 Wall Street Journal
March 28, 2000

The internal combustion engine may be enjoying the last laugh. In his 1992 manifesto "Earth in the Balance," the father of the Internet declared the internal combustion engine to be a graver threat to civilization than war, and proposed to starve the beast through a global tax on fossil fuels until such time as we realized the "strategic goal" of "completely eliminating" it altogether.

Cut to election year 2000, a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna this week and prices threatening to break the $2/gallon barrier at the pump. Mr. Gore's green dream is becoming a political nightmare, especially with the Vice President on record as opposing two things that might ease the crunch: a rollback of government taxes and the kind of regulations that discourage domestic production.

Mr. Gore, recall, cast the tie breaking vote on the 4.3-cents a gallon increase in the gas tax, which some Republicans would now like to repeal. And he also stands against repealing the prohibition against drilling on what may be America's largest repository of oil: the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. On Friday Mr. Gore attacked GOP proposals to allow drilling in the barren Arctic as an effort "to enrich their friends in the oil industry." Refusing to lift the ban on drilling and the other regulatory disincentives for domestic production, of course, only strengthens OPEC's grip over the U.S. economy.

If we are to take Mr. Gore and his friends at their word, that may be just what they want. Presumably, in their world, after people are forced to spend $50 a week to fill up two family cars,they'll scream uncle and sign onto a U.N. protocol and tax that would kill off cars and create a groundswell for mass transit.

As we know from Mr. Gore, consumption itself is a sickness. Indeed, though he concedes that energy is the "lifeblood of economic progress," you don't hear much talk about "lifeblood" for progress in green circles. Instead, we hear about our "addiction" to oil, our unhealthy obsession with "consumption," our mad compulsion to take, as Mr. Gore describes, "larger and larger quantities every year of coal, oil, fresh air and water, trees, topsoil and the thousand other things we rip from the crust of the earth."

Missing in the equation of this bedrock Gore constituency are people. The internal combustion engine, for example, does not go on its own. It requires operators and owners: the independent truck drivers whose livelihood is threatened by rising fuel costs; the working family that needs two cars to commute to and from their jobs; even the single mom who needs not only to work, but to ferry her children to their own appointments. Suburban soccer moms do not generally arrive by light rail. In Mr. Gore's world, rising gas prices are thought to punish greedy SUV owners while miraculously passing over the Ordinary Joes whose cars may be even more important to their lives and livelihoods.

But Ordinary Joes do not figure much in green equations. Instead, the Greenpeace site warns us that "polar bears are starving, walrus and caribou populations are declining, and the Arctic ice pack is melting away." The Public Interest Research Group's site says it is concerned for the red-throated loon and the calving patterns of Porcupine River Caribou. The only people whose livelihoods get mentioned are the Gwich'in Indians, whom the Sierra Club tells us are "a 20,000 year old native culture" whose "traditional way of life" would be jeopardized by oil development.

Never mind, as Louisiana's Democratic Senator John Breaux points out, that oil and gas have been developed off natural reserves in Louisiana without any environmental harm, and the same could be done in Alaska. It is consumption itself that is the enemy. It's hard to escape the conclusion that Mr. Gore and his activist allies really would like for us all to live, more or less, like the Gwich'in Indians.

Mr. Gore's answer is to press Detroit for higher miles per gallon, imposing whatever taxes on fuel it may take to get there. But surely that's the point. It is hardly a coincidence that the kind of future Mr. Gore envisions is, as his own solutions suggest, impossible without a heavy government hand. In fat times, of course, calls for upping gas taxes and restricting where oil companies might explore and what they might do may seem idealistic and visionary. But when that weekly visit to the corner Amoco station begins to bite more deeply into the family finances, people begin to see for themselves the costs involved.

In the long run, says Mr. Gore and his friends, we'll all be better off with more efficient cars and alternative fuels. Maybe. In the meantime, if you're a mom with a vanload of kids, you're stuck. As with the infamous remark by a certain Queen of France on the eve of the revolution, "let them move back into the cities and take mass transit" does not strike us as a persuasive rallying theme -- least of all for a man whose official Web page advertises him as "a champion of working families."

Working families? Already in trouble with United Auto Workers President Steve Yokich for agreeing to China's entry into the World Trade Organization, an Al Gore whose spiritual mission it is to deliver America from the internal combustion engine is not likely to prove popular among auto workers in states such as Michigan come November. In fact, just what is the presumed connection between Al Gore's politically correct politics and these blue-collar types? They drive gas-hogging trucks out across dirt roads into the woods, where they use guns to shoot birds and deer. Even the Christian Right, which only wants not to have to hear people accepting Oscars on behalf of abortion, isn't this far off the PC charts.

Indeed, the closer we look at Mr. Gore's prescription for the future, the more we see the failure of the past. The last time America was menaced by OPEC we had Jimmy Carter, with his odd and even rationing days at the pump. When Ronald Reagan entered office he broke OPEC's back not by declaring war on it, but by freeing up the U.S. energy sector to allow U.S. companies to compete and innovate.

Up to now the luxury of a booming economy has allowed Mr. Gore to indulge his greenest thoughts, whether signing onto U.N. environmental protocols or raising gas taxes to subsidize alternative utopias. Clearly he's got the Greenpeace vote -- and just maybe the Gwich'in Indians. But we'll see if he's as popular with ordinary Americans after they've had a long, hot summer of $1.50+/gallon at the gas pump, while Mr. Gore resolutely seals off oceans of oil in the Arctic.