Kristen Gillibrand, the Democratic senator who has been making noises about wanting to run for Mayor of NY has a very appealing energy policy that she has just published. It isn’t perfect, and sometimes it is imprecise but at least she starts by attacking the biggest and most obvious problems like tax breaks for an industry that scored $137 billion in profits last year. This is an industry that makes over $200M a year on a one penny price increase on each gallon of gas sold at the pump. They don’t need our help. They should be helping us, by putting more money into environmental research, just to offset the damage they now do to the planet. So she’s right; take back the $4B in taxpayer funded subsidies, right now.
She also proposes a “keep it in America” law that would force any oil drilled on publicly leased land to stay in this country to help ease prices at the pump. Currently too much American oil is finding its way to India and China, causing our prices to go up.
Last she mentions the need for more fuel-efficient cars and trucks and new sustainable energy research. This is a really important part of any energy policy. I returned, recently, from Paris where the most obvious thing about their traffic situation is that there are no big cars and trucks. This is a city of narrow, ancient side streets that should and still often do create problematic traffic situations but they are avoided, for the most part, because the vehicular population is half the size of those in America. It looks like the Paris gas price, of around eight bucks a gallon, has its upside.
Ms Gillibrand’s ideas are all good, as far as they go, but nice as it sounds this is not a complete energy policy and only a half-done job. Any kind of energy policy needs to take into account things like the fact that oil companies are continually trying to open new areas to drilling when they already have millions of acres leased and available, that they are not using. If the oil companies don’t use what they have, why should we allow them to control more? Drilling on land may be more environmentally friendly than it has ever been, but it’s still no walk in the park and leaves horrible environmental messes behind. Drilling under water is a fools game and frighteningly dangerous as been seen over and over.
Gillibrand doesn’t attack the Keystone XL pipeline, which everyone who has studied it and doesn’t stand to make a profit on it, sees as a threat to the United States by a company that has shown no ability to police its already leaking pipelines.
She never mentions the exploding gas industry (no pun intended) and how it must be controlled if it is to safely harvest the rich reserves that exist beneath our soil, reserves that are now being recklessly exploited in a way that endangers our air and water. Burning streams, and I’ve seen them, do not inspire confidence in the industry’s ability to regulate itself.
And then there’s coal and the blatant fact that coal driven energy causes more pollution and more death in one year in this country than all the pollution and death caused by the nuclear collapse of Chernobyl since it happened. This is a stunning figure that has been published over and over but it just doesn’t seem to sink in. Not only is coal disastrous for the world in which it is used, but it is an environmental horror in the places where it is mined. Gillibrand mentions this in her energy policy, not at all.
Why are these omissions so blatant in Senator Gillibrand’s proposal? I don’t know. They seem self-evident to me. Maybe it’s because, like any liberal, she wants to do the right thing but like many of them she doesn’t want to offend anyone. That’s lovely if all you’re dealing with is the color of your living room rug, but this stuff is serious and there are a lot of serious people who are looking to make a lot of money who you must go up against if you want to get anything meaningful done. I just don’t think Gillibrand is the person to fight that fight.
I watched her go up against Michelle Bachman on one of the Sunday talking heads programs a while back and Bachman buried her. Now we all know that Bachman is as useless a person as it is humanly possible to create. She hasn’t had an original or intelligent thought in her head since she popped out of the womb and she should have been dead meat for anyone who could put together two logical sentences but she just wouldn’t shut her mouth and Gillibrand, instead of thwarting that technique by cutting her off, stopping the conversation and pointing out what a rude bimbo she was, just sat there and took it, in fact, let this clown bury her.
That tells me that she is nowhere near tough enough to fight the battles she’ll face in city hall in NYC. She’s lovely, she’s smart, but she hasn’t got the stones to fight the huge, Wall Street empires, the Jamie Dimons, or the banking bigs. Even worse, it looks like she doesn’t have them to fight the Sheldon Silvers of the state legislature or the big real estate powers like Trump or even the good guys like the Dursts.
I like Kristen Gillibrand,, I like her very much; she’s smart and functional but I like her where she is, in the Senate where she can get things done without having to butt heads with the real touch guys that run New York.