McCain's Energy

This will be a continuation of my Energy Series. To see the first post in the series, click here. I am working on addressing the three major energy policy plans: Obama's, McCain's, and that of T. Boone Pickens. This post will be on McCain's plan, which he has dubbed The Lexington Project. I think that the stupid name is a response to the Pickens Plan having a name, but that is neither here nor there. Let's get to it:

John McCain's "The Lexington Project" main goals/plans/points:
• Expanding Domestic Oil And Natural Gas Exploration And Production
• Taking Action Now To Break Our Dependency On Foreign Oil By Reforming Our Transportation Sector
• Investing In Clean, Alternative Sources Of Energy
• Protecting Our Environment And Addressing Climate Change: A Sound Energy Strategy Must Include A Solid Environmental Foundation
• Promoting Energy Efficiency
• Addressing Speculative Pricing Of Oil

What is it with these guys and their six point plans? So much writing... Okay, so McCain's main points have a lot of buzz words and phrases. Let's delve deeper and see if this is all a load of crap or if McCain actually has an issue he has an articulated, consistent position on.

Bullet 1): Well, this one breaks down into the two components listed, nothing complicated. a) He wants to open up the Outer Continental Shelf to oil drilling, where such practices are currently restricted by federal law. This would be the offshore drilling that we heard a little about before the economy took a crap. This is a fine and dandy proposition for helping energy independence, but it will accomplish effectively nothing.

We are using ~7.6 billion barrels of oil a year. That's 21 million barrels a day. We are producing 5.5 million barrels a day domestically. There is guessed to be about 18 billion barrels "offshore" that McCain wants to tap. Compare that number to the 96 billion barrels that are currently open for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, coastal Alaska, and coastal California. McCain doesn't really think that this new offshore oil drilling is gonna come up with 15 million barrels a day of oil, does he? Hopefully not. There simply isn't that much oil there to be had. And it will take 10 years to get oil from. Too long.

b) Natural Gas Production. Natural gas is something we have in this country. We have a lot of it. "The Outer Continental Shelf alone contains 77 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas." (from McCain's website) And that doesn't include all the other supplies we have. I am in COMPLETE agreement that natural gas is NOT the end-all solution to our problems. But it buys us time to develop the technology that will be. We can run a lot more on natural gas then we do now. It will be cheaper than oil and it will last longer than oil. I will save more of this discussion for the Pickens Plan post. That'd be a cliffhanger, people... However, McCain still doesn't give us specifics on how/where he'd use the natural gas.

Bullet 2): McCain wants to accomplish this by:
a) Giving tax credits for buying "cleaner" cars. I'm not thrilled about this. People can buy their own blasted cars; the taxpayers don't have to help them.
b) Incentivizing the private sector into developing better technology for electric cars. Again, I'm not thrilled, though I'm more okay with this then tax credits. These companies have plenty of incentive. They make a car that plugs into the wall and uses zero gasoline (i.e. the Volt), they are gonna make a lot of money selling it.
c-f) Using flex fuel vehicles, alcohol-based fuels, killing tariffs/mandates on ethanol, and increasing penalties for violating MPG standards. Flex fuel only works if you HAVE to use alternative fuels. Alcohol/Ethanol-based fuels might work, but they need to come from things other than corn. We've seen what this does to the price of food. Good, fine the people that violate the law (MPG standards). I'm okay with that.

Bullet 3): McCain outlines using clean coal, nuclear, wind, water, and solar power. He also outlines a plan to dump cash into these things to make them work. $2 billion a year for clean coal and tax credits for research into technologies. This is the kind of money we need to be using. We need to make developing these technologies a national priority and fund it like a national priority. We just "spent" $700 billion of our children's children's tax dollars to buy up some banks and bad mortgages. We spend $700 billion A YEAR on foreign oil. We should be spending at least $100 billion a year to stop using foreign oil.

Bullet 4): Environment stuff that Rick could talk better about. McCain wants a cap-and-trade system, too (like Obama).

Bullet 5): Yay, energy efficiency. McCain talks about cutting energy use across the federal government, which he claims "is the largest electricity consumer on earth". Wants to make the buildings more efficient, turn the lights off, build solar panels on rooftops, and all that good stuff. He also wants to make it easier to upgrade our 1970s era power grid to make energy transfer more efficient. I think that both of these ideas are easier said then done and are going to require people making sacrifices, monetary or otherwise, that they might not want to. These are good ideas that I would love to see happen.

Bullet 6): Regulating the futures market (if there have been cases of ill intentions). This assumes that the current laws have been violated, which I doubt that they have. This is a simple supply and demand equation. Oil is expensive cause there ain't a lot of it and people want a lot of it. And some people are smarter than me and know how to make money off of it. Good for them. This is McCain blaming people who did nothing wrong because it is politically popular to do to. It always looks better to say that it is somebody else's fault. He should man up and say "If you don't like $4 gas, quit buying it." We were doing just that before the economic world ended and made all that a moot point.

Bottom Line: I think that McCain has several junk proposals in here, but they are mixed with some good ones. If he could get these ideas implemented in a timely fashion, we could avoid complete collapse. But time frames are something that McCain leaves out. I'd like to see him take more of a stand there. Overall, C+ to B-.