ANWR and Peas

[Guest guest]

ANWR and Peas

By PAUL KRUGMAN

March 15, 2002

 

On Wednesday the Senate voted down a proposal by John Kerry and John McCain

to raise mileage standards on automobiles. The outcome came as no surprise,

but what does it mean?

 

Was it yet another victory for special interests at the expense of the

national interest?

 

No, it was much worse than that.

 

What prevailed Wednesday was an alliance between conservatives who hate the

very idea of conservation, on one side, and union leaders trying to

demonstrate their influence by making politicians jump. It's the same

alliance that, last summer, led the House to support drilling in the Arctic

National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) by a surprisingly large margin.

 

About ANWR: The Times recently had an eye-opening article confirming

something I had been hearing myself, that oil companies are not behind the

push for drilling there - indeed, they are notably unexcited by the prospect.

Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey suggest why: Arctic oil is so expensive

to get at that it's barely worth extracting at current market prices. For

energy companies it's the rest of the Bush energy plan, which would give them

about $35 billion in tax breaks and subsidies, that really matters.

 

But then why are the Bush administration and its allies so vehement about

ANWR? Pay no attention to rhetoric about national security; the Kerry-McCain

proposal would save about three times as much oil per year as ANWR would

deliver even in its brief period of peak production.

 

The real reason conservatives want to drill in ANWR is the same reason they

want to keep snowmobiles roaring through Yellowstone: sheer symbolism.

Forcing rangers to wear respirators won't make much difference to snowmobile

sales - but it makes the tree-huggers furious, and that's what's appealing

about it. The same is true about Arctic drilling; as one very moderate

environmentalist told me, the reason the Bush administration pursues

high-profile anti-environmental policies is not that they please special

interests but that they are " red meat for the right. " (The real

special-interest payoffs come via less showy policies, like the way the

administration is undermining enforcement of the Clean Air Act.)

 

And what about the Teamsters union, which threw its support behind the Bush

plan? It claimed to be motivated by the 700,000 jobs ANWR drilling would

supposedly create. One suspects that the union's leadership knows that this

figure is at least 10 times too high. But the union's members don't know

that; so by making common cause with the anti- environmental right the

leaders can seem to be bringing home the bacon.

 

The debate over fuel efficiency played out according to the same script.

Conservative opponents of higher mileage standards followed closely the

guidelines laid down by Ed Gillespie, the top Republican operative turned

Enron lobbyist, in a memo last April. He proposed selling the

administration's drill-and-burn energy plan by painting conservationists as

" eat your peas " types, who want to take away our creature comforts. Sure

enough, opponents portrayed a modest proposal, which would have set a

36-mile-per-gallon standard 13 years from now, as an immediate threat to the

American way of life. Trent Lott displayed a photo of a tiny

70-mile-per-gallon European compact and declared, " I don't want every

American to have to drive this car. "

 

And senators who are indifferent to the air pollution that kills thousands of

Americans each year got all weepy at the prospect - rejected by serious

analysts - that making cars more efficient would lead to more traffic

fatalities.

 

The surprise, though, is that this dishonest anti-conservationism got crucial

support from the United Auto Workers. There's no good reason to think that

higher efficiency standards would actually cost any automobile worker jobs;

certainly fighting a modest mileage increase phased over 15 years shouldn't

be a priority for the union's members. But as with the Teamsters and ANWR

drilling, fighting conservation gave the union's leadership an opportunity to

look powerful; the appearance, not the reality, was what mattered.

 

You may find it hard to believe that such crucial decisions are driven by

such petty concerns, that an alliance between showboating union leaders and

" drive 100 and freeze a Yankee " conservatives could do so much damage to our

nation's future. But if that's what you think, you do not know with how

little wisdom the world is governed.