Christianity without church/community?

From Scott McConnell with Lifeway Research (hat tip: Touchstone)...

McConnell's survey found that 86 percent believe they "can have a good relationship with God without being involved in church."

McConnell: "Unchurched people do not understand the connection between having a relationship with God and being with other believers in church. In the Christian faith, these are inseparable. Jesus’ last prayer before being arrested, as recorded in John 17, was that everyone who believes in Him would be unified and work together to let the world know that God loves them and sent Jesus. People on the outside see the church as candles, pews and flowers, rather than people living out their love for God by loving others. Such skepticism can only be overcome by churches and believers who demonstrate the unity and love for which Jesus prayed."

Starting with a trinitarian God in community with "Himself" (vs. a unitarian God) to the simple observation that loving one's neighbor implies having a neighbor, Christianity is relational and communal at its core. Failure to understand this and to practice it leaves a sparse life and largely irrelevant faith.

1950's "Christianity"

I've always "had my suspicions" about the 1950s. In Turn Neither to the Right nor to the Left, I wrestle with that decade for almost five pages (in the section of the book on "legislating morality"). Among other things, I noted that comparison of morality over time in general-- and glorification of 1950s in particular-- are fraught with difficulties. Comparisons tend to be selective, based on poor memories, and focused on behaviors vs. hearts.

Here's one question I like to ask: how did the glorious parents of the 1950s yield the highly criticized children of the 1960s?

At the end of the day, it's an interesting question, but one that doesn't take us very far-- and may actually cause trouble if we handle it poorly.

As such, William Murchison has a few useful things to say about all of this in Touchstone. (I liked his title: The Way We Weren’t--Churches in the Fifties Were Filled, But Were They Faithful?)

Watching, a little idly, some recent televised reenactment of the Exodus story, I had a recurrent thought: Wasn’t it nice when Americans, by and large, to one degree or another, acknowledged Great Moments in Theological History—the parting of the Red Sea, Samson and Delilah, hungry lions versus stalwart Christians—and shelled out to see the cinematic reenactments of these moments? Wasn’t it nice? Although . . .

Although what? That’s the point. If you have the impression that the 1950s constituted some kind of last frontier of religious conviction and inspiration in the United States, you might wish to reexamine that impression with dispatch.

I say this out of concern for intellectual clarity in the way American Christians address concerns unimaginable not many years ago....Doesn’t it make you want to close your eyes and relive the era when prayer at school was a human right, as well as a duty, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, with wondrous clarity, and on television yet, set forth the case for Christianity?...

A lot was good back then....The fifties really were a time when the culture broadly affirmed Christianity as a Good Thing. I was there. I saw it; I heard it.

And yet some kind of demurral is strongly indicated: some sign of recognition that no human society, whatever its good intentions and methods, has lived unburdened, unencumbered by the crushing weight of human fallenness....

The fifties were not the summum bonum. They were an episode—a highly instructive one, I might add, full of dangers as well as satisfactions. We really don’t want to bring them back. We want something better, which is to learn from them....

Religion was a going thing, that was for sure. The war was over. Americans wanted something that looked more normal than a carrier deck or a pup tent. Moreover, the war years had in some ways been a praying time: Foxholes were, generally speaking, the last places you’d look for atheists.

The churches had been on hand—heroically, sacrificially....The military issued New Testaments to the troops. (I have preserved my father’s copy.) Christianity, and to a proportionately smaller extent, Judaism, emerged from the war looking better than they had since perhaps the first piercing notes of the Jazz Age.

A key element of post-war normalcy was anchorage in a church. By 1960, an astounding 69 percent of Americans claimed membership in one church or another. Here was evangelization—self-evangelization, really—on the grand scale.

Popular culture, being popular, was suffused with religion: anyway a sort of religion, obscuring more than highlighting doctrinal differences. Where the customers led, the entertainment industry followed, with Quo Vadis, The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, and, above all, Cecil B. de Mille’s cheerfully over-the-top The Ten Commandments...

Fulton Sheen was anything but alone among religious figures dispensing enlightenment and counsel. It was the age also of the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale’s attractive, and moneymaking, proposition was that “you can think your way to success and happiness.”...

There was unmistakably an element of American-ness in the postwar American embrace of organized religion. Into a Pledge of Allegiance too flat and secular for some tastes, Congress, in the mid-fifties, slipped the words “under God” by way of affirming the religious commitment everyone assumed we always had had. Charlton Heston as Moses, in the version of The Ten Commandments I saw as a high-school sophomore, could be viewed as defining the Exodus in Cold War terms: deliverance from tyranny by a jealous God with little time for tinpot despots and their minions....

Surely it was enough, of a Sunday, to put on a blue serge suit and striped necktie, walk the family to the church door, greet the grocer and the lawyer and the electrician, cut loose with “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,” bow heads for the Lord’s Prayer, favor the collection plate with a few appropriately sized bills—then head home, or to a good restaurant, for the Sunday repast. I myself spent many a Sunday this way.

It was no bad way to spend a Sunday, I must remark in retrospect. Was it a good way? That might seem the larger question. It certainly was the question for at least some partakers of American worship in the 1950s. Was this all? For this, Christ had suffered and died?...

When the decade began, I was a mere third grader. I remember no ecclesiological questions arising at the Sunday dinner table. Only later would I become aware of the critics and their supposed effrontery. There was, for instance, the Reverend Theodore Wedel, an Episcopal priest, who, in a 1950 book titled The Christianity of Main Street, argued that “Christianity is today, among a majority of educated men and women, including many nominal Protestant Christians, an almost unknown religion”—combining “Golden Rule idealism” and “moralism”—“a kind of Christianity without theology, one which does not repudiate the name of God but which has basically little to do with him.”...

Are the 1950s in any way a useful model for American Christians of the twenty-first century? Would we like to go back? Would it be better, for instance, if the movie moguls returned to producing religious epics like The Ten Commandments, with their earnest depictions of the power of God?...The epics didn’t go away. The audiences did. When George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told fizzled at the box office in 1965, it became clear that new factors were forming thought—factors that mainstream Christianity might have addressed, or even headed off at the pass, had it listened more attentively to some of the unwelcome criticisms launched earlier against complacency and self-satisfaction.

I think what the decade of the 1950s gives us to think about, concerning the role and duties of religion—the Christian religion, specifically—in a secular society is a matter of some consequence. Two particulars come to mind. First, Christians who are set on identifying themselves with the purposes of the larger society should be, at the very least—careful. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said our Lord. And a good thing, too, given the world’s engagements and preoccupations....Second, complacency regarding the world’s purposes requires no less care and wariness....

At the end of the day, Christianity is about morals second and faith first. It is so easy and common to reverse those-- or to water down or simply eliminate the latter. As we're told in Ephesians 2:8-10...

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

icons: Pentecostal, Evangelical and Catholic

I've never been particularly allergic to "icons", but found an essay by Frederica Mathewes-Green quite helpful. I can't find that on-line (it may have been in the first issue of Books & Culture), but did find an interview with her on the topic by Dick Traub in Christianity Today...

Anyway, I also liked this article by Lance Nixon in Touchstone...

In West Bend, Iowa, a short walk from the motel room we’d rented, with its view of cornfields and white granaries, my wife and I and our children visited the Grotto of the Redemption. We followed a path that led us past the Stations of the Cross and other images arranged, in relatively simple mosaics and stonework, to focus the visitor’s mind on the message of Christianity.

How fitting that the Ruler of the Universe, born in a manger, should be celebrated amid Iowa corn and hog farms. There was a stark nobility about it that brought to mind how Thomas Merton, not yet a Roman Catholic convert, described the Byzantine imagery that impressed him in churches in Rome.

The imagery was “without pretentiousness, without fakery, and had nothing theatrical about it,” and “its solemnity was made all the more astounding by its simplicity—and by the obscurity of the places where it lay hid, and by its subservience to higher ends, architectural, liturgical and spiritual ends which I could not even begin to understand.” He could not avoid guessing at those ends, however,

since the nature of the mosaics themselves and their position and everything about them proclaimed it aloud. . . . For these mosaics and frescoes and all the ancient altars and thrones and sanctuaries were designed and built for the instruction of people who were not capable of immediately understanding anything higher.

It was deeply moving, but for a Pentecostal like myself, also strange. I returned at the end of that vacation glad that I could appreciate the aesthetics of Catholicism, but also content that within my own tradition, we eschew the use of images. Or do we?

I’ve long felt that those who criticize the simplicity of Pentecostal worship choruses don’t understand that they function in just the way Thomas Merton described those Byzantine mosaics. They fill a clear liturgical need that progresses from praise into worship, in very simple terms and imagery that any blue-collar worker can understand.

But it occurred to me after our trip to the Grotto that we Pentecostals (and Evangelicals, too) do, in fact, use “real” images in worship. At least in many churches, they are there every Sunday in the pictures projected onto screens at the head of the church, along with the words to our choruses. We just don’t think of them as “images” or use that term for them.

These “motions” or “backgrounds” usually show people worshiping, the cross, or scenes of nature. Looking at one distributor’s website, I see one that shows a man skylined against a line of hills flooded by sunlight and another that shows a man bowed forward on his knees in prayer in a church with sunlight falling on him from a deep narrow window.

Others show a worshiper with his arms stretched wide in a t-shaped, crucifixion gesture against a sunset sky; a man with outstretched arms standing on a rocky shore pounded by the ocean; a woman at the edge of a meadow, her arms lifted in praise; a man with his arms spread wide against a backdrop of clouds. Another shows a congregation with hands lifted; another is simply an image of hands held open toward heaven; yet another shows a woman with her clothes billowing in the wind and her arms slightly behind her, bathed in sunlight.

If I had to try to put into words the theme of these images, it might be that worship is a way of life, that it takes place regardless of setting, and that fervency, honesty, and humility in worship is desirable. I don’t think any of that is specifically Pentecostal or Evangelical....

Yet this trend raises questions: Can a style of worship be exalted instead of that which its practitioners profess to worship? Could worshipers, in a sense, end up worshiping themselves worshiping, and is that what is going on when we display these images at the front of our congregations?

During the two years in which I tried to attend a non-Pentecostal church, that was the complaint I heard from non-charismatic Evangelicals. They were bothered by what they perceived as the Pentecostal/Charismatic influence in their own worship services, both in the worship choruses they chose to sing, with words about lifting up hands and dancing and bowing down, and in the accompanying worship backgrounds. A particular style of worship can become an idol, one man said during a Sunday school class.

That may be true, perhaps in other traditions as well as my own—yet I don’t think that’s what is happening here. After all, one of the names for these pictures is “backgrounds”—they are only aids to worship, not the focus. This “new” trend might be at least as old as the Psalms, an endorsement of specific postures and acts that reflect the deep yearning of the human being to be a creature who worships the Creator and serves as the high priest of creation.

So while I find myself thinking that I align with Luther’s position on images—we are free to have them or not have them, but they are not to be worshiped, they are unnecessary, and we would be better off without them—yet I find that, in practice, my tradition is actually using images in worship in a way that traditions older than Protestantism might sanction....

What is endearing about the Pentecostal and Evangelical use of images is that they are of ordinary individuals, virtually anonymous, with nothing remarkable about them or the way they are dressed. The point is not to be able to identify them as individual “saints,” as with icons. In fact, the point seems to be not that the “saint” is worthy of honor or veneration, but that God is. The God who is worshiped is the unseen focal point of all those images of worshipers....

I suspect Pentecostals and Evangelicals will never build Grottos of the Redemption at the borders of Iowa cornfields. But we may share with older traditions a picture of what life in Christ is to be.

C.S. Lewis quote of the week-- on marriage

"The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a [covenant] or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise adds nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made...A promise must be about things that I can do, about action: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way."

--Mere Christianity, book 3, ch. 6

when is it a good time to die?

Ghastly wisdom from Dave Coverley in Speed Bump...

This gets to an oft-overlooked truism: from an earthly perspective, there's never a good time to die. If you die while you're relatively healthy, then you died too early. If you die while chronically and painfully ill, then you should have been "taken" sooner. A bit of a Catch-22 for the Divine-- if people are prone to complain, huh? And yes, "everyone" is a critic...

tonight: Lib presidential debates on Fox

According to a press release from Wayne Allan Root's campaign...

In a run-up to the national Libertarian convention-- where candidates debate before the selection process-- Wayne Allyn Root will debate former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel on Fox Business Channel on Friday May 16th [between 8:00 and 9:00 PM].

It's thought to be the first-ever Libertarian Presidential debate to be televised nationally, outside of C-Span coverage, during the Libertarian convention season.

Former Congressman Bob Barr was invited to join the debate- but declined.

Root has also agreed to join Barr and Gravel live and in-person in Washington D.C. on Tuesday
May 20, 2008 in a Libertarian Presidential debate hosted by Reason.

Noonan: the GOP is dying

From Peggy Noonan in tomorrow's WSJ (hat tip: Craig Ladwig)...


The Democrats aren't the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they're finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They're busy being born.

The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They're frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, "Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi." It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid – detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in '78 or '82 or '94....

They are also – Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers – successful, well-connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in '86, how government would pay off! They didn't know they'd stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you're safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way.

Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they've publicly supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

"This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day....

That's what you get when principles are overwhelmed by politics-- and when you have a big tent with various types of conservatives, many of whom must then be ill-served. You can also see evidence of this in the allergic reactions to Ron Paul in many GOP circles and the GOP's inability to turn things around on fiscal conservatism.

addiction to and independence from oil: what does that mean?

William Anderson with an eminently useful post on LewRockwell.com about our addiction to oil, energy "dependence", and the supposed promise of alternative energies (when govt-subsidized)...

Watch any talking head, and when the subject comes to energy, one can expect to hear the mantra, Americans are “addicted” to oil, and especially “foreign oil.” This is repeated as though the repetition is proof that the premise is true.

Thus, American taxpayers are currently being forced to contribute billions of dollars – and will be dunned many billions more in the future – for a number of measures that supposedly will “secure” the United States’s energy use and supplies in the coming years. What’s more, the debate about whether or not these energy programs are even necessary is considered passé. The major question on energy today, unfortunately, is this: How much will government central planning replace relatively free markets in determining America’s energy future?

If I may be bold with words, it seems to me that what we are witnessing is that the future production and supply of fuel in the United States is to be left not to a free market, but to something akin to Mussolini’s corporate state, which gave us the Italian version of “fascism.” While people today have been taught to think of fascism as related to goose-stepping men in military uniforms and dictators with moustaches, it actually represents a form of social organization in which government forces policies upon the business sector in which the state directs production in exchange for guaranteed monopolized markets.

Although I realize that “fascism” is one of those “shock” words that is easily misinterpreted or exaggerated, there is no better term to describe what I see as the energy future of the United States. To explain why I believe this interpretation so strongly, I have prepared a number of questions and answers regarding the production and use of fuel in the United States as a tool by which to point out why the current direction being pushed both by the Bush administration and by Congress not only is wrong, economically speaking, but is just plain destructive.

Oil addiction

Q: Is the United States “addicted” to oil, and especially foreign oil?

A: The term “addicted” obviously is pejorative. Addiction refers to the habitual use of something for which one does not receive a benefit, or at least a long-term benefit. For example, we think of addictions as pertaining to the use of drugs such as cocaine or heroin that might give the user a temporary “high” feeling but that in the long term are injurious to his health. In reference to the use of oil, the picture that the “anti-addiction” advocates want to put forth is that of people who enjoy short-term gains from using gasoline and other petroleum-based products, but whose use in the long run makes them dependent on exports from hostile or unstable countries, such as those in the Middle East....

But there is a problem in using the term “addiction” to refer to oil. The term “addiction” denotes a moral choice, as though it were immoral to use oil, but moral to use a fuel developed from a different source. While I will deal with the use of particular fuels that Bush apparently believes to be the “moral” ones, I will first deal with the issue of whether or not it is immoral to use petroleum.

Petroleum is petroleum, and whether it comes from under the ground within the borders of the United States or from elsewhere, it contains the same molecular structure and the same physical properties. There is no intrinsically moral difference between oil extracted from within the United States and oil extracted from another country. The only question that remains is about its use.

People use petroleum as the basis for fuel for their automobiles, heating their houses, powering vehicles used for work, and many other things. The assumption from the “oil is addictive” crowd is that these things are somehow immoral if they are done with the help of oil but moral if done by aid of another fuel.

Now, it is clear that many of the things on which we depend have an oil component, but the development of fossil fuels has also meant that the world as we know it now can sustain more human life, and for a longer time. (In the pre-capitalist, pre–fossil-fuel age, life expectancy was about 30 years. Environmentalists try to tell us those were the Golden Years.) In other words, fossil fuels – and especially oil – have been valuable products for civilization as we know it.

It is true that Americans (as well as nearly everyone else in the world) depend heavily on petroleum-based fuel. Yet people also depend on oxygen and we hear no one saying that we are “addicted to oxygen” or “addicted to water” or “addicted to food.” Petroleum-based fossil fuels have enabled people to enjoy standards of living that were unthinkable in the past. The difference between depending on something and being “addicted” to it is vast.

Policies that Congress pushes toward oil and oil companies further advance the “oil is immoral” mantra. First, Congress has severely restricted the drilling for oil and currently is trying to permanently stop new drilling in Alaska. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) has vast reserves under its soil, and the area proposed for drilling is not a pristine habitat for wildlife but rather an arctic desert. (The pictures of wildlife that often accompany the news stories on the subject are taken in areas where drilling would never occur, something that the commentators do not mention.)

Second, the new Democratic Congress is attempting to levy stiff taxes on domestic oil (and natural gas), all in the name of trying to force down energy prices. (Earth to Congress; slapping punitive taxes on anything ultimately raises prices for those goods and services.) The obvious purpose is to discourage domestic production of petroleum, making oil-based fuels more expensive, which is ironic, since one reason that voters turned out the Republicans was that they blamed them for high gasoline prices.

Here is the supreme irony: First we are told that we should not be importing oil from Middle Eastern countries or places such as Venezuela, but then we find that the government is also trying to squash domestic production. Thus, it is not hard to conclude that the “buying oil from unstable countries” line is a red herring.

The reasons for such policies are obvious: Congress wants to end the era of fossil fuels altogether, or at least force consumers to use other fuels that Congress has deemed morally suitable for this country. That’s why Congress continues to push the “addiction” lie, as well as the fossil-fuels-create-global-warming viewpoint. However, we hear about other “choices” for “alternative fuels,” and especially ethanol, which I examine next.

Alternative fuels

Q: Don’t ethanol and other alternative and “renewable” fuels show more promise?

A: During the first government-created “energy crisis” of the 1970s, the U.S. government sank billions of taxpayer dollars into the “synfuels” industry. The Carter administration, which pushed the program, insisted that the United States could become “energy independent” by making fuel from coal, oil shale, tar sands, and, of course, corn.

At the time, the price for a barrel of conventional petroleum was substantially below the price for an equivalent “synthetic” fuel, and that differential increased during the 1980s and 1990s. The Reagan administration let the “synfuels” program die quietly, and while there was a short resurgence in the early days of the Gulf War toward “energy independence,” the benefits of relatively inexpensive petroleum were obvious.

The problems of ethanol are much greater than advocates wish to admit. First, and most important, it literally takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel to make a gallon of ethanol from corn. While political rhetoric can be used to rewrite the tax and spending laws that permit the government subsidy needed to make ethanol, it cannot rewrite the laws of science. Corn-based ethanol, which has driven corn prices to very high levels, is a naked subsidy to a relatively small group of persons who grow corn for a living.

Second, ethanol has serious transportation problems, as it cannot be moved by pipeline, which is by far the least expensive and most economical way to transport fuels for long distances. Instead, it must be transported by truck and rail, and that means that new tank cars must be constructed, and they have to be hauled by existing carriers, which are already limited by other factors, such as the availability of roads, rails, and train schedules....(Politicians and other alternative-energy advocates forget that transportation is part of the economic process, too. They cannot simply wish alternatives into being without looking at the costs involved.) John Fund of the Wall Street Journal writes,

As for corn-based ethanol, Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute calls the current mania to subsidize it “the closest thing to a state religion America has.” Corn farmers have done a good job of disguising the fact that it still takes more than a gallon of fossil fuel – 29 percent more is the best estimate – to make a gallon of ethanol. In addition, various mandates requiring the use of ethanol significantly increased gasoline prices last summer and led to spot shortages because ethanol can’t be carried through pipelines and requires special blending plants. James Glassman, an economist with J.P. Morgan Chase, notes that expensive ethanol was a big factor in the sticker-shock consumers encountered at the pump this summer. “We’d probably have retail gasoline prices between $2.30 and $2.40 a gallon if not for ethanol,” he told the Wall Street Journal last June, when pump prices were topping $3 a gallon.

Third, the corn-based alcohol fuel itself is not as desirable as gasoline or diesel fuel in terms of performance. (Yes, Indy cars run on alcohol, but the owners and drivers of those cars do not worry about things such as gas mileage.) Ethanol gets fewer miles per gallon than do gasoline and diesel fuel, and when one adds the fact that the creation of a gallon of corn-based ethanol requires more than a gallon of petroleum-based fuels to be burned, we have the perverse result in which the more ethanol we create and use, the more we use oil. And this is done in the name of “conservation”?

It is true that ethanol can be made from plants such as switchgrass and other “weeds,” but the fundamental issues do not change. Furthermore, because the current ethanol program really is a subsidy to corn farmers, the idea that corn farmers and their political allies would permit other widespread ethanol programs just does not square with political reality.

Energy independence

Q: Won’t “energy independence” make us more secure?

A: There is something reassuring about the concept of “energy independence,” but the term is much more dishonest than one might think. First, and most important, the United States is part of a world economy, and it is not the case that because one product is produced within the borders of this country the United States is “independent” of what happens elsewhere in the world. Indeed, many people who call for “energy independence” have no problem in calling for U.S. troops to be sent around the world for military operations because they insist that global issues are our issues, too. (My comments are not an endorsement of such policies, but rather an attempt to point out that people who call for energy independence need to be consistent in their thinking.)

Second, one must remember that trade itself is by nature a peaceful activity, spurred on by mutual benefits to all parties involved. It is in Americans’ interest to trade with all nations, including those in the Middle East...

Energy “independence” is a foolish term that has no bearing in reality. Such a regime of “independence” would require government to expand its powers of taxation and regulation far beyond where those powers operate today, and Americans would be made substantially poorer for the effort.

There is another way. The United States could return to being a peaceful trading partner with countries of the world, no matter what the ideology of their governments. In the long run, there would be no call for “energy independence,” because trade obviously would be the better and wiser route to take.

Republicans as "dog food" that would be "taken off the shelf"

That's the analogy of Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA)...

The losses in Louisiana and most recently, Mississippi, are certainly an ominous sign for the GOP. I like the line that Dems already picked off much of the low-hanging fruit, so further losses will likely be minimal. But a return to majority status is unlikely until 2010 (and then, only if Barack wins).

Here's Ken Dilanian in USA Today (hat tip: C-J)...

Republicans must regain the confidence of Americans and recast their message to voters to avoid a catastrophe in the fall congressional elections, top GOP officials said Wednesday in a stark postmortem of a loss in rural Mississippi.

Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who runs the committee tasked with helping elect Republicans to Congress, said Tuesday's defeat in Mississippi — after losing GOP seats in other special elections in Illinois and Louisiana — was evidence that "a large section of the American people doesn't have confidence in the Republican Party."

"What we've got right now is a deficiency in our message and a loss of confidence by the American people to do what we say we're going to do," Cole said in a conference call with reporters.

He said, "When you lose three of these in a row, you have to get beyond campaign tactics and take a long hard look: Is there something wrong with your product?"

In a memo to GOP leaders posted on Politico's website, retiring Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., offered a blunt verdict: "The Republican brand is in the trash can. … If we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf."

"This is as bad as it gets for any party," said David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, which tracks each race. "I've never seen a more defeated tone." Nevertheless, Wasserman said, his analysis shows the Democrats will pick up far fewer districts than they did in the 2006 election, when they gained 31 seats. He estimates the Democrats will gain five to 10 seats in the fall. "Democrats won most of the low-hanging fruit in 2006," he said.

Democratic leaders, not surprisingly, have a different view. They hope to capitalize on their winning formula in Mississippi and Louisiana, where their candidates' cultural conservatism played well....

Former speaker Newt Gingrich has urged House Republicans to come out with a series of dramatic proposals, including a moratorium on congressionally directed spending items known as earmarks. His ideas were not widely embraced.

Boehner is rolling out an "American Families Agenda" this week focusing on national security, tax cuts, balancing the budget and boosting domestic oil production.

Baron Hill's "fiscal conservatism" (revisited)

Baron's special brand of "fiscal conservatism" was on display again yesterday as he voted for a $290 billion farm bill-- with significant increases in hand-outs to farmers, even with rapidly increasing food prices and farm income.

Taking your money and giving it to the wealthy?
Voting for increased spending and calling oneself a fiscal conservative?

This won't help Baron's failing grades with National Taxpayers Union, Citizens Against Government Waste, and Club for Growth. (As a fiscal moderate, would Mike Sodrel have joined the 100 GOP House members who voted for it or the 100 or so who voted against it?)

Baron is not as profligate as many of his Democratic friends, but every time I hear him try to claim the fiscal conservative label, it's worth a good belly laugh.

"blue dog" Democrats and more increases in govt spending (given to the wealthy)

From the editorialists of the WSJ, the second half on the recent farm bill (covering the politics)-- with updates inserted by me, from the AP's Mary Clare Jalonick (hat tip: C-J)...

If you wonder why urban Democrats would vote for this rural giveaway, the answer is they have been bought off with roughly $10 billion in extra funding for food stamps and nutrition welfare programs. Someone should tell them that their constituents might not need this cash if the farm bill didn't help keep food prices high. And let's not forget the Blue Dog Democrats who are supposed to be spending hawks. The farm bill busts the budget caps by at least $10 billion, but the Blue Dogs get $5.9 billion in handouts for their districts. So they will put their fiscal sermonizing on hold and vote "aye."

More "fiscal conservatism" from the Blue Dogs-- taking your money (or financing the hand-out with debt) to give a lot of money to rich people. Great!

Mr. Bush is promising a veto, to his credit, but the White House expects even many Republicans to vote to override. The House GOP swears it has learned its spending lesson after 2006. Yet House Minority Leader John Boehner, who opposes the bill himself, isn't rallying GOP opposition. Perhaps there are too many Republicans who crave the handouts too.

The headline of the C-J version of Jalonick's piece said that the House had a veto-proof majority with 100 GOP votes. We'll see about the Senate. But when Bush says something is "fiscally irresponsible", it must be really bad!

Meanwhile, John McCain says "I would veto that bill" and will vote against it in the Senate. Strangely silent is Barack Obama. A major theme of his campaign is to battle corporate special interests in Washington on behalf of the "middle class." Here is one of his first tests, and it'll be fascinating to see if he sides with the well-funded commodity lobby over consumers and taxpayers.

He will continue to remain silent since it's more of the same-- special interests trump the common people, even for Barack.

(really) green acres is the place to be

From the editorialists of the WSJ, the first half of an op-ed piece entitled "who wants to be a millionaire?".

Actually, almost all of the recipients are already millionaires! If you haven't seen it already, check out the EWG website with its amazing detail on farm subsidies, by individual and company over the last decade.

We can't wait to hear how Members of Congress explain their vote this week for the new $300 billion farm bill. At a time when Americans are squeezed at the grocery store, they will now see more of their taxes flow to the very farmers profiting from these high food prices.

This year farm income is expected to reach an all-time high of $92.3 billion, an increase of 56% in two years, making growers perhaps the most undeserving welfare recipients in American history. But that won't stop this bill from passing the House and Senate by wide margins. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was once a farm subsidy skeptic, but she now has some 30 freshman Democrats from battleground rural districts to protect. So more than $10 billion a year in giveaways to agribusiness is a necessary taxpayer sacrifice to keep her majority....

The bill perpetuates the so-called Hurricane Katrina gambit that allows farmers to lock in price-support payments at the lowest possible market price, and then sell their crops later at the highest possible price, and then pocket the high price and a payment from the government for the difference between the two. They in effect get paid twice for the same bushel of wheat.

A bigger scam is the new income limit to qualify for subsidies. Mr. Bush sought a $200,000 annual income cap, but Congress can't bring itself to go below $750,000. Even that is a farce, because it doesn't include loan programs and disaster payments, and it allows spouses to qualify for payments too. The White House and liberal reformers calculate that farm owners with clever accountants can have incomes of up to $2.5 million and still get a taxpayer handout.

Several weeks ago, Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin was asked by the Des Moines Register how many farmers in Iowa would be excluded under the new income cap. His answer: "two or three." On tax policy Mr. Harkin and his fellow Democrats talk endlessly about soaking the rich, but on farm policy they favor soaking the middle class to pay the rich.

Nearly every crop – corn, wheat, sugar – has won increases in subsidy payments even as farm commodity prices explode. (See nearby chart.) Of the 17 most subsidized commodities, only rice and cotton will get a slight reduction in payments, while the bill extends the farm welfare net to lentils, chick peas, fruits and vegetables, and even organic foods. There are new programs for Kentucky horse breeders and Pacific Coast salmon fishermen, and your tax dollars will help finance the dairy industry's "Got Milk?" campaign. Oh, and you still don't even have to farm to cash in. Hundreds of millions of dollars will go to landowners based on their "historical planting average" even if they haven't planted a seed in years.

And once again the big sugar plantation owners in Florida walk away with the sweetest deal: Big Sugar bagged an increase in price supports and a guarantee of 85% of the domestic sugar market at these guaranteed prices. So taxpayers are on the hook for buying surplus domestically produced sugar at 23 cents a pound and selling it for ethanol for closer to three cents a pound....

America's surprisingly green thumb

From Steven Hayward's research for AEI-- as blurbed in The American...

In 1910, the nation's population was only 92 million people, per-capita income (in current 2007 dollars) was only $5,964, and total GDP (also in current 2007 dollars) was about $551 billion--about one-twentieth the size of the U.S. economy today. While the economy has grown more than twenty-fold in real terms since 1910, fossil fuel energy consumption only grew six-fold, and per-capita CO₂ emissions only doubled--from 10.9 tons to 19.4 tons. This is not the profile of a nation that is profligate with energy....

If these differences in standard of living and transportation density are normalized, America's per-capita greenhouse gas emissions would not be much different from western Europe. And here lies the main paradox of the misperception on this issue: it is precisely because the United States is highly energy efficient that we are able to afford and consume more energy than European nations on a per-capita basis. One obvious implication of this analysis is that the United States cannot currently achieve European-level greenhouse gas emissions unless it reduces American output and lowers the nation's standard of living.

the myth of offshoring pollution

The title of an excerpt from Arik Levinson's research-- as blurbed in The American...

Everyone agrees that air pollution from U.S. manufacturing has declined significantly in recent decades. But has America simply offshored its dirty industries and boosted imports of polluting products, as many globalization critics claim? Not according to research by Georgetown University economist Arik Levinson.

The good news, says Levinson, is that most of the pollution reduction over the past 30 years has come from changes in technology, rather than from changes in imports or changes in the types of goods produced domestically.

• Criteria air pollutants collectively declined 58 percent from 1972 to 2001, despite a 71 percent increase in manufacturing output.
• The cleanup was accomplished by changing the mix of goods produced and by altering the technologies used to produce those goods.
• For a typical pollutant, technology accounts for a large majority of the cleanup.

lies, damned lies, and graphs

From Ronald Rychlak of the Heartland Institute, a report on the ways in which visual aids (e.g., graphs) can be misunderstood &/or twisted in order to make evidence look far more compelling-- with application to the global warming debate...

From the executive summary:

A new study on the use of visual exhibits in the global warming debate--a tactic employed regularly by former Vice President Al Gore in his film, An Inconvenient Truth--reveals how graphs, charts, and other images can be accurate and still skew data to support a partisan view....

Author Ronald J. Rychlak notes, “Advocates have ‘packaged’ their evidence with charts, graphs, and other visual exhibits designed to have maximum impact with minimal effort on the part of the public. The manipulation of visuals--bar and line graphs, pie charts, even photographs--has proven to be a highly effective way to offer up scary scenarios ... and it is easily done.

And excerpts from the paper itself...

Global warming involves science, economics, and politics. Each of these areas has its own complexities, and there are many difficult issues and sub-issues. Moreover, special interests on both sides of the debate can make the case more difficult to understand rather than easier.

One problem with the global warming theory is that there is no way to use the scientific method to test the link between carbon dioxide and temperature levels at an atmospheric scale. A scientist cannot emit carbon dioxide into some atmospheres and leave others as an experimental control. We have only one atmosphere to work with and we are dependent on it for our lives. The scientist is left with environmental modeling—sort of reverse engineering. This involves looking at changes that have taken place and trying to figure out why they happened. This is a recognized way to try to understand the world, but it is far less certain than experimentation based on the scientific method.

See also: many supposed examples of evolution-- and especially, Evolution as a comprehensive explanation for the development of life.

There are some things in the climate change debate on which there is widespread agreement. Average global temperatures have increased by about one degree Celsius over the past 100 years. During the second half of that period, carbon emissions from human activity increased significantly, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 ppm to 380 ppm, or from approximately 0.03 percent of the atmosphere to 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. Whether this amount of a “trace gas” actually could lead to a global temperature increase is where much of the modern debate is focused.

Environmental activists may be tempted to exaggerate their case in order to convince the public and politicians of the validity of their scenarios. This was illustrated in a statement made by climatologist Stephen H. Schneider, one-time adviser to Vice President Al Gore and author of the book Global Warming: Are We entering the Greenhouse Century? (1989). Schneider said that in order to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change, “we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

The manipulation of visuals—bar and line graphs, pie charts, even photographs—has proven to be a highly effective way “to offer up scary scenarios” ... and it is easily done. This report explains how visuals can be manipulated by, among other techniques:

-changing the appearance of graphs by adjusting baselines (minimums) and maximums on the vertical axis;

-selectively reporting data on, for instance, a time line appearing on the horizontal axis of a chart;

-using color and three dimensions to call attention to specific elements of a graph, even when those elements may not warrant special treatment; and

-inaccurately superimposing graphs with different scales.

More than a dozen visuals throughout this report, including many that are common to the current debate over global warming, make it easy to see the effect of manipulated visuals....

I don't reproduce any of those here, but they're worth checking out if you've read this far!

Kentucky leading the way on nuclear energy?!

In the most recent issue of the Heartland Institute's Environment and Climate News, Jay Donovan reports on efforts by Kentucky legislators to end the state's moratorium on building nuclear power plants...

Three Kentucky legislators have introduced legislation in the state House and Senate to end a 25-year moratorium on nuclear power plant construction in the state.

The moratorium was enacted in 1984 and banned the construction of any new power plants until a national containment facility for spent nuclear fuel becomes operational.

Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the designated national storehouse for spent nuclear fuel. Although the U.S. Department of Energy reports an extremely safe Yucca Mountain facility can be operational within a decade, political and legal maneuvering by nuclear power opponents has put the facility in limbo....

With at least 25 applications now in the pipeline for nuclear construction licenses in states other than Kentucky, state Sens. Bob Leeper (I-Paducah) and Charlie Borders (R-Russell) and state Rep. Steven Rudy (R-West Paducah) have sponsored the companion Senate and House bills that would open Kentucky for modern nuclear technology.

The legislators propose replacing the requirement of a national spent fuel facility with a requirement that any new nuclear power plant comply with all federal safety standards.

Leeper emphasizes Kentucky should be on an equal footing with other states as energy companies roll out new nuclear power plant proposals....

artists, energy-- and the ability of the market to adjust

From Brian Doherty in Reason, an article entitled Power From the People: What happens when creative consumers decide to generate their own energy?

Doherty opens with a homemade energy example:

Here’s one way to get electricity: First, find two old metal tanks, of varying widths and heights—the kind used to contain compressed gases will do. You might have a few lying around, at least if you hang out in junkyards or machine shops chockablock with working metal sculptors.

Then take your angle grinder—you’ve got an angle grinder, right?—and smooth down the surface of the smaller tank, slicing off any protruding pieces with its palm-sized circular saw. The grinder will get them—just put a little muscle behind it. It’d be good to have a box of replacement discs around, as they wear out quickly.

Now put a different blade on the grinder and cut around the entire circumference of both tanks to get yourself cylinders of the desired height. Really, anyone can do it. I’m no trained metal worker, but I was able to perform the grinding and slicing OK when I had to. It was even sort of fun.

My circumference cut was uneven, though; if you’re an amateur, get someone with a better eye and steadier hand to even it out for you so you can get something close to a seal when you put a lid on top of the wider one. Nestle the smaller cut tank inside the other, attach a grate to its bottom, then funnel carbon-based waste into the top. It can be wood, paper, walnut shells, even coffee grounds. All that matters is that it has some carbon bonds that can break down to make heat and burnable gases.

Get a fire going inside the first cylinder to heat that carbon-based waste, without quite burning it. What you want is to start a process called pyrolysis, in which the carbon-based stuff gets warmed up in an oxygen-poor environment, releasing volatile gases that aren’t fully incinerated. The carbon then becomes char.

Keep heating those released volatiles over the char until you’ve reduced the output gas to mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen; that gas will “live” in the space between the inner and outer cylinder, and can ultimately be sucked out via a hole in the top, through tubes, to run into a generator engine, which will burn them like it burns any other fuel to operate. The byproducts will be carbon dioxide and water.

This technique can also run the engine in your car, which is what the one I helped build in an Oakland metal-worker warehouse last August was intended to do.

As with any biofuel, this process is in essence carbon-neutral, since it only releases back into the atmosphere the carbon that had been taken out by the raw-material plants as they grew. Had that bio-waste not been burned, it would have eventually released the carbon back into the atmosphere through decomposition anyway. Burning fossil fuels, by contrast, introduces new carbon into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered underground.

The chemical and technical realities behind this fuel generation have been very much simplified in the above description, but a workable machine to manufacture usable, carbon-neutral energy really can be constructed in a single afternoon. What you have just built is a jury-rigged version of a “gasifier.” While gasifiers haven’t been widely used in America for decades, it’s not a new technology. In Europe during World War II, when liquid fuel was hard to come by, these generators were adopted as an impromptu way to get many thousands of cars moving.

Most of us, thankfully, have other ways to acquire energy....

A growing number of venture capitalists, small businesses, and government regulators are asking a provocative question: What kind of efficiencies could be realized if power was created by, or at least much nearer, the end user instead?

Experiments in such “distributed generation”—where power is produced by multiple sources through multiple methods, much closer to the point of final use—are happening on industrial scales, via such means as combined heat and power (CHP) and solar. But they are also possible on a smaller scale, as part of a burgeoning “people power” movement. Lots of distributed generation thinking is based on the already old-fashioned solar panel model. But in Berkeley, California, a group of artists and gearheads is exploring more complicated ways to turn the old electricity model upside down without a single dollar in subsidies or a giant power plant.

Their trials, tribulations, and occasional flashes of glory make a compelling case study of how something as emblematic of the machine age as energy production can become intimate and personal. These innovators imagine a transformation similar to the evolution of computers over the past 40 years: from a mainframe model in which consumer interaction was both unwanted and enormously difficult, to a networked personal laptop model where both hardware and software are widely accessible and, for those interested, adjustable to your personal and creative choices, circumstances, and whims—remaining all the while deeply intertwined with an industrial mass-production system.

Their experiences also indicate that industrial creativity has a hard time co-existing with current urban regulations—and that the old model of generating and distributing electricity, with all its flaws, is unlikely to be knocked off its perch any time soon....

And then, to the art/energy combo by Jim Mason, a Berkeley artist Doherty met through Burning Man, an annual festival held in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. Mason was forced to think about self-generated power by the city of Berkeley, which cut off his electricity during a dispute over building code violations....

Click on the link above to read about Mason's efforts...

"green" cars-- and the ability of the market to adjust

From Edward Taylor in the WSJ...

Spurred by the belief that the market for fuel-efficient vehicles is about to take off, a slew of tiny car companies is springing up in Europe and the U.S. They are racing to produce the next "green" car, betting that soaring demand will allow them to survive alongside the giants of Detroit, Stuttgart and Tokyo.

Most of the upstarts were founded in the last 12 months and have financial backing from venture-capital firms. They are headed by former top engineers and designers from the likes of Germany's Volkswagen AG and storied U.K. racecar builder McLaren. Responding to soaring gasoline prices and a tightening noose of emissions regulations in Europe and the U.S., the companies are working on a new generation of hybrid and electric vehicles.

Many of the green start-ups are hoping to ride the coattails of California-based Tesla Motors Inc. Founded in 2003, Tesla unveiled an electrically powered sports car in 2006. The Tesla roadster went into production last month and has presold the first year's output.

One problem: Competition from the industry giants is real. Daimler AG, Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors Corp., Renault SA and Mitsubishi Corp. are all developing new-generation electric vehicles.

Some of the start-ups plan to build and sell cars, going head-to-head with the likes of Toyota, maker of the successful Prius hybrid. Others hope to outsource manufacturing to bigger companies, or even to sell the technology altogether, taking advantage of a growing trend among large auto makers to buy key technologies from outside firms.

"In the past 20 years a lot of the car companies felt it was an advantage to develop and own things exclusively. That's changing," says Henrik Fisker, a former design director at Ford Motor Co. and Aston Martin. Mr. Fisker now heads California-based Fisker Automotive Inc., which he started in 2007 to develop a plug-in hybrid sports car, the Karma. He hopes to put his 125-miles-per-hour car on the market for $80,000 to $100,000 late next year....

The upstarts are entering a notoriously tough market. But analysts say shrinking research-and-development budgets at the big auto makers -- and their interest in outside help to develop key technology -- may have opened up the road for smaller players....

offshore oil rigs-- and the ability of markets to adjust

From Guy Chazan in the WSJ, an interesting story about a little niche in a big, important market...

As a buccaneering oil trader, John Fredriksen shipped crude from trouble spots like Iran and used hardball tactics to build up the world's biggest tanker fleet. The son of a welder, this modern-day Onassis is now Norway's richest man, worth at least $7 billion.

He is also one of a new breed of entrepreneurs reshaping the oil business.

Mr. Fredriksen has amassed an array of state-of-the-art oil rigs capable of drilling in the world's deepest oceans. With production declining in mature basins like Alaska, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Brazil and West Africa are oil's hottest real estate. But the rigs that can drill there are in short supply. That means contractors like Mr. Fredriksen can charge huge premiums for their services.

His success is part of a broader power shift from Big Oil -- the Shells, Exxons and BPs of the world -- to the oil-field-services sector. As they venture into ever harsher and more remote environments, the majors are becoming more reliant on these outside contractors -- geologists, well testers, seismic data experts and offshore drillers -- to find and extract their crude. The service companies are the new rule-setters in an increasingly costly game....

Mr. Fredriksen made an early bet many thought was insane. Three years ago, his company, Seadrill Ltd., broke one of the cardinal rules of the rig business. It ordered two "ultradeep water" rigs, capable of drilling in waters at a depth of at least 7,500 feet, for nearly $900 million -- on spec. It didn't have a single contract from an oil company to guarantee them.

"We didn't feel it was a risk," said Mr. Fredriksen, a 63-year-old with piercing blue eyes, elegantly attired in a blazer and cravat on a recent afternoon in his London office. "We knew there was a boom coming on."

There's no telling how long that boom will last. But Mr. Fredriksen sees years of strong demand ahead. The amount of oil pumped from deep-water fields will nearly double between 2005 and 2010 to about 11 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration....

doom-mongers and false prophets

From Walter Williams through Jewish World Review...

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich said 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 work "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them." In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "... civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 "... somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

It's not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was "little or no chance" of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the Secretary of the Interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. According to the American Gas Association, there's a 1,000 to 2,500 year supply.

Here are my questions: In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of manmade global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity?

When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome?

In 1939, when the U.S. Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken?

Why believe them this time?

Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to manmade global warming?

A few facts: Over 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun's output. And natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas annually than all human sources combined.

what to do with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

From Lincoln Anderson in the WSJ...

A very useful piece. The only thing he doesn't mention is the connection between high gas prices and the depreciating dollar...

John McCain and a number of other senators have been recommending that the Bush administration stop buying crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). They're right.

Over the last eight months, the Department of Energy purchased more than 10 million barrels of oil for the SPR as the price rose $40 to above $120. This is not sensible. It puts upward pressure on oil prices at the worst possible time. It is a waste of taxpayer money. It gives aid and comfort to unfriendly nations. And it is an insurance policy that, for the most part, is no longer needed.

In fact, we should be selling oil from the SPR at $120. Doing so could be a powerful tool for U.S. energy policy.

First, a little background. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was established in 1976 in response to the growing instability of the Persian Gulf oil supply, and to address the threat to oil imports in the event of a war with the Soviet Union. It's been used sparingly: The largest drawdown was only 17 million barrels in 1991 during Desert Storm.

Today we have 701 million barrels of oil stored, of which 4.4 million barrels a day can be pumped. This could replace three quarters of OPEC imports for about 150 days.

But we do not need a brim-full SPR for national emergencies. There is a terrorist threat, to be sure, but it would not shut down oil imports. Other types of energy crises require small oil releases or are not related to import supply constraints.

But the SPR could be used to counterbalance the Organization of Petroleum Export Countries.

The blunt fact is that the price of crude oil on global markets is controlled by this cartel of governments: With 40% of world oil production, it is the biggest player, and it uses its clout. True, OPEC's market share has eroded to 40% today, down from 52% in 1973. But non-OPEC production is already starting to falter.

Because oil prices do fluctuate over a wide range, some say that OPEC is not controlling them. But the cartel is not after stability; rather, it wants a high average oil price. One of its most powerful tools to control non-OPEC oil production and alternative energy development is to allow price crashes to occur from time to time, to cow the competition. In 1985, for example, OPEC increased production in the face of weakening demand, sending prices down to $10 per barrel; it did the same in 1998.

The answer to this situation is perfectly straightforward. We should sell oil out of the SPR when oil prices are