Young: One Hummer of a problem

WACO, Texas — The most significant thing about Tuesday's primaries wasn't that Barack Obama inched closer to the Democratic nomination. It's that he got a bounce from an actual, and actually important, public policy stance.

Or so said one commentator after another. By not pandering to cash-strapped voters on the "gas tax holiday" embraced by John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama was acting presidential, at least in the way we remember presidents once having acted.

How refreshing that an issue that bears on real-world dilemmas would be inserted here, after all that riveting talk of flag pins and ex-pastors.

Oh, those non-issues will be reinserted this fall as sure as the sun is a gaseous ball. But in this refreshing pause we focus on the tough calls required when a policy maker's eye is on the big picture, rather than the summer driving season.

Suspending the gasoline tax is screwy policy. Not only would it cost the federal highway fund billions, it would also encourage people to go on about their fuel-guzzling ways.

That's the opposite of what our government should be doing. The only sure way to lower the price of gasoline is to use less.

Pump and drill and refine and . . . if lower gas prices are your aim, and if demand stays apace of supply, you are fooling yourself as you refuel. Of course, to Bush-Cheney Corp., drilling and pumping are aims to themselves.

The biggest canard is the claim that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would reduce America's reliance on foreign oil. The only way to reduce reliance on any kind of oil is to reduce use. Period.

Economics 101: Oil is fungible, like any other good. That means when it leaves the ground it becomes the world's. If it didn't, we wouldn't call it free enterprise. The only way that could change would be for this country to nationalize its oil.

It's amazing to hear references to "energy security" when in every other way today's policy makers speak the language of the global economy. From soybeans to lumber, it's anyone's anywhere for the right price.

As for U.S. gasoline prices, the only time in recent history the free market dramatically brought them down was when prices at the pump were deregulated in the early '80s. That caused them to go up sharply, which caused gasoline consumption to go down sharply.

We already are seeing some of that dynamic in play. Humvees and Excursions are being traded in for economy cars. Demand is soaring for hybrids.

But we are a long way from taking fuel conservation seriously as a nation.

In somber tones the other day, my son and a friend were talking about the prospect of $6-a-gallon gasoline next summer. That sounds like something certain to throw the U.S. economy into a tailspin. That is, unless Americans realized that an age of scarcity had dawned on them and they adjusted accordingly. We could do that now as a nation.

Veteran petroleum analyst Jan Lundberg asserts that today's high prices reflect something quite fundamental: "The peak of world oil extraction is approximately now." Lundberg says more refineries would be built if the industry projected long-term supplies for it.

"Refining capacity is almost maxed out, but industry sees little point in building more refineries when crude supply is in doubt," Lundberg says.

Once again, this isn't about what Alaska can supply. It's about what the planet can supply.

Back to real issues and the presidential race. Obama proposes $15 billion in research and development on alternative energy.

Someone will tell you we can't afford that, with military engagements on two fronts.

Interesting: We can afford those, but not this? Oh, and what are spending in Iraq? Roughly $2 billion a week.

That means if we took a summer "preemptive war/nation-building holiday" — we could pay for Obama's alternative fuel initiative.

Stick a flag pin in that.

John Young writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald.