From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE HEARTLAND
Black Gold, Silver Lining
By opposing ANWR drilling, Daschle may have become a new Gingrich.
President Bush's plan to open a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling went down in flames in the Senate last week. We're told it was another scorching for the administration's credibility. But in the end, it might be the Democrats who get burned.
Democrats and their ideological allies in the media used the issue as Exhibit A in claiming that the oil, gas and coal industries dictate the administration's energy policy. And in a screed in Sunday's New York Times, Al Gore, a professor at Fisk University and Middle Tennessee State University, blasted the administration for its alleged effort to replace the head of the United Nations global climate study with an Indian scientist more to its liking.
"Just as Enron needed auditors who wouldn't blow the whistle when the company lied about the magnitude of its future liabilities," huffed Prof. Gore, "the administration needs scientific reviews that won't sound the alarm on the destruction of the earth's climate balance."
But Prof. Gore was perfectly happy, back before he began his political career, to accept Enron's support for the carbon-dioxide trading system that he favored. The U.N. committee had been sounding mostly false alarms. And as the summer driving season drives up gasoline prices, the ANWR defeat may become a bigger liability for Democrats than Republicans.
Indeed, the ANWR setback may be temporary. At the least, the White House now has room to let sensible measures encourage markets to continue diversifying America's energy sources, instead of trying to create an "energy plan" for the country.
Earth Day was yesterday. Did anyone notice? It didn't attract the usual hoopla, perhaps because there is so many real issues to be concerned about these days. But the public may also be growing weary of the way environmentalists concoct doomsday scenarios to raise big bucks, a phenomenon the Sacramento Bee brilliantly detailed last year in a series of articles that should have--but of course didn't--win a Pulitzer Prize.
The economic slowdown last year may have concentrated a few minds as well. Bill Ford Jr., chairman of Ford Motor Co., attracted considerable attention for his efforts to burnish his green credentials in recent years, most notably by delivering a speech to a Greenpeace convention in London asserting that the internal-combustion engine was going the way of the dodo. But these days he is personally appearing in ads touting Ford's muscle cars, and word around Detroit is that the company has given up on former president Jacques Nasser's pledge to raise Ford's average mileage by 25% in the next three to five years.
Some commentators are saying that the defeat of the ANWR proposal showed the power of the environmental activists compared with unions, some of which advocated opening the reserve to drilling. But the unions that really count to most Democrats--teachers and public-sector workers--were nowhere to be found on the issue. And if the activists were really powerful, they would have had better luck with their efforts to push through a radical increase in corporate average fuel economy standards.
Environmentalists and their media friends portrayed the ANWR debate as pitting "pristine wilderness" against evil oil companies. But even if you think drilling ANWR was a bad idea, Democrats took a terrible risk in opposing it. If there is a serious blowup in the Middle East, they will be seen as not just opposing economic growth but placing American security at risk.
And their efforts to claim that conservation can keep America humming is likely to face some very skeptical reaction. Would windmill farms get us past a new Arab embargo? Are Democrats willing to tell their colleagues in Nevada to drop their opposition to accepting waste from nuclear power plants? Americans may come to see "conservation" as a euphemism for no growth.
So in a political sense, the death of the ANWR proposal may cede initiative back to the president--if he will seize it. Having knuckled under to the environmental extremists, Tom Daschle has made himself into this decade's Newt Gingrich, the man who didn't know when to say "no" to his friends on the fringes of his party. And Mr. Bush is well positioned to begin making the case why it's the essence of moderation to insist that market ideas and mechanisms must be a central part of any sustainable environmental policy.
Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays.
