Down The Oily Road Ahead

Ezra Klein makes two brilliant points:

New America's Lisa Margonelli has a great piece in the New York Times thinking ahead to the likely consequences of the likely consequences of the oil spill. The obvious next step, she says, is a moratorium on offshore drilling. But that'll only mean a moratorium on American offshore drilling. And that'll push production to places with much worse safety records.

Moratorium for the forseeable furture is absolutely correct but it's closing the barn door after the barn has been hit by a meteor and obliterated into kindling.  A better thing to do is reduce our oil consumption so that  offshore drilling and getting oil from foreign sources is less necessary.  Point 2:

And keep in mind that this is a very small disaster in comparison to the devastation that could follow a 5 degree jump in global temperatures, and yet it's things like offshore drilling -- that is to say, increased access to and consumption of fossil fuels -- that's hastening radical climate change. The dangers of offshore drilling didn't seem real until they became real, and now we're talking moratorium. But if we wait for climate change to really get going before we do something about it, it'll be far beyond the point when we can stop it just by pricing carbon. It's like one of those horror movie taglines: If you can see him, it's already too late.

Serious, deadly serious global warming legislation has to pass now because of this disaster.  The hundreds of billions this disaster will cost us is a drop in the bucket compared to global warming, folks. It's just a taste of what's to come if we don't radically rethink our energy policy in the US.  And yes, that means taxes on gas that are high enough to make people think about taking public transportation, and public transportation that works and is widely available.  Even better, it means redoing cities into walkable ones.

The hippies have been warning about this crap for ages.  Guess what?  It finally happened.  Now's the chance for changing our fates ahead, before we slide down into oblivion.