Remember the fable about the Grasshopper and the Ant? Here's a good take on it, as it applies to Republican and Democratic approaches to our national energy policy. The article is not long, and the whole thing is worth reading (it will remind you how wise Jimmy Carter was), but here are the parts I liked best:
You remember the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant? The
grasshopper spends the warm months–when food is abundant–singing,
dancing, and generally enjoying himself while the ant works hard to
store up food for the colder months, which he knows are coming. And
sure enough, when winter comes, the ant is prepared and the grasshopper
starves.
Well in the world of politics–and particularly when it comes to
energy policy–there are a lot of grasshoppers and very few ants, and
unfortunately, the grasshoppers have been setting policy for a long
time now.
. . .
Over the years, leaders of the Republican Party–like Dick
Cheney–have been openly hostile to the very concept of conservation and
have allowed lobbyists for the oil companies to literally write our
nation’s energy policies. And during that time, almost three decades,
we’ve become far more dependent on foreign oil, and our government has
made little if any effort to encourage the development of alternative
energy sources or even to take simple steps to improve energy
efficiency (such as raising CAFE standards for automobile makers).
In short, for the last three decades, the Republican Party has been
a party of grasshoppers, blissfully encouraging the consumption of ever
greater amounts of oil while doing absolutely nothing to prepare for
the winter ahead. Indeed, they’ve done everything in their power to
marginalize those who have warned that the good times can’t last and
that we need to embrace conservation initiatives and develop
alternative energy sources.
And now that the long-awaited winter has finally come and we’re all
suffering under the weight of sky-high oil prices, what is the
Republican response? They seize upon an imaginary quick fix–off-shore
oil drilling–and they all rally around it, accusing their opponents of being the obstacle to lower gas prices. They preen and pose, convening fake sessions of Congress to show that they
are the ones who really care about gas prices. They ignore what their
own government experts have acknowledged, that allowing further
off-shore drilling won’t produce a drop of new oil for at least a
decade and, even then, will do little if anything to reduce gas prices.
Apparently in the Republican version of the fable, rather than
admitting that he’d been short-sighted and reckless in not preparing
for the winter, the grasshopper pretends that there’s actually a
winter’s worth of food located just beneath his feet and that the only
thing keeping him from digging it up is that damn ant.