At this time of year in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., the oak pollen is covering everything indoors and out with a thick film of yellow-green dust. Grimier still is the thick patina of hypocrisy that coats nearly every utterance by government, corporate, religious, and other spokesmen these days. The pollen makes us sneeze, the hypocrisy turns our stomachs; but the pollen will stop in a week or so, while the hypocrisy is unlikely to abate soon.
A lot of the hypocrisy right now concerns jobs; unemployment is the big concern for many, so why not turn it to your advantage when you have an ax to grind? Thus, when the Administration seeks to reform abuses in student lending, loan companies don't suggest they fix the problems that they could have fixed over the past ten years or more; instead, they argue that reforms would "destroy jobs in the private lending sector." Military spending adjustments suggested by DefSec Gates won't reduce defense spending (in fact would increase it) but they would mean spending on different things, so as a defense contractor, you don't argue the policy, you claim it will result in the loss of 100,000 jobs (just ignore the fact it will create 100,000 more elsewhere).
The issue that prompted my little diatribe today, though, is what I like to call energy reform. As conservative economic columnist Robert Samuelson points out, proponents of "alternative energy" are making a lot of exaggerated claims about how easily or cheaply we can switch to non-carbon fuels. Can we do it for a mere 10 cents a day for every man, woman, and child? Samuelson doesn't think so. I don't either. Can we accomplish it in 10, or even 20, years? No. Once again, I agree. And he's surely correct in saying that politicians love a something-for-nothing proposition. But he takes a very deep skinny-dip into the slough of hypocrisy when he fails to take his conservative cohort to task for the same sorts of exaggeration and deception.
One example is the now-defunct coalition of energy and automotive companies called the Global Climate Coalition, which claimed to have scientific studies suggesting the link between our energy usage and global climate change was inconclusive. It turns out that they covered up the Inconvenient Truth that their own scientists reported the linkage was "well established." The GCC is now defunct but some of its members remain committed to hypocrisy: Utility companies now say that their real concern isn't profits, it that their customers might pay higher costs. Meanwhile, to come full circle, the equally hypocritical television ads of the American Petroleum Institute tout that any changes in their comfy arrangement will .... (care to guess?) ... destroy jobs!
Back to Samuelson for a moment: He wrongly implies that supporters of alternative energy are offering something for nothing. A dime a day per capita for the U.S. population comes to a surprising 13 billion dollars a year - a bit more than nothing. But even if it were zero, the key fact is that something is being offered; a start must be made. We are far behind where we should be thanks to eight years in which our government and industry leaders fiddled while the fossil fuels burned, offering nothing at a very high cost.
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