I could blog every day on the harebrained schemes being cooked up to deal with rising oil prices, but in the interest of efficiency I’ll focus only on the worst. Certainly holding its own among the goop at the bottom of the $136 barrel is this suggestion from Harry Reid, according to today’s New York Times:
He [Reid] also hinted at a potential element of compromise legislation: that any oil produced from wider access to federal lands off shore be reserved for domestic use and barred from export.
How patriotic this sounds, until you realize that the US exports virtually no oil, consuming all it produces and then another 150%. But even if we did export some of the off shore supply, so what? Suppose we export 100,000 barrels we would have consumed and then import an extra 100,000 barrels to make up for it, how would this affect energy prices, the current account, global warming or Reid’s majority in the 111th congress?