There was some good news:
The food crisis, of course, has not gone away. According to one report, 100 million people globally are being driven deeper into poverty by a "silent tsunami" of sharply rising food costs.
One child is dying every five seconds due to malnutrition,
Meanwhile, on the domestic finger-pointing front, well, let’s just say that the remedies to the $4 gas "crisis" proposed by our pundits and politicians can be boiled down to four words: drill, tax, beg, and accuse.
Republicans want to drill for more oil - pretty much anywhere in the nation that has the slightest potential, including national wildlife refuges and ecologically (and economically) sensitive coastlines. In the end, I suspect they will get their way, especially if (when) gas prices rise another dollar or two a gallon.
More drilling solves nothing, of course. At best, it extends the Fiesta for a few more years, while exhausting what’s left of our oil reserves. It also extends our unofficial national energy policy: burn it up as fast as possible - a policy, by the way, that will anger and mystify our grandchildren.
The Democrats' response isn’t much more visionary. They tried, and failed, to get Congress to pass a 'windfall profit' tax on Big Oil. Their plan was to use the money raised to fund renewable and alternate energy sources. The problem with this idea is that it’s probably twenty years too late. We need renewable energy sources NOW. Also, the cost of higher taxes will simply be passed along to the consumer sooner or later, which means poor people will struggle even more than they already are.
Besides, raising taxes is politically nutty. People want action. More drilling is action, which is why I suspect that places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will ultimately be tapped.
For their part, the Bush administration - as well as the heads of most industrialized nations - has pursued a different response
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