My colleague Myron Ebell has a splendid summary of the way the politics of energy is going in the new Cooler Heads Digest this week (sign up for free at www.globalwarming.org):

I wonder if the House and Senate have ever been led at the same time by two leaders who are as unhinged on an issue as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). My knowledge of congressional history is spotty, so I don’t know, but I doubt it. Senator Reid earlier embarrassed himself with a rant in a television interview on Fox Business that, “[C]oal makes us sick, oil makes us sick, its global warming, its ruining our country, its ruining our world.” Now Speaker Pelosi has explained in an interview with Politico her opposition to holding a vote on an amendment to drop the congressional moratorium on offshore drilling: “I’m trying to save the planet. I’m trying to save the planet.” As a number of Democrats who have competitive re-election races have already realized, their leaders’ stonewalling tactics are not playing well with the public. When Democratic Senators and Representatives have a chance to visit with constituents over the August recess, I expect many will find themselves promising to hold a vote on offshore drilling as soon as they get back to Washington. And I also expect that Reid and Pelosi will have to give in and hold a vote. The questions are, how phony can they make it and still get away with it? and how many anti-energy provisions can they attach to it? These are rhetorical questions, of course. They will make the vote as phony as possible and attach as many mandates and subsidies for renewable power and energy efficiency as they can think up. If anything is enacted, any provision to increase domestic oil production will be designed to be as limited and ineffectual as possible. In fact, the effort to hold a phony vote has already gained support from five Republican Senators. Roll Call and Greenwire both reported today that a group of five Republican and five Democratic Senators have proposed a compromise package. It includes a bit of offshore drilling, but would also renew tax credits for wind and solar power and for energy efficiency measures, raise taxes on the big American oil companies, and create a $20 billion “Apollo Project” to replace 85% of gasoline with non-petroleum-using cars within twenty years. This program should be called the T-Boone-Pickens-doggle (for more on T. Boone Pickens, read this blog post from my colleague Keith Moody). What they are proposing is to waste all the money that oil sale leasing and royalties would pay in to the federal treasury on pork-barrel projects. The Republican Senators in this Gang of Ten who are determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory are: Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), John Thune (R-S. D.), Lindsay Graham (R-S. C.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). The Democrats are: Kent Conrad (D-N. D.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). Expect something even worse from the House when they get back.

A few more thoughts from me on the Boone-Doggle. I saw a TV ad for the plan today in which Mr Pickens said it would be done with “private investment.” Glad to hear it. I hope he will give back all the subsidies, refuse any tax breaks and depreciate investment according to the normal rules, eschewing anything that amounts to public subsidy. In particular, I hope that he’ll agree to pay for the $5bn transmission line to be built in Texas to distribute wind-generated electricity himself, without having it paid for by a levy on his competitors. There’s another ad in which he says his plan is necessary because of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have left the US to pay for energy – an unprecedented transfer of wealth, he claims. Funny that the Arab nationalists complain about the transfer of resources to the U.S. When one person has a resource another person wants, and that other person has wealth that he doesn’t need to put to other uses, they tend to agree a price to transfer the wealth and the resources between them. It’s called trade, Mr Pickens, and it has helped make you very rich.