Thursday, December 01, 2005

Joe's Foreign Oil

Blue Mass Group has a post on the Wall Street Journal criticizing Congressman William Delahunt and Joe Kennedy for brokering a deal with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to pay below market prices for oil for low income homes in Massachusetts. I'm not sure how people who think it's A-Okay to get cheap labor from China think it's somehow a terrible crime to get cheap oil from Venezuela, but that's why I'm not on the WSJ Editorial board.

In any event, Kennedy was on Greater Boston last night talking about the deal. He spoke briefly about President Kennedy's push to put a man on the moon in ten years, and compared that with the current President.

"Now we've got Bush talking about taking flights to Mars, which is going to cost billions of dollars, but we don't do anything to get our cars to work with engines that get 100 miles per gallon or don't use oil at all. That is very much within range -- a much easier task to accomplish than getting to the moon in ten years. And yet we just don't show the will to go out and get it done. That's the hard truth about what's going on in this country. We don't go after the tough, hard issues any longer as a nation and try to get that squared away."
Even though Bush's talk of Mars has subsided, Kennedy has a point. With gas prices at the pump going down, I'm not sure if we have the political will for a government funded initiative to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. Still, the feds have scientists and engineers already that they're not funding. What's wrong with putting them to work developing technologies that increase fuel efficiency?