The country has a Fort Knox of oil — some $100 billion in ready to refine petroleum that is just sitting in the ground doing nothing useful whatsoever. Also, we waste another Fort Knox worth of black gold (Texas tea?) driving poorly maintained cars in a very inefficient manner.

Imagine if this country were led by someone who was not a former oil industry executive. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or… Just imagine Dick Cheney was not in charge, but some hypothetical inspirational progressive politician.

What might such a real leader do to cut oil prices in the short term, raise some money for needed clean energy investments (and tax cuts for those hardest hit by oil prices), and in general bring the country together during a time of war in the Persian Gulf?

Dan Weiss and I have laid out such a plan, “Bursting the Oil Bubble: Sell Oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Lower Prices.” Combine tapping the oil reserve with a national push for conservation, and you could bring half a million to a million barrels a day of new supply for a year plus the same amount or more of demand reduction. That could, for a while, burst the oil bubble.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one….

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In mid-2007, a Keystone Center nuclear report, funded in part by the nuclear industry estimated capital costs for nuclear of $3600 to $4000/kW including interest. The report notes, “the power isn’t cheap: 8.3 to 11.1 cents per kilo-watt hour.“ In December 2007, retail electricity prices in this country averaged 8.9 cents per kwh.

Mid-2007 has already become the good old days for affordable nuclear power. Jim Harding, who was on the Keystone Center panel and was responsible for its economic analysis, e-mailed me in May that his current “reasonable estimate for levelized cost range … is 12 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour lifetime, and 1.7 times that number [20 to 29 cents per kilowatt-hour] in first year of commercial operation.”

At the end of August, 2007 Tulsa World reported that American Electric Power Co. CEO Michael Morris was not planning to build any new nuclear power plants. He was quoted as saying, “I’m not convinced we’ll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline,” citing “realistic” costs of about $4,000/kW, he said.

So much for being a near-term, cost-effective solution to our climate problem. But if $4,000 per kilowatt was starting to price nuclear out of the marketplace, imagine what prices 50 percent to 100 percent higher will do.

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We’ve seen that only 49% of Republicans now believe that the earth is warming and only 27% say the earth is warming because of human activity (see “The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP“).

Well, a new National Journal Congressional Insiders Poll finds that Republicans are no more misinformed than their representatives:

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Yesterday, the Drudge Report linked to the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Progress Report written by yours truly, entitled “Global Boiling.” In that piece I wrote: “The evidence for the consequences of global warming is appearing with alarming frequency,” then noted the swath of destructive storms, floods, heat waves, and droughts that are gripping the nation. Drudge’s headline?

Deaths called ‘consequence of global warming’…

What we in fact reported, and what is scientifically established, is that these extreme weather events that caused death and destruction “are consistent with the changes scientists predicted would come with global warming.” The Progress Report cited findings from the National Climatic Data Center, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the University of California, San Diego.

The warming of the planet is bringing an increase in the volatility of weather — how much, how fast is uncertain. But the direction is not — we have heated up the planet’s atmosphere, and are seeing the results of this ongoing global experiment. Each extreme weather event, each record shattered, and even each stretch of seasonal weather provides a piece of evidence to help us understand how the consequences of manmade climate change are forming.

It’s almost as if Matt Drudge (who’s done this before) and his ilk don’t want people to think rationally about the consequences of global warming — so they lie about people who do.

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