More heat than light in energy debate

With gasoline peaking at $4 a gallon, electricity prices climbing and heating costs looming, it's not surprising that the presidential hopefuls are scrambling to tout their formulas for driving down the pain of high energy prices.

The surprise is that the proposals are so badly considered, inadequate and unimaginative. And that they differ so little from partisan orthodoxy.

Start with Democrat Barack Obama's signature proposal, a $1,000 per-family rebate financed by a tax on oil company profits.

As satisfying as such financial vengeance might be, experience proves that windfall profits taxes don't work and have magnificently disruptive effects on the marketplace.

Worse, Obama's new proposal - the very definition of pandering - puts him in the position of calling for a gigantic tax on an industry for which he voted huge tax breaks in 2005. Sen. John McCain, the GOP standard-bearer, voted against them.

Still, that vote doesn't immunize McCain from bad ideas. If his presidential energy policy push began in silliness - a widely derided gas tax-moratorium scheme - it has in some ways gotten worse with time.

He now embraces the nonsense that drilling off America's coast will materially affect petroleum supplies, a politically beguiling position that is beginning to attract attention from Obama, too. Offshore drilling as a solution to the current woes is a useful fiction during an election season, but nobody - including the current administration's Energy Department - mistakes it for fact.

A descent into the details of each man's proposals results in a mixed bag. Obama makes conservation a critical component of his plan. He's right, of course: Diligent conservation would do more to ease supply pressures more quickly than anything else America can do.

Predictably, then, McCain's operatives have derided the very idea - seizing on Obama's suggestion that Americans properly inflate their tires - as evidence that the Democrat doesn't understand the issue. In fact, Obama's position argues the opposite.

But Obama's embrace of a raid on the nation's 70 million-barrel strategic petroleum reserves, at a time when the problem is expensive gas, not scarce gas, misunderstands the purpose of the reserve. It's there to keep oil flowing if the worst happens, not to cushion pain at the pump.

McCain's welcome embrace of nuclear power is part of a plan that - despite recent rhetorical emphasis on drilling - encompasses a portfolio of energy possibilities. It still remains within the Republican mainstream of relatively modest changes to the current administration's stated policies, and includes more coal use and modest tax credits to spur alternative energy exploitation.

The same political moderation can be found in Obama's proposals, which mostly differ from McCain's in degree. Obama calls for more aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and more expensive government help for a wider deployment of alternative-fuel vehicles. But he opposes too much nuclear power and advocates a far greater reliance on electricity from solar, wind and green technologies.

Obama and McCain do agree on a few things, including the need for a better electrical transmission system and the use of a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gases. They also share an ill-advised opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Perhaps what they share most completely, however, is the same thing that guarantees the failure of both proposals. Neither man can lay claim to any real vision on energy, or to the courage necessary to see it through.

Taken as a whole, each man's energy policy is one more example of the meager imaginations that have left America in this predicament, slaves to countries that despise us, living under a sky fouled by inattention. And, still, with no solutions anywhere in sight, least of all on Election Day.