Like the famous ultimate schizophrenic personality in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic horror story,"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," the Democratic and Republican standard-bearers for their parties' presidential nominations both advocate some policies that are wise and sensible in their energy policy platforms. In each case, they are policies that their opponents wouldn't be seen dead with.
Sen. Obama, D-Ill., rightly recognizes the need for the U.S. federal government to invest in a massive crash program of public transportation that is not directly dependent on oil as a fuel. That investment is urgently needed to finally bring U.S. daily work commuting patterns off gasoline dependence.
There is no alternative to this pressing need. Therefore the Republican-conservative ideological blank refusal to even countenance the possibility of expanding pubic transit systems must be over-ridden. However, American conservative True Believers still appear incapable of learning this basic fact.
Republicans have also deliberately starved the U.S. railroad system of essential funds. Passenger rail technology in the United States is now at least 30 years behind that in France and surrounding nations. The United States can simply no longer afford this archaic prejudice. Mass rail travel offers enormous savings on gasoline compared with air travel. A President Barack Obama would act vigorously in recognition of this. A President John McCain wouldn't.
Sen. McCain, R-Ariz, however, is talking hard commonsense on basic energy policy and Obama isn't. McCain wants a huge increase in offshore drilling and the exploitation of domestic U.S. coal reserves. This policy is essential. For there is quite simply no alternative to the three basic elements of oil, coal and nuclear energy to fuel modern electrical power-generating and transportation systems for mass societies.
Obama may realize this privately: He is a relative moderate on coal mining compared with the powerful, wealthy and strident environmental lobby in his party. But publicly, of course, he cannot afford to admit that. Whatever the reason, the hard fact remains that the United States simply has to pump as much oil as it can from its own still considerable domestic and offshore reserves and mine as much coal as it can from its enormous and untapped reservoirs. McCain recognizes this and says so publicly. Obama doesn't.
Neither Obama nor McCain, therefore, is a simple "good guy" or bad guy" on the energy issue. Both of them are their own Jekylls and Hydes on it. In an ideal world, whichever one of them wins the presidency in November would immediately abandon the closed minded posturing and rigid, ignorant ideological prejudices his party has against the good ideas expressed by the other side and adapt them instead.
Regrettably, the thinking in both camps remains ever so closed-minded.