perfidy

The one magazine (though they prefer "newspaper") I read each week without fail is the Economist. I never question why it's been one of my habits for so many years, but if I ever did, an article lead-in like this would provide the answer:

IN THE film “Zoolander”, some male models stop to refuel their car and, just for fun, spray each other with petrol (gasoline). One then lights a cigarette. They all die in a vast fireball. The film-makers appear to believe that male models, though beautiful, are stupid. When it comes to crafting policies to deal with the price of petrol, American politicians appear to believe the same thing about voters. Except that they do not think voters are beautiful.

The entire article, entitled "Politics and petrol prices - Much ado about pumping" is well worth reading.

Sadly, it's not one of the handful each week that the Economist makes available other than to subscribers. It's a good enough article that, were I incorrigible, I'd just post it here. But, being corrigible, I can't see stretching fair use that far, lest I break it. So I'll summarize the points they laid out in the article, most-but-not-all of which were known to me before I read it. (Since I'm paraphrasing and summarizing, of course, I'll be tarting it up, too)

• Politicians are smarmy pencil-dicks who prefer to be seen to be doing something than actually to be doing something.
• This affliction is not unique to either side of the aisle.
• Regardless of your biases and the biases of those you read and listen to, the primary driver for gas prices is the price of crude oil.
• Taxes in the US make up only 18% of the price of fuel, compared to 67% in Great Britain.
• Prices are more volatile in the US because (according to the Economist), fuel is not taxed as heavily as it should be. To the Economist's moderate consternation, not even Algore is stupid enough to be calling for such heavy additional taxes.
  This is an argument they've long made that I disagree with - whatever externalities they think any tax so collected will offset, giving the self-same pencil dicks from #1 above access to any other revenue streams would be profoundly retarded.
• The US is still short about 10% of its refining capacity due to last year's hurricanes.
• The additive MTBE is no longer mixed with gas in "Texas and several eastern states" - its function was to reduce smog and pollution.
• Turns out its other function was as a carcinogen, so the industry switched to ethanol to help with the smog problem
• Ethanol can't be mixed with gasoline and sent down pipelines, because the two tend to separate
• As a result, there's been a backlog in ethanol deliveries, as separate infrastructure was needed to deliver it closer to the point of sale, where it could then be mixed with the gasoline.
• Gasoline demand in the US is finally heading down
• Within two or three years, sufficient refining capacity should be available to avoid supply shocks such as those caused by hurricanes Katrina & Rita
• The government predicts that gas prices this summer will average about $2.71/gallon, which is less than current average prices

Of the bullet points on that list, there are at least four that were news to me. I leave it as an exercise for the reader, but only in a time of extreme boredom, to guess which those were.

And, because the wrap-up to the article is almost as good as the intro, and does a passable job of condemning of the politicians who feign both competence and respect for the intellect of their betters, the voters, I'll quote it here for your reading convenience:

For the most part, Americans are responding rationally to the high price of petrol. Suppliers supply more; consumers consume less. Politicians, however, take it as an opportunity to bluster. The House of Representatives has passed a bill barring “price-gouging”—that is, making it a criminal offence to charge more for petrol than some bureaucrat deems appropriate. This is popular; 69% of Americans even favour price controls. But in the long run, it would reduce the incentive for firms to invest in supplying petrol to Americans, and so would raise prices at the pump. With luck, the bill will die in the Senate.

Both parties tout their determination to free America of its dependence on jihad-fuelling foreign oil by some conveniently distant point in the future. Neither, however, proposes anything that might plausibly accomplish this. House Republicans passed a bill last week to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which would help a tiny amount at best, and in any case is highly unlikely to get through the Senate.

Both parties say they wish to promote ethanol, not just as an additive, but as a fuel in its own right. In practice, this means a futile attempt by government to pick promising new technologies, plus fat subsidies for midwestern corn farmers while cheaper Brazilian ethanol is kept out with tariffs. Lawmakers could free the ethanol market, but many would rather drive their SUVs to a petrol station a block away from their offices for a photo-op denouncing Mr Bush and Big Oil.