The biggest and most persistent McCain/Palin LIE...

[Bread and Circus]

is their implied promise that we will be able to somehow drill and pump our way out of our problems. This has especially come to fore since Palin got onto the ticket. Aside from their nebulous and ill-defined promise to "reform Washington" and their Quixotic promise to "win the Iraq War" their third pillar is promising their supporters that they are going to open the floodgates on imaginary massive wells of oil that are magically sufficient in size to slake the US's oil thirst. The subtext of the message is that they are going to finally turn the spigot on and the money and cheap gas will flow, thereby lowering gas prices. Their campaign is just an advertisement for the oil companies and nothing more.

Promising energy independence without moving almost entirely to electrical vehicles is a total sham. There's just no way that we will ever become energy independent unless we fundamentally change the way we drive. As it is now, we don't get most of our oil from the Mideast, we get it from Canadian oil sands, and will likely do so for some time. But even if we drilled every square inch of our land and coastal waters we wouldn't have enough oil to run our cars and power all of our machines.

A future of electric cars (or some other non-fossil fuel medium) backed up by an advanced bidirectional grid and multiple sources of electricity production(wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, coal, natural gas, oil) would be the only feasible way to gain some sort of energy independence. And even then I don't think we will ever be an energy island because there always will be an international trade of energy in one form or another.

However, the heart of some semblence of "energy Independence" rests not with the sources of power alone but rather with the machines we use every day. As long as we have cars that run on gas, we will always be at the mercy of foreign oil interests. We just simply don't have enough oil to make the wheels go round and round.

So, how much time does John McCain and Sarah Palin talk about what really needs to happen to move toward that goal? As far as I can tell...not at all.

Whenever Palin or McCain have been faced with the "we can't drill our way out of this" truism, they reply "well, at least we are doing something". This is just one lie piled on top of another. Drilling will temporarily increase supply and effectively just become part of the overall world energy supply. However, as long as China continues to industrialize and capital flows to cheaper labor markets, there will always be an increased demand. So, in the short and long run, without dramatic transformation of our transportation vehicles, massive improvement in efficiency, and working with other countries to do the same, all the oil that we could drill will not make any real difference. It will just be bought up and burned off. A policy of "drill, baby, drill" and "drill here, drill now" will do little to improve the lives of Americans and will just be another failed policy of "kicking the can down the road".

In my opinion, this is their biggest lie of oil because it is told over and over, not easily perceived as a lie, and it's a lie that a lot of people want to hear. It's the last part that makes it particularly dangerous.

I personally don't think Obama and Biden go far enough in their rhetoric to detail exactly what we need to in order to plan for a better energy future as I believe it rests more with how we run our cars than anything else. As much as the skirt around the topic, they never go to the heart and say we are going to have all electric vehicles in the next 15 to 20 years, which is really where we should be headed.

Immediate monetary interests aside, there's also the whole issue of climate change and greenhouse emissions that will only be made worse by a "drill baby drill" attitude. Put simply, we have to drive electric cars and power those cars with the type of energy sources that have the least cradle to grave greenhouse emissions.

I can say with 100% certainty if McCain and Palin are elected and they get their way, my children will grow up in a worse country and a worse world.