Here's a look by Joshua Holland
Editor, Corporate Accountability and Workplace Coverage:

CNN tells me that a majority of Americans favor Barack Obama's call to clamp down on speculators and reduce demand through tougher fuel efficiency standards and more conservation. The network also informs me that a majority favor John McCain's plan to open up offshore drilling to expand oil supplies. The take-away: a majority want something substantive done that will lower prices at the pump soon.

Of course, neither candidate has much to offer in terms of short-term relief; the constraints of America's political culture guarantee that price controls and fuel subsidies for transportation-dependent industries -- things other governments might contemplate -- are off the table.
But even in the context of this truncated debate, it's clear that the conservative movement's ideas are utterly bankrupt. They're offering a defense of an unsustainable -- indefensible -- status quo: just pump more oil and we'll keep doing what we've been doing without a hiccup. All they have to offer is drilling offshore and in the Alaskan wilderness.

Let's dig into that argument briefly. Our friend Bill Scher over at Tompaine crunched the numbers offered up by Bush's own Department of Energy and found that opening up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge would result in a decrease in oil prices amounting to 75 cents per barrel of crude, some 17 years from now. Assuming for the sake of argument that demand doesn't increase -- an unlikely assumption -- and using the rough rule of thumb that every dollar in the price of a barrel of crude oil equals 2.5 cents in a gallon of gas, that works out to a promise to reduce gas prices by less than 2 cents per gallon.
McCain claims that there's another 21 billion barrels offshore. Scher cites a a DOE estimate of 18 billion, but let's use the Senator's figure. Opening up our offshore deposits would result in an additional cost reduction of $1.50 per barrel. So, adding the two, we can conclude that opening ANWR and drilling like Hell offshore would result in cost savings to consumers of about 6 cents per gallon of gas. And that's by 2025, meaning that you could get into bed and conceive a child today, and that 6-cent-per-gallon cost reduction would be included in gas prices by the time the fruit of your loins got his or her learner's permit.

Rush Limbaugh won't be mentioning those details, I think..

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive