Other, better bloggers than I have already jumped on the idiocy of Friedman's conceit that the Tea Partiers could, if they chose, widen their movement into a 'Green Tea Party' that would support a $10/barrel "Patriot Fee" on imported oil to reduce the deficit.
But even aside from any connection with the Teabaggers, Friedman's idea is still just plain dumb.
1) It's a multibillion-dollar gift to domestic oil producers. Haven't we talked about this enough since 1980 that this idea would have sunk into Friedman's consciousness by now?
If you raise the price of foreign oil by $10 per barrel (by tax, cartel, or whatever), what on earth does Friedman think will happen to the price of domestic oil? Light crude is currently trading at $85 a barrel. If the price of imported crude jumps to $95/barrel for any reason, does Friedman think domestic producers will continue to charge only $85? Not for a millisecond. The market sets the price of oil, the market just went up $10, and domestic producers will of course collect that extra $10 on their oil as well.
At 5 million barrels per day, 365 days a year, that's a free gift of $18 billion a year to domestic oil producers, who aren't exactly hurting to begin with.
Of course, that's the sort of welfare that the Teabag crowd never seems to have any problem with, so I suppose it does make a perverse sort of sense from a strictly political point of view.
2) Energy independence isn't the same thing as progress on climate change. Reducing energy use would make us more energy independent, but the converse is false. Despite this, the equating of the two ideas seems to have gained great currency in the pundit class lately.
The problem is that America already has an abundant but extremely dirty energy source in coal. We could achieve energy independence by moving to electric cars ultimately powered by coal-fired power plants, but the world would keep on getting warmer.
Billing climate change legislation as energy-independence legislation is politically dangerous. There are a bunch of 'centrist' Dems who will vote for climate change legislation if they have to, but they'd love an excuse to cut and run. Selling the bill as energy independence legislation would give them cover to make the bill about energy independence, while gutting its effectiveness as climate change legislation.
Friedman seems to have a ridiculously idealized notion of American politics: that somehow the right idea, or the right way to sell the right idea, will manage to win everybody (or at least some key bloc) over, and it'll be clear sailing from there. But it's not at all like that.
