President Clinton said yesterday that he will announce steps soon to deal with the rising costs of gasoline and oil. Enviros hope he’ll refuse to consider the environmentally damaging options being bandied about, which include removing the moratorium on offshore oil drilling and opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. Columnist Charles Krauthammer argues in the Washington Post that another remedy suggested by Republicans, lowering the federal gas tax, is wrong-headed. As the price of oil was falling in recent years, he argues, the feds should have been progressively adding taxes to keep the price stable and encourage conservation. Instead, the price of gas got so cheap that Americans stopped demanding fuel efficiency and went on an SUV binge. We now need to reduce our dependence on oil, Krauthammer says. His favored alternative is nuclear power (sorry, Charlie, we can’t agree with you on this point).
