Polyester chicken

The House celebrates Earth Day with the passage of a special-interest-laden Energy Bill.

[The bill] includes $8.1 billion in energy tax breaks and several billion in other subsidies, including $2 billion to increase research into drilling for oil and gas in extremely deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And there is $2 billion to makers of the gasoline additive MTBE to help them defray the cost of phasing out the product, which contaminates drinking water.

The House also called for opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil companies.

Nothing reduces dependence on foreign oil like burning a shitload of it in the search for a few teacups of the stuff that happens to reside under a wildlife reserve. Not a damn thing about CAFE standards (When was the last time Congress enacted higher car fleet fuel efficiency models? When Clinton was President, I think...) or incentives for biodiesel or anything useful like that. Just a whole lotta pork.

GM acted in a similar manner by releasing a new, smaller Hummer this week. One that gets a whole 20 mpg, which is just slightly better than my first car. Only my first car was a 1980 Buick LeSabre Limited, which had factory-standard CB radio and got 14 mpg. I'd hate to see what a Hummer would do after carrying such sophisticated electronics around—it would probably just tie that 25-year-old behemoth in fuel consumption.

We expect our computers to get faster and our cell phones to be smaller, but we're still making basically the same crappy cars we did a quarter-century ago. Yeah, the instrumentation is different, but the power plant is the same.