States’ Rights as they Affect Energy Policy

Here’s an excerpt of frequent contributor John Robbins’ recent comment on my piece about crises and the abandonment of science.

Sorry to sound like a broken record, but a huge part of our problem is simple ‘resistance to change’.  The main reason why Palin and Perry may be even more resistant is they represent states with super-abundant fossil fuel resources, is that they do not want change or questions which rock their profit boats. After all, it’s those resource and production profits which allow Texas and Alaska to have no state income tax. Lots of taxes collected on conventional energy, at many levels.

To a large extent, the Republican political debates include politicians from pretty diverse states, both the haves and have-nots. Massachusetts (Romney-land) is an importer of its energy so it can be expected to have a different prevailing view from reps from energy-exporting states like Texas and Alaska. Super-crowded, high population-density states like Massachusetts are also completely different territories, politically, from sparcely populated states like Texas and Alaska where land seems still very abundant and resources are almost free for as many takers as desire.

Indeed, look at our blue-red political maps nowdays. Is it odd that the more rural, less population-dense, more food-producing, less cities-dominated regions are leaning one way while the more urban, more population-dense, less food-producing areas seem leaning the opposite ways?

… Texas and Alaska won’t like this. Nor will Kentucky or West Virginia or Ohio which produce a lot of coal.

…. So we can expect a “some states vs others” conflict for the foreseeable future.

To be sure. I go back to what we all learned as children about the formation of the United States and the debate over the powers of the states vs. the federal government, in which the voices of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, and the others will forever be remembered. And of course, this wasn’t put to rest by the Founding Fathers; it heated up for almost a full century, came to a head in the Civil War, and has festered in various strange and terrible ways ever since.

Though I can sympathize with the states rights advocates at the time, given the tyranny from which they had narrowly escaped and their rightful concerns about a strong central government, I think it’s obvious that we’d have a more productive, less bureaucratic and more just country if those people had simply lost the argument to Madison, Hamilton, and the Federalists at the time.  We are most certainly not a better nation because we have 50 sets of criminal and civil statutes, 50 individual different political and economic agendas, competing against one another for federal dollars in Washington, etc.