W e need a new John McCain, one who throws overboard some worn-out ideas he has been toting around, and — with fire in his eyes, his belly and his rhetoric — would give an energy speech something along these lines:

“My fellow Americans, we are facing a crisis that could cripple our industry while lowering our standard of living to something that will make today’s travails seem puny by comparison.

“The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way as long as we are willing to fasten our faith to our technological gusto and spit in the eye of the radicals whose sense of proportion is zero.

“These forever-yelping fringe-dwellers would have you believe that if you need more of something, the last thing you should do is go out and get some. Oil is becoming so scarce that the prices are already pummeling some industries to decrepitude while also punishing some of our least well-off families, and yet, guess what? The radicals insist it would make next to no difference to start drilling offshore and in Alaska where we know vast quantities of oil reside.

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“I myself only recently agreed that offshore drilling was crucial, and hereby change my stance on Alaska. The situation is veering toward extreme jeopardy, and there is no choice but to face up to that reality and embrace facts that the radicals don’t want you to understand.

“One is that we have learned how to do this drilling without grave environmental hazard. The other is that these sources contain tens of billions of barrels of oil, enough to tide us over handsomely while other things fall into place.

“Sure, it will take time to get there, but that lame excuse for inaction is one reason we are now in such a pickle in the first place, and the point is to get started so as to begin edging us toward rescue. Price-induced conservation has already begun, and will help in the meantime, along with overcoming radical objections to new refineries.

“We now have strenuous efforts in the auto industry to produce more fuel-efficient cars than anything we have yet seen in this country. We need to look hard at ways to restore the dollar’s value as still another means of making visits to gas stations less a cause for heart palpitations.

“I myself am among those who need to get over this absurd notion that oil company profits are the enemy instead of what they actually are — the incentive to produce more and get us past our present troubles.

“Right now, one major oil company is investing millions on learning non-harmful ways to extract oil from oil shale residing on our continent. We’re talking about the equivalent of Saudi Arabian reserves several times over in the Rocky Mountains alone.

“Nuclear energy and new technology will someday obviate the need for oil, which we can also obtain from coal liquefaction and tar sands, just as it will give us answers to global warming if all the speculation about human-induced dangers should prove true.

“We should at the least heed a Yale scholar who has shown that a number of the anti-carbon proposals would cause trillions more dollars worth of economic damage than any harm caused by warming, and understand that anti-capitalist ideology is as much at work here as anything.

“Even as we look at a future without them, we should acknowledge how fossil fuels have made hundreds of millions of lives possible while helping to advance civilization. The main thing we have to fear is irrationality, and my opponent.”