The right vote, for right now

If we can put a man on the moon, we ought to be able to free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil.

Energy independence is a technical problem. It will take the work of scientists, researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs to solve. But to push that process along, it will take more than one company — or even one industry. It will take a shift in national energy policy.

That’s what is being debated in Washington — and on these pages. The U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed legislation called the American Clean Energy Security Act. Tom Perriello, who represents the Dan River Region in Congress, voted for the bill.

That vote has earned Perriello plenty of scorn on these pages. The letters to the editor over the past week have not been part of an organized letter-writing campaign. Instead, they are genuine expressions of outrage from consistently conservative members of our community who are concerned about the future of our country.

We share their concerns.

But anyone who thinks Perriello — a man who has worked in this community’s soup kitchens — would blindly support a bill that would add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to our energy bills just doesn’t know our congressman. No member of Congress would vote to do that.

Part of this bill addresses concerns over global warming and mankind’s role in climate change. Even if you’re not convinced that that’s a problem, developing new green energy technologies will at least free us from the petroleum prison we’ve inhabited for the past century.

“We have had an oil dependence probably since the day I was born, and I think this bill is going to be a big winner for Central and Southside Virginia. For biofuel, for our farmers,” Perriello said this week.

What Perriello’s critics don’t mention is that some of those projects have already started — biofuel projects in Pittsylvania and Henry counties, just to name two. At nearby Hyco Lake, Progress Energy has just finished spending $800 million to cut emissions to comply with the 2002 North Carolina Clean Smokestacks Act. Is anyone in favor of dirty air?

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which apparently believes Perriello can be defeated in 2010, won’t mention those local projects — or all the research and development around the country that’s quickly turning alternative energy into the stuff of mainstream energy. The group smells political blood, and it is willing to scare people with high cost estimates and talk of a “national energy tax.”

But there is no national energy tax — just a lot of wildly fluctuating cost estimates that don’t take into account all the new ideas, technologies and products that can be used to solve our energy problems.

It took a lot of political courage — and guts — for Perriello to support a bill that’s so widely misunderstood. Maybe voting to give money to NASA in 1962 cost some congressmen their jobs, too.

How smart was that?