U.S. Oil Addicts Deny Need To Change Energy Policy
By Ned Farquhar/
Of the Journal
The addicts have spoken. Not only do they want more oil and gas drilling, anywhere and all the time. They also want to continue huge tax breaks for oil companies that are rolling in dough. For decades they have supported giant oil industry tax breaks like the oil depletion allowance. Now they oppose even short-term tax credits for renewable energy and energy efficiency — unless future generations pay for them by adding them to the federal deficit created by wasteful spending and tax breaks.
Like most addicts, they are fooling themselves, and trying to fool their friends and family.
It's a dodge, for instance, when senators and industry representatives use the excuse of today's oil prices to call for drilling on the continental shelf, everywhere in the Rockies, and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
If they don't know better, they should. The United States holds less than 3 percent of the world's oil and gas, yet uses about 25 percent of its annual production. The addicts claim we need to drill ourselves dry as fast as we can. That's addict-talk. We don't need to get more addicted to an increasingly marginal, expensive resource. Instead we need to break the addiction.
The oil companies, who are blanketing the media with advertisements, are just doing their job: earn a profit and maintain market share. But the politicians and elected officials who back them up – what are they thinking? They haven't just lost their logic. They have lost their sense of shame.
High energy prices are badly hurting everyday Americans. Millions of middle-income households and small businesses are falling behind on their monthly utility bills, partly because they can't afford to fuel their vehicles. The domino effect is that the money they spend for energy isn't available to pay the mortgage. Presto, it's magic: a subprime mortgage crisis.
Among amazing cop-outs in the history of the world, today's absence of dynamic, persistent, positive energy leadership in the White House, Congress, and the presidential campaign ranks high. Even mediocre, weak presidents, candidates, and elected officials should be calling loudly for alternatives and bringing them to market fast. How do we ever adequately fund education, health care, transportation, and social security if we don't solve the energy problem? We can't.
At the White House and on the right wing in Congress, where they defend oil companies as though they were poor orphans, they say shifting our economy to lower-cost, sustainable alternatives will be expensive. They say, let the market make the shift, pitting tiny renewable energy outfits and consumers against international behemoths with record-setting profits.
Meanwhile they watch as U.S. consumers fork over $400 billion a year on foreign oil. Since oil is a world commodity, our demand helps fill coffers in the Middle East in what the McKinsey Global Institute called the “oil windfall in the Gulf.” Oil dollars feed terrorism, dictatorship and jihadism all over the world, from Darfur, to Venezuela, to Pakistan, to Moscow, to Iran. Then American taxpayers fund challenges to terrorism (Afghanistan), dictatorship (Iraq), and jihadism (Iran) threatening our interests. Our direct aid to Israel is more than counterbalanced by our indirect aid to terrorist organizations funded by oil dollars.
Just one year's expenditure on foreign oil, spread out over a decade, would quickly change this nation's energy economy so that it was electrified and efficient. The nation could run on the renewable energy — such as New Mexico's infinite and bountiful wind, geothermal, and solar — that the profligate, oil-stoned addicts say is too expensive.
The true cost to American consumers? Nothing. We'd make a huge profit while strengthening the economy and the treasury for future generations. At a time of economic peril, we'd convert disappearing petrodollars to long-term domestic jobs and energy security.
When this nation moves to electric cars and electrified rail for freight and passengers, Americans will save money and time. Fueling a rechargeable car today costs about one-fifth what it costs to fuel with gasoline or diesel. Saves time too – you plug in at home instead of going to the service station.
For now, we are waiting for the White House, the oil industry, and Congress to realize that the world is changing around them and that they have priced our economy into oblivion. In this hugely important election year of 2008, thank goodness, some of the worst addicts are retiring. Others, unfortunately, are still spouting nonsense. The fall elections can't come quickly enough.
Ned Farquhar is a former senior policy adviser to Gov. Bill Richardson. The views expressed are his own. E-mail: inthewest@comcast.net
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