You Can't See Energy Policy, But All Feel Its Effects
By Ned Farguhar
Of the Journal
The earth circles the sun like a bright blue marble carving its orbit in space.
That blue marble, viewed and photographed from spacecraft, is singularly beautiful. The difficulties we face as human beings just aren't visible from so far away.
Among those difficulties: the price of oil. A barrel of oil now trades at more than $100, a price many experts thought we wouldn't see in the next decade. Economists now link oil prices with the slowing economy and the failure of the subprime mortgage market. So the price of oil is making food, housing, transportation and materials more expensive at the same time the U.S. economy is slowing.
We can't change that. We could drill every last place in the United States and have negligible effect on the price of oil, even on our imports.
A second difficulty invisible from space: where oil comes from. The United States imports 65 percent of its oil, more than 12 million barrels a day, including refined products such as gasoline. So we export about 400 billion crisp, green United States dollars to other countries every year just to buy oil.
Recently the McKinsey Global Institute drew attention to the oil "windfall" in the Persian Gulf, as developed nations transfer trillions of dollars to Gulf nations, the source of so much global instability, religious and social intolerance, and even war. Russia now produces more oil than any other nation and sits on top of the world's largest natural gas reserves. Moscow is discussing creation of an international gas cartel with Iran and Qatar. Oil nations generally aren't friendly to the United States, freedom or civil government.
And a third difficulty: the see-through atmosphere wrapping the earth is building up more invisible heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. As a result the earth is warming. Climate change, say large bodies of scientists after significant amounts of work and study, is happening around us. Most scientists further agree that human activity, particularly the burning of coal, oil and gas, is the major contributor to global warming.
If we continue our current energy habits, and if fast-developing nations adopt similar practices, the seas will rise in the next 50 years as polar ice melts, inundating coasts around the world. Weather patterns will change, creating drought in some regions, floods in others.
Here in the Southwest, we'll see longer, hotter summers, so we'll have less surface water and it will be more expensive and difficult to store.
So energy problems converge. Economy, national security, climate change. It doesn't take too long to realize that if the problems converge, the solutions probably do as well.
Critics say those solutions would be expensive. It would cost us about $30 billion to $40 billion a year for the next five or 10 years to convert to an entirely new energy economy.
That would mean electric cars, much more efficient and affordable, giving drivers new flexibility to choose their fuel and create some market competition among fuel providers. It would mean developing wind power and solar energy and storing them so that we can use them when we need them.
It would mean implementing energy efficiency, making our economy competitive with Japan's and Europe's. It would mean putting high-speed electric trains into some heavily trafficked corridors, putting dedicated bike trails and parking facilities into our metro areas and more.
Converging solutions would boost America's economy, help protect our national security, and reverse climate-change trends. They would cost a small fraction of what we spend on foreign oil.
For the western United States, the benefits would be significant. Instead of paying more and more for imported fuels, we could export our world-class renewable energy to other parts of the country, as well as the technologies developed by our world-class national labs, universities and entrepreneurs. Our ranchers could harvest the wind and the sun. There would be hundreds of thousands of new high-paying jobs.
Congress is still pretty much high-centered on energy policy, struggling over basic questions such as extension of the relatively minor tax credits (due to expire at the end of this year) supporting renewable energy development and production. The earth wouldn't look much different from outer space if a new president and Congress took energy policy a lot more seriously, but it would be a much better place to live.
Dream on, little blue marble in space.
opinion 
...go to bookmarks
E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
