From the Publisher / Arnold G. York
I keep reading about how we are hooked on foreign oil and how we have to make ourselves energy independent. Energy independence has been the mantra of an unbroken sequence of administrations in Washington DC, both Democratic and Republican, and yet with each new pronouncement and each new program, we as a nation seem to become more dependent on foreign oil. At one time that was just an economic problem. Now it’s a matter of national security. Every time you go to the pump and buy gas you’re helping to fund Al Qaeda and a dozen other groups that would blow us to bits if they had the means. Our dollars flow into those Middle Eastern economies that buy their peace with all the radicals by funding them. Effectively, it directs all of that anger away from their own Middle Eastern governments and points it at us and the other western nations.
We can’t defeat terrorist enemies by putting more security people on duty at the airports, or with public relations programs to export democracy abroad. We can only do it by biting the bullet and freeing ourselves of this addiction to foreign oil. Without that oil income, those Middle Eastern governments will have no choice but to change, modernize and join the real world, where unfortunately there are no easy answers.
How do we do it? How do we get this monkey off our back? We have to do two things simultaneously: conserve and find alternative sources.
Conservation. How do we do it? Certainly not by driving a Lincoln Navigator or a Cadillac Escalade or a Toyota 4×4 the size of an 18-wheeler. The solution is not that complicated. It’s the execution of the solution that is very complicated because it pits us against each other and challenges some of our most cherished values, like the right to choose to do whatever you want, if you can afford it. If one person chooses something, it’s a personal choice. If one million people make that choice, we’ve set a national policy. We’re going to have to limit some of those choices. For example, there are all sorts of loopholes for certain automobile and truck models to avoid the miles per gallon limitations. That can’t go on. Everyone should have to meet a gas mileage standard. We have to stop buying that gas-hogging stuff and go small. We have to raise the taxes on gas so there is an incentive not to buy those big old gas burners, unless you’re willing to pay a big excise tax. That’s the conservation side. You can just see the lobbyists lining up to protect our right to drive a 500 horsepower BMW. After all, don’t we all have a constitutional right to drive a $90,000 automobile on Pacific Coast Highway that will go from zero to 30 mph in one and a half seconds? We must to resist those lobbyists or our civilization will never survive.
But conservation is only a part of the solution. The other part is that we have to find alternative sources of energy. Now everyone who is for conservation chokes on this one just the way all the resource people have problems with conservation. Let’s begin with a reality. The cheapest, most abundant, most readily available source of energy in the world today is fossil fuel, namely oil, which we refine into gasoline. If we are to develop other sources of energy, we are going to have to subsidize those sources for a while and we’re going to have to deal with some of the environmental trade-offs that are involved in a massive energy deal. What have we got available to us?
Nuclear energy-We rejected nuclear energy several decades ago. There were other countries that embraced it and it seems to have been reasonably successful for them. There appear to be new, safer technologies. Maybe nuclear technology is something we need to revisit.
Wind, solar and cogeneration technologies-The government has to finance more research and move ahead to help bring some of these to the marketplace.
Drilling for oil wherever we can find it-That means arctic reserves, government lands, and perhaps using new technologies to re-open old fields.
Coal and natural gas-We need them. True coal is dirty and natural gas is probably dangerous, but nuclear war is a hell of a lot dirtier and more dangerous.
If we don’t find some way to make ourselves less dependent on foreign oil, those Middle Eastern governments will never change. If they don’t change, 9/11 will happen again and next time it could be nuclear. There are enough old Soviet nukes floating around the world to scare the hell out of all of us.
The only way we can find a solution is if we as a nation work together to find a solution, which means that everyone has to hurt some. Civilizations die because they can’t adapt to a new reality. We have a new reality. The conservationists, the big auto people and the resource people are going to have to cut a deal with each other. Everyone’s going to be unhappy with part of the deal. I’m fearful that if we as a civilization don’t have the ability to adapt to new circumstances, we will end up watching the slow, or perhaps even violent, decline of the American world.