Turning on the Lights
Make no mistake. This war with Iraq is about oil.
It’s as true this time around as it was a decade ago when then Secretary of State James Baker said the same thing. The single, essential element on the planet that makes the world go around, makes the engines whir and the rocket ships fly is, irreducibly, oil.
It would be nice if that substance were instead love or human kindness, but it’s a black, goopy material usually found at depths of anywhere from one to three miles beneath the earth’s surface. In the years after its discovery, the price of this substance became the measure of world economic productivity. And that price was determined by a little known committee in Texas, which then produced most of the world’s oil. That committee was the Texas Railroad Commission. Funny that a group of cowboys sitting around a card table in Austin determined world economic behavior, but that’s how it was.
Fast forward to the discovery of oil in the Middle East. After a while, OPEC and the sheiks grabbed the reins. To make its factories go, America needed their oil. In return, the Arab nations needed us to buy their oil. It was never a particularly happy equation, owing to all the fractious characters involved. Whenever there was unrest in OPEC-land, and the supply got threatened, America got really, deeply edgy. Now is one of those edgy moments, particularly because President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both oilmen, appreciate the value of the stuff.
Because we’re so dependent on oil, many people—primarily pointy-headed intellectuals—say this nation needs to become “energy independent.” We need this to get ourselves out from under the wings of all those crazy Arabs. What these pointy-headed folks will also say is that we should not allow drilling off the coasts of Florida and California. The next time one of these liberals heads down this direction at a cocktail party, simply remind him or her that we can’t be both energy independent and petroleum-averse at the same time. At this time in history, you just can’t replace the amount of Middle Eastern oil we import with a bunch of peaceful little windmills. Trust us on this one.
But—and this is where we differ from the Bush administration and agree with the progressives—the United States needs the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to develop commercially viable alternative sources of energy. It’s unlikely we’ll become totally energy independent, now or ever. But we sure could use some help in becoming less dependent.
The political reality is that we are held hostage by Middle Eastern oil.
It has prevented us from taking an honest stance toward Saudi Arabia, a country that is no true friend of ours. It has also bolstered people like Osama bin Laden. Many people in the Arab world have become increasingly aware of how far behind their countries are, at least in terms of political systems and freedom. They see that their regimes are repressive, and that we support those regimes because we need their oil. (Saddam, don’t forget, was our pal throughout the ’80s.)
Early in WWII, we faced a similar crisis. Our war machine depended on rubber for tank treads, tires, gaskets for battleships, more stuff than you can think of. Problem was that the Japanese controlled most of the world’s rubber supplies in Southeast Asia. So the government undertook a relatively unpublicized, but massive, effort in cooperation with private business—companies like Firestone and Goodyear—to develop a synthetic substitute for rubber. Within a couple of years, they had succeeded. Their success not only aided our war effort but changed the whole automotive industry. From then on, no one used real rubber in tires.
In a similar way, we need to create public-private partnerships to develop alternative energy sources. They might range from developing safer nuclear power to satellite-based solar energy capture and transmission (a technology that isn’t as Buck Rogers as it sounds). The country that put a man on the moon in less than a decade and developed synthetic rubber can certainly find something out there that will work. Visionary leadership already would have moved us toward that goal.
Instead, we have had a monumental failure of leadership that crosses party lines. No one since Jimmy Carter has had the courage to talk publicly about making non-hydrocarbon-based fuels a priority. It’s time for Bush and Cheney, House Democrats and Senate leaders to put down their battle axes and get together on this.
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