Posted on 01/24/2008 7:15:13 AM PST by xjcsa
With oil prices still flirting with $100 a barrel, everyone is talking about the need for "energy independence." Late last year, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007; Sen. John McCain has declared, "We need energy independence"; and Sen. Barack Obama has called for "serious leadership to get us started down the path of energy independence."
This may all be good politics. But the idea that the United States, the world's single largest energy consumer, can be independent of the $5 trillion-per-year energy business -- the world's single biggest industry -- is ludicrous on its face. The push for energy independence is based on a series of false premises . Here are a few of the most pernicious ones.
The five myths:
1 Energy independence will reduce or eliminate terrorism.
2 A big push for alternative fuels will break our oil addiction.
3 Energy independence will let America choke off the flow of money to nasty countries.
4 Energy independence will mean reform in the Muslim world.
5 Energy independence will mean a more secure U.S. energy supply.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This might interest you.
1. Terrorism isn't tied to oil. Terrorists can still kill on a budget.
2. Alternative fuels will not replace gasoline anytime soon. The currently viable fuel supplements aren't actually viable.
3. If we don't buy oil from the Middle East, China and India will. We don't control the flow of cash to the Middle East.
4. The Muslims didn't reform with $10 oil, they are probably more likely to reform at $100 a barrel resulting in global investments that will be hurt by terrorism.
5. Isolationism isn't just impossible, it's impractical.
Think of this everytime someone demagogues energy policies that will cost you money and take away your freedoms.
Is there a parallel argument in Saudi Arabia saying that they have to break their dependence on American food?
Nice article. Some of us have being making these same points here on FR for some time now. The ethanol now crowd will have nothing of it.
The US should be exporting oil and not importing it. Simplest/best would be to simply ban the importation of oil in a single day, same as stopping smoking. That would mess us up about as badly as we were messed up in WW-II for about a year. A year later, we’d be ten times better off and most of the arch villains in the world would be riding camels and living in tents, as they should be. The wapost is fubar on this one as usual.
If we put a fraction of our effort to go green toward better coal or oilshale technologies, we’d solve our problems pretty quickly.
In a speech last year, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. had some advice for American motorists: "The next time you pull into a gas station to fill your car with gas, bend down a little and take a glance in the side-door mirror. . . . What you will see is a contributor to terrorism against the United States." Woolsey is known as a conservative, but plenty of liberals have also eagerly adopted the mantra that America's foreign oil purchases are funding terrorism.
Woolsey is not a conservative, and describing him as the former CIA director doesn't accurately portray his stance on this issue.
He now works for an organization called the National Commission on Energy Policy. The NCEP is a Beltway front group for left-wing environmental lobbyists that gets most of its funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation -- a non-profit foundation that finances all sorts of leftist causes related to government policy, environmental regulations, etc.
So Woolsey is basically using his CIA and "anti-terrorism" credentials to mask the left-wing agenda of the organization for which he works.
One of the dumbest posts I've ever seen on FR.
This is the article that Rush mentioned that he couldn’t find. Did you send it to him?
But see, also: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1958548/posts
It comes from all those and oil. We need to do what we can where we can. We are trying to do something about all those other factors, too.
Two and a half decades elapsed before annual corn-ethanol production reached 5 billion gallons, as it did in 2006. But now Congress is demanding that the cellulosic-ethanol business magically produce many times that volume of fuel in just 15 years. It's not going to happen.
That's because it's mostly dependent on private enterprise that needs to see profit on a short-term basis. You're all going to scream at me for this, but ...
Fans of energy independence argue that if the United States stops buying foreign energy, it will deny funds to petro-states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Hugo Ch¿vez's Venezuela. But the world marketplace doesn't work like that. Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set globally, not locally.If the U.S. develops alternative energy sources, then the demand for oil drops/the supply of energy increases, and the price drops. And that means less money for people selling oil, many of whom are against everything we stand for. So in this case, I consider energy a national security issue and believe that government expenditure to improve our energy supply is justified.
Remember that oil is not a purely rational market. Much of the supply is regulated by people like Chavez and the OPEC rulers who maniuplate the supply for non-economic reasons. They can choke off the supply and take losses - the people they rule are subjects, not citizens, and thus their rulers don't have to act rationally from either a political sense or an economic one. A purely economic analysis of this issue is not valid.
5 To see why [Energy independence will mean a more secure U.S. energy supply] is a myth, think back to 2005. After hurricanes ravaged the Gulf Coast, chewing up refineries as they went, several cities in the southeastern United States were hit with gasoline shortages. Thankfully, they were short-lived. The reason? Imported gasoline, from refineries in Venezuela, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Throughout the first nine months of 2005, the United States imported about 1 million barrels of gasoline per day. By mid-October 2005, just six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, those imports soared to 1.5 million barrels per day.
And prices jumped up. And they haven't come down as much as they went up. Sure, we were able to get gasoline from elsewhere. But we paid for it. Wait until China and India's demand for oil really spins up. See how easy it will be then to get more gasoline then if another hurricane hits N.O. or Houston square on.
So we're woven in with the rest of the world -- and going to stay that way.
Exactly my point. We are tied in. So when our supply goes up faster than our demand, it affects the rest of the world. Energy becomes a little cheaper for everyone. Other energy producers make less money and require less extremely expensive intervention on our part. And our energy supply becomes less dependent on non-rational decisions by foreign leaders.
Speaking of stopping smoking, I think that's just what that guy ought to do...
Saudi Arabia isn’t dependent on American food. Believe it or not, they even export wheat. The Saudis have enough money that they can buy their food from anywhere. They don’t need us as much as we need them.
If we reduced our oil use by 60%, a lot of us would be living in tents. China and India would enjoy the cheap oil. I guess the poster didn't think that other people would still use oil.
Oil is a global commodity. Demand is going up. We get most our oil from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.
No longer a true statement. We imported more oil from Saudi Arabia than Mexico for the last 6 and last 12 reported months.
The following is the last 6 month average:
5,417 MBPD from OPEC
4,675 MBPD from Non OPEC
2,147 MBPD from Persian Gulf
1,882 MBPD from Canada
1,465 MBPD from Saudi Arabia
1,386 MBPD from Mexico
1,173 MBPD from Venezuela
U.S. [Crude Oil] Imports by Country of Origin
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epc0_im0_mbblpd_m.htm
It was pulled because it was sourced incorrectly and not excepted.
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