Last night the president uncorked what to casual ears might have seemed an ambitious and inspirational proposal :
Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.
"75% of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025." Hmm. As usual, the closer you look at the language, the more hedged you realize it is.
There are two basic problems with the goal -- aside from the unlikeliness of Bush competently following up on it, that is.
First: Just under 24% of our oil imports are from the Persian Gulf (Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates). Canada is our biggest supplier, followed by Mexico. There are only three Middle Eastern countries in the top 10, and Saudi Arabia alone accounts for 15 of those 24%.
Oil imports constitute somewhere around 60% of our oil use, so Persian Gulf oil amounts to around 14% of our total oil use. Cutting that 14% by 75% would amount to reducing our overall oil consumption by 10.5%
That what Bush's grand energy initiative amounts to: A reduction of U.S. oil consumption by 10.5% over 19 years. That's really the best he thinks we can do?
Second: What are the chances that our 10.5% reduction will come solely out of imports from the Middle East? And if it does ... so what?
A 10% drop in U.S. consumption over 19 years is unlikely to lower the price of oil. Demand is surging in China and India, and supply will likely plateau within that time frame anyway, keeping prices sky high. In other words: If we won't buy the Middle East's oil, someone else will. Lots of people are going to want the remaining oil, badly. Middle Eastern autocracies are unlikely to lose their power as long as they've got oil.
The only way I see that we could make the Middle East's oil worthless -- and thus spur democratic transformation, so the theory goes -- is by reducing our demand substantially and quickly, enough to affect the world market. And if we pulled it off, we'd have to resist the temptation to go back to the same teat once the stuff is cheap again..
So: Replacing "more than 75% of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" is unlikely to markedly change our energy situation or the political dynamic in the Middle East.
More succinctly: Big whoop.
Comments
View as Threaded
billofrights Posted 2:04 am
02 Feb 2006
I doubt Bush intends anything substantial or sustained about alternative energy sources. What worries me more is the inability of the environmental, progressive and Democratic Party responses to educate the public and come up with a compelling new direction.
The Apollo Alliance's New Apollo Project would seem to be the most promising start (http://www.apolloalliance.org) because it would re-direct the more than $37 billion in annual energy subsidies that now go to the old fossil fuel based system, and put almost a decade's worth of that money, $300 billion, into new energy directions and greater energy efficiency. Although alternative energy and the Middle East were mentioned in the formal response given by new Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine, it was only a brief reference towards the end of his speech - and the Apollo Alliance didn't get a plug, so people who haven't heard about it didn't learn that night. So even though two books by Democratic mainstream players, Gene Sperling's "The Pro-Growth Progressive" and Stanley Greenberg's "The Two Americas both mention the project - it couldn't make it into the formal Democratic response for a national audience.
Not that the new Apollo Project is not without its critics or difficulties, as witnessed by the environmental groups that have failed to sign on because it doesn't deal with a new regulatory program for global warming gases or a carbon trading system like the McCain-Lieberman bill. And Ross Gelbspan's book "Boiling Point" also delivers some compelling and responsible criticism of its limitations.
Over at the Center for American Progress, John Podesta's think tank laden with former Clinton administration officials, they were pushing for a vastly reduced subset of Apollo's ambitious agenda of new jobs and investments with their Agriculture, Energy and Trade policy forum on Dec. 6th, 2005. I questioned Gayle Smith about the possibility that this more limited emphasis on trade, ag and bio-fuels might not undercut the Apollo's scope - on the premise that whenever Congress if offered a smaller, more focused direction it usually choose that over the tougher more ambitious one - she indicated that it didn't hurt Apollo but ran on parallel policy tracks. We'll see. While this confrence's emphasis was hard to argue with in its specifics, my take is that it will only undercut Apollo on the very practical ground that Apollo needs national introduction and focus if it is to have a chance.
And, after all, the Apollo Project's design and vision of jobs and alternative energy comes from, at least in good part, the rethinking of the environmental "community's" failures on global warming and energy, which gave rise to the publication of the essay the "Death of Environmentalism," rightly given much coverage in Grist.
As part of the critical dialogue about that essay, Ken Ward made the excellent point that the environmental grant funders have never approached the $magnitude$ or focus that would be needed to begin to persuade large portions of American Society that we are at a perilous point that requires enormous changes in policy direction. Despite the enormous amount of global warming/energy information available on hundreds of web sites, our progressive story does not reach most Americans because it is not in major media channels....citizens have to seek it out.
The Bush new direction teaser ought to be a painful goad, a reminder to environmentalists, progressives and the Democratic Party that we don't have the coherence, magnitude or commitment yet to take the good initial directions of Apollo home to the majority of the American people.
William R. Neil
Rockville, MD
Permalink