Our Energy Conundrum
The average driver who pulls into a gas station these days and barks, "Fill 'er up!" focuses primarily on the surging price of gas and gives little or no thought to where it comes from or why the price is so high. Some may understand the surging demand that comes from a billion Chinese and a billion Indians who have joined the oil market as consumers--not only to fuel their cars and planes but as an ingredient in fertilizers, pesticides, medicines, paints, and plastics. Guess how many barrels of oil we import a day? A million? Five million? No, the staggering answer is . . . 12 million barrels a day, and we're heading for 20 million barrels a day by 2025. The price increases over the past year mean that we consumers will send oil producers an additional $50 billion this year--on top of the $120 billion we sent last year.
What makes this so maddening is that we're sending all these dollars to countries that use a good chunk of them to promote anti-American ideas, to spread radical Islam, and to finance the jihadists who are waging the war of terrorism against us. Some of these same countries are also using this largess to develop weapons of mass destruction. As if all that weren't enough, we're also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a U.S. military presence to protect this Middle East energy source. It is a tax on consumers here--not to mention the fact that, yes, these same Middle East oil producers have enmeshed us in two wars over the past two decades. Their capricious governments are increasingly vulnerable to religious fundamentalists and Islamist terrorists who, any day, could devastate the world's economy by sabotaging production.
How dumb are we, anyway?
Illusions. There is much talk these days about energy independence--a fantasy. Any program to reduce our 60 percent dependence on foreign oil will take anywhere from five to 10 years. And neither the Republican answer--more production--nor the Democratic answer--more conservation--will solve the problem. Any coherent energy program will require us to do both. It is also fantasy to imagine that we can rely on alternative power sources from waves or windmills or solar panels. That kind of power is weak, intermittent, and expensive--costing roughly twice the cost of the electrical power produced by either coal or gas.
Most Americans believe they're entitled to cheap fuel, regardless of how much they consume. As gas prices rise, the American public looks for someone to blame, even though gas is cheaper today by at least a third than it was 25 years ago, if you adjust the peak prices then for inflation and for the drop in the dollar. Our gasoline tax is only 43 cents a gallon, compared with $4 in most of Europe, making a gallon of gas cheaper than a bottle of water. Is it any wonder so few Americans don't bother to conserve? When fuel prices did go up, drivers switched to smaller, less wasteful cars, and we began a program of energy efficiency. That was great, but when prices fell, we went back to the gas guzzlers, and now, with just 5 percent of the world's population, we use a quarter of the world's oil.
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