Dubya has once again found time for his true mission in life: selling the government to the oil companies.
After this morning’s cabinet meeting, Bush commended the House for passing his energy bill and urged the Senate to do the same. His reasons were that the 9/11 attacks were “clear” indicators that we cannot risk national security by depending on foreign sources of oil.
There’s no argument with his implicit connection between energy and national security. The argument here is with his implicit statement that we get oil from the Middle East. We don’t.
The US gets its oil from Venezuela–hardly a source of mujahedeen terror. When that dries up, we’ll turn to Mexico and Columbia. The US has no immediate requirement to get energy out of the Middle East. Europe and Asia depend on the Gulf States for petroleum.
Bush, however, would like you to believe that Middle East politics will have an immediate impact on your gas bill and the only way to lessen the impact is to expand drilling for domestic sources of oil.
Under known reserves, the world has an oil supply to last roughly 40 to 50 years. If the US and OPEC were intellectually honest capitalists, the world would never run out of oil because prices would adjust automatically to supply and demand. Unfortunately, the US is dependent on cheap oil like a crack addict and OPEC is an inherently anti-capitalist cartel. Prices are adjusted according to political needs and economic reality is ignored.
There will come a point where the threat to national security involves an oil famine rather than any political threat. The only way to counter the looming threat of oil exhaustion is to move to alternative energy sources ahead of time.
If Dubya is serious about how US energy policies impact the country over the long term rather than how energy policies impact his campaign contributors, then he will make decisions that pour funding into viable, industrial-grade alternative, home-grown energy like hydrogen and other carbonfree compounds.
With our alternative energies being completely green and domestic, the US government would have more legitimacy to its moral supremacy claim that gets this nation into seemingly endless “humanitarian” operations in economically strategic hot spots.
