Andrew Hagen

John Kerry has a brilliant campaign theme: make America independent of foreign oil. Kerry’s only problem is that he hasn’t taken it into the center of his platform.

The USA will probably never be independent of foreign oil. We use too much of it, and our own oil reserves are too small. Yet, by trying to achieve independence from foreign oil, we may reduce our dependence enough to make a difference. This can be called “energy independence” because that is the goal.

Drilling in Alaska (ANWR) and off Florida and elsewhere would not give us enough oil to make us politically independent of the oil oligarchs of the Middle East. The oil locked up in Canadian shale is still too expensive to extract.

Ultimately, we are obsessed with what happens in the Middle East primarily because that is where sits most of the world’s oil reserves, and because the world’s economy is dependent on cheap, plentiful oil. If we can make our country and thus the world significantly less dependent on oil, that will undermine our need to pay deference to tyrannical regimes there, and will give us a freer hand to pursue our highest foreign policy goals. It will defund terrorists. It will deteriorate the financial resources of regimes like Saddam’s Iraq or today’s Iran so that they cannot even afford to build nuclear weapons, or buy them.

US energy independence, or something that approaches it, would shorten the war and perhaps win it outright. Energy independence is thus a war strategy of critical importance.

The Democratic Party platform has this to say on energy independence. (*)

No strategy for American security is complete without a plan to end America’s dependence on Mideast oil. Today, the American economy depends on oil controlled by some of the world’s most repressive regimes. This leaves our economy dangerously vulnerable to nations that do not share our interests. America too often is silent about the practices of some governments because we depend on oil they control.

John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democratic Party believe a strong America must no longer rely on the cooperation of regimes that do not share our values. We believe a strong America must move toward energy independence.…

Harnessing American ingenuity to create renewable energy. Our plan begins with commonsense investments to harness the natural world around us—the sun, wind, water, geothermal and biomass sources, and a rich array of crops—to create a new generation of affordable energy for the 21st century. By mobilizing the amazing productivity of America’s farmers, we can grow our own cleaner-burning fuel. We support tax credits for private sector investment in clean, renewable sources of energy, and we will make ethanol credits work better for farmers. And we will ensure that billions of gallons of renewable fuel are part of America’s energy supply while striving for strong, national renewable energy goals.

Creating the energy-efficient vehicles of tomorrow. We support creating more energy-efficient vehicles, from today’s hybrid cars to tomorrow’s hydrogen cars. We support the American people’s freedom to choose whatever cars, SUVs, minivans, and trucks they choose, but we also believe American ingenuity is equal to the task of improving efficiency. We support improving fuel standards, and because of the challenges this poses, we will offer needed incentives for consumers to buy efficient vehicles, and for manufacturers to build them. We are also committed to developing hydrogen as a clean, reliable domestic source of energy. Our economy cannot convert to hydrogen overnight, so we will fund research to overcome the obstacles to hydrogen fuel and continue our other efforts to achieve energy independence.

Moving beyond OPEC. We can improve our energy security in other ways. We will seek more diverse sources of oil around the world and here at home. We support balanced development of domestic oil supplies in areas already open for exploration, like the western and central Gulf of Mexico. We support the expansion of new infrastructure to develop supplies from non-OPEC nations like Russia, Canada, and nations in Africa. We will increase efficiency of natural gas use, develop the Alaska natural gas pipeline, and enhance our nation’s infrastructure to help supply natural gas more effectively.

Electricity. We will work to create new technology for producing electricity in a better, more efficient manner. Coal accounts for more than one-half of America’s electric power generation capacity today. We believe coal must continue its important role in a new energy economy, while achieving high environmental standards. Working with the coal industry, we will invest billions to develop and implement new, cleaner coal technology and to produce electric and hydrogen power. We will also work to make sure that our people have access to an affordable, secure, and reliable supply of electricity at all times. We support mandatory, enforceable reliability standards. We also support public-private partnerships to make our power systems more flexible, resilient, and self-healing—and more environmentally friendly than ever before.

Government as a role model. The federal government is the largest single consumer of energy in the world. We will cut the federal government’s energy use and challenge local governments, corporations, universities, small businesses and hospitals to do the same.

Our commitment to conservation. A balanced energy policy must create real incentives for energy conservation in our homes, our offices, our factories, and our infrastructure, saving money and improving security even as it creates good jobs and rebuilds our communities.

With sixty-five percent of the world’s oil reserves in the Middle East, we cannot drill our way to energy independence. But we can create, think, imagine, and invent our way there. And we will create jobs, help our environment, and build a stronger country as we do.

This one big idea could be enough to move John Kerry from contender to winner.

George W Bush and the Republican Party have a plan for energy independence, but it is not open enough to alternative energy sources, conservation, or investing in new sources.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2004 at 23:50 and is filed under Election 2004, Global War on Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.