Before the end of World War Two, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes convinced FDR that in order to guarantee American oil security, a special relationship with Saudi Arabia was needed. Ickes and others recognized that there was not enough oil in the United States to support rapid industrial growth. Rather than try to control growth they committed the country to eventual dependence on imports. This dependence also means that the United States has to defend the international flow of oil, and that gets us involved in all sorts of places that we would not otherwise care much about.
One of the ways this reliance on imports was encouraged was to tax domestic oil more heavily than imported oil.
A lot of people think that relieving the domestic oil industry of all of the taxes and environmental restrictions it is under will solve our problems. But there is not enough oil in ANWR or offshore or in the Bakken Shale to eliminate our dependence on imported oil.
Four dollars a gallon is only a part of the price you pay as an American taxpayer. We are the sole guardian of the world’s oil shipping lanes, and our Navy is expensive. As taxpayers we also pay subsidies for ethanol production. We pay for ethanol twice: on April 15, and every time we put a gallon of gas that contains that ethanol into our tanks.
Because we made the decision so long ago, for cheap oil rather than energy efficiency, we lag behind other nations at this point in the game. As we pursue a secure oil supply, we tend to alienate most other nations, not just the oil producers but other consumers. We are now starting to see special relationships being developed between Venezuela and China, or Iran and India.
We need to break our addiction to oil and improve our relationship with the rest of the world. One way to start this would be to impose a tariff of a couple of dollars on each barrel of oil we import. We could also explore a better joint arrangement with NATO and other nations picking up some of the burden of defending the free flow of oil around the world. The money we raise from the import tariff and save on reduced military operations could be directed towards improving our domestic energy efficiency.
It would take courage to step down from being the sole defender of the free supply of oil around the world, because we would be giving up control of that supply. I am not sure that our government is willing to take a step like that. After all, we had the option decades ago, but chose the easy way, because we were afraid of what happens when our constituents don’t get an easy and cheap supply of oil. Our politicians have this bred into them.
Maybe, just maybe, technology will fix our addiction, drop on by for a little update on Kurzweil’s solar predictions. (Yup I am shamelessly flacking my blog, oh well!)
Interesting that you should bring up Kurzweil. The problem with solar power is that, depending on when the emergency hits, we won’t have the time or ability to ramp it up. Because the raw materials for all those solar panels need energy (and petroleum) to make, and some of the ingredients are in increasingly short supply.