It's about Oil

“Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and freedom, but history will actually remember the Bush years as the moment when petro-authoritarians—not freedom and democracy—spread like a wildfire and he did nothing serious to stop it.”

Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times September 27, 2006

An avalanche of state-sponsored panic followed 9/11, but one of my favorite pieces of propaganda was when the Bush administration launched a campaign to link drug use with terrorism. I forget the details but the commercials basically told pot smokers that although they might think that their illegal activity harms no one, drug cartels profiting from marijuana sales support terrorist networks. I forgive you if the whole affair was too silly for you to remember. There was a small counter-campaign that wasn’t financed by the government that suggested that driving gas-guzzling vehicles contributed to terror by financing totalitarian oil-exporting regimes. This counter-demonstration was immediately shouted down by conservatives as being shrill, irresponsible, and somehow disrespectful of the victims of 9/11 (that was a very convenient criticism of any views they found to be inconvenient).

Just about every time he has a microphone within shouting distance Mr. Bush reminds us that the terrorists attacked us because they hate our freedoms when their true reasons were plainly articulated: They opposed U.S. troops on Saudi soil. I don’t think that U.S. troops should be anywhere in the Middle East and certainly not Saudi Arabia. I also don’t think that we should be buying oil from what is one of the world’s most despicable regimes, a regime in which 50% of the populace (women) are basically political prisoners.

I am saying nothing new when I say that Mr. Bush has not asked the American people to make a single sacrifice in our war on terror. We have an army of economic conscripts that we call volunteers and the rest of us sit back and try to ignore the chaos in Iraq by switching the channel to the fantasy world of American Idol or Fox News. We haven’t been asked to so much as cut out one trip to the mall each month as a means of lessening our dependence on the oil we buy from Middle East countries with truly horrible records on human rights—although they are ostensibly our allies while the neo-con crowd tells us that former allies—like France—are now our enemies.

The Bush administration likens the attack of 9/11 to a modern day Yarmuk (636 A.D.), the first major battle between Islam and the Christian west. If that is true—and I don’t believe that it is—then why do we have a virtual pipeline of money flowing from our country into the coffers of our enemies, a pipeline built on our dependence on their oil? Our national policy should be to disarm our enemy, not fill their Swiss bank accounts because we are too stupid to come up with a sane energy policy.

In our battle against energy dependency our president has not even asked for volunteers. This is a war we have been losing for decades and we have yet to admit that we are in the fight. Fuel efficiency ratings of cars sold in America have worsened in the last 15 years as people climbed aboard the sport utility vehicle bandwagon. Investment in public transportation infrastructure has also dwindled. Government funding for Amtrak, the United States’ passenger train service, has always been stingy while airlines received a whopping $15 billion bailout in the wake of 9/11. America’s rail service has been criticized by conservatives for not being self-sufficient while no one expects our highway system to carry its own weight. This is at a time when European countries are falling over themselves to build a vast system of high-speed rail (300 kph).

I have heard that what America needs is a sort of Manhattan Project to bring us into energy self-sufficiency. I think that what is needed is a lot more low-tech. Almost all of the technology we need to become less dependent on Middle East oil already exists. We have cars that get 60-70 mpg and trains that go 300 kph. The bicycle is perhaps the best personal transportation device ever invented. What America needs is not a Manhattan Project but more of an old-fashion fire bucket brigade. We simply need to embrace a lifestyle that will lead us away from the slavery of foreign oil dependence.

Conservatives have a long history of opposing higher fuel efficiency requirements for automobiles. Right-wing propaganda mills like the Heritage Foundation and National Review have argued for years that higher CAFÉ standards don’t lower gasoline consumption and that smaller, more fuel efficient cars are unsafe. Their arguments are specious, if not ridiculous and now we find ourselves some 33 years after the first Arab oil embargo more vulnerable than ever to the whims and instability of our Middle East suppliers. Their only idea to free us from foreign oil is to allow more domestic production in environmentally fragile areas. Even in their best-case scenarios the added production in these areas would do little to meet our energy needs.

Republicans maintain that they represent the party most committed to protecting Americans yet they seem unwilling and unable to reduce our dependence on imported oil which represents the greatest risk to this country. With transportation using 28% of fuel consumption in America it is obvious that higher automobile fuel efficiency would be a good place to start if energy independence is our goal. The fact that energy self-sufficiency isn’t even anything we talk about with any sense of seriousness or urgency demonstrates the absence of any political leadership in America.

Instead of leadership we are treated to the outrage du jour by conservatives: terrorism, gay marriage, abortion, partial-birth abortion, terrorism, illegal immigrants, and terrorism. We are only told what we want to hear. Entire careers are made in politics by those who are best able to figure out what we, the public, will find agreeable and comfortable instead of determining what course we should follow and then implementing a strategy to get us there. It’s like keeping a child on a steady diet of candy because it won’t eat the things it should.

I happen to believe that Americans are practically dying to be asked to do something substantial to make our country better. I think Americans would be willing to make considerable sacrifices if it meant building a stronger future for themselves and their children. If only we could elect politicians with the courage to ask us to make these sacrifices.