Maybe oil independence isn’t a big deal?
by Chris 4 comments Leave a comment April 24th, 2008
Count me among those who think that energy independence is a justified goal for the United States. After reading this article by Peter Kiernan I’m not so sure.
Kiernan tackles these myths of oil independence:
- The United States is dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
- The United States can eliminate the need to import oil soon.
- The activities of terrorist groups in the Middle East, such as al-Qaida, would be curtailed if oil revenue in the region dried up.
- Petro-states such as Iran, Russia, Venezuela and others would be unable to defy the United States if their oil revenue were curtailed by the loss of the U.S. as purchaser of their oil exports.
- The U.S. is defenseless against an aggressive OPEC in today’s high oil price environment.
- Energy independence can insulate the United States from the global oil market.
I’m going to shamelessly boil his arguments down to a few sentences for you lazy readers out there. The United States doesn’t import most of it’s oil from the Middle East. Moving away from oil will take decades. Terrorists find funding even when oil prices are low. Belligerent petro-states will still have customers even if we aren’t among them. We have a strategic oil reserve for emergencies, which we didn’t have in the 1970s. Global energy markets are global, as long as we are part of the global economy, we’ll feel the effects of the global oil market.
A lot of what Kiernan says makes sense and, to be clear, he’s not arguing that we shouldn’t develop alternative energy sources. But I’d like to add that I still think we should do what we can to extricate ourselves from our cozy relationships with the oil dictatorships. Moving away from a dependence on oil should not only help the environment and create new economic opportunities but it will also diminish away the driving force behind our bellicose Middle East policy. It’s about more than gas prices after all.
As oil prices continue to rise, the cost benefit of oil over alternative energy will drop. We will, albeit slowly, see a gradual inclusion of alternative energy into our energy supply. Its pretty crappy that the government offers much larger subsidies to oil companies than to alternative energy, but even with a stacked deck it is pretty much inevitable that alternative energy use is going to rise. The silicon shortage will be ending here in the next couple years and solar panels are going to become economical. Hybrid cars are going to be taking more and more of auto market share.
I thought we got more oil from Mexico than anywhere else.
I thought it was Venezuela, but I could be wrong.
We are both wrong… Its Canada:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html