Wednesday, August 15, 2007 –When considering the large weapons sale being proposed to Saudi Arabia, one also has to consider our unfortunate dependence on the Saudis and Middle East for our energy needs. While these two things are usually treated as separate topics, arming tyrannies in exchange for access to their oil has been nothing but bad for the Middle East and tragic in terms of stability in the world. Large weapon’s sales to the Middle East and our energy dependencen that region are closely related and should considered together.

Billions that we spend for energy go directly to totalitarian regimes, who in turn use those funds to get the best weapons our dollars can buy. And they buy them not just from us, but from the North Koreans, the Russians and the Europeans as well.

Certainly we need the energy the Arab world sells us, but that need is derived from policies we’ve willingly indulged in for the last half-century while paying meaningless lip service to the idea of energy independence. What we have actually done is decided that there are higher priorities than energy independence and our nation’s agenda reflects that.

Pete Peterson convincingly argued in the Wall Street Journal recently that we have oil, gas and coal in abundance and merely lack the political will to develop them. These energy resources can be found in tremendous amounts off shore and other places we’ve decided are off-limits for exploration.

We have also, to our detriment, almost completely shunned nuclear power. A nuclear facility re-opened earlier this month in Ohio was the first one brought on line in the U.S. in 27 years. At the same time, France and Japan have built their nuclear power capability to 80 percent of their energy needs. Their trust in this clean, safe, carbonless resource has worked to their advantage and they did it without the adverse circumstances many in our country said would occur if we went down the same path.

If we, Earth’s largest user of energy, had done what France and Japan did, the world would be a much different place today. Here are some of the things that might have happened.

* Energy priced by supply and demand over the last several decades would have marginalized OPEC, and their manipulated extortive pricing would never have worked.

* Places like Iran, Libya and Iraq wouldn’t have had the dollars to buy weapons that threatened their region and the world.

* Absent the revenues energy provides, lavishly funded oil aristocracies around the globe might have been forced to develop their human capital instead of exploiting it

* Without ample dollars to propagate their hateful ideologies,
Wahabists and people like them would only be known in their own dingy corners of the world.

* Financial resources spent on overpriced energy would likely have stayed right here in America and would have added instead of taking away from our economic strength. Our public and private debt would be lower, as would interest rates.

* Many of the conflicts the world has seen over the last 60 years might not have happened or at least would have been contained with lower levels of intensity.

Defunding the oil-rich dictatorships we support today requires a political will we lack at every level of government. Shaped by our State Department and driven by media and academic elites, our political leaders have put huge energy supplies out of reach while they continue to avoid the political toxicity of the word “nuclear.”

Here’s a simple test to see if a politician understands any of this:
When preaching ‘energy independence’ — and they all do — if they use the word “nuclear”’ alongside the words “solar” and “wind” while reciting the mantra “renewable fuels,” they are trying to fool us…. again. Avoiding any meaningful commitment to growing our nuclear power or developing resources in our control is a cop-out and here’s why.

Touting ethanol is more a sop to farmers than it is a solution to our needs. While driving up the price of grains and animal products, ethanol burns almost as much energy to make as it creates. Solar and wind have been around for a long time and have never made it beyond the small market niches they occupy. They can’t come close to providing us with the energy that nuclear can.

With 15 or 16 active candidates for the presidency traveling around the country, it would seem that one of them should be speaking to this truth: keeping our vast energy-rich acreage off-limits simply means that security concerns are subordinated to our environmental agenda of the moment. It also means that our unhealthy dependence on foreign resources will continue to shape our immediate future, just as depriving us of the nuclear power we are capable of providing for ourselves jeopardizes our children’s future.

It is time to stop this dissembling, self-defeating game and face the reality the world presents us with. Energy independence starts with recognizing the truth and then acting in our best interests.

— nrg

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