Posted on Tue, Jul. 29, 2008

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Reducing demand for oil only option

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is right: We can't drill our way out of this mess.

So is former Vice President Al Gore: For national security as well as environmental reasons, we need a total commitment to alternative energy.

George W. Bush is wrong: Drilling offshore and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge won't affect the price of oil for a decade or more, and (see Pickens, T. Boone, above) more oil isn't the answer anyhow.

So is John McCain: A gas-tax summer holiday is nonsensical pandering.

Barack Obama? Remains to be seen. The energy ideas he's expressed so far cover every possibility but feature none and thus are vaporous until he outlines a specific program.

And so we drift past the halfway point of yet another year in which our energy crisis has not been addressed. We don't have an infinite amount of time to treat an oil addiction that, left unchecked, can destroy our economy.

This summer's rocketing oil price demonstrates once more the danger of our reliance on a finite commodity that is in growing demand around the world and is largely in the hands of people who do not have our best interests at heart.

We can't repeal the law of supply and demand. We don't have control over either supply or price, so the only way to sidestep the law's crushing inevitability is to reduce demand. In figuring out how to do that, we start with certain truths:

• You don't cure addiction by finding more dope and selling it to the addict at a lower price.

• The oil companies once again reporting enormous profits apparently aren't all that concerned, since they spend far more money buying back their own stock and promoting their virtue than they do building new rigs and refineries or working on alternatives.

• Our addiction makes petro-dictators Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin and a handful of oil sheiks far more dangerous to our national well-being long term than Osama bin Laden and his jihadists.

• Given the short-term, "me-first" mentality that drives most American businesses and the stock market that bullies them, free enterprise alone isn't going to address this emergency. Conservatives who shudder at the thought of "big government programs" had best hunker down, as that's the only way the job can get started.

• The Manhattan A-bomb project and the Apollo moon program are not useful models for a national commitment to alternative energy. The former was top secret, and the latter required no particular action of citizens except to pay taxes. A more appropriate template is World War II with its well-understood, universal threat and its requirement for personal sacrifice and participation, both coerced and voluntary, by businesses.

Let's hope the next president and Congress finally get serious about reducing our reliance on oil. But if that happens, we need to be prepared to face another truth: As our share of worldwide consumption drops from its present 25 percent past 20 and heads to 15, the price of oil will collapse. This will tempt us to back off our resolve, and some will cry for a bailout of the suddenly suffering oil companies. That is a mug's game, and we shouldn't play it. Our commitment to sustainable alternatives must be wide, deep and permanent.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.

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