Editorial: Politics, security, and oil

March 1, 2004
Politics, security, and oil Whatever the distractions of the moment, the US presidential race ultimately will be about a single issue: national security.

Whatever the distractions of the moment, the US presidential race ultimately will be about a single issue: national security. When the time comes to vote, Americans will select the candidate they believe best will protect them against a repeat of the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. Other issues will be secondary. The oil and gas industry should work to ensure that energy remains among the subordinate concerns.

It won't be easy. Energy and security always have been linked and to some extent remain so. More often than not, the connection works to the disadvantage of oil and natural gas. The industry itself has for years hinged its political arguments to security. But the arguments nearly always backfire.

Events have a way of refuting intuition. Open-ended logic leads to contradictory conclusions. So it goes with the energy-security connection.

Threadbare alarm

As a lever for decision-making about energy, for example, traditional alarm over the large and growing share of US demand satisfied by imported oil has turned threadbare. Dependence on oil from abroad is said to weaken the country. Yet US dependence on imported oil reached its highest levels ever at the same time the country was becoming the world's unrivaled superpower. Something's wrong with the traditional logic.

This deficiency explains why the security argument, when advanced on behalf of righteous measures like federal leasing and tax changes favoring production, never works. Outside the industry and its supporters in government, it's not persuasive. Yet it never goes away. Worse, it works more effectively and more destructively as an argument to replace oil with fuels favored by politicians and various pressure groups and to force energy consumers into officially favored patterns of behavior.

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks the security argument has shifted shape but not substance. Now the aim is to cut dependence on not just oil from abroad but oil from the Middle East. Doing so supposedly would promote security. Some analysts claim that an easy way for the US to fight terrorism is to reduce oil purchases from Middle Eastern producers by subsidizing nonpetroleum alternatives.

This is nonsense. No matter what the US does, Middle Eastern producers will sell oil and have no trouble finding buyers. The US can only weaken itself by force-feeding its economy costly energy and curbing the choices of its citizens.

It's simplistic and unfair to demonize all of the Middle East because Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and many of the Sept. 11, 2001, murderers came from Saudi Arabia—itself high on the terrorist target list. Saudi Arabia and other nations in the region deserve concern for their failures of governance; all oligarchies do. But commercially disengaging from them wouldn't turn them into the stable democracies of western hope. It would more likely intensify the ethnic and religious dimensions of terrorist hatred. That's not progress. If Middle Eastern oil revenue is funding terrorists, the answer is to find and imprison the money handlers, not rush into errors of international relations, trade, and energy choice.

With energy, alarmism over security—now terrorism—always produces errors. It generates panic. And panic leads to calls for the suspension of market economics and individual freedoms.

Bad ideas

Already, incumbents and challengers alike cite foreign oil as a reason to set wild goals for vehicles fueled by carbon-free energy and for absolute cuts in oil imports and consumption—as though the simple exertion of political will can make such wishes come true. More bad ideas about energy are under serious discussion in Washington, DC, now than at any time since the activist administration of former President Jimmy Carter. The Carter team at least had the excuse that its mistakes—ranging from the lavishly subsidized Synthetic Fuels Corp. to end-use controls on natural gas—hadn't been tried before. Worry about security and terrorism is no excuse to repeat costly mistakes.

Energy can only suffer from the contest over security that the presidential race will become. The US has plenty of other good reasons to make the right moves on energy—reasons like economic health, jobs, vibrant markets, and consumer options. The right moves on energy will help keep Americans free, their country strong, and their representatives in government focused on genuine enemies.