Republicans in the US Senate have produced a field manual that would be useful in political battles over energy if anyone had time to read it. Energy 20/20: A Vision for America's Energy Future, delivered by Sen. Lisa Murkowsky of Alaska, covers all forms of energy from many angles in 121 pages of readable but lengthy analysis and lavish graphics. Its prescriptions are sound, its educational value high. But it addresses the wrong war.
"By 2020," the document recommends, "achieve independence from OPEC imports."
Of course, Energy 20/20 is a political document, and "independence from OPEC imports" is a handy rallying cry in American politics. Here, though, an otherwise sophisticated document plays to the cheap seats. It has an important point to make: that recent changes in domestic and nearby supply and steady improvement in energy-use efficiency make a formerly unimaginable trade development worthy of serious contemplation. But should that development be a stated goal of American policy?
Monolithic threat?
Contrary to the usual rhetoric, OPEC is not uniformly hostile to the US. The United Arab Emirates is not Venezuela. Qatar is not Iran. Saudi Arabia, OPEC's most important member, has mostly friendly relations with the US. If OPEC represented a monolithic threat to US security, the US would have to respond accordingly, accommodating energy policy to priorities of national defense. But OPEC is not a monolithic threat. It's an important force in the oil market, subject to its own internal conflicts, sometimes aligned with US interests and sometimes not. Energy policy must take it into account without compromising other priorities, such as the economy and foreign relations. US energy policy improves to the extent it concentrates on US needs and capabilities and grounds itself in international realities, thoroughly considered. The use of OPEC as a foil to generate urgency too often leads to reactionary mistakes.
It's also unnecessary. US reliance on OPEC oil already is diminishing. With consumption stagnant and supply increasing in North America and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, notably Brazil, the trend will continue. If nothing impedes development of the unconventional resources now reshaping the geography of oil and gas supply, OPEC producers in the Eastern Hemisphere increasingly will depend on growth markets of Asia and the Middle East for sales. The US does not need to take official action to make this happen. It simply needs to let it happen.
But will it? The biggest threat to US energy interests is not OPEC but the systematic misapprehension that too frequently steers policy. For reasons including but not limited to concern about climate change, US officialdom has developed a bias against hydrocarbon energy. It has implemented regulations that deliberately discourage the burning of coal to generate electric power. And it continually proposes tax and other measures aimed at promoting costly renewable energy sources, not as supplements to hydrocarbon fuels but rather as replacements of them.
This orientation to energy policy-making promises cost escalation and energy shortage, a formula for economic decay. It represents a much larger threat to US interests than OPEC ever will. It, not OPEC, is the menace against which Senate Republicans should be preparing to do battle.
Central foe
Energy 20/20 addresses the problem by implication. Its suggestions for regulatory reform, elimination of subsidies for politically preferred forms of energy, and streamlining of project permitting, for example, show appreciation of the perils inherent in current approaches to energy policy-making. But the document never hoists its intellectual self high enough to specify the central foe: governmental orchestration of energy behavior in markets that should be free.
The Republican document is an impressive collection of information that can, if anyone reads it, help correct the misunderstanding underlying US energy politics. But the problem goes beyond errors of fact. The real fight is over core beliefs about what governments should and should not do. On energy, that's the high ground Republicans need to conquer.
