Bob Tippee
The US government needs to relax about imported oil, anxiety over which makes serious people say and propose silly things.
It's not beneath President George W. Bush to leverage energy-policy proposals on US reliance on oil from abroad.
Now Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), who wants Bush's job, is chiming in.
"Today I am proposing a Declaration of Energy Independence because weaning us off foreign oil will both make America more secure and grow the economy," Lieberman declared May 7.
He proposed a plan that would, he said, "not only fix this Achilles heel in our security but open new markets, spur new technologies, and create new jobs for working Americans. And it will do all this without abandoning our values and sacrificing our environment."
And without leasing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain or the federally owned offshore anywhere other than areas now producing.
Lieberman proposes the usual fantasies about conservation and renewable energy. And he upstaged Bush's ambition for hydrogen by proposing that the gas come from coal.
He balms all this intervention with talk about market mechanisms and giving industries required to do the impossible—such selling cars nobody wants—"flexibility" to figure out how.
When will politicians get the message?
Government manipulation of energy markets is like the politically ideal car, the one that runs on uneconomic fuels and shifts polluting energy transactions away from the vehicle itself: It costs ridiculously much and doesn't work.
The US won't achieve "energy independence" with fuel-economy standards for vehicles, subsidies for politically correct fuels, and hollow promises about technologies that don't exist and have no commercial reason to.
Nor should it try. The US might moderate its degree of dependency on foreign oil by producing more domestically—and should.
But there's only one route to real energy independence: a cut in energy use large enough to be achievable only though painful constriction of the economy.
If that's what Lieberman wants, his laughably costly energy proposal represents a great start.
For Americans who like their standard of living, imported oil and free choice in energy markets are vastly preferable.
(Online May 9, 2003; author's e-mail: [email protected])