This morning's Washington Post features an analysis of the energy bill currently pending in Congress, saying that in experts' opinion it "wouldn't wean U.S. off oil imports":
Despite repeated calls by President Bush and members of Congress to decrease U.S. dependence on oil imports, a major energy bill that appears headed for passage this week would not significantly reduce the country's need for foreign oil, according to analysts and interest groups.The United States imports 58 percent of the oil it consumes. Federal officials project that by 2025, the country will have to import 68 percent of its oil to meet demand. At best, analysts say, the energy legislation would slightly slow that rate of growth of dependence.
"We'll be dependent on the global market for more than half our oil for as long as we're using oil, and the energy bill isn't going to change that," said Ben Lieberman, who follows energy issues for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. "There's a few measures to increase domestic production . . . and that would not do much."
The bill would provide billions in tax breaks and other federal subsidies to encourage domestic production and reduce pollution from coal-fired power plants, and would require the use of billions of gallons of ethanol and other products from agricultural biomass. But it weasels out on the centerpiece of conservation:
[T]he emerging package does not do what some analysts said would have the greatest impact on reducing U.S. oil demand and cutting imports: a requirement to increase fuel-efficiency standards for trucks and cars. Under strong pressure from the automobile industry, the House and Senate rejected higher efficiency standards. Lawmakers argued that doing so would require redesigns that would make vehicles unsafe and result in a loss of manufacturing jobs -- arguments sharply disputed by advocates of fuel efficiency.
Up steps the DLC to the plate. "We believe that dependence on foreign oil is the greatest threat to America's national and economic security -- and the most avoidable," Al From and Bruce Reed declare in "How America Can Win Again," the cover manifesto from the current Blueprint Magazine.
Here's the section on reducing oil imports by 25 percent by 2025, instead of watching them continure to grow:
[W]e need to stop feeding the very terrorists we need to defeat. We must eliminate one of America's greatest security vulnerabilities -- our dependence on foreign oil -- by taking advantage of the greatest economic opportunity of this decade: the creation of energy-efficient technologies. "By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism," Thomas L. Friedman wrote in The New York Times. "We are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars, and we are financing the jihadists -- the Saudi, Sudanese, and Iranian mosques and charities that support them -- through our gasoline purchases."The Bush administration has done nothing since 9/11 to increase America's security by reducing our energy dependence. As a result, we're letting terrorists convince the Arab street that all America cares about is oil. At the same time, we're letting our Japanese competitors beat us in the energy innovation race, which offers the best chance of creating high-wage jobs.
To bolster the war against terrorism, we need a national goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil by 25 percent by 2025. To bolster our economy in the next decade the way the information technology revolution did in the 1990s, we challenge Washington to make America the world's leading exporter of energy-efficient products, instead of the world's leading importer of foreign oil. We should, for example, create a booming market for hybrid cars by converting the government's motor vehicle fleet to hybrid engines by 2010 and offering significant tax credits to individuals and companies who purchase hybrids. Policies like those would serve as powerful encouragement to our ailing automobile industry to become competitive in the production of energy-efficient cars.
This document is worth reading in full. It makes a number of ingenious passes of the shuttle across the right-left divide, offering some possibilities (but missing others) for stitching up this gaping wound down the nation's midsection. For example, it includes the creation of a national-service corps under "values." (It also opposes the marketing of violence to children but is silent on the marketing of sexual tease and sleaze -- with rare exceptions, this continues to be Democrats' inexplicable blind spot. The Republicans, of course, have their beam in the other eye.) And it states, "A nation that puts rights ahead of responsibilities, and profits ahead of values, will soon lose them all" -- slashing left and right at the entitlement mentality that infects everyone from the AARP and the UFT to pampered corporations and their over-compensated CEOs.
- amba
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