Last night the President admitted: “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” The President went on to say that “the best way to break this addiction is through technology.”
According to President Bush, his proposed Advanced Energy Initiative will increase funding for energy research by 22 percent, which ultimately will lead to a 75 percent reduction in Middle East oil imports by the year 2025.
To put the President’s rhetoric in perspective, every President since Richard Nixon has spoken in lofty terms of reducing our dependence on foreign sources of oil. It was Nixon who, in 1973, announced Project Independence, an initiative to make the country energy independent in a mere seven years.
Missing from the President’s speech was the fact that, although 60 percent of our oil is imported, imports from the Persian Gulf make up less than a fifth of total oil imports. A 75 percent reduction in Middle East oil imports will still leave us vulnerable to oil “imported from unstable parts of the world”.
At the heart of the issue, however, is our addiction to all forms of energy. Reductions in oil imports will be replaced by coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. Lest we forget, the fossil fuels we burn every year are equivalent to four centuries’ worth of plants and animals. Short of an unprecedented, and seemingly unimaginable, technological breakthrough, national energy independence seems mathematically impossible.
What is striking about this entire debate is the propagandist’s stone-faced determination to avoid, at all costs, touching the other variables in the energy equation. As mentioned in a previous post, massive reductions in energy consumption are well within our technological and methodological reach.
Such reductions need not drastically affect our quality of life nor inhibit income generating opportunities. Yet the key to energy conservation remains in the revitalization of local economies and community autonomy. Just ask the Apollo Alliance, a group which is taking the lead in community-based conservation and energy independence.
It seems that our leaders fear grassroots democracy and a deflated bottom line on the corporate ledgers more than they fear the incipient disaster inherent in fossil fuels and over-consumption.