June 27, 2008

Putting Country First

John McCain is out with a new ad on energy policy called Purpose, in which he stresses his new multi-faceted energy security plan that focuses on conservation, new energy technologies and also on reducing our dependence on imported oil by increased domestic drilling.

Barack Obama opposes that last part because, he says, it will take 10 years for that oil to reach the market. But the farmer doesn't skip planting because the harvest isn't going to be immediate. The out-of-shape guy doesn't avoid starting his new fitness regimen because it won't make the fat disappear overnight. The cancer patient doesn't fail to start chemo because it's going to take months to see results.

If something is going to take 10 years to show results, isn't that a powerful argument that we get started now? When JFK said in 1961 that America would go to the moon by the end of the decade, the reaction wasn't, "It'll take 10 years to see results, let's not start." It was, "Let's get started."

If we'd started 10 years ago, we'd have the oil now. But if Obama gets his way, 10 years from now we'll be listening to Democrats again saying we can't start drilling offshore because it will take 10 years to get the oil.

Certainly, we have to develop alternative technologies. For economic reasons, we can't forever be dependent on oil given the inexorable rise in global demand. For geopolitical reasons we can't forever be dependent on oil imported from unstable regions and hostile regimes. For environmental reasons we can't forever continue to burn fossil fuels - even if you don't buy into the theory of anthropogenic global warming, burning petroleum is not environmentally harmless.

But there is no alternative energy technology or combination of alternative energy technologies that can replace oil today, and there is unlikely to be for many years to come. Solar technology is improving rapidly, but it is nowhere close to being capable of replacing oil. Ditto for wind power. We can't grow enough corn to make enough ethanol to replace oil (and ethanol-fueled rising demand for corn is driving up food prices.)

Biofuels - from switchgrass, cornstalks, chicken dung or algae - are promising technologies but undeveloped and unproven. And we can't all run our cars on used vegetable oil from the local hamburger hut - there isn't enough of it.

For the forseeable future, our economy will run on oil. With global demand for oil rising, it only makes sense to drill for more of it here at home. After all, if we're going to keep buying a lot of oil for the next few decades - and, without a doubt, we are - then it would be smarter, economically, to buy it from domestic sources, keeping the money and the oil industry jobs here in America rather than sending them to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.

It's called putting America first. We shouldn't wait another 10 years to start doing it.