The article has a few suggestions for the next President's first 100 days. What follows deals with oil and the Mideast:
blogs.law.harvard.edu
During the first term of the next president, some 68 million new cars will roll onto America’s roads. In China, the world’s fastest growing auto market, sales of new cars will surpass those in the United States as early as 2015, and in India millions of $3,000 Tata Nano cars will soon begin to flood the bustling streets of Calcutta and Mumbai. Most of these cars will have a street life of roughly 15 years and (barring action by those countries’ leadership) almost all of them will be able to run on nothing but petroleum, locking our future to OPEC and its whims for decades to come. In the words of the International Energy Agency: “We are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.”
Avoiding such an outcome should be a top priority for the next administration. Unfortunately, despite the broad agreement by both presidential candidates on the urgent need to reduce petroleum dependence, they both focus on solutions that are politically contentious (like domestic drilling and increasing mandatory fuel efficiency standards) and by and large tactical rather than strategic. The reality is that neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to materially address America’s strategic vulnerability. Such solutions do not address the roots of our energy vulnerability: oil’s monopoly in the global transportation sector—almost all of the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes can run on nothing but petroleum—and the stranglehold of OPEC over the consuming nations’ economies.
This cartel, which owns 78 percent of global reserves, produces today about as much oil as it did thirty years, despite the fact that the global economy and non-OPEC production have doubled over the same period. Policies that perpetuate the petroleum standard, doing nothing to address the lack of transportation fuel choice, would therefore guarantee a worsening future dependence on the oil cartel as the relative share of non-OPEC oil reserves and production further shrinks.
The new president should therefore declare a strategic goal to break the petroleum standard and replace it with an Open Fuel Standard. This would require that every automobile sold in the United States (and, by extension, throughout the world, since no automaker would give up on the U.S. market) must be able to run on non-petroleum fuels in addition to gasoline. Flexible fuel cars (which cost automakers $100 extra to make and can run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline), electric cars and plug-in hybrids cars (which enable us to use made-in-America electricity) are only some of the solutions at hand. Only through competition at the pump (and the socket) we can drive down the price of oil, reduce its strategic value and curb the transfer of wealth from oil importing countries to OPEC. To bring those solutions to the marketplace in mass would require some presidential signatures, and like everything in life there is some cost involved. But christening more aircraft carriers than would otherwise be needed isn’t cheap either. |
