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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4734)	1/31/2003 1:33:46 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

Oiling the wheels of war By Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray Citizen Works 01.29.03 workingforchange.com Bush, led by oil and arms industries, plunges recklessly ahead into Iraq The Bush administration insists that its drive to war against Iraq is motivated by an effort to eliminate weapons of mass destruction and establish democracy. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is both dictatorial and dangerous, but Iraq has been effectively contained for eleven years and poses few immediate threats to the U.S. or its neighbors in the Middle East. As Nelson Mandela recently told Newsweek, the drive toward war in Iraq "is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush's desire to please the arms and oil industries of the United States." The connections between the Bush administration and the oil industry are embarrassingly blatant. A total of 41 members of the administration have ties to the industry, including the President and the Vice President, who are both former oil executives. President Bush received more than $1.8 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industries in the 2000 election. That's more than the industry gave any federal candidate over the course of the entire decade. As payback, the big oil companies would like nothing more than to see Bush continue to fuel our destructive addiction to oil. Today, the United States depends on oil for 39 percent of its energy consumption needs, up from 18 percent in 1973. That amounts to 19.5 million barrels a day, or 26% of daily global oil consumption. But the oil that lies underground in the U.S. is only 2% of the world's proven reserves. We already have to import over half of the oil we use, almost 10 million barrels a day. And it will only get worse. As long as we are dependent upon oil, we are in the precarious position of being dependent upon foreign sources that we do not control. There are two possible ways to fix this problem. A sane approach would be to gradually reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on oil by accelerating the development and introduction of fuel-efficient technologies. The Bush administration approach is to use our military might to control foreign sources of oil, whatever the cost. Vice President Cheney's national energy strategy, drawn up in secret with the aid of Enron and the American Petroleum Institute (the oil industry's trade association, which Cheney once led), forecasts that by 2020, we will need to import two-thirds of our oil, or 17 million barrels a day. Casting this increased oil dependency as an inevitability, Cheney's energy strategy then recommends, "that the President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy." Where will we get all this oil? From the Persian Gulf, which contains 67% of all proven world oil reserves. Iraq, whose oil-rich lands have more than 112.5 billion barrels of untapped crude or about 11% of the world's proven reserves, has the second largest amount of oil in the world. But while French, Russian, and Chinese oil companies have obtained concessions to drill in Iraq, U.S. companies have been banished from Iraq for more than a decade. Given this situation we shouldn't be surprised that the Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday that White House officials have been quietly conferring with executives of Halliburton (the Vice President's old company, which also has military contracts in the Gulf through its Brown and Root subsidiary), Exxon Mobil, ChevronTexaco and other members of the oiligarchy "to figure out how best to jump-start Iraq's oil industry following a war." (See "U.S. Oil Wants to Work in Iraq," by Thaddeus Herrick, Wall Street Journal, 1/16/03) There is clearly a better way. Instead of relying on costly military ventures to ensure a steady source of oil, we should immediately deploy readily-available technologies that would make us a self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable nation. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) estimates that if we raise fuel efficiency standards for our car and light truck fleet to 40-miles-per gallon by 2012, we can save nearly 2 million barrels a day; increasing the fuel efficiency to 55-miles-per gallon by 2020 could save 5 million barrels a day, almost twice our current imports from the Persian Gulf. According to UCS and the National Academy of Sciences, this could be done by mass-producing hybrid-electric cars, which get double the mileage of today's cars, and increasing the fuel efficiency of conventional gasoline-engine technology. We could also reduce our dependence on oil by using "renewable" fuels, such as ethanol produced from crop wastes, developing hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, and increasing mass transit options. We stand at a turning point. We must stop the war against Iraq and embark on the path to a sane national energy strategy before it's too late. That's why thousands of concerned citizens will be demonstrating on February 4 outside gas stations around the world. The demand is simple: Let's stop this senseless war and establish a new national energy security strategy that reduces our dependence on oil. ___________________________________________________ To learn more about the February 4 Day of Action, and to download all the materials you need to organize your own demonstration, visit www.citizenworks.org or www.targetoil.com.