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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (95418)	4/21/2003 9:00:35 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

One of these days, I'm going to spend a few hours, making a long post adding up the economic cost of our garrison-the-ME-oil-fields energy policy. 100% reliance on domestic energy sources is not currently possible, if current infrastructure, technology, and regulatory environment are a given. But all those can be changed; they are variables, not fixed constants. The regulatory environment could be changed quickly, the infrastructure at much cost, over years, and the basic technology, with much more cost, probably over decades. No quick fixes, this is a long-term solution to a long-term problem. But we don't need total independence, to change the power balance. That's because oil prices are highly elastic: small decreases in demand, translate into big decreases in prices, and big decreases in the political leverage of oil exporters. So, even a modest decrease in the need for oil imports by the U.S., changes the equation appreciably. For instance, I think any attempt to get Saudi Arabia to stop their financing and propoganda for terrorism, will fail, as long as they hold the only big reserve capacity for oil production in the world. Here's an article I just posted on my SI bulletin board (so I wouldn't lose it), which has a number of good specifics: Message 18866608