It’s about time. For too long, we’ve walled off too much of our own energy endowment, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the outer continental shelf.
It’s time to drop those barriers and start doing more to help ourselves, and rely less on the tender mercies of dubious suppliers heading odious regimes.
Sen. John McCain took a step in that direction last week when he dropped his opposition to offshore drilling.
It’s true that if all these barriers to drilling were to vanish tomorrow, the new oil won’t flow for several years. But that’s a poor argument for doing nothing.
In 1995, Republicans were determined to allow drilling in the ANWR and inserted language to that effect in the budget, which President Clinton promptly vetoed.
Critics of drilling pointed out that it would be 10 years before any oil could be recovered, so what’s the big deal? Here we are, 13 years later, with no oil from ANWR. If the policy is drill, you have to, you know, actually start drilling at some point.
Yet increasing production of our own reserves won’t be enough. We need to do more to help ourselves. Drilling should be seen as part of a broad approach aimed at diversifying our energy sources.
We need to move more of our vehicle fleet onto non-oil sources of energy, including ethanol and electricity.
A group called Set America Free, with backing from both sides of the political spectrum, has put together a list of suggestions, which seems a good starting point for debate.
Supporters of the group include both Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
To me, the group’s key point is that we should make greater use of technologies that exist today, rather than do nothing while we wait for those that require further development.
That means, among other things, we should make more cars that can run on ethanol. A flexible-fuel vehicle capable of running on either gasoline or ethanol or different ratios of both requires only a different fuel-control chip and different fittings in the fuel line to accommodate ethanol. Additional cost: About $100.
I know. Ethanol is in bad political odor right now, but I’m not necessarily talking about corn ethanol. If we’re serious about energy diversification, we should drop the tariff on imported sugar ethanol.
Today, up to two-thirds of Brazil’s autos run on ethanol, primarily made from sugar. When the next energy crisis hits, a flexible-fuel vehicle fleet would be a nice ace in the hole.
We also need more hybrids, powered by a combination of gasoline and electricity, as well as what might be termed super-flexible cars: flexible-fuel, plug-in hybrids.
These would run on gasoline or ethanol, as well as electricity produced by the car’s generator and captured braking energy. At night, its batteries could be recharged with the plug-in feature.
Powering more of our vehicle fleet with electricity would shift more transportation uses away from exclusive dependence on oil. Electricity can be provided by a range of sources, including coal and nuclear, and, yes, wind — although it’s still not clear how much difference wind power will make.
As wind farms proliferate, opposition will grow not only for aesthetic reasons but because of the enormous amount of land they require.
Set America Free ( www.setamericafree.org) endorses a broad menu of recommendations along these lines, including incentives encouraging the production and purchase of flexible-fuel vehicles, hybrids and flex-fuel hybrids.
Leading Democrats point out that our current energy woes can’t be solved solely by drilling. OK. But too many people seem to take that to mean it’s fine to ban any additional drilling, which is absurd.
We’re going to need oil for a long time. But we also need to diversify, diversify, diversify.
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