Americans Are Fed Up With Energy Inaction–Give Us a New Manhattan Project

This terrific video comes to me courtesy of my friend Dave Reaboi at the Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C. It really hits home. The time is long overdue for both Democrats and Republicans to get serious about new energy policy. Time for a new Manhattan Project employing American ingenuity and drive in leading the world to reduce dependency on oil.

In the past, intelligent friends have managed to convince me that the global energy/terrorism picture is sufficiently complex that it is not axiomatic that reliance on foreign oil imperils our security (My friend Thinking Man: “What makes you think these terror-sponsoring regimes would be less radical if they were less wealthy? Look at Syria.” And according to another friend, reducing America’s purchase of oil from the Arab world is not a panacea because “oil is fungible,” or, as I interpreted it, even if we stopped buying their oil, they’d still sell it elsewhere).

While the picture may be more complex than oil companies being the bogeymen who imperil us, and I don’t claim to understand all the intersections of geopolitics and economics at work here, dependence on enemies can’t be in our long term best interests. It’s one thing to keep your friends close and your enemies closer if you are in the power seat, it would be quite another if we were ever truly at the mercy of the House of Saud. Time and again, the common folk in America have demonstrated their instincts are solid–and the American people want Democrats and Republicans to get serious about new energy policy.

This entry was written by and posted on July 10, 2008 at 7:48 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>