Big Oil, Hot Air

Conservatives address the energy crisis without mentioning… the energy crisis.

By Theresa Mohin, Duke University

You might expect, since the president recently declared America addicted to oil, and the public increasingly recognizes the threat of global warming, that a think-tank panel called “Technology and Impending Energy Crisis” would address the question of how we can reduce our energy consumption, particularly from oil. But you would be disappointed, at least if the panel was at the conservative Heritage Foundation. The event’s misleading description, “creative solutions to our impending energy crisis,” made it sound like it would include some mention of carbon emissions-reducing technology. It did not.

At least there was no liberal-bashing, maybe because no one noticed me—a renewable-fuel-loving imposter. (I wore pearls to fit in.) But the speakers mostly focused on the half of the energy security issue that conservatives typically care about—how the impending energy crisis affects our national security. There was little talk of the finite supply of oil or of how our consumption of oil threatens our very existence by accelerating global warming. I’ve been told by many conservatives that these are the concerns of tree-huggers and bleeding hearts, which perhaps explains why speakers at Heritage never mentioned the environment. What those speakers missed, and what conservatives generally don’t consider, is that we can tackle national security and environmental protection with the same policy solutions.

The most compelling speaker of the day was Ann Korin, editor of Energy Security magazine and co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Korin’s thought process was this: we don’t have an energy problem, we have an oil problem. She said we are vulnerable to any change in a volatile industry controlled by countries that “do not have and will not have our best interest at heart,” nations with corrupt governments unable to protect their oil infrastructures from terror attacks. She passionately argued for a more mixed set of energy resources in the transportation sector as a solution to our oil dependence. She also decried our $0.54 per gallon tax on imported ethanol and demanded that the United States let all renewables, not just corn ethanol, compete on the fuels market.

These are good ideas, but Korin should have gone further with her argument. She failed to mention (perhaps because of her audience) one of the biggest obstacles to the growth of renewable fuels: the Big Oil lobby. As long as Exxon is making big bucks off sky-high oil prices, you can be sure that alternative fuel options will remain few and far between. (Check out the harrowing attempt of a few recent college grads to make it across the country using only E85 fuel this month.) A more creative solution would reduce our oil demand by going after that infamous byproduct that comes from burning oil: carbon dioxide. Currently, our country (the world’s largest CO2 emitter) subsidizes niche markets like corn ethanol as part of our quest to reduce oil consumption. If instead the government taxed carbon dioxide emissions, big oil companies would have a greater incentive to invest in non-emissions-producing fuels, rather than in new ways to exploit oil reserves. In the case of ridding ourselves of dirty oil habits, regulation drives innovation.

The second speaker, Craig Hansen from BWX Technologies, came up with this fantastically creative solution: divert tons of government subsidies to nuclear power. I really can’t fault Hansen for promoting this faulty idea, as he does work for the nuclear industry. He argued that in order to increase the percentage of nuclear-generated power, we will need up to 12 new reactors (costing hundreds of millions of dollars) in the United States by 2010. Hansen suggested that, unless we begin heavily subsidizing nuclear development, we “will be trading one form of dependence for another,” referring to the possibility of importing nuclear energy from nuclear-powered countries like France and Japan.

This is hardly a way to avoid the “impending energy crisis.” First of all, as Korin had mentioned, oil generates a mere 3 percent of the electricity consumed in the United States. Increasing the amount of electricity generated from nuclear reactors, which currently accounts for 20 percent of the electrical supply, would simply displace other sources of electricity. The vast majority of imported oil ends up in our gas tanks, which cannot be filled with enriched uranium. Hansen also failed to mention that we would be trading one form of environmental disaster for another. Instead of carbon emissions, we’d face a massive nuclear waste problem. Nuclear waste has already been piling up at nuclear power plants for the past 50 years, and the government owes millions to utilities for its cleanup. The controversy over the Yucca Mountain depository is far from over—the earliest projected opening date is a good 11 years away, and in the meantime the cost of the building and maintaining the site continues to rise. Increased nuclear investment is simply not a good solution to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil; in fact it’s almost completely unrelated. It would create more problems than it would solve.

In the end, I walked away from Heritage—free Subway sandwich in hand—dissatisfied with their ideas about energy security. One only needs to look around at the rest of the world to see some solutions to the energy problem. Raise automobile fuel efficiency standards. Invest in renewables like solar and wind energy. Implement a cap-and-trade carbon emissions system. The answers are out there; we need the progressive, creative vision that Heritage lacks to solve this problem.

 
Theresa Mohin is a senior at Duke University and a summer 2006 environmental and energy intern at the Center for American Progress.

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