An Energy Plan to Avoid $5 per Gallon Gas

Do you find yourself wondering lately WHAT HAPPENED to America? A few years ago we had won the Cold War, were the envy of the world, and the economic superpower. Now we have a collapsing dollar, a record national debt which is increasingly owned by foreigners, skyrocketing food prices, and the price of gas has doubled in just two years. We’re fighting a costly and seemingly open-ended war against radical Islam.Much of the world hates us. And every opinion poll shows Americans think things will only get worse. It feels like the wheels have just come off the trolley.

Why such a fall in such a short time?There is no one reason to blame, just like there is no one person, or one political party to blame. But oil, and our dependence on foreign oil, is certainly at the top of the list.
We’ve known since the oil shocks of the mid-1970s that our dependence on foreign oil was a vulnerability, but we’ve done nothing much to solve the problem. For the last 35 years every American President and most national leaders has talked about getting off foreign oil, but the talk never translated to actions.

We need to get off Middle East oil, ASAP,ideally by substituting fossil fuel energy with clean and renewable energy, but at a minimum we need to get off Middle East oil by whatever means necessary. Almost half of the U.S. trade deficit is because we buy oil abroad. But we can’t afford it, so we borrow money to pay for it.Guess who has extra money in the bank to lend us? Those same oil exporting counties.It’s a vicious circle.We are borrowing money from foreign lenders so we can buy oil from them.The wealth America has built up over decades is being shipped off to the Middle East in a matter of months.

As simple as that sounds, solving it will be complicated and difficult. There is no single silver bullet.If it were easy we would have done it years ago.There are short, medium and long-term solutions, but we need to begin all of them today. Doing so will make a few interest groups mad, deny a lot of pork barrel programs, and it is inevitable we will make some mistakes and head down a few dead ends. But the fear of making mistakes, or disappointing a few groups, has for too long been the excuse for doing nothing at all.

For the short term, Washington needs legislation offering consumers and producers incentives and tax rebates for investing in renewable energies, and encourages conservation. We currently have a patchwork of temporary tax credits that make renewable power commercially feasible.Some of them, like the corn ethanol subsidies, reflected special interests but didn’t make sense from a national energy perspective. We need to replace those, immediately, with permanent credits that let the market decide which technologies work best.

We already have the technology for making wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal energy and many Americans have invested in those in their own homes. More need to, but they won’t if it doesn’t make sense financially. And every dollar saved on home heating oil is one dollar less going to pay for Middle East oil.Even so, the effect on the price of gas will be negligible.That’s why it is essential we have legislation that encourages the use of cars that use less gas – whether through higher fuel efficiency standards, or cars that replace gasoline with electricity or cellulosic ethanol and other flex fuels. Ending the 50 cent a gallon import tax on sugar cane ethanol from Brazil will have an immediate effect on gas prices.

To increase our domestic oil production in the medium term, we need to allow domestic offshore drilling, build nuclear power plants and build new oil refineries.There is a current federal moratorium on U.S. energy exploration and production. That might have made sense several years ago, but not at current oil prices.In fact, most experts think oil prices will climb even higher in the next few years due to increased demand from China and India and higher still if there is a terrorist incident or conflict in the Middle East. We must pass legislation immediately to allow domestic offshore drilling in states that want it.

Nuclear power is a proven, inexpensive, and clean energy technology, and supplies almost 20% of America’s electricity.Yet we have not built a new nuclear power plant in over 30 years.Almost 80% of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power.China, India and Russia are all building new nuclear power plants.We need to build new nuclear power plants in areas that want them.

Finally, we need to invest in those technologies that will allow us to turn America’s natural resources into clean energy sources, such as clean coal. America has one of the largest deposits of coal in the world, but burning it for fuel emits hydrocarbons into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change. If we develop the technology to burn coal without those emissions, whether with carbon sequestration or another as yet un-invented technology, we will literally solve America’s energy problems. Much of our coal lies in our most economically depressed regions.A new clean coal bonanza will reinvigorate those communities, by developing an industry which can not only supply America’s energy needs, but which can be exported to other coal-rich, oil-poor countries such as China.

The time for caution is over. We can no longer tolerate this or that special interest group vetoing national energy policy. We can no longer let vacuous political speeches substitute for a comprehensive, significant and effective national energy plan. If you don’t like $4 per gallon gas, just wait until it’s $5 per gallon.