A time for fuel
independence
As the
survivor of a Midwestern flood sagely observed while ruefully looking over
water-soaked debris that was his home, "It’s a shame no one talks
about flood control when the sun shines."
The same
could be said of America’s love affair with petroleum: So long as plenty
spews from pumps, why talk or worry about conservation and alternatives?
But talk
and worry we must.
The United
States is in a war that, by all accounts, will continue for years,
involving indescribable threats to the U.S. homeland from a cunning enemy
using unconventional attacks on random targets of opportunity.
One
crippling tactic would be to interrupt petroleum supplies needed to keep
the highly mobile American society and industry humming.
Not since
World War II has a U.S. president had such a rich opportunity to change
the nation’s gluttonous appetite for petroleum as now, when the entire
U.S. way of life is being put on a war footing and Americans are adjusting
to realities of their new lifestyle.
Just as
U.S. industry in World War II developed revolutionary synthetics and
industry later produced unimaginable products for space flight, industry
is fully capable of transforming alternative fuel and power sources from
experimental ideas to mass-produced substitutes for petroleum.
But
industry needs a push from the federal government, plus massive funds — the sort of maximum impetus provided World War II’s Manhattan Project to
produce the atomic bomb, and that led to spin-off sciences now benefiting
medicine and electrical generation.
The United
States is still far too dependent on imported petroleum. According to
American Petroleum Institute statistics for July, 56 percent of U.S. crude
oil was imported, of which 25 percent came from Persian Gulf states.
Loyal as
Persian Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia have been to U.S. oil needs,
one of the announced objectives of Muslim terrorist Osama bin Laden is to
bring down the Saudi monarchy, which stripped him of his citizenship.
The United
States should no more blindly bank on Persian Gulf oil states remaining
stable and willing to supply U.S. oil needs than it blindly believed
before Sept. 11 it was immune from unspeakable acts of terror.
And how
foolish to even argue that the national strategic oil reserves and new
fields in Alaska would be sufficient to oil the wheels of U.S. life.
The time
for alternative fuels — hydrogen, solar, ethanol and other synthetics yet
to be discoveredľ has arrived.
President
Bush has been ardent about spending upwards of $60 billion for outer space
missile defense, a plan now useless in dealing with the enemy confronting
our strategists.
Diverting
all or most of that funding to alternative fuels development would yield
far more lasting benefits for oil-addicted America’s strategic security.