Reduce Western Oil Dependence
By Mike Wussow and Bruce Chapman
A Russian gas rig in Siberia. Russia currently produces over 9 million barrels of oil per day and has the world's largest proven reserves of natural gas, giving Moscow significant geopolitical clout
(Note: Some of the issues described in this post - particularly U.S. oil dependency and energy security - will be the focus of a major conference hosted jointly by Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center and Microsoft on September 4-5, 2008. Participants will include Anne Korin and James Woolsey, both of whom are also referenced in this post. Details are available here.)
The Russia-Georgia conflict brings uncomfortably to the surface the question of energy security. Like much of the rest of the world, America is addicted to oil, most of it now imported. We rely on petroleum to fuel just shy of 100 percent of our transportation. America imports from its neighbors, Canada and Mexico mainly, but almost as much from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria. Russia supplies 762,000 barrels each day to the U.S. according to numbers released by the U.S. government in June.
Europe imports far more from Russia, of course. That has Europeans quaking in the aftermath of the war in Georgia and makes it difficult for NATO to speak with one voice.
It is hard to see how we will be able to work through the present crisis so long as the West seems irresolute about reducing its dependence on oil, especially oil from Russia. Even those of us who are optimistic that the long term interests of Russia and the West are reconcilable must face the fact that oil and gas pose a Western vulnerability in any negotiations.
A typical traffic jam in Moscow. With more Russians driving than ever before, in the years to come Russia may not be able to export much more oil than it does now, even if large oil and gas fields are developed in Siberia and in Russia's offshore Arctic waters (Photo by: English Russia)
Georgia has three major pipelines. Its two oil pipelines are capable of transporting millions of barrels of oil a day. BP felt threatened enough by the country’s current hostilities that it suspended some operations earlier this week. And although unsubstantiated still, as was noted on Russia Blog, an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal said Russian bombs hit one of the pipelines.
During the 110th Congress alone, more than 350 measures have been introduced related to energy efficiency and renewable energy. President Bush has cleared the path for the U.S. to tap its own off shore resources to fill in the gaps while other options are perfected and made more available. But energy action has been stalled by the Congress and half-measures are all that are being considered now, anyhow.
Off shore drilling is needed as a national policy, not just a state option, and both parties need to get realistic about drilling in ANWR. New drilling will take time, but deciding to do so would send an immediate signal of American seriousness about our security. Environmentalists at home should recognize that we are going to use oil for years to come, no matter what, so the real question is whose oil we use.
But everyone also should be able to agree that the government and private sectors should be increasing energy conservation to lower to overall use of oil. Perhaps the war clouds in Eastern Europe can spur us to take the dramatic efficiency efforts that have been obviously needed for years.
Among the best long-range collective options is the electrification of transportation through the use of innovative vehicle technology, including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. It’s an idea that is at last taking hold in addicted America, but it is still an unimplemented idea. (Discovery Institute has pushed the issue for years.)
According to the Set America Free Initiative, an alliance of security, environmental, labor and other groups promoting ways to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil, “If by 2025, all cars on the road are hybrids and half are plug-in hybrids, U.S. oil imports would drop by 8 million barrels per day.” In 2006, according to the Initiative, the U.S. imported $309.4 billion in oil. At the very least, supporting the development and use of vehicles that, with the flip of a switch, dramatically reduce dependence on oil for transportation is perhaps the single best option America and Europe have for throwing off the yoke of oil dependence. Some, such as former U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Woolsey, and Anne Korin, of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, say the key is for governments (the U.S. from in this case) to take steps that eventually diminish oil’s status as a strategic commodity.
Although oil-dependent nations will be the charge for change, this issue is by no means only about America, which consumes 21 million barrels a day. Global consumption of oil, especially in fast-growing China and India is only expected to rise. Global demand is at about 86 million barrels a day and rising. And this does (or should) matter to Russia too; although it currently has all the oil it needs for itself and for export, many reports say that its production has already peaked.
Energy may not seem to be at the heart of the clash in Eastern Europe, but lowering the significance of the oil pipelines there--and elsewhere--is very much a factor in any increase in the prospects for peace. It wouldn't hurt our security situation in the Middle East either, would it?
Comments
Embarrassingly, it's our own government (Washington)--not Russia--that's prodding us to drive more and larger SUVs as opposed to fuel-efficient vehicles.
Come November, our Republican leaders have a great deal for which to answer regarding the fuel crisis that has mushroomed like a nuclear cloud since 2000.
Posted by: R.L. | August 18, 2008 10:07 AM
Regardless of who is elected in November, one thing is unmistakeably clear: There is a massive 'tidal wave' of consensus opinion building within the US population to support alternative sources of energy, electrification of transportation and to reduce dependence upon foreign o&g, particularly from autocratic nations. That's why the 110th Congress has over 350 measures pending on the subject!
Free people in the US are speaking and their voices are being heard. The Government is finally acting and so to is private business to meet free market demand. Perhaps not fast enough for some, but the die is now cast.
The economic fate of the Russian Autocratic State is heavily tied to demand and income for their state controlled commodities, particularly o&g. The run up in demand and prices over recent years have led to significant increases in cash reserves and corresponding level of chest thumping Kremlin blustering.
Real cuts in demand and income for Russian o&g is going to nip Kremlin blustering right in the bud.
Posted by: Cris Sabo | August 21, 2008 7:26 AM
Why is the "liberal media" not doing it's job when it comes to interviewing McCain's top foreign policy advisor? If they're so in the tank for Obama, why are they not doing so or asking McCain why Scheunemann won't answer questions?
Who is Randy Scheunemann?
He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.
But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.
He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 -- pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.
What were Mikheil's marching orders to Tbilisi's man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.
Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann's client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.
U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?
Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.
That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality -- namely, that Russia's control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.
If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.
Not only did Scheunemann's two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.
Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.
The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the "near abroad" when the Soviet Union broke apart.
Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.
This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.
Scheunemann's resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.
Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.
The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.
Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?
Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... a free people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.
Posted by: Pitchfork Pat | August 22, 2008 12:21 PM
How come no one mentions the role of these NGO's operating in Russia and its political affiliations like Carneige, Open Society, etc.
Even Human Rights Watch is financied by George Soros.
Posted by: james | August 23, 2008 9:07 AM