Power Up on Innovation
In the days after the terrorist attacks, consumers reported cases of price gouging when they went to fill up their cars. Even as millions of Americans pulled together, a few cynics hoped to profit from a shocked and apprehensive public.
Today there’s a different kind of opportunism at work in our nation’s Capital. Under the guise of national security and economic stimulus, some want to scare Americans into drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Destroying a wildlife refuge won’t make the U.S. any safer.
Now is a time to summon our nation’s hopes and strengths. It is not a time to play on its fears to pass bad public policy, including the energy proposals scheduled for a procedural vote today in the Senate.
What’s needed in a debate too often characterized by an instinct for the symbolic is truth. The nation does face serious energy challenges. Our dependence on oil makes us susceptible to price spikes, entangles us in distant disputes and puts our military in harm’s way. And oil money surely funds terrorism.
Drilling in the ANWR, however, won’t change any of this.
Those who insist on portraying the drilling as an urgent matter of national security do a disservice to the public. Arguing that the wildlife refuge may produce as much oil as we import from Saudi Arabia--home to patrons of terrorism and a potentially unreliable exporter--is simply false. Under even the most optimistic scenarios, in which the refuge would produce 1 million barrels per day starting in 2020, we and the world would continue to buy billions of dollars of oil from Saudi Arabia.
Drilling in the ANWR is also incorrectly characterized as a matter of economic security. Proponents cite a 10-year-old report funded by the American Petroleum Institute predicting that drilling would create more than 700,000 jobs. This claim has been contradicted by independent assessments, including one from the Congressional Research Service. More likely, drilling would create a tiny fraction of the jobs predicted, and it won’t help lift the economy out of recession.
We can’t drill our way to national or economic security. But neither can we stand by and merely condemn short-sighted policy proposals.
Our only long-term answer is to promote true energy independence--and to do so requires innovation. In World War II, the U.S. printed a poster with the banner “Invent for Victory.” The nation must again be challenged to make innovation a weapon in our national defense, investing in a “Manhattan Project” that accelerates the development of breakthrough technologies--such as hydrogen fuel cells--that hold the greatest promise to revolutionize our energy system. Fuel cell technology to power cars, trucks, buses, ships and trains exists today. The challenge is making the cells affordable and deploying them throughout the economy.
The nation can create more jobs by investing in efficient and renewable energy technologies than by investing in oil. The Tellus Institute estimates that 900,000 jobs can be created from investments in efficient transportation. The Energy and Resources Group at the University of California estimates that generating 10% of our electricity from renewable energy sources would create more than 2 million jobs in designing, machining, manufacturing, distributing, building and maintaining a domestic energy system.
Yet there are no easy answers. Drilling, conservation, efficiency and renewable energy will not bring immediate national or economic security. The country does need to increase domestic oil production but, given its limited benefits, we should expand production in an environmentally sound manner--protecting the ANWR but exploring the more than 25 million undeveloped acres in the Gulf of Mexico open for drilling today. We can also reduce our dependence on oil and susceptibility to price spikes by investing in fuel-efficient cars and in rail and public transit. We must diversify our fuel base, particularly in the transportation sector, by relying more on natural gas, especially in commercial and government vehicles. We must press ahead with domestic renewable fuels, such as biomass ethanol.
Just as the war on terrorism tests American resolve, so too must we be prepared for a sustained effort in changing our energy policy.
It’s time to call on America’s strength, ingenuity, creativity and invention to open a new front in the war on terrorism--and to support it with a national effort that rivals President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon.
Rather than put false hopes in largely symbolic acts like drilling in the ANWR, a real marketplace for renewable energy must be created to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and prepare us for a different--and far less predictable--geopolitical landscape.
