Montana’s Governor Says Buying Foreign Oil Funds Dictators
I think the answer to this is “Well duh.”
HELENA, Montana (AP)—Montana’s Democratic governor says President Bush is wrong on Iraq and has failed to recognize the importance of energy independence.
Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who learned Arabic while building irrigation projects in the Middle East for six years, said political solutions are needed in the region.
“Mr. President, there are animosities between Sunni and Shiite people in the Middle East that have developed over centuries,” Schweitzer said Saturday in the Democrats’ weekly radio address. “Outsiders cannot resolve this conflict unless the Iraqi people want security and freedom at least as much as us.”
The governor urged the Bush administration not to embed American troops with the Iraqi army, beside what he called “untested and potentially corrupt members of the Iraqi military.”
Schweitzer also argued that American energy independence is the only way to ensure the country doesn’t have to continue fighting wars in the Middle East.
Energy independence. So that means Schweitzer is all for expanding the exploitation of oil reserves on American lands, right? Allowing oil companies freer access to domestic oil reserves and not taxing them into oblivion, right?
Wrong.
The governor touted his support for biodiesel and his efforts to increase wind power in Montana and develop new liquid fuels from coal. He also pointed to the efforts of others to develop more ethanol.
“We have enough energy resources and green technology in the United States to enable us to stop relying on foreign dictators to supply us with fuel,” Schweitzer said. “Along with a smart strategy in Iraq, our energy independence can make us stronger and safer.”
Schweitzer said the country uses 6.5 billion barrels of oil a year, while only producing 2.5 billion barrels. The rest comes from “some of the world’s worst dictators.”
Instead, the nation should cut back on 1 billion barrels through conservation, produce another 1 billion barrels of biofuels, and 2 billion barrels from turning coal into liquid fuel.
“We can achieve energy independence in 10 years, create a whole new industry with hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs, and you’ll never have to send children and grandchildren to war in the Middle East again,” Schweitzer said.
“Mr. President, let’s create hundreds of thousands of jobs in America by producing our own clean fuels—bring our men and women home—and stop spending money in Iraq.”
What a turd.
First, we don’t send “children” to fight in the Middle East we send men and women. Adults who signed themselves up voluntarily to serve in our armed forces. Calling them children is an insult.
Second, it sure is easy to talk about replacing our dependence on foreign oil with a dependence on biofuels and fuels created from coal, but is there any evidence to suggest that these things could sustain our energy needs? Ethanol certainly hasn’t shown that it can be relied upon as a primary source of energy. Supply problems forced gas prices sky-high in Minnesota (which mandates the use of ethanol in all its fuels) this summer. Capacity could certainly be expanded to produce more of the fuel, but ultimately even if we devoted every single acre of usable farm land in this country to producing ethanol we still wouldn’t have enough to meet our massive and constantly growing demand for fuel. Plus, the E85 fuel that has been much-hyped by politicians like Schweitzer (and North Dakota’s own Gov. John Hoeven) has been all but unsellable since the federal government removed the subsidy of it. E85 is, quite frankly, more expensive and less efficient than normal gasoline. Until it can compete with normal gasoline on price and performance it just isn’t going to be a marketable option for most Americans.
Unless politicians like Schweitzer use the power of government to cram it down our throats, which would have the result of raising energy prices so high that most Americans would be wishing for the gas prices of last summer.
And this coal liquification fuel process, while interesting and worth pursuing, is still very much in it’s infancy from what I’ve observed of it.
So people like Gov. Schweitzer can talk all they want about do replacing oil with this or that new-fangled sort of fuel all they want, but at the end of the day the only sure-fire short-term way to stop using so much foreign oil is to a) let our oil companies develop America’s own oil supplies and b) quit taxing the hell out of the oil industry so that they can fulfill our energy needs in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.
I’m all for ending our reliance on foreign oil, but we can’t just do it willy-nilly by cramming fuel alternatives that aren’t as efficient and not nearly as economically viable as oil down the throats of American citizens.
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