Gas Pump Geopolitics

Gas Pump Geopolitics
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: April 28, 2006

In recent days critics have accused President
Bush and his new chief of staff of doing nothing
more than shuffling around the deck chairs on the
Titanic, as they shift, hire and fire senior
White House officials while the president's
popularity continues to plummet. Personally, I
think that is a totally unfair charge — unfair to the captain of the Titanic.

After all, he knew where he was going. His
lookouts just couldn't see the iceberg spar
lurking beneath the surface in their path until
it was too late. This administration, and its
captain, have been staring the iceberg right in
the face for years — it's called dependence on
foreign crude oil. It has been totally visible,
for miles and miles. And yet the Bush team has
just kept sailing right into it, refusing to ask
the American people to do anything hard to put
America on a different energy course.

What is this iceberg staring us in the face? It
is the fact that energy, broadly defined, has
become the most important geostrategic and
geoeconomic challenge of our time — much as the
Soviet Union was during the cold war — for four reasons:

First, we are financing both sides in the war on
terrorism: financing the U.S. military with our
tax dollars, and Islamist radicals and states with our energy purchases.

Second, continued dependence on fossil fuels is
going to bring on climate change so much faster
in an age when millions of new consumers in India
and China are driving cars and buying homes. And
that's why renewable fuels and energy-efficient
cars, buildings and appliances are going to be
the biggest growth industry of the 21st century.
The tougher the energy-efficiency standards we
impose on our own companies, the more likely it
is that they will dominate this new industry.

Third, because of the steady climb in oil prices,
the seemingly unstoppable wave of free markets
and free peoples that we thought was unleashed by
the fall of the Berlin Wall is now being stymied
by a counterwave of petro-authoritarian states —
like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria and Sudan —
which now have more petro-dollars than ever to do
the worst things for the longest time. They will
poison the post-cold-war world unless we bring down the price of crude.

Fourth, we will never plant the seeds of
democracy in Iraq and the wider Arab world if we
don't also bring down the price of oil. These
Arab oil regimes will not change unless they have
to, and as long as oil prices are soaring they
won't have to. Iraq will become just another Arab
state that taps oil wells instead of developing its people.

The beginning of leadership for the president is
to tell the American people the truth: This is
not your parents' energy crisis. The price of oil
is not soaring just because of greedy oil
companies. It is soaring because of structural
changes in the global energy market that could
have vast consequences for America and the world
if we do not respond in a comprehensive manner.

Toward that end, we need a tax on gasoline at the
pump that will keep prices around $4 a gallon
(still roughly $1 less than most Europeans pay),
or we need a tax on vehicles that will make gas
guzzlers prohibitively costly and hybrids and
smaller cars enormously attractive. The sooner
and the more we take the price of gasoline up —
and keep it there — the sooner we can bring it
down forever. If we want to make wind, solar and
biomass more competitive, gasoline has to cost more, not less.

The president can start by pushing the bipartisan
Fuel Choices for American Security Act, now
wending its way through Congress. This bill would
mandate that every car sold in America would not
just have seat belts, but would also be flex-fuel
capable so it could run on ethanol, methanol or
gasoline. It would also pave the way for the
rapid commercialization of plug-in hybrid
vehicles, which would combine electricity and
gasoline to get 100 miles out of every gallon of gasoline consumed.

Finally, the bill would offer Detroit loan
guarantees for transforming its fleets in this
direction. "We're going to have to bail out
Detroit anyway, so let's at least get some public
benefit," the energy expert Anne Korin said.

Yes, the president has wasted so much time, but
if he finally rises to this challenge, Democrats
— who should have taken the lead on this issue a
long time ago — have got to work with him. If the
Democrats shirk this energy challenge, as the
Republicans have, I'm certain there is going to
be a third party in the 2008 election. It is
going to be called the Geo-Green Party, and it is
going to win a lot of centrist voters. The next Ross Perot will be green.