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KUFM / KGPR T. M. Power Ending Our Addiction to Energy, Not Just
Imported Oil President Bush, in his recent state
of the union address, startled some by criticizing This negative characterization of our
national commitment to consuming ever increasing amounts of petroleum
products startled some because both the President and Vice-President
have been closely and personally associated with the oil industry for
much of their adult lives. But there is much less to Bush’s comments than some have
read into them. First of all, Bush was worried primarily about our consumption
of foreign oil because it
often comes from relatively unstable nations and regions, thus putting
our economy and security at risk. Bush
did not even hint at backing away from his emphasis on increasing oil
and natural gas production within and off-shore of the United States
by removing almost all restrictions on where and how drilling can take
place. He still wants our nation to race towards the bottom of our aggregate
petroleum well regardless of the environmental consequences. Bush’s overall emphasis was on increasing
the production of
new energy resources. His list of “new” resources contained all of the
usual energy industry wish list items: “clean and safe nuclear” energy,
“clean coal,” hydrogen, and ethanol, along with perfunctory nods towards
solar and wind resources. There was no
mention of improving the efficiency with which we use our energy resources
even though, for instance, one of the primary sources of our demand
for imported foreign oil is the appallingly low and falling gas mileage
that our cars and trucks get. Bush’s proposals focus on further subsidizing
the consumption of energy by investing federal dollars and our national
lands and waters in the hungry pursuit of ever more energy resources. This is not a slight oversight. It
is central to Bush’s view of our energy problems. To Bush and many other
corporate energy officials, there are no problems with the level
of our energy consumption. They do not believe, for instance, that carbon
emissions are having any impact on global climate. They also do not
believe that the other effluents from our energy production and consumption
present serious health and environmental risks. So efforts to reduce
carbon and mercury emissions, acid rain, water pollution, oil spills,
toxic smogs, and the like, are weakened or stalled as energy production
is emphasized and all of these problems exacerbated. The opportunities for major improvements
in the efficiency with which we use energy in our vehicles, in lighting,
heating, and cooling our homes and businesses, and in our industrial
processes are huge. Technology is poised to revolutionize all of these
major energy uses, if we get the prices and incentives right.
But even the use of market-like mechanisms
to make certain that Americans have to face up to the full costs associated
with energy production and consumption are rejected by the Bush team.
Placing taxes on energy consumption to reflect the damage done and the
resources consumed by our extravagant use of energy of all sorts would
take us in the opposite direction that Bush’s subsidies to the energy
industries would carry us. Cost-based energy taxes could quickly change
our energy use patterns. Energy conservation would be rewarded. Innovative
energy saving technologies would blossom and quickly be adopted. We
would begin to stretch out significantly the productivity and convenience
we can wring out of the energy resources we already consume, reducing
the burden our energy use places on our health, our communities, and
the planet. Such energy taxes need not represent
a net tax increase. Nor would such energy taxes need to fall heavily
on middle and low income households. The revenue from the energy taxes
could be used to reduce, for instance, the high payroll taxes that are
taken out of all of our paychecks. They could also be used to reduce
sales and property taxes on necessities like food and shelter. An energy
tax could be part of an overall effort to begin to tax social “bads”
such as pollution, climate change, and other damaging behavior while
reducing the taxes on social “goods” like hard work, homes, raising
children and medical care. Before we launch into every more costly
public subsidies for new energy and chemical processes operated by the
same companies that painted us into the corner in which we currently
find ourselves, we should focus on the decentralized task of improving
energy efficiency. That is not
to say that we should not be carefully exploring the development of
a variety of more benign energy resources including renewables such
as wind, solar, and biomass. Nor does it mean that we should not be
seeking to make our coal and nuclear facilities as clean and safe as
possible. But, if we follow Bush in simply seeking to replace imported
oil with domestic oil and natural gas and a massively increased and
subsidized coal and nuclear industry, we will simply have solved one
threat to our health and security by creating equally threatening worldwide
problems including irreversible climate change, proliferating nuclear
materials, and a broad range of toxic effluents. That is not a comforting
prospect. |