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A Conservative Energy Policy

February 8, 2006

Haltingly, the Bush administration has acknowledged that America’s addiction to oil -- them’s the very words that President Bush spoke in his 2006 State of the Union speech -- is a serious national problem. Good words. Welcome words.

But the administration can’t resist longing backward glances at the glory days when domestic oil was cheap and abundant. The proposed 2007 budget that the president sent to Congress days later makes another tiresome pitch to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. It was another exercise in denying the unforgiving math of oil dependence.

The addict has promised to get on the wagon, but he is still bellying up to the bar. I’ll quit, he insists, really, truly I will, but let me have just one more drink, just one more toast to a vanished time when America was self-sufficient in oil production and exported petroleum to the world.

Those days are gone. As Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, R-MD, put it in a Feb. 7 statement: “The U.S. has only 2 percent of world oil reserves. We contribute 8 percent of world production. But we consume 25 percent of world oil production. We're pumping our reserves four times faster than the rest of the world.”

An energy policy that promotes more oil consumption and more domestic production that cannot keep up with rising consumption is “futile and self-defeating,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett, a conservative Republican, wants his fellow conservatives to start living up to their creed. As his Feb. 7 statement observed:

“Delayed gratification and self-sufficiency are traditional conservative values. That is why the next conservatism should champion policy changes to use less, not more oil through conservation and energy efficiency. Conservatives should recognize that unless we have a national energy conservation program with the commitment, breadth and intensity of the Apollo moon mission and the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb, our country is unlikely to achieve the goal of replacing more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025 and even less likely to break our oil addiction.”