Thursday, April 19, 2007

Excerpt from "The End of Oil"

I'm slowly working through Paul Roberts' The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World (Amazon, Powell's) and I came across a passage so good I had to share it.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that the Bush administration's energy policy has been so lopsidedly slanted towards oil. Whereas many energy experts, particularly those in the left-of-center advocacy community, saw 9/11 as a prime opportunity to renew the effort to move away from oil altogether, the Bush administration drew the opposite lesson. For Bush, the lesson to be learned about energy insecurity was not that the West should use less energy as it did in the early 1980s, but that the West should be willing to make energy more secure and less unpredictable, as American had tried to do during the first Gulf War. During that war, rather than simply retreating into a defensive energy policy, the West had taken a bolder, more muscular approach and had simply removed the threat to price stability.
Insanity, pure and simple. I opposed the first Gulf War because I thought that America had no business fighting a war over oil, and argued afterwards for an increased tax on gas so that we wouldn't have get involved in a war for oil again. Was I ever proven right, and how.

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