Energy Independence for National Security, Not Environmentalism

Has Bush chosen the wrong issue to burnish his legacy? What if he had reversed these two priorities, gone bold on energy independence—an issue on which compromise with Democrats is possible—instead of Social Security? [Or what about a flat tax?]

[Gary] Bauer [the religious conservative] has joined with other prominent conservatives to promote energy independence as a hard, dry national-security issue rather than as soft, wet environmentalism. These conservatives support a major federal push to promote alternative fuels—ethanol, biodiesel, liquefied natural gas—and hybrid-auto technologies. “This is not pie in the sky,” says Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, as tough-minded a security hawk as can be found in Washington. “The technology is all there. But you need tax incentives to encourage the automobile companies to produce the hybrid cars and federal support to bring the alternative fuels to the pump. You need a major national campaign to accomplish this, but it may not be as hard as people think. For example, I’m told that since most people drive only 20 miles a day, you can get as much as 500 m.p.g. with a simple modification that would allow hybrid cars to plug into the electric grid at night. I’m told the electric industry is so excited about this that they might be willing to pay people $1,000 to buy hybrid plug-in cars.”

There is some enthusiasm within the White House for an alternative-energy push, although it doesn’t quite match Gaffney’s best-case euphoria. Karl Rove has educated himself on issues as arcane as the vagaries of ethanol transport, and there is a drizzle of funds for research into alternative fuels in Bush’s big fat energy bill. But the President and Dick Cheney, who has been in charge of energy policy, remain oilmen at heart, skeptical about a major Manhattan Project-style national campaign to redirect the energy market, mindful of the time and expense necessary to build a new infrastructure and the pipelines, refineries and fueling points necessary to exploit alcohol-based fuels.

Bush and Cheney may be nudged forward, though, by pressure from an unlikely political quarter—the Congress. A group of House Republicans and Democrats, national-security hawks and environmentalists, has been meeting quietly for the past month, trying to gin up bipartisan alternative-energy legislation. A leader of the group, Republican Jim Saxton of New Jersey, has met with Speaker Dennis Hastert, who expressed cautious enthusiasm about the idea. “Look, the Federal Government has subsidized every major transportation advance in our nation’s history,” Saxton told me, “and this is one with national-security implications, given our dependence on oil from the Middle East.” Political implications too: an ambitious energy-independence campaign would divert attention from the current congressional tawdriness, the Tom DeLay scandal, the Terri Schiavo intervention, the Social Security stalemate. It is boldness of a sort that George W. Bush usually loves—a patriotic way to simultaneously address high gasoline prices, the war on terrorism and the embarrassment of holding hands in public with the wrong people.

Bush invited the Crown Prince to Crawford—the highest token of honor and friendship that this president bestows on foreign leaders—for one basic reason: to see if the royal family can do something to lower oil prices. It is doubtful, under the circumstances, that the president made a fuss over Saudi Arabia’s execrable human-rights record or its snail’s-pace crawl (if that) toward democracy . . .

The point is not that realpolitik always trumps values. But there usually is a tension between the two. Sometimes a nation can afford to choose the latter; sometimes it can’t; sometimes a balance can be managed; sometimes the two coincide. But it’s a delusion—a defiance of everything Condi Rice learned in graduate school—to pretend they’re one and the same.