[Mb-civic] Gas Pump GeopoliticsBy THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Gas Pump Geopolitics
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

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.

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