Energy Security
In the last five years broad agreement has evolved that America’s increasing dependency on imported oil is a threat to our national security. The facts are not in dispute. America has approximately 4.5% of the world’s population. We use 25% of the world’s oil output. Our oil usage increased from 17 million barrels per day (mmbd) in 1990 to 20.6 mmbd in 2006 and is projected to increase to more than 22 mmbd by 2030. Domestic production of oil in the U.S. is 5.1 mmbd today and has been on a more or less steady decline since 1970. Oil imports in the late1980s accounted for one third of our oil consumption. Today imports comprise almost two thirds of our consumption, a figure predicted to continue increasing.
The consequences of this dependency were addressed in The Independent Task Force 2006 report by the Council on Foreign Relations titled “National Security Consequences of United States Oil Dependency”. This distinguished group stated, “The lack of sustained attention to energy issues is undercutting United States foreign policy and national security.” It went on to describe the ever increasing financial and political power of energy suppliers in a world addicted to oil consumption. “Major energy suppliers – from Russia to Iran to Venezuela – have been increasingly able and willing to use their energy resources to pursue their strategic and political objectives. Major energy consumers – notably the U.S…. – are finding that their dependence on imported energy increases their strategic vulnerability and constrains their ability to pursue a broad range of foreign policy and national security objectives.”
The clear national policy mandate prescribed by the Task Force is to enhance our national security. “The challenge over the next several decades is … to begin the transition to an economy that relies less on petroleum. The longer the delay, the greater will be the subsequent trauma.”
The national security crisis and challenge of 2006 is even more acute and imperative in view of the wildly fluctuating oil market of 2008. As three-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Thomas Friedman recently observed in his New York Times column, “The big foreign policy failure with much broader balance of power implications (than Iraq) is the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.” He describes the consequences of this inaction, “The failure to mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world, the U.S. economy, to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states from Russia, to Venezuela, to Iran that are reshaping global politics in their own image. If this huge transfer of wealth to petro-authoritarian countries continues, power will follow.”