How Can We Achieve Energy Independence?

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Written by Rod Hunter, a Hudson Institute senior fellow and former National Security Council senior director


While Senator Obama hedges he’d “look” at drilling, Sen. McCain rightly calls for an “all of the above” approach to energy security, now.

Our energy vulnerability is essentially a transportation problem. Some 96 percent of the energy we use in our vehicles comes from oil.  Only 4 percent comes from natural gas and biofuels.

We import 55 percent of our oil, and send billions of dollars to unstable regimes in the Middle East that fund Islamic extremists and to a thuggish government in Venezuela that stokes mischief in our hemisphere.

We must diversify our transport fuels and technologies. Biofuels hold promise. Electric cars may soon enter the mass market. But we can’t know in advance which technologies will prevail, nor when.

Even once breakthroughs occur, transition will take time. Replacing our auto fleet with electric vehicles would take years given the 15-year life-span of cars now on the road.

In the meantime, we must do all we can to expand oil supply from reliable sources, including here in the United States. The National Petroleum Council estimates that off-shore sources could start producing as soon as three years from government approvals.

After decades of dithering, we can’t afford more equivocation and delay. Environmental concerns seem overwrought, given oil industry skills and government oversight.

We must move on all fronts at once, promoting innovation and developing domestic oil sources. Winston Churchill had it right when he said that energy security is found “in variety and variety alone.”