In the long run, we'll all be energy independent
■"Declaration of Energy Independence: We can end our reliance on foreign oil by 2035," op-ed by Robert McFarlane, Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2004, p. A15.
So America should shoot really hard to be energy independent by 2035!
Fine and dandy, say I, but you know what? That date is so far into the future that it's essentially meaningless to describe that goal as a practical strategy to run the world between now and then. Frankly, there's no way we can temporize the current security situation in the Middle East for another three decades, so either we solve it dramatically by then (making energy independence irrelevant) or we screw it up so badly well before then that if that is truly our goal, we'd need to crash-course well before 2035.
All this talk of getting off oil to solve our security issues is a huge and rather useless diversion from the tasks at hand, not to mention the debates at hand. The violence in the Middle East is all about globalization, not energy dependency per se. It's a reaction to the encroachment of modernity into traditional societies in the region, not a function of the regional governments' reliance on oil exports for revenue. The latter truly delays the movement by those regimes toward reform, but that delay is being overwhelmed by globalization's advance, which is clearly not a process that's going to wait around until 2035 for America to engineer a military pull-out on the basis of being energy independent.
The U.S. will have moved onto the hydrogen economy well before 2035, and it won't be because of some godawful government plan to make it so. It will happen because the technology makes sense and the markets figure out how to employ that technology while making a lot of profit in the process.
People who talk incessantly about energy independence as the answer to the challenges/sacrifices/demands of a global war on terrorism are living in denial. It is a cop out argument, not a strategy whatsoever.