What do you expect a Republican to say about our country’s oil dependence? Since learning of the Set America Free Coalition, I’ve been less surprised to hear Republicans criticize our country’s oil habits. Still, it was refreshing to spend an hour this past Monday listening to a Republican Senator enumerate the flaws in our nation’s current energy policy.
The Brookings Institution invited Indiana Senator Richard Lugar to give the kickoff address for its Leadership Forum series (held in celebration of the institution’s 90th anniversary), and he gave a talk entitled “Energy Security: Cause for Cooperation or Competition?” to a packed auditorium. He made a good case for why we need to rethink our national energy policy; I found the solutions he specified less compelling, although one was an interesting point I’d never considered before.
I’ll get my disagreements with Lugar out of the way first. He said he has supported oil exploration in ANWR, and he’s a big proponent of “clean” coal. I wonder whether allegiance to these Republican talking points is the price he has to pay to be able to make these kinds of speeches without alienating himself from the party and its sponsors completely. He must know that any oil we’d get out of ANWR would be a drop in the proverbial bucket, and if he’s studied the issue, he’s probably realized it’d be better to spend the money on new wind farms rather than new coal-fired plants.
Much of Lugar’s assessment of the problem will be familiar to you denizens of the progressive blogosphere: Oil supplies are vulnerable to disruption, and they’re diminishing; countries that control energy supplies have leverage over those that don’t; climate change is a problem (that was #5 for him); and high energy costs are undercutting our anti-terrorism efforts.
The last point was a good argument, and something I haven’t heard often enough in the public energy debate. Lugar pointed out that if poor countries have to keep spending more on energy, we’ll see “negative consequences for stability, development, disease eradication, and terrorism.”
As for the solutions, you won’t be surprised to hear that the Senator from Indiana is a big proponent of ethanol. Lugar wants to see more cars equipped to run on E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. He supports cellulosic ethanol—ethanol made from harder-to-process plant matter such as cereal straw and sugarcane bagasse—for the longer term, but sees corn ethanol as a solution available immediately.
From the environmental perspective, corn ethanol isn’t great—it still takes a lot of energy to make it, and much of that energy will probably come from coal-fired plants. That’s fine if your goal is reducing petroleum dependence, but not so good if you’re trying to cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Lugar mentioned improved efficiency briefly at the beginning of the solutions section of his talk, and he said he’s working to close the SUV loophole and provide consumers and automakers for incentives to increase the number of hybrids on the road. He also called for a cap-and-trade mechanism that would “give credit for carbon sequestration in coal-fired plants and allow farmers and foresters to sell credits for the carbon they sequester.” (I’m not sure how carbon gets sequestered in coal-fired plants, and I hope he’s not talking about one of those wacky schemes to inject CO2 deep into the Earth.)
One proposal surprised me: Lugar supports a $35 per barrel price floor for oil. As he explains it, companies are wary of investing too much money in less-petroleum-intensive alternatives as long as there’s a possibility that oil prices will fall again and make these alternative less attractive to consumers. People may love hybrids now, but will they still want a Prius if oil goes back down to $25 per barrel? Since oil is unlikely to fall below $35 anyway, we might as well set a floor price that’ll provide companies with the assurance they need to move forward with cleaner energy options. This idea makes sense to me, but I’d never thought about it before.
At the end of his talk, Lugar brought the focus back to international issues. China and India, he noted, require growing amounts of energy, and we should draw them into the international system so they can be assured of supplies and we can all reduce potential conflicts. This week, Lugar plans to introduce a bill calling upon the federal government to expand international cooperation on energy issues.
If I were in charge, we’d be focusing on solar and wind energy rather than ethanol and “clean” coal. Since I’m not in charge, it’s nice to hear a member of the party in power sounding the alarm about petroleum dependence and advocating for a new approach to the way we think of energy security for our country and the world.
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