Energy – post 9/11: We’re blowing it

By Jack Furnari

President Bush consistently gets hammered for squandering “all the good will” the United States had after the attacks of 9/11. I’ll put aside the larger argument that the “good will” engendered by being a victim probably would not have served our country all that well, or that the President did not go to war alone but with the bipartisan support of Congress, because it’s been done ad infinitum by hundreds of columnists on both sides of the issue.

What could have been done, and what I expected to get done that no one ever did, was for the United States to grow up and implement a coherent energy policy.

The oil-rich Islamic countries are the financiers of Islamic fascists who terrorize and murder innocent people all over the world -- and that’s been proven so many times it’s not even a debatable point.

Every time I fill up my car, it infuriates me that some small part of my money will eventually find its way to a madrasah in Pakistan, a terror cell in England, or get funneled to groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Be they Liberal or Conservative, Democrat or Republican, serious discussions about energy have been almost non-existent.

In the aftermath of 9/11, this is what I hoped and expected to happen:

• We should have drilled for oil wherever we could. That should have included ANWR, off the coast of Florida, the Gulf or anywhere else there are untapped oil reserves. And yes, heresy of heresies - even in the precious swamp we all know and love - the Everglades.

• Build a new generation of oil refineries. Remember, the gas shortages and price spikes after Katrina were caused because one refinery in the gulf was temporarily shut down. The United States has not built an oil refinery since Paul McCartney was still churning out #1 pop hits with Wings in 1976 - that’s thirty-one years ago.

• Clear out the regulatory hurdles and build a new generation of nuclear power plants. One would think the new pagans who worship at the altar of the earth would want to replace all the “earth warming” coal-powered plants with nice, safe, clean burning nuclear plants, but alas, their regression to paganism has brought with it a disdain for real science and for the society in which they live.

• Stop classifying S.U.V.’s as trucks, thereby exempting them from fuel standards. Sure, there are people with a legitimate need for S.U.V’s, but the people with a legitimate need for these vehicles tend to live in sparsely populated mountainous areas with harsh weather conditions. One thing these legitimate users have in common is hardly any of them live in Florida or go to Town Center Mall and Mizner Park. My position on S.U.V.’s will cause me to catch a lot of heat from my fellow free-market Conservatives… but so be it. When waging war, it’s sometimes necessary to impose restrictions on strategic materials and commodities. Oil is a strategic commodity. Our survival as a nation trumps the economic dislocations that would have been caused by reclassifying S.U.V.’s as what they are - big station wagons, which means cars, which means imposition of fuel economy standards.

And sure, let’s keep researching alternative energy sources like solar, wind, ethanol, Fritos Corn Chips, and any other pre-industrial means of energy generation we can think of. Let’s just not count on them bearing fruit anytime soon. Just because the first time I was lectured about the just-around-the-corner viability of “alternative fuels” was by a hippie in a tie dyed t-shirt smoking a “doobie” in 1971 on Earth Day, does not mean we should quit trying.

In the months after 9/11, all of this could have been passed but hardly any of it was.

We need to abandon our ideological stands on energy and do what’s right for the country. We are at war, and I don’t just mean Iraq. I mean the long term war between fundamentalist Islam and Western Civilization.

If we were to reduce our importation of Middle East oil by ten or twenty percent, we would wreck the economies of the countries that finance terror. When faced with a permanent reduction in income, no self-respecting Saudi prince is going to give up his private jets so he can keep giving money to a bunch of manic Islamic fascist murderers.

It’s not too late. We can still do all of this. We can still hit the financiers of Islamic terror where they breathe - in their wallets.