NEWS

Gore has a point on addiction to oil

07/23/2008

Al Gore might have hit on something when he put out the call last week for Americans to break their addiction to oil and other fossil fuels within 10 years. That something was that he framed his by-now-familiar warning about global warming in terms of national security and economic survival.

Rising oil prices turned out to be the nexus that tied together three big threats to our way of life, climate change, increased national debt held over seas and petroleum-based foreign policy.

Or as Gore put it: "We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change."

By linking the need to slow climate change with the pocketbook issue of higher gas prices, Gore makes a strong case for doing something quickly to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels that also happen to spew greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

His 10-year timeline for producing all of the country’s electricity from "renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources" is ambitious to say the least. Such a dramatic change in our energy infrastructure, if possible at all, will mean a national mobilization on a scale rarely seen except in times of war.

But there is little to be lost in investing in the infrastructure that will help this country wean itself from its heavy dependence on imported oil, even for those who feel climate change is no major threat. Such a change quickly achieved will give the United States a head start on the post-petroleum economy.

Gore picked an apt metaphor for such an ambitious national energy policy by comparing the challenge to President Kennedy’s 1961 call to the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong put the first human footprint on the lunar surface.

It’s time America took its eyes off the gas gauge and set its sights a little higher as it searches for a solution to the nation’s energy problems.