For oil addicts, switch-grass gas and more

Perhaps he winced at Iran’s threat to cut oil exports. Or at a similar Venezuela threat. Or at turmoil in oil exporters Nigeria and Iraq. Or simply at China grabbing every oil patch it can get. But now President Bush has firmly linked US security to its oil addiction.

He made that critical linkage in Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, a startling turnaround for a former Texas oil man who, up to now, preferred throwing tax breaks at oil firms to find more crude.

To be sure, oodles of oil still ooze from the planet, a giant mass of it in Alberta’s gooey tar sands and Colorado’s shale. But the president may have realized two points: Oil prices are likely to remain permanently high, and America’s defense requires it to break its oil addiction, no matter where the world’s remaining oil comes from.

With three years left in his term, Mr. Bush needs to show he’s serious about his “Nixon-to-China” trip into a nonoil energy future. Because he’s framed oil addiction in security terms, he’d best put the same money and jaw-boning behind the solutions that he deploys in the war on terror.

Christian Science Monitor