Energy policy makes strange bedfellows

Picture this:

A conservative Republican who backed the invasion of Iraq and is an avowed capitalist sitting shoulder to shoulder with a Socialist whose party says America is the biggest threat to world peace …

… and be delighted to be together …
Sen. Richard Lugar (the conservative capitalist, of course) and Erik Solheim (the Socialist Left Party member who is the minister of International Development in the Norwegian government) are, on most issues, an Oscar Madison-Felix Unger pairing.

Yet together they hope to reduce the conflict over scarce energy resources, persuade countries to use their energy income wisely and with more transparency and urge broader use of alternative fuels so oil-rich nations don’t hold such a big club over countries without natural resources.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as another example of politicians’ outsized estimation of their own importance.

But between them, Lugar and Solheim have already accomplished things that seemed impossible. It’s not an exaggeration to say that both have made the world a safer place.

Lugar was the co-founder of a program that set as its goal the destruction of left-over (and in many cases abandoned or insecurely stored) Cold War-era nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.

Who would have thought that two U.S. senators could have brainstormed that idea into reality? But in the past 16 years, more than 7,000 nuclear warheads have been deactivated, peaceful jobs for 58,000 weapons scientists have been found, and the program has been expanded to include chemical and biological weapons.

For Solheim’s part, he is credited with negotiating a truce in Sri Lanka’s civil war. It’s mind-boggling that a government official from Norway could help resolve another country’s conflict that lasted two bloody decades.

So when Lugar and Solheim say they’re going to put some effort into trying to ratchet down the hostilities caused by the growing need for energy in developing countries that don’t have it, well – it’s just possible that they might succeed.

Journal Gazette