Let’s get serious about oil

Here’s a nasty thought: Every day you and I subsidize the propagators of terrorism. To import oil for our cars, homes and workplaces, America now spends and borrows a staggering $1 billion every single day.

In the past four years alone, oil producers’ revenues have grown from $300 billion a year to $800 billion. When oil goes up by a dollar a barrel, it costs us an additional $7.4 billion! An increasing share of that money goes to countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, and through that nation to extremist religious groups who support Islamist militancy throughout the Middle East and beyond, disseminating a message of hatred and violence against Western influence and ideas. Small wonder, then, that the overwhelming judgment from a hundred foreign policy experts polled in Foreign Policy magazine is that the highest priority in fighting terrorism must be to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Everyone knows that over the past three years the price we pay at the pump has doubled. The populist rant that this is the fault of “rapacious” oil companies is a glib and false response, and it’s especially unattractive when it comes from Democrats, who have systematically blocked attempts to increase domestic oil production. Oil prices, in fact, are determined by a complex, and increasingly competitive, global market.

The roots of our predicament don’t lie in the boardrooms of Big Oil but at our own back door. In the two decades following 1980, when gas was still cheap, Americans switched from cars to minivans and SUVs, and they moved from the cities to the suburbs and then to the exurbs. Now three out of every four Americans commute to work, many spending hours on the road each day.

NY Daily News