Needed: Energy Policy

Current Congressional brouhahas continue on the deficit management, jobs creation and tax policies the politicians just love to diddle with. And for no productive end.

Example is the current argument about building an oil and natural gas pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. A job-ready infrastructure project for sure, but who owns it? Who is benefiting from it? Who is paying for it?

An argument can be made that Americans will benefit from this project. But it will not be owned by Americans. It is a Canadian project. Moving Canadian fuels.

Those fuel stocks will be gladly consumed in our country for ever increasing prices. But it only sates a temporary need. As all of our short term thinking does, it feeds the immediate needs, not the long term.

Rather than touting the project as a ready made jobs creation project, why don’t we invest instead in real job creation and long term capabilities of our nation? Those ends will prove to be vastly more valuable and globally competitive for our nation than the short term projects.

Here’s why: alternative fuels are the future. Wind, solar, thermal, natural gas; and some oil products, but on a declining basis that befits its declining reserves.

Building a new energy industry based on diverse fuels and technology is much smarter, and in the long run, much better for our ecology, global competition and geopolitical power balances. Along the way we will invent new technologies that will make cars even more safe, fuel efficient, less polluting and better engineered for our social use of them.

Then, too, housing alternatives and new technologies will likely squeeze more value from our housing dollars: higher efficiency, smaller ecological footprint, better use of materials, and better use of land.

None of these long-term effects will be available to us if we constantly look for short term fixes to long term problems. That is a simple fact of life. We ought to accept it and live with it.

We need to focus on the future and live toward it. Investing in future capabilities and technologies allows us to move beyond current problems to a time where we can envision a time without those problems. Sure there will be new problems to wrestle with, but solving the old ones hasn’t been easy for us as we increasingly politicize those issues.

Since when is fuel efficiency a republican or democrat ‘thing’? Why isn’t it an American thing?

We will not get anywhere if all we do is argue political ideology over common problems which deserve solution. Failing that, we should consciously build the future where those problems don’t even exist. Just engineer and invent our way there!

Now there’s an investment I think our government policy should get behind.

We have the smarts, the inventiveness, the need and the resources. Why are we not doing this?

December 21, 2011