America's Oil Craving

  We all know that this country just loves its gas-guzzling SUV's and our other gas-hog toys and that we really do not want to have to give them up just because of a hike in the price of our gasoline.

  Here's a look at our situation from over-seas and what got the United States into this mess in the first place.

  TimesOnline  ( Edited )

The President and most of his dwindling band of Republican brothers (though not, it should be said, the party's presidential candidate John McCain) pursue a similarly silly tack.

They'd have us believe that if only the United States would open up the Arctic to more oil exploration, prices would drop like a stone. In an election, this is all very well. But time is getting on and it is becoming ever more urgent that whoever wins in November drops the populist rhetoric and gets to grips with a couple of basic realities.

The first is that higher energy costs are here to stay. You don't have to buy Goldman Sachs's headline-grabbing forecast this month that crude will reach $200 a barrel.

Oil is up by almost 30 per cent this year alone. That's not the fault of greedy energy companies, or that other current favourite, unscrupulous speculators. It is a simple fact of economic life in a world economy that is, in effect, experiencing a new industrial revolution among half its population.

It is a staple of all political debate in the US now that the American dependence on oil has led to staggeringly bad policy for decades towards the big oil producers. It has forced the US into bed with some unsavoury characters and has been the constant factor behind repeated and often baleful US interventions in the Middle East.

Now, in addition to the threats posed by an even more complicated Middle East, the US has to address the challenge of a rapidly enriching Russia, a country that shows every intention of rolling back democratic progress and using its energy wealth to create trouble for America and Western Europe wherever it can.

In the very near future, real, ingenious American leadership will be needed not to make pointless gestures towards the newly powerful energy producers but to ensure we don't turn our dependence on a scarce resource into political capitulation.

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