Fareed Zakaria has a spot-on editorial today on how much tougher oil makes our foreign policy. It's almost laughable how many sore spots and tricky situations our hydrocarbon dependence has landed us in. In the American drama, oil is the screenwriter and we're the hapless dunce who keeps stumbling into his prewritten traps.
It kinda sucks.
But it's not hard to rationalize that oil dependence was a necessary tradeoff for our modern influence and technological achievement. That's perfectly fair. What's so strange is that now, while we're on the cusp of new technologies that could end our addiction, while we control literally thousands of advances and options that could drastically reduce our dependence, we prefer instead to wait till crisis hits, till prices jump so high that oil becomes a curse and change becomes a necessity. We're demanding that the day come when our switchover will be instant rather than gradual, and that's going to hurt.
Some hyperrationalists on both sides of the aisle like to refer to market mechanisms now. When oil ceases to make economic sense, we'll cease to use it. The market will take care of us, tuck us in at night, read us stories, and make us breakfast the next morning. But the market fails. The many costs of oil, from global warming to geopolitical instability, aren't included in the pricetag of crude. And when they do come clear, they still won't get you at the pump. They'll nail us in emergency appropriations for wars and massive outlays to deal with rapid climatological change. We'll have long seen it coming, but the market won't have noticed until it hits. Zakaria's piece today is a good explication of one of those market-hidden prices, oil's irritating ability to prop up most everyone we want knocked down. Read it.
By the way, The Oil Drum, your goto blog for all things crude and peak, has moved. You can, and should, find them here.
