With a nod to marketing, John Hofmeister’s book is named “Why We Hate the Oil Companies,” but really should carry the title “Who Hijacked Our Energy Debate?” It’s a sobering look at how we’ve allowed caricatures and cliches to substitute for actual solutions to one of our nation’s longest running bumper car rides.

 

Energy independence through slogans like “Drill baby, drill!”, “Let the market decide” and “2020 Fossil Fuel Free” are saturated in our consciousness--and all (as Hofmeister correctly points out) false choices that obscure the real outcome we all desire--clean and cheap electrons to power our information based economy.

 

It was November 1973 when then-President Richard Nixon made the first call for energy independence. At that time, we imported about one-third of our oil from other nations. Thirty-eight years, eight presidents, 19 Congresses and thousands of candidates and issue papers later, we’re now importing two-thirds of our oil. Sure, it’s easy to pile on the oil companies and their Congressional allies, especially when record profits seem to grow exponentially higher every quarter--and the culpability is deserved--but just maybe we are failing because we’re seeking the wrong goal.

 

Clean and cheap electrons shouldn’t be confused with energy independence, nor are they the providence of a political party, yet they’ve become so highly politicized that it’s become almost impossible to find someone who doesn’t hew to the party orthodoxy as the only acceptable route to achieve this unique American definition of freedom and thereby: defeating radical jihadists, sticking it to our Chinese lenders, protecting our troops, limiting carbon emissions to 350PPM, sucking up to Grover Norquist or just winning an election. The problem is, no matter how important those litmus tests may be for your ideology, none of them are mission statements for a great nation on an economic precipice; they’re all tactical rather than strategic--and all have substituted for a coherent national energy policy for nearly four decades.

 

Hofmeister’s other salient point is less easily solved--that politics and energy policy are (pardon the bad pun) oil and water because one runs on two-to-four year cycles, while the other runs on 30-to-40-year cycles. No matter which party occupies the White House or which home-state Senator or House member chairs the all-important committees, it’s a certainty that the people and policies in Washington will change long before the first dime of profit is seen from a gas well or a wind turbine, making it a risky investment for fossil fuels and renewables alike--and the single largest barrier to creating the 21st century economy we all say we want.

 

Of course it’s destabilizing when any nation has to import the vast quantities of energy we do, but our myopia over energy independence has become the proverbial tail wagging the dog. When booking a flight on an airplane, have you ever inquired where the company gets it’s fuel, or do you just want to be protected from high fuel costs that send the price of a summer vacation skyrocketing? 

 

Europe too has her own energy independence issues: it warily imports almost all the continent’s natural gas from Vladimir Putin’s Gazprom while voluntarily curbing greenhouse gas emitting coal and lower emitting nuclear power, leaving itself very vulnerable. Yet which European airplane maker emerged triumphant from the Paris Air Show last week with $80 billion worth of new orders ($60 billion more than their American competitor), announced a one-hour London to New York shuttle in an algae biofuel powered rocket and a 600 million gallon aviation biofuel target by 2020 to hedge against skyrocketing fuel prices? 

 

Make no mistake, the rest of the world has figured out the clean and cheap energy innovation game. After four decades of energy independence futility, maybe it’s time the nation that imported the world’s best scientists to help win the war against totalitarianism, needs to heed the words of the most famous of those immigrants, Albert Einstein, who said, “The significant problems of our time cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”