Liberal fear of energy independence

Boston Globe:

EVER SINCE AMERICANS had to briefly ration gas in 1973, “energy independence” has been one of the long-range goals of US policy. Presidents since Richard Nixon have promised that America would someday wean itself of its reliance on foreign oil and gas, which leaves us vulnerable to the outside world in a way that was seen as a gaping hole in America’s national security. It also handcuffs our foreign policy, entangling America in unstable petroleum-producing regions like the Middle East and West Africa.

Given the United States’ huge appetite for ­fuel, energy independence has always seemed more of a dream than a realistic prospect. But today, nearly four decades later, energy independence is starting to loom in sight. Sustained high oil prices have made it economically viable to exploit harder-to-reach deposits. Techniques pioneered over the last decade, with US government support, have made it possible to extract shale oil more efficiently. It helps, too, that Americans have kept reducing their petrochemical consumption, a trend driven as much by high prices as by official policy. Total oil consumption peaked at 20.7 million barrels per day in 2004. By 2010, the most recent year tracked in the CIA Factbook, consumption had fallen by nearly a tenth.

Last year, the United States imported only 40 percent of the oil it consumed, down from 60 percent in 2005. And by next year, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the United States will need to import only 30 percent of its oil. That’s been driven by an almost overnight jump in domestic oil production, which had remained static at about 5 million barrels per day for years, but is at 7 million now and will be at 8.5 million by the end of 2014. If these trends continue, the United States will be able to supply all its own energy needs by 2030 and be able to export oil by 2035. In fact, according to the government’s latest projections, the country is on track to become the world’s largest oil producer in less than a decade.

Yet as this once unimaginable prospect becomes a realistic possibility, it’s far from clear that it will solve all the problems it was supposed to. As much as boosters hope otherwise, energy independence isn’t likely to free America from its foreign policy entanglements. And at worst, say some skeptics who specialize in energy markets, it might create a whole new host of them, subjecting America to the same economic buffeting that plagues most oil exporters, and handing China even more global influence as the world’s behemoth consumer.

The prospect is prompting a profound rethinking among America’s top diplomats, and experts across a broad swath of the foreign policy world are beginning to explore the kind of global shake-up it might bring. Some are optimistic. “The shifts are likely to be significant, with profound long-term implications,” wrote Citigroup’s Edward Morse in “Energy 2020: Independence Day,” a report published this spring. “Burgeoning US energy independence brings with it an opportunity to re-define the parameters of post-Cold War foreign policy.”

As much as the shift brings opportunities, however, it is also likely to open the United States up to liabilities we have not yet had to face. The consequences may be both good and bad, enriching and destabilizing for US interests—but they will certainly have a major impact on our geopolitics, in ways that the policy world is only just beginning to understand.
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There is much more.

When you get to the bottom of this long story you find the liberals real fear is that we want be as willing to adapt the inefficient alternative energy they have been pushing because of their carbon phobias.

What is largely omitted are the benefits not just from energy independence by the increased direct jobs for Americans that have been outsourced by Democrat policies for decades.  We are already starting to see a boom in manufacturing jobs in this country because the price of US natural gas gives companies a competitive advantage.  There is a great deal of expansion in chemical manufacturing and European and Asian companies are already moving production to the US for chemical manufacturing and steel production.   These are jobs that would not exist if we were limited to to wind and solar power, and in the case of Europeans, they are jobs that are moving here because wind and solar are too costly.

The piece gives a good idea of what liberals think of energy independence, but it leaves out many of the real world benefits.