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Foreign Affairs
The Future of Energy Policy
By Timothy E. Wirth, C. Boyden Gray, and John D. Podesta
C. Boyden Gray, while skeptical of the climate science, believes that there are sufficient unrelated benefits from a comprehensive, market-oriented, and worldwide approach that involves all sources, sinks, and countries, and sufficient cost savings associated with such an approach, that the risk of disadvantaging the United States or endangering the world economy by proceeding in this manner is minimal. Timothy E. Wirth is President of the United Nations Foundation and a former U.S. Senator from Colorado. C. Boyden Gray is a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and served as Counsel to former President George H.W. Bush. John D. Podesta is Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and served as Chief of Staff to former President Bill Clinton. The views expressed here are the authors' alone.
The Big Questions
A century ago, Lord Selborne, the first lord of the Admiralty, dismissed the idea of fueling the British navy with something other than coal, which the island nation had in great abundance. "The substitution of oil for coal is impossible," he pronounced, "because oil does not exist in this world in sufficient quantities." Seven years later, the young Winston Churchill was appointed first lord and charged with winning the escalating Anglo-German race for naval superiority. As Daniel Yergin chronicled in The Prize, Churchill saw that oil would increase ship speed and reduce refueling time—key strategic advantages—and ordered oil-burning battleships to be built, committing the navy to this new fuel. Churchill's was a strategic choice, bold, creative, and farsighted. The energy choices the world faces today are no less consequential, and America's response must be as insightful.
Energy is fundamental to U.S. domestic prosperity and national security. In fact, the complex ties between energy and U.S. national interests have drawn tighter over time. The advent of globalization, the growing gap between rich and poor, the war on terrorism, and the need to safeguard the earth's environment are all intertwined with energy concerns.
The profound changes of recent decades and the pressing challenges of the twenty-first century warrant recognizing energy's central role in America's future and the need for much more ambitious and creative approaches. Yet the current debate about U.S. energy policy is mainly about tax breaks for expanded production, access to public lands, and nuances of electricity regulation—difficult issues all, but inadequate for the larger challenges the United States faces. The staleness of the policy dialogue reflects a failure to recognize the importance of energy to the issues it affects: defense and homeland security, the economy, and the environment. What is needed is a purposeful, strategic energy policy, not a grab bag drawn from interest-group wish lists.
U.S. energy policies to date have failed to address three great challenges. The first is the danger to political and economic security posed by the world's dependence on oil. Next is the risk to the global environment from climate change, caused primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels. Finally, the lack of access by the world's poor to modern energy services, agricultural opportunities, and other basics needed for economic advancement is a deep concern.
None of these problems of dependence, climate change, or poverty can be solved overnight, but aggressive goals and practical short-term initiatives can jump-start the move to clean and secure energy practices. The key challenges can be overcome with a blend of carefully targeted policy interventions that build on the power of the market, public-private partnerships in financing and technology development, and, perhaps most important, the development of a political coalition that abandons traditional assumptions and brings together energy interests that have so far engaged only in conflict. Turning this ambitious, long-term agenda into reality requires a sober assessment of the United States' critical energy challenges and the interests that can be mobilized for the necessary . . .