Lugar offers solutions for energy security

Senator Dick Lugar continued offering solutions for increasing America's energy security in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday, February 1.

In the op-ed, Senator Lugar quickly makes the point he has been pressing for decades, "Nearly every major foreign policy challenge we face is aggravated by our continued addiction to oil ... Americans sent nearly $430 billion to other countries in 2008 for the cost of imported oil -- an amount equal to almost half of President Obama's stimulus package. Those hundreds of billions should be spent to build a new energy economy here, not shipped to dangerous regimes overseas."

And as Matt Tully pointed out in his February 4 column in the Indianapolis Star, "Last spring, as gas prices approached $4 a gallon, we stubborn Americans began to alter our driving behavior."

So in an effort to reduce U.S. consumption of imported oil, keep that money in America and help avoid foreign policy challenges, Senator Lugar advocated for a "net-zero gas tax" similar to the one conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote about in January.

Norman Ornstein, in a February 4 column in Roll Call, notes "It is in fact a compelling idea, the best and simplest way by far to reduce the amount of money we send to despots like Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that they recycle to undermine our values and interests, and to reduce our addiction to fossil fuels and encourage even more use of alternatives. We know it works: When prices get higher than $3.75 a gallon, behavior changes significantly in terms of car and truck purchases and driver behavior. When the price comes down, we revert to unfortunate form."

Bill Seamans writes in his February 3 Keene Sentinel column "Supporting Lugar’s contention is the often repeated observation that the money we spend at the gas pump goes to some governments that feed funds to terrorist groups. But the question rises whether, like the sacrifices of war, would Obama’s regime be able to puncture the bubble of denial and persuade the public to stop complaining and take on a fair and equal share of the patriotic effort to fix America first, before we can solve problems elsewhere."

The idea has been discussed by other sources, too, including:

• Kevin Hassett and Gilbert Metcalf of the American Enterprise Institute;
• Jason Bordoff of The Brookings Institution and Professor Gilbert Metcalf of Tufts University;
• N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard economics professor and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for President George Bush; and
• BusinessWeek reporter John Carey.