What's so bad about foreign oil?
How achieving "energy independence" would leave Americans worse off.
There are many things I want independence from -- incoming e-mail, the section of my wedding vows about monogamy, this bogus corporation I created to lower my taxes but now takes up all of my time, Sam Zell -- but foreign oil is not one of them. Foreign oil is my favorite kind of oil. It means other nations clog their beaches with ugly rigs, do dangerous work and suffer environmental disasters and I still get to cruise Sunset Boulevard in my yellow Mini Cooper convertible. Oil exploration is an industry America should look to expand right after alchemy research and pyramid building.
Yet Barack Obama and John McCain, in speeches and ads, have spent this week arguing about who is most serious about achieving independence from foreign energy. Both are willing to drill offshore even though that won't produce more gasoline until long after we all own electric cars. And both want to relieve gas prices by tapping the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, despite the fact that there's no emergency and higher prices are the only thing that has been effective at getting Americans to curb consumption of foreign oil. The only smart thing I heard was Obama's advice to fully inflate your tires, though he overlooked the fact that gas stations no longer have free air pumps, or even decent pay ones. I'm surprised he didn't tell us to save gas by not getting lost with the aid of free Amoco maps.
If the candidates wanted to be independent from all oil, I'd embrace that green goal. But they only hate foreign oil. As if foreign oil was inherently different from good, God-fearing, strong-work-ethic American oil, the kind that is ignited by freedom and burns terrorism and France. To the commodities market, there is no American oil, no American cotton, no American aluminum, no American coffee -- they all get bid on without national prejudice. Even I know that, and my academic study of commodities consists solely of watching "Trading Places."
If we were energy independent, the politicians imply, prices wouldn't go up. But if you're an oil-striking American dude -- maybe a little naive, but smart enough to know that your hot daughter Elly May is going to be better off in Beverly Hills than the Ozarks -- you're going to shop your barrels to the highest bidder in the world, not just to whiny Americans with their near-worthless dollars. More oil procured from under U.S. soil means more oil on the global market, not more oil for just us.
