The Oil Industry Exposes a Powerless Superpower

The U.S. must change its energy policy. It must finally rethink its energy consumption and its helpless relationship to the oil lobby.

What a joke. The most powerful nation in the world can’t even get a temporary ban on offshore oil drilling through the court system. The oil industry’s high-priced lawyers are too well prepared, and the industry owns the judges. How is anyone supposed to take seriously Obama’s threat that BP had 24 hours to explain how it planned to get a new cap on the oil bubbling up from the ocean floor?

The U.S. government must do all it can to ensure that the drilling moratorium remains in effect. That’s also what many voters expect. The oil companies can’t go back to business as usual until they find out just how and why the Gulf catastrophe happened.

At the same time, the world’s number one per capita energy consumer must do all it can to end its oil addiction. To that end, governmental research efforts must increasingly focus on solving energy problems. The U.S. indisputably possesses the high-tech know-how and the basic research to do so.

The extent of the progress possible in a relatively short time in this field has already been shown by aircraft manufacturers and turbine builders over the past three years. Until recently, it wasn’t considered possible to use biofuel to power a commercial airliner. And now a solar-powered airplane has stayed aloft for over 24 hours. More daring thinking is what’s needed here because what remains of the world’s crude oil is far too valuable to waste every day in internal combustion engines.