Confusing the Problem

BreakPoint WorldView » November 2008 I remember all too well the pressures placed on an incoming administration. The new president needs to create a cabinet. Thousands of political favors need to be paid off. And this year, the global financial crisis threatens every citizen. But there’s one issue the new administration and Congress simply can’t ignore. And that’s energy independence. Yes, oil prices have gone down recently due to slumping demand and the lifting of the offshore drilling moratorium. But as I write, OPEC is already poised to cut production—which places more pressures on the world’s shaky economy. The past year has been a rude reminder of just how dependent our way of life is on foreign oil. The skyrocketing price of crude oil affected more than our driving habits and vacation plans—it affected even grocery bills. It’s past time that we do something about it. But elites pontificate that if we simply let the prices of oil rise, the country will be forced to develop alternate energy sources. People will drive less and use less fuel, and that would benefit the environment. But hand-in-hand with the pontification is a stubborn resistance to looking for new sources of domestic oil production, either onshore or offshore, or in Alaska. The implicit message is that allowing such drilling would interfere with the lesson that the American people need to learn. But at what price? THE TOLL ON THE LEAST OF THESE Historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote about talking with some people at a rural gas station in central California. These people could not afford a “new fuel-efficient” car, and “they were now spending a day or two of their wages just to fuel their cars for their long rural commutes.” As Hanson put it, the “truly ethical and environmental solution would require embracing positions long considered anathema” to our elites. “Fairness to the poor and middle class” means lowering oil prices, not raising them as part of some social engineering scheme. At this point, people object that increased drilling will do nothing to lower gas prices. They insist it will be decades, if not longer, before the increased exploration pays off in new supplies. Well, they are wrong: Before the moratorium on offshore drilling, oil companies had already discovered billions of barrels of reserves on the California coast. A friend of mine in the industry says they could be online and pumping within two years. Nobody would benefit more from offshore drilling than working Americans—those being hurt the most by the status quo. It is galling to me to watch people who, doubtless, live in large homes, fly in private planes, and are not affected by the price of gas, build their idea of utopia on the backs of the poor. Christians must care about the environment, of course—but people, especially the poor, come first. CONFLATING THE ISSUES The reason we have become so confused on our energy policy is that for years we have confused two questions. One is the environment and the other is energy. Since the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s, Americans have known we are dangerously dependent on foreign oil. When I worked for President Nixon, we announced a grand campaign for energy independence. And President Carter famously called his plan the "moral equivalent of war." Yet more than three decades later—here we are. The only thing that has changed is that we are more dependent on foreign oil than we were before! In 1973, we imported 28 percent of our oil. Today, it is closer to 60 percent. What's more, as Robert Samuelson noted in the Washington Post, "Most imports come from countries that are potentially insecure, unstable or hostile." That is an understatement: Those countries are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iraq. As Frank Gaffney, a national security expert, wrote in the National Review, the war against terrorism and American energy security are inseparable. So we’ve known what to do, but we just haven’t done it. It’s what the great Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn called “a lack of civic courage.” But this has got to be dealt with. Energy-independence is critical, not only because of its national security implications but because of its vital economic implications. We no longer have the luxury to continue putting off this first issue, which is energy-independence and a stable U.S. economy that doesn’t break the backs of the working people. The second issue is the environment. No serious person denies the threat posed by high oil prices. But the same cannot be said for man-made global warming. Interestingly enough, or ironically perhaps, I was in discussions about this in the Nixon White House. All the experts were telling us then, as many still do, that the problem is not global warming but global cooling. Even in the last three years ocean temperatures have actually dropped. While you have probably heard that the “debate is over” about global warming, in many ways it is just getting started—at least, in earnest. For example, back in March, hundreds of scientists endorsed a declaration that read, in part, “There is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.” In the absence of this “convincing evidence,” they declared that the notion of a consensus among climate experts is “false.” For their trouble, these scientists are scorned and compared to Holocaust-deniers. Still, their conclusions are based on real world observations instead of predictions made by climate models. Even among scientists who believe that man-made global warming is real, there is no agreement on its extent, or what best to do about it. BACK TO EDEN When it comes to the environment, the only way we are going to make a significant change is to return to a proper biblical understanding of stewardship of the Creation. To do so, we must return to Genesis and to the first principles laid out there for us. When God created the world, he created man on the seventh day as the apex of his creation. Only to man, did God give powers of reason and imagination. And so rightfully, with this high place, God gave mankind certain privileges and responsibilities. “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,” commanded God (Gen. 1:26). More specifically, He commanded Adam to cultivate the garden and to name the animals. In order to bring fruit from the earth, man would have to bring his reason and imagination to bear. Man’s dominion over creation, as scholars from the Acton Institute suggest, “requires responsible stewardship. Such stewardship must uphold the common good of humanity, while also respecting the end for which each creature was intended, and the means necessary to achieve that end.” A biblical worldview demands good stewardship over the resources freely given to us, not only for our sake, but for the sake of generations which come after us. But “nowhere does revelation suggest (as do some contemporary religious and secular environmentalists) that creation undisturbed by human intervention, is the final order God intended.” Contrast this for a moment with prevailing worldviews. The biblical worldview teaches that God created man and made him fundamentally different than the animals. Many environmentalists today, see no such distinction. The biblical worldview teaches that responsible stewardship begins with a commitment to people. Meanwhile, environmental organizations have population control as one of their central themes. People are the enemy. They have invaded the pristine wilderness, and the invaders must be repelled. THE PEOPLE PARADOX But here’s a little irony. Contrary to popular beliefs, forests in America today are actually larger than they were a century ago. The reason? According to research from the Acton Institute, “fossil fuels have been turned into fertilizers that, together with new pesticides, other means of preventing spoilage, and advances in the new plant species… have produced so much more food per acre that large amounts of land have been spared from cultivation altogether.” In fact, despite all of the fossil fuels Americans currently consume, “North America absorbs more carbon dioxide through plants and forests than it emits through industry.” But perhaps this is just an outlier. Certainly, economic growth couldn’t have any positive effect on environmental quality. Or could it? Consider this: “There is a direct and positive correlation between the degree of political and economic freedom and both the level of economic attainment and the rapidity of economic growth in the countries around the world. The 20 percent of the world’s countries with the greatest economic freedom produce, on average, over ten times as much wealth per capita as the 20 percent with the least economic freedom, and while the freest countries enjoyed an average 2.27 percent annual rate of growth in real gross national product per capita through the 1990’s, the least-free countries experienced a decline of 1.32 percent per year. On the other hand, there is also a direct and positive correlation between economic advance and environmental quality. The freer, wealthier countries have experienced consistent reductions in pollution and improvements in their environments, while the less free, poorer countries have experienced either increasing environmental degradation or much slower environmental improvement.” In other words, if you put primary emphasis on developing people into responsible stewards, as they develop they will come up with ways to clear and purify the environment. If, on the other hand, you slap on some draconian solution, what immediately happens is the economy in those countries stalls out, growth stops, and pollution and poverty continue. And this is why we so desperately need to separate the energy-independence problem from the environmental one. The moment you conflate the two you get distortions in public policy, you get mixed motives, and you get people promoting one thing for a hidden cause over to the side. The environmental problem—no matter what scope you believe it to be—is only going to be solved by technology and by creativity. It won’t be solved by shutting down economies. That will produce absolutely the reverse effect. In America, we need an adequate supply of oil while we’re developing alternatives. Drilling, here at home, so that the costs are reduced, is absolutely vital to our national interests, to our national survival, as well as to international growth. We can’t simply shut the machine down while we wait for new alternatives. We’ve got to drill and drill quickly, in Alaska, offshore, and anywhere we can until we have independence. But we need a continuing effort to develop alternatives alongside. As the new Administration maps out it policies and priorities, Christians need to be aware of the dangerous overlapping of these two issues and the confusion that arises and misguided policies that will be produced. Put people first, and people with creativity, resources, and a biblical understanding of stewardship will solve the environmental problem.

11/14/08