Counterpoint: Appetite for energy from any source, at any price, can't last

By DAVE DURENBERGER

Last update: May 13, 2008 - 1:17 PM

Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., has an explanation for the escalating costs of gasoline (Opinion Exchange, May 10). Like many Republican solutions of late, it is simple, easily understood, painless, and enriching of fossil fuel producers and auto makers. It is the unwillingness of the Democrats in Congress to increase U.S. oil production and refining capacity, to increase (clean) coal production, or to increase nuclear, renewable, and alternative energy sources.

I rode from Detroit to St. Paul on Sept. 11, 2001, in a rented van with then-St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman. During the 11-hour trip we watched gas stations change prices in reaction to the crisis. Crude oil traded at $30 a barrel on the day in March 2003 that President Bush and (by then) Sen. Coleman retaliated against Al-Qaida by attacking Iraq. The price has been rising ($125 last Friday) ever since, as commodities become more valuable and oil more of a political tool in the hands of petro-dictators from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia.

If members of Congress needed more proof that producing our way out of this crisis is not the answer, they have it now. It's evident in the price of food, almost everywhere in the world. In the prices farmers pay to produce crops they can't decide whether to sell for food, feed, or fuel.

If you buy groceries as often as you buy gas, you know they are riding right up the price scale together. Gas prices might drop a bit from time to time. But food, unless it comes from your garden, never does.

Markets tell us there are two ways to reduce prices: Boost supplies or reduce demand. This is especially true in world markets for products economies can't do without. The Summer Olympics are threatened more by Beijing's polluted air than by the Dalai Lama and Free Tibet. The world's, to say nothing of our own, insatiable appetite for energy from any source at any price cannot go on.

I started my Senate career amid oil-price crises in the 1970s, and I learned that our industrial and technological genius can be turned to low-risk fuel production and to reducing both consumption and demand for energy. If only our political genius could be turned to the policy issues around fuel pricing.

The United States has never chosen that route, because we think Americans like everything on the cheap and because of members of Congress who prefer it that way as well. This is the year we are preparing to change. Tom Friedman says we haven't tried easy demand reduction yet -- like lower speed limits and improved mileage requirements.

It's not so much 9/11 as it is globalized economics and the new leverage in a consumptive world of petro-dictators. They think they have us by the you-know-what. But they don't, unless we let them.

Dave Durenberger, a Republican senator from Minnesota from 1978 to 1995, is chairman of the National Institute of Health Policy.

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