Neal St. Anthony: Country's interests, oil lobby's are at odds

Midwest governors and a growing number of companies and consumers already have voted with their wallets on a more-efficient, less-oil-dependent economy.

Already, more than half the states, including Minnesota, have agreed to substantially cut greenhouse gases and produce as much as a quarter of their electricity and motor fuels from home-grown renewable energy.

Meanwhile, in Washington, bills are moving through Congress, despite the likely threat of a veto by President Bush, that would cut oil use in this country by as much as 50 percent over the next 25 years, increase vehicle efficiency to 35 miles per gallon on average, subsidize investments in efficiency and renewables with increased taxes on oil companies and require that we get as much as 15 percent of our electricity from wind, geothermal and other alternatives.

To no one's surprise, the American Petroleum Institute, the oil-and-gas lobby, opposes this legislation, saying it would effectively cost Minnesota households an average of $500 more per year by 2015, slow economic growth and cost 17,500 jobs.

I don't buy it.

"To put it kindly, the American Petroleum Industry is blowing smoke," said Jack Uldrich, who studies emerging technologies through his Minneapolis-based Nanoveritas Group. "Renewable energy is a huge opportunity, not an economic burden."

Here's the irony: Even some oil executives at outfits such as Conoco Phillips and Total SA are conceding that the over-stretched oil industry will be unable to meet growing global demand over the next 25 years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Case in point: Five years and about $500 billion in borrowed tax dollars into our occupation of Iraq, that country is pumping less oil than it was before we arrived, thanks to the warring factions.

There's a growing consensus that North America is running low on reserves, and that what's left, including the huge deposits of western Canadian tar sands, yield really expensive, hard-to-get oil.

Conversely, outfits such as the Minneapolis-based Great Plains Institute, the brains behind the Midwest governors' pact, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Blue Green Alliance of labor and environmentalists are producing promising studies that show the investments in research labs, waste-to-energy plants and factories on next-generation batteries and wind turbines are going to be an economic and national-security home run.

"The real energy story is that the states have been filling the vacuum of leadership left by Washington, D.C.," said Rolf Nordstrom, who heads the business-funded Great Plains Institute. "The American Petroleum analysis is penny wise and pound foolish. The American people now know the connections between where we get our energy and our foreign policy. If we get our energy house in order, we can fix a lot of our foreign policy. No matter how pure our motives, everybody sees what we do through the oil lens. The sooner we start to get off oil, the sooner we start to fix things."

As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has repeatedly pointed out, the United States would probably be a lot stronger today if it had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks to take concrete steps to substitute energy efficiency -- the cheapest investment -- and domestic resources in order to cut our imported oil tab. Paying for foreign oil also has contributed to our huge balance of trade deficit and the dollar's five-year decline.

Several years of $50-plus-a-barrel oil, rising gasoline prices and new demand from China and India have spurred researchers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and even oil companies such as British Petroleum and Chevron to invest in next-generation alternatives that will make us a more efficient, stronger economy.

As the United States starts to cut oil consumption and develops new efficiencies, technology and fuels, we'll also help to restrain oil prices by using less.

Still, oil is not going back to $20 a barrel. And it's time to start breaking the habit for many economic, national security and environmental reasons.