The (Ex) Washington Realist

The Seattle Times had this to say about yesterday's hearing on energy in the Senate, where politicians did well scoring rhetorical points against oil company executives but there was little talk of solutions.

We have a U.S. energy strategy predicated on a series of "no"s--and many members of Congress are complicit in enacting them.

This is what we have:

No to increased exploration and exploitation of domestic U.S. sources of hydrocarbons, for environmental and aesthetic reasons;
No to increased use of nuclear power in the U.S, for fear of accidents.;
No to increased use of nuclear power around the world, for fear of the proliferation risk;
No to increased use of coal, especially by China and India and other developing countries, for power generation, because of global warming;
No to providing low-cost clean coal technology because of the expense that would be borne by the developed world;
No to opening up Iran's major deposits of gas and oil because of the continued rule of the Islamic Republic and instead pushing for stronger sanctions.

What's left? Strategy one--ask the Indians and the Chinese to voluntarily limit their use of energy and stop their economic growth--not going to happen. Strategy two--ask the Saudis to pump large volumes of extra oil into the market. We got an answer to that question this past week.

Something will have to give--and the question is whether we make choices in order to shape events or whether the dam begins to break. My guess--as we've seen with Iran--is that maintaining strong sanctions long-term is not going to happen. The nuclear genie is also increasingly out of the bottle.

We'll see where things go from here.