OIL INDEPENDENCE: Iran and Brazil Can Do It. So Can We.

Iran and Brazil Can Do It. So Can We.

By Gal Luft

Washington Post, Sunday, July 6, 2008; B01

When the founding fathers declared our independence, they could not have imagined that, 232 years later, the United States would be so spectacularly dependent on foreign countries. It would be roughly eight more decades before oil gushed from a well in Titusville, Pa., marking the beginning of the global oil economy; it took eight decades more for the United States to become a net oil importer. But the republic's disastrous dependence on foreign oil has increased by leaps and bounds ever since.

In 1973, when OPEC imposed its oil embargo, U.S. oil imports composed 30 percent of our needs; today, they make up more than 60 percent, with a growing proportion of that crude coming from the world's least stable regions. At around $145 a barrel, the United States, by my calculations, will spend more on imported oil this year than it will spend on its own defense budget, and much of that money will flow into the coffers of those who wish us ill.

Since oil dependence is so unappealing, you'd think that energy independence would be an easy sell, especially on this Fourth of July weekend. But in fact, very few policy ideas have been so ridiculed. A 2007 report by the National Petroleum Council, a privately funded group that offers advice from the oil and gas industries to the federal government, calls energy independence "unrealistic"; a recent book, "Gusher of Lies," by Robert Bryce, a former fellow at a think tank funded in part by energy interests, described energy independence as a "dangerous delusion"; and a 2006 Council on Foreign Relations task force went so far as to accuse those promoting energy independence of "doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal that is unachievable over the foreseeable future."

Ignore them. Energy independence does not mean that the United States must be entirely self-sufficient. It simply means reducing the role of oil in world politics -- turning it from a strategic commodity into merely another thing to sell.

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I should be speechless but I'm not. 

Democrat CFR Candidates:

Barack Obama

Hillary Clinton

John Edwards

Chris Dodd

Bill Richardson

Republican CFR Candidates:

Mitt Romney

Rudy Giuliani

John McCain

Fred Thompson

Newt Gingrich

The mainstream media's self-proclaimed "top tier" candidates are united in their CFR membership, while an unwitting public perceives political diversity. The unwitting public has been conditioned to instinctively deny such a mass deception could ever be hidden in plain view.

You think you have a choice... but you don't.