The Sunday Times
September 19, 2004
Just think ... if we didn't need oil there wouldn't be a problem
by Sarah Baxter
Neo-cons are getting the green message: alternative fuels can win the long war
An extraordinary marriage is on the cards in the United States; the Greens and the neo-conservative right are jumping into bed with each other. The issue that is bringing these political foes together is oil. Both say it is urgent for economies to end their dependence on the Middle Easts cash crop.
They come to the debate from different directions. The Greens arguments global warming and so on you already know. But you may not be familiar with the neo-cons concern. Giving up oil, they say, is the best long-term weapon in the war on terror.
Listen to the words of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a hawkish think tank in Washington: Our energy demand is financing terror, its mission statement says baldly. We believe that a shift from oil is the best guarantor of global security, prosperity and freedom.
Last week the right-wing Hudson Institute in Washington held a seminar on Saudi Arabia. The star speaker was Bernard Lewis, the most renowned scholar of Islam in the West and darling of the neo-cons.
Lewis, who was born in Britain but is now based at Princeton, spoke about the rapidly expanding Muslim populations in Europe and elsewhere and how they are being converted to the most noxious form of Islamic fundamentalism, spread by the Saudis.
The discovery of oil has given the Saudis wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams, enabling them to take advantage of the natural desire of Muslims in the West to teach their children about their religious heritage. As a result of their stranglehold on learning, the rantings of Wahhabism were becoming the dominant form of Islam.
Lewis concluded that the Saudis had to be sent back to their impoverished former life in the desert. There is only one solution and that is to find another source of energy besides oil. It seems to me to be the only way we can put an end to this poison which fouls the sea and the roads and pollutes minds.
The audience was startled. But other rightwingers went on to echo Lewiss concerns. David Pryce-Jones, a Briton who writes on Arab affairs for National Review magazine, opened his talk with a warning from the Nobel prize-winning novelist Sir VS Naipaul.
You must make it plain to people, Naipaul had urged him that morning, that they face a choice between saying its more convenient for the sake of oil to keep the Saudis going and taking a stand against them. If they hesitate to make that choice, they are gambling with civilisation.
Pryce-Jones pointed out that western experts knew little about the internal workings of Saudi Arabia. Talk about this prince being a reformer and that prince being a hardliner was pure guesswork, similar to the Kremlinology of the cold war. While the royal family had granted a few sops to the West some limited municipal elections will take place next year pro-democracy activists were still being thrown in jail.
In any case there was no Saudi Sakharov figure: if free elections were held tomorrow 40% of the population would probably support Osama Bin Laden, putting a damper on the desirability of regime change.
Now, as everybody knows, oil is a finite resource that will eventually run out. It makes sense on that basis alone to explore alternative sources of energy. The problem is that scientific research takes time. So does changing consumers gas-guzzling habits.
Lewis believes that with the right government incentives it could take us 25 years to give up oil. If we are to rely on the private sector alone, 75 years is more realistic.
Meanwhile, over at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, its founder Gal Luft, who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army, spells out his concern that most of the worlds oil is produced by unstable Middle Eastern regimes that could blow up at any moment.
We stay away from environmental debates, says Luft dismissively. We think the issue is very urgent because of the national security aspect.
Luft is reluctant to ask Americans to adopt a hair shirt. The solutions we advocate do not require any compromise of the American way of life. Alternative fuels can power large cars such as SUVs (four-wheel drives). According to Luft, consumers should already be looking to buy hybrid electric cars, which can increase fuel efficiency by 30-40%.
Everything were arguing for is already beyond the research and development stage. Its a question of allocating the right government incentives, says Luft. Every new car should have a mandatory flexible fuel capacity.
Nobody doubts that hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles are the cars of the future, supported by alternative fuels such as ethanol (from corn) and methanol (from coal or natural gas).
Americans might be persuaded to drop their love affair with oil, as long as it is not just the loopy left telling them to give it up. Of course the present incumbents of the White House, two former oilmen named George Bush and Dick Cheney, remain obstacles to change. But at least their friends are beginning to desert them on this one.
I asked Lewis whether, as a guru of the right, he could yet become a hero of the Greens. Its a new thought, he chuckled, evidently pleased.