In an interview with Knoxville radio station, WUOT, Ambassador Brooks spoke on why the current global situation is much more complicated than the Cold War. Focusing on Iran and North Korea, Brooks noted that they pose a much different threat than the Soviet Union did because of their track records in supporting terrorism and their disinterest in playing by the normal rules of international relations. Brooks also shared that, in the case of Iran, its desire to become a regional hegemon also drives a continuous increase in arms stockpiling by its neighbors.

On the topic of nuclear energy, Brooks was much more optimistic noting that, despite the tragedy in Fukushima, nuclear energy will see a huge expansion.  Therefore, the U.S. will have to decide if it wants to lead in nuclear energy and set an example for responsible development of nuclear power, or let others assume the role.

To hear more, click here to listen to the interview or read Frank Munger’s blog post here.

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At their launch event, USESC founders emphasized the importance of finding solutions to the nation’s current energy dilemma and described the risk associated with America’s reliance on oil as a sole transportation fuel. Across the bipartisan panel, members agreed that, in the interest of national and economic security, America must pursue strategies to diversify the fuel sources used in transportation – eliminating the decades old monopoly that oil has enjoyed in the U.S. transportation sector and diminishing the strategic importance of this resource. McFarlane was certain to point out, however, that the group is not “anti-oil,” but more accurately “pro-fuel choice.”

The depth of this group’s bipartisan membership – drawing from the Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush Administrations, the U.S. Senate, all three military branches, academia, and Fortune 500 leadership – shows the seriousness of America’s energy challenges and is evidence that the will exists among U.S. security, business, and political leaders to work across the aisle to find solutions.

While J. Bennett Johnston, former Senator (R – La.) and USESC member, acknowledged the difficult partisan atmosphere in Washington, he argued that there is still optimism in the halls of government. That optimism, he said, is based in the energy field where Republicans and Democrats can agree on the need for a way forward.

In the case of the USESC, the answer to high energy prices and unreliable fuel supplies is the introduction of viable alternative fuels for U.S. vehicles, including ethanol and methanol. Competition among different fuels, the group said, is the key to creating a new, affordable, reliable American energy sector – one not beholden to the price of oil and actions of producers thousands of miles away.

At the event, Hart described current U.S. energy policy as a doctrine of buying fuel from a market controlled by dangerous places hostile towards American interests and periodically fighting wars to protect America’s access to those resources.

Across the board, the organization’s Republicans and Democrats concluded that periodically suffering from drastically shifting fuel prices, annually sending billions of much-needed U.S. dollars to foreign markets, and sacrificing American lives and treasure to protect global oil supply lines in places like the Persian Gulf has made the nation vulnerable security wise and economically.

For more information, you can visit the U.S. Energy Security Council website www.usesc.org.

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OUR country has just gone through a sober national retrospective on the 9/11 attacks. Apart from the heartfelt honoring of those lost — on that day and since — what seemed most striking is our seeming passivity and indifference toward the well from which our enemies draw their political strength and financial power: the strategic importance of oil, which provides the wherewithal for a generational war against us, as we mutter diplomatic niceties.

Oil’s strategic importance stems from its virtual monopoly as a transportation fuel. Today, 97 percent of all air, sea and land transportation systems in the United States have only one option: petroleum-based products. For more than 35 years we have engaged in self-delusion, saying either that we have reserves here at home large enough to meet our needs, or that the OPEC cartel will keep prices affordable out of self-interest. Neither assumption has proved valid. While the Western Hemisphere’s reserves are substantial and growing, they pale in the face of OPEC’s, which are substantial enough to effectively determine global supply and thus the global price.

According to senior executives in the oil industry, in the years ahead that price is going to rise beyond anything we’ve seen — well above the $147 per barrel we experienced three years ago. Such a run-up in the price of oil has been predicted as a consequence of an event like an attack on a major Saudi processing facility that takes production off line. But such a spike would be more likely to be caused by the predictable increase of demand in China, India and developing countries, alongside the cartel’s strategy of driving up prices by constraining supply. While OPEC sits on 79 percent of the world’s conventional oil reserves, it accounts for only one-third of global oil supply.

There is, however, a way out of this crisis. Ultimately, electric cars may become the norm, but for the near and middle term, the solution lies in opening the transportation fuel market to competition from sources other than petroleum. American oil companies have come around to understanding the wisdom of introducing competition, as a matter of their own self-interest. But doing so means rapidly ramping up production of the alternative fuels, and that is the challenge. As an example, before investors will expand production capacity for cellulosic ethanol from plant life, or for methanol from natural gas — which on a per-mile basis is significantly cheaper than gasoline — they want to see that a sufficient proportion of the cars and trucks on America’s roads can burn these fuels.

Here too, however, a solution is at hand; it lies in Detroit’s making more flex-fuel cars — cars able to use gasoline, ethanol, methanol or any mixture of these. And because this flex-fuel option costs less than $100 per car, making such a change is not exorbitant. Indeed, some 90 percent of all cars sold in Brazil last year are flex-fuel cars, and many of them were made by Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. That gives Brazilian drivers the option to purchase the most cost-effective fuel, and they can easily switch from one type to another.

But here’s the rub. Although the American manufacturers have stated publicly their willingness to make flex-fuel vehicles up to 50 percent of their production, they’re just not doing it. Hence the need for Congress to require that new vehicles allow the use of alternative fuels. In some corners of Washington, that raises a cry against “mandates.” Of course the response to that is: Doing nothing is equivalent to mandating a monopoly by a single fuel (whose price is set by a foreign cartel).

Competition is a bedrock of our American way of life. It’s time to introduce it into our fuel market.

That is the purpose of the United States Energy Security Council, a bipartisan group being introduced to the public today in Washington, which includes former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and two former secretaries of defense, William J. Perry and Harold Brown, as well as three former national security advisers, a former C.I.A. director, two former senators, a Nobel laureate, a former Federal Reserve chairman, and several Fortune-50 chief executives (including a former president of Shell Oil North America, John D. Hofmeister).

The time has come to strip oil of its strategic status. We owe it to those who lost their lives on 9/11 and in its aftermath, and to those whose fate still hangs in the balance.

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Unfortunately, ARPA-E may now also become known as the acronym for “A Reckless and Paltry Approach Endangers” when it comes to our national security.Established by the Bush administration but first funded by the Obama administration, ARPA-E has made solid progress in its infancy, in particular paving the way for private companies to invest in important innovation.  So far, six of ARPA-E’s clean energy projects have attracted more than $100 million in private capital investment and the projects are slowly but surely starting to make an impact.  In April, the agency announced a preliminary agreement to test an important new energy storage technology; the company that is likely to be the first candidate used a $750,000 grant from ARPA-E to advance its technology enough to raise $12 million privately.

Funding cuts, however, would leave the agency in a precarious position to carry out its mission and jeopardize its future potential.  As Dan Reicher, the Executive Director of Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, testified before the House Natural Resources Committee earlier this month, “without adequate federal funding…the institutional promise of ARPA-E will not be realized.”

Why must the institutional promise of ARPA-E be realized?  Because not doing so carries enormous national security implications.  For example, take the issue of rare earth elements (REE).  REEs are used in a wide variety of products across the world ranging from laptops to guided missiles.  China, however, controls at least 96 percent of the global supply and this month took further steps to tighten government controls over the industry by creating a rare earth monopoly in the Inner Mongolia region.

ARPA-E, meanwhile, is taking steps to ease America’s dependence on REEs, directing some of its new grant for clean energy research toward rare earth alternatives.  But if further research and development on this front is disrupted because of insufficient funding, it could have far-reaching costs beyond the energy sector.  Continued REE dependence could make “the U.S. economy vulnerable to shortages, tariffs and disruptions that might be spurred by diplomatic tensions” while “China could very well use its rare earths supply to control U.S. defense production.”

Underfunding ARPA-E is a high-risk, low reward strategy that will hinder innovation and increase our vulnerability.  This is not what it takes to “Win the Future.”  Imagine if the same attitude had existed with respect to DARPA – and the advancements that would have been stifled or lost as a result.  ARPA-E has the same potential as DARPA. It would be a shame if the only risk we took going forward was with our long-term security.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Partnership for a Secure America.

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Since the conclusion of last year’s UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, doubt surrounding the efficacy of the multilateral negotiating process had been steadily gaining momentum, and the criticism was set to explode in the event of failure in Cancun. Last December, after two years of unrealistically ambitious expectations, the Copenhagen Accord was cobbled together in the eleventh hour by President Obama and a handful of other heads of state, putting an end to a disappointing two weeks of controversy, chaos, and finger-pointing. The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin described watching events play out in Copenhagen to be “like witnessing the derailment of a slow freight train on a curve that could be seen to be too sharp well ahead of time.” By all accounts, the mood at this year’s conference at Cancun’s Moon Palace resort was much more cooperative, and the resulting set of decisions, the Cancun Agreements, is being lauded as a sensible and balanced compromise, albeit an imperfect one. Nevertheless, support for a move away from the UN process in favor of a bottom-up approach based on national policies and bilateral engagement will surely continue, and deservedly so. The Cancun Agreements can serve as the blueprint for an eventual legally-binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But there is still much progress to be made – and a wide gap to be bridged between stated commitments and scientifically-recommended action – that will require simultaneous action on several diplomatic tracks.

Even if the Cancun conference had not produced such an unexpectedly favorable result, the UN process deserves to be preserved. The all-inclusive forum is likely the best means of addressing certain issues affecting many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries, particularly adaptation, clean energy technology transfer, and deforestation. Furthermore, the perception that success hinges on the adoption of a legally-binding treaty is false. It is important not to downplay the ability of “soft law” political agreements to produce tangible results. Besides, without the political will in the U.S. Senate, any internationally-binding treaty would be irrelevant, and the woes of New START should shed any lingering hope that a climate change treaty stands a chance of Senate ratification in the foreseeable future. And even in the absence of legislation, the U.S. has the capacity, through federal regulation and aggressive state and local initiatives, to come very close to meeting its short-term emissions reduction commitments (17% reduction below 2005 levels by 2020). At that point, it is not unreasonable to envision the emergence of the political will for strong legislative action, especially if successful state or regional efforts present a sound model for a national initiative.

Still, it is important not to overlook the shortcomings of the UN negotiating process, and to seek more appropriate avenues for progress where they exist. Despite the success in Cancun, other bilateral and multilateral efforts like the G20 and the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate should play a larger role in climate diplomacy. Climate change is a multifaceted problem, and climate diplomacy requires a creative multi-pronged approach. But perhaps the best way to improve the process is by, as Revkin explains, “shifting from climate-centric diplomacy to a slate of efforts aimed at advancing the human condition in ways that limit climate-related risks.” Climate and energy policy would benefit from a conceptual shift away from a concentration on carbon reduction toward one on green growth. It is much less constructive to focus on ways to ensure “equitable access to the world’s carbon space,” in the words of Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, than to focus on ways to foster long-term low-carbon growth.

Regardless of the future course of UN negotiations, the U.S.-China relationship will continue to be the key to any long-term solution, and there is still a substantial “trust deficit” to overcome. But the ostensible staring contest on climate change action between the world’s two largest emitters is quickly becoming a specious perception. China plans to institute a carbon trading market in its next five-year plan this March, which will make its carbon intensity reduction pledge a binding domestic policy. More importantly, China and the EU continue to outpace the U.S. in clean energy investment by a wide margin, which should have already prompted what Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called the United States’ “Sputnik moment.” Clean energy investment over the next ten years is projected to be as large as $2.3 trillion, according to a report released this month by the Pew Environment Group. In 2009, China’s clean energy investments nearly doubled that of the U.S. – a trend that, if continued, will severely impede the United States’ ability to compete for jobs and export markets in the 21st century economy. The climate change crisis is already being conceptualized around the world as a clean energy opportunity. As the notion of a global “tragedy of the commons” slowly evaporates, a global “clean energy race” is rising in its place. And the U.S. is running the risk of being left all alone at the starting gate.

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Over the past week, Taliban militants in western Pakistan have bombed and set fire to dozens of tankers carrying oil to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The seemingly daily trend of attacks on NATO fuel supply convoys has been ongoing since Pakistan closed a key border crossing in retaliation to a U.S. helicopter strike within its airspace. This recent surge in violence highlights the increasingly precarious reliance on fossil fuels as the single most critical strategic linchpin of U.S. military success. With the soaring costs – in both dollars and lives – of the military’s dependence on oil becoming ever more apparent, there has never been a more urgent time to accelerate the transition to renewable energy use on the battlefield.

Even before the recent wave of attacks, a study by the Army Environmental Policy Institute found that for every 24 fuel convoys to Iraq or Afghanistan, one soldier or civilian involved in the transport was killed. On top of the risk, the economic costs of the military’s dependence on oil are staggering. Although the military purchases gasoline at a relatively cheap price, transporting a gallon of fuel to a forward operating base can cost up to $400. Moreover, the sheer scale of the military’s energy expenses ($20 billion in 2008) leaves it particularly vulnerable to oil price volatility, as just a $10 uptick in the price of a barrel of oil costs the Department of Defense about $1.3 billion. These factors, in addition to the strategic challenges and indirect costs associated with importing foreign-produced oil rather than using American-made renewables, make the military’s current energy practices dangerous, inefficient, and ultimately unsustainable.

Although the Pentagon has taken strong strides in developing and deploying clean energy technologies, it still has plenty of untapped potential. In a report released in July, the CNA Military Advisory Board suggested that increased collaboration between DOD, DOE, and the private sector can spur the innovation necessary to make renewable energy technology more viable in the military. In FY 2010, DOD received $80.5 billion in funding for research and development alone – more than the entire operating budget of nearly any other government agency. A reallocation of some R&D funding from weapons systems to energy innovation would likely increase long-term U.S. national security significantly.

The military is also uniquely positioned to be a catalyst for economy-wide clean and renewable energy development, creating markets and driving down costs as its technological innovations are adapted for civilian use. The military has a long history of pioneering technologies that later found wide commercial success, from nuclear power to GPS systems to the Internet. As the nation’s largest single consumer of energy – accounting for roughly three quarters of the entire U.S. government’s energy usage – the impact of DOD’s investments could ripple throughout the economy. With the current legislative stalemate in the Senate, the military just might be the best vehicle to propel the U.S. economy toward a clean energy future.

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Days before the Senate dispersed for its August recess, Harry Reid announced that a vote would not be held on a “bare minimum” energy-only bill, just weeks after the Senate gave up on comprehensive climate and energy legislation. The inability of the Senate to gain any traction on even the most modest of energy bills in the wake of one of the most devastating environmental disasters in history is a clear indicator that there is still a long road ahead toward a strong U.S. climate change policy. There is no better time to reexamine the debate, and the debate begins with the science.

The science of climate change is sound but complex. Climate change will affect different parts of the planet in very different ways, and it is impossible to precisely quantify the physical impacts on Earth’s surface, let alone the social, political, and economic implications of those physical impacts. But ‘uncertainty’ in climate models – the expected variability in data – is too often mistaken for uncertainty about the science itself, and the well-funded lobbyists wishing to cast doubt on the science have made an almost effortless practice of manipulating the statistics and skewing the facts. Still, much of the public’s misunderstanding about climate change persists because of serious flaws in messaging by the science community to counter the misinformation. In many ways, the purpose of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to bridge this communication gap with the public. But with recent polling suggesting that the U.S. public increasingly perceives climate change as a very low-priority issue, the IPCC – and the science community as a whole – needs to overhaul its communication strategy.

The IPCC’s communication problems have spurred plenty of controversy in the past. Last month, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri sent an ill-conceived letter to the scientists participating in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), advising them to “keep a distance from the media.” The letter was widely criticized by scientists for seemingly encouraging a “bunker mentality.” In recent months, questions have also swirled around the validity of conclusions reached in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), particularly concerning the projected timeframe for the melting of Himalayan glaciers. Although a review by The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency found “no errors” that would impact any of the report’s 32 main conclusions, the agency did raise a concern that “the foundation for some of these conclusions could have been made more transparent.” But while the IPCC’s transparency may need improvement, its process does not. The IPCC has always had a very meticulous assessment process. The AR4 Summary for Policymakers was “approved line-by-line by all WMO and UN member governments” in a thorough three-day conference that was open to members of the media. And yet, due largely to its uncoordinated communication strategy, the IPCC has been unable to allay widespread criticism of its process. Even Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, has requested an independent review of the IPCC due for release next week.

David Ropeik, a risk communication consultant, offered the following perspective on the science community’s apparent communication gap in an exchange with Andrew Revkin of The New York Times:

“The passionate debate over why people don’t seem to “get” science is the newest chapter in an old discussion. Are people too stupid? Is our education system failing? Do scientists not “get” people, or communicate poorly? It’s time to move past those rather tired questions, because they are predicated on the assumption that there is an “It” to “Get”… some ideal truth that perfect reason can reach, if only the communication gap were bridged and “the facts” were made clear. That fails to acknowledge, as Drs. Jasanoff and Brulle have noted, that human perception of facts is not just a fact-based process. It is an affective mix of fact and feeling. We JUDGE facts. We INTERPRET facts. We run facts through our values and instincts and life circumstances and a host of other affective lenses that produce our beliefs. The gap isn’t scientists from Mars and people from Venus. It’s the gap between people from the mythical land we’ll call Rationalia ignoring evidence of how the real people of Earth actually behave.”

As journalist Chris Mooney has pointed out, polling shows that political ideology weighs heavier on an individual’s views about climate change than education level. Better educated Republicans are actually less likely to accept climate science than those who are less educated, while the correlation among Democrats is reversed. This appears to support Ropeik’s conclusion that information is not simply evaluated in a fact-based way, but rather that climate science is interpreted, first and foremost, in a “politically driven” way. To engage the public at a more “human” level, the IPCC and the wider climate science community needs to call on social scientists and communication experts to drive its messaging strategy, contributing to what American University School of Communication Professor Matthew Nisbet has called “a cultural shift in how leaders in U.S. science view public engagement.”

For many, climate change is just an abstract concept – a hazy set of possible scenarios that will play out gradually and often subtly in the all-too-distant future. In a sense, climate change will always be abstract, often guided just as much by faith as by tangible evidence because it is impossible to definitively attribute any specific environmental event to rising temperatures (the recent flooding in Pakistan, for example). But it is important to approach the issue in new and creative ways to make the theoretical more practical. Some skeptics will likely remain intransigent regardless of how irrefutable the evidence becomes. But when climate change is presented as a public health issue, as a national security issue, or as a moral issue, the message appeals to a much broader audience that would otherwise be unwilling, for purely political reasons, to accept the scientific consensus. The leap from science to policy will always be difficult because politics inevitably gets in the way. But if communication experts take on the challenge of overcoming the political obstacles with new messaging techniques and perspectives, climate change can eventually rise from a bottom-tier issue in the public’s eyes and real policy solutions can finally begin to take shape.

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Today’s headlines have heralded two important new developments concerning the Gulf of Mexico oil spill: BP might finally be able to cap the gushing oil well, and the Obama administration has placed a new moratorium on deep-water drilling. Another event of potentially equal importance is receiving far less national attention: a commission created by President Obama to investigate the oil spill disaster is meeting for the first time.

The oil spill commission is the second major advisory panel Obama has formed this year, following his establishment of a blue-ribbon commission on the federal deficit in February. These commissions are addressing two of the most pressing and difficult challenges facing America: energy policy and our yawning national debt.

If, like most people, you are cynical about commissions, you probably assume that these panels will not accomplish anything other than giving our elected officials an excuse for delaying tough decisions while the commissions conduct their work. But my research on over 50 commissions from the past three decades reveals that, during crises, bipartisan commissions often use their powerful political credibility to spur major reforms. (I present these findings in Terrorism and National Security Reform: How Commissions Can Drive Change in Moments of Crisis, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2011.)

Indeed, the oil spill commission, scheduled to report in November, is poised to have a large impact on energy policy. Its mission is to uncover the causes of the spill and make recommendations related to offshore drilling. Congress’ extreme partisanship and the pressures of an election season mean that the House and Senate may not be able to reach agreement on changes to offshore drilling regulations or broader elements of energy policy this year. This gives the commission the opportunity to shape new legislation when it reports in January.

The panel’s membership also boosts its chances for success. Obama has named as the commission’s co-chairs former U.S. Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat, and former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Reilly, a Republican. Graham and Reilly are political moderates, and Obama has appointed pragmatists with scientific, engineering, and environmental backgrounds to the panel’s five other slots. With strong leadership from Graham and Reilly, such a group should be able to follow the example of the 9/11 Commission in conducting its work in a nonpartisan manner and issuing a unanimous report that gains broad public backing. The commission might then be able to prod President Obama and Congress to adopt its reform proposals, much as the 9/11 Commission did in triggering a counterterrorism and intelligence overhaul in 2004.

Less happily, the deficit commission faces much higher hurdles in its mission to bring the federal budget into balance. The lack of an immediate debt crisis means that members of Congress have less incentive to rally around a painful, but necessary, compromise that combines tax increases and cuts to entitlement programs in order to close the deficit.

Moreover, the deficit commission’s membership has poor prospects for maintaining a nonpartisan tone or issuing a unanimous report. The 18 commissioners include six Obama appointees and 12 members of the House and Senate named by the Republican and Democratic congressional leaders. Most of the Obama appointees, including the co-chairs—former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson—are centrists willing to support creative proposals for narrowing the deficit. But many of the legislators on the commission appear less open to compromise. For instance, Republicans Tom Coburn and Paul Ryan oppose any tax hikes, while Democrats Xavier Becerra and Jan Schakowsky seem resistant to significant cuts in Social Security or Medicare.

Even so, the deficit commission, which must report by December 1, is not destined to fail. In creating the panel, Obama ordered that its report required the approval of 14 of its 18 members, creating a lower bar than unanimity. If America’s fiscal situation goes from bad to worse in the coming months, creating a sharper feeling of crisis, commissioners will face growing pressure to reach agreement. It might then just be possible to muster 14 votes within the commission for groundbreaking reforms. Since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have agreed to bring the commission’s proposals to the floor in their respective chambers, a strong supermajority report from the commission might even, at a time of crisis, spur legislative action in Congress.

While the deficit commission faces longer odds for success than the oil spill panel, these two commissions are among our best hopes for restoring the country to fiscal sustainability and setting a new course for energy policy. Far from just being ways for politicians to pass the buck, commissions can be essential tools for bridging partisan divides on the most difficult national challenges.

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British Petroleum has finally figured out how to get under the skin of the American Commander in Chief. President Obama, clearly irritated by BP’s lackluster cleanup efforts, has suggested that the British oil giant place in escrow funds sufficient to compensate those American citizens affected by the spill. (BP has just agreed to put 20 billion into an escrow account.) As a political decision, this is both a necessary and shrewd move on Obama’s part. But the underlying geopolitical realities that this oil spill has brought to the surface cannot be understood unless one thinks a bit more carefully – and creatively – about what the BP debacle really is, and what President Obama’s initial failure to take charge really means.

On the surface, the oil spill in the Gulf is an ecological disaster. On this understanding of what the spill is, the main problem is that gigantic plumes of oil – a precious natural resource – are quickly and relentlessly destroying the environment. As BP’s rogue oil eagerly escapes its underwater prison, our wetlands and diverse wildlife expire ahead-of-schedule and unnecessarily. The theory, then, is one of environmental catastrophe, and the dramatis personae are as vanilla as the theory: Barack Obama, beleaguered American President keen to end the crisis; Tony Hayward, the incompetent CEO of BP who makes for an easy target for the world’s politicians, pundits and public intellectuals; the American public, at once enraged and confused; and the shareholders of BP, hiding in the shadows, hoping that the cost of this crisis will not fall on their backs.

A better theory – more powerful and descriptively accurate – is available. This is no mere ecological disaster, but is, correctly understood, an attack on our political, economic, and cultural infrastructure caused by no single individual or institution but enabled by many. It is now well known that a number of indicators pointed toward the possibility of a spill of this magnitude. And yet BP and the relevant U.S. regulators did nothing.

In retrospect, Obama’s failure to properly reform the Minerals Management Service (MMS) is clearly a colossal error. The MMS, the institution that has for ages allowed the oil industry to self-regulate without meaningful oversight, specifically gave BP the authority to drill in the Gulf in April 2009 without doing a comprehensive environmental review of the potential dangers. The MMS thought it would be sufficient to encourage BP to “exercise caution while drilling due to the indications of shallow gas.” Translation: We know this project could go terribly wrong, but go ahead anyway; Americans simply must be able to enjoy their treasured Escalades.

Yet be careful how you conceptualize the BP debacle. This is not a case where an administration has simply failed to prevent an unforeseeable ecological disaster. Nor is this a case where one actor – Barack Obama or Tony Hayward or anyone else – should be exclusively identified as the critical point of failure. That said, it is true that the Obama Administration failed to properly protect U.S. interests and the American people. However, if we want to move forward, we must view ecological dangers of this order of magnitude as threats to our political, economic and cultural infrastructure. For what does it matter whether a terrorist organization or a multi-national company visits vast harm upon us? In either case our country could be maimed or crippled. Moreover, if we think of an oil spill merely as a regrettable “environmental” problem, we will be too eager to (1) punish a small subset of the guilty parties and (2) adopt stop-gap regulations that aren’t effective in the long run. This simply won’t do. We must instead come to terms with the strategic, economic and moral importance of moving to cleaner, safer sources of energy.

This way of conceptualizing the BP spill has some surprising implications. Consider just three:

First, if President Obama fails going forward to take real, substantial steps to prevent off-shore drilling disasters like this one in the future, he will in effect be failing to protect the United States from a grave political, economic and cultural threat. It would be quite similar to a sitting President failing to protect our economic and political institutions from terrorist attacks.

Second, the real strategic interests of the United States must be given pride of place when energy policy is created and enforced; we must temper our short-term concerns with finding new sources of oil and instead give primacy to clean energy solutions that work.

Third, we must really commit ourselves to clean energy in a way that makes a range of policy blunders – e.g., not forcing BP to do a comprehensive environmental impact and safety study before drilling in the Gulf – beyond the realm of the possible.

The BP spill is no ordinary ecological disaster. It’s an attack on our real, long-term interests as a liberal democracy that values meaningful self-government, human welfare, and responsible energy consumption. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we will be able to move in the right direction.

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With the oil slick from Deepwater Horizon lapping at the shores of Louisiana, all sorts of doubts about the wisdom of offshore drilling are suddenly gushing up to the surface. Environmentalists and liberals long against offshore drilling are latching on to the disaster as hard proof that the potential costs of offshore drilling outweigh any possible benefits. In his recent op-ed for the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote, “President Obama needs to seize the moment; he needs to take on the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd, telling America that courting irreversible environmental disaster for the sake of a few barrels of oil, an amount that will hardly affect our dependence on imports, is a terrible bargain.” Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Florida, agreed, saying that “Drilling too close to the coast poses too great a risk to the economy and the environment of Florida and other coastal states.” Even Governor Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has decided not to allow additional offshore drilling in California in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Obviously, many of these reactions have more to do with politics and popularity than a sustained analysis of the costs and benefits of offshore drilling. But as my colleague John Prandato recently wrote, this is true for almost every aspect of the offshore drilling debate, which tends to be highly political rather than pragmatic in nature. Political considerations were largely behind Obama’s recent lifting of the ban on offshore drilling, a decision aimed at bolstering Republican support for climate change legislation. If it had worked, Obama’s concession might have been an acceptable sacrifice: Republican and conservative Democratic support is necessary to pass climate change legislation, and removing the ban on offshore drilling was seen as a potential trade for that support. Unfortunately, however, Obama’s gamble didn’t suceed. While Republicans dutifully applauded the decision, it isn’t clear that Obama won any actual Republican votes from it. And although some conservative Democrats, notably Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb, may sign on to support the bill, their backing comes at the cost of more liberal and environmentally-minded lawmakers such as Nelson. Thus, as a political strategy aimed at garnering the votes necessary to pass climate change legislation, Obama’s decision to open up offshore drilling is looking like a wash.

Without any political boons, the administration’s justification for its decision must now rest on the laurels of pragmatic policy- essentially, that the benefits of offshore drilling outweigh the potentially catastrophic human and environmental risks that are being made so painfully obvious in the Gulf of Mexico right now. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that offshore drilling is good energy policy. According to the best government estimates, around 18 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude oil were protected under the moratorium. At current consumption rates, if these offshore reserves were to become magically available to consumers tomorrow, they would only be able to meet the U.S.’s total energy needs for about 2 and a half years. But the oil will not be available anytime in the near future. At the very soonest, production would not start for at least another seven years, and there would be “no significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.” Overall, it is not likely that offshore drilling will go very far towards reducing American dependence on foreign oil imports, nor will it have a meaningful impact on the price and availability of oil. In short, it is not a solution, or even a partial solution, to America’s energy problems.

Essentially, then, Obama has agreed to a questionable energy policy with potentially devastating impacts as a political sacrifice for votes he didn’t end up getting. Not a great deal. So what to do? In all likelihood, the future of offshore drilling is likely to remain a matter of political concessions aimed at hammering out energy legislation. But that doesn’t mean Obama shouldn’t at least take the opportunity given to him- as perverse as it sounds- by the Deepwater Horizon spill to ask American citizens to seriously examine the future of America’s energy security and our nation’s dependence on oil. Were Obama to step up and admit he made a miscalculation on the safety of offshore drilling, he could make an important move toward pushing Americans to invest in and adopt clean energy as an alternative to short-lived and dangerous oil drilling. While the Deepwater Horizon spill may be just one accident, it should be enough to remind us that sustainable energy, not offshore drilling, is where we should be focusing our efforts.

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