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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At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 28, just as the world’s attention was becoming riveted to the pro-democracy protests taking place in Egypt, a pro-democracy leader from another repressive regime, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, sent an audio message to the Forum’s influential and powerful participants. In the course of her message, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate called upon the global community to begin investing in her country with developments in technology, infrastructure and microlending services. While Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi cautioned that, “we also need to pay close attention to the costs and collateral damage of our development, whether environmental or social,” she asserted that responsible investment was necessary to bring 55 million Burmese people into the 21^st century.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s message comes at a time when global attention has been fixated on the turmoil in the Middle East, leaving little airtime for vital discussions of reform in other oppressive regimes. Indeed, the only government who seems to have paid serious attention to her Davos remarks has been the Burmese military junta itself. After Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s message on increased development in Burma ignited a debate as to whether this was a call for the West to lift economic sanctions which inhibit Western investment, her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), issued a statement two weeks ago re-iterating its support of “targeted sanctions.” In response, the mouthpiece of the military, the government newspaper The New Light of Myanmar, warned that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD could meet “tragic ends” for publicly supporting sanctions. Instead of discussing new alternatives for Western companies to invest in the Burmese people, the conversation has been diverted right back to where the junta wants it – old arguments over sanctions.

Meanwhile, as the West dithers and the NLD clings to old ideas, Myanmar’s closest neighbors, such as Thailand and China, have stepped into the gap – and have often blatantly disregarded Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s plea for respecting the environment and workers’ rights.

For instance, the new Dawei Development Project, spearheaded by Italian-Thai, one of Bangkok’s largest conglomerates and run by one of its most respected families, aims to create an industrial zone in southern Myanmar that would employ millions of Burmese. Yet, the Dawei project has the potential not only to decimate an otherwise pristine environment along Myanmar’s lengthy Andaman Sea coastline but also to endanger the lives of millions of Burmese workers and area residents. Thailand’s Oxford-educated prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was actually quoted in the International Herald Tribune as saying, “Some industries are not suitable to be located in Thailand … That is why [Ital-Thai] set up there [in Dawei]” – effectively implying that Burmese workers’ lives and living conditions are worth far less than their Thai counterparts. The IHT article goes on to detail how Myanmar, unlike Thailand, lacks the kinds of laws that require environmental impact reports and hearings with local residents before moving forward – making it easy for unscrupulous foreign companies to do business with the unscrupulous government.

Thai companies are not the only ones to invest in Myanmar without fear of pesky regulations. In recent years, Chinese companies have swarmed their southern neighbor, looking to harvest its abundant natural resources for use in resource-hungry China. Last October – just before the November elections and the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest – I spent two weeks traveling around Burma. Almost every local I talked to, from lowly souvenir seller to middle-class innkeeper and wealthy, Western-educated business people, told me about the encroaching presence of Chinese business. Many believed that their country was being stripped of its resources by Chinese businesses, while the generals profited. For instance, despite having numerous hydroelectric plants, gas reserves and other means of producing electricity, the government sells most of it to neighbors like the Chinese and Thais, while Burmese citizens endure near-constant blackouts. A local businessman in Mandalay I spoke to outlined Chinese business involvement in the country: Chinese corporations buy Burmese raw resources like timber at bargain prices, while still lining generals’ pockets; those raw resources are made into goods in Chinese factories; those goods are then sold back to the Burmese at much higher prices, with the generals and the government profiting a second time around.

What can be done? Despite the iron grip the military junta has on its people, there are reasons to hope. Even though the NLD reiterated its support for sanctions, younger Burmese activists, as well as increasing numbers of Western observers, are beginning to agitate more for the lifting of sanctions. As Mark Mackinnon points out in a recent article in Canada’s Globe and Mail, the West does business with China, despite its authoritarian regime and corrupt practices that are similar to Myanmar’s, much to the benefit of millions of Chinese people, who have been pulled out of poverty due to economic engagement with the West. Myanmar is also an increasingly more open society than, say, North Korea. While most Burmese do not have mobile phones because the SIM card alone costs $1000, almost all of the people I met had Facebook profiles and email accounts.  Through these Internet portals, many people engage with foreign tourists they have met and keep up with international news. Though the generals have been very good at oppressing the people in most other ways, they seem to have underestimated the power of the global web revolution. As generals like 78-year old Than Shwe begin to pass away and the Burmese people engage more with the outside world, there is a chance for a transition to the stable and open democracy that its people have been hoping to see for decades.

Amelia Salyers graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a degree in English literature. Having lived and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, she has recently returned to the United States after two years spent working at a communications agency based in Bangkok, Thailand.

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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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Another milestone in humanity’s quest for water will soon be conquered! A Canadian entrepreneur, Ron Stamp, is set to sail for a fjord in Greenland and harvest massive chunks of pure iceberg.  His hope is to eventually sell the converted ice as bottled water for up to $10 per unit. Crazy? Maybe, but Mr. Stamp’s actions represent both an increasing trend of resource extraction and the creativity needed to sustain a better future.

Entrepreneurs like Mr. Stamp exhibit a valuable frontier mentality. They expand the boundaries of human activity, helping to open new geographic markets and take advantage of previously untapped resources. For centuries such entrepreneurs have been the drivers of our economic growth and prosperity.

Yet this frontier mentality is a double-edged sword when applied to scarce water resources. The world’s access to a sustainable freshwater supply is already at a tipping point. 800 million people, particularly in politically unstable Middle Eastern and North African countries, currently lack access to safe water. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live under water-stressed conditions. Unless we act quickly, we could all potentially have to pay $10 for a glass of regular tap water, let alone iceberg water.

To meet this water challenge, entrepreneurs like Mr. Stamp must redirect their focus and energy. Rather that continue to exploit far-off geographic frontiers, they must help the United States and other nations more efficiently manage the water resources close at hand. This means more than building additional dams and reservoirs. It requires a host of creative measures, including adopting drip-irrigation technologies on a mass scale, preventing leakages in municipal piping systems and better capturing rainwater in urban environments.

Most importantly, entrepreneurs must help the greater business community understand the importance of managing freshwater sources. Water-use and its related cost, whether financial or environmental, must be taken into account regardless of industry, product or service. Only by integrating water into our daily cost-benefit analysis can we hope to reduce water mismanagement and conserve precious resources.

So please, Mr. Stamp, before you move on to the next iceberg take a moment and think how you could help improve water management back on the mainland.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

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Saturday, Iran celebrated their great victory over the “arrogant powers” by opening their first nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The opening coincided with dynamic conversation on Jeff Goldberg’s recent article in The Atlantic painting a picture of military action as a foregone conclusion, and prominent foreign policy leaders such as former UN Ambassador John Bolton fanned the flames by renewing calls for a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Dangerously, the discussion on how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program has moved away from the case for bombing Iran to who and when, ignoring the painful lessons learned from depicting military action as a clean and straightforward solution. We are still reeling from the burdensome commitments of Iraq and Afghanistan: a military response by either the United States or Israel will take much more than just bombs and have major potential consequences beyond Iran, realities noticeably absent from much of the conversation.

The most obvious and immediately damaging example is world oil supply. Iran could block the Strait of Hormuz, and therefore an astounding 20% of the world’s oil supply. Its estimated oil prices would shoot from $80-$100 to $400-$500, creating a devastating strain on the world economy and possibly result in increased military action.

Beyond the economic blow, the United States would face a whole new set of challenges with the ensuing shifts in the regional power balance, and with decreased leverage to confront them. Many of the advances in foreign policy goals laid out in Obama’s Cairo speech would be discredited, and while Arab heavyweights such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia might privately condone an attack on a regional threat, the public rebuke would support the goals of Islamic extremists by playing right into their rhetoric of the American aggressor.

Another likely consequence is exacerbated regional instabilities through attacks by proxies: Hizbullah would threaten Lebanon’s fragile state, and Israel would face increased attacks from Hamas and destroy any chance of a Middle East peace deal. Iran could leverage their growing regional authority and connections to terrorist groups, even cause complete breakdown in Iraq and Afghanistan. If a decision to bomb occurs before IAEA inspectors are removed from Iran or before verification that Iran violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States risks condemnation from Turkey, Russia, China, and other regional powers, effecting a broad set of policy issues and their willingness to cooperate on regional priorities beyond Iran. It would be a stinging and debilitating blow to our diplomatic and strategic goals.

Further, since Bushehr, Arak, Natanz, and other known nuclear sites are jointly run by Russia or monitored by the IAEA, the development of weapons-grade uranium would likely occur at a secret site, similar to Qom. An effective military strike would require bombing multiple locations over an extended period of time, including nuclear sites, research facilities, and military installations, resulting in an inevitably high number of Iranian and international civilian casualties. Moreover, the lack of knowledge on the exact nature of the targets could result in extensive civilian and environmental devastation due to nuclear fallout. There is also a possibility bombing could be futile, and Iran would pursue a nuclear weapon with fervor under the guise of legitimatized self-defense.

On a domestic front, the degree to which the election protests took the United States by surprise reveals our limited understanding of Iran’s politics. The country’s rising prominence in the region increases the significance of their domestic situation to the outside world. The protests, while harshly contained, indicated the hard-liners’ hold on the country is not absolute. A time-tested result of outside military intervention in the region is a surge of national unity: if there is a bomb Iran policy would likely drive Iranian’s moderates into the arms of the regime, snuffing out any potential future generation of leaders and reforms.

A nuclear weaponized Iran is a real and pressing threat. But before we resort to a military option, calculating what would happen the next day, the following week, and subsequent years is equally critical to our security priorities. We need to ask questions about the challenges and the capability of meeting them. Attacking Iran’s nuclear ambitions may seem like an easy short-term response for a militarily dominant United States, but the last ten years of American involvement in the Middle East demonstrate the extensive commitments required beyond just a few bombs.

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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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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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On Wednesday, President Obama announced a proposal to lift the long-standing ban on offshore oil and natural gas drilling off much of the south Atlantic and north Alaskan coasts, as well as parts of the Gulf of Mexico. The announcement has drawn the ire of critics across the political spectrum. Some on the left are outraged by Obama’s “betrayal” of his environmentalist base, and some on the right have called the extent of new offshore access insufficient. In reality, the policy he outlined will do very little to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and it will have no effect on oil prices in the foreseeable future. And Obama knows it. From the administration’s perspective, this announcement is about one thing: building support in the Senate for comprehensive climate change and energy legislation.

Studies have shown that offshore drilling will have very little impact on domestic oil prices. In fact, not a drop of new oil from this proposal would be seen for at least seven years, and the modest uptick in production and negligible price dip would not even be felt for two decades. Offshore drilling’s impact on real prices pales in comparison to that which could result from sound financial regulatory reform to curb speculation in commodity futures exchanges, or from putting a stop to the supply manipulation routinely practiced by OPEC in response to the artificially rising demand.

Nevertheless, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham – who is expected to introduce a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman within the next month – has insisted that offshore drilling be part of the energy equation of the future. Obama’s announcement on Wednesday follows similar concessions in recent months to conservative nuclear and coal interests. The administration’s Fiscal Year 2011 budget request included $36 billion for the nuclear loan guarantee program and the stimulus bill included $3.8 billion for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) research and development.

With an otherwise small chance of success for a Senate bill resembling the House version that passed last summer, these were concessions that Obama knew he simply had to make. Comprehensive climate change and energy legislation can not pass on a strictly party-line basis. The most recent analysis of the prospects for legislation in the Senate by Environment and Energy Daily lists 41 “yes” or “likely yes” voters – with Graham being the sole Republican – and 30 “fence sitters”, consisting of 19 Democrats and 11 Republicans. But last August, a group of 10 moderate Democrats from mostly Midwest coal-dependent states said in a letter to Obama that they would not support a bill that limits greenhouse gas emissions unless American industries are protected from competition by countries that do not adopt similar standards. And just last week, a separate group of 10 coastal Democrats wrote a letter to Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham to insist that they would not support a bill that “greatly expands” offshore drilling. With so many competing interests within the Democratic Party, Republican support will be not just important, but necessary.

Comprehensive climate change and energy legislation will be a heavy lift, and the end result will be far from perfect. But if Obama’s wink-and-nod to the oil lobby frames the debate in his favor and bridges the political divide on comprehensive legislation, then this is a price that proponents of a strong and lasting climate change solution should be more than willing to pay.

With this latest concession, Obama has shown a willingness to slight a major portion of his political base for the sake of bipartisan support for comprehensive climate change and energy policy. In an op-ed co-authored by Kerry and Graham in The New York Times, the two Senators acknowledged that “this process requires honest give-and-take and genuine bipartisanship.” Now it’s time for those who support a broad ‘all-of-the-above’ package of energy solutions to come to the table and help shape legislation that will put a price on carbon and lead America toward a clean, secure, and independent energy future.

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