I’ve written before about Oil and our military policy. This article on Slate touches on some of the same points in much more detail.

Namely that both the US economy and the US military feed on a diet heavy in oil, that our policy for securing that oil is in serious trouble, first from the islamic revolution in Iran, and now due to Osama’s attempts to destabilize Saudi Arabia’s government and due to our own success in destabilizing Iraq.

If our oil supply is seriously curtailed both our economy and our military start to falter, one undermining the other in a sort of “death spiral,” further reducing our ability to project influence in the world.

It would seem prudent in these circumstances to pursue means of acheiving greater energy independence. I’m not against approaching this problem on a number of fronts, but drilling in ANWAR is of such minor consequence, energy supply-wise, that it isn’t worth all the distraction and effort. The same goes for nuclear power. We have enough trouble figuring out what to do with the waste that we’ve accumulated over the past 6 decades of nuclear energy, is it really worth the pain to try and actually build more plants, especially when Oil is primarily a transporation fuel these days?

Meanwhile, investments in alternative energy and fuel efficiency are largely ignored, which is a shame, because these are exactly the sorts of things that could do well for american companies as a couple of billion people in China and India are already rushing up the economic ladder, with all the energy demands that brings.