Bipartisan, multipronged solution needed

Ron Levesque, Las Vegas

Thursday, July 3, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Thomas Friedman’s commentary in the June 24 edition of the Las Vegas Sun (“Bush peddles oil to an addicted nation”) makes it seem as if it were only during the current administration that this country discovered it is sorely in need of a real energy policy. Mr. Friedman (and the rest of us) should indeed be angry about this, but not just with this president. In 1973, when global cooling was the looming catastrophe that was going to end civilization as we know it, we began to discover just how economically and geopolitically vulnerable our reliance on foreign oil had made us.

Since then, we’ve had seven presidents and 18 congresses. Collectively, they have failed to put together a coherent strategy that would form the basis of a sound energy policy: one that blends short- to midterm compromises (increased exploration, drilling and refining capacity, enhanced clean coal technology, and oil shale development) with long-term, cost-effective alternative or renewable energy sources such as nuclear energy, solar and wind power, geothermal, and advanced hybrid electric or fuel cell technologies.

There is no immediate, simple or single solution to this problem. We can neither drill nor conserve our way out of this mess. Nor can we immediately begin using some new set of miracle technologies that will drop the price of oil or end our dependence on it.

This problem, which has been steadily growing for 35-plus years, will begin to get solved only when our politicians, and all of the corporate and environmental special interest groups that lobby them, recognize that blocking the other side’s proposal is not the way to a sound energy policy.