When Bush and Cheney doubled down on fossil fuels: A fateful choice for the climate
Liam Downey and Timmons Roberts | July 7, 2016
The scalding report of the Iraq Inquiry, or Chilcot report, released this week about Tony Blair’s decision to support George W. Bush in his drive to invade Iraq showed how bad ideas can set off devastating trains of impacts that echo down the decades. Blair was widely villainized in his country for putting the “special relationship” with the U.S. above much safer options of containment and multilateralism. But where did the U.S.’s “bad idea” come from?
Fifteen years ago this spring, the United States took a determinative turn when President George W. Bush, in his second week in office, created the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG). The group was tasked with coming up with a solution on what to do about the U.S.’s heavy dependence on oil from the unstable Middle East. The NEPDG never reconsidered U.S. or global dependence on petroleum. Instead, seeing a future of relentlessly increasing global demand for fossil fuels, the White House believed global oil production would have to increase dramatically by 2025 for the U.S. and the world to remain economically stable.
Looking back, one could argue that this “oil escalation” strategy failed on all counts, exacerbating instability in the Middle East and setting the U.S. and the world back a decade and a half in the fight against climate change. Now, we face the retirement of aging coal and nuclear power plants, and a conjuncture where low oil prices are driving a new boom in the Middle East where extraction is the cheapest in the world, as just reported by the Internation Energy Agency. This is a pivotal moment in which we face a choice similar to the one that President Bush faced then: double down on what we know (fossil fuels) by building a new generation of natural gas wells, pipelines, and power plants to power our inefficient vehicles and buildings, or, make a decisive move toward renewables and efficiency.
The Bush/Cheney chapter is illuminating in this context. Headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, the NEPDG issued a report—portentously called the National Energy Policy (the NEP)—only four months after Bush took office. Cheney and the NEPDG met with nearly 300 top energy industry officials, including 18 oil, mining, and gas associations, BP, and the vice president of Exxon Mobil. The NEPDG had just one meeting with environmental specialists, after the document was drafted. Ominously declaring that “Energy security must be a priority of U.S. trade and foreign policy,” the NEP’s overarching goals were to increase global oil production, diversify our foreign oil suppliers, and clear away any economic and political obstacles that might get in the way of U.S. procurement of petroleum. This would, of course, keep the country dependent on foreign oil and the companies that sell it, but would hopefully improve national security by maintaining global economic stability and reducing U.S. dependence on any single foreign oil-producing nation.
Read more: http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/planetpolicy/posts/2016/07/07-bush-cheney-fossil-fuels-downey-roberts
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