Energy Independence Bites Back

Conservatives have been talking nonsense about energy policy for weeks and John McCain seems ever-more-invested in it. But when you hear something dumb like this there’s something that should be kept in mind:

Sen. Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power, but Americans know better than that. We must use all resources and develop all technologies necessary to rescue our economy from the damage caused by rising oil prices and to restore the health of our planet.

What you’re hearing here is, in part, a bit of political opportunism from progressives coming back to blow up in our faces. Energy independence was simply never the real issue. Canada has many fewer people in it than the United States has, but it produces more hydropower than we do:

Under the circumstances, there’s no reason we should aspire to become “independent” of Canadian electricity. And, indeed, since many parts of the United States are quite a bit closer to Canada than they are to Texas or Alaska there’s no reason to think that energy autarky would or could ever be an efficient way to allocate resources. There’s nothing wrong with importing clean energy when doing so is economically reasonable, and there’s nothing good about domestic production of dirty energy. But “energy independence” and the insidious “foreign oil” polled better than did more serious talking points so the rhetoric of energy autarky got a ton of validation. And then along comes the folks who want to say we need to “drill here, drill now” and it’s probably true that insofar as you think, wrongly, that the nationality of our energy resources is the main issue that domestic exploration is part of the solution.