According to this morning's USA Today, the effort to get America off of Saudi oil is expanding:
Efforts to stem America's appetite for oil, nearly two-thirds of it imported, is getting new attention in Congress with a push from an unusual coalition of environmentalists, evangelical Christians and conservatives.The diverse groups are putting pressure on lawmakers to find ways to curtail oil use, especially in transportation, and to promote alternative fuels and new technologies less depended on fossil fuels.
Environmentalists view reduced oil use as a way to curtail pollution and lower the risk of climate change. A number of conservatives and others argue the dependence on oil imports poses a security threat.
Fascinating. This is the geo-green" alliance which I wrote about the other day. It also adds the Evangelical Christian "Creation Care" movement, making it a highly potent force. Potent enough to take on the Big Oil executives who just got done lying their way through Congress? Perhaps. According to USAToday:
Both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in Congress are listening [to this coalition].A bipartisan group of senators planned to unveil legislation Wednesday they say would save 2.5 million barrels of oil a day within a decade and 10 million barrels a day by 2031. The country now uses a little over 20 million barrels of oil a day, most of it for transportation.
Currently, the U.S. consumes over 20 million barrels per day of oil, well more than half of which is imported. Cutting 10 million barrels per day would essentially eliminate U.S. oil imports and get us out of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of 19 9/11 hijackers. This pleases those concerned with U.S. national security (former CIA Director James Woolsey and Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser to President Reagan), those concerned about saving God's creation (Gary Bauer, president of American Values), and those concerned about global warming and other environmental issues (the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Apollo Alliance).
The question is, can all these groups, representing tens of millions of Americans, defeat a handful of super-rich, super-corrupt oil executives and their allies in the Bush Adminstration? Stay tuned...