Oil dependency: energy-related security crises coming sooner than expected.

• Author: Frodl, Michael G.
• Position: Energy - Viewpoint essay

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VIEWPOINT

The average global temperature has not risen now for a couple of years. A barrel of crude oil is down $100 from its recent high and gasoline costs half of what it did last summer. So why still bother with energy policy? Don't we have other, more immediate priorities today, such as saving our homes and jobs?

There is still one major reason to keep pursuing energy reform: national security. The United States must change its energy ways not because of climate change--although protecting the environment is still a priority--but because our dependency on crude oil makes the nation vulnerable.

Anyone who is still agnostic about the need to diversify energy sources should look at what happened in Europe this winter. Several years ago, Russia and Ukraine got into a squabble about unpaid natural gas bills. Russia turned off natural gas supplies to Ukraine. Europe became "collateral damage" in that fight, because its move to cleaner energy made it overly dependent on natural gas, and 25 percent of those needs are being supplied by Russia. The problem is that Europe's natural gas flows not from Russia, but indirectly through Ukraine. Russia is happy to use energy as a weapon to bludgeon former Soviet satellites back into the Greater Russian imperial fold, as well as to tighten its grip over Europe.

In 2006, when Russia decided to pull on Ukraine's energy chain, an arrangement was agreed to between Moscow and Kiev, with the intermediation of Brussels. The European Union then announced it was going to reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas. Two years later Moscow pulled the chain again, but the European Union was no less dependent on Russia.

This is happening in the middle of one of Europe's coldest winters in decades. Snow fell in London in early November, the first time since the 1920s. Canals in Holland froze over and people went skating. Russia leveraged the cold, just as it used "Father Winter" to stop Napoleon's armies and then Hitler's. In the Balkans, homes went without heat and light and factories shut down. The Czech Republic actually restarted a Soviet era nuclear reactor--something it had been obliged to retire in order to join the European Union. European newspapers denounced the trap of "cleaner" energy and demanded that Brussels back out of the forced march towards natural gas. But it was too late.

Even more frightening for average Europeans is that Moscow is now telling Brussels that Europe can be...