The Focus on Energy Independence Is Misplaced

For 35 years, the policy of the United States government has been to seek "energy independence." In fact, energy independence is more than just a policy goal. It has become a patriotic cliche: motherhood, apple pie and energy independence. Every president since Richard Nixon has promised to lead us toward it, if not to actually achieve it. Barack Obama and John McCain both promised it during the campaign. Countless commission reports and newspaper editorials have called for it.

Meanwhile, during those same 35 years, we have been moving away from energy independence, not toward it. When our quest began, America acquired a third of the oil we consumed by buying it from foreigners. Now it's two-thirds. Despite all the rhetoric, we are twice as dependent.

"Independence" sounds healthy. Yet we make no attempt to be independent of other countries in regard to other goods or services. Actually, the policy of seeking energy independence is a dramatic exception to the broader American policy of free trade. The theory of free trade holds that a nation is better off when its citizens are permitted to buy goods from foreigners at any price they wish to pay and worse off if the government interferes with these arrangements. By this definition, the quest for energy independence is another form of protectionism. That word annoys a lot of people, and it doesn't settle the debate. But it does put the issue of energy independence in a useful perspective.

Free trade is always a hard sell. If you don't buy the theory in the first place, there is no reason you should buy it in the case of oil.

But all of those presidents, from Nixon to Obama, have claimed to believe in free trade, and most of them proved that they meant it in regard to most products. Yet they all have made an exception for oil. Why? America imports and exports a vast array of products. What is the patriotic necessity of eliminating imports of this particular product?

The reason, of course, is security. Specifically, two types of security: economic and strategic. These are valid concerns. Periodically, foreign oil producers gain enough market power to hold us for ransom.

And our foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, must take into account the interests of oil producers in a way that we could live without, to say the least. Energy independence presumably would free us of these nuisances.

But what is energy independence? The simplest answer would be when we produce as much energy as we consume: net energy imports (basically, oil imports) of zero. But our largest supplier of foreign oil is Canada, which sold us about a fifth of all the oil we purchased abroad in the first eight months of this year. Is there any reason being independent of Canadian oil must be a major national priority? No good reason comes to mind. The same is true of Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, Algeria, Ecuador, Brazil and a host of other suppliers. Saudi Arabia and Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, the second- and third-largest suppliers to the United States, are perhaps a different story. But oil is fungible, meaning that one barrel is more or less the same as another. In terms of achieving energy independence, this is both good and bad news. If we really wanted to avoid importing oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, we could do it; we would simply ban imports from those countries and replace them with oil from places we prefer to buy from. We have done that with Iran. Trouble is, the shunned countries could then sell their oil in other places, we would have to buy an equal amount from other places and the net effect on the oil market would be almost nil.

The only way the United States alone can weaken the economic and political power of oil is to reduce the amount we use, regardless of where it comes from. So consuming less oil -- as opposed to replacing imported oil with domestic supplies -- should be the goal. What's more, there are other good reasons -- better reasons -- for reducing our oil consumption, including less harm to the environment and, above all, the reduction of greenhouse gases to prevent or mitigate global warming.

But there is no special magic about energy independence. The goal is not so much a mistake as it is a muddled concept and a red herring. The benefits of energy conservation are incremental. They begin with the first barrel saved and continue indefinitely -- even past the official independence point, where the oil we're using equals the oil we're producing and net oil imports from all foreign countries are zero.

Every barrel of oil we don't consume reduces the market and political power of nations such as Saudi Arabia, no matter where that barrel would have come from. Likewise, every barrel we don't consume helps the environment and slows global warming, and whether it is foreign or domestic oil makes no difference. Energy conservation is what's important. Energy independence doesn't matter.

Roger Sant is co-founder of AES Corp., a Virginia-based power company with plants in 29 countries. Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine and an occasional contributor to The Post.