The day that changed everything had surprisingly little impact on U.S. energy policy.
A decade after Sept. 11, 2001, the United States is still importing as much as 60 percent of its petroleum supply, much of it from the unstable Middle East. And many experts? predictions for how the U.S. would respond to the attacks have fallen flat: We didn?t open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, for example, or launch an all-out effort to lessen reliance on foreign oil through conservation and alternative fuels.
Continue ReadingAn even bigger casualty, perhaps, was the expectation that a nation at war would put aside its ideological differences and unite behind a common energy strategy.
?It didn?t take too long to get back to business as usual on energy policy,? said Adam Sieminski, the chief energy economist for Deutsche Bank ? who, like many experts, had expected the attacks to aid the push for energy independence, on both the supply and demand sides.
What happened? One likely reason, Sieminski said: ?All of the complicating factors that were acting on energy policy before Sept. 11 still existed, and getting people to compromise on their very strongly felt positions turned out to be a lot harder to do.?
Instead, former Senate energy chairman J. Bennett Johnston said, the biggest shift in the U.S. energy picture since 2001 has been the ?game-changing? boom in natural gas from shale ? obviously, not the work of Al Qaeda. Other major changes have included the surge in hybrid vehicles and the rising influence of China on the global oil market, said Dan Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate strategy for the Center for American Progress.
The U.S. energy picture has also evolved in other ways in recent years, as seen in the aftereffects of last year?s BP spill and in President Barack Obama?s promotion of higher fuel-efficiency standards and clean energy under the banner of green jobs. But again, Sept. 11?s fingerprints are hard to see.
As it turned out, ?9/11 was not basically over energy,? argued Johnston, who is now a lobbyist. ?9/11 was such a catalyzing event ? it brought the parties together. It brought the American public together. People said, ?We?re going to build a stronger nation.? ? But it?s not like from that emerged cap and trade and ANWR and Yucca Mountain and fuel economy standards.?
To others, what should have been a wake-up call became a missed opportunity.
Sept. 11 ?would have been a wonderful teachable moment to get serious about energy efficiency,? said Rocky Mountain Institute co-founder Amory Lovins, a consultant and scientist who has written books on energy security. ?That isn?t how it turned out. It would have made an interesting alternative history.?
Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he thinks the security implications of Sept. 11 did have a lot to do with President George W. Bush?s declaration in 2006 that ?America is addicted to oil? and needs to devise fuel from new sources, such as switchgrass ? both statements that Ebell considers ?unfortunate.?
Otherwise, ?it seemed like the impetus from the terrorist attacks really carried over into creating the Department of Homeland Security and attacking Afghanistan and Iraq,? Ebell added. ?And there was unity on those things, but it didn?t go very far beyond that into domestic policy.?
But 10 years ago, it seemed reasonable to expect that the nation?s energy ways would have to change.
?Mideast oil funds terrorism,? said then-Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski, a supporter of ANWR drilling, in a Sept. 17, 2001, article by Greenwire.
The same article quoted a policy expert from the conservative group Citizens for a Sound Economy as warning that ?our unwillingness to meet more of our energy needs at home may have helped to strengthen our enemies abroad.?
A month after the attacks, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman drew a similar line between gas-guzzling Americans and the financing of Saudi schools that preach hostility to non-Muslims. Friedman went on to quote a Johns Hopkins foreign policy specialist as saying: ?Either we get rid of our minivans or Saudi Arabia gets rid of its textbooks.?
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