Yesterday, we teetered on the verge of a shooting war with Iran, something that neocons are salivating over, but something that the rest of the country has little stomach for. And, for what? To keep the Strait of Hormuz unmolested, i.e. preserve shipping lanes for Middle East petroleum.
How about, instead of continuing to play globocop for nations that can afford to protect their own interests, but can’t be bothered (and indeed are hell-bent on suicide), we, instead work an economic angle that would address the matter at the well-head?
Step 1 – Build nuke plants like crazy, all over the US. Use modern, “fail-safe” designs, and reopen Yucca Mountain to handle the waste. This’ll greatly reduce our dependence on oil, gas, and coal power generation. Nuclear power is already the cleanest and safest of all power generation systems, and present-day tech makes it even better.
Step 2 – Drill, baby, drill! Mine, baby, mine! Keep pulling that stuff out of the ground.
Step 3 – Sell, baby, sell!! Become the preferred supplier to all those nations reliant on the Middle East’s oil. We’re already net-exporters of carbon energy thanks to technology (and no thanks to lefty-luddites freaking about fracking), so why not really go for it? By going nuke-heavy, we free up even more for export.
Step 4 – Walk away from the Middle East. Not our circus, not our monkeys. If they start making trouble for each other, that’ll prop up the price of oil and gas, giving us benefit from exports (and offsetting the price drops caused by using less, thanks to our nuke plants). If they try to prop up their prices by cutting back on production, as they so often do, we undercut them. If they try to flood the market and drive our domestic production into dormancy (their oil is usually cheaper to extract), their economies still take a hit and the West still comes out ahead.
If the Europeans are worried about the Middle East and the Bear, they should spend on their own defense, instead of riding on the backs of the American taxpayers.
A win for the domestic economy, a win on the geopolitical stage, and a win for the American taxpayer. Win, win, win!!!
Doing all this will, of course, require two things. First, a paradigm shift in the regulatory environment and its hostility to good things like cheap energy. Second, an acknowledgment that forcing the nation into renewables is a fool’s errand, and that going nuclear is Step 1 in dealing with global warming, if it needs to be dealt with.
Doing all this will also make millions of progressive and neocon brains explode, Scanners-style.
Which wouldn’t really bother me all that much.
Win, win, win, win!!!!
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