What Could Have Been... | Green Energy News

March 16, 2003 – Vol.7 No.51

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN. WHAT COULD STILL BE.

It’s too bad we don’t have time machines. If we did we could go back to the late 1970’s and help President Jimmy Carter pass an energy policy, as he suggested for the U.S., that would move the nation towards energy independence. If we could go back in time and do that, maybe this war in Iraq wouldn’t be taking place.

If we had created an energy policy more than two decades ago that could have weaned us, and perhaps the rest of the world, from over-reliance on fossil fuels, that policy might have encouraged the oil exporting nations to seek other, better uses for this precious natural resource than burning it for fuel. They could have been forced by economic pressures to seek other market, product and business opportunities for crude oil that would have built new industries and created the jobs that go with them.

Further, in our world-of-what-could-have-been - a world no longer lusting for oil - the flow of easy money that fosters greed and builds dictatorships would have ceased long ago. Iraq and other nations would have concerned themselves more with building their own economies and industries and trading with others, than in self-gain.

Though we can’t travel back in time, we can at least attempt to shape the future. We could begin to back away from crude-oil-as-energy right now. We could encourage oil exporting nations to begin seeking other opportunities for their resources. And if those countries don’t know exactly which products, which industries, the world needs, then we need to tell them and help them, if needed, to make the transition from oil-for-energy to oil-as-a-precious-resource.

Right now it looks as though both the U.S. and Iraq will lose in this war - irreplaceable lives, Iraq militarily and sovereignty, and the U.S. in world public opinion as the admired champion of free will.