The True Cost of Oil is Always Too High

March 1, 2011

Defenders of Wildlife President Rodger Schlickeisen

The National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog this week asked,

“How Should Obama React to Spiking Oil Prices?”

Here’s what Defenders’ president Rodger Schlickeisen had to say:

If President Obama is serious about ending the ongoing gas crisis and setting this country on the path towards a safe, reliable clean energy future, he needs to follow through with the plan he laid out during the State of the Union: ending Big Oil’s massive subsidies and applying the considerable savings toward an increasing national investment in renewable energy sources.

Whether in the Middle East or our own Gulf of Mexico, the oil market is reflective of the industry that produces it: volatile, unreliable and dangerous. If what this country is looking for is stability, we’re going to have to make some changes.

To truly – and permanently – solve our oil problem, we must rapidly expand our investments in clean, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Renewable power from large-scale solar and wind farms can help to speed up the transition to a clean-energy future, as long as we also make sure that renewable development is done right, in the places that it makes the most sense.

The bottom line is that the cost of oil is always too high. Whether it is paid at the pump, through tax subsidies to billion-dollar corporations, in devastation to our environment or with human lives, Americans can no longer afford to depend on this dirty and dangerous fuel.

Big Oil and its supporters in Congress know that opening more areas for drilling in the U.S. will not mean a thing when it comes to the prices at the pump – not in the coming years and certainly not in time for this summer’s driving season. They’re just using the higher prices as a vehicle to argue for their own profit-driven agendas. And the oil companies certainly don’t care about saving money for the typical American. If they did, they wouldn’t be urging their allies in Congress to continue the outrageous and unnecessary $5 billion in subsidies they receive every year, paid out of hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

It’s time for Big Oil to get its dirty hands out of our pockets. We need to take back those billion-dollar giveaways and secure our energy independence by investing that money in clean, renewable energy, energy efficiency and the technologies needed to get our cars going further on a gallon of gas. In doing so, we also invest in our economy, putting Americans back to work in jobs that can’t be sent overseas.

The bottom line is that the cost of oil is always too high. Whether it is paid at the pump, through tax subsidies to billion-dollar corporations, in devastation to our environment or with human lives, Americans can no longer afford to depend on this dirty and dangerous fuel. If President Obama wants to help end our harmful addiction to oil and move us toward ending a constantly precarious and uncertain fuel fixation, he will see high gas prices not as a crisis, but as a wake-up call.