No energy policy costs $95 a barrel

The Mideast crisis underscores the pressing need for a national energy policy.

We need to develop a comprehensive approach that will reduce our reliance on energy imports, encourage conservation and permit production of the energy we need to fuel our major energy users: transportation, stationary motors and space heating and cooling.

Transportation - including air, ground and sea mobility in industrial, agricultural, commuting and recreational areas - relies primarily on crude oil products.

Stationary motors - such as those used in industrial production, municipal and urban services (e.g. sewage disposal pumps, elevators and household appliances) and space heating and cooling - rely primarily on electricity. The electricity is generated by coal, nuclear power, hydropower, natural gas and other sources of energy in addition to oil.

Over the past decade, the relatively low price of imported oil has increased our dependency on energy form a very dangerous, unstable region of the world, the Persian Gulf.

As a result, we are paying a steep price for that dependency - more than $2 billion a month to maintain our troops in the Mideast. If the cost of this deployment is added to the price of each barrel of oil we import, it means we are paying over $95 a barrel.

At the same time we have placed other sources of energy off limits, as pointed out in a recent report by Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy, a group headed by the former president of the Academy of Scientists and including several Nobel laureates.

According to the report, hydropower is off limits because people oppose the destruction of pristine valleys and rivers, the dislocation of fisheries and negative impact on tourism.

Pipelines to transport domestically-produced natural gas and oil cannot get the necessary permits in many areas owing to environmental restrictions. Some promising oil fields are also off limits.

Solar electricity and wind-propelled generators are opposed because of their noise, large land requirements and other aesthetic reasons in addition to high maintenance costs.

Solar heating requires a large capital investment and is costly to maintain. Goethermal and the harnessing of ocean tides are opposed because they require unsightly facilities. Coal is losing favor because of its effects on atmospheric pollution - including acid rain and global warming - and the environmental damage caused by mining.

Nuclear power is essentially out of business in the U.S. owing to a costly permitting process and public concern about waste disposal.

So one again we see the cost of our fragmented approach to government. When policy is driven by special interest and the contributions of political action committees, the public interest loses.

We lose our ability to weigh competing claims and balance different perspectives.

Hopefully the crisis in the Mideast and the fact that young Americans are placed in harm's way will underscore the national interest in establishing secure energy supplies.

This is an issue that affects all of us. The old, fragmented approach will no longer work.