Voinovich's View: "An Important Moment and Opportunity"

Column:

America’s oil dependence poses a grave threat to our national security and economic strength. Russia is leveraging its vast reserves of oil and natural gas to project power over Europe. Iran has repeatedly threatened to interfere with shipping lanes the world’s busiest oil transit corridor. And Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has indicated that he has no problem with reducing his nation’s oil production in an effort to inflict economic damage on the United States.

These and other threats should compel our nation and its leaders to pursue efforts that would seek to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. For a decade in the U.S. Senate I have been calling for a “Second Declaration of Independence” from foreign sources of energy, and have pushed for the development of a comprehensive national energy policy. Yet, Congress has been locked in a malaise, and has failed to harmonize our national security, energy, economic and environmental needs.

As Ohio’s senior senator, I am calling for an end to energy complacency once and for all.

Energy freedom is the key to strengthening both our national and economic security. America must find more and use less – and we must enact policies that fully and safely utilize our abundant domestic oil reserves, transition our transportation fleet towards alternative domestic fuels and electrification, and do more to conserve what we already have.

Today our nation imports approximately 60 percent of our oil, much of which is produced by hostile or unstable states. As we continue to become more reliant on foreign sources of oil, we are essentially shipping our jobs and wealth overseas for oil to pad the coffers of many nations that do not have our best interests at heart.

The United States spent more than $360 billion to import oil in 2008, 60 percent of which went to the oil-exporting OPEC nations. This represents 60 percent of our nation’s total trade deficit. Our already fragile economic security is affected by any political or military unrest in oil-exporting regions of the world, causing energy costs to rise, hindering our ability to compete in the global marketplace and bringing our national security into question.

And, we cannot overlook our national debt. Today, 51 percent of the privately owned national debt is held by foreign creditors – mostly foreign central banks. That is up from just six years ago. Foreign creditors provided more than 70 percent of the funds that the United States has borrowed since 2001, according to the Department of Treasury. Unfortunately, we are going to do a lot more foreign borrowing.

According to the Treasury Department, the three largest foreign holders of U.S. debt are China, Japan and the OPEC nations. We cannot afford to allow the countries that control our oil and our debt to control our future.

This is why my colleague Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and I have come together to craft the National Energy Security Act of 2009 (NESA), a bi-partisan bill that leads America into a future free of an oil based economy. Our legislation is intended to reduce the U.S. economy’s oil reliance by 80 percent by 2050. We can reach this goal by diversifying and promoting electric and alternative-fuel transportation; increasing the supply of our domestic energy resources; and strengthening energy infrastructure. Although our goal is challenging, the difficulty of achieving it is matched only by the urgency of the situation we face.

NESA would: 1) diversify and promote the development and production of an electrified transportation fleet; 2) build the crucial infrastructure necessary to electrify light-duty transportation on a wide scale; 3) enhance our national power grid to improve reliability and ensure that the grid is sufficiently robust to meet growing demand; 4) safely expand the development of domestic oil and natural gas by exploring the most promising areas of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), opening new areas of the Gulf of Mexico, and ensuring the expeditious leasing for all areas of the OCS; and 5) support low-carbon sources of electricity, including nuclear and advanced coal, through loan guarantees.

I believe that NESA represents a rare opportunity to break the energy policy gridlock with a truly comprehensive, bipartisan plan that will make our future more prosperous and more secure. This is an important moment and an important opportunity. It is time to end the poverty of common sense that has only served to squander America’s wealth of domestic energy resources.

It is my hope that our children and grandchildren will celebrate the day America came together to reaffirm its independence a second time through a comprehensive energy strategy that rekindles the American spirit of self reliance, innovation and creativity. That is the goal of this piece of legislation, and I truly believe that “together we can do it.”