June 18th, 2008 by Matt

John McCain’s energy speech yesterday contained several lines which were bait for POMED-ers like us.  Here’s the money quote:

“Even if our economy were somehow immune to this threat, the vast wealth we shift to the Middle East, Venezuela, Angola, and elsewhere would still have a third harmful and perverse effect. It would continue to enrich undemocratic, unjust, and often corrupt regimes. Some of the most oil-rich nations are also the most stagnant societies on earth. And among the many luxuries their oil wealth affords them is the luxury of ignoring their own people. In effect, our petrodollars are underwriting tyranny, anti-Semitism, the brutal repression of women in the Middle East, and dictators and criminal syndicates in our own hemisphere.

We cannot allow the world’s greatest democracy to be complicit in such corruption and injustice.”

McCain also discussed the situation of “dependency and debt” caused by, for instance, borrowing Saudi money to buy Saudi oil, and the misfortune of our energy policy being reduced to American leaders “supplicating for lower prices before the sheiks and princes of OPEC.”

McCain’s prescription for reducing our dependence is a combination of more domestic exploration and capacity-building (outside of ANWR), better regulations governing the oil futures market, clean energy innovation, and nuclear power.

Posted in Election 08, Oil, US foreign policy, US politics |