[Mb-civic] A Better Approach To Energy - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Better Approach To Energy
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By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 30, 2006; B07

BERLIN -- German motorists shrug off gasoline prices that have gradually 
climbed above $6 a gallon. So while President Bush scrambles to show 
angry voters that he is fighting gas prices of more than $3 a gallon, 
Chancellor Angela Merkel leisurely turns her thoughts to summit meetings 
and vision statements.

This seeming contrast will feed the stereotype of car-happy, wasteful 
Americans getting their comeuppance while energy-circumspect Europeans 
smugly motor on. Three decades of high gasoline taxes -- they are 60 
percent or more of the retail price in much of Europe -- have apparently 
numbed Europeans to oil supply shocks and forced them to accept fuel 
conservation as a way of life.

But take a closer look at Merkel's meeting in Russia with Vladimir Putin 
last week and her upcoming trip to Washington this week. Energy anxiety 
leads Merkel's summit lists with an urgency and importance that match 
American desperation on oil. The anxiety is expressed differently -- 
natural gas and nuclear energy are the hot buttons here -- but it 
surfaces throughout the Continent.

Energy resources and shortages, in their many forms, dominate the global 
agenda today as dramatically and as dangerously as they did in the 
multiple "energy crises" of the 1970s. No underlying issue unites and 
then divides citizens and countries more than do the man-made scarcities 
and misuse of fossil-fuel, nuclear and alternative energy.

Those problems require a global response from consumers rather than the 
fractured, nation-by-nation competition that currently prevails. 
Amazingly, the mechanism for such cooperation already exists. What is 
lacking is the political will to use it effectively.

So Bush scrambles and Merkel broods as she plans her agenda-setting 
policy declaration to the German parliament on May 11. The world's 
leaders are rediscovering that threats to energy supplies reach deep 
into national psyches, for good reasons.

Disorder and disruption of those supplies suggest to citizens that their 
leaders have lost control over events, a devastating blow to national 
confidence and trust.

In London and Berlin last week, I found officials consumed by 
pronouncements on natural gas supplies coming out of Putin's cash-rich 
and newly assertive Russia. A threat by Gazprom, the giant Russian 
energy supplier, to discriminate against Europe on future gas contracts 
in favor of China and the United States focused minds and brought 
conciliatory gestures toward Moscow in both capitals.

German commercial entry into Siberian natural gas fields and a pipeline 
under the Baltic Sea were the big items in Merkel's meeting with Putin 
in the western Siberian town of Tomsk last week. Putin struck the 
pipeline deal with Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder. But Merkel 
has been careful to confirm the deal and to insulate it from her 
challenges to Putin on human rights and other political issues. She was 
more conciliatory in dealing with a Russian president who sees himself 
as a much more powerful figure in the world than he did when they first 
met three months ago.

Putin has increased his leverage over the West by playing hard to get on 
Iran and its double-edged energy challenge to the world. Iran's ability 
to disrupt world oil markets provides a shield against international 
pressure to abandon its nuclear enrichment program. Russia is crucial to 
the threat of international sanctions that Merkel and Bush hope will 
dissuade Iran from pursuing enrichment.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the war chatter coming out of 
Washington, the diplomatic effort to get Russia and China to support a 
U.N. Security Council resolution mandating that Iran suspend enrichment 
has made progress in recent days, according to U.S. and European 
officials. That resolution and the graduated campaign of new pressures 
that it would unlock will be discussed in a high-level six-power meeting 
in Paris on Tuesday.

However the Iranian case is resolved, there is fresh interest in the 
establishment of an international nuclear fuel bank to plug the 
loopholes that Iran has exploited in the nuclear Non-Proliferation 
Treaty. The best candidate to oversee the fuel bank is the 26-nation 
International Energy Agency, based in Paris.

The IEA, founded in 1974 as a counter to OPEC, has been allowed to 
languish since then and has a professional staff of only about 150. But 
it has the potential to become the effective advocate and coordinator 
for oil-importing countries that U.S. officials foresaw at its outset.

Western leaders urgently need not only to calm their publics about 
energy supplies but also to begin a long-term program to reduce their 
vulnerabilities to foreign upheaval and blackmail. Bush and Merkel 
should put revitalization and redirection of the IEA at the top of their 
talks, which should cover a lot more than the price of gas.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801988.html
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