This Wall Street Journal ($) Holman Jenkins, Jr. piece lays the wood to John Kerry’s “energy independence” blather that he has been using recently in various campaign speeches and working papers. The entire column is a brilliant expose of the demagogury that commonly revolves around the issue of energy policy and the alleged need for “energy independence” from Mideast, and here are a few choice tidbits:

[Kerry] puts himself in excellent company here, since the same shibboleth has been paid lip service by every president since Nixon. It’s also a favorite of prominent newspaper columnists who, throwing up their hands about the Middle East and finding Americans more tractable targets for castigation, cite the urgent need for a “Manhattan Project on energy.” The idea never fails to elicit applause from audiences of ordinary voters and focus groups too, in about the same way that Mom, apple pie and stopping foreigners from “stealing our jobs” are reliable applause lines.
That is to say, as a goal, energy independence is neither desirable nor practical and, were it otherwise, would still not solve any real problem. But it provides a useful service as a vehicle of escapism and an emblem of personal virtue.

In fact, Mr. Jenkins postulates that Kerry’s plan to reduce dependence on Mideast oil would likely have unexpected consequences:

Oil is oil: We’d still be bound by prices in the international marketplace with all their unsettling volatility. Mr. Kerry proposes nothing more than a symbolic slap at the Arabs, his target accounting for less than 10% of total consumption. In fact, were his plan to have any effect at all, the U.S. would likely become more dependent on imports as high-cost U.S. producers were squeezed out; and more dependent on Mideast oil, as high-cost foreign producers were squeezed out.

Then Mr. Jenkins deals with several of the unspoken assumptions that underlie the escapist fallacy of energy dependence on Mideast oil:

We’d be able to wash our hands of military and security entanglements in the Mideast. No, we wouldn’t. Oil would remain a commodity in global markets, so we’d still be exposed to the international price of oil, including all gyrations caused by Mideast politics. Even in the improbable and bizarre circumstance that the U.S. swore off oil consumption altogether, we’d still have to live in this world. Notice that we invest heavily in the security of Japan, South Korea, Israel and Western Europe, though none has oil.
Our dependence makes us beholden to Arab oil states. This is similar to the argument put to President Truman by the State Department when it vehemently opposed his recognition of Israel. Yet it’s hard to imagine how we could make ourselves more irritating to Arab states than by supporting Israel, which we’ve done for 50 years. Somehow we still manage to keep buying all the oil we want.
We’d be freer to press for democracy and human rights in the Mideast. Huh? The U.S. is going to engage in campaigns of destabilization against unattractive regimes in which we no longer have an interest? On the contrary, their co-optation by petrodollars and consequent integration in the world economy is the main inducement to the Arab oil states to eschew antisocial behavior.
The Saudis spend our oil money on religious schools preaching hate against the West. The Saudis would continue to receive billions for their oil even if the U.S. weren’t buying. In any case, their support for radical Islamists has nothing to do with oil and everything to do with the Saudi regime’s domestic insecurities. We can’t fix this problem with energy policy; let’s hope we’re not so feckless as to evade the real fight against terrorism in favor of a fantasy that all will be well if Congress is allowed to spend billions on a pork-barrel scheme to wean industrial society off hydrocarbons.

Mr. Jenkins concludes by noting that the problem of high energy prices is a different problem than reliance on Mideast oil:

None of the above means we don’t have a real, workaday concern for “energy security — more accurately stated as a concern about price, price, price, and even more importantly, volatility of price.
But this problem is steadily fixing itself as oil consumption becomes a smaller part of total consumption, leaving the economy better able to withstand price gyrations. Per unit of economic output, we burn 55% fewer petroleum Btus than we did 30 years ago. As is the case with most historical dilemmas, we will overcome our reliance on Mideast oil by surviving long enough for history to give the U.S. new and different problems.

As readers of this blog have heard before, your demagouge antenna should go up every time you hear a politician advocate a policy that means that we should pay more for a product such as oil.