时事资讯:美国清洁能源立法无损产油国影响力

【英文原文】

Clean Energy And Oil Independence

It seems that energy and climate legislation is increasingly being presented as a plan to curb U.S. dependence on foreign oil. And that - if true - would presumably bring a whole raft of benefits, including a cleaner environment, weakened petro-states, a healthier trade balance, and a tidier foreign policy. If only.

The latest call comes from the left-leaning think tank, Center for American Progress, in a report released today, 'Securing America's Future.' The thrust of the argument is: Clean-energy legislation in the U.S. will lessen the country's dependence on oil, which these days essentially means foreign oil.

Echoing other recent calls by military leaders, CAP says that reducing that dependence would allow the country to sidestep an unattractive future, especially in the national-security sphere:

'[America's] need for steady supplies of oil means it must adjust its behavior and strategies in order to maintain relations with less than-savory regimes including Venezuela, Nigeria, and Russia. These countries, as well as smaller nations such as Angola, will therefore hold an increasingly disproportional amount of bilateral and regional power, while the United States has diminished leverage and constrained policy options in strategic regions such as the Middle East and Central Asia.'

That's not even including the potential economic benefits - the U.S. spent $1.5 trillion on oil imports over the past decade, and last year's bill amounted to 2.3% of gross domestic product, a record level, CAP says.

All that is true - but the problem is that the legislation under consideration in Congress wouldn't really do much to dent America's oil appetite. As CAP notes, the Waxman-Markey bill would reduce U.S. oil consumption in 2020 by a mere 876 thousand barrels a day, or about 4.5% of total U.S. oil consumption.

And that means that a U.S. oil diet won't necessarily reshape the world or weaken petrostates. CAP argues that lower U.S. dependence would weaken oil producers such as Iran by freeing up China to buy more oil from 'stable nations.' Maybe so - but China has been busy inking oil and gas deals with Iran, Sudan, Myanmar, and Russia, and not just because U.S. demand has been crowding it out of 'friendly' suppliers.

The fact is that China's demand for oil more than tripled over the last 15 years, and few analysts expect the country's double-digit economic growth to eschew a similar demand for oil in coming years. Even if the U.S. cuts back a little on oil consumption, in other words, China (and other developing countries) will more than make up the slack - which will keep today's petrostates in business all the same.

There are plenty of potential benefits in the energy and climate legislation currently in Congress, but disarming the world's petroleum producers doesn't appear to be one of them.