Neocons and Priuses

Interesting (and biased) article at Slate talking about: Why Iraq hawks are driving Priuses. bq. President Bush has a simple policy about energy: produce more of it. The former oilman has packed his administration with veterans of the oil and coal industries. And for most of the first Bush term, his energy policy and his foreign policy were joined at the hip. Since the Bush administration believed that controlling the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf was critically important to the American economy, the invasion of Iraq seemed to serve both the president's energy goals and his foreign policy ones. The "It's about the Oooiiilll!!!" meme surfaces yet again. BZZT - Wrong! bq. But a curious transformation is occurring in Washington, D.C., a split of foreign policy and energy policy: Many of the leading neoconservatives who pushed hard for the Iraq war are going green. James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and staunch backer of the Iraq war, now drives a 58-miles-per-gallon Toyota Prius and has two more hybrid vehicles on order. Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy and another neocon who championed the war, has been speaking regularly in Washington about fuel efficiency and plant-based bio-fuels. Nothing wrong with that. I am not anti-environment, I love the environment (one reason why we moved from the city and onto a farm) but the current crop of self-proclaimed Environmentalists are a bunch of self-serving scare-mongers. They are funded to do these "studies" and if they are not able to promote these studies, their source of funds dries up so of course, they are going to promote whatever current crises are popular. Using less fuel, switching the lightbulbs to Compact Fluorescent, that sort of stuff is just plain common sense... bq. The alliance of hawks and environmentalists is new but not entirely surprising. The environmentalists are worried about global warming and air pollution. But Woolsey and Gaffney�both members of the Project for the New American Century, which began advocating military action against Saddam Hussein back in 1998�are going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones. They seek to reduce the flow of American dollars to oil-rich Islamic theocracies, Saudi Arabia in particular. Petrodollars have made Saudi Arabia too rich a source of terrorist funding and Islamic radicals. Last month, Gaffney told a conference in Washington that America has become dependent on oil that is imported from countries that, "by and large, are hostile to us." This fact, he said, makes reducing oil imports "a national security imperative." Interesting viewpoint -- it does make a lot of sense and conservation is by far the best way to care for the environment. The article goes on to talk about some meetings and groups (giving links to them) although it still gives ink to the idea of Ethanol which is known to take more energy to produce than it can yield by combustion. Electric cars are good for short-haul use but nothing will replace gasoline as a prime mover. And of course, there is no mention of Nuclear...