Unsophisticated environmentalists and unsophisticated geo-political thinkers have joined forces to promote useless policies.

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.

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...

Neocons and greens first hitched up in the fall, when they jointly backed a proposal put forward by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based think tank that tracks energy and security issues. (Woolsey is on the IAGS advisory board.) The IAGS plan proposes that the federal government invest $12 billion to: encourage auto makers to build more efficient cars and consumers to buy them; develop industrial facilities to produce plant-based fuels like ethanol; and promote fuel cells for commercial use. The IAGS plan is keen on "plug-in hybrid vehicles," which use internal combustion engines in conjunction with electric motors that are powered by batteries charged by current from standard electric outlets.

Petroleum is a global commodity. All energy is a global commodity. When the US imports manufactured goods it in effect imports the energy used to make them as well as the materials used in their manufacture. A sensibly complete accounting would also include the value of the knowledge used in manufacture, both the specific technologies and intellectual property and the organizational knowledge that knits together the enterprise and operates it.

Bio-fuels increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Tons of carbon and methane are released into the air every time a field is plowed to grow crops for bio-fuels. This not only pollutes the air it degrades the soil. It isn't just a snarky criticism to call bio-fuels "dirt burning", it is literally true.

To reduce atmospheric carbon energy must come from a non-carbon source and the biosphere must sequester carbon from the air. Forests and grasslands rather than farm fields is the way to do this. This increases the size of the working set, keeps more carbon in living biomass, and sequesters a fraction of that in durable forms in the soil for long term storage.

Gravitational, solar, geothermal and nuclear sources of energy reduce atmospheric carbon. In some cases they have other environmental impacts, for example hydro power from dams reduces instream flows and starves coastlines of sediment needed to resist erosion from storm waves.

Environmentalists were punked by politicians all during the later part of the twentieth century and they are being punked again by a new crew. In fairness, environmentalists punked themselves too since they were shallow thinkers who failed to grasp either the scope or scale of the subject. They think too short term and don't grasp whole systems as is absolutely essential for making such judgements.

In truth they are not environmentalists, they are merely politicians. Their goal is to gain power and determine policy rather than preserve and remediate the environment. They live hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck, and utterly fail to grasp the significance or consequences of policy beyond the next meal. They usually function at a level of abstraction that allows the mucky details of environmental reality to be ignored. They see no need to consider the effects of agriculture on the atmosphere and so ignore the environmental effects of the whole agro-industrial complex and restrict their rudimentary accounting of the net effects of biofuels, ignoring many costs as externalities. Out of sight, out of mind.

The idea of energy security is naive. To achieve it means isolation, refusal to trade with the world in any goods not just petroleum. That way lies madness as well as depression. Energy flows around the world in every product and service. It is only engagement with rest of the world, both the part we like and the part that hates us, that offers hope for security and peace. We must treat with the developing world to allow them to develop. There will be growing pains, analogies of teenage tantrums as societies and cultures are destabilized by emergence from less developed conditions. Just as no child can become an adult without passing through the confused years neither can societies.

Just as parents and other adults in the community must remain engaged with kids as they grow, and suffer when they lash out, so must the developed world remain engaged with the developing, including the skin heads, rag heads, goths, greasers and whatever other rebellious poses the more troubled ones strike. It is neither pleasant nor safe but it is not optional. It doesn't go away when ignored, it gets worse.