The idea of "energy security" is nonsense but it sells well in Peoria. Those who don't understand economics and global commodities have the mistaken notion that it is possible for some country, any country, to withdraw from world trade in energy by some magical combination of energy scams that promise to provide self sufficiency within a geographic area.

The idea of energy isolationism is one of those strange bedfellows fantasies, like the alliance of doctrinaire libertarians and loony leftists against agricultural subsidies, that in this case brings together neo-conservative islamophobes and pseudo-environmentalists, those who use environmental issues as political wedges to advance authoritarian agendas but don't really give a fig about the environment other than an emotional need to appear pious on green religion.

The earlier posts Green Accounting, Rain Dance and Off Broadway discussed these silly ideas from several perspectives. But since this snake-oil is attractive to shallow thinkers there are still opportunists fleecing the marks and it is possible that they can influence policy. A few of the dingbat blogs have pointed to this partial version of a non-webbed article by journalist Thomas Friedman that repeats one of the main fallacies.

Living green is not just a "personal virtue," as Mr. Cheney says. It's a national security imperative.

The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. Its petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices - in oil states from Russia to Nigeria to Iran - that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. ....

... there's a huge difference between what these bad regimes can do with $20-a-barrel oil compared to $60-a-barrel oil. It is no accident that the reform era in Russia under Boris Yeltzin, and in Iran under Mohammad Khatami, coincided with low oil prices. When prices soared again, petrolist authoritarians in both societies reasserted themselves.

We need a persident and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home.

The growing economies of the world - the ones with 5 out of 6 humans on the planet - will be happy to buy petroleum from the bad guys. The bad guys know that and just laugh at nutters like Friedman. The price of oil will rise and fall with the rate of world economic expansion. The only way the US could cause a blip would be with policies so bad that the economy goes into deep recession and drags the world, at least for a while, with it.

A gas tax will do nothing but bloat the coffers of government for a while until they spend it all. Conservation is merely a virtue but virtue is good business sense when it reduces the cost of production. This isn't something that must be inspired, or can be inspired. It's a basic rule of business.

But even if we declined to import any petroleum and taxed ourselves senseless we wouldn't be any more secure. The bad guys would still be rich from the sale of their commodities which would still be in great demand all over the world, and we would still import the energy generated from that petroleum in the form of the finished goods and services we import. Every ship load of Chinese consumer goods in effect imports the energy used to acquire, manufacture and transport all of the materials in those products. It's just hide-the-pea again. Stealth energy imports.

Energy isn't a national problem. It's a global problem. That's why political solutions aren't relevant. Politics is the wrong tool. It can't get a grip on the energy issue. To reduce the value of fossil fuels it is necessary to have a better method, a more attractive and abundant alternative. That's a technology problem mostly though there is a political aspect in the nuclear neuroses of many western nations.

I think it's time to review the requirements of Strategic Reliabilism: epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, based on good evidence, and applied to significant problems. Friedman is mistaken. Again.