Thursday, April 22, 2010 – James Carafano, Mark Klugmann, Gordon Chang

Frank begins the show with a monologue on why we should continue to pursue offshoring drilling, and why America cannot continue to depend on OPEC oil.  James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation talks with Frank about President Obama’s de-nuclearization agenda, and the missile threat from Iran.  Mark Klugmann gives his take on the Chavista threat from Latin America.  SFR regular Gordon Chang provides his insights on why the Communist Chinese are bailing out Hugo Chavez’s regime.

MONOLOGUE – April 22, 2010

But first, I’m going to spend a few minutes talking to you about this oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico that blew up in the past 24 hours or so and what that means. Not just in its own right, of course it’s a mess, probably an environmental problem –but certainly something that suddenly calls a lot of attention to the potential problems with these platforms, I’m sure that we’ll have environmentalist and other litigants mustering out to say, well we can’t possibly do what the president has indicated he wants to do kind of namely expanding our exploration and exploitation of offshore oil resources.

But of course that’s all uppermost on our minds on earth day, isn’t it folks? Never mind the energy security needs of the United States, let’s think about just how we can ensure that there aren’t any problems arising from our exploitation of our natural resources. But this particular setback isn’t happening in isolation, we recently saw in Saudi Arabia a plot, we’re told, involving a hundred or so people aimed at seriously taking down the Saudi oil infrastructure.

And then of course, today, we’re hearing that there are 3 days of war games underway involving the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ naval forces operating in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Not I suspect an accident, as those operations are the sorts of things that the Iranians routinely threaten whenever anybody suggests we might have to use military force or the Israelis might have to use military force to stymie the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

So all of this suggests to me that it’s high time we think fresh about the growing vulnerabilities of our present and yawning dependence on oil as the means of powering principally our transportation sector in this country. And you know, even if the price of oil were not going back up through the roof; the folly of having this kind of dependency, rendering us susceptible to interruption of that oil supply, whether it’s through accidents or by design, is something that I simply believe we cannot continue in good conscience, knowing what we know, without untoward risk to our economy and to our national security.

So what should we do about it? Well, for some time here at Secure Freedom Radio we’ve been talking about an initiative that has been pioneered by a group that we at the Center for Security Policy have been involved with from its inception. It’s called the Set America Free Coalition. It calls most immediately for the simplest of steps, the most economical of steps, the most technologically easy of steps to transform our fleet, not overnight of course, but in relatively short order from one that is completely dependent on OPEC—an organization that is, let’s face it folks, populated by enemies of the United States!

Transforming us from their wards, their dependency into nations that can treat oil as my friends at Set America Free Gal Luft and Anne Korin are fond of saying, as though it were salt, a reference of course to the fact that salt once was a strategic commodity—now it’s just another commodity, something that we throw over our shoulder or put out on tables.

Nations used to go to war over salt; well nations go to war now, or will in the future, they certainly have in the past over oil if we continue to have this as a serious vulnerability. And we may or may not be at peak oil but we are certainly facing limitations on this resource, and the Chinese are doing absolutely everything they can, including with Hugo Chavez, to buy up as much of the world’s oil supply as they can.

So here’s the plan, for less than $100 a car new automobiles can be sold here in the United States that are indifferent to whether they have gasoline in the tank or ethanol, or methanol, or butanol or some other alcohol-based fuel. And the beauty of those alcohol-based fuels is that they can be produced from sources other than deeply buried petroleum. And what we want, what we urgently need, what we have to have is “fuel choice” at the consumer level and the national level so as to move away from this current vulnerability and all that flows from it.

So we know how to do this. There are about 6 million of these so-called “flexible fuel” vehicles on the road today; there are drivers today who can simply fill up their tank wherever they find ethanol. And if in the future, there is a sufficient enough market which would happen if we adopted this so-called “open fuel standard” requiring that by 2012, 50% of the new cars sold in America are equipped in this fashion. And according to legislation that has been awaiting action in the Congress, by 2015 80% of the American automotive offerings from the car manufacturers need to be flexible fuel equipped.

This is an eminently sensible step. It would really begin transforming our world, because not only we but other countries around the world would suddenly be capable of producing the fuel themselves without to depend on OPEC, without having to tap into reserves of oil if they have them.

So this is the wave of the future folks, we are going to do this; this open fuel standard, mark my words, will happen. It is a question of whether it happens before we need it, before people blow up oil platforms or oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia or close the Strait of Hormuz or in any other way catastrophically disrupt the lifeblood of our economy at this point, namely imported oil.

It will be done, the question is: later, or sooner? And later is worse.

Those are my thoughts, tell me yours here or on the Frank Gaffney facebook or twitter accounts.