Local View: Consider Complete Costs of Waging War for Imported Oil
by Chuck Woodside (Journal Star) In a recent speech about energy, President Barack Obama said: “If we refuse to take into account the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction — if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and the national security costs and the true economic costs — we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”
Now, two professors at the University of Nebraska have come forward with some of the facts that the president wants “to take into account” — “the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction.”
In a groundbreaking article in Environment magazine, “Securing foreign oil: A case for including military operations in the climate change impact of fuels,” Professors Adam J. Liska and Richard K. Perrin try to put a price tag on U.S. oil imports.
Yes, it’s well known that the United States imports nearly 60 percent of the nation’s total oil consumption — at least 12.9 million barrels per day — at a direct cost of roughly $300 billion a year. But that’s just a small part of the total cost of our dependency on imported oil.
… Most of this Middle Eastern oil arrives in the United States on four supertankers every day. As these supertankers travel through the dangerous maritime straits of the Middle East, the U.S. military protects them — at a cost of $100 billion a year, according to estimates by Liska and Perrin. READ MORE
