PUMP DREAMS.

In the predawn hours of October 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israeli positions in the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Two weeks later, after the Pentagon had started airlifting materiel to Israel, to counter Soviet shipments to Egypt and Syria, King Faisal, of Saudi Arabia, cut off his country's oil exports to the United States. Other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which had been founded in Baghdad thirteen years earlier, followed Faisal's lead. Almost overnight, the price of crude oil doubled. Gasoline prices rose sharply, shortages developed, and a new phrase entered the American lexicon: "gas lines." On November 7th, President Nixon, already under pressure from Watergate, addressed an anxious country, saying, "Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source."

More than thirty years later, Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, Anwar Sadat, Hafez al-Assad, and Golda Meir are all dead--and so is King Faisal, who was assassinated by his nephew in 1975--but energy independence has returned as a major issue. The price of crude recently touched fifty dollars a barrel, drivers in many parts of the country are paying more than two dollars a gallon for gasoline, and both Presidential candidates have been sounding uncannily like Nixon. "I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation--not on the Saudi royal family," Senator John Kerry said in his speech at the Democratic Convention, in July. "And our energy plan for a stronger America will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future--so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East." President Bush has countered by pushing his own energy agenda, which includes a controversial proposal to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an idea that Congress has so far rejected. "We will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy," Bush told the Republican Convention.

Although the Democratic and Republican energy plans differ widely, their underlying rationale is the same. In 2003, the United States consumed some twenty million barrels of oil a day, of which slightly more than half was imported from abroad, much of it from the Persian Gulf. By 2020, according to the Department of Energy, domestic oil producers will be meeting less than a third of United States needs, and the Gulf countries will be supplying up to two-thirds of the world's oil. "This imbalance, if allowed to continue, will inevitably undermine our economy, our standard of living, and our national security," the Bush Administration's National Energy Policy Development Group warned in a May, 2001, report. "But it is not beyond our power to correct. America leads the world in scientific achievement, technical skill, and entrepreneurial drive. Within our country are abundant natural resources, unrivaled technology, and unlimited human creativity. With forward-looking leadership and sensible policies, we can meet our future energy demands and promote energy conservation, and do so in environmentally responsible ways that set a standard for the world."

When energy independence is presented in this way, it is hard to object--who would advocate energy dependence?--but optimism and an appeal to American patriotism don't add up to a coherent policy. Moving beyond rhetoric and actually trying to make America less reliant on foreign oil involves confronting powerful commercial interests, solving difficult technological problems, and convincing the American public that cheap fuel is not a birthright.

The two hundred and ninety million people who live in the United States make up just five per cent of the world's population, but they consume a quarter of the world's oil supply. For much of the twentieth century, the United States was the world's largest oil producer, and its profligacy wasn't a pressing problem. Today, however, we are only the third-largest producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. In terms of proven reserves--oil deposits that are known to exist and are believed to be accessible at reasonable cost--we have slipped to tenth place in the international rankings, as reservoirs in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have started to dry up.

According to the oil company BP's "Statistical Review of World Energy," a recognized authority on these matters, at the end of 2003 the United States possessed thirty-one billion barrels of proven reserves, more than China and less ...