UPDATE 06/21: Hugh Hewitt featured an interview with a corporate security expert named Frank Dowse (I can't find a transcript of the interview). Dowse, a former Marine, consults with American corporations that do business overseas, particularly with protecting their personnel. He mentioned something that stuck with me, and is, I think, a better way of describing our "energy policy;" paraphrased: there's a difference between risk and uncertainty.
Rather than say we have put ourselves in the way of avoidable risk, it's far more accurate to say we've created conditions of needless uncertainty. There are too many factors that need to go right all the time in order to maintain the fragile balance between supply and demand. It doesn't need to be this way.
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There's news tonight that the Iowa flooding has devastated the corn crop in the state. What does this have to do with risk? With terrorism? Our regressive environmental policies have, once again, made our economy vulnerable to terrorist activity outside the country.
Iowa corn is primarily used in the production of ethanol. Ethanol is a required additive to gasoline. If ethanol production is affected by the cost and availability of corn, then this will hit the price of gas at the pump. Do you think filling your tank is tough now? Wait a week.
What does this have to do with terrorism? High oil prices are causing pain all over the world, particularly in the price of staple foods like rice and corn. Americans feel it most at the gas station, but it has ripple effects from the cost of food to the cost of clothes, electronics, etc. Practically everything that's made overseas and imported into the country is going to cost more.
This makes our economy particularly vulnerable to large scale attacks on "critical" energy infrastructure sites outside the country, like Saudi oil processing facilities. The pressures placed on the economy by the ethanol requirement have made us even more vulnerable to forces out of our control, like flooding and Saudi counterterrorism capabilities.
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