Fighting for Oil We Shouldn’t Need : Energy: If we’d demanded a sensible energy policy 10 years ago, we would not now have a catastrophic military policy.

Wars have a way of creating striking images that distill the conflict’s chaos into a single, lucid moment. In World War II there were the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, and the emaciated Holocaust survivors greeting their liberators at Auschwitz. In our war against Vietnam there was the GI setting fire to a peasant’s hut with his lighter and the screaming infant abandoned on a bombed-out road.

Now, among numerous TV images from the Gulf, two are likely to stand as the emblems of our latest war: the descent of a smart bomb--cleverly tracked by video camera--flying unerringly into the elevator shaft of a building in Baghdad, and the oil-soaked cormorant futilely struggling to fly over a low concrete wall.

In contrast with the unequivocal meaning of the earlier ones, the Gulf War’s images reveal its fundamental ambiguity. The cormorant, an innocent victim of the huge oil spill, can be seen as a metaphor for Saddam Hussein’s attack on an innocent Kuwait. On the other hand, the smart bomb symbolizes the enormous technological power and explosive force that the United States has unleashed on Iraq--vastly out of proportion to an invasion no different from earlier ones we have easily tolerated (for example, by Turkey in Cyprus or Morocco in Western Sahara), not to speak of the incursions that we ourselves undertook in Grenada and Panama. Together the two images signify that, unlike World War II (where our side was just and the enemies’ was not), or the war in Vietnam (where the situation was reversed), the conflict in the Gulf is an unjust war on both sides.

President Bush claims that he is fighting a just war against Iraq and, seeking further arguments to bolster his position, has lately seized on ecology for support. Bush has declared that Iraq’s deliberate oil spill is “environmental terrorism”--a war crime against nature that, in the minds of the many Americans who were appalled by Exxon’s spill at Valdez, might bring the weight of justice to the U.S. side. I would argue that the U.S. war against Iraq is not only politically unjustified, but is the unnecessary, tragic consequence of the President’s own efforts to obstruct the creation of a sensible energy and environmental policy.

The production and use of oil dominates our environmental and energy problems, ranging from smog and global warming to oil price shocks. A large part of the remedy is to reduce our dependence on oil sharply by conserving energy, substituting domestic natural gas wherever possible and shifting to renewable, solar sources. Yet Bush removed from the recent Clean Air Act provisions that would have served this purpose by encouraging the use of methane and ethanol as alternative fuels for gasoline-driven cars. As vice president, he even blocked an effort to improve auto gas mileage. His recently proposed energy policy continues this misguided approach.

Had Bush--and before him Ronald Reagan--not obstructed such efforts, the United States could now be well on the way to energy independence, based increasingly on solar energy. For example, by 1980 it was well-established that a $500-million government purchase of photovoltaic cells (they convert sunshine directly into electricity) would, within five years, create an industry capable of competing economically with utility power in most of the country. But Reagan killed such solar programs in their infancy.

Had the photovoltaic program been activated, the approximately $100 billion currently cited as the possible cost of the Gulf War could have paid for enough photovoltaic cells to replace nearly a third of the country’s electric power capacity. Similarly, a decade ago my own research group, under contract to the Department of Energy, showed how the production of solar ethanol from crops could replace about one-quarter of the demand for gasoline without reducing food production or farmers’ profits. But when our report was submitted, the relevant Department of Energy division had been abolished.

In sum, for more than a decade we have had the knowledge, and the time, to replace most of our dependence on oil--and certainly to the degree we rely on Mideast oil--with conservation measures and renewable solar sources. Had that been done, would we now be embroiled in a disastrous war in the Gulf? President Bush would have us believe that this is really a war over the independence of Kuwait, but as one wag put it, Kuwait was noted for producing broccoli instead of oil.

The Gulf War is the tragic fruit of Bush’s misguided reliance on oil. Despite the President’s rush to create a “new world order” in which, as he recently declared, “what we say goes,” if we--the American people--had had the political will to demand a sensible energy policy, this war could have been prevented. Now we have a catastrophic military policy instead.