The need to achieve energy independence is as important for the U.S. today as obtaining hegemony in the space program was in the 1950s after the USSR launched Sputnik.

Most experts feel that our dependence upon hydrocarbon fuels has not only become prohibitively expensive but is also destroying the environment.

Unfortunately, as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tom Friedman pointed out in an April 30 article in The New York Times, “Dumb as We Wanna Be,” our political decisions have hindered energy independence. Friedman argued that “we have no energy strategy and that we have discouraged new renewable energy technologies.”

He cited the inability of Congress to extend any stimulus for wind and solar production since December. Friedman quoted Rhone Resch, the president of Solar Energy Industry, “that in 1997 the United States was the leader in solar energy with 40 percent of global solar production. Last year, we were less than 8 percent.

The Clinton-McCain call for temporarily suspending the 18-cents-per-gallon federal tax on gasoline is a gimmick, not a solution. Politically it is dead on arrival and economically it might even marginally increase demand for gasoline.

As James Woolsey, the CIA director from 1993 to 1995, put it, “The U.S. cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis. Our growing dependence on scarce Middle East oil is a fool’s game.”

The U.S. daily consumes 20 million barrels of oil — the equivalent of filling a 25-story skyscraper on a football field-sized base.

At $120 per barrel — a price reached in the past couple of weeks — the yearly tab for our gasoline guzzling would come close to $876 billion.

Since we import about 65 percent of oil needs, the size of our oil trade imbalance would approach $600 billion. To quote the late Sen. Everett Dirksen “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Since oil began replacing coal in the early 20th century as the foundation of the Industrial Age, global powers have waged an all-out struggle to secure this fossil fuel by employing bare-knuckled politics and military arms.

The heavyweight fight over securing hydrocarbon fuels between the United States and China might only be in the early rounds. To quench its growing oil thirst, China has pursued a much more conciliatory foreign policy than the United States toward Iran, Sudan and Venezuela in the hopes of securing those nations’ oil output.

Currently the daily demand and supply of oil balances roughly out at 80 million barrels worldwide. The growing demand for petroleum should significantly surpass the available supply within the next decade. Experts predict that oil production could peak by 2015, while demand should grow about 2 percent per annum.

Paul Roberts, in his book “The End of Oil,” raised alarms about Saudi Arabia’s oil capacity:

* There has been no outside audit of Saudi Arabia’s future production capacity.

* Its existing “mega fields” are all more than 50 years old.

* Saudi Arabia has only two more potential mega fields.

* No mega fields have been discovered since 1960.

Saudi production constraints should haunt all developing nations given that the desert kingdom has the world’s largest reserves, some 25 percent.

To date, many oil experts have perceptively criticized our efforts to be energy independent.

In the early 1970s, the U.S. produced 66 percent of its oil needs. Today it produces only 33 percent.

Our development of alternative renewable energy sources has been mostly rhetoric.

Alternative energy represents only 10 percent of our supply. To make matters worse, 8 percent of our non-hydrocarbon-fuel energy supply derives from aging nuclear power plants, which are a political hot button.

Even worse, hydrocarbon-fuel usage is destroying the atmosphere and leading to global warming. We must think “green” or risk killing much life on our planet.

Reputable scientific studies indicate that the proliferation of carbon dioxide will thin the atmosphere’s ozone layer considerably by 2050 and thereby increase global warming.

Higher temperatures would cause a major meltdown of glaciers. Melting glaciers would raise the sea level from 2 to 7 feet over the next century, leading to major flooding of coastline areas.

Energy independence should not be viewed as just something nice, like ice cream following a wonderful dinner.

Instead, ramping up non-hydrocarbon-based renewable energy sources such as solar, wind power, geothermal and nuclear will require the same energy and effort that we expended after Sputnik.

Originally published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune