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Lovins 16 (1:40)
Topic(s): Foreign Oil
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Video Transcript
With a few very isolated exceptions like Bahrain, Arab
countries without oil have had greater development success
than Arab countries with oil. And reasons for this are fairly
well understood, when you have an economy very dependent on
oil exports, it tends toward authoritarianism, corruption,
opacity, all of the trends that are really opposite of
democratization, liberalization of markets and also that tend
toward political instability. So increasingly, our armed
forces are being turned into an oil protection service
guarding pipelines, trying to shore up authoritarian regimes
that happen to be willing to sell us their oil. It's a very
bad scene and you know our military professionals did not sign
up to guard pipe lines, they signed up to protect American
citizens.
Well they can do that a lot better if we don't depend on that
far-flung imperial apparatus for collecting oil to get it to
your pump. And I think that our whole oil dependence has all
the signs of the addiction, President Bush referred to our
addition to oil quite rightly, I think surprised many people
when he did so. But you know, when you're an addict, you don't
ask your pusher if you need a fix, you just try to kick the
habit. We have very good ways to do that now—we'll be a
lot happier and healthier when we do.
