Can we cash-starve the oil tyrannies? Probably not.

The questions are these: Can we stop or at least enormously reduce the amount of oil we import from countries that are unfriendly or even hostile to the United States? And if we can, will it matter much to their funding of terrorism?

Consider Saudi Arabia. Let's leave aside for this piece the argument that reducing oil consumption helps battle climate change. I have written before that there are excellent reasons to wean ourselves off oil as much as possible that have nothing to do with (scare quote alert) "climate change." Frank Gaffney testified to a US House committee last summer that at present trends of supply sources and rising usages, competition for access to oil could become a dangerous flash point between the USA and China. Furthermore,

About three-quarters of the world’s proven oil reserves are in the hands of adherents to an ideology best described as Islamofascism. We are and our allies are, as a result, transferring enormous wealth in the form payments for imported petroleum to people who are trying to kill us.

Not least, our putative friend, the “moderate” regime of Saudi Arabia is using such funds to promote a pincer movement against the West, involving Wahhabi recruitment and indoctrination via Saudi-funded mosques, madrassas, political influence operations, prison and military chaplain programs and campus organizations on the one hand and Muslim Brotherhood fronts on the other. As Under Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey told Congress in July 2005, “Wealthy Saudi financiers and charities have funded terrorist organizations and causes that support terrorism and the ideology that fuels the terrorists' agenda. Even today, we believe that Saudi donors may still be a significant source of terrorist financing, including for the insurgency in Iraq.”

Our enabling of such behavior is the height of folly, an irresponsible and certainly unsustainable practice from a national security perspective.

America imports 63 percent of its oil. Canada accounts for 18 percent of total imports, meeting 10.5 percent of US demand. Nineteen percent of all the oil we use import from the Persian Gulf. Since we import 13,173,000 barrels per day, that means we import 2,503,000 (rounded) bpd from the PG. (The API summary is here.) We would not wish to cease imports from every PG nation - we should buy from Iraq as much as we can, for example. Saudi Arabia provides 7.4 percent of total domestic requirements. (Venezuela, no friend of ours, provides 6.5 percent.) We buy no oil from Iran. Other PG nations individually provide so little of our oil that they are collectively clumped as "other" in the API's country breakdown.

So, for the security issue that Gaffney explained, there are two questions:

1. Can we either replace Saudi oil - 1,531,000 barrels per day - with another source, or can we implement efficiencies here that would reduce domestic requirements by at least that much?
   
2. As far as the Saudi's funding of terrorism goes, will it matter to their revenues if we do?

From the security perspective, only reasonably near-term solutions will matter. We could drill in ANWR and replace Saudi oil altogether for the next 30 years - once we started large-scale pumping and refining. But politically, that's a dead issue, as is, for that matter, opening any other domestic oil fields.

Se we're only going to stop buying Saudi oil because of gained efficiencies, not increasing domestic production. (We have been trying to increase non-PG imports for at least 30 years, so substituting other imported oil for Saudi oil is not realistically on the horizon.)

I think we can reduce, perhaps eliminate, our need for 1.5M bpd with improved efficiencies in motor-vehicle propulsion. But before I talk about that, let's take a look at whether buying zero Saudi oil will matter to their funding of terrorism.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, Saudi Arabia can produce 12.1 M bpd and is producing 10.7M bpd. The country uses 2.1M bpd and therefore exports 8.7M bpd.

At $90 per barrel, the Saudis make $783,000,000 per day in export revenues. If we stopped buying their oil, they'd make $648,000,000, a 17.6 percent reduction. But it's still a heckuva lot of money. I'm not sure that such a reduction would crimp the resources of the Saudi princes who backchannel money to Islamist causes and groups. Nor would it necessarily reduce the Saudi government's funding of Wahhabist madrassas and the like in the West or elsewhere.

Such a revenue reduction assumes, of course, that the Saudis couldn't find other buyers. Reducing our demand will take time, during which demand will increase in other parts of the world, mainly China and India and southwest Pacific countries, whose rising demand is already pushing oil prices up anyway.

Since worldwide oil demand is expected to rise 60 percent by 2020, the Saudis will have no difficulty selling as much oil as they can pump. So the idea that we can shut down their funding of Islamist groups or causes by eliminating our need for their oil just doesn't hold up.

At least, that's the way I see it.

Coming - can we gain enough energy efficiency to eliminate our need for Saudi oil? I think so.