Steve Huntley writes in the Chicago Sun Times:
I and others have written the country needs a Manhattan Project to free us from a dependence on overseas oil that only enriches countries that wish us ill, like Iran and Venezuela, and funds hostile ideologies such as fanatical Islamism. In short, energy is a national security issue requiring government intervention in the economy of the type that conservatives like me normally don’t like.
The Manhattan Project was the World War II effort to produce an atom bomb before the Nazis could. Another example was the 1960s program to put a man on the moon before the Soviet Union could.
These required new technologies, and my thinking on energy tended to focus on finding new technologies. Others with better minds have come up with a Manhattan Project for energy that requires no scientific breakthroughs and uses current infrastructure. Those are the guiding principles of “A Blueprint for U.S. Energy Security” from Set America Free. It’s a coalition of individuals and organizations across the political spectrum ranging from social conservatives to environmentalists, or, as one of them puts it — “tree huggers, do-gooders, sodbusters, cheap hawks and evangelicals.”