Everyone likes to talk about “energy security,” or its even more poll-pleasing but less sensible cousin, “energy independence,” but few ever bother to define energy security with any tolerable degree of exactness, let alone measure it in a meaningful way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy has stepped up, and just released the second iteration of its Index of U.S. Energy Security Risk.
The Index comprises 37 different metrics grouped into four primary areas: geopolitical, economic, reliability, and environmental. The Index also has the virtue of backtesting is metrics all the way back to 1970, which could be said to be the beginning of the modern era of serial energy “crises” with the first Persian Gulf oil disruption starting in 1973
