Iowa’s starring role in the presidential campaign brought Peter Robertson, vice chairman of the board of Chevron Corp., to town last week. With a media spotlight shining on the state, it’s a good place to inject ideas into the debate.

So Robertson is out to emphasize a few basic points:

• If we’re worried about energy supplies – and we should be – the first step is to improve the efficiency of our energy usage. The United States still lags behind Europe and Japan, and China has a long, long way to go.

• Efficient or not, America’s energy use will continue to grow, and no single fuel source will make the problem disappear. We’ll need them all, and corn-based ethanol will just be one relatively small part of the answer. “We’re saying, grow all the corn you want and make all the ethanol you want,” Robertson said.”We’re at E3 (3 percent ethanol content in gasoline) or E4 now, and we’re all for going higher. Whatever the farmers can supply, we can use. We can go to 10 percent” without creating performance problems in the typical vehicle engine. But don’t expect his industry to become an E85 booster.

• Most important from Chevron’s viewpoint, Robertson wants to convince the candidates and the public that his company is spending all it can on finding more oil and developing alternative energy sources. The oil industry’s profits might seem staggeringly huge to the rest of us, but he says punishing the companies with windfall-profits taxes is shortsighted.

Chevron made a net profit of $17 billion last year. Robertson wants you to know that it’s also spending $2.5 billion over the next three years on renewable fuels and efficiency research.

It’s hard to see Big Oil as the good guys. But it’s also unrealistic to think that we can harvest our way to energy independence. Our proper role, while we have the nation’s attention, is not to sing the praises of ethanol but to demand that candidates tell us honestly what they think is best for the nation.