The End of Black Gold...Texas Tea

KXS Jan2k5

Energy is the foodstuff of modern society.  Through that prism, we’re in a late hunter-gathering stage, sucking remnants of prehistoric dead things up from the earth and spreading their ghosts across the sky.  The primitiveness of our energy gathering and consumption is proven in part by its destructiveness to habitat.  We’re willing to accept poisoned rivers, rising seas, and ever-stranger fauna mutations to keep our engines of growth roaring.  And, we’re willing to deal with warfare, but not for what conspiracy maven's might think. Oil wealth keeps Middle Eastern tyrants in power, and that really makes the United States looks bad. To survive and prosper past the next couple of decades, we need to get beyond oil and bring the rest of the world with us.

Most politicians, because they are jelly-spined poll-sluts, will not tell the American public what most already know:  Right now we need Middle East oil, not like the Euros and East Asians need it— that’s another essay, but we need it nonetheless.  Even if we start a Manhattan Project for alternative energy tomorrow, or tonight for that matter, we will need to import oil for another 10 years at least.  Yet by all means, let’s start that project pronto.  Sadly and predictably, the Bush (Enron Exxon Halliburton) Administration will not make it happen at the pace we need.

There are two primary avenues of attack regarding long-term solutions to the current energy crisis: alternative energy sources, and energy conservation.  Every serious-minded energy maven on our coughing planet knows that hydrogen is our future, complimented by wind and solar power.  The question is whether that future comes to the fore five years from now, or fifty years from now.

Imagine, for a moment, how nice it would be for vehicles to run on clean energy, how nice it would be for that same energy source to provide electricity everywhere— courtesy of localized micro-grids that made wide-spread blackouts impossible; and how nice it would be for our computers, cell phones, and gameboys, to lose their reliance on environmentally caustic things like traditional batteries.  We can do these things right now— technically, but not economically. 

Developing fuel-cell technology to the point that it is economically competitive with combustion engines or batteries has been a long hard slog for several companies because it is damn hard to do...as any mechanical engineer will tell you.  Researchers for Honda have just built the first low-cost fuel cells that can operate below freezing temperatures, essential to eighty-something percent of all drivers.  Ballard, a Canadian fuel-cell company, has invested hundreds of millions into the vision of a pollution-free politically stable energy source, and they are not even sniffing a profit yet. 

Market forces alone will not make this happen in a timely manner.  Governments need to take an active role beyond distributing seed money.  These are the kinds of things governments are meant to do…handle the really big tasks that the private sector can not or will not tackle.  This means designing and implementing infrastructure, like hydrogen fuel pumps, as well as perks for compliance, like tax incentives for weaning us off the petrol teat.  If we can subsidize farmers to the tune of 12-figure dollar-counts, we can do the same for energy, since our way of life depends on it.

In the meantime, we need to get back to the conservation mindset that served us well during the eighties.  Between better home insulation, dimming the office lights, lowering the thermostat, and fuel-efficient cars, we all got past the energy crises of the seventies.  As some of you recall, those fuel-efficient cars were light, ugly, and climbed hills like Rush Limbaugh taking on Everest, but we saved a lot of energy.  It ain’t pretty, superbly functional, or even the permanent solution, but it beats the alternative.   

The alternative, stasis, may well conjure an economic felching (dry or inaccessible oil fields mixed with skyrocketing demand) that’ll make the Great Depression look like our last recession.  For the historically ignorant, and they seem to be riding high these days, a post-modern uber-depression would mean panic in the streets and panic in our hearts.  All that crazy Mad Max stuff would come to pass.  So, do not pontificate about blood for oil, reality crushes such ignorant thoughts.  Right now we have no choice, and it stinks.  It would be nice for someone up on high to tell us these truths, instead of prattling on about spreading freedom like some heat tolerant herpes virus across the Middle East— a noble goal and vital long-term solution for sure, but only a piece of the puzzle.

We need a stable Middle East as long as we need oil, because it’s tough to pump and ship oil in an area gone apeshit with war and terror.  The United States, believe it or not, is doing it the nice way right now.  If we’re made to do it the mean way, we’ll overrun everything between Cairo and Teheran with a three-million-strong conscript occupation force, because keeping our automobiles stuck in traffic means that much to our way of doing things.  These economic facts, mixed with our culture’s greedy sense of entitlement, and satellite broadcasting, have angered much of the world beyond what we militarily occupy. 

The disparity between the developed west and the third world must be ameliorated and eventually erased.  Unfortunately for the oil supply, much of the third world has taken it upon itself to do just that.  Consumption is skyrocketing across East Asia, home to a quarter of earth’s humans.  We bitch about high oil prices and the pace of third world development to the chagrin of folks who want to catch up to us...since, you know, we broadcast the superiority of the American way to every nook and cranny that can catch an electronic signal.  The USA, pop. ~290 million, consumes roughly a third of the world’s oil supply, and a quarter of all extracted natural gas.  When China, pop. ~1.3 billion, reaches per person economic parity with the US, and only a stuporous dingbat thinks that won’t happen, the Chinese will consume between four and five times the energy we will.  Do not try to convince China to return to their peasant-farm roots.  They are so over that.

Since everyone is currently pumping at full or near-full capacity, and there have been no significant new oil-field discoveries since the seventies, the math is pretty easy to figure out. If we do not take the lead in embracing non-fossil fuels, then young populous superpowers like India and China will balk at investing in clean, safer, energies. 

If energy shocks make the great societies of our planet turn inward, globalization and it myriad tendrils will not retreat in any way a professional granola protester will recognize.  Out of sight out of mind no longer works when the particulars of nanotech and wireless are being mastered and applied to everything from medicine to farming.  If we return to a dark age, it will not be some quaint scenario filled with organic farmers and quiet churches anchored to bucolic town squares like an Amish wet dream.  It will be a world with omnipresent and draconian security where the accrual of power and privilege will produce, within a few generations, an uber-race of genetically enhanced buff geniuses.  The other ninety-eight percent of us will be chattel, or worse.

We have a lot of work to do.

In terms of financial strength, the alternative energy sector is to big oil what a clique of suburban soccer-mom investors is to Wall Street.  The top five oil companies generated over one trillion dollars in revenue last year.  That’s roughly the GDP of Spain…and now we really know why Bush Co. tells us that SUVs are perfectly reasonable urban toys.  This Administration has cast its lot with short-sightedness and profiteering.  Drilling for oil in Alaska won’t make a difference, and in the long-term, even a stable Middle East won’t make a difference.  I love free enterprise and most of what the business world represents, because corporations dilute governement power, and that is a wonderful thing. But there are certain times in history that governments must answer high callings that are beyond the grasp of individuals or corporations. This is such a time. We have to get past our oil addiction.  Otherwise, the lights will go out.