Governor Palin recently had an editorial published in the pages of the Washington Post. I felt it deserved a response. I am not an economist, so I won't address that aspect of the editorial, but I did want to talk about resources, considering statements like this:
We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil.
I am going to present an analogy. As with most analogies, this is probably a poor one, but work with me.
Imagine for a bit that you are the head of a family, a well-off family from the big city. For whatever reason, though, you have decided to give up on city life, and head out to the country to try your hand at farming. So, you sell your apartment, trade your Bimmer for a pickup, cash in your chips, and head to the fertile plains to make your fortune.
You are now in a situation where you have limited resources. If you can get your farm working, then you can raise food to support yourself and your family, and possibly make enough extra to sell and earn a profit. But right now, until you get your crops harvested, you have to live off your reserves.
Initially, your reserves may seem rather large. A successful family may be worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can buy a lot of groceries, pay a lot of bills, with that kind of cash. But it is also possible to frivolously waste that money if you are overconfident.
Running a farm, especially as a start-up, isn't easy. You need to maintain and fuel your vehicles, purchase tools and materials, make repairs to your house, your barn, your other buildings. You need to buy feed for animals, and seed and fertilizer for crops. You may need to hire extra hands to get the work done. This is going to cost a lot of money, and take a lot of time, and meanwhile, you have to keep your family fed while you're waiting for your crops, even your garden crops, to mature.
In all likelihood, there is going to come a point at which you look at the food you've got stored in the freezer and preserved in the larder, and realize that you're going to have to ration that food to keep everyone fed. And now you've got a baby on the way that you weren't initially planning for. Things are going to be tight, but you just might make it if you eat sparingly and don't waste food. This is assuming, of course, that your tomatoes are ripening on the vine, your chickens are nice and plump, and your other plans are coming to fruition.
But what happens if the boll weevils strike, and foxes raid the henhouse? Then what are you going to do? Can you make it on your reserves, eke out some kind of life until the next growing season? Or do you become filled with despair, and decide to throw a party with what you've got left, grab a little bit of happiness before you're destitute and starving?
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I am a liberal, and proudly so. But I don't eschew the value of conservative thought, with the emphasis on conservation. A truly conservative person, a cautious and pragmatic individual, would save some supplies, just in case. Call it rainy day money, or emergency supplies, whatever you like. In tough times, those reserves will help you survive. And the best way to employ them is in conjunction with a plan. Like our would-be farmer from the analogy, those reserves might help you survive until you can set up a self-sustaining system to meet your needs. A survivor on a raft in the ocean might try calculating how long it might take before rescue, or how far to travel to a life-sustaining island, when figuring out how to ration his or her emergency rations. But, just eating those rations up in the hopes that something will change by the time you're finished, is not acting to a plan. It is a desperate, foolish act, because when you are reduced to that level, you have given up conscious control over your own destiny.
This is the downfall of the Republicans, the elephant in the room of Palin's editorial.
At one point, people seriously believed that these resources would not run out, could not be consumed. But we live in the 21st century, and we understand where fossil fuels come from, we have an idea of how many there were, how much is left, and at what point it becomes impractical to recover them. We have, in all likelihood, already passed that point, known as Peak Oil.
Many people have and still are working to obfuscate the concept of Peak Oil (Wikipedia), to prevent the common man from being familiar with the concept. How often do you hear it being discussed on the news? How often is it brought up to counter the "Drill Baby, Drill" arguments espoused by Republicans? Not often enough.
We live in a world that is running out of cheap energy. The people who make a living from producing that energy are well aware of this. However, they have motive to conceal that fact from the world. The oil corporations and oil-producing companies have not been setting themselves up for a soft landing once the low-hanging fruit are all picked. They have instead built themselves onto the top of a rickety tower, and there is likely to be quite a crash once enough people figure out that nothing is holding it up anymore.
So, let me bring this back to Palin's demand that we tap our "God-given" natural resources.
There are alternative fuel sources, and we're all aware of them. Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, Biofuels, Nuclear, have all been discussed here many times. They each, individually, have drawbacks, but most of them are renewable and sustainable. Over time, and more experience with implementation, they may improve. But again and again, attempts to embrace alternative energy sources have been stymied by the fossil fuel companies. And now we're running out of time.
What I am afraid is that Palin's approach, to use our reserves now, is the nihilistic approach. The fossil fuel interests know that we're running out. It won't be instantaneous, we're just on the downward slope of the peak, but with the economies of China and India coming on line, and no serious investment in alternative energy infrastructure, what's left is going to get sucked out within a couple of decades, I'm guessing.
So, these people are rich, and pretty much untouchable. Why not make a few billion more dollars selling off the reserves, and have one last big party? Hell, they aren't going to be around for the suffering that future generatiosn will experience.
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I wanted to bring a couple things together to finish this off. Palin uses the words "responsibly tap". I have already implied that responsibility is not what is involved here. But I'm not opposed to tapping that reserve at some point. Pragmatists have plans. And we do have some time to enact a plan to develop sustainable energy. It is going to require foresight and will to accomplish, and it may well require some harshness: we could go a long way toward sustaining our energy supplies with laws that enforced sensible, rather than wasteful use of energy resources. That would make people unhappy, but would be beneficial in the long run. The key, though, is to be working to a plan. If we had a plan to implement renewable energy supplies, then tapping our reserves to keep us going through the rough spots would be acceptable to me. But unless and until such a plan is formulated and implement, I cannot see tapping those reserves as anything but nihilism, a last party before the apocalypse.