Most citizens approach energy issues without considering historical background. By putting the past first, observers might achieve deeper and more useful understanding about matters such as how the formation of the Department of Energy affects the policy orientation of DOE today.
What exactly is the Department of Energy? On one hand, such an inquiry seems impossibly simple-minded, requiring a 'double-duh' answer like "an administrative branch of the United States Government that deals with how Americans get and use energy, especially electricity." On the other hand, one might present a flow-chart of the complex administrative apparatus of DOE and seek to explain what the different pieces do, which would be a complicated and instructive undertaking that might begin at the following web address: http://www.energy.gov/... However, because neither of these approaches to the question start with historical background, both would lead to important misconceptions about DOE and energy policy generally in the U.S. today.
In fact, the only way to view current policy debates clearly and intelligibly is to adopt a threefold historical examination of DOE, the first of which is governmental, the second of which is industrial, and the third of which is military. Such an investigation will reveal that, far from being a neutral arbiter of energy and electricity in America, DOE is a central element of what President Eisenhower warned could become an overarching "military industrial complex," meaning that a democratic discussion of energy is only possible outside of the purview and control of the Department of Energy itself.
DOE began in the Manhattan Project. That thirteen of twenty four 'Assistant Secretaries' in the department deal directly with nuclear matters should therefore come as no surprise. In terms of spending, a better name for DOE might be the Department of H-bombs. This fundamental underpinning of U.S. energy bureaucracy by nuclear weapons and nuclear power is clearest in following the names that led to the formation of the Department of Energy under President Carter, himself a nuclear engineer and commander of a nuclear submarine.
The Manhattan Project yielded the Atomic Energy Agency, which was a bomb-maker, pure and simple. This led to the Atomic Energy Commission, which both continued nuclear weapons R&D and vowed fission "power to cheap to meter," a prognostication hilarious but for the wasted alternative energy opportunities foreclosed by adherence to the false promise of nukes. The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 separated nuclear reactor issues from technical energy research matters, creating the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Research and Development Agency. While the NRC has remained the overseer and erstwhile guarantor of civilian nukes, ERDA formed a key part of the skeleton of Carter's DOE, which has continued to operate from its formation in 1977 until today, as noted, in a fashion that is overwhelmingly, and from a historical point of view, unavoidably, biased in favor of nuclear solutions to energy questions.
As an example of the annals of industry, DOE represents a multilevel development that could easily take a lifetime to understand in all its richness. However, by showing the connections between the work of David Lilienthal and Vannevar Bush, on the one hand, and the current programs of DOE, on the other, citizens might clarify their comprehension of how DOE works in setting goals and establishing parameters. Lilienthal, a chairman of both the Tennessee Valley Authority--now a prime owner of nuclear power properties--and the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote Big Business: A New Era, in which he extolled as critical the concentration of capital and the expansion of corporate control, in order to support individualism, democracy, and a society in which modernity and efficiency would go hand in hand.
In its current organizational state, the sorts of government/industry conjunctions that Lilienthal promulgated now exist, at the very least, in the four 'Power Administrations' of DOE and in all but one of the Under Secretary's subsidiary offices, to wit all of the Assistant Secretariats that deal with specific technical areas of power production or overlapping concerns of environment and energy. Vannevar Bush's seminal report, Science: The Endless Frontier, cemented the federalizaiton of basic science research as a key tenet of United States preeminence and prosperity. As the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in WWII and as leader of the Joint Research Development Board of the Army and Navy after the war, Bush served as the traffic cop at the intersection of science and government, with the primary applications being military even as Bush advocated the necessity of such work in securing peacetime production and prosperity as well. In terms of the present DOE, the entire Office of the Under Secretary for Science, with its eight additional Under Secretaries, as well as the Advance Research Projects Agency-Energy, descend directly from the legacy of Bush's work. Once again, that well over half of the work of these bureacracies deal with nukes is no accident.
In their collection, Major Problems in the History of American Technology, Merritt Smith and Gregory Clancye reserve one section for consideration of "The Military-Industrial-University Complex." Among the documents included here is Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address. 'Ike' was no pacifist, nor did he display any predilection toward socialism or dismantling the machinery of corporate hegemony. Yet the final page of the President's speech remains one of the clearest and most sober warnings on record of the danger to democracy of militaristic industrial governance.
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience(and)is felt in every city, every State...,every office of the Federal government."
Thus DOE is much more the manufacturer of H-bombs than it is the promoter of solar or other renewable energy sources. Thus, DOE's personnel come from the military or the corporate henchmen on the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. In its essence, DOE represents what Eisenhower witnessed in his own administration and foresaw as a threat to democracy in the future. Not merely a problem of Dick Cheney's exclusion of the public from energy policy debates in 2002-04, this militarization of science and energy are at the core of the government's manifestation of the possibility of 'energy.' In this context, decentralized and renewable technologies do not stand a chance; they are outside of the military-industrial model that is central to the history of DOE and its cohorts at the NRC, DOD, and so forth.
In a brief essay, only the faintest outlines of a complete case for a truly alternative examination of energy is possible. However, one might hope that even this overview is suggestive of two things. First, citizens cannot hope to follow, let alone suggest alternatives to, present policies unless they inform themselves of the historical background of these matters. Second, if the agenda for discussion is in the hands of the 'experts' at DOE, citizens can never anticipate anything but a continuing diet of nuclear and related technologies. DOE's birth is indistinguishable from the the H-Bomb establishment, so expecting support for renewable energy from this direction is tantamount to expecting a tiger to bring hay to the lambs. A final evidence of this inherent incapacity for democratic dialog about supposedly democratic technology is available in noting that the Chief Operating Officer of DOE, Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel B. Poneman, is a longstanding proponent of American nuclear weapons supremacy, an ardent lifelong supporter of nuclear power, and a general functionary of the intersection that brings together militarism, corporate economic power, and the politics of war about which President Eisenhower warned us fifty years ago. http://www.whorunsgov.com/...