If I had to choose – and I do - a single arena to be politically involved in, it would be the environment. Not that other matters don’t interest, concern, or scare me half to death.
Indeed, under the current regime, the list of items I’ve found myself paying worried attention to has expanded alarmingly. From our grotesquely neo-imperialist foreign policy to the attack on labor rights and reproductive rights and civil liberties to the continued upward redistribution and concentration of wealth and power, there’s plenty to be worried about. It’s extraordinary what’s under attack. Not so very long ago, for instance, I thought the forces of reason and enlightenment had won the battle over creationism being taught in the public schools.
Moreover, I’m a holistic kind of guy. I can never get out of my mind for one minute that there’s a connection between that wretched foreign policy and the creationists’ rejuvenation of their once-defeated plan to put science on a par with the ancient equivalent of the X-Files.
Holistic or not, there’s only so much one person can actually do – or write - and still be politically effective. I don’t believe in an afterworld, but even if I did, for me in this world, environment is the biggest of big pictures, most particularly, energy, a field I’ve been involved with in various ways for 27 years, starting at the Solar Energy Research Institute.
In my opinion, how we deal with energy in the next 50 years, but starting tomorrow, will make or break civilization, and may very well make or break the atmosphere.
Two things: First, I’m not proselytizing for recruits here. Everybody’s righteously dedicated to their own project, and I’m glad for it. Keep up the good work. Second, I’m an optimist, or rather, an optimistic pessimist, not a doomsayer. The optimistic side says: If we get started on the right energy road right now, I believe human ingenuity can avert disaster. The pessimistic side asks: But will we? If I thought the answer was a definite no, I’d be planning to spend the next ten years downing tequila shooters and building furniture.
Several times in the past 14 months, I’ve delivered up my energy policy descriptions and prescriptions for critical review. This being Daily Kos, I got back far more useful information than I presented.
This week, Devilstower wrote outstanding and deeply researched pieces on electricity and transportation, the two most massive consumers of energy, drawing a substantive array of commentary from Kosopotamians who have thought a lot about this issue or worked in the fields under discussion. If you haven’t yet read his essays, don’t be put off by their length. Complexity requires elaboration, and the energy story is profoundly complex.
Unfortunately missing from Devilstower’s and my previous suggestions for a reasonable and far-sighted alternative energy policy is that the folks in charge of the U.S. government for the next four years don’t want an alternative energy policy. They want and their industry pals want business as usual, and now they may have the votes to pass the porky, myopic, eco-monstrosity that Enron, Cheney and the others haven't been able to get past the Senate since 2001.
So, with forces of darkness arrayed against us, what do we do, tactically speaking?
A four-fold approach is what I'd choose.
First, get behind an idea being widely considered with fresh interest from many on both sides of the aisle: break this bloated freak into smaller pieces and then fight over each one individually. In this way, we can, perhaps, on some issues, shave off Republican votes that, pork being pork and all, would otherwise be lost to us because voting against one big package can mean the White House will whip out the thumbscrews.
Not that this tactic will get us close to a good energy policy. Victories may be few and even those diluted. But going this way may help us curtail some damage that might otherwise be done. You can get a quick view of what a few people are saying about this idea in Amanda Griscom Little’s piece on the subject at Grist..
The piecemeal strategy could prove successful on many fronts, including on the Arctic Refuge. "The vote numbers effectively haven't moved on MTBE [given the new makeup of the Senate], but the numbers have moved on ANWR," said [Bill] Wicker [spokesman for the Democrats on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee].
Here's why: While Daschle voted for the energy bill, he was a steadfast opponent of drilling in ANWR; his successor will support both. And while Obama will almost certainly vote against drilling in ANWR, his predecessor Peter Fitzgerald was one of the few Republicans who also opposed it, meaning that Obama adds no new votes to the ANWR opposition. Also, Republicans are much more vulnerable to peer pressure on this issue given that there are no regional reasons (such as MTBE contamination or Yucca Mountain) for them to oppose it.
According to [Bill] Wicker, the congressional leadership is expected to make opening ANWR a part of the budget reconciliation process early next year by tacking the ANWR provision onto a budget bill that cannot be filibustered, so it would need only 50 votes to pass rather than the 60 necessary to avert a filibuster. "They tried to do this in 2003 and failed, but the reality is that with four new Republican votes, open-ANWR proponents have the wind at their back," he said.
[Dan] Becker of the Sierra Club said this may be just what environmentalists need. "The public opposition to drilling in the Arctic Refuge is huge. People have come to associate it with greed rather than need."
And historically the perception of greed has galvanized public opposition to initiatives that are overly friendly to industry and unfriendly to the environment and public health. Lawmakers and business lobbies overreach, and then get slapped by public opinion. This is precisely what happened with the MTBE liability exemption, for instance. It's what happened during Bush's first term when the EPA tried to weaken standards for arsenic in drinking water and exempt millions of acres of wetlands from protections -- initiatives that stirred up so much controversy they simply couldn't survive.
"Right now," said Becker, "greed is the best friend that the environment has."
Second, get behind conservation again in a big way. Ronald Reagan claimed conservation meant “freezing to death in the dark.” Dick Cheney says it's merely “personal virtue.” In fact, even the constrained conservation achieved since 1978 vastly reduced the amount of energy we now consume compared with what industry experts claimed we would be gobbling up by now. This was done without reducing our standard of living. In fact, smarter energy use saved money.
However, as a nation, we’ve accomplished only a third or less what we could do in conservation. When it comes to energy, with the right policies, less can be more. Making conservation bipartisan is doable if we take the right approach.
Third, get behind a focused alternative energy program that – even if it doesn’t anywhere near where we need to be as soon as we need to be there – at least points us in a good direction rather than backward. If a more amenable Administration comes along, the program can be accelerated, enhanced, fine-tuned.
To get enough votes for such a policy, however, requires that it have, let me add my voice to the chorus, the right frame.
While I have serious reservations about aspects of the proposal, and nearly burst a laugh gasket over the estimate of $26 a barrel for oil in 2025, I do think the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Winning the Oil Endgame offers a salable alternative to the miserable proposal that Congress will reconsider in the spring. As you see from lead author Amory Lovins’s article on the subject, it has a built-in frame: money. How America Can Free Itself of Oil—Profitably: It will cost less to replace the oil the U.S. will need than to buy it.
Inefficient light trucks and cars, which consume 40% of our oil, are at the center of our oil habit. And ultralight and ultrastrong materials for vehicles are the No. 1 enabling technology for changing that. Advanced composites like carbon fiber, backstopped by lightweight steels, can nearly double the efficiency of cars and light trucks and improve both safety and performance. The new materials will cost about the same per vehicle as today's metals, in part because manufacturing will become simpler and the system needed to propel the vehicle smaller and lighter.
If we use ultralight materials to engineer advanced versions of vehicles like today's Toyota Prius hybrid, we'll go a long way toward realizing the gains. A Prius costs a few thousand dollars more than a comparable nonhybrid but uses just half the gasoline. At the cost Toyota expects to reach in 2007, the fuel savings will repay the added cost in about five years. Building an ultralight version of the Prius would save 71% of the fuel, cutting the payback time to three years.
Fourth, get behind municipal and state policies and programs that relate directly or indirectly to energy. Innovative public/private approaches make sense at this level. I’m not just talking about tax breaks for buying hybrid vehicles or state investments in green electrical generators.
ohwilleke, for example, has some guaranteed-to-make-some-people-irate suggestions about land use in his comment on Devilstower’s Monday transportation thread. However, controversial ideas of this nature, which go to the root of our over-consumption of energy, must be a key element of any visionary policy.
Is this all we need to do? Obviously not. But as long as we're in the opposition, it may be all we can reasonably expect to achieve.