As energy prices rise beyond all amazement, if the US continues on its current 'Seize the Oil' methods to preserve the stuff we need without changing our sources of energy, we risk preserving our lifestyle at the expense of our Democracy. As Americans still believe in Liberty and Freedom, it may be our strongest card to play yet.
Robert Freeman at 321 Energy sums it up in his article (see link) "Will the end of Oil mean the End of America?"
quotes & ideas below the jump
Freeman Writes:
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a stake and place it in a clearing.
Soon, a monkey smells the treats inside and comes to see what it is. It can just barely get its hand into the coconut but, stuffed with booty, it cannot pull the hand back out. The Indians easily walk up to the monkey and capture it. Even as the Indians approach, the monkey screams in horror, not only in fear of its captors, but equally as much, one imagines, in recognition of the tragedy of its own lethal but still unalterable greed.
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America has its own hand in a coconut, one that may doom it just as surely as the monkey. That coconut is its dependence on cheap oil in a world where oil will soon come to an end. The choice we face (whether to let the food go or hold onto it) is whether to wean ourselves off of oil -- to quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis for civilization -- or to continue to secure stable supplies from the rest of the world by force.
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To date, we have chosen the second alternative: to secure oil by force. The evidence of its consequences are all around us. They include the titanic US budget and trade deficits funding a gargantuan, globally-deployed military and the Patriot Act and its starkly anti-democratic rescissions of civil liberties. There is little time left to change this choice before its consequences become irreversible.
The world is quickly running out of oil. In the year 2004, global production stood at 82 Million Barrels per Day (MBD). By 2020, demand is forecast to reach 112 MBD. But additions to proven reserves have virtually stopped and it is clear that pumping at present rates is unsustainable. New Scientist magazine recently placed the year of peak production in 2004. Virtually all experts believe it will almost certainly occur before the end of this decade.
The situation is especially critical in the US. With barely 4% of the world's population, the US consumes 26% of the world's energy. But the US produced only 9 MBD in 2000 while consuming 19 MBD. It made up the difference by importing 10 MBD, or 53% of its needs. By 2020, the US Department of Energy forecasts domestic demand will grow to 25 MBD but production will be down to 7 MBD. The daily shortfall of 18 MBD or 72% of needs, will all need to be imported.
That 25 million barrels would come out of a world supply of maybe 70 million barrels...and China will need 30 million at the same time! Nevermind what India or Europe will require, leaving pretty much nothing for Japan, the rest of Asia, Canada, Latin America, Australia, or Africa. Anyone can see massive war is inevitable by this point.
If the US economy is not to grind to a halt under these circumstances it must choose one of three alternate strategies: dramatically lower its living standards (something it is not willing to do); substantially increase the energy efficiency of its economy; or make up the shortfall by securing supplies from other countries. President Bush's National Energy Policy published in March 2001 explicitly commits the US to the third choice: Grab the Oil. It is this choice that is now driving US military and national security policy. And, in fact, the past 60 years of US policy in the Middle East can only be understood as the effort to control access to the world's largest supply of oil.
As long as the US chooses the Grab the Oil alternative, the implications for national policy are inescapable. The combination of all these facts -- fixed supply, rapid depletion, lack of alternatives, severity of consequences, and hostility of current stockholding countries -- drive the US to HAVE to adopt an aggressive (pre-emptive) military posture and to carry out a nakedly colonial expropriation of resources from weaker countries around the world.
But the provocation occasioned by grabbing the oil, especially from nations ideologically hostile to the US, means that military attacks on the US and the recourse to military responses will only intensify until the US is embroiled in unending global conflict. This is the perverse genius of the Grab the Oil strategy: it comes with its own built-in escalation, its own justification for ever more militarization -- without limit. It will blithely consume the entire US economy, the entire society, without being sated. It is, in homage to Orwell, Perpetual War for Perpetual Grease.
We already know all this. The creation of an 'Oil Empire' is already subverting democracy. Recall Ashcroft's words on the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act: "...those who oppose us are providing aid and comfort to the enemy." In other words, protest against the government -- the singular right without which America would not even exist -- is now being defined as trying to overthrow the government.
Freeman continues:
And by the internal logic of a global Oil Empire, this is entirely reasonable. The needs of the people of any one country must be subordinated to the larger agenda of Empire itself. This is what the Romans learned in 27 B.C. when Augustus proclaimed himself Emperor. It was the end of the Roman Republic and the disappearance of representative government on earth for almost 1,700 years, until the English Civil Wars in the 1600s. That is the reality we are confronting today--offering up our democracy in propitiation to an Empire for Oil. It will be a fateful, irreversible decision.
So what do Democrats do about it? Run on the Spectre of Military Dictatorship in America.
Ideally the 2008 presidential candidate should been born in the early 1960s ... too young to have fought in 'nam, too old to have fought in the Gulf War. Alternately, NO VETERANS.
Some soundbite suggestions
The Democrats should run against the Republicans by simply stating "Following our current course will lead inevitably to Military dictatorship in the United States."
Run on a crash program weaning America off Oil. "If I am wrong and we do this anyway, then we only have a stronger, more efficient economy. If I am right, and we do what my opponent suggests, your grandchildren will never know democracy."
Use Shiavo as an example of what is coming: The Government under Republicans will poke itself into your private affairs "for its own good" with no thought to your personal liberty.
A nation permanantly at war cannot preserve Democracy. Therefore, we must decide. Which is more important to preserve? Guzzling gas? Or crash developing a post-oil economy? Sacrifices will be required of the American People, but we need to frame it as deciding which is more important to preserve: Affluence or Democracy. If we choose Affluence, we must surrender Democracy. If we choose Democracy, we must at least in the short term reduce our affluence as resources shift from consumption (more 'stuff') to reseach on non-oil energy sources.