Note: this is second in a series of posts I'm doing reviewing Robert Zubrin's Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil. Part 1 is here and originally posted at New Worlds.
President Bush has said Iraq is "the central front in the War on Terrorism." He is wrong. The central, decisive front is America's fight for energy independence.
The world economy is currently running on a resource that is controlled by our enemies. This threatens to leave us prostrate. It must change—and the good news is that it can change, quickly.
Zubrin thinks he has the recipe for our salvation and he lays it all out in Chapter 1. He explains the scale of the problem by pointing out how much the Saudis have us over the barrel and how much worse it will get. "At currently projected rates of consumption, by the year 2020 over 83 percent of the world's remaining petroleum reserves will be in the Middle East, controlled by people whose religion obligates them to subjugate us." He goes on to explain that the current passel of panaceas in vogue; the hydrogen economy, conservation, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal and solar power, are all grossly inadequate to solve a problem of this scale. Hydrogen in particular evokes extreme disgust. "The people who have foisted this hoax on the American political class are charlatans, and they have done the nation an immense disservice."
Hydrogen is a hoax because it is not a source of energy, but a carrier of it, and one of the least practical carriers we know of. Conservation can only help us to go down a tiny bit more slowly "like using buckets to bail out a ship whose bottom has been ripped open." For some reason he considers hybrids part of the conservation scenario, as they are seen as just another way to use a little less gasoline. I'm not so sure about this. As a Prius driver for a couple of years I am extremely impressed with the technological innovation and ordinary cars seem ridiculously wasteful by comparison. Ideas like regenerative breaking and not having the engine running when coasting downhill or waiting at a traffic light seem to me the way a car obviously should be designed. Zubrin bases his calculations of conservation efficiency on a "wildly optimistic 5% market share," but why not mandate all vehicles use these sensible technological innovations as he proposes to do with flex fuels?
With new, cleaner electricity generation schemes such as nuclear, wind & solar, the problem is that liquid fuels are needed to power cars, trucks, ships and airplanes. Petroleum is by far the cheapest liquid we have had for these purposes and why we've invested so heavily in basing our economic infrastructure upon them. These clean technologies do get Zubrin's respect and will be enormously helpful for our energy future, just not for filling the tank.
The solution is alcohol for two major reasons; the largest producers of both ethanol and methanol - the two primary alcohol fuel choices- are all in the western hemisphere, and a relatively recent technological innovation, flex fuel vehicles, allows the economical alternative of running an internal combustion engine on any combination of ethanol, methanol, or gasoline. This makes it practical to get an alcohol fuel industry up and running virtually overnight. A mandate to produce these vehicles would enable a market to develop for producing the fuels to run them and free us from having to pay through the nose to get it from our enemies.
If all cars sold in the US had to be flexible-fueled, foreign manufacturers would also mass-produce such units, creating a large market in Europe and Asia as well as the US foir methanol and ethanol—much of which could be produced in America. Instead of being the world's largest fuel importer, the United States could become the world's largest fuel exporter. A large portion of the money now going to the Arabs and Iranians would instead go to America and Canada, with much of the rest going to Brazil and other tropical nations. This would reverse our trade deficit, improve conditions in the Third World, and cause a global shift in world economic power in favor of the West.
One of the questions that leaps to my mind is what would be the hidden costs of such a switch? Would destruction of the remaining Amazon rainforest be among the results? I've been hearing that this is already a problem with Brazil's dependence on an ethanol economy, and I'd like to hear Zubrin's explanation for how such a major shift would not result in unintended biological catastrophe.
Still, despite these particular misgivings, this is a most impressive chapter which neatly summarizes a plan which would fairly painlessly place us on a much better footing for the future. The next two chapters try to predict the consequences of staying on our present course and it's not pretty.
Update: Zubrin's response via email on the question of mandating hybrids:
The answer to why we should mandate flex fuel but not hybrids is twofold;
- FFV's have virtually no price differential with ordinary cars, whereas hybrids cost a lot more. Thus mandating FFVs is a much more practical proposition - its like mandating seat belts.
- By mandating FFV's we make flex fuel the international standard, and put hundreds of millions of cars worldwide within just a few years that are free to choose between alcohol and gasoline. This is the key thing that must be done to contain OPEC's ability to raise prices. Right now they have no competition, because they are a vertical monopoly. If you want to drive, you have to buy their stuff (and hybrids, incidentally, would not change this picture, unless they were hybrid FFVs). But if we force them to compete with alcohols produced by farmers and other sources from around the world, they won't be able to keep the price above about $60/barrel, because that is the point where alcohol fuels become attractive.
It is very important to understand this; the high oil price is a very REGRESSIVE tax on the world population. To rich Americans, it's a nuisance, but to poor people in the Third World it is a crushing burden. It's one thing to pay $100/barrel for oil if you make $200/day. It's another if you make $2/day. No one has the right to call themselves a progressive if they are willing to let this viciously cruel robbery of the world's poorest by the worlds richest go on, or worse, escalate - which is what it is set to do unless we use FFV's to break the oil cartel's vertical monopoly.