Photo: U.S. Navy
President Barack Obama's
speech on energy and national security today contained some good and some not so good. Unfortunately, it also contained nothing really new. Rather it was a reprise of his speech a year ago, with
tweaking around the edges. But that time the go-ahead for more oil drilling was supposed to be in exchange for a cap-and-trade deal. This time, no trade-off, just more drilling. As Ezra Klein
wrote:
Unfortunately, it’s not a very good plan, even if it may be very good politics. It says less about how we’ll solve our energy problems than how we’ve resigned ourselves to not solving them.
Energy security is shorthand for “oil we drill here” as opposed to “oil that gets shipped here.” So the first part of the plan is all about expanding domestic production of some of the very fuel we need to be weaning ourselves off of.
What is being proposed to make us less foreign oil dependent is more domestic drilling despite the fact that the U.S. consumes 20 percent of world oil output but only has 2 percent of world reserves. Plus, continued reliance on environmentally disastrous (but heavily subsidized) corn ethanol as well as the prospect of alternative biofuels. Plus, more efficiency in oil-fueled vehicles. Plus, "clean coal" to make electricity to power the electric cars the President has said he wants a million of on the road within four years. Plus, more nukes just as soon as the quick-and-dirty comprehensive review of existing nukes "proves" nothing like what happened in Japan can happen here, and problems like waste disposal and overcrowded spent fuel pools are shunted aside. Plus, more vehicle efficiency. Plus, solar and wind.
Too much of the wrong approach and not enough of the right one. And, although climate change got mentioned in the speech twice (to many eco-advocates' surprise), it requires more emphasis despite how it bristles the neck-hairs of the brigade of denier ignoramuses in Congress. Sure, references to $4-a-gallon gasoline were probably needed to cut through the constant drone of the Koch Brothers' media drowning out the truth. But people not being able to fill up their gas tanks isn't what is actually at stake here.
The President is absolutely right not to want to leave things to the next person who sits in the Oval Office. And he has not done so. His push for green energy with stimulus money and other funding is, in fact, the closest thing besides the military that this country has to a desperately needed industrial plan. He deserves significant credit for that. His own words today made clear that he gets it:
We cannot keep going from shock to trance on the issue of energy security, rushing to propose action when gas prices rise, then hitting the snooze button when they fall again. The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity and security on a resource that will eventually run out. Not anymore. Not when the cost to our economy, our country, and our planet is so high. Not when your generation needs us to get this right. ...
We need you to dream big. We need you to summon that same spirit of unbridled optimism, that bold willingness to tackle tough challenges and see those challenges through that led previous generations to rise to greatness – to save democracy, to touch the moon, to connect the world with our own science and imagination.
That is what America is capable of. And it is that very history that teaches us that all of our challenges – all of them – are within our power to solve.
Absolutely. Earlier this month, Peter D. Schwartzman & David W. Schwartzman at the Institute for Policy and Research Development published A Solar Transition. They set out to calculate how much fossil fuel would have to be burned now so we would never have to burn any ever again.
Arguably no challenge is more serious for the world’s future than bringing about a rapid decarbonation of the energy infrastructure with the possibility of preventing the onset of catastrophic climate change. With a mathematical model we demonstrate that this transition is technically plausible using modest inputs of existing fossil fuel reserves in the creation of a global solar power infrastructure even with existing solar technologies such as wind turbines. In addition, this global power capacity can likewise provide energy consumption per person levels for all of humanity consistent with high human development requirements.
By 2035, they calculated, a renewable energy infrastructure could provide 3.5 kilowatts of power for each of the 9 billion people on the planet by then. That is dreaming big, just as the President asked us to do.
But dreams cost money to become reality. If we are going to make a real difference on the energy front, which means on the climate-change front, then a much bolder plan than the blueprint put forth Wednesday is required. Big bucks need to be attached to it. Certain self-interested parties will oppose this, calling it unnecessary spending when, in fact, it's an essential investment in our security, the world's security.
Studies done as long as 20 years ago have sought to calculate how big a proportion of its military budget the United States spends to protect access to Middle Eastern oil. No easy matter since spending is not broken out regionally and analyses of specific Department of Defense programs leave big holes. In 1991, what was then the General Accounting Office estimated that DOD spending to protect access to oil in the 1980-1990 period amounted to $33 billion a year (exclusive of the Gulf War). In today's dollars, that would be $88 billion a year. Inflation-adjusted numbers from another study, Decisions for Defense: Prospects for a New Order, put the number at $171 billion. Subsequent reports have estimated differently. How much of the ultimate cost of $2 trillion or so for the Iraq War counts toward to that oil-protection total? All of it? Half of it?
When candidate Obama was discussing energy on the campaign trail, he proposed that the federal government invest $15 billion each year for 10 years in research and development and commercialization of renewable energy sources. That was at a time when it's estimated the United States was spending $150 billion a year on the Iraq War.
So, for argument's sake, let's take that annual $150 billion and make it the 10-year commitment to start getting us off fossil fuels. In other words, $1.5 trillion in federal dollars, by 2020. (With their far smaller economy, the Chinese government is spending $738 billion over the same period on renewable energy.)
Impossible in the current political climate? The idea will be hooted off the stage in 30 seconds? Perhaps. But instead of letting the narrative be set by climate-change-denying Republicans and the cohort of Democrats who enable them, we should take a page from the right-wing playbook.
Seventy years ago, in 1941, a far less affluent America, barely out of the Depression and still suffering from high unemployment, ran into a rather large and expensive problem regarding national security. Americans didn't whine about it. They didn't say the country was too broke to engage. Money was borrowed, great gobs of it, and the nation went to work with its allies to bring down European fascism and its counterpart in Asia.
If we truly believe that energy and climate change are crucial matters of national security, of international security, matters as important as those that propelled us into World War II, then we should behave like it.
If every bill adding tens of billions of dollars to the budget to wean us off oil can only be passed by including "Patriotic" somewhere in its title, then that's what should be done. If it takes saying that those who oppose such spending are "weak on national security," then we should say it. We've been dinking around for more than three decades, denying the energy crisis we knew was coming. That delay has cost us trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. Twin crises are upon us now, full bore: an energy crisis, a climate-change crisis. Underfunded halfway measures to deal with them will fail. Without investments in amounts commensurate with those crises, our energy policy will be little more than words.