The Energy Revolution

Outside Magazine is not just a rag for rock jocks and rugged fashionista wannabes. It also contains some pretty heavy duty journalism from reporters in the field in places like Darfur, Kasmir, and Afghanistan. They also frequently also dabble in politics, taking on environmental issues with integrity and objectivity. During the 2000 election Outside Magazine produced an issue in which the principal stories were to compare the two candidates records on environmental issues.

In the February 2005 issue, the wind surfing, kite sailing, hockey playing Senator John Kerry addresses the Outside community directly.

The spearhead of this editorial is in the final three paragraphs:

“This fight is as critical as it is symbolic. Roads, pipelines, and other developments would irreversibly damage this national treasure. President Bush and pro-drilling forces cite special-interest junk science to argue that they can limit the damage by drilling in only 2,000 acres. But oil is scattered throughout the refuge, so drilling in 2,000 acres could mean 40 separate 50-acre footprints. Even they know the line they're selling is bunk.

We can counter this by telling the truth about our energy future. We import 2.5 million barrels of oil from the politically toxic Middle East every day, and our consumption of foreign oil has risen to 55 percent. I don't want fragile and often unfriendly regimes to hold America's energy security in their hands, but we need to remind a country weary of conflict in the Middle East that drilling in the Arctic won't make a dent in our oil dependence. The U.S. Geological Survey has concluded that there are only 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil in ANWR.* That amounts to just a six-month supply for the U.S. Irreversibly damaging a truly wild place is an unacceptable price to pay for such a small payoff.

We can't drill our way to energy independence. We have to invent our way there, by harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit that made our country great. We can conserve energy and make our cars run farther on a gallon of gas. We can increase our investment in clean-energy products and create hundreds of thousands of jobs along the way. What we can't do is buy into the myth that America's energy future lies under the snow of ANWR.”

When people hear the amounts like “billions of barrels of oil” equated to 6 months or, if one takes the most hopeful numbers, 14 months, they are incredulous. “Only 6 months. Preposterous, we couldn’t possibly go through that in 6 months."

Oh yes we do. It’s not just cars people.** It’s heating homes and places of work. It’s providing fuel for trains, planes, automobiles for mass transportation. It’s providing fuels for our entire military. Think about it. Yeah, we do burn over ten million of barrels a day in oil.

How long do we think we can keep this up? It takes the planet a few eons to renew this resource; I really don’t think she can keep up with the demand.

Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs and Steel has written a new book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

I have not read the book yet myself, it just came out. But here is an excerpt of the Editorial Review:

“Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society's response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster.”

At the moment this country is not just disregarding the coming disaster when the oil reserves dwindle, we are in complete sticking-our-fingers-in-our-ears-and-screaming-“LALALALALALALA!” denial.

Add to that argument the second point of Kerry’s editorial: That our dependence on oil has created a dependence on the sometimes hostile countries in the Middle East. They have us by the political short hairs and if they want to start telling us to jump, we have no choice but to ask “How high?”***

Destroying 8% of one of our largest wildlife reserves by drilling up a years supply of oil is not going to solve this problem. In two years the oil is gone, the caribou heards are decimated, the bears & wolves, falcons * snow geese are gone. The area may recover in time for our great-grandchildren, if they're lucky. And we will still be tied to foreign countries' apron strings because we need their oil.

Much of America and American politics at the moment is devoted to finding our way back to some mythic glory years in which America was an economic powerhouse and American citizens all lived in nuclear families in their own homes and went to church in their own cars (though how they plan to do this while sending jobs overseas and not stabilizing a price-ballooning housing market is beyond me).****

Oh yeah, and they were all white too.

But the sad truth is that time is linear. It’s a law of nature. We do not get to go back. We do not get to stop. Time moves forward and either we can move forward with it or get run over by other societies who understand that concept better than we.

The choice is not simply starkly clear, there is no choice. We must find embrace alternative means of powering our cars, heating our homes and workplaces, flying our planes (though I imagine that one will take more time) and so on. In the meantime, write to your Senators and Congressman or Congresswoman to block drilling in the ANWR.

This country achieved greatness because it embraced the Industrial Revolution. To remain great we must embrace the Energy Revolution.



* This is the low end of the estimate. You can read the summary of the U.S. Geological Survey here at USGS.gov

** How Much Gasoline Does America Use?

*** The oil company execs and their pet Government officals may enjoy that sort of thing ("Oo baby! Harder!"), but we won't.

**** The joke is that if you talk to those that lived through those years, they were not “Leave It To Beaver”. “Good old days? *snort*” would be my Grandfather's typical response.