Published in
the Spooner Advocate, Spooner, Wisconsin
Wednesday, August
18th, 2004 02:37:56 PM
Looming energy crisis, extraordinary opportunity
By Lance McKee
The presidential candidates and commentators say too little about our most
important issue: oil. It’s our Achilles heel, the root of our security
problems, the weakest pillar of our economy. But if we transition from oil
to renewable energy soon, we could come out of this precarious time, as my
shop foreman used to say after we fixed a mistake, “smelling like
a rose.”
Read “The End of Cheap Oil,” in the June 2004 National Geographic
Magazine. Study Web sites and recent books on “peak oil.” World
demand for oil and natural gas is rising dramatically as China and other
poor nations develop. U.S. demand is rising, yet U.S. production peaked
in 1971 (new Alaskan wells will barely change that), and world production
will
peak soon.
“
Peaking” means every year less oil will be pumped than the year before.
Turmoil in oil-producing nations will cause “oil shocks,” aggravating
the pain of oil depletion.
Matthew Simmons, a respected Houston-based energy industry investment banker,
and a Republican, said in June 2004: “Oil is far too cheap at the moment
[about $40 a barrel]. The figure I’d use is around $182 a barrel. If
we price oil correctly, it could give us time to find bridge fuels, fuels
to fill the gap between an oil economy and a renewable economy.” Simmons
was on Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force. Read his speeches
at www.simmonsco-intl.com.
Bush administration and Exxon/Mobil executives admit that we will depend
increasingly on foreign oil, a dependence contributing $110 billion this
year to our record-high trade deficit. Our military efforts worldwide to
protect wells, pipelines, tankers and refineries will cost at least an
equal amount. We’re at war in Iraq, the country with the world’s second
largest reserves, and that could be just the beginning. Some authors predict
oil wars that would make our occupation of Iraq look like a picnic, and oil-induced
economic disasters that would make 1970’s “stagflation” – caused
by an OPEC oil embargo – look like a golden age.
Let’s reduce our $220-plus billion per year oil liability and invest
in our future. Here’s how:
1. Conserve! It hardly makes sense, does it? With the subsidies oil companies
get, and with our military support to despots who give us oil bargains
while shortchanging their people, the “free” market has made crude
oil cheaper than bottled water, until now. Nevertheless, the easiest, most
cost-effective part of the solution – the “low-hanging fruit” – will
be conservation.
2. Give tax rebates to homeowners who invest in energy conservation and
renewable energy, and to car buyers who buy fuel efficient cars.
3. Impose a steadily increasing sales tax on oil-derived fuels, natural
gas, and coal to motivate conservation and to motivate investment in sustainable
energy businesses and technologies. Proportionally decrease the income
tax
paid by low-income and middle-income people, who will suffer the most from
rising fuel prices and inflation.
4. Set Renewable Portfolio Standards, boost carbon offset trading, and
in other ways support renewable energy market development and research.
Such
supports have been negligible compared to subsidies for fossil fuels and
nuclear, which should no longer be subsidized.
5. Raise corporate average fuel economy (CAFÉ) standards. Car manufacturers
should significantly increase the fuel economy of their offerings every
year. This would incidentally boost export sales to a world that craves
cars that
look American but burn less gas.
6. Build a decentralized electric power system with a few large and many
medium and small producers. Develop and adopt market-stimulating national
or global standards and practices for connection to the grid and for management
of distributed generation. (Global standards broaden the market available
to component manufacturers.) Build a transparent digital real-time electricity
market for users and producers who are mainly homeowners, farmers and small
and medium sized businesses. Modernize the grid to balance the load.
7. Be realistic. First hybrids and euro-diesel, then batteries and fuel
cells. First combined heat and power, then no-fuel alternatives. Before
investing
in gasohol or biodiesel, study their oil inputs. Be honest about life cycle
costs and whole-system resource budgets. Count externalized costs, like
the damage to children’s brains from coal power plants’ mercury
emissions.
Compare energy expenditures to computer expenditures. Surely we can tap
Americans’ genius
for invention and entrepreneuring to launch a renewable energy boom bigger
than the internet boom. We will start thousands of businesses and employ
millions of people in the design, manufacture, sales, installation, and
servicing of products related to solar power, wind power, biomass, net
metering, combined
heat and power, geothermal heat pumps, fuel cells, aerogel insulation,
superconductors, supercapacitors, microhydro, batteries, green appliances,
switches, inverters,
regenerative braking, hydrogen storage and small scale hydrogen production.
We will remodel homes and offices for solar gain and build homes that create
surplus energy for sale and for transportation.
We will innovate, export, and, as a bonus, begin to solve the global warming
problem. We will become a healthier people as we reduce harmful emissions,
and a wiser, happier, and more prosperous people as we assert personal
and local control over energy. But if we delay, the skyrocketing cost of
foreign
oil and defense will make us too poor to prime the boom.
The Kerry/Edwards renewable energy proposals are far more serious, detailed
and imaginative than the Bush/Cheney proposals. I believe Kerry and Edwards
will propose more when they see voters embrace ideas like those above.
Bush and Cheney, despite token support for renewables, are wedded to
oil, coal, nuclear, and big defense contractors: the “military industrial
complex” in Eisenhower’s warning. They’re too close
personally to the executives who gave us Enron and the California electricity
crisis.
I'll vote for Kerry and Edwards and then hold their feet to the fire.
I hope you will, too. We all need to get smart and active about this.
Let it be
our legacy. Leaving an economically strong, energy rich, environmentally
healthy and internationally respected nation to our children and grandchildren
is something we can do.
Let’s do it.
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Lance McKee is a writer and consultant living in Worcester, Massachusetts.
He grew up in Wisconsin -- in Spooner, Watertown and Brookfield --
and attended
Badger Boy's State. He was chairman of the Elm Grove/Brookfield Young Republicans
in 1965, and earned his way through the University of Wisconsin - Madison
working in machine shops. He helped start and run a successful software
industry standards
consortium, has run his own small business, and is president of the Tatnuck
Brook Watershed Association.
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