The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!

People used to wonder where the tipping point was for gasoline. Unleashing my massive intellect, I’ve calculated it’s approximately $4 per gallon. Four bucks is the point at which people stop driving, airlines start charging extra to lose your luggage, and Hummers lumber uneconomically into that long oil-soaked night.

It just so happens that gas started to cost a bit more per gallon than milk in the middle of a Presidential campaign. The price of this Nectar of the Exxons^TM is the perfect wedge issue. We can all argue over various lop-sided tax schemes, how much we should invest in alternative energy, and how many holes we’re going to poke into Mother Earth in a vain attempt to find more Texas Tea.

BTW, I’d guess we’ll stop drilling as soon as we begin to suck up magma from the Earth’s core.

It’s the Trust Stupid
Don’t get me wrong, these are legitimate debates, even if the time to have them was 30 years ago. Unfortunately, much gets lost in the bloviating about how the next president will save us all from ourselves. But despite all the talk about technology and drilling and taxing, the one thing we need above all others is the one thing we’re least likely to get…trust.

The technology already exists to make drilling reasonably reliable and safe. The same is true for nookular power. The problem isn’t technology. The problem is that we can’t trust a “free” market to operate it safely.

For example, the Exxon Valdez disaster wasn’t about technology, it was about Exxon allowing a drunk to captain a single-hulled tanker into an environmentally sensitive place. Exxon whining about their culpability is squirmy bunk. Had they maintained a robust monitoring program for their captains there would’ve been no need to cry over spilt oil. If the cheap bastards had used double-hulled tankers - probably converted at less cost than their CEO’s bonuses - there would’ve been no disaster. The same is true for last year’s leaks in the Alaska pipeline. They didn’t just develop oily stigmata, they rotted because the Titans of Capitalism didn’t inspect and repair them as they should as a cost saving measure. Clearly, money trumps safety time and again.

War of Crapitude
Nuclear technology isn’t a big problem either. Despite other countries using it effectively, Americans are left with a deadly fear of the stuff. That fear is well-grounded. Power companies haven’t had a sterling record when it comes to keeping nuke power safe. They built reactors on fault lines. They caused the Three Mile Island disaster. They buried nuclear waste in under-engineered and poorly maintained dump sites. They tote nuke materials around in unmarked trains and trucks with no special protection. Hell, according to the Homeland Insecurity folks, they can’t even keep nuke sites safe from the all-feared Al Qaeda. That’s not responding to a War of Terror, it’s responding to a War of Crapitude.^TM

Humans are inventive. Using no more than our opposable thumbs, we’ve evolved from swamp scum to Masters of the Known Universe. We can build machines that can take us to the edges of the galaxy. We’ve developed highly structured societies with unique ideologies to accommodate a massive array of problems.

Solving our energy problems will take the most technologically inventive minds in the world. It’ll also need the best financial wizards to finance it. However, it’ll also take some fundamental changes to the American notion of capitalism. We’ll need to understand that capitalism’s only role is not simply making money. The money also needs to be spent to gain the trust of their market. The public must trust that if an oil company presents a technological proposal for drilling in ANWR, they will vigorously carry out the safeguards. It’s all about change.

Yeah, I’ll be holding my breath for that one.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

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If an oil company executive says oil prices are going up, believe him.

The average cost of gasoline in the US went over $4 per gallon this week, but that’s cheap compared to my local price of $4.55. But chin up, in most of the industrialized world it’s several dollars more. Of course, Europeans are getting a little sump’n, sump’n with their fill-up - a spreading truckers’ strike for example. It’s already causing spot shortages of some types of food across the continent. Third world countries are struggling too. So many feed crops are going to ethanol production they’re having food riots in places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

We used to get juice glasses, dinner plates, or at least an antenna ball for buying gas in this country. Heck, they even pumped it, checked the oil, and washed your windows. But all that disappeared during the last big oil crisis. You remember the early 70s, when gas shot up from about 45 cents per gallon to top a buck for the first time. Those were the days of the odd/even system that allowed you to buy gas only every other day based on whether your license plate ended in an odd or even number. The long, snaking lines were positively soviet-like in a time when anything soviet-like was worse than being - dare I say it? - a liberal.

Not Crawling Out on a Limb

These days, the prognosis for our rising prices changes as often as Hillary changed her mind about staying in the presidential race. One expert says prices have almost peaked. The next says, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Still others say there’ll be a prolonged period of higher prices, but won’t crawl any farther out on the limb than that. Each of them knows who’s at fault too. Depending on which big head screams at you, it’s oil speculators, big oil companies, a failure to release oil from our strategic reserves, high taxes, low taxes, or no problem at all.

The worst part of this pickle is that it could’ve been largely avoided. I learned the world was running low on oil in a 1965 geography class. The oil problem is no secret, contemporary thing. It’s burned like a refinery flare for quite some time. One would think that when gas was $1.25 we would have said, “what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down”, and gotten to work doing something about it.The failures in energy policy over the years are bipartisan and ostrichian. Instead of repeatedly extending Detroit’s mileage standards, we should have been making them more aggressive. Instead of decades-long arguments to drill ANWR’s 3-day supply of oil, we should have been funding alternative fuel research. Instead of giving tax breaks to oil companies to drill more - which worked out oh-so well, eh? - we should’ve been working on stable, non-cartel controlled sources of oil. We should have been developing technology and improving our pitiful public transportation system. And those Hummers and deregulated markets? Gee, who could’ve foreseen those as a problem?

‘Major Tom to Energy Control’
The next president, along with all the world’s other heads of state, needs to make this a top priority. Make headway on it and we’ll go a long way toward fixing many of the other problems we have, from a faltering economy to Middle East instability. We need a mixture of short term actions to keep the energy wolf at bay and long-range policies designed to squeeze every scintilla of energy from whatever source we’re using. This isn’t the time for people to argue that we might as well do nothing because it’s too hard to find a single magic bullet. It’s not the time to shy away - nor particularly move toward - tax changes or other political issues based purely how well they play in Peoria. It’s also not the time to summarily reject any form of energy, including nuclear. They all have their place and it will take some uncomfortable steps to get where we need to go.

There’s a good model for how to manage all these complex tasks too. I realized the value of it lying on my bedroom floor in 1969 and looking at the moon outside my window. People were walking around up there and they’d been put there by a carefully planned, governmental effort to make sure they were. What started as a Cold War game of one-upmanship provided us with technology that transformed our world and eventually helped bring the same Cold War to an end. We could do much worse than using a similar forward-thinking plan tackle our energy problems.

“Major Tom to energy control…”

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

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Thirty-eight years ago I was a high school student. College campuses were afire with more protests than you could shake a stick at. At the risk of sounding like a “these whippersnappers today…” speech, kids today really don’t appreciate exactly how much general upheaval there was.

At the beginning of my sophomore school year an earnest young college organizer came to our school to form an environmental club. The club was a way for those of us still needing permission slips to attend anti-war protests to get involved in something “radical”. Our parents figured this whole environmental thing was nothing but an extension of Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautify America campaign and it seemed a safe bet a state trooper wouldn’t whack us in the head for picking up trash. For our part, we were excited more by the prospect of being able to skip class for club activities than about picking up trash.

The organizer spent his time telling us about environmental products available in the Whole Earth Catalog. Clearly, one day we’d all shower with water heated by solar stills and build our geodesic houses out of the cast off hoods of cars. Beer bottles, presumably since there were always so many lying around the commune, also seemed like a futuristic building material. We’d all crap in bio-composting outhouses too. Later, as I grew up, those meetings made it easier to understand why our cars weren’t flying, our robots weren’t sweeping our floors, and why Tang was the penultimate triumph of the recently won space race.

Ah Mom!
Over the months, the club began to disintegrate. Long lectures about composting dinner scraps - like your Mom would allow that - didn’t much hold the interest of a bunch of young horndogs trying to recruit cute chicks for the mostly male club. But in mid-winter our organizer started to talk about a huge celebration called Earth Day that would be another Woodstock. In April, millions of kids would descend on Washington and celebrate the Earth in a way no one could have ever imagined. We asked what there would be to do and our organizer simply said “celebrate” in that doe-eyed way true hippies had back then. They didn’t need no stinkin’ plans, everyone just “went with the flow”.

Ya dig?

April 22 came around and we all piled into the organizer’s wheezing VW Microbus - which spewed more pollution than a coal burning locomotive - and headed for Washington. The traffic jam was horrendous. Cars boiled over and many of the more laid back simply stopped in the middle of the street and wandered away to swim naked in the polluted Potomac. We were sure the Earth was being celebrated somewhere in the Washington Metro area, but it was something we took on faith rather than actual participation.

As with many 60s-era revolutions, the club ran out of steam. Our organizer didn’t show up to our meetings. Word had it he’d met a girl with hairy legs and flowers in her hair and they’d packed up the Microbus to move to Haight-Ashbury. We discussed merging our club with the primarily female student poetry magazine - Rutabaga Fudge - but stopped short of a real merger when it became apparent that listening to poetry might actually be required. We still got out of class to attend meetings, although our only further activity that year was to show up on picture day, hold up our stomach-churning green eco-flag, and pile atop one another to flip off the camera.

We’ve Come a Long Way Baby
Earth Day has come a long way since then, but it’s still more about style than substance. They teach environmental science in high school now. The classes are long on making posters about the far-off promise of wind farms and convincing your Mom to change the light bulbs at home. People still gather to celebrate the Earth, but the crowds are considerably smaller and no one runs off to skinny dip in the Potomac. Poor Al Gore has risen above his former wooden self to make movies and start a television network, making him look marginally hip. He uses solar panels at his palatial farm and buys carbon credits to offset things like the pumps for the swimming pool, but the global warming naysayers are getting the last laughs as this Earth Day rolls around.

Today’s Earth Day is still more about picking up beach trash than solar energy or wind power, but everything starts small and takes awhile to catch on - although 38-years seems a little glacial even by American societal standards. Picking up beach trash is better than nothing and a few Moms may have even been convinced to swap out the light bulbs (but only when the incandescents burn out). We still aren’t building houses out of car hoods or remembering that the Whole Earth Catalog turned into a middle-class chain of department stores. Earth Day isn’t dead, but it sure needs some life support.

Solar-powered life support, if we can manage it.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!