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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The Bush family may be a political dynasty, but they aren’t a particularly intelligent dynasty - and you can’t chalk all of the dumbness up to Bush the Lesser either.

When Bush the Elder invaded Iraq in the 1990s he left the God-awful place with political currency banked. Unlike his son, he was able to do that for four reasons.

• Although many believed the sole purpose of the 1990 war was simply oil, his invasion did carry the patina of justification in that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, something actually warranting a military response.
• When Daddy threw the Iraqis out of Kuwait - using an honest-to-God coalition rather than a Coalition of the Inept - he knew when to stop. You may not have liked Saddam, but you can say one thing for him, he kept the myriad factions from tearing out one another’s throats.
• Daddy knew the difference between a war and an over the top nation-building project that rewards war profiteers rather than successfully building much.
• Finally, he kept oil prices somewhat in line, or at least handled it better than his ham-fisted son.

A Heap-O-Political Goodness
Daddy B came out of the desert with a clear win and flying high on a heap-o-political goodness. But George the Elder had that congenital Bush defect that makes them unerringly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - and the defeat he snatched was starting the nation on the road to clean energy and less dependence on foreign oil. As he had the nation busy reading his lips, we could have been doing something to keep gasoline less than 4 bucks per gallon today and had cleaner air to boot.

Had we chosen to start a space race-style energy program, hybrids would now be the rule rather than the exception, the Big Three might still be the Big Three, and a much of our energy would come from something other than burning liquefied dinosaur bones.

Just before the implosion of Enron, The Big Dick told then browned-out Californians that you can’t conserve your way out of an oil shortage. True enough, if you don’t even try - and that’s the point. Given a 20-year head start, we’d have found ways to do that by now. Young George wouldn’t have to deny global warming or worry that it would destroy an economy he’s already left in shambles. Kyoto needn’t have been something to fear, but an antiquated benchmark we’d already passed.

Turning the Air Into Primordial Soup
Largely because of George the Elder (and the other limp-wristed administrations since), we have Middle Eastern dictators right where we want them - with their bejeweled curly-shoes firmly atop our necks and our tongues far up their poop chutes. We’re arguing over whether New York will sink in 30 years or 50 years and the rest of the world looks on us disgustedly for our failure to stop turning the air into primordial soup. Oh, and there’s the half-assed war too.

Sure, our current Mr. Potatohead may draw on his vast experience running oil companies into the ground to fashion a back-asswards energy policy, but it was the Popster who squandered our best chance to change the world in a good way instead of a concieted, my hubris uber alles way. Had Dad invested his political capital wisely, instead of squandering it on Halliburton stock, the country would have been much safer from his daft son.

But then, that’s the Bush Way^TM isn’t it?

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!