By now it comes as little surprise to most observers that with the exception of cutting taxes and waging war, the current administration is far more committed to symbolic gestures than to serious or even achievable policies.
Nonetheless, tonight’s proposal to cut American gasoline usage by 20 percent in the next 10 years is indeed bold, especially from an administration so thoroughly wedded to the oil industry. It remains to be seen how the President plans to fund this proposal, even as he expands the war in Iraq, attempts to balance the budget and pledges to save Social Security and Medicare.
More important, perhaps, was the Democratic response. At the opening of what was one of the strongest rebuttals in recent memory, freshman Senator Jim Webb from Virginia pointed out that this was the seventh time this president has mentioned energy in a State of the Union Address—but the first time he’ll be working with a Democratic House and Senate. The implication was that if the President is serious, Congress may actually pass some alternative energy legislation with teeth.
Unfortunately, Democrats are almost as misguided as Republicans in terms of energy, from NIMBY opposition to wind power in California and the Northeast (and to nuclear everywhere), to knee-jerk support for any proposal that subsidizes biofuels in the heartland—an approach that will at best be a marginal solution and at worst an environmental and social-justice catastrophe. It is interesting to note that the President referred to reducing gasoline consumption rather than oil in general. Creating biofuel from corn, at least, requires huge amounts of natural gas and diesel (for tractors) but, presumably, little gasoline.
The President did, at least, mention the most obvious sensible proposals: expansion of wind and solar, hybrid battery technology, and diesel cars. Notably (and thankfully) he did not mention hydrogen again.
We are far, however, from any response remotely commensurate to the depletion threat we face—responses which would include the dramatic energy conservation, rapid expansion of light-rail nationwide, the rebuilding of interstate passenger train service, a program to switch from long-distance truck shipping to rail freight, steps to re-localize and de-industrialize agriculture etc.
In the meantime, the U.S. government as a whole is now in the strange process of telling itself just how dire our energy predicament is. Two years ago, the Department of Energy commissioned a report which concluded that mitigation of oil depletion would need to begin 20 years before peak in order to avoid a decades-long fuel shortage. Given that several experts believe we have already peak, to say that time is short is an understatement.
Last week, the Senate held hearings on “The Geopolitics of Oil,” listening to testimony that was, according to Republican Senator Domenici of New Mexico “absolutely startling with reference to the future.” Included in the panel was Linda Stuntz, a co-author of last fall’s extremely gloomy Council on Foreign Relations paper called “National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency,” which argued that
“During this next twenty years (and quite probably beyond), it is infeasible to eliminate the nation’s dependence on foreign energy sources. The voices that espouse ‘‘energy independence’’ are doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal that is unachievable over the foreseeable future and that encourages the adoption of inefficient and counterproductive policies. Indeed, during the next two decades, it is unlikely that the United States will be able to make a sharp reduction in its dependence on imports, which currently stand at 60 percent of consumption. The central task for the next two decades must be to manage the consequences of dependence on oil, not to pretend the United States can eliminate it.”
Given this backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that a great deal more of the President’s speech was focused on the middle-east than on energy policy, and that the word “Iran” was mentioned more than a few times. Anyone who thinks that we can achieve a painless shift to an alternative-energy future is kidding himself. The elites, anyway, seem to be preparing for a “last man standing” approach.
marks a political sea-change that is as significant as any particular proposal Obama may have articulated.
Posted by: cheap jersey | June 29, 2011 at 05:45 AM