thedrifter
08-04-03, 06:14 AM
Joe Buff: Energy and Insecurity
The topical question of energy sufficiency splits the world into Haves and Have-Nots. Looking at this pragmatically, America falls somewhere in between: Though we possess untapped reserves ourselves, without constant imports of oil and natural gas from other countries our economy and our way of life would collapse.
To achieve true energy independence, we’d need to produce as much as we consume. But we don’t, and it doesn’t seem likely we’ll get to that good point of balance very quickly. So right there, on the problem of sourcing energy, the belief that the U.S. can live in splendid isolation is totally shattered. To preserve the American Way -- whatever that may mean -- we absolutely must keep looking abroad, and keep sending our envoys and troops overseas.
This dovetails too tightly for comfort with other challenges we currently face; the War on Terror, and nuclear weapons proliferation, will eventually creep ashore in force and hit us where it really hurts if we let them. Explosions in the price of a gallon of gasoline or diesel or heating oil, and rolling electrical blackouts, are clear and present dangers too, ones for which we’ve already had a most unpleasant foretaste. A severe enough energy crisis would put us in a nasty bind indeed, as our ability to snuff out terrorism and squelch those rogue-group nukes would be lethally compromised at the worst time.
To repeat for emphasis, realistic solutions intermesh, just as do the three different problems of energy, terror, and atom bombs: We need shrewd and determined diplomacy, backed up by a strong and nimble military. We need them badly, and we need them now. We also need (and this essay will take a stab at trying to provide) an action-oriented framework of context within which to fathom and manage the oil import-export competitive arena. Inarguable facts suggest that there isn’t an easier or cheaper way out:
1. Since the word “ecology” first entered the popular vocabulary in the 1960s, voluntary conservation in our country as a whole has been important and has helped, but has fallen far short of being a decisive answer. Recent behavioral trends suggests this is not likely to change much in the relevant future.
2. “Alternative” energy -- ranging from solar power, to wind or tidal power, to hydrogen fuel cells and even hydrogen fusion reactors -- has advanced at a rather slow pace. The reasons range from huge existing capital investment in doing things “the old way,” to sheer public apathy and conflicting political agendas. There’s maybe hope for faster advances soon, but the promising pockets of near-term progress are small, and you can’t run a car or refrigerator on promises and dreams.
3. Those countries who have the greatest overabundance of oil -- in other words, the exporters -- tend to be unstable places at best. Few of them could be called, by any stretch of the imagination, model democracies. Two of them, Venezuela and Sao Tome, both recently suffered bizarre and disturbing overnight coups and then countercoups. Other possible new large reserves in Africa lie under places torn by civil strife and plague of almost Biblical proportions. And at the moment, bitter controversy rages over Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting Al Qaeda. If the Saudis turn off the oil tap, as OPEC did twice in the ‘70s, we’re in big trouble. Russia, and disputed turf in the waters near China, also hold large supplies -- need I say more?
4. In the recent past, and more distant past too, the pressing strategic needs of Have-Nots to have what the Haves have did lead to war. Imperial Japan’s aggression in the early 1940s, in response to an embargo by FDR, directly triggered U.S. involvement in World War II. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because he coveted their oil wealth, after he drove Iraq nearly bankrupt during his 1980s war with Iran. And in the olden days, when warships were fired by coal and thus had limited cruising endurance, the need for coaling stations around the planet helped foment an era of colonialism; the lingering aftermath of bloody counter-reactions to that self-same colonialism are visible in international affairs today.
5. Civilian nuclear power plants are not the cure-all they once seemed in America. Just this week, one letter to the editor in a “great metropolitan newspaper” argued that we ought to unilaterally dismantle all our existing plants, not just because of safety worries but to wipe out any trace of dual-use tech related to atom bombs, to set an example the rest of the world would supposedly follow toward complete nuclear disarmament. A slight problem with this is that two big industrial countries, France and Japan, both get a large percentage of their overall electric supply from nuclear power plants. I don’t see France or Japan “pulling the plug” on this massive infrastructure any time soon, if ever. They have their own overwhelming strategic interests as sovereign states -- and, to put it delicately, those interests aren’t always consistent with ours.
Even if we outraged countless American citizen-voters, and despoiled our environment as much as we could, drilling for more oil and gas in both Alaska and Florida, say, and building an unnatural forest of windmills to generate voltage along the whole horizon of Cape Cod, we couldn’t come close to satisfying our energy needs. For perhaps another twenty or thirty years or more -- barring a technical breakthrough of miraculous proportions -- the United States will remain an importer of large amounts of fuel. Especially with the high op tempo of the continuing War on Terror, with our ships and planes and supply trucks and tanks guzzling oil and gas and lubricants like crazy, this petroleum-resource trade deficit means dependency for America, and that means vulnerability. (Our nuclear-powered naval vessels also get just so many miles per pound of reactor core, and their reactor-grade fissile metal takes many megawatts to refine from unprocessed yellowcake.)
A paradigm shift worth examining is to narrow or neutralize this perverse trade deficit gap, by redefining it on terms where we can win. Economists for decades have used their own lingo for what we now call in battle “asymmetric warfare.” The phrase they use is “comparative advantage,” which means exporting as much as you can of the stuff you’re the most efficient at making. (Doing so redresses your import reliance on other countries for their best stuff.) To achieve success on the macro-economic, geopolitical energy front, we need to play to America’s strengths. That amounts to our exercising ambassadorial negotiation skills and jawboning persuasion, along with maintaining a high-profile and flexible military presence, worldwide. These are things on the global stage we’re close to best-in-class at, more or less, and Operation Iraqi Freedom shows where we need to further burnish our goods.
We clearly must harness our historically proven talents at “transformation” under pressure, and at learning rapidly (if reluctantly) from our recent mistakes. More focused foreign aid, better trained and equipped and briefed peacekeeping missions, and smarter pre-planned nation-building assistance all should be part of the toolkit for shipping abroad, and in much more user-friendly packaging too. Call it neo-Dollar Diplomacy or quasi-Teddy Rooseveltism, and think of it what you will. What counts most is that the end product be fully credible, and palatable and appealing, to the flesh-and-blood consumers in foreign lands -- who in turn can sell us their oil with minimum mutual stress and uncertainty.
Enlightened self-interest is our prime motivation here, not altruism: As I already said once in this essay, you can’t run cars and refrigerators on promises and dreams, and you can’t stop terror or rogue nukes when your weapons platforms, as Patton once put it, are hobbled because they “gotta have gas.”
© 2003 Joe Buff.
Sempers,
Roger
:marine:
The topical question of energy sufficiency splits the world into Haves and Have-Nots. Looking at this pragmatically, America falls somewhere in between: Though we possess untapped reserves ourselves, without constant imports of oil and natural gas from other countries our economy and our way of life would collapse.
To achieve true energy independence, we’d need to produce as much as we consume. But we don’t, and it doesn’t seem likely we’ll get to that good point of balance very quickly. So right there, on the problem of sourcing energy, the belief that the U.S. can live in splendid isolation is totally shattered. To preserve the American Way -- whatever that may mean -- we absolutely must keep looking abroad, and keep sending our envoys and troops overseas.
This dovetails too tightly for comfort with other challenges we currently face; the War on Terror, and nuclear weapons proliferation, will eventually creep ashore in force and hit us where it really hurts if we let them. Explosions in the price of a gallon of gasoline or diesel or heating oil, and rolling electrical blackouts, are clear and present dangers too, ones for which we’ve already had a most unpleasant foretaste. A severe enough energy crisis would put us in a nasty bind indeed, as our ability to snuff out terrorism and squelch those rogue-group nukes would be lethally compromised at the worst time.
To repeat for emphasis, realistic solutions intermesh, just as do the three different problems of energy, terror, and atom bombs: We need shrewd and determined diplomacy, backed up by a strong and nimble military. We need them badly, and we need them now. We also need (and this essay will take a stab at trying to provide) an action-oriented framework of context within which to fathom and manage the oil import-export competitive arena. Inarguable facts suggest that there isn’t an easier or cheaper way out:
1. Since the word “ecology” first entered the popular vocabulary in the 1960s, voluntary conservation in our country as a whole has been important and has helped, but has fallen far short of being a decisive answer. Recent behavioral trends suggests this is not likely to change much in the relevant future.
2. “Alternative” energy -- ranging from solar power, to wind or tidal power, to hydrogen fuel cells and even hydrogen fusion reactors -- has advanced at a rather slow pace. The reasons range from huge existing capital investment in doing things “the old way,” to sheer public apathy and conflicting political agendas. There’s maybe hope for faster advances soon, but the promising pockets of near-term progress are small, and you can’t run a car or refrigerator on promises and dreams.
3. Those countries who have the greatest overabundance of oil -- in other words, the exporters -- tend to be unstable places at best. Few of them could be called, by any stretch of the imagination, model democracies. Two of them, Venezuela and Sao Tome, both recently suffered bizarre and disturbing overnight coups and then countercoups. Other possible new large reserves in Africa lie under places torn by civil strife and plague of almost Biblical proportions. And at the moment, bitter controversy rages over Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting Al Qaeda. If the Saudis turn off the oil tap, as OPEC did twice in the ‘70s, we’re in big trouble. Russia, and disputed turf in the waters near China, also hold large supplies -- need I say more?
4. In the recent past, and more distant past too, the pressing strategic needs of Have-Nots to have what the Haves have did lead to war. Imperial Japan’s aggression in the early 1940s, in response to an embargo by FDR, directly triggered U.S. involvement in World War II. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because he coveted their oil wealth, after he drove Iraq nearly bankrupt during his 1980s war with Iran. And in the olden days, when warships were fired by coal and thus had limited cruising endurance, the need for coaling stations around the planet helped foment an era of colonialism; the lingering aftermath of bloody counter-reactions to that self-same colonialism are visible in international affairs today.
5. Civilian nuclear power plants are not the cure-all they once seemed in America. Just this week, one letter to the editor in a “great metropolitan newspaper” argued that we ought to unilaterally dismantle all our existing plants, not just because of safety worries but to wipe out any trace of dual-use tech related to atom bombs, to set an example the rest of the world would supposedly follow toward complete nuclear disarmament. A slight problem with this is that two big industrial countries, France and Japan, both get a large percentage of their overall electric supply from nuclear power plants. I don’t see France or Japan “pulling the plug” on this massive infrastructure any time soon, if ever. They have their own overwhelming strategic interests as sovereign states -- and, to put it delicately, those interests aren’t always consistent with ours.
Even if we outraged countless American citizen-voters, and despoiled our environment as much as we could, drilling for more oil and gas in both Alaska and Florida, say, and building an unnatural forest of windmills to generate voltage along the whole horizon of Cape Cod, we couldn’t come close to satisfying our energy needs. For perhaps another twenty or thirty years or more -- barring a technical breakthrough of miraculous proportions -- the United States will remain an importer of large amounts of fuel. Especially with the high op tempo of the continuing War on Terror, with our ships and planes and supply trucks and tanks guzzling oil and gas and lubricants like crazy, this petroleum-resource trade deficit means dependency for America, and that means vulnerability. (Our nuclear-powered naval vessels also get just so many miles per pound of reactor core, and their reactor-grade fissile metal takes many megawatts to refine from unprocessed yellowcake.)
A paradigm shift worth examining is to narrow or neutralize this perverse trade deficit gap, by redefining it on terms where we can win. Economists for decades have used their own lingo for what we now call in battle “asymmetric warfare.” The phrase they use is “comparative advantage,” which means exporting as much as you can of the stuff you’re the most efficient at making. (Doing so redresses your import reliance on other countries for their best stuff.) To achieve success on the macro-economic, geopolitical energy front, we need to play to America’s strengths. That amounts to our exercising ambassadorial negotiation skills and jawboning persuasion, along with maintaining a high-profile and flexible military presence, worldwide. These are things on the global stage we’re close to best-in-class at, more or less, and Operation Iraqi Freedom shows where we need to further burnish our goods.
We clearly must harness our historically proven talents at “transformation” under pressure, and at learning rapidly (if reluctantly) from our recent mistakes. More focused foreign aid, better trained and equipped and briefed peacekeeping missions, and smarter pre-planned nation-building assistance all should be part of the toolkit for shipping abroad, and in much more user-friendly packaging too. Call it neo-Dollar Diplomacy or quasi-Teddy Rooseveltism, and think of it what you will. What counts most is that the end product be fully credible, and palatable and appealing, to the flesh-and-blood consumers in foreign lands -- who in turn can sell us their oil with minimum mutual stress and uncertainty.
Enlightened self-interest is our prime motivation here, not altruism: As I already said once in this essay, you can’t run cars and refrigerators on promises and dreams, and you can’t stop terror or rogue nukes when your weapons platforms, as Patton once put it, are hobbled because they “gotta have gas.”
© 2003 Joe Buff.
Sempers,
Roger
:marine: