Our Ball and Chain
By Leo Brown
[President Obama's Weekly Address]
It is astonishing that President Obama needs to convince us that energy efficiency is an important priority. His argument is clear and basic, and he presses on.
Of course, funding (and fear of the unknown, but that's another story) is a big part of why the nation isn't rallying around this cause. President Obama is correct that investment in clean energy would pay manifold dividends in the near future. But we must also, for example, mend our archaic system of education, riddled as it is with perverse incentives and slack. As we lag behind other developed nations in science and math, can we afford to ignore this expensive problem? Must we choose, or do we have enough cash on hand to address both challenges?
I might not be asking these silly questions had the United States not invaded Iraq in 2003. Because hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent to that end, we are left bickering over whether to invest in energy, education, or nothing at all.
However, we must consider that if the United States had not invaded Iraq, we probably would have found another way to spend those few hundred billion dollars. Pressing issues - education and energy efficiency - that pertain directly to the economy and national security would most likely have been neglected anyway. So what is it about our government culture that makes such a dim fate seemingly inevitable?
In an op-ed that President-elect Vladimir Putin wrote prior to the March 4 elections, he accused the United States of being "obsessed with the idea of securing absolute invulnerability," and announced that this is "the root of the problem." In fact, this is quite an accurate assessment. Americans are obsessed with "securing absolute invulnerability"; one might argue that this is necessarily the aim of a government, even if it is a distant dream. But because our sphere of influence is so immense and our military so vast, remaining invulnerable gets to be quite expensive and, from President-elect Putin's perspective, intolerably invasive. This would be so even if the United States were to refrain from launching wars of choice based on emotional fervor and pitifully faulty intelligence briefings.
Just as Russia is saddled with more land than any single country could possibly manage well, we have consolidated power to an extent that requires most of our economic might to maintain it. This is why we are in debt, and this is why we don't provide for our citizens at the standards of other developed nations. This is why a commitment to clean energy remains a distant dream.
It seems like soon (if not already) energy efficiency should be at the top of the US to-do-list for "absolute invulnerability." Our war with Iraq was already beginning to clumsily address the global fuel feud, and our tension now with Iran seems to be in some ways an extension of the same idea. You wrote about Russia's oil pipelines last week, which is the Russian measure against the oil competition. And now it seems like Obama is pushing the opposite way towards less dependance on oil, so as to give less leverage to the oil-rich nations. So why is it that this doesn't seem to be a popular policy in the US?
ReplyDeleteAs for education, I guess that's just going to sit on the back burner for a while.
Sato - I should clarify that the Russian pipelines aren't really a measure against oil competition so much as they are a economic weapon that can be used to control "transit countries." So since Russian oil flows through Ukraine, and Ukraine makes money whenever this happens, Russia gains a political advantage by having an alternative to the Ukranian pipeline. They can basically tell Ukraine to play by Russian rules or else they'll take their business elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteSo I wouldn't really say that Obama is "pushing the opposite way" - rather, he doesn't have the same options as Russia because we just don't export very much oil (we don't have very much to begin with, and we use most of it). But yes, the idea is to secure some economic buffer against oil-rich nations. In a sense, our situation resembles Ukraine's, though only in certain regards - like us, Ukraine would benefit if it were less dependent on the flow of foreign oil - but unlike Ukraine, we are not a "transit nation."
Increasing energy efficiency is something that would benefit both Russia and America, but there are so many factors that get in the way that make it an unpopular policy. The first thing, of course, is the influence of the oil lobby in Congress, or in the case of Russia, the influence of corruption in the state-owned oil sector. In theory, these industries could benefit in the long run, but the people in charge of such large-scale changes are, of course, interested in their personal job security - and a decrease in demand for oil would threaten their career. So that's on a surface level.
Aside from that, I think people do understand that oil politics has gotten us into so many messes over the last century and we would be better off without it - but these people aren't calling the shots. And anyway, while they might embrace the idea in theory, the unknown is very scary and legitimately insecure. And then there is the significant chunk of our population whose jobs are directly tied to the oil industry - from sailors to gas attendants to truckers to geologists - who would probably be concerned about how their paycheck would be impacted by this all, perhaps more concerned than they are about foreign wars and global warming and the like.