George W. Bush has presided over the diminution of America's prestige and influence in ways almost too numerous to count: flouting the Geneva Conventions, permitting torture, launching unprovoked wars, claiming unprecedented executive power, bungling relationships with the UN and virtually every other country on the planet, eroding civil liberties, increasing government secrecy, the list goes on and on.
But in the long haul, I think his most grievous blow to this country is the one that is least discussed and understood: his utter failure to prepare the U.S. for the 21st century energy situation. This is treated with typical casual silliness in the press and has provoked little outrage in a public that sees American global hegemony as a fixed fact of life.
But it isn't fixed. It isn't immutable. Matter of fact, it's tottering:
President George W. Bush, already weakened at home by the soaring cost of oil, is finding that it's also eroding his ability to achieve his foreign-policy goals.
"It's a geopolitical nightmare," says William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine and defense secretary under President Bill Clinton who is now chairman of the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consulting firm. Such nations as Iran, Russia and China "don't see us as the colossus that can cause them any harm, either by our economy or by our prestige."
Record-high energy prices are weakening Bush's prospects of assembling an international coalition to counter Iran's nuclear ambitions. They are diminishing his chances of influencing energy-rich nations such as Russia and isolating troublesome ones including Venezuela and Sudan. And they are straining U.S. economic and diplomatic ties with China, whose oil needs are skyrocketing.
...
"We're in the middle of a new wave of resource nationalism because these countries feel like they don't need any help" from the U.S., says Luis Giusti, who headed Venezuela's state-run oil company before Chavez came to power. "This is a completely different world."
Yeah, you could say that. Maybe energy prices will dip again in the short term, but this "completely different world" we're getting a preview of is our inevitable future.
The best thing Bush could have done the minute he came into office is focus like a laser on reducing demand: tax carbon, tax gas, raise fuel-efficiency standards, plough money into any and every alternative fuel. Reduced demand would help hold prices down in the short term and help the country prepare for the day when they inevitably rise. Fucking around with supply -- drilling in ANWR, off the coasts, in the West, and everywhere the hell else, fiddling with refinery permits, removing environmental standards on gas -- is at best a delaying tactic.
He's catching on, but only nominally, too little too late. A couple of shocks -- another war, another terrorist attack, a natural disaster that knocks out a significant supplier -- and we could teeter into geopolitical chaos. We no longer have the moral, economic, or military muscle to keep a lid on it.
(via EnergyBulletin)
Comments
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EnderStonebender Posted 12:16 am
02 May 2006
Although reducing demand is definitely a good idea, the means to do so suggested above aren't particularly good ways to do so. Since the amount of tax on fuels isn't quoted at the pump, the first two (tax gas and tax carbon) look exactly like decreased supply (or increased demand, or oil company greed) to consumers. Raising fuel efficiency standards has a long delay between legislative action and street-level action - cars must be designed and built to meet the new fuel efficiency standard; we could expect the delay to be several years at least. Plowing money into alternative fuels has the same problem as increased fuel efficiency: R&D must be completed, then consumer products designed and built, only then do consumer products start to actually reach consumers.
Is there a quick fix? In short, no. But there are some things that could be done to reduce demand more quickly than any of the methods above. Here are some ideas:
First, offer an incentive to get older, less efficient cars off the road - why continue to drive a 1972 Plymouth when the government gives you half the purchase price for a 1992 Honda if you have a receipt for the Plymouth from a junkyard or recycling center? People who are well off and collect and drive old cars as a hobby won't need the incentive money, but collector cars generally aren't daily drivers that heavily affect demand anyway.
Second, since there are flexible fuel vehicles on the road that can run on E85 already, set a schedule to require fuel stations with more than a certain number of pumps to set up some portion of those (say one in six pumps, only for stations with six or more pumps) as E85 pumps. This won't have as immediate an effect as getting older, low-MPG cars off the road; but it will guarantee that virtually all Americans have access to more environmentally friendly fuel. Again we have the delay from passing legislation to consumer availability, but if Bush had pushed this at the beginning of his administration, we would be seeing E85 pumps in a lot of place now.
Third, federally mandate that all states conduct yearly vehicle inspections. This will cause functional but poorly maintained vehicles to either get maintenance (which will cause them to run better, and hopefully cleaner and more efficiently) or get off the road. Many of the vehicles that fail inspection will be unsafe vehicles anyway - and who would object to having a lower proportion of unsafe vehicles on the road?
Fourth, require auto makers to produce retrofit kits that allow cars that are currently gasoline-only to be upgraded to FFVs. The automakers would certainly insist on limits on the model years for which they would have to produce these kits (which is reasonable - they don't have limitless engineering talent available to them); and it suffers from the same delayed implementation problem as any other non-tax legislative fix.
I'm sure there are more ideas out there...
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rh Posted 12:30 am
02 May 2006
Well said. My sense for a long time now has been that the solutions that are being fronted by politicians, if all were taken together, might reduce demand growth a bit, but we'd still be doing nothing to actually reduce demand.
We Americans are currently proving that $3/gallon gasoline does little other than make us complain more than usual. So, it would seem that high prices, by themselves anyway, aren't the way forward either, not if we're going to see the real reductions climate change demands.
I'm not sure what it's going to take to get people to realize the dangers of us bumping heads with China and India over "our" oil or what the reality of 380 ppm is going to mean soon enough, but judging by the embarassing political pandering of the past couple of weeks (does anyone else feel slightly more slimy??), this little dust-up hasn't been nearly enough to get people to really consider the realities we're facing...
rh
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:43 am
02 May 2006
"The impact of a switch from gasoline to ethanol has an ambiguous effect on greenhouse gas emissions, with the reported values ranging from a 20% increase to a decrease of 32%."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Science 27 January 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5760, pp. 506 - 508
DOI: 10.1126/science.1121416
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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Tom Twigg Posted 4:31 am
02 May 2006
The sad truth is that the average american car got better mileage in 1979 that it does today. On the bus ride leg of my trip to work today we passed an intersection where I noticed the cars lined up behind a stop sign waiting to get on the highway. Seven cars, all of them looking rather "newish" ... six of them were SUVs or vans, and a single small car (VW Beetle), the only one that would get better mileage than my old but otherwise good '84 Volvo.
So, I see the "let's subsidize trade-ins for newer cars" to be more of a subsidy to the auto industry than anything else, if you aren't going to require the upgrade to meet higher fuel economy standards or some other meaningful benchmark. Newer just doesn't cut in by itself.
If a twigg falls in the forest but nobody is there to hear it, it's probably best because there is bound to be cussing.
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sunflower Posted 4:38 am
02 May 2006
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bookerly Posted 11:18 am
02 May 2006
The world is changing. Such change is inevitable because poor countries were not going to stay poor forever if they could help it. Since wealth is power (to some extent), the increasing wealth of a variety of countries would lead to a "new world order". This means a world in which leadership must be shared. And resources and wealth.
I am struck first of all by William Cohen's language (a moderate Republican, I shudder at similar ideas expressed by a real right winger). He said "Such nations as Iran, Russia and China "don't see us as the colossus that can cause them any harm, either by our economy or by our prestige.""
This is an interesting turn of phrase, because it suggests than being seen as a "colussus that can cause ... harm" is a good thing. In other words, it suggests that being in a position of scaring and threatening others is where we want to be.
So, my fellow Americans, is that true?
And David says "and we could teeter into geopolitical chaos. We no longer have the moral, economic, or military muscle to keep a lid on it."
Two things strike me about this statement (and I frequently agree with David, but am using his statement here to examine attitudes that I believe are held by most Americans, so nothing personal!).
The first is the assumption that "we" need to "keep a lid on it", which suggests the need (or the idea that it's a good thing) for America to be in charge, to be the boss. There is also the suggestion that without America as the boss, the world could "teeter into geopolitical chaos" (I could be misinterpreting this one).
This suggests that the world without America's leadership cannot solve problems, cannot take care of itself.
I point these out so that hopefully whoever reads this will think about our assumptions (I once shared them) of American superiority, the place of America in the world.
The second thing that struck is the ues of the term "military might" in regards to keeping a lid on things. I would hope that at some point America would begin to move beyond using it's military might to force it's will on the world.
While Bush is to blame for accelerating what is happening (and for the many evil and disgusting things he has done), some of what is happening is inevitable as other nations begin to grow and want some say.
One of the questions for America in the 21st century is "Can we learn to relinquish power and share with others peacefully?".
Patrick
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Weeb Posted 4:06 am
03 May 2006
"Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta asked the House Energy and Commerce Committee today for the authority to revamp the system of fuel economy standards for cars....
'What we need is the statutory ability to reform the structure of the program,' he [Mineta] said, to avoid problems with the current system. Those problems, he said, have hurt American automakers and endangered safety by forcing manufacturers to make more small cars.
Mr. Mineta said the system should be revamped to set different fuel standards for different sizes of vehicles."
For more go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/washington/03cnd-fuel.html?hp&ex=1146715200&en=ea400f4861e
90414&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Hurt automakers by forcing them to make smaller cars!? What roads are they driving on? Vehicles are getting bigger and bigger. And guess what Bush Administration? Because of the laws of physics small cars get better gas mileage. It is unbelievable that the Administration now wants to undercut fuel mileage standards even more by having different standards for different-sized cars!
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Rob Posted 6:03 pm
05 May 2006
Non-renewable/fossil Coal (56% of U.S. supply): 2.095 pounds of CO2 are expelled into the atmosphere for every kilowatt produced. This is our most polluting and most plentiful fossil fuel used to generate electricity. In addition, the particles that come out of the smoke stacks have been proven to cause cancer, acid rain and are not held to vehicle emission standards.
Nuclear (22.38%): No CO2 is expelled into the atmosphere directly from nuclear fission, but when...
"the entire nuclear fuel cycle and plant construction are taken into account, nuclear energy produces 4 or 5 times the emissions of renewable energy. Uranium mining and milling, processing, enrichment, fuel fabrication, transportation from centralized manufacturing sites, reactor construction, and nuke waste disposal. All these things are energy intensive. For example, the Paducah, New York, uranium enrichment plant uses so much energy that it has a dedicated coal-fired electricity generating plant to meet its needs. Further, the plant is the nation's largest contributor of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which destroy the ozone layer that protects our fragile environment from harmful rays of sun."
- Michael Welch, January 2002 issue, Home Power Magazine.
Non-renewable/fossil Natural Gas (9.3%): 1.321 pounds of CO2 are expelled into the atmosphere for every kilowatt produced.
Hydroelectric (9%): Hyrdoelectric is your primary electricity source in Seattle and the most profound ecosystem-destruction energy available. Using your fast and loose logic- you are killing salmon per mile driving your electric car- just how many? Standing in the Skagit river, with no salmon, thanks to your vehicle choice- blame the messenger or the buyer? The environmental costs of hydroelectric dams are often severely underestimated. Entire ecosystems are destroyed when rivers vital to local habitat for animals and plants become lakes, and cover many square miles of land.
Non-renewable/fossil Petroleum (3%): 1.915 pounds of CO2 are expelled into the atmosphere for every kilowatt produced. On a nationwide average, we do not use very much for electricity. However, as an example of it depends where you are, in Hawaii they produce 76.4% of their electricity by burning petroleum.
Following your anti-biodiesel logic, converting our entire fleet of vehicles to plug-in hybrid would mean a dramatic increase in the above energy sources- drilling in ANWAR and offshore for oil, damming all of our available rivers, and establishing more offshore natural gas platforms- dramatically increasing our climate change emissions and drastically impacting biodiversity. Or, we could radically subsidize wind, solar or new energy sources which are not economically viable- you have clearly stated your opposition to alternative energy subsidies. So which is it?
Biodiesel is the most energy efficient vehicle fuel available. Definitive peer reviewed studies have show a positive net energy balance of +3.5 or more including ALL ENERGY INPUTS OF PRODUCTION.
While you don't consider CO2 a emission of concern, the rest of the world does.
As a "biodiversivist" I would expect you have a grasp of the complexity and entirety of our energy dependencies. Somehow you ignore reality in your ongoing anti-biodiesel crusade. Utopian do-nothing approaches to our challenges are not valid. Choices are being made. You are doing a disservice to Grist readers, Russ, with this ranting of yours. Please re-think your approach and look more clearly at the information available.
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