Jim Henley says that "energy independence" is the most ridiculous phrase in the American political lexicon:
The concept of "energy independence" is a sham.
I think it's generally code for "Then we can stop being nice to the fvcking A-rabs," but this gets gussied up with terms like "instability" and references to Hugo Chavez, who has been around a lot less long than the Magic Words. (It is often also code for "let's float politically connected domestic producers some subsidies!") There's no question that the oil-producing world is full of problematic regimes. But you don't hear every respectable politician in the country calling for diamond independence or cheap electronic toy independence or independence in all the other things that come from places with dodgy politics.
Anthropogenic global warming is a very good reason to cut fossil-fuel consumption, but that means grubby American coal as well as greasy foreign oil. It has nothing to do with "energy independence." Energy independence is just another dream of autarky. It would take so long to achieve any version of it worthy of the name that the politics of various oil-producing nations might be unrecognizable by then, for good or ill.
The only reason you shouldn't automatically disqualify any politician who utters the phrase is that they all utter it, so you'd be disqualifying all of them. Actually, that's not a good reason.
I used to not mind the silliness so much, but my conversations with folks in D.C. last week convinced me that it really does carry lots of weight -- it's not just something people use as a populist garb to lay over global warming policy. People believe it. It's the reason lots of otherwise intelligent Congresscritters have not rejected CTL out of hand.
Time to join this fight, I guess. Here's a preview: the goal should not be energy independence but resilience in the face of all kinds of stresses. The things we need to do to fight global warming will increase resilience and cut GHG emissions. Pursuing energy independence via coal will do neither.
Not independence. Resilience.
City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks
Is Bill McKibben right to be angry with Obama?
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Sam Wells Posted 8:28 am
19 Jun 2007
Our objective should be more tailored to the realities that maybe we should become more diversified and self-sufficient, while reducing our carbon footprint.
What exactly is wrong with that goal and that objective?
/sammie
Onward through the fog
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:39 am
19 Jun 2007
The concept that we would be denying them funds is just silly.
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:47 am
19 Jun 2007
Carbon Sustainability
Food Sustainability
Economic Sustainability (Long term)
Geopolitical Sustainability
etc etc
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odograph Posted 10:13 am
19 Jun 2007
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Delay And Deny Posted 10:25 am
19 Jun 2007
There's nothing national about energy.
If you're Larry Page, you can get off the grid by investing millions in solar and hydrogen generation.
If you work for Wal*Mart at $7 an hour, you are an eternal slave to Exxon.
Get wise -- we are not all in this together.
John Bailo
You Read It Here First
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Rune Posted 10:35 am
19 Jun 2007
I think that is exactly right, David. And while we are at it, lets recognize the need for resilience rather than "sustainability," too. We are entering a period in which all number of interrelated systems are expected to experience greater volatility. What once may have made it possible to calculate and live by sustainable rates and means is increasingly a thing of the past. Resilience in the face of change is where it is at.
Now, back to "energy independence." This is an appeal made to consumers who feel very dependent upon certain goods, various forms of energy being foremost among them. The question, then, becomes, upon whom are they dependent? Most of them are not schlepping overseas to bring home bags of oil to mix with increasingly dear and mostly domestic (North American, at least) supplies of natural gas and electricity generated by mostly local coal and uranium. No, they are dependent upon a small number of big, mostly multinational distributors of energy, often posing as "American" companies.
To become energy independent, consumers either need to gain control over their own means of producing usable energy, or they need to be able to buy from a field of many truly competitive suppliers that do not have sufficient monopoly power to manipulate the total quantity of supply and, thus, price.
Secondarily, these distributors need to be able to by adequate stocks of inputs from truly competitive markets, or take control of their own supplies. But whether those supplies come from abroad or not is mostly beside the point unless they are subject to "country risk" because they are getting most of their supplies from a small number of less than stable countries and cannot quickly and economically switch to suppliers elsewhere.
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:44 am
19 Jun 2007
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:15 pm
19 Jun 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Nucbuddy Posted 1:20 pm
19 Jun 2007
Are you trying to say that the United States needs, or could conceivably within the next 1,000 years need, to import uranium?
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:24 pm
19 Jun 2007
William Catton Jr also discussed "energy independence" in his 1980 book "Overshoot", he pointed out that it is impossible to have energy independence based on fossil-fuels because eventually the fossil fuels will run out. The only way to have energy independence is to use the free energy sources of solar/wind/geothermal/hydro that are on your land, otherwise you are using "ghost" acreage from somewhere else.
So I think resilience is useful, but people will have to want to value long-term sustainability over short-term increase. The only way to get "captalism" away from that is to make all companies employee owned and operated.
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Nucbuddy Posted 1:37 pm
19 Jun 2007
What is "return on soils"?
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:43 pm
19 Jun 2007
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Nucbuddy Posted 1:52 pm
19 Jun 2007
Jon Rynn wrote: if you wanted to use the midwest soils long-term, you would probably return them to grazing for bison, or at least do instensive permaculture, not monoculture.
Why would soils be used for anything other than mining?
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:53 pm
19 Jun 2007
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:53 pm
19 Jun 2007
And the funny thing is that we buy most of what we have from other countries now. They could cut off cars and we would have to make more of our own, but wait, that would take even more energy...
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:57 pm
19 Jun 2007
Nuclear power, by the way, is a great example of something that is not resilient, even assuming I bought the normal arguments for its usefullness, which I don't. The classic work on this is by Charles Perrow, "Normal Accidents". The problem with nukes, even French ones, is that so much can go wrong -- and I'm not even talking about meltdown,any very complex system that is tightly integrated is very susceptible to collapse; that is, it is not resilient. This is actually even a problem in the rainforests, which is why it is such a horror to chop them down, they are very hard to get going again
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:01 pm
19 Jun 2007
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:08 pm
19 Jun 2007
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Nucbuddy Posted 2:09 pm
19 Jun 2007
Why would soils be used to produce nutrition when nutrition can be synthesized in chemical factories or grown in indoor windowless soil-less aeroponic factories?
Jon Rynn wrote: Soils are [...] very valuable.
They do tend to contain uranium and thorium. But, then, many other parts of the earth's crust also contain uranium and thorium.
nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
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Rune Posted 2:12 pm
19 Jun 2007
I think for our purposes it means that there has to be a lot of slack in the system, and a lot of redundancy, so tht if something goes out, something else can take up the slack.
Yes, and at the other extreme, it is possible to achieve resilience by simply reducing "needs" to the status of "wants" or even "treats." Then, is something is not readily available, it's not a show stopper. Note that this is not an either/or choice, and that there are many other alternatives to come to a state of overall resilience.
William Catton Jr also discussed "energy independence" in his 1980 book "Overshoot", he pointed out that it is impossible to have energy independence based on fossil-fuels because eventually the fossil fuels will run out. The only way to have energy independence is to use the free energy sources of solar/wind/geothermal/hydro that are on your land, otherwise you are using "ghost" acreage from somewhere else.
I regard Overshoot as a must read classic, but I do take exception with the point you have presented above. I think it is too extreme in at least a couple of ways.
First of all, people have been known to achieve lasting energy independence without fossil fuels or solar/wind/geothermal or hydro on their land. They simply did without the energy slaves and creature comforts we regard as essential in modern times. Again, I am not advocating that we all emulate the diggers, I am just pointing out that we quite easily fall into the trap of assuming we must maintain what is an extraordinary level of energy consumption, both in historic terms and on a comparative geographic basis.
Second, it is not necessary to own energy resources as an individual in order to achieve energy independence. In fact, from an efficiency, cost, maintenance, and, indeed, resilience standpoint, the optimum solution probably involves some form of collectivism, whether it is by family, neighborhood, town, bioregion, or what have you. What is important is that the owners or renters of resources remain well informed of the state of their resources and expectations to use them, as well as able, in terms of rights and abilities, to manage the resources as they wish, or negotiate their management according to their wishes in the context of adequate recourse should things not be tended to as desired.
Finally, and not too quibble too much, but I am willing to accept a person or an collective as energy independent if they can comfortably meet the criteria of my second point well beyond the span of their own lives and that of several successive generations of those they expect to follow them in their respective stations in life. I am sure others will have many different ways of looking at that, but I am pointing out my own so as to at least stimulate some thought about the matter.
Nucbuddy, I think the point Jon is making about maximizing returns is that if you push your resources to the limit, they tend to fail, often suddenly, and if you don't have any resources in reserve, you are likely to experience all sorts of unpleasant thoughts and feelings when that happens. And nobody likes that. <chuckle>
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:26 pm
19 Jun 2007
As for enrgy independence, I think you're actually talking about --here comes -- local self-reliance, to get back to the work of a certain guest blogger. I think that self-reliance will be somewhat hierarchical -- that is, much of our production of energy, goods, and food will occur in neighborhoods and towns/cities, there will be some specialization across city regions (maybe ecoregion is another word to revive), but as I have argued in some of my articles at SanderResearch.com, particularly in my "extreme makeover, global edition", I think there are good reasons to think that economies should never be greater than continental or subcontinental size, certainly not global.
Finally, I would agree that it is basically immoral to maximize income today if it means that you are decreasing wealth for the future. There needs to be an ethic which states that taking away wealth-generating capacity is not wealth, it's "illth", to use Hazel Henderson's phrase. In other words, economic growth is the increase in the capacity to create wealth, not an increase in wealth at a particular time. That way, any drawdown is counted as a negative, not a positive.
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Nucbuddy Posted 2:35 pm
19 Jun 2007
Reserves of uranium and thorium are plentiful worldwide, and all other mineral and chemical resources can be produced from those.
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Sam Wells Posted 3:14 pm
19 Jun 2007
First I have no idea why you're picking on Arabians for their perfectly good black oil. If you check you facts we actually get more black oil (you call it crude oil) from Nigeria, Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada, and maybe some tailing stuff some the NOrth Sea and Alaska. It's a global economy. Get with it.
Second, Rune raises serious serious flaws of specious reasoning when saying that energy independence is not such as bad goal. Let's say the world collapses into WWIII and absolutely no oil comes to the US except for some from Canada and Mexico. Hey man, we're independent! We'll just make do without all that gasoline and diesel. Too bad. I can see the Nuevo Mafia doing real good here.
Third, how "soil" got into this discussion is like way freaking over my head, like maybe I needed a hit on your bong. Soil? Whaaa?
Fourth, let me tell a little story about the so-called oil embargoes of the 1970's and early 1980's. The marketers were told to ration gasoline and diesel, yet there were more tankers on the US coasts than ever. A friend of mine owned a truck stop near Austin TX and while he could not sell any fuel above a certain limit, he filled over 20 fuel tanks of 10,000 gallons on his personal property.
My friend basically said that Big Oil was getting back at Carter policies for energy independence and decided to fuck the market for another buck a gallon - I think those were pretty much his exact words. I think he was right, and I did see his illegal tank farm in his backyard.
Most of what is being said is psychological and political without having the benefit of science and economics. It is a typical journalistic trap.
=sam
Onward through the fog
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Rune Posted 3:35 pm
19 Jun 2007
Sounds like you've got nothing to worry about, then, Nucbuddy. You can just dig up fresh sources of ionizing radioactive energy and keep your mojo working forever. And, should that ever fail, you can just stretch out in the open somewhere and wait until nightfall when one of us humans can find your glowing carcass . . . and encase it in thick, dense material in which to transport it to, say, that evolutionarily accelerated animal park in what was the Soviet Union when a certain event called into question the recent cover story of The Economist announcing the era of clean, safe, reliable nuclear energy. LOL.
Jon, we are largely on the same page, often literally, according to your citations. I am just saying that we are better served to keep in mind our best choices will probably not be found in black and white terms nor at the extremes (e.g., living as some band of Native Americans once did), although the contrast and clarity of extreme examples does serve to make certain points. But let's not forget to return to the chaotic swirl of possibility and wonder once we get clear on the concepts of use and interest.
In that vein, I am not convinced of the utility of distinguishing between resource independence of self-reliance. In real life, I suppose once would do well to be ever mindful of the possibilities for collaboration or going it alone, and plan and reconsider accordingly at all times.
There needs to be an ethic which states that taking away wealth-generating capacity is not wealth, it's "illth", to use Hazel Henderson's phrase.
Oh, is that where that came from? I thought one of the people at Redefining Progress actually had an original thought. Oh, well. <snrk!>
There are many strands of true cost and positive psychology systems sprouting up in this, the dawning of post-autistic economics era. . . . Oh, no, I hope I have not shocked the reclusive keepers of the faith and original relic of Adam Smith's ghostlike hand by sharing yet another term of cultural relevance and irreverence. Hey, sometimes simple honesty can come as a shock for some people. Just imagine what the next 20 years will be like for them. The always diplomatic and reserved Howard Kunstler (LOL!) shared some rather tame thoughts (for him) about that yesterday.
. . . We're involved in Iraq because we don't want to begin thinking about modifying our behavior at home. We are desperate to preserve our access to Middle East oil because that is the only way we can keep running our society the way we're used to running it. Mostly, we don't want to face the tragic misinvestments we've made in the infrastructure of happy motoring, and we don't want to face the inconvenient truth that there really isn't any combination of alt.fuels that will permit us to keep running all the cars the way we like to run them. Either we keep getting the oil or say goodbye to the American Dream Version 2.K.
The public has now decided that this nation's primary mission is to find some magic way to keep the cars running on a fuel other than gasoline. Everyone from the greenest greenies to the most medieval-minded Kansas Republican senator has joined in this collective wish. They are certain to be disappointed. All the Priuses in the world will not avail to save the Drive-In Utopia. The public will learn painfully what Iraq is all about.
Every time somebody blames the politicians for this predicament, I'm reminded that the politicians are actually doing a fine job of representing what their constituents want. What they want is to not change their behavior. Not even the science and technology folks want to think about changing our behavior. They just want to find new ways to continue the old behavior. They're invested in the triumphal effort to come up with a happy motoring rescue remedy. Their techno-cred is on the line. They all want to be the first kid in their housing subdivision to run a car on dark matter.
So, we've gone to Iraq on the quixotic mission to stabilize-and-pacify this key territory in the greater region of the Middle East, so we can keep getting oil imports out of there in a reliable and orderly way, so we can keep on driving all our cars. And the whole thing has turned out rather badly.
Now there is another consensus forming. Across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right, elected officials are now clamoring to "stop the war in Iraq." By this they mean get US troops out. What cracks me up is their juvenile belief that being there is somehow optional for us, that we can keep on running Wal Mart and Walt Disney World without paying any price for it in the costs of policing the Middle East.
If we don't maintain a military presence in Iraq, it is perfectly plain what will happen: Iran will instantly gain control of the southern Iraq oil fields. Iraq doesn't have an army anymore. It is incapable of preventing Iran from acquiring control of its territory. From that vantage, Iran would also effectively threaten the sovereign existence of Kuwait. Then there is the question of how much instability Iran could generate next door in the Shia-dominated Persian Gulf shoreline region of Saudi Arabia, where most of that nation's oil lies. (Meanwhile, there will be plenty more Iran-inspired mayhem in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.)
It seems to me the answer to all this is clear: the first thing the US has to do is reach a different consensus about our behavior here at home, starting with the proposition that the happy motoring era must end. If we're not willing to do that, we're eventually going to lose both at home and in our struggles abroad. You can be sure that coming disturbances in the oil markets will make suburban life untenable while exhaustion and bankruptcy breaks our military.
The air waves and internet sites are full of blather now about ending the "war" and bringing the troops home. The presidential candidates are agonizing over their various positions on the Iraq adventure. I'd like to hear one of them tell me how Atlanta is going to function without Middle Eastern oil, or how Wal Mart will move its merchandise from San Pedro to Lansing without a "warehouse on wheels," or how the thousands of yellow school bus fleets will carry on next September.
Actually, instead, I'd like to hear talk about drastically reforming our zoning laws to discourage any more suburban development or a pitch to allow some of our tax money to fund a US passenger rail revival. I'd like to see a candidate refuse to attend a Nascar race on the grounds that it's an unconscionably stupid fucking waste of energy resources. I'm waiting for one of these birds to tell the American people the truth: you can't have it both ways. you can't get our military out of the Middle East without changing the way we live.
I'm sure he was just kidding. . . .
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Rune Posted 3:43 pm
19 Jun 2007
Given that I haven't said word one about "goals" in this thread, good, bad, or otherwise, I'd say the odds are you have pointed the finger in the wrong direction when attempting to call attention to fallacious argumentation. Good demonstration of imagination, though! Credit where credit is due, you know.
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Rune Posted 4:06 pm
19 Jun 2007
The United States has been importing uranium from Canada for a while, now. And Canada keeps having accidents that cause supply restrictions and price spikes.
Whether we ever "need" to import or mine uranium is another matter.
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caniscandida Posted 9:27 pm
19 Jun 2007
It seems clearly enough understood here by now, that the battlecry "Energy Independence!" on the lips of politicians has little to do with global warming, or even with domestic energy conservation and efficiency. The huge political issue in the 2008 cycle is, needless to say, Iraq. Seventy percent of the electorate want the US to get out of there sooner or later; and the expression "energy independence" is interpreted in the minds of very many voters as meaning, "We will no longer need to maintain a military presence in the Persian Gulf and Iraq." Hence, the more one talks about ethanol and coal-to-liquid, the more one appears to be a brilliant and far-seeing master of geopolitics.
In fact, Big Oil, and a somewhat different powerful interest group, Big US-based Globalized Business, will make sure that the US maintains a strong military presence in the Persian Gulf and vicinity for quite some time. It has not that much to do with securing the supply of petroleum from there to the US, which Sammie has said is not all that important. But it has everything to do with keeping the other petroleum markets well supplied, especially our principal trading partners in Western Europe and East Asia, primarily Japan and South Korea. Also, such East Asian countries as Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia supply a huge amount of labor for US businesses.
The American electorate have much much bigger hearts than do Big Oil and Big Business. But they do not play global chess as well.
The cynical reading of post-9/11 history, promulgated by the "blood for oil" school (to which I cannot help but subscribe), has it that it was extremely convenient for the Bush/Cheney "interested parties" (BCIPs), who had already been scheming to invade Iraq before 9/11, that the people who drove airplanes into the WTC and the Pentagon happened to be from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and their bosses were living in Afghanistan.
With the pretext that the US is fighting a "global war on terror," and that the central battlefield is in Iraq, the US military presence in Iraq and Kuwait and in the Persian Gulf is going to be there for a long time to come. It is also helpful that the Iranian hardliners are saying and doing provocative things -- something else that the BCIPs are finding convenient. It is hard to see how any new US president in 2009, of either party, will be able to pull US troops from the region entirely.
Right after 9/11, the international community was behind the US attack on the Taliban. It is interesting that in the course of that, the US managed to make new ties with the Central Asian "stan" countries, and establish a military presence in a couple of them. Those bases happen to be conveniently located near Afghanistan, but also near the Caspian oil fields. Vladimir Putin went along, initially; and he was rewarded by having his bloody suppression of the independence movement in Chechnya re-interpreted as "part of the global war on terror." (It also helped that the Chechens have not played their cards at all well.)
Putin himself, or rather Russia, is of course a major supplier of petroleum and natural gas to Europe. But an unreliable one.
It has often been observed that if only the US had tried hard enough, whether at Tora Bora or in general, they could have got Usama bin Ladin, Aiman az-Zawahiri and Mullah Umar by now. But that is the point: The US wants everyone to think that they and their NATO allies are trying hard in Afghanistan, when in fact they are dragging their feet, wanting to maintain a presence there for as long as possible.
We should shed many tears for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, him of the gorgeous green overcoat. And half a tear for General Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan, who improbably is a well-loved ally of the US.
Notice that there is a well-manned US military base in Djibouti, a small country at the southern end of the Red Sea, commanding traffic around the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. This had been a French territory, and the French have themselves always maintained a military presence there. But the new US presence looks like a perfectly justified part of the "global war on terror": Djibouti is just north of Somalia, a "failed state," in which Islamists recently tried to gain control of the government; it is not too far further north from Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, where the US embassies were bombed by Al-Qaida agents in August, 1998, with horrific effect; it is across from Yemen, birthplace of Usama bin Ladin, with strong Al-Qaida connexions, and where the USS Cole was attacked in 2000.
But also, oil-bearing tankers traveling from Sudan to China must pass close by Djibouti. US Big Business has lots invested in China, so the US wants the Chinese to have their petroleum, for now. Too bad about the people in Darfur.
One minor disappointment to the BCIPs happened just before the March 2003 invasion: the failure to secure a supply line for the US military through Turkey to northern Iraq. The status of the Kirkuk oilfields is still uncertain. The object of the BCIPs would be to maintain a secure flow of oil from Kirkuk through Turkey to a south-eastern Turkish port.
That may still happen. Turkey is one of the most interesting countries in the world right now. It is a curious coincidence that General David Petraeus caught everyone's attention, early in the occupation, by doing very good work up in Mosul, not far from Kirkuk. Presumably he has maintained good relations with his Kurdish friends. What a fun geopolitical game: how to be nice to both the Kurds and the Turks!
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Sam Wells Posted 3:41 am
20 Jun 2007
As an interesting twist, we know that much of the geo-politics resolves around oil and gas now, along with all those nifty pertoleum products.
But how about regular old water? People will bitch, moan, and fuss about dirty air or oil politics but they will kill for water. If I may be so bold, perhaps Grist could run a post about freshwater.
And yes, water has a bunch to do with Global Warming as well. Best regards,
sammie
Onward through the fog
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:59 am
20 Jun 2007
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Rune Posted 4:32 am
20 Jun 2007
Have a great day.
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Rune Posted 4:48 am
20 Jun 2007
. . . "One in three people is enduring one form or another of water scarcity," the International Water Management Institute says in a report compiled by 700 experts and backed by the United Nations.
The scarcity figures are higher than previous estimates.
"It is much more widespread than we thought at first," the institute's director-general, Frank Rijsberman, said. "It's very concerning. We see what we can easily call a water crisis in quite a few different countries," he said, citing as examples Australia, south-central China and India.
"Conquering hunger and coping with an estimated 3 billion extra people by 2050 will result in an 80 per cent increase in water use for agriculture on rain-fed and irrigated lands," the report says.
Demand for irrigation - which absorbs about 74 per cent of all water used by people against 18 per cent for hydro-power and other industrial uses and just 8 per cent for households - is likely to surge by 2050.
Many nations are also shifting to produce biofuels - from sugarcane, corn or wood - as a less polluting alternative to fossil fuels. High oil prices and worries about global warming are driving the shift. . . .
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:03 am
20 Jun 2007
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barbara santoro Posted 11:28 pm
22 Jul 2008
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