Energy is cheap, if you sustainably collect and store it.

Storing it is the problem, but only a paradigm shift away.

Oil, coal etc should be used for plastics, chemicals etc, and not to be burned as a waste product.

Yes war is useless in today's world

>> His central argument was that war between modern powers was futile in the sense that no matter what the outcome, he thought both the losing and the victorious nations would be economically worse off than they would have been had they avoided war. >>>

In the olden days insurrection of a defeated foe  was avoided in the short term by killing all the able bodied men.

Humanity has no taste for that today, therefore war needs to be banned.

>>TP: Bart, I question your invoking of Tom Friedman. It wasn't so long ago that he was waving his rhetorical pompoms in support of Bush's project.

That's why Friedman is so significant. Since his cheerleading for the war, he has evolved to a position on which greens can find some common ground. He is Mr. Middle America, much better than greens at communicating with the broad population.

100% purity? No thanks! If we are to win, we need to  work with allies with whom we aren't in total agreement.  Let's keep in mind how FDR forged the New Deal.

BTW, I look forward to your food/agriculture posts, Tom. There's almost nothing like them in the mainstream press.

The problem is that the people who decide to go to war aren't the ones paying the bills for it. They see numbers with lots of zeros after them as the cost of a worn-out tank or jet engine and it's all Monopoly money to the testosterone-filled doofuses that say "kill 'em all and let Allah sort 'em out".
The energy crisis is the least of our problems in the near future. Most of the difficulties will arise around ideologies and nationalism that NEVER considers the Net Creativity of what we do. When it comes down to considering our Consumption, we just don't. We only consider our desires and what the 'next' person has. If someone else has something, we are supposed to have it, and our kids are supposed to each have one. It's all in the marketing. 9/11 was just the big red SALE! sign in front of the Depleted Uranium Toy Store.

"It's not me"-Martin Blank

I always find it amazing how few Brits know anything about that war - it's kind-of avoided in the British school curriculum. It was a real turning-point in the way modern wars were fought.

Propaganda came to the fore (Winston Churchill, then a 'embedded' journalist, famously exaggerated all sorts of things for his British public, including 'swimming' through a river to escape his Boer captors that I used to walk ankle-deep though as a kid).

It was the first time a colonial power had to face off to a highly-organised essentially guerilla army (the Boers) who had an purpose-designed, very flexible command structure and innovated camouflage, trench warfare, and roadside bombs.

Needless to say, (as any American general in Iraq could tell you) despite massive numerical and technological superiority, the Brits were on the losing end until they innovated 1) concentration camps, which actually worked for them in the short term, forcing the Boers to capitulate to avoid the deaths of more tens of thousands of their women and children, and 2) the original 'scorched earth policy' during which they burned Boer farms and shot all their livestock (thus depriving the soldiers of sustenance), giving rise to decades of post-war Boer poverty and the subsequent rise of the pro-Nazi, pro-Apartheid Afrikaner Nationalists... and we know where that ended up.

I think the reason that Brit schoolkids don't get taken near this war is that ignorant men callously watching tens of thousands of women and children die of preventable diseases in their concentration camps really doesn't suit the image of the chivalrous, caring Brit soldier that the porpagandists of the time sought to cultivate. After all, the nasty Nazi's invented concentration camps, didn't they...

If the Anglo-Boer War is any lens through which to view the current Iraq, the US will have to be extraordinarily ruthless to win against the 'insurgents', and will have to deal with a century of blowback as a result. Seems like Rummie didn't read his history...

Cheers

Whiskerfish

Thanks to all for the insights.

Tom:  I too am befuddled at the "normalcy" of American politics at the moment.  If nothing else, the fact that the Iraq War represents today a tragically large opportunity cost should be common sense, but doesn't seem to be.

I once said, after Stiglitz' $2 trillion estimate came out (re: war costs) that there was absolutely nothing I could think of that $2 trillion couldn't buy.  Seriously.  The colonization of Pluto would be cheaper.  We could get America off all oil for chump change.

Add to that the fact that an intelligently-designed energy system would not create more danger in the world for America, as this war has, and I fail to see why George Bush is still President.  But then, I am Canadian.

Whiskerfish:  For some reason, Canadian schoolkids are never taught about our complicity in the Boer War, either.  Gee.  Wonder why.

To borrow Lenin's phrase.

If he and James Woolsey can be useful to bring more people around to the national security implications of oil addiction, then I say a big Whoopee.

But the flip side of viewing oil as a military-industrial problem is, as I've said here before, that we're likely to get a military-industrial solution.  Meaning, most likely, coal-to-liquids and oil shale extraction (if possible.)

On balance, viewing oil solely as a security matter will probably make the environmental movement's work harder, not easier.

JMG: viewing oil solely as a security matter will probably make the environmental movement's work harder, not easier. Problem is, John, that ignoring the issue won't make it go away.

How useful is it to call Friedman an idiot? It makes us feel superior, but does not advance our understanding.

Friedman is energetic and far better at communicating to a large audience than any green writer. If we are serious about change, we need to challenge ourselves to learn from other people.

I think you meant JM, not JMG (that'd be me).

But I will point out that Friedman is NOT better than any greenie at communicating with the great masses--far from it.  He's just got a bigger megaphone.  

Not to take away from what he's done right on energy since his shameful pro-war columns (which, bizarrely enough, extend to this morning, when he proposed a kind of "do over" in Iraq, where we REINVADE, only with enough troops this time . . . incredible how someone supposedly so smart can be so thick) but he has no audience because of his quality.  His audience is because of his position.

Oh, and great posts throughout in this thread.  This would be a good time for everyone to drop what they're doing and read or reread Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly."

The real JMG:
Friedman is NOT better than any greenie at communicating with the great masses--far from it.  He's just got a bigger megaphone.   The first step in becoming politically effective is to see things as they are, not as we'd like them to be. Nah, nah, you don't get to be lead columnist for the NY Times unless you're very good.

It doesn't mean I agree with him. Not at all.

Same with the wonderful propaganda/lobbying/communication apparatus that the U.S. rightwing has developed. I oppose them with every ounce of my being, and yet I recognize their accomplishment. Their think tanks, broadcasting networks and PR techniques are a high point in the art of propaganda. We are fools if we don't learn from what happened.

The problem with greens as communicators is that we've retreated into our little ghettos of like-minded people. We have our own jargon and catch phrases.  We are too proud to learn to use modern communication techniques.  We have an unfortunate tendency towards elitism and snobbery. We know that we are RIGHT, and too bad for the unfortunate hoi polloi who don't recognize it.

Yes, there are many problems in gettting a green message across (media consolidation, social inertia, etc.  But a great deal lies within our control.

S-L-O-W-L-Y things are changing (and Grist is an example of a more effective approach).