Dave, man, slow down.  Our goal should be to achieve energy independence defined as being able to sustain energy production and demand within the US, maybe with some help of our neighbors in Mexico and Canada.  

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

What our goal is, is Sustainable Energy.

Carbon Sustainability
Food Sustainability
Economic Sustainability (Long term)
Geopolitical Sustainability
etc etc

I see it as a parallel goal, mostly overlapping with GW response.  It's true that a few people focus on coal, but I think even to the person on the street solar and wind are easier sells.  That's why they are booming.

Not independence. Resilience.

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.

The ironic thing about the way energy independance is pitched, often it's by importing Uranium, BioFuels, and Natural Gas....

GreyFlcn energy independance is pitched [...] by importing Uranium

Are you trying to say that the United States needs, or could conceivably within the next 1,000 years need, to import uranium?

...it has a very technical, but very deep meaning, in the rather dense volume "Panarchy", which is also discussed by Thomas Homer-Dixon in "The upside of down".  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.  By maximizing return on soils and everything else, we build a system that can easily collapse.  

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.

Jon Rynn wrote: By maximizing return on soils

What is "return on soils"?

...or anything else by using it up, just like using the principle of a bank account will maximize your income (maybe I should have said income instead of return) but in the end you will wind up broke.  This is going on with overfishing in the oceans, deforestation, etc., and can also be referred to as "drawdown", using up your assets, assets which are what you use to actually create wealth.  The soils in the midwest, for instance, are being used up and blown away, which is inevitable ifyou want to maximize short-term.  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.

With 40 trillion tons of uranium in the earth's crust, it might take a while to use up the soils, don't you think?

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?

...because if one part of it goes down and gets overloaded, there are lots of different paths that a piece of a transmission (such as this comment) can take to get to the destination.  It was actually designed originally to be able to survive a war because of military considerations (say if a part of it were blown up) but it came to be very useful for civilian purposes, obviously.  It would probably "minimize" cost to have one line going all around the country, but that would have made the system so vulnerable to any number of outages that we would not be having this conversation.

I assume we use soils to grow food.  You use land to mine.  Soils are living organic matter built up over hundreds of years, they are very valuable.  
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

biodiversivist, which is a whole other issue.  Our trade deficits are of the sort that have brought down any other economy that has had them, yet we continue to shop until we drop for a number of reasons, prime among them that the oil-producing countries take our dollars and only our dollars for their oil, so people have somehting they can use with the dollars we give them, since we don't give them goods in return for our goods.  Another part of my split/holistic line of thought,depending on how you think of it, is how to revive manufacturing in this country before the economy collapses.

...we could revive manufacturing (cradle to cradle, of course) by building lots of train systems and windmills and solar panels and efficient buildings, etc.etc., and have enough jobs that everybody could have a highly paid, permeanent, high-skill job, in other words, we'd have a better economy than the one we have now if we built a sustainable (or resilient) economy.

Jon Rynn:
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>

Rune wrote: if you don't have any resources in reserve, you are likely to experience all sorts of unpleasant

Reserves of uranium and thorium are plentiful worldwide, and all other mineral and chemical resources can be produced from those.

To "have resolve" is not a goal or objective but is a strategy.  Sorry to say it, but it is like Bush saying that the siege in Iraq is a goal or something when in fact it is just a maneuver.  Should we be "dauntless" too?  Not too daunting or pessimistic?

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

Second, Rune raises serious serious flaws of specious reasoning when saying that energy independence is not such as bad goal.

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.

Are you trying to say that the United States needs, or could conceivably within the next 1,000 years need, to import uranium?

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.

Sammie's question, "Why pick on the Arabs?," is a good one, and his reference to Big Oil in his memory of rationing days during the Carter administration is important.

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!

... and I must apologize for misrepresenting Rune and using the 'F' word once.  

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

...to post about water, I'm not sure who here is an expert on that; look at the hansen post Roberts just put up too, but it seems to me that glacier melting, particularly the rivers that come out of the glaciers in central asia, would be a major catastrophe, since those feed the indian, chinese, and southeast asian rivers.

and I must apologize for misrepresenting Rune

Have a great day.

...is for growing grain for livestock, I believe 80% of corn (or is it all grain?) in the U.S.  There's a website somewhere, I can't remember, that claims that the production of one pound of beef uses 1500 pounds of water