Energy Policy

There's a relatively new neo-conservative talking point making the rounds today regarding our energy policy, and I'd like to take issue with it.

Ten years ago, so the story goes, Bill Clinton vetoed a bill to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, or ANWR (often pronounced like the first name of the assassinated Egyptian President Sadat), and that had he not, that oil would be starting to flow today into the United States, at a time when we desperately need some additional oil to increase the supply and drive down prices.

And that story is true as far as it goes, but, there are several problems with it.

First, the Energy Information Administration did a study in 2004 which suggested that not only would it take 10 years to start getting oil out of ANWR, but it would be 20 years before we'd reach peak production, and that even at expected peak, it would account for about 4% of our total oil usage.

So imagine we had 4% more oil available to us today than we have (forgetting that it would be another 10 years before we'd reach that peak). How much do you think that would be affecting the prices at the pump? According to Department of Energy Projections, about 75 cents a barrel. I'm not kidding. The price of oil is up around $130/barrel, and we could drop that to $129.25/barrel, when at the start of the Bush it was under $35/barrel (not corrected for inflation) and in 1999 was as low as just around $15/barrel.

See the difference? 75 cents per barrel just doesn't mean much when we're looking at an increase of around $100/barrel and a quadrupling of the price.

But more importantly, we have to stop accepting the neo-conservative redefinition tactic that they're so good at.

Our problem as a nation is our addiction to oil. We use too much of it. It pollutes our air, it (apparently) warms our planet, it forces us to give vast quantities of our money to some of the same people who seem to want to kill us and it leaves us woefully unprepared when that oil supply eventually dries up, whether that's in 10 years or 25 years or 100 years.

But if you watch carefully, the far-right news sources (such as Fox News) take the true statement "we need to break our national addiction to oil" and subtly change it to "we need to break our national addiction to foreign oil".

What we need, and need right now and need vitally, is an energy policy that encourages us to continue to innovate in the area of clean and renewable energy sources. Hydro, wind and solar power primarily, bringing down our use of oil and coal and eventually even nuclear power as we ramp up on these other sources.

Right off the bat, we could reduce a lot of our problems if we'd help support companies like NanoSolar, a company which reportedly has come up with a new way of making solar cells that allows them to be manufactured at a price point of around 30 cents per watt of generating capacity and sold for 90 cents per watt, when the current going price is around $4.80/watt. If we can get that price down to the range that it's affordable to put up on all of our roofs we could cut down on our need for coal and oil generated electricity. (NanoSolar reportedly can't keep up with demand right now, but I imagine that if they ramp up to mass production, and if they can be encouraged to lease out their process to other production companies as well, that price point could drop still further).

If we then used that solar electricity to run geo-thermal heating and cooling systems in our homes, and ran either solar or geo-thermal water heaters, we could significantly diminish the need for heating oil, propane or natural gas heating in our homes.

If we encourage the development of newer and better electric cars like the Chevy Volt and the Think City or more efficient hybrids like the Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid, and can use some of that same solar power to make our commute back and forth to work each day, or to school or shopping or whatever, we can take yet more oil out of the national circulatory system. (For those of means who want something a little sexier, check out the Tesla Motors Roadster. A bit expensive, but it'll kick the butt of most gas powered cars out there, for those who truly need to compensate.)

To be sure there are certain technologies for which no alternatives currently exist. To my knowledge, no one has come up with a workable alternative to the fuel-fired jet (although we might move to bio-fuels, if that doesn't have too great an effect on the availability of food crops), but just think about how much less petroleum we'd use as a nation if most of us were doing most of our driving in cars that we charged up from a photovoltaic array on our roofs?

This isn't going to come quickly or easily, of course. Early adopters (and Janet and I fully plan to be among them, once the kids start leaving for college and we begin building the smaller, eco-friendly house we'll be retiring to) will probably not see a return on investment equal to that investment, and will have to be motivated primarily on the wish to help leave the planet as good as we found it. Even if there were viable electric cars available today and we started phasing out the old gas-guzzlers, it'd be nearly a decade before most of the older models were off of the road. And those early cars have some very serious limitations in range, time to fully recharge, payload capacity, top speed, etc, your average so-called "socker mom" isn't going to be trading in her minivan for a little two seater go-kart of a car any time soon.

But our national problem right now, in any number of different areas, is our addiction to oil as our primary source of energy. That much of that oil is foreign adds to the areas in which the addiction is a problem, but if you're addicted to crystal meth and you're able to start acquiring it from your brother instead of from some violent punk on a street corner, you haven't solved your addiction problem, you've just made sure you’re not supporting violent criminals because of it.

Solve the problem. Solve the whole problem. Don't let someone misdirect you to believe that the trouble is just the foreign oil. That's just the tip of the (quickly melting) ice berg.

Liam.