http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/37/news-bearman.php

Los Angeles Weekly
AUGUST 5 - 11, 2005
Bush’s Energy Disaster
Time to park the SUVs in the White House garage
by JOSHUAH BEARMAN

As the Senate cast its votes on the energy bill last Friday, giving
Republicans a little legislative victory before everyone skipped town for
the summer, Bush issued a congratulatory statement. “I applaud Congress,”
he said, “for a bill that will help secure our energy future and reduce our
dependence on foreign sources of energy.” A nice sentiment — except that
“securing our energy future” is the one thing the bill won’t do.

Then again, that was never the intention. This was Bush’s baby from the
start, the fruition of Cheney’s infamous task force, to which he invited
every industry honcho he could find to write their own tickets right into
the country’s energy policy. After that, of course, it was larded with
extra tax breaks and subsidies, like $500 million in deep-water drilling
that will likely wind up in Tom DeLay’s hometown, Sugar Land, and billions
more that will drain straight into industry coffers.

This at a time when high oil prices are sending industry margins soaring:
Exxon-Mobil’s third quarter last year was the most profitable corporate
earnings in history. Boone Pickens, head of BP Capital Management, a
billion-dollar hedge fund that makes people wealthy trading energy futures
and related investments, sums up the high times like so: “I’ve never had so
much fun in my life.”

But the giveaways are the least of the bill’s problems. When both sides
claim victory, it’s a sure sign of mediocre legislation. Republicans got to
line some pockets and call it economic progress. Democrats were able to
shelve (for now) a few hot-button issues like the MTBE indemnity and
drilling in ANWR. (And when barely derailing a raid on ANWR is considered a
Democratic victory, it only shows how much the Republicans have been able
to set the agenda.) Likewise, Republicans were able to take out the
fuel-efficiency standards and global-warming language that so offended
them. In the end, the energy bill was a hodgepodge, a collection of
provisions with no vision.

The problem is we need vision with energy most of all. Because there will
come a day, sometime fairly soon, when a barrel of light, sweet crude will
emerge from some oil field and the world will have officially burned more
oil than what’s left in the ground. That moment — peak oil, it’s called —
is not a question of if but when: Some say the tap-out starts out in 30
years; Exxon-Mobil’s own recently published estimate says five; one
Princeton geologist says maybe next year. When it does happen, it may not
be celebrated, or even noticed right away, but it will mark the beginning
of the long slide to an inevitable reconfiguration of, well, civilization
as we know it.

If that sounds alarmist, recall that our vast economy of just-in-time,
transnationally shipped inventory is fueled entirely by petroleum. As is
our food supply, whose end products like poultry and beef are elaborate
(and remarkably inefficient) conversions of petroleum energy into food
calories. The widespread use of petrochemical fertilizers to grow feed for
livestock has turned agriculture into one of the biggest sources of oil
demand after transportation. It’s a demand that’s skyrocketing worldwide:
With current measures, experts predict global oil consumption will rise 57
percent by 2025 — just in time for that coming peak. If small supply shocks
like OPEC’s embargoes in the ’70s can create recessions, what would happen
in the face of significant, persistent, growing shortages?

A Greater Depression, or even chaos, is the answer, as was discovered in
late June at a war game called “Oil Shockwave.” The participants, including
many former Republican administration members, spent several days running
through various scenarios of disrupted oil supply. Even with small-scale
trouble, the exercises quickly spun out of control. “The American people,”
concluded former CIA Director Robert M. Gates, “are going to pay a terrible
price for not having an energy strategy.”

James Woolsey, another former CIA director present at “Oil Shockwave,” was
equally troubled. Woolsey, friend to Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and
Douglas Feith, and member of the bona fide neocon Defense Policy Board, has
become an alternative-energy buff in the interest of national security. A
few weeks later, Woolsey presented a paper along with George Schultz,
Reagan’s secretary of state, to the Committee on Present Danger about how
our oil dependency makes the country extremely vulnerable. They argued that
national security requires a radical change in energy policy, starting with
fuel-efficiency standards. Woolsey and Schultz also dared to draw the
less-talked-about blood/oil connection: that the spread of the Wahhabi
ideology and a lot of terrorist planning has been funded by petrodollars.

If energy conservation, then, is a first line of national defense, why do
so many jackasses drive their SUVs around with American flags all over
them? More importantly, why did the country get an energy bill that,
according to the administration’s own Energy Information Administration
(EIA), will actually raise gas prices and increase oil demand nearly 14
percent in just the next six years?

To be fair, the bill did include many new incentives for renewable energy.
And although many on the Left don’t like it, the bill’s jump-start for
nuclear power — much safer today with new technology — has some mixed
promise. But that’s not broad enough thinking. We need what Woolsey and
Schultz describe: a focused effort in funding and research that turns the
energy equation upside down.

Instead, we’re getting $10 billion more “missile defense.” And an even
costlier PR junket — I mean scientifically valuable manned mission — to
Mars. Not to mention the war in Iraq, at $200 billion and counting. Imagine
how much renewable-energy development we could have gotten for all that
money. Problem solved! With the kind of funding wasted by Bush in just the
past five years, we could have had a Manhattan Project for energy security
several times over — and actually made a difference in national security.
As Woolsey and Schultz put it, sounding like granola munchers on their way
to Earth Day:

“A plug-in hybrid averaging 125 mpg, if its fuel tank contains 85 percent
cellulosic ethanol, would be obtaining about 500 mpg. If it were
constructed from carbon composites, the mileage could double, and, if it
were a diesel and powered by biodiesel derived from waste, it would be
using no oil products at all . . . What are we waiting for?”

What indeed.