Tim Wood
american notes
When fauna and flora take precedence over humans, there is a serious problem that has nothing to do with the ugly face of capitalism.
The United States is frothing about its energy vulnerability. California is suffering rolling blackouts that threaten its neighbours and petrol prices are higher than they have been in a decade.
It’s important to separate the energy crisis from the rise in oil prices. There is no shortage of fuel for cars, trucks and heating homes; it’s just very expensive. Electricity is in very short supply though, leaving the Pacific Northwest with sporadic power cuts.
Both problems high prices and shortages are the result of well intentioned but misguided policies to save the environment. The result has been an excessive focus on conservation for which the country is now reaping its reward.
Conservation was the wrong medicine because the US was already paring its consumption. In 1970 Americans consumed 270-million British thermal units (Btu) per capita. In 1999, at the height of the bull market, the per capita figure was 356-million Btu. That 32% increase is laughable against gross domestic product that grew 839% over the same period and federal income tax receipts that soared by 837%.
Simply put, the US has been more efficient than any other nation in curbing energy consumption even as the population and economy surged.
That is not good enough for radical environmentalists who have become a potent force in US politics. While much of the activist environmental lobby is aligned with consumerist Ralph Nader, it has a strong crossover with the Democratic Party and considerable reach into the Republican Party.
Radical is not too strong a word. There is widespread sympathy for the idea that humans intrude on nature like an alien weed in an indigenous garden. The looniest faction embraces “deep ecology”, a modern religion embracing human “diebacks” as a sacrifice to Mother Earth’s well being.
Yet such obvious foolishness has found its way into a system that everyone else apparently envies. Or at least they used to.
The environmental movement gained serious leverage with the hysteria over the ozone layer. Its apogee came during Bill Clinton’s final days as president when the Kyoto Accord looked certain and the country was saddled with dozens of economically insane decrees. These ranged from banning roads in forests to mandating arsenic levels in drinking water lower than that found in pristine rivers.
At the same time, environmental pressure groups have been all too successful convincing politicians and administrators not to look very favourably on refineries, pipelines and electricity generation.
Petrol was attacked because it is supposedly the surest way to force people to drive more efficient cars. Since the late 1970s the US has stiffened emissions standards and regulated fuel economy to the point of absurdity. There are now pressure groups calling for off-road vehicles of the urban type to be banned.
Likewise, petroleum pipelines are economically unviable because 95 different blends of petrol are required to satisfy air quality requirements around the country.
This might have worked if the US had followed Europe’s declining population trend. The exact opposite has happened with a boom in immigration. California’s population has doubled in a decade but it hasn’t built a single large-scale generating plant in that time. Its electricity grid is hopelessly inadequate with no link between the energy-rich south and the energy-starved north of the state.
Even as shortages take a toll, the lessons remain unlearned. The Golden State is demanding that the federal government cap energy prices that are thousands of percent higher lest everyone go bankrupt. Electricity price caps for California’s consumers created the mess in the first place and that lesson should have been learned from Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. All his price caps proved was that they reduced supply by undermining profit incentives.
There is also a clamour for “clean” fuels. The problem is that large-scale wind and solar generation are unviable without budget busting subsidies. They’re also lethal to birds and a waste of land. In between there are calls for ethanol fuels, which are really just pork for the Midwest’s maize farmers.
So the US sits with a dilemma. It likes creature comforts at a good price and delivered in ways that don’t upset the view from the sitting room. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen if you don’t build new power plants, drill for more oil and sink pipelines. Unpleasant perhaps, but very necessary for those not of a school that believes civilisation is better off living in caves by the light of tallow candles.
Whether or not the Bush energy plan will succeed in the face of a Democratic party controlled Senate hell bent on wrecking his presidency remains to be seen. However, it is inescapable that the solution to the US’s energy crisis is more growth not less consumption.