Most Americans would agree this is true, but don’t really believe it will happen in their lifetimes. If it does, they vaguely think science will have a convenient substitute ready to go.
Well, they may get an unpleasant surprise, sooner than we think. That‘s because of China, the fastest-growing oil consumer in the world. We still use nearly twice as much, but China is catching up fast.
Their economy is booming, and they have four times as many people as we do. That has to mean less oil available for us, soon.
Lots of books have been written about oil before. Some of them are overly sensationalist, and others by people who don’t have a credential or a clue how government or science work.
David Sandalow has both sets of credentials. He is the Brookings Institution’s energy and environment scholar, and has a long background in government.
He has been both a former assistant secretary of state, and a member of the National Security Council’s senior staff. He also has something very rare these days: Bipartisan respect.
Not only have both Bill Clinton and Al Gore written blurbs praising this book, it has an admiring foreword by Senator Richard Lugar, a conservative Republican from Indiana.
Freedom from Oil does three things in a remarkably short amount of space. Sandalow discusses why we are so dependent on oil and profiles nine people, from a general in Iraq to a race car driver, who are calling attention to the need to end oil dependence.
But the main theme is crafting an energy policy for a newly elected president. The recommendations here range from massive federal funding for mass transit to tax credits for biofuels.
Sandalow’s President would have the government buy “plug-in-hybrid” cars for official use, and promote a steep rise in the gasoline tax, with rebates for poor and energy-efficient families.
Virtually everything here sounds right, with one possible exception. Sandalow puts more faith in ethanol than most experts think is justified. But his other policy recommendations make perfect sense. Or would, in a sensible world.
Americans have a history of responding to crises at the last possible minute, or after the dam bursts. As noted here, elected officials who ask us to sacrifice tend to be former elected officials.
Freedom from Oil ends with the President giving his speech calling for a change in our way of life, followed by a statesman-like speech from the leading senator of the other party, pledging to work together. The problem is that right now it is hard to imagine the parties working together, in Washington as in Lansing. And until we get to that point, the oil time bomb is sure to continue to tick.
Hopefully we’ll grow up. Before it’s too late.
1. Point one. There is plenty of oil. High crude oil prices now are related to high speculative prices (due in large part to the malevolence of our enemies in the middle east) and the monopolistic pricing of OPEC.
2. Point two. High gasoline prices are due in part to high crude oil prices, but also to taxes and particularly to a shortage of gasoline refining infrastructure.
3. Point three. If you want to cut gasoline consumption, tax it. But Democrat-party bosses will never accept the political fallout that would flow, like an oil gusher, from such a tax.
4. Point four. It might be nice, for people who want to link auto traffic to the electrical power grid, to also support nuclear electrical generation.
5. Point five. Long before we "run out" (!?) of oil, it would become so expensive as to lead to great conservation. The beauty of supply-and-demand. In the meantime, with a vibrant economy, the genius of the marketplace is a LOT more likely to come up with a better solution to transportation energy needs than, say, Congress. Or the Brookings Institution. Let the marketplace figure it out. (Too bad the Brookings institution was not around in 1807, to predict that in 100 years, the world would "run out" of hay for horses, and the horse-waste-disposal problem would be so great that the economy would come to a halt.)
6. Point six. Ethanol. Reason No. 1,001 to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and to read its editorial pages is to take in the series of reports that various contributors have done on the costs of ethanol production. It is hugely expensive. It is little help in overall energy consumption. Ethanol production further skews farm production in the direction of government-subsidized argiculture. And ethanol sucks up fresh groundwater for the production process like you wouldn't believe.
Other than that, this was a really incisive interview.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 30, 2007 at 03:37 PM