Energy policy, meet connectivity. Connectivity, meet energy policy.
Was just reading some stuff over at the Oil Drum regarding “Energize America,” a Daily Kos brainstorm. Never mind the details for now, let’s look at what these folks are trying to achieve:
By 2020, Energize America will:
-make the nation safer from unstable regions of the world - where most of the global oil supply is located;
-insulate the U.S. economy from energy supply disruptions - both natural and human-made
-…
The list goes on. But these are the ones that are raising my blood-pressure. These folks want to make us safe by firewalling us off from those nasty “unstable regions of the world.” As if we could move to some global version of the suburbs and never have to go shopping at those dirty urban stores where the homeless guys hang around the doors and ask for change as you walk in. Furthermore, these folks want to “insulate” the US economy from the energy supply disruptions these unstable regions create.
In other words, the problem isn’t that the inner city is riddled with crime, the problem is that the only place we can buy our energy is in that crime-riddled inner city. If only we could buy our energy without leaving our beautiful, safe global suburb. Then we could live our whole lives in our happy gated community and never have to deal with those messy parts of the world.
I know that the folks who wrote this weren’t looking at the problem like this. That’s the problem. Globalization is connectivity. Globalization is interdependence. It is losing the ability to be nationally self-sufficient and in direct control of everything your country needs. It is the march of economic development being played out on a global scale. The agricultural revolution led to food surpluses, which led to non-agrarian professions, which created individuals who were dependent upon the rest of their social group for their food. The industrial revolution led to mass production and regions that were dependent upon other regions for their food. Globalization is the next natural step in this process: nations that are dependent upon other nations for their food. This makes the stability of those nations our problem, because we depend upon them. We can solve this problem in one of two ways. We can stop depending upon them (the “do it all yourself” solution), or we can address the problems that are making them unstable (the “to it all together” solution). The latter solution might seem like the safest route, but it carries a cost with it. Doing everything yourself means you make do with less. It means that you trade a higher standard of living for a more certain future. And it means that you sever your responsibility for your larger community.
I don’t think that it is morally acceptable or practical to try to distance ourselves from the Gap. I think that the Gap’s threat to us is why we need to shrink it. “Shrinking the Gap” is a sustainable solution. “Avoiding the Gap” is shoving the problem into the closet, locking the door and hoping the walls hold. Which approach do you think makes sense in the long term?
I more than agree that it is morally unacceptable and impractical to distance ourselves from the gap or to avoid it. I think in fact it is impossible. Let me argue metaphorically (as you have with the urban-suburban example). A geographical analogy does not quite capture for me the degree of interdependence that has been built into the world economy by the very success of the global capitalist free enterprise system. It was the efficient and utilitarian choices that made the world interdependent — e.g. to make certain components in certain places for certain prices, and in recognition of certain immutable realities such as the presence of oil in some places and not in others.
But once we ran out of continents to run to from each other, and live happily apart, and organized a global economy as if it WERE one rational world, the following Metaphor of the Jetliner seems to be more apt —
I like to think of the countries of the World as riding in a Boeing 747 run by World Economics Airways. (It is of course their only airplane.) The pilot is the American President. The co-pilot is the British Prime Minister. (Sorry, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.) The crew are the Coalition of the Willing’s Militaries. The First World countries, or since this is no longer the Cold War era, the Countries of the Core, are sitting in First and Business Class. Countries of the Gap and all the rest are in Economy. Some countries, the the worst performing, most corrupt are in the Cargo Hold. Now we may lock the doors to First and Business Class all we want, but the fuel tanks of the jetliner have at all times to be safeguarded. And to say we shall only guard one and not the other 3 engines and fuel tanks, well that would be nuts even if a 747 can theoretically fly on a single engine. If rowdy people start playing with guns and bombs near those fuel tanks, they cannot be ignored no matter how serene and convivial it is in the First Class Lounge. it becomes the duty of the pilots, crew and even passengers to do something about it. And should a small hole develop in the fuselage because there are dangerous explosives in the Cargo Hold, the conviviality wouldn’t last very long at all.
Thanks for indulging an amateur’s comment. Yours was a stimulating read.
Comment by Rizalist — December 16, 2005 @ 8:01 am
Hey there Rizalist, thank you for the kind words.
You make a good point emphasizing the interdependence of our world - a point that I utterly agree with but under-emphasized this post’s metaphor. It is this intersection between the moral (it is not acceptable to firewall ourselves off from instability and suffering) and the practical (it is not feasible to firewall ourselves off from instability and suffering) that makes this period of history so revolutionary. If we were to try to return to some sort of 19th century-style isolation our standards of living would plummet and the dangerous of global epidemics, transnational crime and terrorism would still threaten us.
Comment by Wiggins — December 16, 2005 @ 3:38 pm
As one of the authors of the Dkos Energize America plan, feel free to read the full post and rip it apart. url above rkaiser@inayat.org I’m not apologizing for attempting to get us to a point where we are less dependent on energy imports. Can we be energy independent, of course not, it is a global energy market and nothing we do short of total isolationism can change that. What we can do is attempt to control our destinies a bit by doing something besides fighting wars for control of ever shrinking oil resources. If you read the actual plan the majority is conservation and developement of renewables. To me that is far superior to deciding we should just go invade the “inner city” cause that’s where the oil happens to be. Why not reduce our demand, let the “inner city” enjoy lower prices and greater growth while develop new sources of energy and reduce the levels of pollution we spew into the air?
Comment by btower — December 16, 2005 @ 9:39 pm
The problem is, there’s always a danger when we see other people as a means to the end of our happiness, rather than ends in themselves. We certainly shouldn’t firewall ourselves off from the dangerous parts of the world, but we must accept that sometimes engagement on our terms isn’t the right solution for them either.
Treating Asia as a means to our ends was why we got involved in Vietnam, why we helped radical islamists in the 70s and 80s (to protect their countries from Russia and their own soviet-leaning governments), why we supported Saddam Hussain to make war on Iran. It’s likely to lead to us more concerned with making Iraq safe for *us* than doing the right thing for its people. Not because we’re “bad”, but because self-interested do-gooding is easily blinded to its own faults.
And “first do no harm” is a good maxim to live by when you are dealing with complex systems that might be beyond your control.
Dependency is neither an absolute good nor bad. The amount of dependency you want is a subtle, pragmatic judgement. Children must eventually grow up to be independent of their parents. Every person must learn responsibility through having a chance to make his or her own mistakes.
At this point in time, it certainly would be better for America to invest it’s money in energy saving and alternative energy technologies rather than in pumping more weapons and soldiers and mercenaries into the middle east; and making more widows to bring up more America-hating sons.
How do you get to a free, prosperous, America-friendly middle-east? Well, the price of oil is a huge perversion of the economics and politics of the region. If oil were less important, entrepreneurial Arab countries like Dubai (investing in tourism and shipping) might become role-models. If oil were less important, Sunni Arabs would have less reason to oppose the break-up of Iraq into independent states capable of peaceful coexistence. If oil were less important, the Saudi economy would have been more diverse and the royal family less powerful.
In fact, I’d suggest that dependencies should either be long-term and broad, or short-term and narrow. Meaning that two countries can be highly interdependent if they trade a wide variety of goods and services (and each depends on the other for a myriad of things); or we can have one country with a short-term dependency on another’s speciality. But long term, specialist (normally one-way) dependency is likely to be unhealthy. It involves too much power.
America’s dependency on Arabian oil, is also Arabia’s dependency on American political support and weapons, which in retrospect has been good for neither country.
Too late to fix the past now, but if we’re thinking grand strategy, sensible interdependence rather than acute “addiction” is probably what we should be aiming for.
Comment by phil jones — December 17, 2005 @ 10:33 pm
Hi Ben,
My apologies if I gave the impression that I wanted to rip apart your entire plan. I appreciate that most of it deals with policy proposals for conservation and renewables, and none of that is what bothered me. I am no energy policy wonk (though I do find the subject fascinating) and wasn’t offering a critique of your specific proposals.
What does bother me is the larger context for your plan and its impied assumptions. Your insinuation that we are currently fighting wars to control oil resources, for example. These sorts of simplistic claims can score political points, but don’t lead to a coherent or valid description of the world. That was what was bothering me, and I will respectfully hold to my position.
Comment by Wiggins — December 17, 2005 @ 11:05 pm
Hi Phil,
Yup, mutually-healthy interdependence ought to be our goal. We’re on the same page there. But I still don’t believe that buying less oil from Saudi Arabia necessarily will help them develop their economy to become a state that can compete in the globalized economy.
We all want genuine stability in the Middle East. American companies want it because chaos is bad for businesses. Americans want it so that our soldiers aren’t dieing over there. The folks living in the Middle East obviously want it because they are the ones dying and suffering from the instability. So we need to think about what policies will foster honest stability (not strong-man enforced stability). I believe that blood and treasure will have to be expended - but it has to be expended intelligently, as you point out so well, because of the risk of backlash. Finding a way to better export stability is the tool we are all desperately trying to develop. We need to get smarter on this and hopefully Iraq is serving as the catalyst.
Comment by Wiggins — December 19, 2005 @ 12:57 am