Graham, Kerry, Lieberman: “Every day, we spend nearly $1 billion to sustain our addiction to foreign energy sources and we ship Americans’ hard earned dollars overseas, some of which finds its way to extremist or terrorist organizations.”
Recent events underscore the need for the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill, which is key to maintaining and improving U.S. energy and national security (see “EIA: Clean air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill would make America more energy independent, cutting U.S. foreign oil bill $650 billion through 2030, saving $5,600 per household“).
Yesterday, Meet the Press focused on the failed effort to blow up an airline on Christmas Day. One exchange was especially illuminating (transcript here)
MR. GREGORY: Doris, you’re familiar with writing long and wonderful volumes of history. And if the war on terror, if chapter one was written by President Bush, now it’s chapter two and beyond; and it’s still very, very complicated, an entire decade really defined by, by terrorist acts at the front end and at the back end, an attempted act at the back end. So much different than the wars we have fought in our past.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, as always, provided a crucial historical perspective:
MS. GOODWIN: True. But I think there are certain lessons, even though the war on terror is a war about individuals, loose organizations, it’s not countries, there aren’t going to be treaties. We’ve learned things from other wars that I still think are valid here. Number one, you have to have allies on your side, and I think that’s what the Obama administration has begun to do. I mean, after we made the announcement about the Afghan escalation, NATO put in 7,000 troops. That showed that some work had been done at that point. I also keep thinking that somehow what we really missed in the beginning of this decade on the war on terror, what would have happened right after September 11th if President Bush had called for independent–a Manhattan Project for independence from Middle Eastern oil? What if he’d called for a lot more people to join the Army? We wouldn’t have had these same soldiers going back three and four times. What if we’d had a tax increase, as we’ve done in every other war, to fight a war? We wouldn’t be facing the deficits right now. So I think even though it’s a different war, the need to mobilize the spirit and the energy of the American people, so it’s not just our soldiers fighting those wars alone over there, is still relevant in history’s terms.
The Manhattan project of course was not a long-term basic R&D effort, which is how some people seem to use the analogy. It was a staggeringly massive engineering project aimed at rapidly developing — and, more importantly, deploying — a very specific military technology, part of an even bigger effort to deploy technology, as I discuss in the conclusion to my book:
This national (and global) re-industrialization effort would be on the scale of what we did during World War II, except it would last far longer. “In nine months, the entire capacity of the prolific automobile industry had been converted to the production of tanks, guns, planes, and bombs,” explains Doris Kearns Goodwin in her 1994 book on the World War II homefront, No Ordinary Time. “The industry that once built 4 million cars a year was now building three fourths of the nation’s aircraft engines, one half of all tanks, and one third of all machine guns.”
The scale of the war effort was astonishing. The physicist Edward Teller tells the story of how Niels Bohr had insisted in 1939 that making a nuclear bomb would take an enormous national effort, one without any precedent. When Bohr came to see the huge Los Alamos facility years later, he said to Teller, “You see, I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that.” And we did it in under five years.
Now, of course, the government can’t turn the whole country into a factory — the private sector is crucial to this “enormous national effort, one without any precedent” — one aimed at deploying low-oil, low-carbon commercial products on a large scale. And that’s where there is a bipartisan realization that the key to energy independence is the climate and clean energy jobs bill as Senators Graham (R-SC), Kerry (D-MA), Lieberman (I-CT) spelled out last month in their “Framework for Climate Action and Energy Independence in the U.S. Senate”:
Carbon pollution is altering the earth’s climate. The impacts have already been seen and felt throughout our country and around the world….
This document outlines the principles and guidelines that will shape our ongoing efforts to develop comprehensive climate change and energy independence legislation….
We believe a near term pollution reduction target in the range of 17 percent below 2005 emissions levels is achievable and reasonable, as is a long term target of approximately 80 percent below 2005 levels….
Securing energy independence. We find ourselves more dependent on foreign oil today than any other time in our nation’s history, and that is unacceptable. Every day, we spend nearly $1 billion to sustain our addiction to foreign energy sources – and we ship Americans’ hard earned dollars overseas, some of which finds its way to extremist or terrorist organizations. Presidents and politicians have bemoaned this fact for decades; and now is the moment when we can – and must – break that habit. By spurring the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies and increasing our supply of domestically produced oil and natural gas on land and offshore, our legislation will ensure America’s energy security. We will do so in a way that sends money back to the states that opt to drill and also provides new federal government revenues to advance climate mitigation goals. We will also encourage investments in energy efficiency because we believe that consuming less power will help keep energy bills down and simultaneously extend the life of our domestic energy resources. Finally, maintaining the ability to refine petroleum products in the United States is a national security priority. It is our belief that we can preserve our refining capacity without sacrificing our environmental goals. If energy independence is to be a priority, we must keep the entire energy cycle right here at home.
This is also no ordinary time. This year we’ll see whether we have ordinary — or extraordinary — leaders
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And here’s the regional breakdown:
barrels and %
North America 1,648,765 33.56%
Africa 980,231 19.95%
Middle East 837,841 17.05%
South America 784,999 15.98%
Europe 567,152 11.54%
Asia 91,236 1.86%
Oceania 2,774 0.06%
Most of our oil comes from our continent. It surprised me.
So much for overseas.
We do need a Manhattan project style program, IMO, with a WWII scale effort.
What I favor is seizing the coal fired power plants, and forcibly converting them to BECCS:
An added benefit of BECCS is that it would decouple the generation of aerosols from fossil fuel use. So it would be possible to deal simultaneously with both global dimming an global warming. It would be possible to keep aerosol generation high, by burning biomass and perhaps some high sulfur coal without scrubbers, and at the same time actively put CO2 back underground, and do all of these things on a massive scale, operating at a profit.
Global dimming appears to be a major effect, and this apparently means that the greenhouse warming of the atmosphere has been partially masked by global dimming. This appears to mean that the climate is much more sensitive to CO2 than we previously thought- CO2 forcing has been partially masked by aerosol dimming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
So yes, we need a huge mobilization of resources to deal with this problem, acting on a pragmatic rather than an idealistic basis.
We need to nationalize the coal fired power plants, and use them to actively put CO2 back underground, by retrofitting them to BECCS. BECCS decouples the generation of aerosols from the use of fossil fuels. Having this flexibility, we could then use the BECCS plants to draw down CO2 levels, keeping particulate emissions high in the meantime. Once CO2 levels are down, we could then use the scrubbers on the converted BECCS plants to draw down the particulate levels.
I liked Goodwin’s what-if about deciding to become energy independent in 2001, but then she goes on to say that what if we had sent more troops. The military industrial complex and endless wars are killing us. How about what if we withdrew within a year from the Middle East and South Asia and decided to spend that money on energy independence?
I also don’t like WW II or even Manhattan Project analogies. My father was a career officer in WW II, and was haunted by it. He regained his happiness when he became a pacifist at age 71. The Manhattan Project was a crusade to build something that would blow up entire cities. Even if both of these were necessary, there should not be any celebrations of them, or even positive examples.
When I heard the story about the new “world’s tallest tower” in Dubai this morning, I thought, “Well, that’s where all our money is.’
And that’s because, in the 1980′s, Ronald Reagan and the republican party decided, rather than continue the renewable energy initiatives of Jimmy Carter, and break OPEC, it was more important to insure the profits of their clients in the Oil industry and the House of Saud.
The solar panels on the White House came down, and the incredible transfer of wealth — inevitable wars — were set in motion.
So if we had invested all the “WAR” money as well as related costs into sustainable energy production and efficiency, Where would we be today? Any guesses out there?
The current Military budget is about $650 billion per year. Our next nearest competitor, China is ~$87 billion. Anyone see a major threat to them???
Assuming a National Security threat to destabilized populations the world over, which I do, is it proper to allocate some of that vast discrepancy to sustainability?
It is important to note that much of that $650 billion goes to “cost plus” government contracts to big companies, thus perpetuating inequities. Recall that Corporations lobby with big money to effectively, quite successfully, stack the deck in THEIR favor.
Finally. Corporations are not beholden to humanity, only to the bottom line being “BLACK.” That in essence gives the corporations a license to KILL as long as it is not TOO blatant about it. (Soon to be expanded by the Supreme Court???) Think tobacco, Bophal, Love Canal,… Consequently; Atmosphere for a free dump for pollution. Good! pollution controls that cost money. Bad! Clean up mess? Someone else’s problem. (SEP’s “Hitch Hikers guide…) Poison rivers, if they don’t get caught. Good! Sustainable factory practices that may cost up front but big pay back down the nine? BAD! Economic policy that promotes consumption and FAST profits. GOOD!!! Economic policy that promotes the well being of humanity present as well as future generations? HAY, IT ANI’T MY PROBLEM!
Do you see a roll for “rational self government” here? A humanitarian uprising? A world currency? A CARBON TAX?
A billion dollars a day! What is the amount at $80 a barrel? I didn’t realize it was so much.
40% of our oil comes from the Middle East and Africa (i.e. Nigeria, i.e. the dude who tried to blow up our plane) according to Mr. Lehman. Mr. Lehman: please think a little more about this.
When Carter was president I think we got over 50% of our oil domestically. We’ve been going backwards for the last 30 years.
Guess I need to read your book Mr. Romm. It’s sitting next to my bedside.
Even though much of the oil we import is coming from Canada and Mexico, we’d still be economically better off buying a lot less oil from them, and we will have to soon enough, anyway, since conventional oil production is falling in both countries and producing from tar sands is so environmentally devastating that it will have to be curtailed at some point. Trade deficits mean more foreign debt and more downward pressure on the dollar, no matter which country we’re buying from.
We’ve already waited far too long to ramp up efforts to get off of oil and coal. And, yes, a carbon tax would be a sensible way to prod business interests in the right direction.
And being honest about the cost of wars by levying a specific war funding tax would help change attitudes about whipping out the military option every time there is a problem.
T Lehman: What do your numbers represent? They add up to 4.9 million. US daily use of oil is about 20 million barrels. Worldwide daily use is about 85 million barrels. I can’t get your numbers to reconcile to either.
Well, diverting about 60% of the national security budget to replacing fossil fuels, etc., would do far more for our actual security than what the $$ are being wasted on now.