Our Visceral (Energy) Policy

Please help me live by writing to your Representative about nuclear power. Photo by Norbert RosingIn "No Energy". the Atlantic's Joshua Green writes about the history of environmental disasters - in particular oil spills - spurring on environmental legislation.  There was the landmark 1969 spill off Santa Barbara which gave birth to Earth Day and the National Environmental Protection Act, thereby putting a moratorium on offshore drilling.  And the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill catalyzed the 1990 Clean Air Act, eight years in the making.  Seems pretty straight-forward.

So why does the most recent Gulf explosion have most politicians defending offshore drilling?  Green suggests that the Democrats have put all their eggs in one basket with the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Climate Bill, viewed as a final Hail Mary attempt to regulate carbon emissions during this session of Congress.  The bill is a two-headed monster of a compromise, pushing for nuclear energy and offshore drilling investments while simultaneously starting implementation of a cap-and-trade scheme for electrical utilities and gradually expanding to other industries.  The rush to defend offshore drilling is par for the course for soulless Republicans and political maneuvering for sneaky Democrats.  God (or BP) clearly doesn't care.

Green concludes:

Perversely, the Gulf disaster has had the short-term effect of weakening the already tepid support for a Senate climate bill. That may change as Louisiana's coastline is subsumed by oil. Washington eventually responds to public outrage. (Just ask Goldman Sachs.) But for now, energy can join the long list of issues on which Washington leadership has vanished.   

I don't think leadership has vanished.  There is just an order of priorities that democratically elected leaders naturally follow, and that's whatever order gets them elected.  This is why "defending marriage" becomes more important than defending the country.  

One of the most important issues any country faces, and one of the least sexy, is energy policy.  Energy policy can change in a democracy, but it usually requires a huge natural disaster with dead seahorses and stuff, a terrorist attack, a panic film which captures the public imagination, or threat of job loss for self-serving political opportunists to rally the public into thoughtless action.  Hence Green's usual corollaries to any action on energy policy.  

Oil spills happen, both naturally and otherwise.  We know this, and we have known this for many years.  But we still need to drive our cars to work, and make plastic, and heat our homes.  No one is willing to give that up, no matter how many dead manatees make it onto the news.  And so any reactionary measures are likely to cause more harm than good.  The best we can do is minimize oil spills by imposing rigorous standards of procedure, multiple layers of oversight, and trying to reduce overall consumption of oil as much as possible.  

We've known Middle Eastern oil sucks since 1973, and the move towards more offshore drilling represents almost forty years of characteristically slow democratic process on this front.  Recently, we realized that not only does Middle Eastern oil suck, but oil actually sucks in and of itself.

Here's what we have to gain from getting out of oil (Middle Eastern or otherwise): (1) no more dependence on decadent dictatorships - we can't really go around preaching peace and freedom when we're forced to publicly make out with crime lords, opium barons, and people who consider themselves living gods; (2) significantly reduced greenhouse gas pollution; (3) we can stop getting ripped off by OPEC; (4) we can avoid coming tensions with Russia, Canada, and Greenland over access to Arctic oil deposits; (5) the exorbitant prices our citizens pay to meet their daily energy needs will no longer line the pockets of speculators, currency manipulators, and day-traders; (6) we will have incentives to develop new energy technologies, which we can then market to the rest of the world.

Here's what we have to lose from getting out of oil: (1) a large fraction of our corporate empire; (2) dead baby seals.

How to continue meeting our energy needs without oil is a difficult problem, and the solution is a widespread and gradual switch to nuclear power in as many areas as current technologies allow, with investments in other renewable energy forms as they pertain to various locations (for example, thermal energy for the ring of fire, solar power in the southwest, hydroelectric power for the Mississippi, and wind farms up and down the East Coast).  Such a switch could provide jobs and incentives for science and technology training, both of which would have positive residual effects.  We should put such a system in place in as minimally-invasive a way as possible: encourage the free market to take up the mantle, pass the torch from federal to state and local governments.    

Politicians and citizens who are afraid of nuclear power point to the dangers of meltdowns and terrorism.  However, these dangers are misguided and overblown.  Nuclear power safety technologies today are marked improvements on those from the Twilight Zone, bomb-shelter building days.  Domestically located nuclear reactors are much safer than oil fields situated in the heartland of Islamofacism.  And having a domestic energy economy insulates us from the blowback resulting from our current addiction to Middle Eastern oil and corresponding political meddling in other countries's affairs.  

Making such a switch to a nuclear base politically palatable should be easy, but in a democracy, a necessary ingredient is good PR.  It's up to the American Media to make oil-drenched baby seals more inspiring than turbaned radicals with AK-47s.