Controlling our Own Energy Production & Consumption: Why We All Must Do Something

Exerpt from The End of Oil, by Paul Roberts. Page 302-304

Not only has the Bush administration simply refused to advance a substantive climate policy, or a serious alternative to the Kyoto treaty, but it is actively working to keep the idea of a climate policy out of the public view. In the summer of 2003, under orders from White House staff, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deleted most references to climate change from a long-awaited report on the state of the global environment. According to a story in the New York Times, the deleted sections included the EPA's conclusions about the role that human activity is playing in climate change, as drawn from a 2001 report by the National Research Council that the White House itself had requested and "which President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year."

Administration officials also cut any mention of a 1999 study showing how global temperatures had risen more sharply between 1990 and 2000 than at any time in the previous thousand years. "In its place," according to the Times, "administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion." Some EPA officials were so appalled by the revisions that they sent out a memo saying the revised report "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change." As one climate policy analyst told the Times, "this is like the White House directing the secretary of labor to alter unemployment data to paint a rosy economic picture."

...It is tempting, in light of such behavior, to blame all American energy problems on the current administration, with its links to the oil industry and its somewhat misplaced faith in an oil-driven energy economy. The more discouraging reality, however, is that neather Bush nor any of his predecessors could even think about advancing so risky and shortsighted an energy policy if American voters had any objections -- and by and large, they do not. Americans are, in general, the least energy-conscious people on the planet. We are not only profoundly ignorant about what energy is, and the critical role it has played and continues to play in economics and politics, but most of us simply don't care about energy.

...Thus it is that we Americans (and most of our media) are largely untroubled by Secretary Rumsfeld's absurd claim that the Iraqi war was "not about oil." We're not upset that the White House has steadily refused to disclose the names of the energy companies that helped write U.S. energy policy. We don't think it odd that the White House Energy Task Force was studying maps of Iraqi oil fields and pipelines as early as March 2000 -- more than eighteen months before the September 11 attacks -- or that the vice prisident's former oil company, Halliburton, won a multibillion-dollar U.S. government contract to repair Iraqi oil fields even before the second Iraqi war was under way. Or [sic] that one of the first actions by U.S. military forces in Iraq was to establish a tight security perimeter around the Iraqi Oil Ministry in downtown Baghdad, while hospitals, schools, utilities, and other critical elements in the infrastructure were left to be burned and looted. We refuse to be troubled by facts like these because even to look closely at them might force us to see them as extensions of an out-of-control energy system that begins at home, in our own cars and houses.

Exactly when world oil production will peak is a matter of debate. I believe one day we will look back on the present and see that right now is when we started down the slope of declining production. If this is true we can expect to see rising prices, shortages, brown outs and rolling blackouts occur with increasing frequency. We will see increasing unrest and more political and military confrontations in oil producing regions. We will see increasing pressure on our environment as we are forced to rely more heavily on "dirty" fuels such as coal.

Neither our politicians nor many of our citizens seem to be aware of these issues, or if they are, few of them care. That leaves you and me.

There is much we can do ourselves on a personal level through conservation and by developing our own alternative energy resources. But time is running out. We can't afford to be complacent anymore. We can't afford to leave it up to our politicians. We all must do something to take charge of our own energy production and consumption.

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit