Henri Reynard Speaks Out

Moving Backward Into the Dark?

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There are few things that rival backing up in the dark as a challenge to equilibrium. I rediscovered that fact this morning as I stood in my darkened bedroom and tried to get the second foot into the left pant leg of my warm up suit. Hardly awake, unbalanced and hopping backward on one foot I finally managed to get the pants to cooperate with my left foot before I made enough noise to wake my wife. It was really dark enough that I had no idea where my hopping had ended up taking me, so I stood there a minute, trying to get my bearings. Then I took a step forward and hit my nose on the closet door, I had backed into the closet. I stuck my hand out and wound up knocking down a dozen or do ties before I extricated myself and quietly exited the bedroom. Cleaning the mess up later when it was light out made more sense. How like the current energy policy that whole process was, casting around in the dark without a reference point in reality. Moving backward, off balance, with no clue where I really was until I bumped my nose on reality. Yep that about describes how the wacky unbalanced pantless wonders in our energy department are proceeding backward into the future.

Our energy policy is as bankrupt as our foreign policy and certainly as ineptly handled as any major area of our government. Broke and busted and mostly disgusted describes those of us who believed the US government back when we were trying to discover an answer to energy independence in the seventies. There were a lot of us who learned not to take the government on as a partner in a business venture. We were only importing a little over thirty percent of our oil in those days, but that was clearly strategically unsound enough to alarm some of us.

The Carter Administration had just taken office and the days of energy independence were upon us. Yep we were going to show those oil Sheiks in OPEC what American ingenuity could accomplish. We did, didn't we? Yep now we are only importing sixty percent of our oil and headed towards seventy by the end of this decade. We really showed them fellahs how to milk this big white cow didn't we? Of course we are importing four hundred billion dollars worth of goods more than we are exporting now every year. Oil is not the only strategic commodity we import, TV's are almost all made elsewhere and shipped into the country. How would we get along without TV's if there were a war with China? Or computer memory chips for that matter. Taiwan is a major source for both as is South Korea. In any war with China they would both have other problems severe enough for them to stop making a lot of stuff for us and concentrate on their internal needs.

War with China, preposterous! As preposterous as it might seem we never could have imagined fighting Iraq in the eighties, they were our ally against the evil Iranian regime. They were also a conduit for arms to the Afghanistan rebels who were fighting the Soviets, yesterdays pivot point on the axis of evil. Of course in the seventies Iran was under the Shah and firmly in our camp. Do you see how confusing following who we like and who we hate can be even in retrospect? Do you see how fast it changes? Do our tame little chicken hawks imagine that they can fight in Korea again without raising the ire of the Chinese? If they do I want some of whatever they are smoking, it is better than anything I have in these cheap cigars I buy over the Internet. It's hard to get a good cigar these days, that is one constant; as long as Castro is alive we will have a hard time getting a good cigar. Maybe we could get the hawks to find some Weapons of Mass Destruction in Cuba. Do you think they could analyze a few satellite photos and discover the weapons hidden under the cigar factory? If only we could raise Meyer Lansky from the dead maybe Cuba could rise again to the level of decadence it reached before it became an out post of the old evil empire. Would that get us a good nickel cigar? Not unless you can stand to smoke the nickel bubba.

Anyway back to the energy policies of the wise guys in Washington, who think an addiction to oil is better than an addiction to cocaine. They put coke addicts in jail and oil addicts in the White House in this country, even when the oil is a major cause of wars and economic dislocation around the world. Coke usually only cleanses the gene pool of idiots who think using a drug that raises your blood pressure that much is a good idea. Oil wars cost more lives during the last century than any other kind. In fact you can make an argument that WWI and WWII were both about control of oil producing areas more than any other factor. So why are we backing into the dark with our energy policy? Because oil generates eight tenths of a trillion dollars for the oil addicts every year doofus. Only a quarter of that comes from this country and only eighty billion dollars of that amount comes from oil produced here. That means we are not in charge of this industry that we invented any more. In fact the Oil Industry is almost certainly more in charge of our destiny than we are of its impact on us.

The Oil Industry has bought the White House several times in the last century and usually has an option on the Congress. It needs stability in the Middle East, so we fight its dirty little wars and support it with our diplomacy when we can figure out how to get our ideas ahead of our weapons. The Oil Industry dominates the world of international commerce at least as much as the banking industry did in the days before oil. Does this mean evil people are sitting in a posh room somewhere planning all of this? Hell no! If you think that's how these things happen just put your tinfoil hat on and hide in your basement so no one can change your mind! Oil is a legitimate instrument of power. It is cheaper than most alternatives will ever get, and requires little in the way of undiscovered technology to process and ship anywhere. It is a darn convenient relatively inexpensive source of energy. That is why demand for it is always growing; it makes a few billion lives better every day. It is not an enemy of progress; it is a fountain of progress in human terms as well as in economic terms. So why don't I like it? I do dummy! I just think it is time to wean the world from this milk of good mother earth's bosom and move toward replacing it before it runs out! Of course there is a certain cachet to conspiracy theories but I have never liked that bouquet much.

Most people won't work hard enough to conspire effectively, and people paranoid enough to hide their addiction to power have a hard time achieving any. The Oil Industry would love to have a renewable source of energy that it could control to replace oil. The whole energy market would change if that happened, just not overnight. Infrastructure costs money to replace. It took nearly two generations for the car to replace the horse completely in this country. In many parts of this world the only available means of transportation is still shanks mare. It will take time for the hydrogen car to replace the gasoline car, but that will happen. Or it won't and something else will replace the gasoline parts but change will happen. It will probably happen as oil gets harder and harder to find and demand for oil finally exceeds supply on a consistent basis. Change will kick into high gear when we reach the point where half of the oil that can be pumped out of the ground has been used up. That's because prices will no longer be controllable by OPEC or anyone else at that point.

So why am I castigating the unimaginative boobs in Washington about doing what comes naturally? Because the arguments over drilling in the Arctic Preserve are wasting time. In a world where anticipating problems can keep your nation's butt off the hot griddle we need better answers than oil, oil and more oil! We can be the source for the technologies that replace oil, or we can be the consumer of those technologies. The difference is where trillions of dollars flow during the process of change, into our pockets or someone else's. It is this simple in the end, if our government pursues policies that makes oil more attractive than even its natural advantages make it; then we cannot effectively pursue alternatives. If we cannot level the playing field for alternative sources of energy such as wind power, then we will wind up being the consumer when we need those technologies. We will need them, so why not adjust our policies and our economy to prepare for that day? Because the boobs in charge of things are oil addicts, that's why! Oh well its time to go for my walk and time to smell the flowers and listen to the birds. I hope I got this out of my system for today and that a little of it infected you. God bless and keep you safe in these trying times.