“Scale Down the Human Project”?

A drive up I-95 from Washington to New Jersey confirmed what the petroleum industry tells us – high gas prices have not proven an impediment to American drivers. U.S. gasoline consumption is down only about three percent since Hurricane Katrina, and only four percent in comparison with September 2004.

A drive up I-95 from Washington to New Jersey confirmed what the petroleum industry tells us – high gas prices have not proven an impediment to American drivers. U.S. gasoline consumption is down only about three percent since Hurricane Katrina, and only four percent in comparison with September 2004.

So let’s be honest. Americans have competing values. We say we believe in conservation but don’t conserve. We say we don’t want to support Saudi Arabia and Iran with our oil purchases, but we don’t make the investment in energy infrastructure to avoid it. We want America and its coastline to look like the 19th Century, but want the material and economic benefits of the 20th. We want 21st Century energy solutions without difficult choices. But choices are all we get.

JINSA believes in alternative fuels including biofuels. JINSA believes in nuclear energy, wind and solar power. We believe in hybrid cars, hydrogen cars and mass transit. And we believe the United States must drill for American oil in Alaska’s ANWR – and build refineries outside the Gulf of Mexico, build power generating plants that do not hold the entire eastern seaboard hostage to a wire in Ohio, and build liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals to support imports from the vast fields abroad (yes, imports of anything increase our vulnerability, but the sources of LNG are widely distributed).

Not to take steps to ensure wider energy choices and lessened dependence on imported oil is to fall back on the failed bargain of “cheap” oil for “stability” in the Arab world and in South America. It is to throw in the towel on breaking the links between oil money and terrorism, and between oil money and instability in our own hemisphere.

ANWR will not solve our energy problems, but it may signal the end of our national chimera of not having to choose. ANWR should be only one step in proving that Americans understand that our standard of living now and in the future will depend on making energy available from sources less subject to the whims of dictators and nature.

There is another choice. Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over, believes energy should be seen, “in the larger context of… population pressure, resource depletion, habitat destruction. The only way to solve that ultimately is to scale down the human project… reduce the per capita rate of consumption of resources and reduce the population.” His model: Cuba. “There are a lot of lessons for the U.S. in the experience of Cuba. As dysfunctional as planned economies can be, and socialist governments can be, there was an advantage in this instance in that they were able to make decisions quickly and change their modes of agricultural production rapidly… The U.S. government is not likely to learn many lessons from Cuba… I wish it were otherwise.”

We don’t want or need economics lessons from Cuba. BRAVO to the Senate Energy Committee (including two Democrats, minus one Republican) for voting to attach the ANWR leasing provision to the Budget Bill. We hope, rather than “scaling down the human project”, the Senate has begun a realistic march toward advancing it.