Howard Beale-like thinking about energy from the Washington Post op-ed page

I don't agree with the headline of this graphic. Suburbanites aren't evil, but there is no question that the suburban development paradigm uses energy in a manner that is wasteful and likely not sustainable.

If you ever saw the film "Network," the television anchor "Howard Beale" is fed up, exhorting people to change ("I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore...") but then, he's gotten to so to speak by the people with money, and he changes his tune, to go along...

Sebastian Mallaby's op-ed piece "What 'Energy Security' Really Means," in today's Post reminds me a lot of Howard Beale post-conversion. He takes the line of Daniel Yergin, consultant to industry and government, and author of many books on energy issues that the best way to be secure is to recognize our interdependence. I guess if everyone is more connected and at risk then somehow we are all safer.

As far as access to cheap oil is concerned, the world today is a different place but people don't want to believe it. "61 Pontiac" by Robert Bechtle, 1968-69.

I don't know about you, but when I think about all the people--soldiers, not just from the U.S. and Iraqi citizens, and I exclaim, "wow, you're dying so people can drive, for the most part by themselves, in cars, on the streets and freeways of the United States." I still feel guilty about it, even though for the most part I use transit, walk, or ride a bicycle (soon I'll be getting a vehicle for work and then I suppose I will be part of the problem).

But Mr. Mallaby, just like Daniel Yergin, isn't asking questions about how the United States uses energy, and for what. The fact that the U.S. consumes 25% of the world's oil, uses 65% of it for driving, for use by 6% of the world's population, doesn't seem to register.

Even if you don't believe in the peak oil thesis, the reality is that oil production is what it is, and that daily production (what economists call "supply") isn't much higher than current worldwide demand. And, as China (and eventually India) demands more of its "fair share" of the world's oil use, current development paradigms may well come crashing to a halt.

Interdependence is dependent on increased availability of precious energy resources. Hydrogen, ethanol and all the rest of the proposed technology solutions that I collectively call "the next generation asphalt nation" (apologies to Jane Holtz Kay, author of the book Asphalt Nation) aren't as efficient energy sources as gasoline. So despite the hype, things are likely to get pretty hairy, regardless of calls for reason on the world's newspapers opinion pages.

Did you see this article, "Capitalist Roaders," in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, about the development of "car culture" in China?
Nick Waplington for The New York Times. State subsidies keep the price of gas down, currently just above $2 a gallon. Meanwhile, state-run Sinopec will soon be teaming up with McDonald's to build drive-through restaurants at filling stations.

From the article:

By 2000, enough regulations had been removed, and enough people were making money, that car ownership became a reality for many Chinese for the first time. Li Anding, born in 1949, the year the Communists came to power, said he was still astonished at the change: "When I started writing about cars, I never expected to see private cars in China in my generation, much less some of the world's fanciest cars, being driven every day."

As the men around the table listened to Li's history and added to it, there was a palpable sense of pride. This wasn't simply progress on the level of a convenience — analogous, say, to your neighborhood moving from dial-up to high-speed Internet. To them it was China finally entering the world stage and participating fully in human progress. It had the additional meaning of something long denied that could finally be acquired, like a wrong being rectified. Over and over again, the group described car ownership with a term I would never have thought to use:

"Once China opened up and Chinese people could see the other side of the world and know how people lived there, you could no longer limit the right to buy cars." "This right is something that has been ours all along." "Driving is our right."

My friend Rachel MacCleery (some of you may remember her as the Ward 6 Transportation Planner), now Executive Director of the China Planning & Development Institute, has quite a job ahead of her...

Index Keywords: energy