Politics and immediate gratification

Commenting on last night's election and the prospect of fading Democratic fortunes, as well as the Republicans' own failure to cement an enduring majority five years ago, the New York Times suggests that an FDR New Deal-kind of realignment in the American political landscape is unlikely in the 21st century:

On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment also reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night. It was probably never very realistic for modern political thinkers of either party to dream of a 50-year reign. This century’s tectonic realignment is more likely to last 50 months or maybe 50 weeks, depending on how long it takes voters to seek out the latest offer or the newest best deal.

So given the magnitude and complexity of some of our problems--climate change, peak oil, and the growth of entitlement spending, particularly for healthcare--how does Washington develop enduring solutions when political power shifts so quickly?

ALSO IN THE TIMES TODAY, David Brooks draws an interesting analogy in a conversation with Gail Collins about what Democrats should do next given Scott Brown's victory last night:

Let’s say we had a year-long debate in the run-up to the Iraq war. Let’s say at the end of that debate, 33 percent of Americans thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq, 46 percent thought it was a bad idea and the rest weren’t sure. Then let’s say that there were a bunch of elections in places like New Jersey and Virginia in the middle of this debate and George Bush’s party lost them all badly. Let’s say at the end of this debate there was a senate race in Wyoming in which a Democratic candidate made preventing the war a central plank in his campaign. Let’s say Bush went out to Wyoming and told voters they had to support the Republican to save the Iraq invasion. And let’s say the Democrat still went on to win that Wyoming Senate seat by more than 5 percentage points.

Would you have advised George Bush under these circumstances to go ahead and invade Iraq? Would you have advised him to call a special lame duck session of Congress to push through a war resolution before the new senator could be seated? Would you have advised him to invent some legislative trick so he could still have his invasion? Or would you have said, George, I know you really want to invade Iraq. I know you think an invasion will do a lot of good for the world. But the American people are pretty clear about this issue. Maybe you should show a little doubt. Maybe you ought to listen and give this whole thing a second look.

FOR THE OPPOSITE POINT OF VIEW, namely that Democrats should move forward with getting healthcare reform legislation to President Obama's desk, Ezra Klein has a number of good posts today here, here, here, here, and here.

Shades of squeezes to come

You don't have to know too much about Russian history to see how two new gas pipelines will give Russia leverage over their Eastern European neighbors... or wonder if they'll use it. In the coming era of increasing resource scarcity, we're bound to see more of that around the world. Maybe the new shale technology that's expected to increase natural gas reserves will blunt the impact, however.

Currently, Russian gas has to be piped through Eastern Europe to reach Western Europe. If Russia shuts off the gas to pressure a neighbor in the east, it is felt in the more powerful, wealthier countries to the west, where it touches off loud protests.

The new Nord Stream pipeline will change that equation. By traveling more than 750 miles underwater, from Vyborg, Russia, to Greifswald, Germany, bypassing the former Soviet and satellite states, it will give Russia a separate supply line to the west.

As a result, many security experts and Eastern European officials say, Russia will be more likely to play pipeline politics with its neighbors.

“Yesterday tanks, today oil,” said Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, a former head of Poland’s security service....

Such tactics are hardly without precedent. A Swedish Defense Ministry-affiliated research organization has identified 55 politically linked disruptions in the energy supply of Eastern Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Until now, Russia’s use of natural gas as a foreign policy tool has been limited to short embargoes, at least in part, analysts say, because it is so blunt a club.

Last January, for example, Russia shut down a pipeline that crossed Ukraine, ostensibly over a dispute with Ukraine on pricing and tariff fees.

The shutoff left hundreds of thousands of homes in southeastern Europe without heat and shuttered hundreds of factories for three weeks.

Peak oil is coming...

A new study finds that the difference between the most conservative and the most optimistic predictions as to when worldwide oil production will begin to decline is only 15-20 years... and that doesn't give us much time to prepare.

... Discoveries of new oil fields are in decline. Even the "giant" Tiber field recently found by BP in the Gulf of Mexico "will only serve to delay peak oil by a matter of days", he says.

"Of the 70,000 oil fields on Earth, just 100 giant fields account for 50 per cent of the oil we use," says Sorrell. "Most of these giant fields are quite old and past their peak of production, and we're not going to find many new ones."

Michael Pollan needs your help

Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food (my related posts here and here), is starting a new project to document the common sense food wisdom of regular people:

“Eat your colors,” an Australian reader’s grandmother used to tell her; now we hear the same advice from nutritionists, citing the value of including as many different phytochemicals in the diet as possible....

I want to create a compendium of such rules, across cultures and also time. Some of the rules readers have sent me so far are specifically about navigating the modern food landscape: “It’s not food if it comes to you through the window of a car.” “Don’t eat at any restaurant of which there is more than just one.” “A snack is not the same thing as a treat.” “If a bug won’t eat it, why would you?” and so on.

Will you send me a food rule you try to live by? Something perhaps passed down by your parents or grandparents? Or something you’ve come up with to tell your children – or yourself?

When I was a kid, my mother made her own bread & butter pickles (with all that mustard seed in the bottom of the jar, yum!), canned peaches and other fruit, and baked so much fresh bread that we stopped eating it. My dad made homemade ice cream in a hand-cranked ice cream maker. Once my parents even used an antique butter churn to make our own butter (with cream from the unhomogenized whole milk that we got straight from a dairy farm).

It was good stuff, and I've often thought that it's sad that so few people do these things anymore, especially the pickling and canning. Pollan's project to collect our food lore seems right on to me.

You can post your contributions as comments here.

WRITING THIS POST I was reminded of an article I read in the August 2005 issue of Harper's. It looked at the largely organic and highly sustainable methods that Cuba's small farmers and gardeners have had to improvise in response to their economic isolation. From "The Cuba diet: What will you be eating when the revolution comes?":

In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth. They import some of their food from abroad—a certain amount of rice from Vietnam, even some apples and beef and such from the United States. But mostly they grow their own, and with less ecological disruption than in most places. In recent years organic farmers have visited the island in increasing numbers and celebrated its accomplishment. As early as 1999 the Swedish parliament awarded the Organic Farming Group its Right Livelihood Award, often styled the “alternative Nobel,” and Peter Rosset, the former executive director of the American advocacy group Food First, heralded the “potentially enormous implications” of Cuba's new agricultural system.

The island's success may not carry any larger lesson. Cuban agriculture isn't economically competitive with the industrial farming exemplified by a massive food producer across the Caribbean, mostly because it is highly labor-intensive....

There's always at least the possibility, however, that larger sections of the world might be in for “Special Periods” of their own. Climate change, or the end of cheap oil, or the depletion of irrigation water, or the chaos of really widespread terrorism, or some other malign force might begin to make us pay more attention to the absolute bottom-line question of how we get our dinner (a question that only a very few people, for a very short period of time, have ever been able to ignore). No one's predicting a collapse like the one Cuba endured—probably no modern economy has ever undergone such a shock. But if things got gradually harder? After all, our planet is an island, too. It's somehow useful to know that someone has already run the experiment.

The great disruption

There's a must-read op-ed from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today titled "The Inflection is Near?" He warns that we have not only reached the limits of our financial system but are also facing the limits of what the earth can handle:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

...

One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment — when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once — “The Great Disruption.”

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible.

(Now might be a good time to watch "The Story of Stuff," a video that packs an amazing amount of information into 20 easy-to-understand minutes. Highly recommended.)

I'M REMINDED A BIT of an article I read last year in NewScientist. Rather than addressing the issue of us pushing up against the limits of what is possible, "Are We Doomed?" examined the ways that an increasingy networked and interdependent world actually becomes less stable and prone to collapse over time.

Reading it, I remembered being a child and first becoming aware of the environmental movement in the 1970s. Once while thinking about pesticides or nuclear waste or some other manmade threat to our natural world I had the intuition that we're in a race with ourselves: can our technology develop fast enough to keep us one step ahead of the problems that we've created with earlier technological achievements?

I'm not one to believe that there is always a technical or scientific solution to every problem. Some problems are human in nature. Satisfying some of our needs is, in fact, grounded in production. Can we grow enough food? Can we supply fresh water? But others are philosophical. Can we learn to be happy with what we have rather than continually requiring new things and new stimulation?

In "Are We Doomed?" Debora MacKenzie notes that as a society becomes increasingly complex, it inevitably faces the problem of diminishing returns:

"For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies....

There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.

As complexity has increased, hierarchical systems have given way to networked systems:

"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point.

And this explains some of the very financial shocks that we're now experiencing:

As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely understood."

The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials, information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other."

Fire is a natural part of a forest's lifecycle. By interrupting that cycle in places like the American West, we've set the stage for increasingly intense firestorms by allowing dead material to build up. Just as forest managers are now trying to adopt strategies more tolerant of small blazes, we may need to accept small collapses as being integral to human societies as well:

"This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse.

ANOTHER ARTICLE in the same NewScientist issue, "Will a Pandemic Bring Down Civilisation?" warned that we're more vulnerable to pandemic than we have been in the past. Because our societies are more complex and integrated now, things are likely to break down rather quickly if certain key individuals become sick:

Especially vital are "hubs" - the people whose actions link all the rest. Take truck drivers. When a strike blocked petrol deliveries from the UK's oil refineries for 10 days in 2000, nearly a third of motorists ran out of fuel, some train and bus services were cancelled, shops began to run out of food, hospitals were reduced to running minimal services, hazardous waste piled up, and bodies went unburied. Afterwards, a study by Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, predicted huge economic losses and a rapid deterioration in living conditions if all road haulage in the UK shut down for just a week.

What would happen in a pandemic when many truckers are sick, dead or too scared to work? Even if a pandemic is relatively mild, many might have to stay home to care for sick family or look after children whose schools are closed. Even a small impact on road haulage would quickly have severe knock-on effects.

One reason is just-in-time delivery. Over the past few decades, people who use or sell commodities from coal to aspirin have stopped keeping large stocks, because to do so is expensive. They rely instead on frequent small deliveries.

Cities typically have only three days' worth of food, and the old saying about civilisations being just three or four meals away from anarchy is taken seriously by security agencies such as MI5 in the UK.

Now extend the truck driver scenario to other critical areas of our civilization: medical care, electricity generation, communications. If hospitals run low on supplies, people will grow sicker. As more people become sick, it becomes more likely that power plants will shut down, either from being short-staffed or starved for coal (which arrives constantly by train). When the power goes off, television and radio go off the air. The knock-on effects are enormous.

We are, without a doubt, living in interesting times. Are we at a turning point? With any luck, yes.

Why cows and bluefin tuna are different

From Ezra Klein.

I feel like I made a "Chait choice" when I bought my Mazda RX-8 in 2006. I had a feeling it would be my last chance to own and drive a sporty car before the price of gas became prohibitively expensive, and the trend is, I think, proving me right.

National Clean Energy Summit Wrap-up

Whew! Today was the full day session of the first annual National Clean Energy Summit here in Las Vegas, and it was a long one. T. Boone Pickens opened the day at 9am, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrapped it up with remarks at 5pm.

I'll write more tomorrow and share some of the details of today's presentations, but here are some initial thoughts.

My sense is that transitioning from oil and other fossil fuels to new, renewable energy sources will be the challenge of this generation.

For the past century, we've had the luxury of investing our wealth in, well, luxuries. Why? Because energy has been cheap.

Now that peak oil has or is about to arrive, we'll have to instead invest in the research and development of clean energy alternatives and the electrical transmission and other infrastructure required to get energy from where it's available (the Southwest has abundant sunshine, the Midwest plenty of wind) to where it's needed (the coasts).

If we fail to do this, we'll be spending whatever is left of our wealth on true necessities... and the things that now seem like necessities will become tomorrow's luxuries.

AS FOR WHAT YOU CAN DO: my takeway from yesterday and today is that getting Congress to renew investment tax credits for solar and other renewables is critical to making progress. Every day when there's uncertainty in this industry increases the risks of climate change and reduces our flexibility in an unstable world.

More details from me tomorrow; here are stories from the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Another argument against offshore drilling

From Slate.com:

The bigger danger from the push for drilling—or more exactly, the arguments used on its behalf—may be how it affects our own behavior. If we pretend that offshore drilling is a fail-safe means of lowering oil prices (or even a likely means), we may hold on to rosy and unreasonable expectations for future gas prices. (In this respect, the Lantern thinks Obama has been more honest than McCain.) That will in turn change the calculations we make when it comes to long-term decisions like whether to shell out extra cash for a more fuel-efficient car or a home with access to mass transit. As long as we're counting on gas prices to go down, those green lifestyle choices won't seem as attractive. We may well be surprised once again that we're paying so much at the pump, without having done anything about it.

Good timing on that Walmart post :-)

Yesterday's post on Walmart and the downside of long supply chains was well-timed as the New York Times has an article today about the impact of high fuel prices on globalization. Specifically, some U.S. businesses are beginning to build components closer to home to avoid paying increasingly expensive shipping costs.

"Made in America" might be posed for a rebound...

The Walmart Strain

Watching this animation of the spread of Walmart across America, I was reminded of The Andromeda Strain. :-)

But Walmart is serious business.

There are the usual complaints about Walmart's business practices and its impact on communities.

My first hand experience: when I was a kid in the 70's, my small hometown in rural Kansas had every kind of store you could imagine. Downtown is boarded up now. People shop at Walmart and similar big box stores. And that story has been repeated thousands of times across America.

Wake Up Walmart and Walmart Watch address those concerns.

Politically, Walmart is working to prevent an Obama presidency based on the concern that his election would increase the likelihood of the unionization of their nearly 1.5 million U.S. employees.

Perhaps most worrisome of all is the risk that James Kunstler raised in The Long Emergency: namely, that the very efficiency that Walmart has brought to the "supply chain" makes us our society more vulnerable to disruption.

In other words, American communities once depended on a collection of local businesses and other sources for the essentials of life. Some of our food and other necessities were produced locally. What wasn't we got from various small stores who each had a variety of suppliers. This sort of system is more resilient because no single link in the chain is going to devastate the community.

But with the Walmartization of our economy, more and more of our necessities come from far away, and we depend increasingly on businesses (like Walmart) who have long, relatively simple supply chains. A huge percentage of Walmart's products, for example, come from China. A break in that supply chain--due to war, escalating fuel costs, epidemic, or other crisis--has a disproportionately huge impact to American citizens.

In other words, there's no where else to turn.

More from Kunstler:

Wal-Mart and its imitators will not survive the oil-market disruptions to come. Not even for a little while. Wal-Mart will not survive when its merchandise supply chains to Asia are interrupted by military contests over oil or internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" will not be able to operate in a post-cheap-oil economy.

It will only take mild-to-moderate disruptions in the supply and price of gas to put Wal-Mart and all operations like it out of business. And it will happen. As that occurs, America will have to make other arrangements for the distribution and sale of ordinary products. It will have to be reorganized at the regional and the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances at multiple increments and probably by multiple modes of transport. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy, and fewer choices of things. We are not going to rebuild the cheap-oil manufacturing facilities of the 20th century.

We will have to recreate the lost infrastructures of local and regional commerce, and it will have to be multilayered. These were the people who Wal-Mart systematically put out of business over the past thirty years. The wholesalers, the jobbers, the small-retailers. They were economic participants in their communities; they made decisions that had to take the needs of their communities into account. They were employers who employed their neighbors. They were a substantial part of the middle class of every community in America and all of them together played civic roles in our communities as the caretakers of institutions—the people who sat on the library boards, and the hospital boards, and bought the balls and bats and uniforms for the little-league teams. We got rid of them in order to save nine bucks on a hair dryer. We threw away uncountable millions of dollars worth of civic amenity in order to shop at the Big Box. That was some bargain.

Walmart... just say NO.

Energy flow in the U.S.

Where does our energy come from? Where does it go?

This graph illustrates the flow from nuclear, natural gas, coal, petroleum, and other energy sources to where it gets used, namely residential, commercial, and industrial consumers and transporation.

The point of this post from the Huffington Post is that petroleum is mostly used for transportation in the U.S., and the author suggests we just need to find an alternative energy source for getting from point A to point B.

Notice also how much energy is lost... almost 60%. Where does it go? A lot of it is lost as electricity flows from power plants to electrical outlets, a lot is lost as heat (think of your car engine).

We can't drill our way out of this mess

But we can sure dig ourselves into a deeper hole.

Bush and McCain are eager to hand over the U.S. continental shelf to oil companies to allow for offshore drilling.

Problems:

• The oil companies have already leased 68,000,000 acres of federal lands for oil production but aren't using them as of yet. So why not give them a "use it or lose it" notice on those leases before handing them sensitive offshore areas or the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge?
• The best estimates I've seen suggest that drilling in these additional areas would only lower the price of a barrel of oil by a buck or two. That's just pennies off the price of a galon of gas.
• Production is a decade off... that's not going to help us in our short term squeeze and only puts off the inevitable: moving to sustainable energy sources like solar and wind. And we may need to rely more on nuclear as a bridge to get us there. It's also ignoring the best solution: energy efficiency which we can start putting into place today.

And one thing to remember when the issue of oil company profits comes up: a large portion of the land where U.S. oil comes from is owned by the federal government. In other words, it's ours, the American people's. The oil companies are just leasing it from us, and for ridiculously low amounts of money.

The nuclear option

No, not talking about Congress and judicial appointments. :-)

Given that Yucca Mountain is in Nevada, what to do with nuclear waste is a particularly important issue here.

And since our supplies of fossil fuels are limited, development of alternative energy sources is critical. So what role will nuclear play?

After the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents, I'd been opposed to nuclear power plants for quite awhile. Global warming re-framed the problem for me. As one article I read pointed out, the problem of managing a relatively small amount of nuclear waste is a problem orders of magnitude more manageable than the one of putting billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

So if the technology is right, I'm open to re-invigorating America's nuclear power industry. My preference, though, would be that nuclear energy only serve as a bridge as we transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to one based on truly sustainable energy sources like wind and solar.

John Scire, a professor at the University of Reno, recently published a short article about the re-processing of spent nuclear fuel to significantly reduce the amount of waste that has to be stored for the long term. He stated that Senator Pete Domenici supports the idea; here is the bill that I think he is referring to (S. 3215).

There's also an article from the December, 2005 issue of Scientific American on the subject; it's available as a PDF here.

Response from Jon Porter about domestic oil drilling

Here is the response I received from Representative Jon Porter regarding my opposition to domestic oil drilling in ANWR and off the coasts:

July 8, 2008

Dear Michael:

Thank you for contacting me to express your views on our clean energy future. I appreciate you taking the time to express your views on this important issue.

As you may know, Congress is currently considering a number of measures intended to reduce the price of oil and gas as well as reduce our reliance on imported energy sources. The price of energy affects every sector of the American economy and the lives of every American. And our nation’s dependence on foreign oil threatens our national and economic security. More than half of our energy needs are derived from foreign sources such as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Demand for energy in the United States is outstripping supply, and will continue to grow as our 21st century high-tech economy expands. These higher energy costs are also squeezing family budgets, undermining farms and small businesses, jeopardizing jobs and threatening the long-term health of our economy. I am committed to ensuring an adequate supply of dependable, affordable and environmentally clean energy for America’s future.

During the 110th Congress, the House of Representatives and the United States Senate passed a comprehensive energy package that included the first CAFE standard increase in 30 years. This legislation could reduce U.S. oil use by 1.1 million barrels per day by 2020, as well as act as a catalyst for the biofuels industry. Please know that I joined 313 of my colleagues in voting in favor of this important legislation.

Additionally, I have worked tirelessly as an advocate for renewable, clean, sources of energy and providing tax incentives to promote innovation in those fields. The Solar One facility in Boulder City is an example of what investment in renewable energy sources can accomplish. I was proud to have played an important role in bringing Solar One to Southern Nevada. Nevada’s Solar One is the third largest solar facility in the world and is the first large commercial solar production plant in the Silver State.

Please know that I will continue to work to ensure that we have the energy resources we need to grow our economy and improve standards of living for all Nevadans. Again, thank you for writing me. If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me in the future.

Sincerely,

Jon C. Porter

Member of Congress

Response from Harry Reid about domestic oil drilling

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responded to my recent email regarding my opposition to drilling in ANWR and off the U.S. coasts:

July 7, 2008

Thank you for contacting me about domestic oil supplies. I appreciate hearing from you.

I know that high gasoline and oil prices are hurting hard-working Americans increasing the costs of doing business for almost every industry, as well as raising prices for consumers. That is why I introduced the Consumers First Energy Act of 2008 (S.3044). Among other things, this bill would aggressively weed out oil price speculation, protect consumers from price gouging and encourage big oil companies to invest in clean alternative fuels made in America. Our overdependence on oil, especially foreign oil, is harming our national security, environment, consumer markets and our economy. A new direction is needed to move us much more quickly towards energy independence.

I noted your concerns about proposals to increase domestic drilling. Currently, there are 45.5 million acres of federal onshore lands that have been leased to oil and gas companies, yet 31 million of these acres are not producing. Additionally there are 33 million acres leased in the outer continental shelf that are also not producing. Opening up even more land to drilling would only reward big oil companies which have already amassed over $600 billion in profit since 2000 and provide little price relief to consumers.

The United States consumes roughly 25 percent of the world's oil, but only has 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. Even if oil companies were permitted to explore and drill for oil and gas on any federal land they wish, America would still be dependent on foreign oil. And OPEC, oil companies, and oil speculators would still have the power to decide what price Americans pay at the pump.

For these reasons, I believe that major investment in efficiency and the domestic production of clean renewable energy and alternative fuels is both the best solution and the inevitable solution to our dependence on oil. Unfortunately, the oil companies have only invested negligible amounts in these solutions thus far.

We should focus our attention and efforts on developing our nation's clean renewable energy resources, and improving the efficiency of our vehicles, homes and businesses. By investing in clean renewable energy and energy efficiency, we can create thousands of new jobs and keep hard-earned gas money in the pockets of Nevadans and all Americans instead of sending it overseas or lining the coffers of the oil companies.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. For more information about my work for Nevada, my role in the United States Senate Leadership, or to subscribe to regular e-mail updates on the issues that interest you, please visit my Web site at http://reid.senate.gov. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

My best wishes to you.

Sincerely,
HARRY REID
United States Senator
Nevada

The oil squeeze

The recent spike in oil prices has been a long time coming, and the mess Americans find themselves in is largely one of our own making.

We represent about 4% of the world's population but consume a quarter of the world's daily oil production. And 70% of that we use for transportation.

We've passed up opportunities for decades to improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks. Here's the story of how we got ourselves into this predicament.

Against the tide

It seems that the high price at the pump is swaying Americans' attitudes about drilling off our coasts. So rather than count on Congress to maintain its off-limits stance toward that drilling, I wrote my Senators and Representative today:

Senator Reid, Senator Ensign, Congressman Porter,

With gas prices as high as they are, it's tempting to get into a "drill anywhere and everywhere" mode to find more oil. Unfortunately this will solve neither our short term nor our long term energy problems.

I am opposed to drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and to any additional oil exploration off the U.S. coastline. I urge you to vote against any bill that would open either of these areas to drilling for oil.

I believe that the world's supply of oil that's easy to find and extract has already been used. It will be more expensive to find and pump whatever is left.

If we were to end the ban on offshore drilling, it would be decades before we'd see an impact:

A 2007 Department of Energy study found that access to coastal energy deposits would not add to domestic crude oil and natural gas production before 2030 and that the impact on prices would be “insignificant.”

So even if we moved ahead with offshore drilling, the results would be a long time coming.

Think about it: more than 20 years before offshore drilling would make a meaningful impact to U.S. supplies.

And the amount of oil likely to be found off the U.S. coastline would increase supply by only a small amount, meaning we'd see a miniscule impact to oil prices.

We could spend the next two decades trying to feed our oil addiction...

Or we could use that time to focus on the development of new energy sources, greater conservation, and the simultaneous improvement of the health of our species and our planet.

Risking our coasts and natural environment is the fool's route, the one that seemingly gets us off the hook but leaves our children in an even worse predicament.

Please vote against opening up the U.S. coastline or ANWR to drilling.

Oil: how close we are to a crisis

The June 25th issue of New Scientist includes "Final Warning," an article about the risks to the world's oil supply arising from the small number of key pipelines and shipping routes that transport petroleum from producers to consumers.

Here's an interactive graphic that accompanies the article (which, unlike the article itself, is free for anyone to access).

One interesting fact which explains why we're addicted to oil: a single barrel of the stuff contains enough energy to equal the work output of five laborers working 12-hour days for a full year.

Whoa, get me some of that stuff!

Up up up

The Los Angeles Times looks at some of the potential effects of $200/barrel oil, basing the article on trends already being seen in California and the nation as well as some recent studies.

Some of their predictions--like the shortening of supply chains and more reliance on local suppliers--sound like the unraveling of our cheap fossil fuel-oriented economy that James Kunstler describes in The Long Emergency (post here).

The Las Vegas Sun has an article today which mostly sums up my feeling about gas prices. Las Vegas depends so heavily on tourists that an era of high fuel prices will force a reset on expectations about the local economy.

Is the long emergency beginning?

I read James Kunstler's The Long Emergency in 2005, and I let several smart people I know borrow my copy. One of them commented afterwards: "The problem I have is that I can't come up with many good arguments to counter Kunstler's predictions."

This was the book that introduced me to peak oil, the notion that once we've recovered half of the world's petroleum reserves, the remainder will be increasingly difficult to recover. For the last hundred years or so, we've built our society on cheap fossil fuels. Once we've used up the easily recoverable deposits, the remainder become increasingly difficult to recover, and prices will skyrocket.

Kunstler commented on America's suburbanization as one of the most wasteful uses of tax dollars ever: by subsidizing developments that require that people drive long distances to work and shop, we've exacerbated the problems that our society will face when energy prices rise.

And rise they have. The Wall Street Journal discusses the possibility of $7/gallon gasoline in the next few years, and the New York Times reports on how higher gas prices are already affecting the desirability of life far from metropolitan centers, including the outer suburbs. And then there's the impact to the airlines...

Fasten your seat belts, it may be a bumpy ride.