Lance Mannion: What we need are cars that run on air

The President wants us to reduce our consumption of foreign oil by a third over the next ten years. Reuters doubts this’ll happen.

Previous presidents have made similar promises on energy imports that they failed to meet.

Reuters doesn’t tell us which previous Presidents promised this or how they tried and failed to keep their promises. The best way to do it is to reduce our consumption of all oil. There’s no mention that under two previous Presidents, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, we actually managed to cut back on the amount of oil we guzzled.

We were forced into it by OPEC but we did it. We drove less. We turned down our thermostats. We insulated our homes. We started buying Japanese and German cars and that got American car companies to start building cars that got better mileage. We were doing such a good job of conserving that the price of oil began to plunge, which turned out to be a bad thing, because another President came along who, noting that oil was cheap again, said, “Conservation means being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter,” and gave us permission to go back to guzzling oil to our hearts’ content.

Reuter doesn’t report this.

That President, Ronald Reagan, also thought it was a good idea to save the American auto industry, which was still struggling to make cars as fuel-efficient as the Japanese, by making it possible for Detroit to sell us gussied up pick-up trucks at bargain prices---yep, there was a time when an SUV didn’t cost as much as your parents’ paid for their house--- and suddenly we were on the road again, barreling down the highway at 10 miles per gallon.

Reuters doesn’t report that either.

Anybody know what the ratio of Sububans to Priuses out there?

And Reuters doesn’t report that the last American President’s big idea on how to reduce our consumption of foreign oil was to try to get a large reserve of it reclassified as domestic.

All that oil under Iraq was supposed to become ours.

You probably noticed I skipped over Bill Clinton.

Don’t fret. I’m backing up.

During the 90s, we started doing a lot of things that should have reduced our consumption of foreign oil. We built and drove more fuel-efficient cars---although they were hard to see over all the SUVs. We bought more energy-efficient appliances. We installed insulation and windows that held the heat in in the winter and held it out in the summer. We made strides in the use of alternative sources of energy. Ok, more like baby steps. And we bought Al Gore's book.

It hardly made a dent, because he’s something else Reuters didn’t report. The reason we consume so much oil, foreign and domestic, is that our economy and our way of life are based upon cheap gas and cheap oil.

During the 90s the trend that began when the first Model T’s rolled off the assembly line continued and intensified. Thanks to cars and the cheap gas that powered them Americans could spread out. We no longer had to live on top of each other in cramped little apartments in cities or shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors in tiny houses in little towns. We could take advantage of all the open spaces the United States contains from sea to shining sea. And thanks to cheap oil (and coal and a lot of government-built dams) we could build ourselves little castles and live in them warm and snug all winter long with the lights burning all night and first the radios and then the televisions keeping us company all day. During the 90s we spread out even farther, we built our castles even bigger. We put more cars on the road. And along with our TVs we were now leaving on our computers and video game consoles 24/7.

This is the way we live now. It’s the way we’ve lived for almost a century now. It’s the way we want to continue to live. And we can only to continue to live this way if we can continue to, as Mike the Mad Biologist says, “light things on fire.”

The day when cars run on air and our houses heat, cool, and illuminate themselves entirely by drawing from the earth, sun, and wind is a long way off, as is the day when we’re all riding bikes and taking natural gas powered busses to work.

Reuters didn’t report it and President Obama didn’t say it, because no American President wants to be the one to say it, that, absent the invention of a miracle power source that’s renewable, safe, cheap, and produced in a way that doesn’t require intrusions into anyone’s backyard, the surest way to not just cut back on but eliminate our consumption of foreign oil is to change the way we live so we don’t have continue to light as many things on fire.

This will require a lot more than replacing incandescent light bulbs and remembering to take reusable bags to the grocery store.

It means smaller houses on littler patches of ground closer to where we work and fewer cars traveling fewer miles.

Here’s the thing.

Even if Americans could be persuaded to give up our current suburban idyll en masse, most of us can’t do it or don’t dare.

People can’t sell their houses because they’re not worth what they paid for them or won’t make them as much money on the sale as they’ll need to move. Even if they can sell their houses at something better than a dead loss, where do they move to? Closer to her job or his? Closer to his family or hers? Whichever job they choose, what’s to say it’s going to be there in a few years or even one? What’s the sense in moving closer to the office or the factory with the odds being good that the company’s going to go belly up or move its operations overseas before you have to replace the hot water heater or buy a new energy-saving dishwasher?

What are the odds we’re going to get a President with the guts to not only tell the American people, “It’s time to move out of the McMansion in the country to a bungalow on the outskirts of the city” but tell corporations, “No more making obscene profits by screwing your employees every which way and then moving your operations when you can’t make more money by screwing them some more”?

Radically changing the way we live and make money is a moral challenge, as well as a political one, and persuading us to make those changes ought to be the job of priests and preachers as well as politicians. But over the last forty years the priests and the preachers have been obsessed with sex and working hard to persuade us to a.) have less of it while b.) making more babies. A. of course doesn’t address the problem except by giving us less reason to go out on the weekends. B. makes it worse because more babies means, eventually, more cars and more McMansions and more lighting things on fire.

I’m not going to get into how much oil we need to burn to feed ourselves, but more babies means more mouths to feed by lighting things on fire to grow, process, and deliver their food.

We’re not likely to get a President who will tell people to have fewer babies either.

Reuters, being afflicted with the same myopia and parochialism that warps all reporting from Washington these days, can’t help itself from reporting this as a purely political story. And since all political stories from Washington have to be either about Republicans winning or Democrats losing, the story works its way from being ostensibly about energy to being about President Obama’s poll numbers. But there wasn’t any real chance that Reuters was going to report the main problem this President has to deal with and all those unnamed Presidents had to deal with when trying to find ways to reduce our consumption of foreign oil.

Us.

We’re just not ready to change the way we live.

Even if we could.

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Over time things might change. There are signs that they already are. People have been moving back into cities. Small towns have been reviving. Local governments are getting smarter about planning and zoning. The governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida might hate trains, but there are a lot of people in their states who think they’re nuts and governors in other states happy to take the money they’ve rejected.

And the technology for alternative, renewable forms of energy keeps improving, making them more practical and affordable. Of course, if they get practical and affordable enough we won’t need to change the way we live all that much, unless it’s for the better. Nobody’s going to mind making fewer trips to the gas station.

But a revolution in the way we live or in our energy technology or both will take time. At the moment we have to deal with two big problems. One is that lighting things on fire is very, very, very bad for the planet. But that’s too big an issue for me to deal with here. The other is that it’s just costing us too much to heat and cool our homes and fill our gas tanks. As I wrote last week, the price of gas is relative. It’s not whether it costs more or less, it’s whether we can afford it whatever it costs. Since few of us are about to suddenly start making a lot more money, we need it to cost a lot less.

A good and quick way to do that is for us to reduce the demand for oil ASAP.

Among other things, the President has two ways of doing this in mind that aren’t exactly popular. Drilling for more natural gas and building more nuclear power plants.

People don’t like the first because it’s caused them to open their faucets and have jets of flame shoot out of them.

People have never been comfortable living in the shadow of a nuclear power plant and what’s happened in Japan isn’t reassuring. In fact, it’s moving people to demand that existing plants be taken offline.

Mike the Mad Biologist argues that not only is this impractical, it’s dangerous, even deadly.

See his posts here and here.