The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  We can and should do the same—begin to invest in solar and other renewable forms of energy in America. For far too long, we have been hooked on oil, and we continue to pay a terrible price for it economically, politically, militarily, and environmentally. We need to wean ourselves from it both for our own future survival and prosperity and because so often other countries of the world look to us as an example of what they can or should do.

  Strip Oil of Its Strategic Value

  Two hundred years ago—and for a thousand years before that—one of the most strategic substances on earth was salt. It was “strategic” because no army could travel without it—salt was necessary to preserve food in a pre-refrigeration era. Wars were fought over it, and countries that had lots of salt made out well, while land-locked countries with no salt reserves were forced to sell their natural resources in exchange for it.

  Oil is the new salt. It is now the planet’s number one strategic resource. And, as has been noted by numerous commentators since the first Gulf War in 1990–1991, if the primary export of Iraq were broccoli, we wouldn’t have given a damn that Saddam Hussein was a tin-pot tyrant.

  The unfortunate reality is that we have within and around our national boundaries about 3 percent of the world’s oil, but we consume about 24 percent of the world’s produced oil. So we buy what we don’t produce. This dependence represents a massive transfer of wealth from us to oil-producing countries.

  Countries like Saudi Arabia rake in billions from oil-dependent countries like the United States, and oil revenues fuel their economies. In 2008, for instance, Saudi oil revenues spiked to $281 billion, a quadrupling of revenues from 2002. In 2009 those fell sharply to $115 billion, still nothing to sneeze at.2 Oil revenues fund much of the fundamentalist Wahhabi Movement within Saudi Arabia, and it’s out of this movement that come the most virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric, textbooks, and television and radio programming.

  Thirty years ago the nations composing OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, were producing around 30 million barrels per day, nearly half of the world’s oil consumption. Regardless of how much we buy from OPEC nations or instead buy from Mexico, their production will continue, because oil is a fungible commodity, and it will just go to others who are no longer buying from whomever we choose to buy from. The proof of this is that today OPEC production is still around 30 million barrels—even though world oil consumption has increased and is now around 85 million barrels per day. The OPEC nations don’t adjust production to meet demand; they maintain it to control prices so they have relatively stable income.

  The only way we can change this situation is by reducing the amount of oil we use. Oil is a strategic commodity, and we need to strip it of its strategic value.

  So what do we use all that oil for that makes it a strategic resource? We certainly don’t use it to produce electricity—only 2 percent of our electricity is generated by oil because we have huge domestic supplies of coal, which produce more than half of our electricity. Pretty much nobody is producing electricity with oil except the oil-rich countries of the Middle East; even rapidly growing countries like China and India, for example, are not producing oil-fired power plants.

  Thus, moving to solar, wind, biomass, or even nuclear power to generate electricity in the United States will help tremendously with our CO2 output and all the pollution “externalities” associated with coal, but it will not make us less oil dependent or strip oil of its strategic significance.

  The simple fact is that oil accounts for roughly 95 percent of the energy used for transportation in the United States (and our military is the world’s single largest consumer of oil), and that’s what makes it strategic. If we want to strip oil of its strategic value, so it can’t be used as a weapon against us and we can use our remaining oil supplies for rational things like producing plastics and medicines, we need to shift our transportation sector away from oil and do so quickly.

  This has been the essence of T. Boone Pickens’s rant, although the eccentric oil billionaire is now a natural-gas billionaire, and he’s suggesting that we convert our truck fleet in this country from oil to natural gas, which is nearly as bad a source of greenhouse gases as is oil. He’s right that such a change would make us stronger and safer, both militarily and strategically, but he misses the climate change part of the equation (which is also increasingly becoming a strategic issue, as global climate deterioration leads to crises both at home and abroad).

  Europe, Japan, and China are moving fast to shift their transportation sectors from oil to electricity, mostly through the use of trains. Brazil did it over the past 20 years by mandating that all cars and trucks sold would have to be “flex-fuel”—capable of burning gasoline or ethanol, diesel, or biodiesel. The result is that Brazil now meets nearly half of its transportation needs with domestically grown ethanol made from sugarcane, and more than 80 percent of its cars and trucks are now flex-fuel. And the added cost to Brazilian drivers to buy a flex-fuel car instead of a gasoline- or diesel-only car? About $100.

  China is similarly moving in the direction of flex-fuel cars and is doubling every year its methanol production (mostly derived from domestically produced coal).

  Flex-fuel cars can also burn part-ethanol, part-gasoline. If, for example, we were to shift to only 20 percent of automotive fuel being gasoline (the remainder being ethanol or methanol), a single gallon of gas would go five times as far. A 40-miles-per-gallon (mpg) car would become a 200 mpg car in terms of the strategic resource of oil-derived gasoline.

  Most significantly, in the United States fully half of all automobiles are driven fewer than 20 miles in any given day. This is an easy range for an electric-only or a plug-in-hybrid car. By moving to the latter immediately—mandating them—we could shift the entire US auto fleet to consuming 50 percent or more electricity instead of gas/diesel in less than a decade, stripping oil of half its strategic importance.

  And our trade policies are really stupid on this. We have no import tariff whatsoever on oil, so there is nothing to discourage American drivers from using foreign-produced oil products to fuel their cars and trucks. But we charge an import tariff of more than $0.50 per gallon on ethanol, discouraging Americans from using the fuel and discouraging the more than 100 countries in the world where there’s enough intense sunlight and sugarcane grows well from becoming net fuel exporters.

  If we add to all of this some good scientific innovation in developing a mix of low-carbon energy resources (solar, biomass, geothermal, wind, tidal power) and can figure out a way to strip the carbon dioxide from our power plant smokestacks and turn it into a solid (calcium carbonate—which you can buy at the store under the brand name “Tums”—is a good candidate), it’s not inconceivable that by 2050 we could cut our CO2 emissions by more than 80 percent. And perhaps even decades sooner, if we begin now.3 Plus we could strip oil of its strategic value and make our nation independent of Middle Eastern dictatorships.

  So today we face a twofold crisis: First, the planet is getting warmer and it appears that our reliance on carbon-based fossil fuels is at the core of that trend. Second, the United States itself is more vulnerable to being held hostage by our reliance on imported fuel than we were in the early 1970s when the Arab oil embargo, triggered by our support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, nearly brought us to our knees.

  Make Polluters Pay

  In Denmark gasoline is taxed heavily and costs nearly $10 per gallon because the government—with the consent of its citizens, the result of a public information campaign that wasn’t drowned out because there is no domestic oil industry to speak of—realized it was picking up about $3 per gallon of the real cost of gasoline.

  Cars and trucks produce exhaust, which deteriorates buildings and statues, causes cancers and asthmas, and, when rain catches it on the way down, pollutes waterways and crops, with those poisons ending up in the food chain. With a national health-care system in addition to other public services, t
axpayers in Denmark are picking up the cost of cleaning public areas and historic sites, treating the cancers and the asthmas, cleaning waterways, and restoring farmland that’s been polluted by gas additives, like lead and MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether).

  So they decided to recover those “externalized costs” from gasoline with an increased gas tax.

  Internalizing Profits while Externalizing Costs

  Here in the United States, we allow businesses to externalize those costs and have government or consumers (in the case of cancers and asthma) pay for them, instead of incorporating that cost into the retail price of gas. The first imperative in business is to make a profit, and one of the effective ways to do so is to internalize profits while externalizing costs.

  The internalizing-profits part is pretty easy to figure out: keep as much money as possible in the company, jack up prices to the maximum the market will bear, reduce expenses like labor and raw materials as much as possible, and increase efficiencies. All of these things constitute “the way of doing business” that most Americans understand.

  But it’s only half of the equation. “Externalizing costs” is a fancy way of saying, “Pass along the costs of doing business to consumers or to the government so that they don’t affect profits.”

  Another part of this equation is the use of nature, which involves a bit of both internalizing to the company the “free” services of nature, including the presence of fossil fuels, and externalizing to nature the “costs” of pollution.

  For example, a nuclear power plant must exhaust hundreds of millions of calories of “waste heat” every day. The way the nuclear industry does this is by building nuclear plants next to rivers or lakes and cycling the cold water from “nature” through the nuke’s cooling towers. Not only do nuclear power plants not pay for this water but the heat that’s added into the rivers or lakes (and the water that escapes as steam, evaporated in huge plumes from the cooling towers) has a real set of “costs” associated with it.

  Fish die, ecosystems are altered, and less water is available downstream for uses like drinking and agriculture. The same is true of the lethal radioactive nuclear waste that is produced at every nuclear plant, which is temporarily kept on-site and eventually shipped off to government-run waste management sites.

  Not one of these costs is paid by nuclear power plant operators: instead, where they’re run for-profit (like in the USA), it’s the taxpayers, the citizens, and nature itself that pay the externalized costs.

  The result is that we’re wiping out nature by our use of its “free” resources. In 2001, with support from the United Nations, 1,360 of the world’s top scientists and experts convened to examine the consequence on nature of these externalized costs. Four years later, after exhaustive analysis of ecosystems around the world, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was explicit:4

  Nearly two-thirds of the services provided by nature to humankind are found to be in decline worldwide. In effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down natural capital assets.

  In many cases, it is literally a matter of living on borrowed time. By using up supplies of fresh ground water faster than can be recharged, for example, we are depleting assets at the expense of our children….

  Unless we acknowledge the debt and prevent it from growing, we place in jeopardy the dreams of citizens everywhere to rid the world of hunger, extreme poverty, and avoidable disease—as well as increasing the risk of sudden changes to the planet’s life-support systems from which even the wealthiest may not be shielded.

  We also move into a world in which the variety of life becomes evermore limited. The simpler, more uniform landscapes created by human activity have put thousands of species under the threat of extinction, affecting both the resilience of natural services and less tangible spiritual or cultural values.

  We need to step back a bit from our oil, transportation, and energy policies and take a holistic view of the planet’s ecology and how human actions affect it.

  Earth as an Organism

  Since the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock, first popularized in his 1979 book,5 the scientific and philosophical worlds are becoming increasingly aware that the planet is a single giant living organism, and all the living and “nonliving” parts of it are actually continually interacting in the dance we call life.

  Our Aristotelian and Cartesian worldviews—that the world is actually a giant machine of sorts, and if we can just find the right lever to pull, we can fix everything—are being shown for the myths that they are, whether by climate change, the massive amount of oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, or the explosion of cancers and gender deformities in life forms worldwide (from frogs to humans) over the past 50 years as we’ve dumped huge amounts of hormone-mimicking plasticizers and other chemicals into our environment.

  The simple reality is that I can take a car apart in my driveway, then put it back together, turn the key, and it’ll run. But if I took a cow apart in my driveway, no matter how skilled a surgeon I am in reassembling it, it’ll never moo again. Life is different from machines.

  And our separation from life—whether by our worshiping gods in boxes every weekend, our belief in the supremacy of science, or our living, moving, and working in separated-from-life environments—has caused us to make personal and societal decisions that are destructive to life all around us for millennia. The tragic reality is that life is undergoing the sixth-biggest extinction in the history of the planet—an extinction that may one day include us if we don’t quickly wake up.

  What we need to do immediately is to start taking small, incremental steps while also raising societal awareness in preparation for taking bigger and more substantive steps toward more earth-friendly approaches and policies when it comes to energy use.

  The good news is that we know what we need to do to help solve our energy and sustainability problems.

  For example, about 10 percent of the electricity we generate in the United States is consumed by “vampire” appliances and power supplies that are not even turned on or in use.6 Another 6.5 percent of the electricity we produce in this country is wasted through “line losses”—the resistance of copper wires to the passage of electricity through them over long-line high-power transmission lines.7 If we used electricity at the point of generation—like running your house off your own solar power—that loss percentage would drop to zero. Instead, because it’s profitable for large power companies to have centralized generating stations, we’re losing all that electricity as heat from transmission lines and are burning enormous amounts of coal, natural gas, and oil to produce it.

  Lessons from Abroad

  These problems are huge but they’re not insurmountable. Other countries are already showing the way. Just as America now faces an unsustainable thirst for energy, so too was Germany faced with a power crisis in the late 1990s. Growing demands for electricity collided with the reality that the country has no oil reserves and a strong bias among its people against building new nuclear power plants in the wake of the nearby Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.

  Yet the government knew that the country needed the electricity equivalent of at least one or two nuclear reactors over the next decade. So, how was it to generate that much electricity without nuclear power?

  Germany’s Alternative to Nuclear

  In 1999 progressives in Germany passed the 100,000 Roofs Program (Stromeinspeisungsgesetz),8 which mandated that banks had to provide low-interest 10-year loans to homeowners sufficient for them to put solar panels on their houses. They then passed the Renewable Energies Law (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) and in 2004 integrated the 100,000 Roofs Program into it.9 The Renewable Energies Law mandated that for the next 10 years the power company had to buy back power from those homeowners at a level substantially above the going rate so the homeowners’ income from the solar panels would equal their loan payment on the panels and would also represent the actual cost to the power company to ge
nerate that amount of power had it built a new nuclear reactor.

  At the end of the 10 years, the power company gets to buy solar power from its customers at its regular rate, and it now has a new source of power without having to pay to maintain (and eventually dismantle) a nuclear reactor. In fact, while the reactor would have had a 20- to 30-year lifespan, the solar panels typically have a lifespan of 50 years.

  For the homeowners it was a no-brainer: they were getting low-interest loans from banks for the solar panels, and the power companies were paying for the power generated by those panels at a rate high enough to pay off the loans. It was like getting solar power panels for free.

  If anything, the government underestimated how rapidly Germans would embrace the program and thus how much more power would be produced and how quickly. By 2007 Germany accounted for about half of the entire world’s solar market. Just that one year, 2007, saw 1,300 MW of solar-generating capacity brought online across the country.10

  For comparison, consider that the average generating capacity of each of the past five nuclear power plants brought online in the United States is 1,160 MW.11

  In 2008 Germany added 2,000 MW of solar power to its grid, and in 2009 homeowners and businesses put onto their roofs enough solar panels to generate an additional 2,500 MW. Although the goal for the first decade of this century was to generate around 3,000 MW, eliminating the need to build two new nuclear power plants, this simple, no-risk program had instead added more than 8,500 MW of power.