November 2005 - Reaping the Whirlwind, Part Two

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Insights, Gripes, and Conjecture

Not that the tree huggers can wash their hands of complicity in the weaknesses in our national infrastructure exposed by Katrina. They have earned as much scorn as anyone else. For 30 years the tree huggers agitated to fix our energy-dependence problems and rightly argued that it’s stupid to foul our nest with pollutants. But, they offer no meaningful solution, only absolutism.

Many tree hugging alternatives are silly. Take wood. Wood is a renewable resource, and, with scrubbers, wood power plants can generate very expensive electricity for small regions. But we cannot meet our national electricity needs with it and keep growing.

Most other alternatives are causes for demonstrations. Wind power is very clean, but ... birds dice themselves in the turbine blades. And, like cell towers, no one wants to look at them, so there is great resistance to wind farms in New York and on Cape Cod.
Nuclear is bombs, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a dangerous design that only a Communist system would endorse. TMI was nasty, but the technology worked: The containment building contained the spill.

Coal and synfuels? Coal is forever dirty. Mind closed. And so on.

What about recycling? Good, but, sorry, it’s just conserving oil. Heresy #1: Dick Cheney was right: Conserving our oil-based energy is not a long-range solution to our oil-dependence.

Heresy #2: Dick Cheney was wrong: Developing more sources of oil is not a long-range solution. It’s is the national equivalent of the stashed pack of smokes the guy with the nicotine patch keeps handy. It’s nothing more than an addict’s fix for our short- and long-term withdrawal wobblies.

So, when you refine it, we the people are split into two camps: One’s addicted to the status quo and gaming the treasury for tax breaks—never mind the national good. The other’s addicted to the idea of clean energy alternatives for our national good, but only if they are absolutely perfect in all far-out scenarios. Both block the way to energy independence and wise investment in our national infrastructure.

Katrina blew away the idea that it’s smart electing leaders who don’t believe government works. Our government was once smart enough to nurture entrepreneurs and subsidize roads, canals, manufacturing, railroads, electricity, telecommunications, airplanes, radio, computers, ICs, and the Internet. Government could be smart enough to invest in us smartly again, if we the people smarten up enough to shed our insularities and political absolutisms and demand change.

Yet, we show no such inclination. For engineers, scientists, researchers, and manufacturing, this is self-defeating. Your career and unborn kin will benefit directly from wise government.

Our unyielding partisanship and refusal to mold compromises that create clean, sustainable energy sources make future energy supply disruptions, wars, and economic dislocations more likely. We have and will reap what we sow.

“When men sow the wind,” said Frederick Douglass, “it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.”

Katrina exposed the weaknesses in how we the people run our union. It’s up to us to change our future.

Thanks, Pal —Lockwood