Thinking about Energy Conservation, American Security, America’s Greatest Generation and our Veterans.
May 31, 2010
“All that is required for Evil to prevail is for good men (and women) to do nothing”-Edmund Burke
How can you link energy conservation, America’s Security, Veterans and America’s Greatest Generation into a blog devoted to the implementation of Cost Effective, Common Sense, Energy Efficient-Green Building? Easy–this country’s reliance on non-domestic oil and its lackadaisical approach in embracing the invisible benefits of energy conservation and energy efficiency is undermining the United States security and putting this country’s very existence in jeopardy- maybe not today, but possibly sometime in the not to distant future.
I saw a statistic two days ago in a local newspaper that just disgusted me and forced me to ask myself, just what the heck is going on here. I felt stupid and unfilled about what my life has been about the past 35 years. The statistic showed that the United States produces 4.9 million barrels of oil a day, while it consumes 19.5 million barrels of oil a day. What’s wrong with this picture? We are buying 14.6 million barrels of oil a day from non-US sources; many of these sources oppose this country and our way of life. This reliance on non-domestic oil, while paying little more than lip service to energy conservation, efficiency and alternative energy choices is screwing around with our national security.
Some will say our plan is to use everybody else’s oil up, so we will be the only ones left with any. While we pursue that policy, other countries are screaming past us in the pursuit of energy conservation, energy efficiency and alternative energy options. That says to me when they run out of oil they will have already developed other alternatives and that places them in a more secure position then the U.S. Not to mention the creation of new industries contributing millions of jobs and advanced energy technologies.
The statistic further fueled my rage when it showed that the Oil produced from the Gulf of Mexico provides 8% of the United States daily consumption or 1.6 million barrels a day. So now we have to read and see daily the results of an environmental disaster, endangering some of the most beautiful and life giving ecosystems in this country in order to produce 1.6 million barrels of oil a day? I would rather spend my efforts on developing clean coal technology, but that is another story.
Something is just plain wrong here. I keep asking myself, has the US’s values and common sense changed that much in my lifetime? That this obsession with oil dictates how we view the world and the majority of our foreign policy is based on this oil fanaticism?
Having served in Southeast Asia (not Vietnam) in the early 70′s and having had 3 sons serve in the Middle East and the Balkans; I started to reflect on Memorial Day, Freedom, and just why this oil statistic infuriated me. It kept coming back to this country’s security and common sense. I put myself in the position of being a soldier. What would I feel if someone suddenly walked up to a individual about to do me harm and gave them a gun to shoot me with and they had used my money to buy it? I will tell you–I would be freaking irate. This reliance on oil, most of it now non-USA produced, does that. It allows our enemies to arm themselves and while we pay for it.
Winston Churchill stated: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm” For me it burns my posterior to know I am giving the men and women, who oppose my rough men and women, the money to buy arms to kill them. They kill our Fathers, Sons, Mothers, Daughters, Grandchildren, Aunts, Uncles, Friends, Nieces and Nephews, the very people who put their life on the line everyday for me. All the while I am arming the very enemy we send them out to fight. With everything I have learned in life–I can’t fit this into my moral compass.
I don’t live in a box. I am not an isolationist. I like the fact that during my lifetime the world has become smaller and more accessible. I enjoy the different countries, their geography and their varied cultures. For the most part I enjoy the people I have met from many different parts of the world. My natural personality, many times working to my detriment, is to like and trust everyone initially. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt, until I get a whiff of a donkey doughnut hole side or a rectal, cranial inversion.
But more than any other country on this planet I love the good ole United States of America. I have been a lot of places, but there just isn’t anyplace like here and I don’t want to lose that feeling. I do love it so.
For over 30 years I have lingered over the inability of this country to get a handle on its obsessive consumption of oil. If anyone in 1979 told me we would be paying less than a $1/gallon of gasoline in the 90′s, I would have thought they were barking at the moon. I thought we were on the right course way back in the 70′s and early 80′s. I thought it was going to be like going to the moon, an exciting technological advance in energy technology. The best brains in the business were going to be given incentives to take the United States running into the future. It was an exciting, purposeful time, but alas our commitment stalled.
That earlier movement was fueled and constantly reinforced by oil shortages, long waits in gas lines, odd-even days of being able to fill your vehicle up with fuel, cold winters, the exorbitant cost of oil to heat your home, the astronomical, overnight jump in oil prices at the start of the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973, the formation of OPEC-with its resulting control of pricing and production, the taking of American Hostages by Iran, and having paid over $3.50 cents per gallon of gas in Europe way back in 1973. These events solidified my daily realizations of how reliance on foreign oil, and our oil dominated economy, endangered this great free country. Then in a bit of short-sightedness, one of the men I admire most in my lifetime, made one mistake–he got rid of the incentives geared towards taking the United States on the path to conservation, efficiency and alternative energy options.
I guess I don’t think rationally at times. I think passionately about the United States, those great men and women in uniform, this great life where you can travel 1000 of miles in either direction without a passport or change in language. In the same thought process I think of all the beauty I see and the wonderful automobile that takes me to see it and I cherish it, all the while my twisted brain is simultaneously spending hours thinking about how to glamorize common sense, energy efficiency (it’s invisible) and energy conservation, that is so necessary to maintaining our way of life.
Unfortunately no one, including me, has figured out how to do that. We got Gecko’s, Cave Men, long leggy women and rugged he-men marketing all kinds of things that capture the American Psyche, but we got nothing that glamorizes the most critical aspect of our daily lives, learning how to conserve what we have and still maintain progress and a way of life.
You can’t sit a beautiful woman on the back of energy efficiency and sell it. I can’t pin a murder on it, or relate it to some movie star cheating on their wife or husband. The name, Energy Efficiency, doesn’t get anyone’s adrenalin pumping. It doesn’t sell papers or TV advertisements. It doesn’t affect our life much on a daily basis, only monthly when we all get a bill. Even the thought provoking statements of saving the planet for our children and their children doesn’t motivate us. We get motivated over disasters, big events, and tragedy. We are usually so wrapped up in the daily grind of living that it takes the spectacular to divert our attention. We get enraged quickly, but have very short attention spans, because life takes us back to daily reality. We have stopped being dreamers.
This is touchy, but I remember growing up in post WWII America where Veterans of that conflict refused to purchase anything from Japan, Germany and other Axis members during the conflict. As late as the early 80′s I can remember Vets of the Pacific Campaign refusing to buy Japanese automobile’s because of their remembrance of buddy’s killed and maimed during that campaign. I can remember their statements that , “they were not going to purchase something from anyone who had tried to kill them, let alone send money to help them gain a position in the United States Marketplace.” They weren’t paying for something that took a job away from someone in the States.
They had been to war to defend this country and its way of life. They knew what it was to risk all and persevere. They were action people, who had faced a depression, lack of hope, fear and death, survived and went on to try and create a United States that was safe and secure, for my generation and those that have followed. Of course they were the people that birthed my generation’s feeling of not trusting anyone over 30. My generation, who wanted to change the world, despised capitalist pigs and yet went on to become the greatest capitalist pigs of all. Somewhere we lost our moral compass and are leaving this country in a worse state then what we inherited. We were verbally committed to do right, but we lacked stick-to-itiveness in our pursuit of money, fueled by our reliance on oil and our belief we were smarter than anyone.
I can’t help but think that the Greatest Generation, in their heyday, when confronted with the realistic facts that they were importing 14,000 barrels of oil a day, fully 75% of their daily needs, would have suddenly made other arrangements. They might have chosen Kennedy’s words, “We choose to go to the Moon because we can.” Or they might have remembered Eisenhower’s warning of a military, industrial complex taking over the world.
One thing for sure, they would have never stood for sending billions of dollars to countries that put soldiers in the field to fight against their kids in defense of the United States. I mean, come on, do you think George Patton, George Marshal, Harry Truman or Franklin Roosevelt would have authorized us to buy oil for our tanks by giving Nazi Germany millions of dollars a day for their oil or sued for peace to gain access to it. Do you think Douglas Macarthur would have given Emperor Hirohito millions of dollars a day for oil so they could fly Kamikaze missions and attack the United States or given up the Philippines for it? In other words where have we gone wrong in believing it’s OK to give money to our enemies, so they can kill us? That defies any logic learned in my life.
The greatest generation would have taken that fact and done something about it. They would have begun energy conservation methods. They would have pursued energy efficiency. They would have pursued alternative energy solutions. One can argue that they had the opportunity. Did they? America’s obsessive love of oil developed after WWII. It helped fuel the expansion of an economy run by a generation that had suffered through a depression and a World War. They were ready for some good stuff and they were sitting on top of the world.
At that point in history the United States had its own capacity to produce oil sufficient to fuel our needs. We had it and we had the technology. At the same time our scientists and oil experts where exporting this technology to the Middle East and other countries. In those days, America and its technology was welcomed. We weren’t the enemy. Those feelings started to disappear in the 60′s and 70′s, brought to a head by the formation of OPEC, an organization that suddenly controlled the majority of the World’s production of oil and could dictate the amounts pumped and pricing. The United States was still the 1000 lb Gorilla in the market because of its fantastic way of life and its consumption standards-of course these standards did help progress the world. The U.S. would continue to be a substantial force in driving pricing and production in the 70′s and 80′s, again because of our way of life and our consumption patterns. Now that has all changed–the United States isn’t the 1000 lb. Gorilla in the room–the world is–but we continue to act as if we are and are endangering our way of life with our refusal to conserve or embrace efficiency.
This country has given the oil and gas industries financial incentives for years. Our whole economy is based on it–cars, trucks, construction equipment, housing, suburbs, farming, offices, manufacturing, etc. Most Americans, when looking at today’s budgets, wonder why we would even consider going further to subsidize some Star Wars energy fantasies. The fact is in the world of reality, the greatest Star Wars concept of alternative energy is that energy you don’t use. Conservation and Efficiency are alternative energy and should be classified as such. They aren’t as glamorous as solar or geo-thermal, but they are more efficient. How about this for a new Alternative Energy Heading–energy efficiency and energy conservation?
How do we get there? We have to give tax breaks and provide the capital to move this alternative forward. We have to mandate energy conservation and efficiency measures that are simple, common sense approaches. This isn’t rocket science. Hell even the caveman knew you had to block off drafts in the cave to stay warm, or the same cave was a cool retreat in the heat of summer. While we are attacking these basics of efficiency and conservation, we can continue to pursue other alternatives. After all American’s can chew bubble gum and walk at the same time. All these things create real jobs and new American industries. So why not just pursue the glamour alternative energy solutions of solar, wind, geo-thermal, nuclear or wave action? Could it be because these alternatives only perform effectively when efficiency practices are in place? Are we just going to produce it and waste it, like now? That is not a solution.
Too many Americans think that all this energy conservation is about them changing their life. They want to know what is in it for them. How is it going to benefit me in dollars? Too many think it is a tree hugger concept. The real gist of this is reality and our way of life that so many have died to protect. We do them an injustice when we make the easy decisions to go on as we have, not making any changes, fat and happy, all the while jeopardizing our security and the security of those men and women on the front lines who are trying to defend that way of life. We should keep in mind what that great common sense American Ben Franklin said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
I would love to return to the glory days of the United States, when it used its brilliance to help lead the world in progressive directions. Today that critical progressive direction is one involving energy conservation, energy efficiency and alternative energy solutions. It isn’t rocket science or an Einstein theory; it is just plain common sense. This is the path we and the world must go down. It may not affect many of us alive today, but it certainly will affect our children, their children and those that come after. You have to ask yourself how many people have given their life and energy’s for that very promise, the future, to keep this wonderful planet and this wonderful country called the United States of America, heading in the right direction.
We have to emphatically retool and force our economy in new directions by whatever practical, committed means necessary. We are at a fork in road and as the linguistic Yogi Berra says, “When you come to a fork in the road, you take it.” We have to pursue a new direction in the hopes of preserving Freedom. Abraham Lincoln said it best: “Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.”
This Memorial Day blog sprayed in many different directions from my original premise of energy and security, but I am going to put it out there anyway. These are my thoughts. I pray everyday for the protection of those tough people who defend me and this country. My prayers today are with those great Americans who came before us and gave their all in the pursuit of this concept of freedom called the United States of America. I thank God they did.
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