Need Energy (2008)

Originally posted as a Facebook note July 19, 2008.

My family and I braved the rain tonight and went for ice cream (or, rather, the ice cream-like substance known as "frozen custard") at Culver's. When we got there we found a crowd of young people on a church work trip to help flood victims. That was cool.

What was not cool was listening to someone else next to us loudly rant about gas prices. He wants to drill in the Arctic (a small part of ANWR, the caribou won't even notice) and off the coast of Florida (the Chinese are already doing it, and so what if a little oil gets on the beach?). I pleaded with my family to move to another seat, but eventually had to go sit in the car to escape him.

(Redolent it was of the scene in "Annie Hall" where Woody Allen produces Marshall McLuhan to put down the loud ignoramus in the movie line. Except real life isn't like that, and anyhow he would probably just have counterproduced Rush Limbaugh, and things would have just gotten louder.)

I decided what bothered me most about listening to this loudmouth was that he is more right (i.e. correct, not conservative) than I care to admit. He is almost certainly retired, and was complaining that it costs him $60 to fill up his Escort. I can symphathize with that, although our gasoline needs are pretty small; I think his fuel price fueled anxiety is probably more typical of Americans today. He wants to drill, and only the U.S. Congress is standing in his way. If he's at all representative of Americans, and I think he mostly is, they won't be standing there for long. Either they agree to drill, or Republicans win the election and drill for them.

(What I mean by "mostly" is he clearly is not concerned about the environment at all, and most people are. Let the caribou die, let the earth warm, let oil-soaked birds die by the hundreds, let the coral reefs collapse. He would fill his tank and not give a shit. Most people would fill their tanks and feel sad.)

In my ideal world, we would recognize our need to be more than mere consumers, to live in a way that sustains resources for other humans, and sustains the environment for other creatures. Well, la de da (another Annie Hall-ism). We don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world where people are used to a certain lifestyle, where many people are economically insecure, and where a 35% increase in fuel prices in one year has freaked a lot of people out.

In the long run, we need to change living and transportation patterns in a pretty radical way. Maybe we will. In the short run, that's not an option, especially for people like our friend on a fixed income, or people barely making it. Much as I hate to admit it, drilling in previously off-limits places is a major part of the short-term answer.

But it can't be all the answer, despite the calls of President Bush, Senator McCain, and our Culver's buddy. All this does is kick the supply problem down the road, damage the environment in possibly irreparable ways, and send us back to the fool's paradise we've been living in for the last 25 years.

Drilling must come with a conservation mandate, and a major shift in federal money from highways to mass transportation. We need, in short, to couple the short-term fix with a long-term intelligent plan for sustainable energy use.

Our custard-eating friend scoffs at those who say the oil in ANWR won't find its way to the gas pumps for years. He says if they had started drilling 10 or 20 years ago, we'd have the gas now. Well, if they'd started 20 years ago, we'd probably have used it all by now, and then we'd be in a fix and the environment would still be damaged.

I don't have a lot of optimism this is going to happen. The Republicans want to drill, period, and the Democrats either want to drill, too, or they don't want to but lack any better idea. You can't oppose something with nothing, and the Repubs are winning bigtime on this issue for now. But I am given to handwringing, so maybe there's a brighter side to this I'm missing.

So, my Facebook friends, cheer me up, damn it!