March 30, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff
Over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein has a brilliant post on why we can't just CAFE our way out of the Middle East:
In the 30-or-so years of CAFE standards, American fuel usage hasn't decreased one iota -- and in fact, oil imports as a share of U.S. consumption have risen from 35 to 59 percent in those three decades. All CAFE standards have succeeded in doing is making cars unsafe, and creating a morass of regulation that automakers circumvent (the Chrysler PT Cruiser is classified as a light truck, for Chrissakes!). . .. . . cheaper oil is directly responsible for our country's worldwide leadership in per capita productivity with regard to fuel consumption. You have an alternative you'd like to offer? Hydrogen and electricity are energy carriers, not energy sources; as such, they must first be generated from coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, or some other natural source before they can be converted into usable energy sources. Raw hydrogen must be produced, for instance, from natural gas or generated by the electrolysis of water. This leads us back to electricity (electrolysis, incidentally, is the most energy-intensive process of any fuel making alternative; you'd have to burn carbon fuels to manufacture it, making the advantage of conversion negligible at best). Nuclear power is the obvious solution -- a long-term, pollution-free source -- but I suspect you're not willing to go that route.
Further, hydrogen comes married to other elements generally (as in methane gas or water). Most of today's fuel-cell technology relies on hydrogen extracted from methane, in a process that emits large quantities of greenhouse gases. Domestic sources of methane are too limited to serve any significant demand for automobiles. So we'd be forced to look for foreign sources -- sources found primarily in Russia and Iran, and in many Middle East nations. In other words, good-bye oil dependency, hello methane dependency!
. . . a gas tax -- is an expensive solution and does nothing to create the kind of 'energy independence' greens are always going on about. The EU, for instance, taxes gas up to $4 per gallon, and yet it still imports more than half its oil! . . . Besides, we do tax -- we just use backdoor taxes like the CAFE scheme.
. . . To suggest that Islamofascists flew planes into our buildings because of my SUV, then, is just plain silly. . . 'If there wasn't any oil in the Gulf region the United States would NEVER have gone to defend one Arab tribal group [...] against another . As a consequence we wouldn't now have thousands of troops and planes in Kuwait and S. Arabia. Bin Laden and his gang of Islamofascists wouldn't have decided that infidels were despoiling the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. And so on.' By the same logic, I could argue, 'If their weren't any Wahhabism in the Gulf region, the US would never have had to defend itself against Islamofascism, etc. For that matter, were there no Arabs, there'd be no Wahhabism...'
CAFE is useless at reducing our oil consumption, because the evidence is that households use a sort of straight-level budgeting process for gas consumption -- raise fuel efficiency, and people drive more until they're at the same oil consumption as before. Which is what has happened with cars in the US -- according to my energy guru, our gasoline consumption hasn't dropped at all since CAFE was introduced.
Second of all, you can't reduce Saudi income through ANWR either, except from the slight price pressure exerted by a new source in the market. That's because oil is a world market; whatever the price is on that market, domestic suppliers have to be paid the going market rate to prevent them from selling it elsewhere. That's also why we can't boycott Saudi oil; it wouldn't effect their income one bit.
The only way to hit the Saudis where it hurts is to convert to non-fossil fuels. And you know what that means, boys and girls -- Nuclear. Which is why we need to collectively sit on those NIMBY's in Nevada until they squeal for mercy. (I do sympathize. If they were going to put it in my backyard, I could probably find all sorts of reasonable-sounding arguments as to why they shouldn't. But the stuff's got to go somewhere.)
But I do think that Goldstein is wrong about the tax. It would be more effective than CAFE at reducing fuel consumption, because of the way that people budget purchases. People tend to put money in "baskets" in their head: this much for food, this much for laundry soap, etc. The CAFE tax goes into the price of the car, which is not, in most people's minds, in the same "basket" as gasoline purchases, so it doesn't influence their consumption. Moreover, it's a high fixed cost; there's no marginal cost to added mileage that would cause people to forgo that extra trip to the grocery store; quite the opposite, it makes the extra trip cheaper. In fact, it's about the stupidest way you could possibly imagine to reduce consumption. A tax would be much more effective.
But it would cripple the US economy in the short and medium term. My macro professor argued convincingly that the stagflation of the 70's was brought to you by the sharp contraction in the oil supply, which lowered productivity by a considerable percentage.
Now, there are some environmental activists who understand the full implications of what they’re doing when they essentially lobby to block all forms of energy except impractical ones like wind power (Yes, it is impractical – if we tried to switch to wind power on a widespread basis, we wouldn’t have any room left for the houses and factories the wind is supposed to power.) or currently infeasible ones like solar power (Minnesota. Winter. You’re heating the house how? Oh, with the backup wind farms powered by the blizzard. Try again: you have to take the wind towers down if the wind goes much above 30 m.p.h.). Most, however, are animated by ignorance. Some have a very dim knowledge of how either the economy, or the alternative energy sources they are proposing, work; this leads them first to swallow any unworkable proposal made by Nader or Chomsky without question, then eventually, with enough peer reinforcement, to spin their own fantasy worlds based on the “science” and “economics” found in Greenpeace pamphlets.
Others nurture fantasies about a bucolic paradise without factories. This is because they appreciate neither the vast amount of technology required to produce their “organic” lifestyles, nor for the squalor experienced by the colorful natives they admire.
Those who claim that they can live simply based on their propensity for going out into the woods for months at a time, do not realize, or have chosen to forget, that their packs, tents, sleeping bags, rock-climbing ropes, parkas, boots, and too many other pieces of equipment to name, are made from petroleum derivatives.
They do not know that coal, no longer easily accessible near the surface as it was in the days of our Bronze Age forbears, is needed to smelt the iron to make the shovel, plow, hoe, bridle bits, scythe, knives, etc with which they plan to return to the land.
They have never experienced food insufficiency as a permanent fear, rather than an occasional inconvenience at the end of the month.
They think that the patriarchy is some sort of bizarre aberration with which every society was mysteriously afflicted, instead of the natural result of an economic and technological condition in which brute strength is more important than brains.
They are unaware that they can’t get penicillin from any old bread mold.
They do not know anyone with a dead baby, so they think they’d be okay with half the children in their community dying before the age of five.
They do not know anyone who has died in childbirth, so they think that they could handle 1/10-1/4 of the women in the community dying in same.
They have very few friends who have died young, so they think that they could accept an average lifespan of 30.
They don’t know how short 30 years is; or they don’t think that they would be affected.
They do not know that those Afghani kids on TV are blond because their body lacks the nutrients to produce their natural hair coloring.
They have never had body lice or intestinal parasites.
They have never seen a wound infected with maggots.
They have never seen leprosy or festering abscesses or sores that do not heal.
They have never seen an arm or a leg swollen with gangrene.
They have never seen a child waste its life away with diarrhea.
They have never seen a cold turn fatal.
They have never seen someone biting on a rag to keep from screaming while the saw bites into their leg.
They have never seen how white a woman’s body is when she’s exsanguinated by a post-partum hemorrhage.
In short, they’ve created a fantasy world in which the rivers and fields are pristine, and edited out the enormous human misery that accompanied this condition historically. Or they’ve made up some plausible sounding scheme and are demanding we implement it without bothering to figure out what the actual effects would be – and get angry when we do find out, and the effects aren’t what they’d imagined. And they want us to base our economic policy on this fairyland.
Well, that was a bit of a digression. But I feel better now. There’s really nothing like bile and spleen for perking up one’s morning, hmm?
Posted by Jane Galt at March 30, 2002 9:45 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links