Tough Love Russian Style and American Energy Policy

I hope the Russians love their children too. - Sting 1985

Russia has cut off gas to the Ukraine. Lesson: get addicted to Russian oil and expect to be eaten by the Russian bear. Simple stuff. Lesson #2: energy is power.

Now here's the good news. The world is aflood with energy, with energy in every imaginable form. Some forms are more expensive than others. We use the cheap stuff first. We would still be heating homes in the Northeast with anthracite, had it not been replaced with cheaper fuel oil. And natural gas. The mines were shut down, but remain full of anthracite, huge mountains of anthracite. When I first lived in Oregon we heated homes with saw dust. Again, something cheaper and handier came along. Oregon did not run out of saw dust; they just started building houses out of it. In WWII we cut off Germany's petroleum, so they manufactured gasoline from coal. And nearly developed nuclear energy.

There is more oil under Colorado than in the entire Middle East, by an order of magnitude. And that much again in the Alberta tar sands. This is all solar energy, fossil solar energy, stored up in the ground from other lush times. Indeed, nearly all energy on earth is solar energy, from our sun. And much of it is stored away in the ground. There is far more of it than we could ever figure out how to use. But we always used with the cheap stuff first.

If we edge ahead of that just a tiny bit, buy energy a tad pricier than the current cheapest stuff from the current cheapest place, we take charge, create a new paradigm. We leave the Russians and the Middle East with a lot of anthracite in the ground. But this can not be done with market forces. One has to decide to pay a tad more for energy and thereby slip the power away from the cheapest sources. You do that with tariffs. And regulations. Rules, as it were, rules that favor and assure domestic production and thus slide power in our direction.

All this takes is a bit of courage and some brains. And someone to explain how it will work and why we must do it.

What I am suggesting is the fundamental plank of my old Senate campaign, that we have an energy policy, that we take charge and design a system that works for the American people. Had we done that, we would have had none of this mess we face today, including great sandy wars. The sad thing is, we could have done it then. Maybe this time people will get it.

And I am not talking about giving up gas guzzlers. We just let them die of their own accord, as they will have to do, unable to compete with the new high speed rail systems that will have to emerge. And the really cool mini-cars and motorcycles, and hell yes, even subways and (covered?) bike trails.

Energy is different than other industries like, say technology. More like water or money, it requires a policy and rules. Then let the free market do as it pleases.