A century of lies about internal combustion arising from a millennium of monopolistic misconduct in energy has wounded the world’s collective health, fractured a fragile environment, and ignited a deadly petropo-litical war that has become nothing less than a cataclysmic clash of cultures. Oil is the root of all this tribulation. In energy as in politics, power corrupts. Through the ages, power has indeed corrupted those who need it, those who produce it, and those who control it. Today our high-energy world teeters at the brink. The gauge is edging toward empty, and as it does, the political, environmental, medical, and economic costs continue to squeeze humanity. The crisis is not new, but more urgent.
Tragically, from the first barges of coal controlled by the Hostmen of Newcastle centuries ago, to the choking pollutants of steam locomotives, to the scandal-plagued development of the battery of the nineteenth century, to Edison and Ford’s struggle to mass-produce their electric car in 1914, to the abandonment of urban mass transit, the world has cried out for sweeping solutions to correct the mistakes undertaken in the name of energy. Those mistakes have left the twenty-first century a hostage to internal combustion, which consumes some 63 percent of America’s petroleum use. Yet a legacy of corporate looting, deception, manipulation, and misinformation has so successfully obscured the facts that society can’t discern the true energy solutions for our petroliferous society. Many do not even comprehend the true problems that internal combustion has wrought.
No one needs a book to stay current on the health consequences of the internal combustion machine, or the alternative sources and technology to overcome it. The latest information is continuously delivered by the fast-paced media of the day, from official Web sites, television and radio, to the nation’s magazines and newspapers. But all too often, the enormity of the threat to public health and the sensible alternatives are lost in the incremental coverage.
Start with health. In a word, we are killing ourselves by the mile.
Driving internal combustion machines does to the world’s population what cigarette smoking does to the individual. Tailpipe emissions from diesel- and gasoline-burning vehicles contain toxic nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, as well as arsenic, formaldehyde, chromium, and a poisoned well of other ingredients.. This brew also contains fine particulate matter. These particles embed in the lungs of everyone who breathes the air that trucks and automobiles befoul. Smaller toxic substances—ultrafine particles or nanoparticles—can penetrate the lung’s membranes and contaminate the blood. Nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons combine with sunlight to create ozone, which irritates the lungs and eyes. The result is elevated levels of heart and blood diseases, cancers, nervous system toxicity, and impairments to fetal development resulting in low birth weight and premature deliveries. Asthma has become epidemic. One in six children in California’s Central Valley carries an inhaler to school. Lung cancer has become the nation’s leading form of cancer.1
It has been difficult to separate out exactly how many deaths are caused by engine exhaust, but the American Lung Association estimates the national death toll from particle pollution to be in the tens of thousands annually. California’s Air Resources Board and the American Lung Association of California believe fine and ultrafine particulate matter from all pollution sources now kill as many Americans annually as traffic accidents and secondhand smoke. In California alone, all forms of air pollution annually cause some nine thousand premature deaths, nine thousand hospitalizations, 1.7 million cases of respiratory illness, 1.3 million school absences, and 2.8 million lost workdays, according to the state’s Air Resources Board.2 How much of that air pollution damage is attributable to exhaust pipes?
Transportation sources account for some 60 to 90 percent of all air pollution in Los Angeles County and three adjacent counties, according to estimates of California’s Air Resources Board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which encompasses four Los Angeles-area counties. What’s more, state air-quality officials acknowledge that the nation’s top five ozone-polluted areas and eight of the top ten particulate-polluted counties are in California.3
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 60 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions are spewed by motor vehicles, and in some cities the number is as high as 95 percent. Nonroad vehicles employing petroleum-based engines add to the transportation sector’s overall pollution profile.4
Internal combustion kills. Few of us realize that, as we drive to nonsmoking restaurants, everyone around us is inhaling toxic gases as deadly as that in any cigarette.
Because mass transit was fatally undermined and America’s love affair with the automobile has only deepened, and because car-enabled metropolitan sprawl has become an immutable urban reality, congestion has added its own miasmic dimension. Most suburban families now operate two or three automobiles, which collectively take a dozen trips daily, annually turning odometers 31,000 miles per vehicle. Highway traffic is up 130 percent since 1973 when the oil shock first woke us from oil-induced slumber. In America, more than 80 percent of all trips are now made by automobile, which is double the European number. Europe enjoys extensive urban and intercity transit systems, which reduce auto traffic. In 1996, road congestion cost America’s top seventy cities an aggregate $74 billion for 4.6 billion lost hours and 6.7 billion wasted gallons of fuel, according to the Texas Transportation Institute; a decade later, these numbers are even more dramatic.5
Certainly, a nation in gridlock massively wears away at productivity and heightens toxic levels, but it also creates what experts call “environmental injustice.” The same amount of pollution will not affect all communities in an area equally. Those who dwell and work along the highways, commonly lower-income minority groups, suffer most because those toxic effects are concentrated most along the source—the highway itself. Moreover, during congested times, the same number of cars will spew that much more in tailpipe emissions because of idling, bumper-to-bumper traffic and the very nature of clogged rush-hour traffic. A map pinpointing cancer concentrations in an urbanized area, such as greater Los Angeles, reveals frightening veins of deadly hot spots coursing on either side of the highway.6 The expressways themselves have become the slow killing fields of our transportation system.
Environmental damage caused by the petroleum industry and its consumers is earth-shattering, literally. Oil spills such as that of the Exxon Valdez inflict severe local ecological disasters where they occur. The Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in March 1989, devastating the shore along with the area’s sea life, birds, and furry animals. The Exxon Valdez incident is famous, but hardly the largest spill in recent years. Saddam Hussein’s intentional destruction of Kuwaiti oil wells caused 24 million to 60 million gallons of crude to gush into the Persian Gulf. But the largest spill on record is from Pemex’s Ixtoc I; from June 3, 1979, until it was capped forty-two weeks later, Ixtoc I dumped an estimated 151.2 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, most of which floated toward the Texas coastline.7
The list of major oil spills is long and spans the globe. In fact, during the past twenty years, the world has witnessed thirty oil spills larger than the Exxon Valdez. During the 1990s, 346 spills occurred in excess of two thousand gallons, or about 10.6 million gallons annually—that is, an additional Exxon Valdez every year.8
What a spill can do as a huge incident, all of us do incrementally. Daily gasoline runoff from streets, driveways, and other domestic leaks pour nearly 11 million gallons—equal once again to an Exxon Valdez spill—into American waterways every eight months, according to the National Academy of Sciences. The damage from all these spills—from slight to very Exxon Valdez—lasts years longer than scientists originally thought.9 The food chain and the world’s waters are progressively being poisoned, as are the coastlines; the damage is worsening faster than nature’s ability to repair itself.
What oil does to the water, it also does to the land. Coastlines suffer from oil spills with the familiar scenes of tar-coated shores, blackened and crippled birds, and hapless furry creatures unable to come clean. But the environmental destruction from routine exploration, drilling, extraction, refining, and distribution can exceed the damage of a major oil spill, according to a University of California study. Adverse ecological effects include deforestation of large tracts of wooded regions, chemical contamination of land, and concomitant harm to whole animal populations.10
What’s more, America’s oil and gas industry creates more solid and liquid waste than all other municipal, agricultural, mining, and industrial sources combined. In 1995, the American oil industry by itself spawned 146 million barrels of drilling waste and 22 million barrels of so-called associated wastes. Associated wastes include the “produced water” used in drilling operations. This water is often discharged into the American water system, yet it is at least four times saltier than ocean water and commonly contains megaconcentrations of toxins such as benzene, xylene, and ethyl-benzene. Produced water can in some instances be a hundred times more radioactive than nuclear power plant effluent.11
What oil does to the water and land, it also does to earth’s atmosphere. Every gallon of gasoline used spews twenty-four pounds of heat-trapping emissions, vastly heavier than the gasoline itself, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. A heat-trapping blanket—causing the famous “greenhouse effect"—has enveloped the earth. America consumes about a quarter of the world’s oil. Total American tailpipe emissions generate two-thirds of the carbon monoxide, a third of the nitrogen oxides, and more than 27 percent of the country’s overall contribution to the greenhouse effect, which has pushed our planet into global warming.12 Some say the damage may soon be irreversible.
Global warming is raising the seas, changing and intensifying climates, rewriting the wind patterns, and shifting plant and animal populations. Arctic and antarctic ice is suddenly melting more rapidly than anyone expected, which is raising the level of the sea. Scientists fear that key glacial structures have begun melting, thus allowing an accelerated meltdown of other ice sheets. Indeed, Antarctica is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice annually. Alpine and Alaskan glaciers are melting far more rapidly than anyone expected. In Alaska, some homes are now dropping through holes in the thinning permafrost. In 1996, detaching Greenland ice formations dropped water into the ocean in an amount equal to 90 times the water consumption of Los Angeles. In 2005, Greenland ice deposited water equal to 225 times the water consumption of Los Angeles. The British Antarctic Survey estimates that the sea may soon rise by five millimeters annually, or an inch every five years. Each vertical centimeter of sea level covers one horizontal meter of beach, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A 50-centimeter rise in sea level would inundate 8,500 to 19,000 square kilometers of coastline and would dramatically impact such low-lying cities as Boston, Miami, and New York. Indeed, more than 75 percent of all humans live within 60 kilometers of a coast. Scientists fear an irreversible tipping point is upon us. There is no known human defense for so vast a world-changing high-water incursion.13
Global warming does not always mean a warmer place. It means there is more energy and moisture in the atmosphere, which in turn produces more rain, more violent storms more frequently, and sometimes a colder world for traditionally warm climes. Each 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (one degree centigrade) rise in temperature allows the atmosphere to hold 6 percent more water vapor. This causes more rainfall in some places and therefore longer drought in other places. Certainly weather cycles are always at play. But those cycles have been prodded and intensified by potent changes in the atmosphere and oceans due to global warming, according to numerous overlapping, international scientific studies. Since the hydrocarbon-rich industrialization of the late nineteenth century, the earth has warmed more than one degree Fahrenheit, and the mean temperature is still rising. Adding to the problem is a radical change in salt content in the rising ocean waters. Glaciers are composed of freshwater. As they melt, glaciers dilute the ocean’s natural salinity and therefore change the density of surface water. Less saline, less dense, warmer surface water does not sink as readily, thereby disrupting the natural ocean currents that keep Europe temperate and the tropics tropical. One component of the Gulf Stream is already flowing about a third slower than it did during the early 1990s. Warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico mean more frequent and suddenly explosive hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina was an example—the first of many predicted. The alphabet has become exhausted as hurricane season starts earlier in spring and extends longer into the fall and early winter.14 Katrina’s cousins are coming.
Wind currents have already changed. Westbound coast-to-coast flights take longer, require more fuel and sometimes refuel stops, and are therefore more costly. Flights east are shorter, propelled by mighty tail-winds from the west.15
Warmer weather is rewriting animal habitation and insect infestation. Mosquitoes are thriving in more places, and droughts force mosquitoes to migrate to moist realms, bringing disease with them. Malaria parasites take advantage of the warmer times to achieve full maturity more frequently. West Nile virus, discovered in 1937, is no longer an African disease. It is now found in many places in the United States from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, as well as such northern nations as Canada and the Czech Republic. Lyme disease, carried by deer ticks, has now exploded as the causal bacterium thrives farther and farther north, scientists suggest. The Centers for Disease Control report that Lyme disease incidence in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and north-central states nearly doubled during the decade beginning in 1991. Higher temperatures and milder winters in Canada have allowed the mountain pine beetle to flourish, infesting and devouring vast tracts of timberlands in British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains. Entomologists predict milder temperatures will permit the beetle to easily move north and east, plundering whole forests along the way.16
Oil is fracturing our very world.
Petroleum, especially foreign oil, is also breaking us. In the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) retaliated against the industrial world for its connection to Israel with an “oil shock” that caused long lines and served as a wake-up call to America and the West. But in the decades since, the world has continued to sleepwalk. In 1973, just before OPEC’s oil shock, the nominal average price of gasoline was about 39 cents per gallon; our nation imported some 30 percent of our petroleum. In twenty-first-century money, that 1973 price would equal about $1.71. In 2005, the price at times broke the $3 per gallon barrier; in 2006, industry watchers predicted a fast rise to $5 per gallon. Yet since 1973, imports have doubled to 60 percent of overall consumption. Transportation is the leading source of those additional import needs—more than 60 percent.17 The pump price increases expected in the years to come are fundamentally unknown. They depend on wars, political instability, and hurricanes. Only hurricanes can reliably be predicted—and even those just days in advance.
The high cost of fuel has created unemployment and fiscal hardship. Expenses have dramatically risen for aviation fuel, truck fuel, fertilizers, and every other form of nontransportation petroleum product. The industrial world has been disrupted by oil price shocks four times in the past three decades. Each of the first three shocks has been followed by a recession in America. The latest 2005 price hikes have reduced U.S. gross domestic product by about $150 billion, or about 2 percent.18
The true price of every gallon of gasoline, adding in expenditures for tax subsidies and government programs, harm to health, environmental damage, and military operations to protect the supply, is almost impossible to reliably calculate. The range of estimates of what are called external costs is so dramatic as to be an exercise in fuzzy mathematics. It is like counting stars. We know they are out there but can only guess at the astronomical figure.
Some of the most quoted and informed studies conclude the true cost of gasoline to be between $5 and $15 per gallon, creating a yearly national pump-supporting expenditure of between about $231 billion and $1 trillion. The numbers defy hardening because the costs, such as military expenditures—amounting to about $6 billion per month in Iraq—require a political measuring stick to attribute them to oil. But this much is known about external costs: They are real and massive. The Defense Department allocates from $55 billion to $96.3 billion annually to safeguarding petroleum supplies, two-thirds of which are pumped from the Persian Gulf. Tax incentives and government programs supporting oil are estimated to be at least $38 billion and perhaps as much as $114.6 billion annually. America’s 2005 energy legislation by itself extended $8 billion in tax incentives to oil producers despite the industry’s record gargantuan profits. Social, health, and environmental programs add staggering sums, but segregating how much of those expenditures are rooted in petroleum is impossible, even though most experts agree the expenses are significant.19
While the true cost of a gallon of oil still eludes the analysts, most agree that it is a soaring number that shakes all understanding of pump price and distorts the true comparative dollar appeal of alternative fuels. No baker could sell a loaf of bread, no builder could sell a new home, and no automaker could sell a car if the external costs were double or even quadruple the actual selling price. Oil has escaped a financial accounting. Beyond mere cash expenditures, the human toll of death and dismemberment arising from America’s necessary protective military presence in the Middle East as well as the harm done to the health of its citizens is incalculable. Family anguish is not measured in joules, but in jolts.
Meanwhile, since 2003, OPEC and its members have spent some $13.3 million on federal lobbying, about half of which comes from Saudi Arabia. Since 2003, oil companies have spent $59.4 million supporting the price of oil and our dependence on it. In 2005, one oil company alone, ExxonMobil, logged a string of stunning record quarterly profits. ExxonMobil’s third-quarter results, after Hurricane Katrina had wiped out Gulf Coast facilities, yielded $9.9 billion. That was a three-month record. Fourth-quarter 2005 profits rose to $10.7 billion, again a record. ExxonMobil’s profit of $1,146 per second could purchase enough gasoline for the average car to drive almost 10,300 miles. Quarterly profits for ExxonMobil alone for the rest of the century’s first decade are predicted to continue to exceed the earnings of all nonoil Fortune 500 companies combined.20
Petroleum is not just financially suffocating, it has caused the biggest transfer of wealth in the twentieth century—more than all the invasions and repressive asset seizures of dictators and warmongers. In 2002, America spent $200,000 per minute—about $105 billion per year—on foreign oil. More than $25 billion was spent that year on Persian Gulf oil. By mid-2006, foreign oil payments had escalated to $500,000 per minute. Since that first “oil shock” of 1973, more than $1.16 trillion has been transferred from the United States to oil-producing nations. The next trillion, experts estimate, will be flash-transferred in the four years between 2006 and 2010.21
When British and French petro-imperialism invented the oil states in the years after World War I, local Arab potentates swept through the desert atop camels and steeds, looting travelers and protecting tribal water wells. Forbes magazine recently declared that in the three decades since the 1973 oil shock, ten new Saudi billionaires have been created along with whole tribes of millionaires—all from the transfer of industrial wealth to desert kingdoms and totalitarian regimes. When Western money transfers to the volatile Islamic Middle East, it often directly or indirectly finances anti-American and anti-Western causes, including agitation, religious intolerance, and terrorism.22
Petropolitics, petromilitarism, and petroterrorism have thrown our world into a true clash of cultures, one that the industrialized world antithetically rushed toward with zeal and abandon. Gasoline fumes can be intoxicating. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, the Middle East has been the object of Western oil imperialism. In those first twentieth-century years, Europe’s capitals prepared for an inevitable world war of numbing proportions. France, England, and Russia eyed the Ottoman Empire of the Turks as the “Sick Man of Europe” and trembled with anticipation waiting for the sultan’s realm to break apart and leave its oil-rich Middle East territories unprotected. To win this predicted war, Winston Churchill craved fast oil-burning naval ships to replace Britain’s coal-burning fleet. Churchill understood the adage “oil don’t grow in England,” but he knew it was obtainable from Persia and Mesopotamia—that is, Iran and Iraq. Then, beginning in 1914, the men who ran the world achieved precisely what they feared most: an inevitable world war of numbing proportions.23
World War I: 8 million dead, 21 million wounded, 2 million missing in action, $180 billion spent. The Great War that many thought would be concluded within weeks dragged on mercilessly for nearly half a decade. In numbers that defy the darkest imagination, young men continually climbed out of muddy trenches to valiantly charge barbed wire, mines, and machine-gun fire. They were blown to bits, poisoned by gas clouds, and starved en masse in the irrepressible bloody conquest, loss, and bloody re-conquest of mere meters of territory.24
The disastrous 1915 Gallipoli campaign alone killed more than a half million men from both sides. During the Battle of the Somme in 1916, about a million men died from all countries; on just the first day, there were 58,000 British casualties, a third of whom were killed. At Verdun in 1916, the dead and missing were generally estimated to be nearly a million. Russia lost more than any country: mobilizing 12 million, suffering 1.7 million fatalities, 5 million wounded, and 2.5 million missing or taken prisoner. Germany’s numbers were almost as staggering.25 The best explanation of why the nations of Europe went to war and sacrificed so many men was this: They just wanted to.
But from the madness that was World War I, the industrialized world was able to standardize on oil. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford’s 1914 dream of an electric car in every barn and garage succumbed to the heartbreaking events of its demise. But even then, decades of recurring “oil famines” had placed the future on notice that oil was finite. The petroliferous Second Industrial Revolution was self-extinguishing.
Within days of World War I erupting in August 1914, the British invaded Mesopotamia to control the vast untapped petroleum that nation would yield more than a decade later when its first gusher came in. From the steps of Baghdad, the British commander in 1919 read a grandiose proclamation: “We come not as conquerors, but as liberators.” But British officials on the ground did not stop military actions, even after the ceasefire, until in 1919 they had cobbled together a new nation from a key oil-producing region of eastern Turkey and three Mesopotamian provinces to create a new oil state. London renamed this territorial assemblage Iraq.26
Not being a member of the League of Nations, America was unable to help carve up the Persian Gulf colonies of the Ottoman Empire. Victorious Great Britain and France were primed to control all Middle East oil as spoils—that is, until American oil interests objected. The American Petroleum Institute and Standard Oil led the charge. Typical was the ominous report to Woodrow Wilson’s administration submitted on May 13, 1919, by M.L. Requa, a former director of the U.S. Fuel Administration now working closely with the oil industry. Requa vigorously warned the undersecretary of state that America owned 90 percent of the automobiles in the world; it was the most rapidly industrializing nation on earth. The country was already forced to import more than 60 million barrels annually from Mexico. But Mexican exports were declining due to political conditions and were “dependent upon the whim of whatever desperado may be temporarily in the saddle in Mexico for the supply of fuel oil. . . to meet a deficit which the United States cannot supply.” No matter how domestic reserves and growth were extrapolated, argued Requa, “our petroleum reserves . . . will not last over seventeen years.”27
Requa stressed that the United States would run out of oil unless it secured equal access to Iraq. That caused the Wilson administration to launch the 1920 Open Door policy, which demanded that war victors Great Britain and France share Iraqi oil with U.S. oil companies. After years of oil imperialism that created oil states run by hand-selected sheikhs and British-ordained kings to sign on the dotted line, the famous but secretive 1928 Red Line Agreement carved up Iraq and adjacent regions into American, British, and French monopolies and spheres of interest. American, British, and French oil imperialism spread from Iraq to all of the Persian Gulf.28
The oil industry, since its inception on August 29, 1859, at a depth of 69.5 feet below the oily creek south of Titusville, Pennsylvania, has never been a free-market capitalistic enterprise. John D. Rockefeller built his oil empire on the legendary monopolistic fraud, deception, and anticompetitive conspiracies of Standard Oil. England built its oil empire on a gov-ernmentally controlled and propelled entity called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed British Petroleum. France brought together an empire of independent importers under the government-controlled Com-pagnie Française des Pétroles, thus forming its national oil-producing arm. When America demanded to join as a Red Line partner, Washington encouraged key oil companies, seven at first—Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York, Gulf Corporation, Atlantic Refining, Sinclair Oil, and two smaller firms—to create an American oil empire ultimately called the Near East Development Company. These three Western oil empires were brought together in the secret Red Line Agreement, entrenched and protected by Western military power, diplomatic prowess, economic collusion, and local avarice. Thus Mideast oil became a business acquired by government through closely or wholly controlled corporations that were completely dependent upon continuous military and diplomatic support. No other business enjoys this sponsorship, which began at the outset and continues to this day.29
Historically, the oil cartel established by the League of Nations and America collided with the seething Lawrence of Arabia-era demand by Arab and other Islamic populations to achieve independent, national rights, free of decadent Turkey and free of infidel Christian presence. On July 24, 1920, Arab nationalists learned that their hoped-for national rights had been snubbed by the League of Nations and its mandate system of colonies. Great Britain and France, aided by America, would gain dominion over their lands and the control of a precious resource that the unin-dustrialized people there did not need—but the modern West did. Moreover, even as the League of Nations denied national recognition to the Arabs, it created a refuge for persecuted Jews seeking the right of return, thus enshrining in international law the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.30
As a result, three intertwined evils—the infidel European Allies, the infidel Zionists, and the black substance the West craved—now became conflated in the Arab mind to create one great Satan. Indeed, these three evils would galvanize the Arab consciousness for virtually the next century. For the first time in fifteen hundred years, the Arabs stopped fighting each other. Sunni and Shia, tribal enemies, those of the desert and those of the city, the intellectual and the peasant, could all unite under one Islamic banner, because 1920 was am al-nakba. Forevermore, 1920 would be a black year in the collective Arabic consciousness. In Arabic, am al-nakba means “the year of the catastrophe.” The day, July 24, 1920, was nothing less than the day the jihad against the West was born.31
Immediately, populations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere in the extended Mideast revolted against the West and anything associated with its oiled aspirations. During that year, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic jihad exploded in a diverse wave of bus bombings, beheadings, arsons, brutal atrocities against missionaries, massacres of civilians, and railroad sabotage. The unmitigated violence was subdued only superficially by massive British aerial bombardment, an extended French and British occupation, and Whitehall-selected Hashemite rulers imported from the Arabian Peninsula. Certainly, these British-picked rulers cooperated with big oil. But the despots remained unloved by the disenfranchised people they governed. Moreover, the local populations did not seek the form of government London and Paris savored, theoretical democracies that could be counted upon to perpetuate oil supplies.32
With or without Hashemite kings or local strongmen, the angry, restive populations would find no common ground with the West on their own land. Arab and Islamic movements fervently reviled the West as infidels, “the enemies of Allah,” and “the sons of apes and pigs.” It was oil, not sand, that brought the West to the dunes of the Middle East. It was neither our programs nor our politics that the local people detested; the people had coexisted with all manner of egregious and detestable programs and policies for centuries. It was our very presence they detested. That presence was predicated on one product: petroleum.33
The West stayed too long, drilled too deep, and assumed too much. In 1919, the supreme elected Arab leader, Faisal, trepidatiously warned the League of Nations that his people would not sit still without a fulfillment of national aspirations even as their oil wealth was being exported. “In the old days the area was too huge,” Faisal admitted, “and in parts necessarily too thinly peopled, to communicate common ideas readily.” But, Faisal explained, “The unity of the Arabs in [southwest] Asia has been made more easy of late years, since the development of railways, telegraphs, and air-roads [air lanes].”34
Railways, telegraphs, and air lanes. Telephones, motorcars, and highways. Computers, cell phones, and Internet. Airplanes. The West is now at war with radical Islam. The industrial civilization spawned by oil is now threatened by those who possess it. Every object of modernity and technological convenience has become a weapon against the West—from the simplest cell phone that can coordinate an attack or trigger a bomb, to great 767s that can be converted into fiery missiles to destroy the tallest skyscrapers. Despite the political dangers, the social consequences, the environmental damage, and the seemingly incalculable cost both out of pocket and out of society, our addiction keeps us fixated on the substance. Like all other addictions, the addiction to oil imperils our very way of life, and indeed our survival.
No more inefficient system of energy exists than drilling for it and transporting it from the far corners of the earth and the bottom of the seas, especially when those operations are contingent on military conquest or protection. The single most fuel-inefficient undertaking on earth is arguably the heavily armed military convoy escorting oil tanker trucks in Iraq. More petroleum is undoubtedly consumed to protect the delivery than is carried in the tanker itself. Since improvised explosive devices have entered the equation, fatalities per gallon have created frightening new mileage charts.
The world is running out of oil right now. Conservation at home does nothing to reduce the wild growth in automobiles and other oil consumption in hyperindustrializing China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and elsewhere in the emerging world. The real rate of world consumption will be determined not on Main Street or Piccadilly Circus, but on the bustling new highways of New Dehli, Islamabad, Moscow, and Beijing. Bicyclers in Beijing had never seen a privately owned motor vehicle on their streets until 1984. Twenty years later, five beltways encircle Beijing as its congested sprawl copes with nearly two million automobiles. About a third of the country’s new cars are purchased by just-created millionaires who prefer such guzzlers as Hummer and Rolls-Royce. China only began importing oil in 1993 but is now the world’s second-largest consumer.35
Estimates of petroleum reserves sufficient to power an industrialized globe for the next fifteen to twenty-five years provide momentary reassurance. “Hubbert’s Peak” is not a mountaintop but the acme of the oil industry’s bell curve, the statistical moment of peak worldwide oil production predicted by geophysicist M. King Hubbert. But all the permutations of Hubbert’s Peak do not take into account sabotage, terrorism, pet-ropolitics, OPEC embargoes, or draconian price hikes. The main sources of oil are in the Middle East, followed by unstable Nigeria and Venezuela, both of which have been struggling with shaky oil industries plagued by kidnappings, facility invasions, and politicized manipulations. Three well-placed suicide bombers at Saudi Arabia’s oil choke points, a political showdown with Iran, or a Katrina-sized hurricane destroying the refinery infrastructure that hugs the Gulf of Mexico could bring the peak tumbling down. Little or no supply cushion exists to satisfy the world’s daily addiction of at least 80 million barrels of petroleum, a number that is steadily climbing with every emerging consumer in India and China. More than just transportation, the industrialized world also needs petrochemicals for the cosmetics on its cheek, the shirt on its back, the fertilizer in its fields, the drugs in its veins, and the food in its belly.36 Producing a single 1,250 pound steer requires 283 gallons of oil.
In many ways, the world is coasting on fumes.
A September 2005 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study on the coming energy shortage declared, “The supply of oil will remain fairly stable in the very near term, but oil prices will steadily increase as world production approaches its peak. The doubling of oil prices in the past couple of years is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Peak oil is at hand with low availability growth for the next 5 to 10 years.” The study ominously warned, “Once worldwide petroleum production peaks, geopolitics and market economics will result in even more significant price increases and security risks. To guess where this is all going to take us would be too speculative. Oil wars are certainly not out of the question.”37
Hence from all corners comes a desperate cry for an all-encompassing solution, some way to magically transform our society’s energy reliance from oil to something else—anything else. The radiance of solar does not require an overseas army to defend the supply line or a foreign policy to manage it. The wild wind does not require an overseas army to defend the supply line or a foreign policy to manage it. Homegrown combustibles such as corn-based ethanol do not require an overseas army to defend the supply line or a foreign policy to manage them. None of the alternatives requires an army or a foreign policy. Whatever the alternative, it will require a crash program to implement it. The clarion call of a frustrated world invokes the memory of a prior all-out program to achieve a highly technological objective—two Merlinesque words that have become icons of national will.
America wants a “Manhattan Project.” The world needs it.
On December 7, 1941, tightly formed squadrons of Japanese bombers dived from the sky with deadly precision to mercilessly attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. The next day America declared war on Japan. Three days later, Nazi Germany, honoring its Axis alliance, declared war on the United States. On December 18, 1941, now in a two-theater war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated a national crash program to develop atomic weapons before either Japan or Germany did so. Both Axis nations had active atomic programs under way. America’s secret atomic program, code-named the S-l Project, enjoyed unlimited funding as it brought thousands of physicists, weapons specialists, and other engineers together in a network of newly constructed or suddenly invented locations around the nation. “Site X" was at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and “Site Y" at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Four years after the S-l Project was launched, four bombs were successfully created: a test bomb; Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima; Fat Man, which was dropped on Nagasaki; and a fourth, never-used bomb.38
The unprecedented S-l Project became known as the Manhattan Project. Ever since, the idea of a massively financed crash program of hy-perengineering has become part of American folklore and mystique. The very term “Manhattan Project” is popular shorthand for “we can do anything—and quickly.” Understandably, those concerned with shifting from oil to alternative fuels constantly beckon for a Manhattan Project to achieve that goal. Many see a Manhattan Project for energy as an almost unattainable dream. But few understand the true nature and cost of the Manhattan Project and how easy it would be to launch such a project to fulfill the twenty-first century’s hope of extricating itself from petroleum.
The Manhattan Project of Roosevelt’s day did not as much discover nuclear science as it codified, expanded, and applied the knowledge gained over prior years of experimentation, creating a radical, new, world-changing technology. In the same vein, a Manhattan Project for energy would codify, expand, and implement our existing knowledge of alternative power sources such as solar, wind, and ethanol. Such a project would develop more than mere theories; it would yield the working infrastructure to make green energy independence a near-term reality.
Could any nation afford the financial cost of a Manhattan Project? The true numbers are more feasible than nearly anyone imagines. Total expenditures for the original Manhattan Project were about $1.89 billion in World War II dollars, spent over four years. That sum included slightly more than $512 million for the key Gaseous Diffusion Plant and $477.6 million for the Electromagnetic Plant so indispensable to fission. Actual research and development, however, clocked in at only $69.6 million. The World War II total of $1.89 billion equals about $20 billion in 2006 dollars.39
By way of perspective, during World War II and the Manhattan Project years, America spent much more on other weaponry—the 1996 equivalent of $31.5 billion on ordinary bombs, mines, and grenades, $24 billion on small arms, and $64 billion on tanks.40
How realistic is an expenditure of $20 billion today to develop independence by means of alternative fuels? Answer: It simply requires national will and a national priority. Examples abound.
The Apollo program to land a man on the moon totaled nearly $20 billion, or about $135 billion in 2005 dollars; each of the rocket programs alone, such as the Saturn rocket, cost between $28 and $45 billion in 2005 dollars—both more than a Manhattan Project. The Hong Kong Airport, which required the frenetic creation and deconstruction of several islands, opened in 1998 at a cost of $19.9 billion. The Chunnel under the English Channel cost an estimated $15 billion in the 1990s. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which was rushed into construction after the first Arab oil shock in 1973, cost nearly $9 billion at the time, which equals about $45 billion in 2005 money. The Taishet-Nakhodka Pipeline, now under construction, will carry natural gas from Siberia to northwest China over a tortuous 2,581-mile course at a projected cost of between $15 and $18 billion. Another just-announced natural gas pipeline, this one from Alaska to the lower forty-eight under the aegis of ExxonMobil, BP, and Cono-coPhillips, will require between $25 and $30 billion. The Trans Texas Corridor, a newly planned network of some 4,000 miles of intermodal highways spanning Texas, will cost $31.4 million per centerline mile or an estimated total of about $145.4 billion to $183.5 billion—give or take a few billion.41
The war in Iraq cost about $6 billion per month, or three Manhattan Project-sized enterprises annually—that is, seventeen weeks of war in Iraq costs about the same as the Manhattan Project.42
Since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, the country has been willing to undertake great enterprises like the Manhattan Project regularly. The nation has not been shy about spending large sums. If energy-starved partners in Europe and Asia were included in the finances, $20 billion over four years—the Manhattan Project budget—would emerge as a rather unspectacular sum, especially if split among the top ten industrialized nations. Indeed, all industrial nations have a vested interest in sharing clean, renewable energy to wean the world off oil.
ExxonMobil alone could fund its own Manhattan Project with six months of its 2006 hyperprofit.43
But if the United States and possibly its partners commit to a Manhattan Project for alternative energy, what form of energy would be chosen?
All too often, the simple sense, clarity, and reliability of the available energy solutions are obscured by the many lobbyists, pressure groups, and other special interests that want to spin their pet solution to the funding forefront. Some undertakings are little more than cash-intensive boondoggles projected to run for decades with no hope for an immediate cure to the world’s current precarious oil addiction. Some ventures appear to be mere public relations, tokenism by big oil or big auto as they tread technological water while the last drop of petroleum is drilled regardless of the consequences. Some seem a fanciful diversion from the shortest, smartest path to clean energy independence—like an all-out push to land a man on the moon but only after undertaking an expedition to Pluto.
Moreover, the biggest idea in energy may be the smallest solution—not great towers trailing over the horizon, but little boxes in our backyard.
Man cannot race toward an energy catholicon without stopping and looking to the heavens, for it is the sun that gave man life, and it is the sun that will sustain all future life. Even the blackest substances, such as coal, derive their dark density from the remnants of once-thriving sun-enabled life-forms subjected to the crush of centuries. No wonder Pharaoh Akhenaton in about 1350 BC proclaimed the visible sun disk to be the first all-encompassing God—not merely the chief god among a panoply of gods, but the sole God, the one God. The monotheistic cult of the sun disk predates quasi-monotheistic Zoroastrianism and completely monotheistic Judaism. Famed archaeologist and Egyptologist H. R. Hall understandably saluted Pharaoh Akhenaton as propounding a truly “rational” religion.44
But which forms of sun-imbued energy should any Manhattan Project turn to first? Experts agree that the concept of “one size fits all” is not a viable answer. Indeed, it was such a mandate that caused our addiction to fossil fuels as an omnisource. Diverse regional, seasonal, and even periodic solutions, approached in a variety of modalities, are envisioned as the basis for any new network of green renewable energies. Nations and regions should call upon their strengths to power their future. Windy places can capture wind. Sunny places can capture solar. Coastal realms and suitable terrain can capture forms of thermal. They can do so cleanly and inexhaustibly.
There are numerous alternative energy sources under development—too many to be adequately addressed in a single chapter of any book. But among the salient ones is something called clean coal. For many, the concept of clean coal is oxymoronic, like natural hairspray. But Washington is now subsidizing a $2 billion decade-long project to develop clean coal. The coal in question will not be shoveled and burned in boilers as it has been for centuries, but subjected to steam and oxygen treatments in a complex chemical combination and shift process called an integrated gasification combined cycle. The coal will be used to create noncarbon fuels, and the coal itself will be stripped of its harmful composition. The plan, enshrined in the Clean Coal Power Initiative Act, is to create a working clean coal technology by 2020 that can then be implemented in actual industrial use over subsequent decades.45
Clean coal comes complete with an attractive patriotic advertising program, a pretty logo, and a catchy name—FutureGen. But before coal ever arrives at a cleaning location it will require traditional strip and surface mining, petroleum-burning giant diggers, trucks, and other heavy-industry machinery. It will need to be transported by mighty diesel-burning railroad engines. The FutureGen project does not address that strip-mining coal is killing whole mountain ranges, altering the landscape, and wreaking havoc with the ecology. Coal mining is one of the most environmentally destructive industries in existence, and a voracious consumer of petroleum in the process. To provide the coal to be cleansed will consume vastly more petroleum that it could ever save.46
What’s more, just mining the coal subjects workers to one of the most hazardous forms of labor known to man in an industry with one of the worst safety records in history. In 2006 alone, a cascade of spectacular mine accidents and deaths spotlighted the historical deadliness of coal mining. After sixteen men were killed in four West Virginia tragedies during just several weeks of January 2006, West Virginia governor Joe Manchin issued an emergency order compelling all 544 mines in his state to stand down for a safety review.47
Dirty coal currently provides about half of America’s energy needs. Worldwide, coal is utilized similarly. King Coal is expected to continue to rule for the coming decades. Projections promise that no matter how fast U.S. energy use expands, and how many alternatives come online, coal will continue to provide about half of U.S. energy needs. Other nations currently using coal have made similar predictions for their own use.48
Cleaning dirty coal seems a protracted diversion when it is possible to merely capture existing clean sources, such as solar, wind, and ocean power. The Coal Utilization Research Council, an industry lobby group, is not eager to discuss the sense of its place in the world’s pending national petroleum emergency even as it enjoys a $2 billion decade of government-funded research. The Coal Utilization Research Council in Washington, D.C., declined to accept questions.49
A tenth of a Manhattan Project has already been diverted to the concept of clean coal. One or two full Manhattan Projects over the coming decades will undoubtedly be required to achieve this alchemist’s dream. In a similar category is nuclear energy. Nuclear reactors, as profoundly complex as they are, as many billions as they cost, as many years for construction as they require, as potentially lethal as they can become, merely heat water to create steam to turn an electricity turbine. As such, nuclear reactors represent the most intricate, costly, complicated, and deadly water boilers since man discovered flame. Nor are clean coal and nuclear energy the only costly boondoggles being pursued. It would require a thick dedicated volume to list them all.
However, numerous promising methods of harnessing energy are being overlooked, underfunded, or developed in slow motion. Many of these methods date back decades or even centuries. Many were either proven long ago or are waiting to be resurrected and brought to fruition. Not a few share a common flaw—they are simple.
Various types of thermal energy are available. Warm water rises—a fact of simple science. As it rises, the water creates a temperature differential that can be processed by a heat exchanger. Long but simple intake pipes are needed to duct the water as it rises. Ocean thermal-energy conversion, a nineteenth-century idea, has been demonstrated throughout recent decades in Cuba, Brazil, and Hawaii. In 1984, the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory tested the idea and obtained an astounding 97 percent energy conversion efficiency. But ocean thermal-energy conversion development in America has been shut down.50
A variant of the thermal-energy principle is the Deep Lake Water Cooling project now being constructed in Toronto. Large tubes resembling great alpine horns are submerged five kilometers along Lake Ontario’s natural slope. The cold water provides chill for air-conditioning, then proceeds harmlessly to the city’s potable water system. The first three intake pipes now under construction will assure seventy-five thousand tons of refrigeration, enough to air-condition one hundred of Toronto’s architectonic glass-and-steel skyscrapers or sixty-eight hundred homes. This thermal project subtracts that much of the city’s hydrocarbon signature, which would otherwise contribute to deadly global warming even as it creates delightful office cooling.51
Geothermal energy—that is, tapping the earth’s everlasting font of internal heat and steam to turn turbines and thereby make electricity—is a worldwide reality today. The process was conceived in 1903 in Larderello, Italy, in scenic Tuscany when the local prince began tests to drill into the hot steam pockets below, capturing the steam to turn power turbines. By 1904, the prince’s small test system, looking less sophisticated than a backwoods Kentucky whiskey still, was powering lightbulbs. In 1905, the palace and residences of Larderello were electrified. By World War I, a 250-kilowatt turbine powered by subterranean steam had electrified all the chemical plants and villages of the entire Larderello region. This included the area’s well-known industrial boric acid works.52
Today, hundreds of geothermal sites around the world are providing more than 8,000 megawatts of electricity. One megawatt is thought sufficient to power some 750 to 1,000 homes. As of 2000, Iceland generated 172 megawatts of geothermal-based electricity, which as of then satisfied about half its energy needs; it also supplied geothermal heat to 86 percent of Iceland’s homes. Indonesia annually generates some 600 megawatts of geothermal. The Philippines annually generates more than 1,900 megawatts of geothermal.53
The United States generates more than 2,800 megawatts of geothermal, mainly in the West. In California’s Lake and Sonoma counties, where some of the nation’s finest wine is produced, nineteen geothermal electric plants are operated. These simple installations, many concentrated in an area known as The Geysers, each generate between about forty and seventy-two megawatts, providing about 70 percent of the residential power needs from the Golden Gate Bridge north to the Oregon border. Geother-mal plants are also operated in volcano-rich Hawaii, as well as in Nevada and Utah.54
But global unexploited geothermal resources are vast. Experts disagree on how vast because—just as with oil—the proposition requires speculative drilling, sometimes just a few hundred feet below the surface, and sometimes several thousand below. Once erected, geothermal electric plants are remarkably reliable. Geothermal stations remain online 95 percent of the time, while nuclear plants are online only 65 percent and coal plants 75 percent of the time, according to a 2003 State of California study. In Italy, a century later, those Larderello plants are still generating electricity.55
The geothermal process itself is relatively simple. Experts at the Geothermal Energy Association trade group as well as the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory agree that geothermal is essentially “just a big pipe in the ground.” If done correctly, they add, the power supply and the sunken pipe works are “permanent.”56
Many countries in the world are dramatically increasing their pursuit and funding of geothermal energy—but not the United States, whose geothermal research and drilling has almost ground to a halt. The Geothermal Energy Association, in March 2006; complained that budget proposals under consideration would zero out the government’s future support for geothermal. A survey has identified forty-six potential plant sites in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. Together, these plants would generate an estimated 2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power cities the size of Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Sacramento, and Seattle combined. Yet these site proposals have not been acted upon.57
In fact, complained the Geothermal Energy Association, a long backlog exists at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on applications to develop geothermal sites. How long? Geothermal Energy Association executive director Karl Gawell answered, “Twenty-five years.” Gawell stated that in a Katrina-like government response, the Bureau of Land Management claims it lacks the clerical and administrative support to process the applications—and has lacked it for twenty-five years.58
Internal BLM summaries of outstanding applications from 1970 to 2004 include 59 applications in California, covering 97,116 acres, plus 77 in Nevada, covering 128,235 acres, and 79 in Oregon, covering 137,314 acres. The BLM’s list shows 226 lease applications waiting years for action. The BLM’s own March 2005 “Comprehensive Strategic Plan,” marked “For Internal Use Only,” clearly identifies many of the ignored applications. In Oregon, for example, application OR54587 in the Willamette National Forest, dated January 31, 1974, is still awaiting a response; application OR54517 in the Mt. Hood National Forest, dated February 25, 1974, is still awaiting a response; application OR12443 in the Mt. Hood National Forest, also dated February 25, 1974, is still awaiting a response59
Gawell added that one method the BLM has used to clear its backlog is to send letters to the original individual applicants, only to learn that, up to a quarter century later, they are deceased. The application is then removed without checking if it was passed to a successor individual or commercial entity. “It’s true,” protests Gawell, “some applicants have died waiting. The BLM’s solution is to wait until people die off before acting.” Gawell added that even if the applicants died waiting, site action should be taken. “If the lands have geothermal potential and are likely to be good candidates for development,” he said, “they [the BLM] still should do the planning review,” thereby locating the most suitable geothermal sites.60
When asked, a defensive BLM official blamed the backlog on the U.S. Forest Service for not producing the proper environmental impact statement. “We are waiting on the Forest Service,” said the BLM spokeswoman. To the question why the BLM did not follow up with the Forest Service after decades, no answer was forthcoming. A Forest Service spokeswoman did not respond to the implications of the BLM charge or Gawell’s complaint. But she confirmed that her agency was aware of the backlog and hoped to catch up within a half decade, then make their recommendations to the BLM, which would then start its own lengthy process. Only after the BLM acts can industry proceed on the site development. Thus, the Forest Service spokeswoman acknowledged, significantly expanding geothermal in America was probably decades away. “Ironically, Congress just passed a big new package of tax incentives for new geothermal plants that get on line by 2008—a very few will be developed, but for most sites, that will never happen.”61
But for Gawell and the geothermal industry, their relatively simple contribution to overall energy independence is consciously being orphaned. “This all has a chilling effect,” Gawell stated. “When an applicant sees it can take decades just to get an application process—and you can die waiting—why bother?" The BLM counters that since 2001 the agency has acted on some two hundred site applications within its backlog. The agency states that this progress is ten times faster than in prior years, but concurs that new development is still an inexorably slow process measured in many years.62
Natural gas is said to be a cheaper form of electrical generation by a few pennies per kilowatt.63 But when external costs for military, health, and environmental damage are added, geothermal is less expensive than natural-gas-fired plants—which also require drilling. Moreover, geothermal does not depend upon a $25 billion pipeline crossing the continent or supertankers that require naval protection, or diplomatic intervention. Geothermal is just a pipe in the ground.
As promising as geothermal is, it is just a portion of any overall solution. Partnering in importance are wind and solar energy.
Wind energy has been used for centuries to pump farm water from the ground, mill grain, and send great ships across the ocean. The media is constantly filled with fascinating articles about elaborate wind-power endeavors. Everyone knows the familiar image of a modern, high-efficiency windmill resembling a giant propeller mounted on a tall tower. Denmark today derives 20 percent of its total energy needs from wind turbines; they are all privately owned. Germany now operates more than 16,000 wind turbines, mainly in the northlands near Denmark; the country is systematically phasing out all its nuclear reactors, and by 2010, wind will provide about 12.5 percent of Germany’s total power requirements. Ireland generates about 500 megawatts, of which 25 megawatts is conveyed from offshore installations.64
The United States could satisfy 40 percent of its energy needs from the steady winds of North Dakota alone. North Dakota is the windiest state in the Union with a potential of 1.2 gigawatts, followed by Texas, possessing 1.1 gigawatts, and then Kansas, South Dakota, and Montana, each offering a full gigawatt of potential. Just twenty states from coast to coast possess enough windy terrain to power most of the country’s needs. Indeed, when all states are included, enough wind energy blows to supply the United States’ power needs three times over.65
Critics assail giant windmills for their appearance, especially in otherwise visually appealing land areas. The elongated blades, with even longer ones constantly in development, have killed birds and bats. Proponents argue that oil wells, power lines, nuclear reactors, and the other edirices of an energy infrastructure all disrupt the landscape and also kill their share of birds and bats. Indeed, windmill advocates argue, skyscrapers regularly kill numbers of birds.66
Wind technology is constantly improving, making every new generation of wind turbine that much more powerful. In the current century, Denmark replaced most of its existing 1,300 turbines, which were capable of generating 100 megawatts each, with just 300 turbines capable of 300 megawatts each. Major wind farms, with their long arrays of giant windmills, are being planted worldwide, from the desert north of Palm Springs, California, to Ireland to Germany. General Electric alone has produced some 5,000 windmills worldwide. State-of-the-art 1.8-megawatt wind machines costing about $1 million to $2 million could each power some 500 to 600 homes. Yet wind energy now provides a meager 1 percent of America’s energy. Federal energy officials and even industry sources do not expect to supply as much as 6 percent of the nation’s needs until 2020. At the same time, all the stops are being pulled out to approve and finance gargantuan natural gas pipelines traversing the world’s most defying terrain and costing between $10 billion and $30 billion each. Wind experts estimate that for every billion dollars invested in wind energy, 2 billion kilowatt hours will be generated daily for twenty years. By comparison, that same billion spent on natural gas will purchase just about 20 billion cubic feet, or just a two-day supply of electricity.67
Even more promising than wind is solar. The traditional picture of solar energy is thick, glass-encased panels generating electricity through photovoltaic cells. Those panels are becoming increasingly more efficient, but they still require a decade of use before they achieve cost-effectiveness. Without government assistance, the affordability of solar energy is out of reach for most. Moreover, as important as they are, those panels are restricted to certain types of spacious surfaces or landmasses.68
Critics argue that panels would require a landmass of 10,000 square miles to renewably generate all of America’s energy. Advocates suggest utilizing great tracts of unused American desert and prairie, as well as highway median strips, offshore sites that would function much as offshore oil-drilling platforms or wind farms do, abandoned military bases, and, most important, rooftops. “We have virtually unlimited flat rooftops in America—millions of square miles,” affirms Jon Slangerup, CEO of Solar Integrated Technologies of California. He adds, “Consider millions and millions of square feet of industrial flat rooftop just in California. That untapped potential alone could generate ten gigawatts of electricity per sunlight hour—and that doesn’t even count the additional rooftops of residential and governmental sites.”69
Moreover, the latest generation of solar is not a rigid panel, but thin, flexible film just a sixteenth inch thick, completely unprotected and exposed to the elements, that can be installed atop any structure from a flat warehouse roof to a slanted military tent. Solar Integrated Technologies utilizes solar film in great rolls. The product has already been installed on numerous warehouse and school roofs in California. Each installation generally produces enough power to feed electricity back into the grid. That earns money or credit with the local utility where the law mandates that utilities pay for private electricity transmitted back into the grid.70
But the most astonishing development in solar energy will completely rewrite the rules of solar energy and electrical generation. Konarka of Boston is one of an elite group of companies that is developing nanosolar, that is, organic nanotechnology. The photovoltaic electricity will be generated not by panels big enough to hold in your hand but at the molecular level. Nanosolar materials will routinely be printed, stamped, and transparently admixed into fabrics, plastics, and wallpaper. Solar will become cheap and abundant, an intrinsic aspect of mass production like stain-resistant coatings. Nanosolar will become an innate part of the surfaces of future laptops, roofing tiles, drapes, and other objects. Straight, flat surface requirements will be a thing of solar energy’s past as this seemingly magical technology works invisibly even in common devices such as cellular phones, binoculars, gutters, vests, and entire building exteriors.71
Konarka has already attracted some $60 million in investment as well as partnerships with such multinationals as Chevron Oil, Eastman Chemical, Siemens, and DuPont, with additional participation by such national entities as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Electricité de France. Other nanosolar companies are scampering to proliferate their own product partnerships. Nanosolar is not a far-future development. True, nanosolar is years away from omnipresence. But the U.S. military is already developing applications, and major partners such as Chevron, Siemens, various textile makers, and others are planning product rollouts as early as 2010.72
There are many forms of nonpolluting, renewable alternative energies. Their value to the world’s overall energy solution is more than just in their ability to generate electricity, which eliminates dependence on earth-killing hydrocarbons, such as natural gas and coal. Yes, clean, renewable forms of electricity such as solar, wind, and geothermal will replace the coal used to heat our homes, run our appliances, and power our factories. But equally or perhaps more important, those new renewable forms will also be used to make fuel to operate our motor vehicles.
Creating fuel requires an industrial process that requires energy. It takes energy to make fuel. No one can wave at the wind, bask in sunlight, or wade in water to harness the power needed to drive a car. These power sources require machinery to extract the energy of the sun directly or indirectly stored or transduced in such sources as fossil matter, coal, wind, photosynthesis, and of course solar itself.
When the source of the energy that creates, refines, and distributes the fuel is clean and renewable, then we have truly begun energy salvation. But which fuel is best? Numerous seemingly nonpolluting fuels are available. Among them are biodiesel, methane, and ethanol. Each comes equipped with its own high-pressure lobby group. But ethanol, made of corn, has taken the lead in national attention as an alternative to petroleum. What began as an additive functioning as a 10 and 15 percent gasoline extender has become elevated to a potential major ingredient in a gallon of gas. E85, for example, is an emerging blend of automobile fuel composed of 85 percent ethanol and only 15 percent gasoline. Dedicated E85 pumps are now being established at gas stations, mainly in the Midwest’s corn-rich farm belt.73
At first blush, ethanol from corn appears to be a solution from America’s heartland, a win-win proposition in the struggle to free the world from harmful hydrocarbons and politically embroiling fuel. But American ethanol cannot stand on its own. Ethanol actually depends upon the continued use of petroleum and by necessity increases petroleum consumption and greenhouse gases. Many experts say ethanol simply uses more petroleum than it saves. For example, a key series of studies was conducted by Tad Patzek, a University of California geoengineer, and David Pi-mentel, a Cornell University expert in life sciences, energy, and sustainable agriculture. Pimentel’s and Patzek’s studies asserted that “ethanol production using corn grain required 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced” and that even proposed alternative ethanol cellulose sources other than corn, such as switchgrass, wood, and straw, “required 50 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.” Those energy expenditures cover a range of hydrocarbon users from the diesel-burning tractors and combines on the farm to the ordinary trucks needed for transport to and from the industrial centers.74 “In plain words,” Pimentel explained, “it takes 1.29 gallons of petroleum or petroleum equivalents to produce one gallon of ethanol.”75
The conclusion that ethanol drank more petroleum than it saved subjected the two researchers to a vilification campaign by ethanol industry lobbyists, according to Pimentel. ‘Our first such report was reviewed by twenty-six top scientists who advised the secretary of energy,” he said, “and they unanimously approved it. But two members of Congress from ethanol-producing states had us investigated, our very honesty was investigated.” Patzek and Pimentel say they welcomed the investigations, which ¯ they say sustained their findings. “But now I would like another investigation,” Patzek insisted, “a thorough investigation of this entire affair.”76
When asked about the Pimentel and Patzek studies, a National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition spokesperson stated that such studies were “discredited,” adding, “Only uneducated people would write such a thing, or believe such a thing.” A second official from the organization stated, “I concur. Such people are uneducated.”77
Patzek denied he was uneducated, citing his coauthorship of 177 scientific papers, and five books soon to be published. His resume includes degrees in chemical engineering and engineering physics, as well as a prior stint with Shell Development, where he worked on “enhanced oil recovery methods and evaluated the future of U.S. energy supply from tar sands, heavy oil, and coal.” He added, “I have taken more courses in thermodynamics than almost anyone at Berkeley.” Patzek, who has published his findings widely, says he will not back down and has more scientific peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic coming out. However, said Patzek, he must now must keep future articles a secret until after publication to avoid pressure on academic editors by ethanol interests.78
Pimentel also denied he was uneducated, explaining he was an Oxford University graduate and author of six hundred scientific papers and twenty-five books. “The problem is the ethanol people have a lot of money,” says Pimentel, adding staunchly, “This is not about energy or science. What is driving ethanol is politics and big money. You can quote me!”79
A senior alternative fuels expert from a leading company within the automotive industry that has abstained from the ethanol bandwagon concurred. “Ethanol is just a scam,” he said, “and I hope you have the courage to say so publicly!”80
Criticizing corn carries a price. Even a March 1997 study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) documenting the adverse energy-tax effects of ethanol was viciously attacked by corn interests. After the study, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, in a long letter written June 6, 1997, demanded an official explanation and self-investigation by the GAO of itself. Throwing down the gauntlet, Grassley demanded answers to a series of fiery, accusatory questions. Question 2: “[Explain why] the report is most egregiously flawed by giving the appearance of being a cost-benefit analysis when it clearly is not.” Question 4: “Was it your intention to deceive Congress and the public, or was this the unavoidable outcome given the narrow, specific nature of the questions you were required to answer?" Questions 5 and 6: “Why did you bury your admission on page 23 that this report should not be viewed as a cost-benefit analysis, instead of highlighting this crucial point at the beginning?" Question 9: “Why did you fail to report that the elimination of the alcohol fuels tax incentives would create additional consumer costs in the reformulated gasoline markets?" Questions 12, 13, and 14: “Did you not realize that by framing your discussion of energy impact by measuring ethanol’s energy security benefit in relation to its displacement of crude oil instead of [the deadly additive] MBTE, that you would be obscuring the importance of ethanol in reducing MBTE imports?" Grassley’s letter even excoriated the GAO for including the history of congressional action on behalf of ethanol. Question 16: “What purpose was served by Appendix I, Chronology of the Legislation and Events Affecting Ethanol Fuel Use?”81
Despite Grassley’s “J’sccuse,” GAO officials answered point by point and reiterated their assertion about ethanol appending that the additional attendant military cost was therefore a foregone conclusion: “We concluded in our report that the alcohol fuels incentives do not significantly reduce petroleum imports. Therefore, defense expenditures and foreign assistance to protect oil supply lines from the Middle East were appropriately beyond the scope of this report.”82
The ethanol industry itself advocates the least negative study available, this one by Argonne National Laboratory, which concludes that only three-quarters of a million BTUs of fossil fuels are required for each 1 million BTUs of ethanol delivered, or about three-quarters of a gallon of petroleum or equivalents to produce a single gallon of ethanol. But, says Pimentel, “Argonne left out many of the energy inputs, such as the energy used by farm machinery and their maintenance. They left out processing equipment. They left out the petroleum used in the production of hybrid corn.”83
The ethanol industry trumpets the Argonne analysis because the same study also concludes that traditional gasoline production requires even more petroleum, about 1.23 million BTUs of fossil energy consumed for each million BTUs of gasoline delivered. The higher cost of producing a traditional gallon of gasoline sets forth the ecologic and economic sophistry that it takes “more gasoline to make gasoline” than to make ethanol—ethanol is therefore preferred, not because it functions as a solution, but because it is the lesser of two energy evils. Either way, these studies ipso facto demonstrate the inherent inefficiency of the whole concept of gasoline-based internal combustion. Numerous studies agree that it takes more than a gallon of petroleum to produce and deliver a gallon of gasoline. Importantly, all the key studies generally bypass the oil burned by the tanks, trucks, aircraft, and naval ships that attach to the oil industry.84
American ethanol by definition must work with gasoline. An oil disruption today would halt or radically reduce ethanol production, depending upon the severity of the disruption. Therefore, ethanol is not an alternative as much as an adjunct with a strong lobbying and advertising movement behind it.
Moreover, ethanol requires farmland and heavy petroleum-burning farm machinery. There is not enough farmland to produce all the ethanol the nation needs to replace gasoline. Indeed, ethanol industry proponents and experts believe ethanol comes with a built-in ceiling: only 30 percent of the nation’s needs could be solved by ethanol, and even that would require an estimated two to three decades of additional farm, distillery, and distribution expansion. However, even if doable, that expansion in ethanol comes at a significant cost.85
The American government pays an unnecessary 51-cent-per-gallon subsidy for every gallon of ethanol, a price support achieved by a convergence of lobbying and commercial interests. This subvention is granted to the oil-company blenders as an “incentive” to blend the ethanol yielded by such giant agribusiness concerns as Cargill and ConAgra. One of those leading corn interests, Archer Daniels Midland, has been the subject of multiple criminal investigations, and in October 1996 it agreed to pay the largest criminal antitrust fine in history, $100 million, for lysine price fixing. The company’s executives in Decatur, Illinois, were indicted right along with the company. Among the statements secretly videotaped by the FBI’s mole was the assertion “The customer is the enemy.”86
The new 51-cent-per-gallon subsidy comes by way of HR 4520, the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, signed into law on October 22, 2004, by President George W. Bush. Within the Jobs Creation Act was the little noticed Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit. The next year, 2005, $2.1 billion in tax credits were issued to oil companies to blend some four billion gallons of ethanol. These were not tax deductions, but tax credits that allow a write-off directly from the oil companies’ bottom-line tax bill. In turn, the 51-cent subsidy boosted ethanol demand, which in turn raised the price of a bushel of corn for producers such as Cargill, and concomitantly inflated the cost of ethanol at the pump by as much as 30 percent. Sources in the ethanol industry readily concede this subsidy functions as “a pass-through subsidy” to corn and ethanol producers.87
The fast growth of ethanol is in large measure also pegged to the introduction of flex-fuel cars from General Motors and Ford. These cars, which employ a capability first achieved decades earlier by Henry Ford in the Model T, enable twenty-first-century vehicles to seamlessly operate on a combination of fuels, from traditional gasoline to ethanol-rich E85. At first appearance, the introduction of flex-fuel cars appears to be a dynamic move toward homegrown energy independence. Ford has already sold 1.6 million such flex-fuel cars and trucks and will by the end of 2006 add another 250,000 vehicles. GM is aggressively marketing E85 in various parts of the Midwest.88 But every gallon of American ethanol consumed requires the world consume and endure more petroleum burning.
America’s ethanol industry is keenly aware of its dependence upon petroleum. Its industry trade group has called for new processing plants to be partially driven by renewables and is also investigating utilizing other cellulose products, such as switchgrass. But those developments are many years away.89
However the 51-cent-per-gallon subsidy is here today. That has started a frantic gold rush to produce corn to sell to oil companies to blend. Those GM and Ford flex-fuel vehicles and pumps sprouting throughout the Midwest and beyond only expand the market. In 2006, 97 ethanol plants produced four billion gallons. But the industry hopes to double its output by 2012. Some 40 plants are now under construction and 150 are fast jumping from drawing board to construction. But coal is cheaper than natural gas, so ethanol will now also become a daily consumer of tons of coal. Hence, many of those new ethanol plants will be rushed into operation as cheap coal-burning facilities.90
For example, the Gold-Eagle Cooperative of Iowa is now burning 300 tons of coal daily—three railroad carloads—to produce 150,000 gallons of ethanol a day. Affable Gold-Eagle Cooperative general manager Brad Davis happily explained that hazardous particulate matter was greatly reduced by his refineries. “This is clean coal,” he said proudly. “You can’t even see the smoke coming out of the chimney.” Asked if the coal was mined by traditional smoke-spewing, heavy, diesel-thirsty coal-mining equipment, then transported by diesel trains and off-loaded and processed by any number of greenhouse-inducing diesel processes, Davis answered, “I guess it is.”91
Ironically, ethanol is achieving genuine green independence for Brazil. Brazilian ethanol comes from sugarcane, which American soil cannot grow in cheap abundance. Most important, ethanol refineries are driven not by coal or hydrocarbons but by a sugarcane by-product called bagasse. Hence, Brazilian ethanol is genuinely renewable and sustainable. Flex-fuel vehicles manufactured by Ford and GM for the Brazilian market can use ethanol that exceeds an 85 percent admixture. They can run on El00, that is, 100 percent ethanol. Zooming petroleum prices in 2006 pushed Brazilian ethanol into profitability and has already ended the country’s importation of foreign oil. Indeed, Brazil has been exporting millions of gallons of ethanol to the United States. Today, more than 28 percent of all Brazilian vehicles operate on either 100 percent sugarcane ethanol or a substantial ethanol mix. Brazil owes its success story to more than two decades of ethanol production heavily subsidized by the government, Manhattan Project-style, plus an intelligent choice of sugarcane as a feedstock, and the ability to drive the industry by burning alternative bagasse. Today, Brazilian ethanol stands on its own, almost free of subsidy, as a free-market fuel—homegrown and almost pollution free.92
Brazilian sugarcane ethanol packs eight times the energy production efficiency of a gallon of corn ethanol. Yet the American importation of Brazilian ethanol is profoundly obstructed by a 54-cent-per-gallon special tax designed to keep this energy solution out of the country in favor of petroleum-dependent corn ethanol. Indeed, even American investment in Brazilian sugarcane ethanol has been limited by Washington-imposed restrictions.93
Whether American ethanol becomes a hot new gasoline displacer or just continues as a popular extender, the process will already have received nearly a fifth of a Manhattan Project. The balance of a Manhattan Project should be paid by 2010. When that occurs, society will not be much closer to decreasing oil imports or petroleum-based pollution.
Then what is the answer for an industrialized world thirsting for energy, panicking that its petropolitical supply may at any moment be fatally ligated by terrorist attack, by governmental blackmail, or by a world so warmed that its hurricanes are now vastly more powerful and unstoppably more frequent? Does the answer lie in great new infrastructures, massive new pipelines, or monumental arrays? Many say the real answer lies in the water in our glass, the palms of our hands, and a small box in our backyard.
Once more, it is the inestimable power of the sun and its fundamental universe force that commands, a force as prodigious as a great star and yet as infinitesimal as a molecule. Of all the elements of the known universe cataloged by the periodic table, this one leads them all. It is number one, the first, the most elemental, the beginning of all life and for many its salvation as well.
It is hydrogen.