Free At Last

I just got off the phone with a physicist from Silicon Valley.  He’s not just any scientist.  He’s been the CEO of a super computer company and now is hired by venture capitalists to determine the potential of emerging hydrogen energy companies.  What he told me was eye opening.  Hydrogen has long been viewed as the ultimate solution to the energy crisis.  It’s the most common substance in the universe and can be converted to hot energy without any CO2 or other pollutants.  The problem is it currently takes more energy to convert hydrogen than the energy it produces.  (This is a common problem for new energy sources.)  Second, currently we have no hydrogen energy grid to deliver hydrogen fuel across the country.  Well both those problems are within our grasp of being solved.  All we need is the political will to make it happen.  My scientist friend said if we had the guts to invest $25 billion a year for five years, we would solve the last remaining barriers to economically creating almost infinite energy.  Second, for an equal amount we could create a Hydrogen Distribution Network to fill everyone’s fuel cells in our neighborhoods.  That’s a lot of money you say.  $50 billion for 5 years is $250 billion bucks.  But wait, that’s just two years of financing the known direct cost of the Iraq War.  It’s less than one half of one percent of Gross Domestic Product.  It’s less than one half the annual profits of the big oil companies.  And for what?  The end of our dependence and entanglements of Middle Eastern oil despots.  And the beginning of a new era of sustainable abundance.  So what are we doing about it?

Well the CEO’s of the bloated oil companies who collectively made $123 billion last year and came to Washington, got nicked with a few sarcastic remarks which don’t amount to more than throwing spit balls at an oil tanker, got on their jet fuel-guzzling private jets and flew back to their mansions. Why doesn’t anything happen?  Could it be the oil lobby has more influence than we do?

A lot is being written about the price of oil now because what’s happening is so serious.  This is how I see it:
•    Oil is a strategic resource.  It impacts the cost of everything.  The oil companies don’t make it.  They just pump it.  Oil companies don’t add much unique value.  Gasoline is as low-tech fuel; most of the energy released by burning it is wasted.  Oil companies have done little invention or innovation except in finding ways to extract it.
•    Oil is a natural resource.  Nature created it.  Since the use of oil impacts the quality of all our lives, those who control it have a special social responsibility to all of us.  This isn’t socialism; it’s common sense.
•    In the 1980’s we decided that competition wasn’t an important pillar of free market capitalism so we cancelled our anti-trust laws and the oil companies merged into a powerful club.
•    In spite of record profits, oil companies are investing little in new oil field development or refineries.
•    As percent of profits oil companies are not seriously investing in clean renewable energy resources; indeed the CEO of Exxon said that Exxon is an oil company not an energy company.  The biggest use of oil profits has been to buy their own stock and issue dividends to shareholders.
•    Demand for oil worldwide (including China and India) has risen 10-15% while prices have doubled.
•    Speculators have created an oil-commodities bubble similar to our internet-housing bubbles.
•    Turning food (corn) into fuel is boondoggle forced upon us by big agriculture.  It’s causing food riots and is a lousy fuel.
•    Our energy policy now represents the greatest transfer of wealth from working Americans to foreign despots in the history of the world.  Our children spend a day’s wage to fill up a tank of gas and money ends up building luxury hotels in Dubai or providing night-vision goggles to the Taliban.
•    The people who control our energy policy don’t care.  They are part of a new class of super-wealthy who have their own jets, their own schools, their own security forces, their own banks and fortresses and private islands to survive whatever happens.
•    There are many myths that all of this is the inevitable working of global capitalism and everything is playing out according to divinely inspired markets.  It’s not.  The economy as been rigged by years of corruption and concentration of power accompanied by a relentless P.R. machine telling us this is the best we can hope for.

One of the healthiest responses to injustice and avoidable suffering is to focus our anger into a loud voice aimed at leaders and allow our cultural megaphone to turn up our volume.  I suggest we grab our Congressmen by their lapels and insist that oil companies invest 25% of profits in a new, private Institute for Energy Independence which funds honest science in scalable clean renewable technologies especially hydrogen.  Insist big oil companies must have independent board chairs and at least 30% of the board be non-stock holders.  And take $25 billion a year out of private, no bid “defense” contracts (we evidently pay KBR $75 to do a load of wash for our troops in Iraq because of a no-bid contract) and build a Hydrogen Energy Web for energy delivery.  If we do this, car companies will build the cars.

None of this will happen overnight, but it will happen if we don’t give up or give in.  We must not listen to stories about how this won’t work by those who prosper from the status quo.  We are not helpless. Go to Write Your Representative or Congress.org and write your Congressperson today.  Demand a focused, funded plan to free us from oil slavery.

Imagine a future  free of oil.  In 5 years.  Just imagine.

To visit American Dream Project’s home page, click here.

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