My Energy Crisis Paper!

For my capstone course in the History Department at the University of Rochester, I have chosen to write a research paper exploring the cultural currents of the "energy crisis" in the 1970s. I've spent the last two weeks reading far too many newspaper articles about gas lines, the Arab embargo, and the Carter administration, and it's almost humorous how easy it is to predict the positions of opinion writers from 40 years ago based solely on my impression of their publication's biases today.
I've been starved for time or subject matter to blog about as of late, so simply to get myself back in the habit, I'm going to give you my preliminary thesis for the paper.
The "energy crisis" was an economic, cultural, and political upset in the United states that resulted from drastic short term shocks to the world supply of crude oil. The oil embargo woke Americans up to two realities: first, dependence of foreign oil would inevitably rise and second, world fossil fuel supplies were ultimately finite. Gasoline shortages and brown-outs scared American consumers and made conservation politically salient, which was reflected in the initiatives of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations to encourage conservation by consumers as a short term solution to the "crisis".
However, Jimmy Carter's reference to domestic efforts towards conservation and energy independence as "the moral equivalent of war" can safely be dismissed as hyperbolic, and this attitude certainly didn't reflect public opinion. At different points in the 70s, a significant portion of Americans believed the "energy crisis" to be a product of political and corporate machinations. The reality of the "energy crisis" is that this moment of heightened political awareness of conservation, finite-supply, and energy independence issues occurred at a time when all of the 'easy to extract' oil was gone. The real solution to the problem was that American consumers would have to pay higher prices for fuel to support more expensive exploration and drilling technologies.
Contrary to the claims of conservation advocates, the supply of future energy did exist, it simply had yet to be developed, and once it was the so-called "energy crisis" evaporated. This period remains of interest for today's environmentalists, however, because the questions that were raised in the 70s about finite supply of petroleum and the environmental costs of developing hard-to-get sources were accurate, but untimely. Back then, even conservative projections predicted that enough energy resources remained to power the global economy past 2030, and many placed their hopes for the future in the development of futuristic alternative energy sources such as nuclear fusion.
Perhaps today the energy issues we face are more the "moral equivalent of war" than they were when Carter spoke. 40 years later and the basic problems of industrial civilization raised during this period remain unsolved. Unfortunately, though, we don't have the same luxury afforded previous generations: discounting the future.

The Truth about the Energy Crisis

Energy is an enormously salient contemporary issue. From the pending lift on the ban of Hydraulic Fracking in New York State to Obama's deferred decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, the voices yelling about the environment our energy are getting louder. Greenies point to the BP spill. Energy companies fight back in the battle for public opinion with "clean coal" tv spots that tie the issue to the economy.

No one is wrong to tie the issues of environmental protection and economic recovery. They are intrinsically linked. But...

It's too easy to loose sight of the truth about the energy crisis: that the sun is really our only source of power. Discounting geothermal energy, all of our energy is already coming from the sun, albeit indirectly. The calories we consume were once plant matter that harnessed the sun's power through photosynthesis, and fossil fuels are no more than extremely pressurized organic matter. The gasoline in your car is brought to you courtesy of very very old organisms that accumulated the energy through photosynthesis that is pushing you down the highway.

Humanity is lucky that Earth has an abundance of fossil fuels that have accumulated over the history of life on the planet. Harnessing their power has allowed us to build a vast modern civilization. It's as if life on Earth has built of a cache of the sun's energy to propel an intelligent species toward progress.

It's time we realized, though, that the only source of energy that Earth really has is the sun. Even wind farms are harnessing energy created by climate patterns, which are created by the sun's seasonal warming and cooling of air. I believe that the next truly great innovation of civilization will be to directly harness the sun's energy. No reliance on organic matter. No reliance on fossil fuel energy reserves. Such a direct and efficient method of gathering energy has boundless possibilities for economic development.

First, we will start using solar panels more widely. Eventually we will plaster the Earth with them. Then someone will realize it's more efficient to put a giant dish in orbit that always collects sunlight and transmit it in compressed microwave form to the Earth. And finally, man will truly master nature by building a Dyson Sphere around the sun.

Democracy in its Twilight

All I could think about during my trip to our capitol was the fact that Congress has only a 9% approval rating. Seriously, what are we DOING when our representatives don't represent us?

Imparting Cultural DNA

I just spent my day at a career fair in NYC. Why is it that I am 22 years old and still feel like a child? A quarter of my life is passed and I am still not a self-supporting adult?

I've heard someone somewhere say that adolescence ends at 25. How can that be when we are physically mature at 18? Because when our species transformed from monkeys into people, we began building a world that requires more than physical maturity to navigate.

All other forms of life communicate to their progeny how to behave through DNA. The double helix encodes all the molecular information necessary for how that organism should "be". It tells a dandelion how to flower, an elephant to grow a trunk, and a birds to instinctively migrate.

Homo Sapiens are much more complex than any of these creatures, of course. We use tools. We build cities. We trade stocks, options, and bonds representing equity in invisible corporate entities. We speak. We fall in love. It takes more than the genetic, molecular encoded information in DNA to teach a young human how to understand these phenomena.

We use a mechanism of our good ol' intelligence to pass this information to our children: culture. I define culture as the "stuff" our parents give us when they show us how to live. There are so many kinds of ways to live, and that's how we see such a vast difference in cultural practices and values.

How could this possibly be relevant to my career fair? Because the prep-school, the college education, and your internships are all slowly bringing you into the culture of the working world. There are basic best practices in this world that are necessary to being a productive, pro-active member. I have another two years of intellectual, cultural, and "productivity" adolescence to look forward to because that fraction of the 7 billion people on Earth I have come in contact with hasn't finished socializing me. We've all got nature, but nurture takes time.

Corporations are NOT People

I'm a person. You're a person. We vote. Corporation are not people. But the U.S. government thinks they are.

Last year's Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission established corporate personhood for purposes of campaign finance. That decision effectively abolished limitations on the campaign contributions that a candidate can receive from a single source. A candidate's millionaire friends can channel as much money as they want to the campaign through Super Political Action Committees, which, while they are not technically affiliated with the campaign on paper, are run by former campaign directors as a campaign program bloated with funding. These "Super PACs" are responsible for the prolific ads in states with early primaries. 

With Citizens United, the influence of money in politics and its corruption of democracy are complete because now corporations are "people" entitled to the "free speech" of supporting candidates with financial contributions. Corporations are not people; they are collective bodies guided by the sole mandate to increase its profits. Isn't it obvious how a corporate body established for profit will abuse the opportunity for "free speech" in our political process?

I had the rare opportunity to ask Justice Scalia how he, a strict textualist, found basis for corporate personhood in the Constitution. His answer? The First Amendment protects free speech by people, and does not distinguish whether they must be individuals or  can be groups. Seems to me like strict-constructionism has devolved into an argument you might find on the History Chanel: 


"Well, there is no evidence that the founding fathers DID NOT want corporations to choose the president. There is also no evidence that the founding fathers weren't Aliens, so they probably were."

Candidate befriends a business. Candidate promises deregulation. Corporation gives millions of dollars to the Super PAC supporting that candidate. Candidate is in corporation's pocket. Super PAC runs non-stop ads with inflammatory remarks and dramatic music. Average American's opinion is influenced. Votes are bought. Candidate wins. Corporation runs government.

Now, as the Republican primary moves forward, the candidate with the largest war chest of these unlimited corporate funds (Mitt Romney) is the obvious frontrunner. This isn't democracy. It's concentration of power in the hands of those who already have it. I'm convinced that corporate power over elected representatives is responsible for terrible legislation like SOPA. It's abhorrent, but it is also the future. As we the people continue to lose the political institutions established to protect our rights as human beings, our lives and the lives of our children will increasingly be run by some company's bottom line as we are subjected to the ultimate passivity: consumerism. Buy what they sell us. Elect who they tell us.

Domestication

In Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steal, the brilliant ornithologist turned geographer/historian of UCLA identifies the ready availability of domestic-able animals on the Eurasian continent as one of the key factors determining the westward direction of conquest that begun in 1492. Horses, cattle, oxen, sheep, and swine were all domesticated not only to feed humans, but also to perform work. For millenia, horses and oxen provided the work that transported goods or powered grain mills.

Civilization is founded upon the ability of the innovative and the ingenious entrepreneurs among us to subject animals to their will. Today, the subject of these domesticating efforts are no longer beasts, but consumers, and the most powerful men and women have manipulated the behavior of their fellow humans to bring them money and power. Consumers are made to believe that they cannot perform a host of self-supporting tasks for themselves. If something in the home breaks, a repairman is called, and Billy Mays has a great new product on  television that you simply must buy!

I can't help but feel lost as a member of a public that has had the wool pulled over its eyes. We sit and watch mindless television. We are told what to buy by advertisements and who to vote for by CNN, FOX, or MSNBC. We work long and hard, only to have 1/3 of our income appropriated by the government and the rest of it appropriated by rich CEO's pandering microwaves, iPods, or cell phone service. I thought the 13th Amendment ended slavery?

What makes me truly despair is that the comforts of a first-world lifestyle are not necessary, but that we have been made to believe they are by years of social conditioning. Even as I write this, I am not willing to smash my laptop in protest. I am a calf, locked up in the close-quartered cells of a dairy farm, unable to escape my fate as I, my peers, and the vast majority of first-world citizens have been domesticated to serve the purpose of more clever and more powerful human beings.

Who of these lives more like an animal, and who lives more like a man?

Politics in the Digital Age

Check it out. The GOP hasn't even nominated a candidate for president, and they have already written the manual on how to beat Obama.

Their ace in the hole? Use Barack's words against him. Literally, Republicans have amassed scores of sound bites and video clips from as long ago as 2008 in which Obama makes promises to fix the economy. Their strategy is to use the man's amazing oratory against him by throwing these clips from the past at voters as evidence of Obama's failure.

Say Republicans win the Presidency in 2012. What is to keep Democrats from doing exactly the same thing in 2016? With the proliferation of campaign material on the Internet, it's impossible to hide a politician's record in the Digital Age.

Given Americans' love for scandal and how much we love to hate incumbents, this could be a very bad trend. I see either of two outcomes in following this development to its logical end. Either politicians will never make promises on the campaign trail (and then what do we have to judge them on at the polls?), or George W. Bush will be the last two-term president in history.