finding resilience in uncertain times | climate, food, energy, safety, money

George Bush wasn’t all bad. It seems that he understood something crucial—probably because of Dick Cheney’s insistence. As he put it bluntly, back in more innocent times in May 2001: “What people need to hear, loud and clear, is that we’re running out of energy in America.”

This is a message people need to hear—and “loud and clear.” Unfortunately people didn’t. Whatever the Bush administration had to say about energy supplies was overshadowed by fear-mongering and the “war on terror.” It seems that most Americans still don’t understand this simple point—and they’re certainly not living like they understand it.

And even more disastrous, the decisions the Bush administration made about how to deal with our looming energy shortages were short-sighted, and may make it harder for America to deal with its looming energy shortage.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” as former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his book, The Age of Turbulence.

If the Iraq war cost $3 trillion—as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates—imagine how much better shape we’d be in if we sank that into clean energy technologies instead?

That money wasn’t simply lost, of course. Much of it went to buy oil to power the war effort. Much of it went to companies like Halliburton that built the vast green zone, and to security firms like Blackwater. So it got plowed back into the U.S. economy in a way. But that money could have accomplished something useful, but instead it got spent on a vast operation that seems to have made the world less stable, rather than more so. And it could have funded innovation that would continue to drive the country for decades to come, instead of enriching some giant corporations, oil companies, and security firms.

What if people had heard—really heard—Bush’s message back in 2001 and brushed off terrorist attacks as annoyances instead of regarding them as a cosmic war between good and evil? What if they’d seen that with the looming energy shortage, and continuing use of dirty fuels, “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse”?

(That prognosis is from the 2009 State of the Future report, “backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation,” as the Independent puts it.)

If we’d chosen another path at that critical moment, the world’s trajectory could be far different today. But as it is now, greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster, and the temperatures climbing quicker, than most anyone expected. As Ross Gelbspan puts it, “reality swamps the IPCC’s worst-case scenario”.

The more I learn about energy, I think it’s one thing that people really need to understand better. And yet, how many—in the U.S. or elsewhere—understand that America is running out of energy? And that if America makes more bad decisions about how to deal with looming energy shortages, then the world is headed for disaster?

Photo from the American Presidency Project

Related posts:

1. “What people need to hear, loud and clear, is that we’re running out of energy in America.” —George W. Bush in May 2001...
2. Read: “Energy minister will hold summit to calm rising fears over peak oil” The UK government and industry heads met to weigh up the risk of oil going into terminal decline, the Guardian...
3. Alan Greenspan says Iraq war was over oil "Everyone knows the Iraq war is largely about oil" Greenspan writes in his memoir...