U.S. security linked to our ability to withstand shortages
by Carl Etnier
Now even Daniel Yergin sees the writing on the wall. Yergin is the chair of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and he is frequently quoted in the press as an authority on oil price developments.
Oddly enough, the press turns to him for predictions despite his dismal track record. He has consistently predicted decreasing oil prices during the last decade, as oil has risen from $12 per barrel to over $120. His detractors recently commemorated "Triple Yergin Day," the day that oil first hit $114/barrel, three times the $38 mark that Yergin projected in 2005.
This week, with $114 oil in the rear-view mirror, Cambridge Energy issued its first forecast for rising oil prices: the company told "The Wall Street Journal" that the price could rise to $150 before the end of the year.
Prices are rising because oil is scarce, and the scarcity is worsening. The amount of oil available to import-dependent countries like the United States is already dropping, and the decline is expected to accelerate as more countries (such as Mexico) flip from exporting oil to competing with us for imported oil.
Against that backdrop, I reported in my previous column on April 27 on Richard Heinberg's suggestion last month that the disaster preparedness infrastructure adapt to prepare for expected, extended oil shortages, as well as the food shortages that are likely to accompany them. Heinberg calls communities "resilient" if they are prepared to keep functioning in spite of sudden and severe shortages of basics like food, fuel and electricity.
Next week, Renewable Energy Vermont explores how to make Vermont's electricity and heating fuel sectors more resilient. Their second annual Distributed Energy Conference, with the theme "Building Resilient Communities," takes place in Stratton on Thursday. Their interesting choice of keynote speaker, John Robb, illustrates the connection of resiliency to national and local security.
Robb, a former Air Force pilot, studies counter-terrorism, and his first book examines how small groups of 21st century terrorists can damage much larger organizations by targeting critical infrastructure like oil pipelines. He is working on a new book about how resilient communities can, through their very design, withstand such attacks. It turns out that those same design properties also can buffer the communities against energy and food shortages, whether they are caused by resource depletion or sabotage.
The connections among energy security, energy efficiency, and international security are not new. The first extended treatment that I'm aware of was published in 1982; the book Brittle Power was written by energy efficiency gurus Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins and funded by the Pentagon.
The authors described the United States as a nation with a fragile energy system, where it would only take a few malicious people to black out the entire country, and a small band of criminals could cut off 75 percent of the natural gas to the eastern United States just by hitting targets in Louisiana. The Lovins' prescription was to increase the resilience of the energy system by relying less on centralized sources of energy and more on efficient uses of decentralized, or distributed, energy.
Spreading energy sources throughout the landscape makes them considerably less vulnerable both to ordinary failures and to terrorist attacks. A nuclear power plant epitomizes centralized energy production. A collapsed cooling tower or stuck valve at Vermont Yankee could shut off one-third of our state's usual electricity supply. Failure or sabotage at the on-site substation could have the same effect. Emergency planners worry, rightly enough, about terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants, which could release enough radiation to make many counties uninhabitable.
If Vermont Yankee's share of Vermont's electricity came instead from small, distributed sources like wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, small hydro and wood-fired combined heat and power facilities, no single failure could have much effect on that portion of the electric supply. And terrorists don't attack wind turbines — there's not much payback per toppled turbine.
John Robb expands on the Lovins' work to picture a resilient community that can "survive an extended disconnection from the global grid" in many areas, including energy, food, communications and transportation. For electricity, for example, he promotes "micro-grids." They are tied into the continental electrical grid, but they are designed to be disconnected and supplied with local power when there is a large-scale blackout like the Northeast blackout of Aug. 14, 2003, that left 50 million North Americans in the dark.
For liquid fuels like oil, distributed generation is more difficult. Vermont's Feed and Fuel Project, for example, looks to the state's farmers to grow enough oil seed crops within 10 years to supply about 3 percentage of the diesel and No. 2 fuel oil now consumed here — not a lot, but enough to run equipment on farms. The goal would bolster resilience in the food and fuel systems by providing local production of a small but crucial part of liquid fuel needs.
When the reductions on the world oil export market seriously constrict our ability to keep trucks shipping food to us, we'll be glad to have locally produced fuel for running our own agriculture. We'll also want to seriously expand our agricultural production of food for Vermont kitchens. When tractor-trailers are parked because diesel is intolerably expensive or just not available, the dairy export market won't be worth much, either. It's time to consider how to convert more dairy farms to growing food for Vermont, with local inputs only.
Community resilience and national security are connected not only domestically, but also internationally. In his new book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Michael Klare describes a "new international energy order." Klare, director of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, argues that Russia has become a superpower once more, due to its abundant energy sources.
I interviewed him on Equal Time Radio on WDEV Wednesday, and this is how he described our security situation:
In an era of energy scarcity, which we're in today, those few countries that are 'energy surplus powers' are extraordinarily privileged in the world power system, and countries like the United States and the European countries are in an inferior status.
We don't have enough energy to meet our needs, so we're dependent on the handful of countries that are wealthy in resources. The country that's wealthiest in the world in resources is Russia. Russia has the fourth or fifth largest supply of oil, but it's No. 1 by far in natural gas.
Because oil is likely to disappear in another decade or two, natural gas will then be the No. 1 source of energy, and Russia has by far the largest supply of natural gas. It also has lots of coal and uranium.
Vladimir Putin grasped this essential reality 10 years ago and was determined to use this inherent power to restore Russia's role as a superpower. He understood that in this century, energy would be the source of power, in the way that nuclear weapons were in the previous century.
U.S. military spending is now greater than the rest of the world combined, yet all those weapons may not give much influence in the changing landscape of the 21st century. The United States is a debtor nation, borrowing money from China to pay Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil, and then burning it.
I asked Klare how long he thought the United States would be relevant internationally.
He replied,
That depends exactly on whether we can more aggressively take the leadership in developing energy alternatives. I don't think military power is a useful measure of power in the world any longer. I think energy ingenuity and innovation are the most important assets we can have, and right now we're not in the lead.
Consider the broad cast of characters who are all arguing that the United States must move rapidly to use less energy and rely more on locally produced, renewable energy: a professor of peace and world security studies, a counter-terrorism expert, energy efficiency gurus and a peak oil analyst. The country is not doing nearly enough to follow their prescriptions, but next week's conference on Building Resilient Communities provides tools to move Vermont further in that direction.
=====
Renewable Energy Vermont's Distributed Energy Conference, "Building Resilient Communities," will be held May 15 at the Stratton Mountain Resort. For more information, see www.REVermont.org or call 229-0099.
The book Brittle power: Energy strategy for national security, by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, is available for free download at www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid114.php . A summary article is at www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/EnergySecurity/S83-08 FragileDomEnergy.pdf .
John Robb's blog is www.globalguerrillas.typepad.com
Carl Etnier, director of Peak Oil Awareness, blogs at vtcommons.org/blog and hosts radio shows on WGDR, 91.1 FM Plainfield and WDEV 96.1 FM/550 AM, Waterbury. He can be reached at EnergyMattersVermont(at)yahoo.com.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Posted with permission of author.
UPDATE (May 12). Today's post by Jeff Vail mentions similar ideas: Center for a New American Security: More Palliatives from Policy Wonks.
energybulletin.net |
