Collide-a-scape

One of the catch-phrases President Obama didn’t use in his much parsed Oval Office speech on Tuesday was energy security. He did, however, make a glancing, split-second reference when discussing the costs associated with a transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy (emphasis added):

And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

Obama’s reluctance to mention energy security in his speech strikes me as odd, considering how the term has become a central plank in his Administration’s energy policy and also a popular new Democratic talking point, which Michael Levi, an energy expert, notes in this recent Foreign Policy piece:

That two-word phrase — “energy security” — is an idea invoked frequently by everyone from oil company executives to green-energy proponents, and one that has taken center stage in the United States since the Gulf spill. Last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar cited energy security in explaining the need to continue drilling in the outer continental shelf. Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman have argued that their new clean energy and climate bill will help the United States achieve energy security. Obama’s new National Security Strategy, published last month, invokes energy security no fewer than four times.

That Obama didn’t talk about energy security in his Oval Office address perhaps owes to the main point of Levi’s FP article, which is reflected in the subhead:

Politicians, oilmen, and green-energy boosters love to invoke the idea of energy security. None of them know what they’re talking about.

Levi includes himself in this clueless category. Earlier this week on his own blog at the Council on Foreign Relations, he wrote:

The phrase “energy security” is on my business card, yet whenever anyone uses it, I scratch my head.

I admire this humble tone from an energy scholar. Levi’s forthright attitude echoes the refreshing openness that a number of leading environmental security experts exhibited on this site during an excellent thread on the equally squishy climate security term.

The tweety and bloggy opiners who care most about climate change and energy policy were mostly left cold by President Obama’s big speech last night. Here’s an arbitrary round-up that captures the varying reax:

MoJo’s Kevin Drum panned it. The Atlantic’s Joshua Green said it was a “decent speech, but he [Obama] wimped out on climate change.” Kate Shepard, also with MoJo, called it “disappointing” and said Obama “largely avoided the issue of climate change.” Indeed, said Bill McKibben:

I was struck by the fact that he didn’t mention climate change, except as a reference to the title of the house bill, and that he didn’t mention carbon prices.

Concludes Time’s Byran Walsh:

It may be time to bury cap-and-trade.

Yet Joe Romm gave Obama a B, and focused more on the White House talking points handed out afterward. The Oil Drum, meanwhile, played it down the middle.

So did Andy Revkin, it seems, who called the speech “workmanlike” and said:

Obama has left open the prospect of pivoting to energy and climate as a top priority in coming months, but chose (wisely) not to use a moment of national unease, built on a backdrop of unchecked pollution, as a launching pad.

That Obama did not seize this “moment,” though, is precisely what pissed off many progressive climate watchers, so it’ll be interesting to watch the reax to Revkin on that score.

I’ll update additional responses from other notable commentators throughout the day.

UPDATE: 6/16: 10:15am: Here’s the Yeglesias header on his post: “Obama Punts on Climate.” Grist’s David Roberts, echoing Romm, is determined to accentuate the positives.

11am: A quick and dirty scan of some mainstream media columnists also reveals an interesting spectrum. In the Washington Post, David Ignatius detected a”glimmer of leadership” in the speech, and said Obama got it just about right:

Call to arms. Three-point plan. End our energy addiction. God bless America.

That sort of facile nothingness frustrated both John Dickerson and Danial Gross at Slate, who wrote of Obama:

while he spoke eloquently and specifically of his faith in America’s ability to innovate in the long-term—a faith I share—he was vague when it came to the specific, short-term steps the organization he runs can take. As John Dickerson notes here, there was little mention of tough, controversial, but necessary initiatives such as placing a price on carbon, or sharply raising the tax on gasoline, or instituting a cap-and-trade regime. Obama’s speech was like a PowerPoint presentation with the last few slides missing.

For its part, The WSJ, in its lead editorial, wrote that Obama

naturally took the opportunity to put his moribund climate legislation back in play.

Based on the dominant assessment of most observations I’ve cited thus far, you have to wonder what speech the WSJ editorial writers were watching. Or are they just on automatic pilot over at the editorial page?

4.20:pm: Ezra Klein probably speaks for a lot of dispirited greens today, with this observation:

I’m just not sure how you do a response to climate change if you can’t really say the words “climate change.”

Brad Plumer over at TNR certainly agrees and adds, for good measure:

If the president can’t make that case in a major prime-time address in the midst of the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history, then who can?

But Roger Pielke Jr. argues that President Obama deserves credit for admitting he doesn’t have all the answers [when Obama asked for "other ideas" on how to tackle climate change and decarbonization]. Roger adds:

For too long “I don’t know” has been taboo in discussions of climate policy. But understanding the limits of our policy proposals is a first step toward wiser policies.

On this note, Roger’s take echoes Andy Revkin’s, whose post headline on the speech read:

Obama Seeking New Ideas on Climate and Energy

In stark contrast to the many climate watchers who have slammed the President’s speech for its timidity and half-measures on energy policy, Roger is laudatory:

Obama showed policy leadership in his speech, which will likely have partisans upset. Nonetheless, it is policy leadership that this issue needs, not political posturing.

4:45pm: And finally, Alexandra Fenwick at CJR has an excellent roundup of the national press coverage of Obama’s speech, which is carried under this clever headline:

All Talk and No Oil Cap Makes Barack a Dull Boy

The NYT uses the Gulf oil disaster as a hook to examine the peak oil “collapsitarians.” Some of them are a bit overwrought, it seems, and want to do more than rub their worry beads. Fortunately, there’s a new cottage industry catering to their anxieties. The theme of the NYT story can be gleaned from this opener:

As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year — that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Indeed there is. Click on the link for that telephone course. Check out its marketing pitch:

How do you feel about the current unraveling of industrial civilization and the coming transition? Do you long for a place to discuss your feelings, thoughts, and methods of preparation? Do you long to feel less alone as you live with all you know?

Now that’s some serious fear mongering, served up with a soothing New Age veneer. Sure enough, click on the instructor’s bio and homepage, and you’ll learn that she’s a former psychotherapist, whose latest book is called Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Path.

What’s that sound you hear? The wonks at The Oil Drum retching in unison. Because I’m sure that’s just what they want, their high-minded debates on overshoot being co-opted by pseudo-spiritualist claptrap.

Still, you gotta admire that singularly American can-do entrepreneurial spirit. If industrial civilization is going under, someone might as well cash in on the collapse.

Yesterday, I took an expansive, meta perspective on who’s responsible for climate change and the U.S. addiction to fossil fuels.

But make no mistake, the legacy of George W. Bush’s two terms, in all things related to domestic energy development, from deliberate lax oversight to eye-popping corruption, looms large today.  Rebecca Lefton at The Center for American Progress (CAP) has written a very useful post and timeline, documenting how the federal government, under Bush, became a handmaiden to the oil and gas industry.

I spent a lot of time in the 2000s covering the consequences from some of the events and policies that Lefton highlights. My focus was on the coalbed methane and natural gas boom in the West.  The searing impacts never really gained critical mass in the mainstream media and certainly were not much appreciated by the rest of the country. But the industry imprint chokehold was (and still is) felt acutely in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and New Mexico, where the gas drillers reign.

Among the many stories I wrote, I chronicled the devastating impacts to ranchers, to wildlife, to archaeology, and to public health. I wrote so much (and in varied venues, such as Science, Mother Jones, and Backpacker) about BLM Utah’s egregious capitulaton to the oil and gas industry that the state office in Salt Lake City stopped talking to me in 2008. None of what I documented in all these pieces has ever been challenged by BLM, nor has anyone ever been brought to account.

While I’m on the subject of Utah, I should mention that Selma Sierra, the person who served as BLM’s state director during the Bush Administration’s second term (prior to that she was Gale Norton’s chief of staff at Interior), was only just reassigned to Siberia the BLM Eastern States office, where she will serve in a “leadership position” overseeing the 30,000 surface acres in the 31 states east of the Mississippi. She’s actually swapping positions with Juan Palma, who will now manage Utah’s 23 million acres of public land.

Sierra’s legacy in Utah, like Bush’s legacy in the West, will be felt for many years to come.

That’s the clever headline for this NYT Green post, which recalls an interesting piece of litigation:

Back in 2005, a group of landowners on the gulf coast filed a federal lawsuit against energy and chemical companies, arguing that they were directly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions that exacerbated the effects of Hurricane Katrina. It named more than 30 companies, including oil giants like Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil.

Read the entire post to follow the intriguing turn of events that led to the case being dismissed. What interests me more is this effort to blame oil companies for climate change. That’s like someone with heart disease who lived off of Big Macs suing McDonald’s.

In contrast, here’s Andy Revkin over at Dot Earth, assigning responsibility for the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, but he might as well be talking about man-made climate change, as well:

The oil disaster doesn’t belong to BP, or to President Obama or his predecessor; we all own it.

In his post, Andy takes stock of his “ownership.” More of us should do the same, but as I suggest in the comments over there, the menu of options should include the urban lifestyle, which is infinitely more sustainable than suburban sprawl and the car culture that so many Americans are now hostage to.

There’s an intriguing, somewhat dispiriting profile by David Owen in the current New Yorker ($ubscription) of an idealistic,  enviro-minded inventor who wants to do good in the world, but is having a hard time overcoming the “limits of innovation.”

The subject of the piece is Saul Griffith, who as recently as 2004 was a Ph.D. student at MIT. By all accounts he’s brilliant–heck, that same year he won a $500,000 MacArthur “genius grant” for an eyeglass invention that the judges thought would bring cheap, corrective lens to poor communities around the world.

It didn’t work out that way, and eventually the gifted inventor turned his attention to energy–how to make it both clean and affordable. Again, things haven’t worked out as he hoped, and now Griffith is thinking that the solution to climate change lies not with technology but human behavior.

He’s also become pretty cynical. Here’s some friendly fire that is sure to singe greenies from Berkeley to Boston:

I know very few environmentalists whose heads aren’t firmly up their ass. They are bold-facedly hypocritcal, and I don’t think the environmentalism as we’ve known it is tenable or will survive. Al Gore has done a huge amount to help this cause, but he is the No. 1 environmental hypocrite. His house alone uses more energy than an average person uses in all aspects of life, and he flies prodigiously. I don’t think we can buy the argument anymore that you get special dispensation just because what you’re doing is worthwhile.

The kicker is a beaut, and shows that Griffith is as brutally honest with himself:

Right now, the main thing I’m working on is trying to invent my way out of my own hypocrisy.

Liberal bloggers are befuddled, enviros are outraged, and the opposition party, as President Obama likely anticipated, is scornful.

Most of the conventional analysis is trying to make sense of the Administration’s decision in the context of the Senate’s tortured energy bill negotiations. And because that doesn’t seem to make sense, people are scratching their heads.

Fortunately, the president laid out his rationale in a speech:

Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy.

Given our energy needs. That’s the key here. And it’s what Greens conveniently ignore. Now I happen to think that everything else in that phrase from the speech is mostly window dressing.  There are many regulatory hurdles for companies to overcome before they can start “exploratory” drilling.  And even then, it’s an open question whether it’ll be worth it to them.

So if the Administration’s gambit isn’t intended to influence wavering Republican senators on the climate bill, and won’t increase our domestic supply of crude for at least a decade, what’s really going on?

Perhaps the offshore announcement is intended for a different audience. Foreign Policy raises that intriguing possibility here. If that’s the case, then the Obama team, while saying all the right things about renewable energy, is keeping one cold eye on projected estimates of worldwide energy consumption rates, and the other on one very worrying scenario.

UPDATE: I think Tom Yulsman is on to something here:

Politically, Obama is looking at rapidly rising petroleum prices right around the time of his reelection campaign, if not sooner. Economically, he’s looking at a potential crunch just when things are supposed to be getting better. And while opening these new regions to drilling isn’t going to solve the problem (because even if large amounts of oil are lurking there the supply won’t come on line for about a decade), at least he’s now given himself political cover.

One year ago, Pepe Escobar, a keen observer of global energy politics, wrote this:

Forget the mainstream media’s obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama “dead or alive” bin Laden, the Taliban — neo, light or classic — or that “war on terror,” whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

Specifically, Escobar was referring to what has become known as the The New Great Game, an international power struggle over oil and gas reserves in Eurasia.

But after reading Global Warring, Cleo Paskal’s excellent new book on geopolitics in the era of climate change, I’m convinced that someone should amend the Wikipedia entry so that in addition to Eurasia, Africa and the Arctic are included as geopolitical battlegrounds for control over the world’s energy resources.

I’ll have more to say about Paskal’s book in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, here’s my review of Global Warring in Nature’s Climate Feedback.

During George W. Bush’s two terms, environmentalists and archaeologists complained (with justification) that the oil & gas industry was allowed to run roughshod over Western public lands. I wrote a bunch about this for numerous magazines, from Audubon and Mother Jones to High Country News and Archaeology.

The same question arose in all these stories: can natural gas development coexist harmoniously with the preservation of scenic, environmental and cultural resources? Well, anyone who followed this issue during W’s era would obviously answer no, and that’s because the deck was stacked in favor of the oil & gas industry. Drilling permits were handed out like M & M’s. The two main overseers of Western public lands, the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, exerted negligible regulatory oversight, with terrible consequences for wildlife, air quality, and ancient archaeology. There was no “multiple use” balance at all. One use took precedent over all others: gas drilling.

So now we have a new Administration that is promoting a different form of energy development. And guess what? That same question is popping up again, as this NYT story illustrates. But this time, the conflict is not over drilling rigs, but over whether solar and wind farms can coexist in spectacular places like the Mojave desert. As Todd Woody writes in his Times story, this latest debate over multiple use on public lands

encapsulates a rising tension between two goals held by environmental groups: preservation of wild lands and ambitious efforts to combat global warming.

Not only is the desert land some of the sunniest in the country, and thus suitable for large-scale power production, it is also some of the most scenic territory in the West. The Mojave lands have sweeping vistas of an ancient landscape that is home to desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, fringe-toed lizards and other rare animals and plants.

This new debate is likely to be fractious in the environmental community, pitting climate change advocates against preservationists.  There will also be rich doses of irony, courtesy of Cape wind opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is upset that Senator Diane Feinstein has kept renewable energy projects from going forward in areas of the Mojave desert that are slated to become National Monuments. Kennedy indignantly tells the Times:

This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review.

You have to admire his chutzpa.

In the way this issue is now playing out–at least with respect to the Mojave lands–there are some interesting parallels beween the Bush Administation’s energy policy by executive decree and Senator Feinstein’s legislative fiat powers. As the Times notes:

Mrs. Feinstein heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees the budget of the Interior Department, giving her substantial clout over that agency, which manages the government’s landholdings. Her intervention in the Mojave means it will be more difficult for California utilities to achieve a goal, set by the state, of obtaining a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020; projects in the monument area could have supplied a substantial portion of that power.

It’ll be interesting to see how environmental magazines cover this, including the one I worked at for nearly ten years, until 2008. Climate change is  the big environmental issue of our time; it really has overtaken all other issues, especially in the larger national debate. So it stands to reason that a headlong clash between competing environmental goals will provide much fodder for continuing coverage by environmental journalists.

As I said, we’ll see.

There’s an interesting exchange over at The Oil Drum about the legacy of President Carter’s infamous 1977 energy speech. For my money, this commenter (who also posts essays at The Oil Drum), is spot on:

It is almost impossible to quantify the damage that this one speech did to the very real need for a modern restructuring of the advanced world’s energy systems. Such is the terrible damage caused by false alarm. To this day, that time period (the late 1970’s), that speech (the Carter energy speech) and that period of press hysteria has ingrained into my mind the absolute need to be cautious about making or accepting hysterical pronouncements of “we are running out of oil”, “by the year XXXX we will consume more oil than we can produce {you actually heard this said in the 1970’s, but of course on a worldwide basis it is a statistical impossibility) and all such claims that the end is nigh.

There can be nothing more damaging, NOTHING, than false alarm. It destroys for decades the credibility of the perhaps well intentioned campaigners issuing the warning, it destroys support for the cause (whatever cause it may be) among the most able and dedicated potential recruits to the cause, it gives the enemies of the cause needed ammunition to rip apart the cause on the sword of it’s own words.

I have always believed, and still do, that Jimmy Carter was and is one of the most honorable politicians in American hitory, one of the few men of absolute conviction and decency to ever become President of The United States of America.

I also believe that the speech he gave on energy on the fateful day was one of the most damaging speeches ever given, to the future of the United States, to the future of rational planned transition to a modern energy system, and by extension, to the future health and prosperity of the world.

Jimmy Carter armed the enemies of modern energy, he destroyed the credibility of those who knew the need for change and modernization was real and imperative, and he drove a generation away from taking seriously one of the most serious issues of our era. No enemy could have done as much damage to the cause of a real humane transition away from our enslavement to fossil fuel as this friend of the cause Jimmy Carter did by way of a poorly researched, poorly thought out false alarm. His hysteria helped waste a third of a century.

Any cautionary lessons here for climate catastrophists? Will people be making similar observations about the climate crisis in thirty years?