I really dread the 2012 election cycle, especially the presidential race. We know that both the Obama and Romney campaigns have enough money to completely dominate television advertising, and given what we have seen from the Republican primary races, it will be overwhelmingly negative. It appears that Romney’s theme will be that Obama was not up to the job and gave us four years of failure, so he deserves a chance to get it right. Almost every speech is filled with “he didn’t … I will.”
So much negative commentary may get us all to turn off our televisions and do something useful. For our family, that will be working in the garden where we raise almost all of the fruit we eat. Sorry, Safeway, there is another choice, in season, fully ripened, as fresh as can be.
But this column has always been about politics and policy. It should be obvious that we can not remain as we are when the world is changing. It is always important to understand what is changing and to develop polices to mitigate the change or adapt to it. But in the rhetoric of the current national politics, we are doing neither.
If this is going to be an election about the economy, then that is where we will find the most half-truths, evasions and outright lies, not that most media will allow itself to call them that. They will generally allow any politician to evade the truths by claiming to having misspoken. Actually, Rachel Maddow is willing to call them lies, but she is such a lightning rod for right wing attacks, that her direct language will not change many people’s minds.
Our economic future is going to be determined by how we handle the facts of a growing demand for products, services, housing, etc. in a world with finite resources. At the nexus of these concerns involved energy, fuels and water.
As we exhaust our supplies of easy fuels, it becomes more costly to get the new one. Thus, we have the development of new technologies to extract natural gas, such as fracking. Even if we ignore the question as to whether the process releases radiation or injects poisons into the shale formations, the process requires using fresh water and contaminating it before injecting the water into the ground.
In one way, this is not even new. The oil available under western Kern County is very thick, viscous material that does not flow well. Our solution has been to inject hot water or steam into the formation so that the oil can more easily be pumped to the surface. In a single recent year, oil companies purchased 8.4 billion gallons of water from local sources and almost all of that was injected into the ground to loosen more oil. There are more examples that could be cited. This is enough if you consider how long our community could go with that volume of water.
Romney seems to have an irrational faith in our collective ability to discover new process that can avoid any responsibility of our current actions. If the world economy is demanding more gasoline from a dwindling supply of fuels, it does not make sense to follow an energy policy that makes it easier to exhaust our reserves as quickly as possible. Avoid the pay now and don’t think much about the future.
Obama has a rhetoric that sounds like he understands the situation, but appears to be afraid of the political consequences of making the decision that should be made. It is as if rising gasoline prices threaten his political future to the extent that he is willing to follow policies threatening our economic future. At best, I think he uses the “all of the above” terminology to hide a desire to more quickly develop alternatives.
This has become as much a moral issue as it is an economic one. I find it difficult to avoid those Energy Tomorrow ads from the American Petroleum Institute. They promise us a future of another century of fuels. I know that my father was born in 1898. So a century has passed in two generations. What kind of future will we pass on to our children if we exhaust these supplies of energy over the next century? Basic requirements, such as heating for single family homes will need new solutions. Cooling those same homes in a globally warming world will be an additional challenge.
We have time now to deal with this, but only if our leaders have the political will to seek answers. I am not sure that they are even asking the right questions. It is only those with no ties to corporate fundraising, like the Green Party’s candidates, Jill Stein or Kent Mesplay, who ask the questions and can provide the answers. Unfortunately, their lack of corporate funding makes their election nearly impossible.
