Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Gus Speth: Silver linings
Gus Speth, Gristmill
Seven post-financial-crisis opportunities for healthier economies
—
Are there silver linings to the dark cloud of the financial crisis? It is a truism in our politics that only a crisis produces real change. So, looking on the positive side, what might we hope this crisis will bring forward? Here are seven outcomes worth seeking:
1. For decades, anti-regulation market fundamentalists have argued with increasing success against government interference in the economy. Thanks to the crisis, we should be able to say goodbye to all that. Our country is in deep trouble on several fronts, and if we want to cure these ills, some strong medicine must be taken. That points to effective government intervention as a big part of the answer. Smart government does not mean wasteful, bloated government, but it does mean government. So bring on the regulation, and not just in the financial sector.
… 3. As political leaders look for ways to stimulate the economy, we can urge that they channel major public investments into rebuilding America’s collapsing infrastructure, into long-neglected public amenities, and, most of all, into building new industries that can help us simultaneously address our massive dependence on foreign oil and our urgent need for new, renewable energy sources to address the climate crisis. Recent studies show that millions of new green collar jobs can be the result.
4. Perhaps the financial crisis will teach us to live more simply with less consumption. Our materialism, positive psychologists report, is toxic to happiness, and our hyper-consumption is one of the main drivers of environmental decline. Being less focused on getting and spending (initially, in part, because there will be less to spend) can help us rediscover that the truly important things in life are not at the mall nor, indeed, for sale anywhere.
5. Wall Street’s excesses should rekindle America’s populist heritage.
Gus Speth is dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
(12 November 2008)
The EPA’s Stalin era
Rebecca Clarren, Salon
“It’s absolutely shocking what’s going on,” say insiders. Secretive changes have diluted science and jeopardized public health. Will Obama overcome Bush’s toxic legacy?
—
This may sound like just another Erin Brockovich-style tear-jerker. Enter stage right: Poor people exposed to toxic chemicals who worry that the government is ignoring their plight.
But the story of the hundreds of sick people who live near the former Kelly Air Force Base illuminates an entirely new manner in which the Bush administration has diluted science and put public health at risk. This year, largely in obeisance to the Pentagon, the nation’s biggest polluter, the White House diminished a little-known but critical process at the Environmental Protection Agency for assessing toxic chemicals that impacts thousands of Americans.
As a coalition of more than 40 national and local environmental organizations put it in a letter to EPA administrators this past April: “EPA, under pressure from the Bush White House, has given the foxes the keys to the environmental protection henhouse.”
… “It feels like Stalin-era Russia, like the administration set themselves up to decide what’s allowable science and what isn’t,” says a high-ranking staff scientist at the EPA, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Until the recent economic crash, this has been such an anti-regulatory administration. One of the ways to undermine regulations is to undermine the science behind them. It’s absolutely shocking what’s going on.”
Public health officials say this attempt to derail the scientific evaluation of toxins is one of the most damning legacies of the Bush administration. In late September, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing critique of the EPA’s new toxic-assessment procedures. It concluded that the secretive procedures compromise scientific credibility and sacrifice the public’s trust in government. Despite such hefty criticism, public officials fear that because the new procedures have been instituted at the EPA so far below the public radar, their harmful impact will survive long after Bush leaves office. It will take a bold and expedient move by Barack Obama or the next Congress to curtail the influence of the Pentagon and other government agencies on the EPA.
(12 November 2008)
Caruso discusses impact of Obama administration on energy policy, prices (video and transcript)
Monica Trauzzi, OnPoint, E&E TV
With senior advisers to President-elect Barack Obama already signaling that he intends to overturn some Bush administration decisions, including the expansion of oil and gas drilling on public lands, how is energy policy expected to shift over the next four years?
During today’s OnPoint, Guy Caruso, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former administrator at the Energy Information Administration, discusses his expectations for the Obama administration’s approach to energy policy.
Caruso talks about the impact of the credit crunch on domestic and international oil projects and also gives his short- and long-term predictions for energy prices.
(12 November 2008)
Bednarz: My Unsent Letter to Obama
Dan Bednarz, Health After Oil
Barak Obama’s mailbox is overflowing with suggestions of books to read and policy initiatives to implement. He’ll thank everyone for communicating with him, but I think his plans are already made, especially for energy and the economy. And that’s why I’m not sending him this letter:
Dear President-elect Obama:
Congratulations on your historic election. I hope your family chooses to adopt a shelter dog; it’s doubly gratifying to do so.
Briefly, I think that the subprime financial crisis was triggered by the rise in oil prices in 2005, which then helped to burst the phantom bubble of wealth and expose massive debt underlying financial systems. Moreover, as oil climbed to $147 a barrel the result has been a deepening recession with approximately a million jobs lost in 2008. In addition, with Americans losing retirement and investment savings, and many also worried about their homes and jobs, they are –sensibly- consuming less. With the price of oil receding some buyers will reenter the market and this will raise prices and repeat the cycle. Price volatility and a slowing or halting of economic growth are primary indicators of the peaking of world crude oil production.
Over-consumption of the earth’s resources is at the heart of our nation’s woes, especially in healthcare, my area of work, which I only mention here. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, please stop trying to return our economy to perpetual growth; as peak oil portends, the earth can no longer sustain it; and the fossil fuels we’ve already burned –plus overpopulation and the overexploitation of other resources like fresh water- pose added grave threats.
This is a paradox because many Americans are not ostentatious consumers; they are struggling to make ends meet or are mired in or sliding into poverty. They could understand massive conservation and even economic cutbacks if they knew they were safe from destitution.
The longer we try to return to continuous economic growth the harder we make it to create a new economy based on living in unison with the earth.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions, especially about dogs.
Sincerely,
To elaborate, it is vastly better to have a man of Obama’s ability, intelligence, temperament and political outlook in office than W. Bush or McCain. However, we must not forget that he is a politician and a lawyer, not a scientist, much less an ecologist. He is already running for reelection. He’s not sure if he has a consensus to act other than to throw borrowed money at Wall Street and the economy and hope for the magic of a return to growth. If this fails –which I believe it will- he’s covered politically for a time but will then find himself unable to govern from the center, the right or the left, as we typically understand these terms. His best option is a new orientation rooted in ecological economics; but there is no reason to see this happening soon at the level of presidential politics, even at this difficult time.
As a person who believes in the American Dream (and in some respects he has lived it), Obama is not about to be the president who tells his fellow citizens that the dream ultimately was based on over-exploiting natural resources (Tom Friedman would have a conniption). Therefore, to realize that the American way of life is out of sync with the earth’s ecology also will undermine Obama’s identity. We’re dealing with, I think, not mere policy options but with the emotional and conceptual ruts of what social scientist Michel Foucault terms the dominant episteme: “something like a world-view, a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge, which impose on each one the same norms and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure thought …” It is this episteme of perpetual technological progress and economic expansion that is now being undermined by what E.O. Wilson terms The Bottleneck of ecological limitations.
The pervasive dominance of this episteme misconstrues the ecological problems we face as malfunctions –to be fixed with growth- in the current economy. So I think Obama’s initial challenge is to recognize, as Marvin Gaye put it, “what’s going on;” and that realization –if it comes- will arrive through experiential knowledge, what many of our parents called “the college of hard knocks.”
Dan Bednarz
(12 November 2008)
