A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [142]
If we could build the infrastructure to capture and transport energy from renewable sources, the energy itself—sunlight, wind, tides, geothermal heat—would come for free. That’s what “clean, eternal” means. But we hear that energy that comes for free is too expensive. Who tells us clean, eternal energy is too expensive and that it would “wreck the economy”? Why, it’s none other than the big brothers: Big Oil and Big Coal! We’ve crossed that bridge before. There was another time when people vehemently insisted that changing America’s main source of energy would wreck the economy. The cheapest energy that has ever powered America was slavery. Energy is always a moral issue.
Big Oil and Big Coal maintain our addiction to their elixirs. But we allow it, rather than freeing ourselves to a more diverse, decentralized, cleaner, stable array of fuel sources.
The real tragedy is that for thirty years we’ve known that for reasons of national security and patriotism alone, we need to phase out our dependence on oil, coal, and gas. Our foreign dependence, the jobs we’re missing out on, the pollution, the worker-killing explosions, the way we enrich dictators and terrorists—we’ve known all that since the politically induced oil shocks and gasoline lines of the 1970s. I remember those lines with some fondness, because I waited on them as a young high school buck and proud new owner of a used hippie van. But those lines were all we needed to learn that security for the United States, and the globe, requires a future largely free of fossil fuels.
And since the late 1980s, we’ve known that fossil fuels are also destabilizing the world climate. But Big Oil and Big Coal, using the subsidies we pay them, maintain the weakest government money can buy. So most Republicans and a few indebted Democrats scoff at energy efficiency.
Multinational corporations are by definition not patriotic; they can’t afford to be. But we can’t afford for them not to be. Their interests are not our interests. For the main reason behind America’s decline—in manufacturing, jobs, technological innovation, and moral leadership—we need look no further. Multinational corporations have strangled innovation in its crib. Killed all our first-born ideas and sent the entrepreneurs who could have saved us fleeing to places like China.
China understands its moment. Today China is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in wind and solar energy, electric cars, and high-speed rail. It’s also the world’s greatest lender of money to the United States; we have yoked ourselves to interest payments to the world’s biggest totalitarian government, while forking over union jobs, technological leadership, and the American Dream. It’s been said that empires are not destroyed from the outside; they commit suicide.
Every president since Nixon has talked about our need to kick our oil addiction. Some were serious. But by failing to sweep money out of politics, we disenfranchise ourselves from control of our own government, our own country.
And yet we simply won’t be able to maintain civilization by digging fossil energy out of the ground and burning it. There’s not enough. By the middle of this century, well within the life span of many people already born, we are scheduled to add to the world another two billion people—nearly another China plus another India’s worth of people. Of the truly great human-caused environmental catastrophes, foremost is the human population explosion. The forests, the fishes, and fresh water are collapsing under the weight of the number of people on Earth right now. All the other global environmental, justice, human development, energy, and security problems either start with or are made worse by the sheer crush of our numbers. The projected growth will squash human potential as billions of poor get poorer, while flaring tensions and igniting violence. Being concerned about overpopulation isn’t anti-people; not being worried about it is anti-people.
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