Our Pollyanna Energy Policy

Our current lack of a National energy policy to get us out of these Pollyanna times is part of what keeps leading us into National disrespect and wars. Read this article to see what must be done to start turning this big ship we call our beloved country.

Robert E. Freer, Jr., President of The Free Enterprise Foundation

In 1913 Eleanor Hodgman Porter published the first of two novels about an orphaned girl, Pollyanna Whittier, who arrives in Beldingsville to live with her strait laced and strict Aunt Polly and transforms all about her from frowns to smiles and elevated spirits by her own inexhaustible optimism and determination. The books had such an impact on pre-war America, flushed with its growth into a world power, that being “Pollyannish” became part of our language to describe anyone who was optimistic to the extreme.

Surely it is clear, optimism as a philosophy of life will get you farther than pessimism; it is an editorial attitude of this newspaper. The challenges, both personal and national, we face cannot be overcome if we merely wring our hands and say the “sky is falling.” Regrettably, as a nation we haven’t even reached the state of consensus to agree as to the state of the heavens, falling or not. We remain in a Pollyannish state of denial.

While my view on our state of denial is not limited to energy policy, it is clearly accurate when applied to our national energy policy and practice. We continue to mindlessly gobble huge amounts of the world’s supply of fossil fuels, compromising our national security by our dependence on undependable foreign sources of supply. Our practices challenge our stated principles of non interference in the affairs of foreign states and require huge, unproductive expenditures for environmental control measures to protect our atmosphere from further degradation. What are we thinking? Even Pollyanna wouldn’t assume that continuation of our national energy addiction won’t lead to disaster.

The world produces 84.6 million barrels a days of crude oil. The United States consumes 20.7 million barrels a day. That is almost 25% of the world’s supply. To put our national jeopardy into context, we only produce 6.8 million barrels a day from domestic sources and can only refine 17.7 million barrels in domestic facilities. Please remember the use figures are not static but growing apace while the world supply figures are not. Additional unproven reserves are proportionally small and require a long lead time to secure. We are hung up on those 14.1 million barrels a day difference between domestically produced and imported daily consumption. Nothing short of a “Moon Mission” dedication by the nation will get us out of this mess.

Our enemies are counting on Pollyanna to prevail. They invented the earliest form of abacus and know how to bring us to our knees. By the way, don’t count on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is a short term band aid of 700 million barrels. You do the math. It won’t last long. Any substantial interruption of supply, and our economy would implode.

Our technological sophistication would, as our enemies intend in best guerilla warfare manner, become the Achilles heel to bring us down. I will admit that the math is not quite as simple as projected because of allied source oil that might still be available in some amounts, but those societies are largely advanced as well, and in a jihadist warrior inspired interruption of oil to the West, market interdependence would end up working against the developed world.

We can, with dedication and the marshalling of the skills we do have, work our way out of this disastrous dependence, flip the dependence back on the oil supplying nations and spur our own economic development through the use of clean non-imported energy. What it takes to accomplish this is to adopt some variant of the following strategy with a determined exercise of national will.

It is beyond scandal to allow ourselves to have gotten into this mess. If we have the courage and the will, coming together to solve our energy dependence will propel our society throughout the 21st century and provide the economic underpinning to work on many of our other glaring problems.

If you consider bio-fuels to be what is growing in the neighbor’s cornfield, think again. A strategy based on corn grain, is, at best, a zero sum game from both a net energy and environmental perspective. It also cripples the important role corn plays in our being able to feed the third world and in regaining a positive balance of payments to underpin our currency. Bagasse from sugar cane works and perhaps the stalks of the corn plant and certain grasses may in time yield a positive exchange for the effort. They do nothing for the environment or to wean us from the internal combustion engine. In the short run for national security reasons, it may be worth the effort, but it is decidedly not where our effort needs to be concentrated.

In the transportation arena, we need to concentrate on non internal combustion solutions. U.S. and world suppliers of passenger vehicles need to receive every inducement we can think of to bring hydrogen cell vehicles to the market in large numbers. A gallon of gasoline has the same energy content as a kilo of hydrogen, but hydrogen vehicles get 2 to 3 times higher mileage.

Copyright © 2007 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

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