We must become independent — not just of imported oil, but of oil itself.

 

We must become independent — not just of imported oil, but of oil itself.

A determined pack has begun to race its engines and to try to shoulder us off the road toward energy independence. It’s time for those determined to stay on the track to drive aggressively.
The energy-independence question is really about oil — the rest of U.S. energy use presents important issues, but not the danger of our being subject to the control of nations that “do not particularly like us,” as the president put it. Some of the engine racers have an economic interest in keeping our transportation system 97-percent oil-dependent. Less understandable are the authors of a recent Council on Foreign Relations report accusing those working for such independence of “doing the nation a disservice.”
The authors of that report and their followers define “independence,” contrary to both Webster’s and common sense, as essentially “autarky” — i.e. complete self-sufficiency, or not importing oil even though we remain dependent on it. Such a Pickwickian definition captures none of the thinking of serious advocates of reducing our oil dependence: The point of independence is not to be an economic hermit, but rather to be a free actor. 
It is true that some who promote oil independence spice their remarks by implying that we might substitute oil from domestic sources or from our near neighbors for cheap Middle Eastern imports, and somehow manage to insulate ourselves from the world oil market. 
But speechwriters’ tropes shouldn’t be taken as serious policy proposals. Geology will not cooperate in any such fantasy. There is no reasonable way that we can leave oil in place as the near-exclusive fuel for the world’s transportation systems and simultaneously wall ourselves off from the world oil market. If we want to end dependence on the whims of OPEC’s despots, the substantial instabilities of the Middle East, and the indignity of paying for both sides in the War on Terror, we must define oil “independence” sensibly — as doing whatever is necessary to avoid oil’s being the instrument of despotic leverage and foreign chaos. 
Those who won our independence as a nation didn’t just fling imported tea into Boston harbor — they did whatever was necessary to wrest themselves from British control. We need not call out the Minutemen, but to avoid the consequences of dependence we must become independent — not just of imported oil, but of oil itself.
Does this mean that we cannot use oil or import any? Of course not. Oil is a useful commodity that can readily transport energy long distances. It already has competition from natural gas in industry and from gas and electricity for heating. But in transportation it brooks no competition — it is thus not just a commodity but a strategic commodity. Oil’s monopoly on transportation gives intolerable power to OPEC and the nations that dominate oil ownership and production. This monopoly must be broken. To tell us that in following this path we are doing a “disservice to the nation” and should resign ourselves to oil dependence is like telling us we should not urge an alcoholic to stop drinking, but should rather impress upon him the health advantages of red wine. 
Not long ago, technology broke the power of another strategic commodity. Until around the end of the nineteenth century salt had such a position because it was the only means of preserving meat. Odd as it seems today, salt mines conferred national power and wars were even fought over control of them. 
Today, no nation sways history because it has salt mines. Salt is still a useful commodity for a range of purposes. We import some salt, so if one defines independence as autarky we are not “salt independent”. But to most of us there is no “salt dependence” problem at all — because electricity and refrigeration decisively ended salt’s monopoly of meat preservation, and thus its strategic importance.
We can and must do the same thing to oil. By moving toward utilizing the batteries that have been developed for modern electronics we can rather soon have “plug-in hybrids” that travel 20-40 miles on an inexpensive charge of night-time off-peak electricity at a small fraction of gasoline’s cost. (After driving that distance plug-ins keep going as ordinary hybrids.) Dozens of ordinary hybrids converted to plug-ins now on the road are getting in the range of 100 mpg of gasoline. And millions of flexible-fuel vehicles are also now in the fleet. Producing them adds costs well under $100 and they can use up to 85-percent ethanol (before long to be made from biomass rather than corn) — methanol, butanol, and other alternative fuels produced from grasses and even waste.
A flex-fuel plug-in hybrid that gets 100 mpg and, when it needs liquid fuel, uses only 15-percent gasoline, is approaching a utility of 500 mpg. Other oil-breaking technologies are coming. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the newly-independent Americans asked their band to play “The World Turned Upside Down.” Get ready for a reprise. 

Trust democracy?

Trust democracy?

Comment about those who trust democracy enough to offer themselves up to its abuses in every election cycle. His comment lauded those who put themselves on the line for the opportunity to serve the public. I found much to agree with in what he said, and a good deal to differ with as well.

While those who trust democracy in offering themselves for public service are to be praised, not everyone running for office trusts democracy to that extent, and many display a decided distrust of democracy. They are easy enough to pick out.
A candidate's trust in democracy is measurable by the way that their campaign is conducted. When they are running their campaign on a shoestring without professional campaign staff, it tells you that their level of trust is high, both in democracy and democratic principles and in their confidence in their own ideas. Often the value of their ideas can be measured by the number of volunteers who are willing to offer their own time and effort to see that those ideas get a hearing in governance.
This is not to say that a well-funded campaign cannot evince a trust in democracy, but the idealist's campaign nearly always does.
Conversely, there are candidates whose level of distrust in democracy is clearly evident. The symptoms of that condition are as easily picked out, because in spite of the candidate's efforts, they are almost impossible to conceal from anyone who is looking for them.
Those symptoms include inordinate amounts of cash, to be used in an effort to buy the election. In this election cycle, the first since the Supreme Court edict regarding the Citizens United case, we have hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions being funneled through money laundering operations such as American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The sources of these funds are jealously guarded from public disclosure, but you can bet your bottom billion that the candidates receiving those funds know exactly where they came from. The candidate being in the dark about those facts would defeat the object of the exercise, which is to buy a candidate and make sure that he stays bought. If he didn't know who his new owner was, he might cast an errant vote, and that's not what he was purchased for in the first place.
There is also the ultimate in cynical distrust of democracy that is demonstrated by efforts to manipulate the electorate in casting its votes. These are mostly techniques to reduce turnout for the opponent by voter caging, leading to illegitimate challenges to individual voters at the polls, or, as we see happening in Nevada this year, cynical campaign commercials featuring appeals to the opponent's supporters to stay home on Election Day.
Other ways to depress turnout require confederates in control of the voting apparatus so that the allotment of facilities to conduct the election can be skewed to reduce availability of those facilities in selected areas to make voting more difficult and increased in those areas that the fraudulent candidate sees as more solidly in his favor.
Then there is good old-fashioned election fraud. In this age, the intention to engage in election fraud is frequently telegraphed by the dishonest candidate's admonishments against, or intention to oppose, voter fraud, a crime that is astonishingly rare, but played up by those who wish to deceive the electorate
The methods for election fraud are many, but in this day the most common is the manipulation of data streams from those eminently hack able electronic voting machines, especially those without a paper trail to provide a check on the electronic results. Of course, election fraud has always been with us, sometimes elevated to an art form as in the electoral depredations of Tammany Hall.
It's what inspired Josef Stalin to say, "It's not the people who vote that counts, and it’s who counts the votes." We may safely conclude from this that Josef Stalin didn't have much trust in democracy.
Up to now, I have been leaving it to the reader to conclude who does and who does not trust democracy, understanding that they are well capable of rendering that judgment, but to refrain from naming names seems like an act of ignoring the elephant in the room. We all know that these various cheats and frauds are those that are predominantly employed by Republicans in this century, so I might as well make the general statement, Republicans do not trust democracy, and they have good reason not to.
They understand as well as anyone that the direction in which they intend to move the country is one that is unacceptable to a free and open society. To trust in democracy is to take part in their own destruction, and they will not countenance that without employing every dirty trick, telling every lie and violating every public trust and every applicable law to advance their narrowly selfish aims.

It is up to us, the People of the United States, to perpetuate our democracy, our values and our society by stepping into a voting booth and choosing candidates who do trust democracy. By doing so we can make our democracy worthy of the trust that we all place in it.