Our New Energy Crisis

When it comes to energy, we need real change.

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almost four years ago, when oil was trading at around $40 a barrel, Paul Roberts wrote a story for Mother Jones on a bleak scenario gaining currency among energy insiders, but not yet in the mainstream consciousness: peak oil, basically the notion that the world’s petroleum resources are nearing exhaustion. If the theory held true, Roberts warned, oil prices could soon leap to “perhaps as high as $100 per barrel—a disaster if we don’t have a cost-effective alternative fuel or technology in place.”

Welcome to the disaster: $100-a-barrel oil is in the rearview mirror, and no cost-effective (or even cost-prohibitive) alternative has emerged. The most dire consequences of this failing—hurricanes, drought, extinction—are occurring far more rapidly than even Slideshow Al could have predicted four years ago. And then there’s the war.

It’s easy enough to blame Dick Cheney, Big Oil, Detroit—all of whom have done their part in obstructing progress. But their chicanery distracts us from the far greater problem, one that, unfortunately, comes down to Organic Chemistry 101. Every technological advance of the last 150 years has been powered by a unique, extremely energy-dense, but finite—and, as it turns out, planet-killing—source of fuel. Switching away from fossil energy requires an economic and social transformation at least as great as the Industrial Revolution. And we have to build this new economy on the fumes of the old, hoping that we don’t run out of gas, or ice caps, before we get there. As Roberts points out in this special issue on energy, if we sit on our hands or let the process be hijacked by vested interests, “there may not be enough crude left in the ground to fuel a second try.”

This change will be painful. Building a new energy economy will require enormous government and private investment. It will involve massive workforce upheaval and possibly physical dislocation. The conservation measures demanded will make victory gardens or Jimmy Carter donning a sweater look like three-day diets.

The last time we took such issues seriously, in Carter’s day, it was called an energy crisis. Thermostats were turned down across the land, and we went into R&D overdrive. And that crisis was only about the price of oil—which topped out at all of $78 in today’s dollars. Few were talking about global warming or blood for oil.

Today’s energy crisis is on a different scale. We’re reliant on an ever-more dubious cast of characters to provide us power. And if you think the mortgage meltdown is troubling, wait till the markets discover the real price of carbon and realize that our entire economy is, essentially, built on a planetary accounting fraud.

Greenhouse gases, geology, and geo­politics give us no choice but to change our ways. The truth is, that change has already begun. Just as we’ve gone, in the space of a few years, from debating the validity of climate change to being confronted daily with the rapidity of glacial melting, so too will the shift to a postfossil economy, now largely imperceptible, soon be painfully evident. We can—as we did when confronted with the Great Depression or World War II—overhaul our society and economy and emerge stronger, or we can get swamped by change, watching helplessly as others ride the wave of postcarbon innovation. Will we be Chrysler or Toyota?

What we can’t bank on is that some geek in Silicon Valley will, on her own, come up with the perfect solution. Nor will the treasured fixes of the left—solar panels on every roof, banning Hummers, forgoing imported tomatoes—be sufficient. The questions we face are on the order of: Are you willing to consider a nuclear plant in your back yard? If not your yard, whose? And if not a reactor, how about damming a bucolic river, or windmills that ruin a cherished view? What new regulations and taxes do we need to kick-start the transformation?

Forcing the nation to confront such questions is the most critical task our next president faces—more important than resolving the war, bolstering the economy, or fixing health care. As Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) has warned, the president will have advisers whispering that she or he “can appear forward-looking on energy with a few carefully chosen initiatives…. without asking for sacrifices or risking the possible failure of a more controversial energy policy.”

We are guaranteed better leadership than Bush: John McCain introduced the first carbon cap-and-trade bill, and both Clinton and Obama have presented solid, at times groundbreaking, energy plans. But better isn’t good enough. We need someone who recognizes the urgency and enormity of the task at hand, who won’t fall for bromides like “energy independence” or “clean coal,” and, most of all, who can shock the rest of us out of our complacency and ask for sacrifices. Let’s hope that kind of change is in the offing.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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