Power Hungry (6 page)

The public loves the idea of renewable energy. On November 19, 2008,
WorldPublicOpinion.org
released a poll of nearly 21,000 people from twenty-one nations. The findings: Seventy-seven percent of respondents believed that their country should “emphasize more” use of solar and wind energy.
¹¹

In December 2008, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) sent out an e-mail asking voters to sign a petition that was to be sent to President-Elect Barack Obama. The LCV's board is a Who's Who of American environmental groups, including representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society, and the Environmental Defense Fund.
¹²
The petition told Obama that it is:

In April 2009, during the telecast of the Miss USA pageant, the show's emcee, Billy Bush, and cohost Nadine Velasquez declared that
the silicone-and-swimsuits soiree was, in fact, environmentally friendly and was therefore part of NBC's initiative, “Green Is Universal.” The slogan is a play on the name of the TV outfit's parent company, NBC Universal, a subsidiary of industrial giant General Electric.
¹⁴
Following the corporate plug, Velasquez said that “Miss USA will be awarded a brand new, more eco-friendly green crown, because green reigned here.”
¹⁵

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Chu, who now serves as the U.S. secretary of energy, has made his own glib pronouncements.
¹⁶
In mid-2009, Chu appeared on
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
and said, “We want energy but we want it carbon-free.”
¹⁷

“Carbon-free” energy appears to be such a selling concept that even pimps have begun hawking it. In 2005, Heidi Fleiss, the “Hollywood Madam” who gained notoriety in the mid-1990s after she was arrested and convicted on attempted pandering charges, announced that she was planning to open a “stud farm” in Nevada that would cater to female customers.
¹⁸
But in 2009, Fleiss announced that she had dropped plans for the bordello and was instead focusing her talents on alternative energy. “That's where the money is,” she said. “That's the wave of the future.”
¹⁹

From Gore to Chu and Miss USA to the Hollywood Madam, Americans are being carpet-bombed with energy happy-talk. And that happy talk has contributed to a widespread sense of guilt.

Here's an exercise: The next time you hear someone say “We are addicted to oil” or “We are addicted to coal,” try this: Substitute the word “prosperity” for “oil” or “coal.”

I don't offer that idea to be flippant, but rather to point out just how disconnected America's rhetoric about energy is from the perspective of the 2 to 3 billion people on the planet who live in dire energy poverty. At the same time that many of those people are still relying on biomass (such as wood, straw, or dung) for their cooking needs, and spending large chunks of their time and labor procuring those fuels every day, most Americans live in a world of energy abundance with access to cheap fuels that their counterparts in places like South Africa, Sudan, Laos, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Pakistan can only dream of.

While most of us certainly appreciate the many blessings of prosperity, there's a growing sense that U.S. citizens should sign up for Jenny Craig or an Atkins Diet for gasoline and electricity. Conflating energy use with addiction—sex addiction, gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, Internet addiction—has facilitated a growing sense of anxiety in Americans.
²⁰
Add in fears about global warming—which many scientists believe is being caused by, or at least exacerbated by, the burning of hydrocarbons—along with claims about energy shortages and terrorism, and that guilt becomes ever more easily exploitable by politicians, pundits, and erstwhile capitalists looking to suckle at the federal teat. On top of all this, Americans feel guilty about their prosperity, particularly when compared with the grinding poverty that is common throughout the world.

In mid-2009, a Canadian energy analyst, Peter Tertzakian, published a book called
The End of Energy Obesity
that tapped into these themes of guilt and addiction. In the first chapter, he declared that “we have become increasingly addicted to energy because we thoroughly enjoy the standard of living that energy-consuming devices and services make possible.”
²¹
Tertzakian's claim echoes the worldview espoused by Barack Obama in early 2007 when he officially announced that he was running for president. The United States, Obama proclaimed, must break free of the “tyranny of oil.”
²²

Huh? Billions of people would dearly love to be tyrannized by oil in exactly the same way most Americans are. Consider India, a country of 1.1 billion people, where the average resident consumes about 0.11 gallons of oil per day.
²³
The average American consumes about twenty-four times as much. And yet, over the past few years, many Americans have become increasingly ambivalent about their energy use. In some circles, people who drive SUVs are subjected to ridicule; conversely, fuel-efficient cars such as the Toyota Prius confer on their drivers a certain amount of environmental cachet, or “eco-bling.”

The growing Western obsession with carbon dioxide has even led some consumers to buy “carbon credits”—a type of get-out-of-jail-free card, an environmental indulgence—that theoretically allows them to offset a certain amount of the carbon dioxide they are responsible for emitting. The promoters of these indulgences promise buyers that their
money will go to “green” projects, such as a system that captures methane gas from a Chinese landfill, or perhaps the construction of a dam in India.
²⁴
But by 2008, the market for carbon indulgences had grown to some $54 million per year, and the Federal Trade Commission was advising consumers to be wary of the potential for fraud when buying them.
²⁵
And in late 2009, a British travel company, Responsibletravel. com, announced that it had quit offering carbon offsets because, in the words of the company's founder, they had become the equivalent of a “medieval pardon” that allowed buyers “to continue polluting.”
²⁶

Along with carbon credits, Americans have been barraged with claims about the desirability of being “carbon neutral.” In 2007, Al Gore's followers held Live Earth, a global series of concerts that claimed it was “carbon neutral” because, among other things, it had purchased carbon credits to offset the air travel done by concert organizers and performers.
²⁷
At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic National Committee created a “green delegate challenge” that asked each of the 5,000 delegates who were going to the convention in Denver to pay $7.50 for a “carbon offset.” The money was to be funneled to NativeEnergy, a Vermont outfit that promised to invest the money in various renewable energy projects.
²⁸

It's not just the Greens and the Democrats. One of history's most prolific purveyors of indulgences, the Roman Catholic Church, has begun equating carbon dioxide emissions with sin. In September 2007, the
New York Times
reported that the Vatican was aiming to become “the world's first carbon-neutral state.” In pursuit of that concept, the Vatican paid to plant a convent-load of trees on a 37-acre tract of land in Hungary. The plot was to be renamed the Vatican Climate Forest, and once the trees were in place, the Vatican would, in theory, have an atmospheric dispensation for all the carbon dioxide emissions that came from its cars, its offices, and, presumably, the hallowed lungs of the Holy Father himself, Pope Benedict XVI.

The
Times
quoted a Vatican official, Monsignor Melchor Sánchez de Toca Alameda, who averred that buying carbon credits was akin to penance. The monsignor did not advocate sackcloth and ashes, but he implied that believers may avoid eternal carbon damnation by “not using heating and not driving a car, or one can do penance by intervening to
offset emissions, in this case by planting trees.”
²⁹
Of course, there's no sin in planting trees. But can the trees in Hungary really offset all of the Vatican's carbon output? And for how long?

It's interesting to ponder what Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist, might have thought of all this. Maslow originated the idea of the “hierarchy of needs,” the concept that humans, as they increasingly satisfy their physiological needs—food, water, sleep, clothing, shelter, sex, and so on—begin seeking to fulfill more complex needs, such as love, esteem, and “self-actualization.” Using Maslow's template, it appears that many Americans have become so wealthy, so sated with living well—in a way that is made possible by using large quantities of cheap hydrocarbon-driven power—that their successful self-actualization depends in part on how much guilt they feel about consuming the very commodities that allow them to prosper.

An example: A few months ago, a friend of mine, a well-compensated M.D., bought a large Toyota SUV. The nearly 3-ton behemoth was equipped with a 381-horsepower engine, a DVD player, leather seats, and a rear cargo area big enough for a quick game of badminton. While escorting me on a trek around the perimeter of the vehicle, the physician admitted some feelings of guilt about his new wheels—and yet the mere act of sharing those pangs of iniquity appeared to assuage some of his feeling of environmental sinfulness.
³⁰

The disconnect between America's energy use and its guilt over that energy use is even being featured in an ad campaign sponsored by—get this—one of the world's biggest energy companies. That's right: California-based Chevron (2008 revenues: $273 billion) has been running a campaign called “Will You Join Us?”
³¹
The advertising barrage includes billboards and print ads with photos of handsome people with text lines imposed over, or near, their faces.
³²
One says, “I will leave the car at home more.” Another reads, “I will finally get a programmable thermostat.” But my all-time favorite is the ad that proclaims, “I will use less energy.”
³³

Pardon my insolence, but how many people in Uganda, Cambodia, or Peru wake up in the morning and declare, “By golly, I'm going to use less energy today”? Not many, I'd wager. And yet, this notion of guilt, combined with rhetoric about addiction and the idea of “using less,” has become a powerful theme in American politics.

PHOTO 1
Ad from Chevron's 2009 “Will You Join Us?” campaign

Source
: Chevron,
http://www.willyoujoinus.com/assets/downloads/media/Chevron_Iwill_use%20less%20energy.pdf
.

Furthermore, consider Chevron's corporate strategy: It is advising its customers to use less of the stuff it sells. Imagine what might happen if other companies followed suit: Microsoft would encourage people to use its software less or forgo the updates; Ford Motor could run TV ads advising drivers to continue piloting their old clunkers; Whole Foods could advise grocery buyers that what they really need isn't fresh produce and a warm baguette, it's ... nothing at all. Given Chevron's lead, corporate America may now forsake selling anything ever again. Imagine the environmental benefits! Just think of the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions!