Power Hungry (7 page)

Now, some of Chevron's motivation for its ad campaign may be that it wants to soften the company's image. And when it comes to image, energy companies are often seen as only slightly more likeable than Lucifer himself. A 2006 Gallup poll found that just 15 percent of Americans had a positive view of the oil and gas industry, whereas 77 percent had a negative image. Out of twenty-five sectors that Gallup asked about, the oil and gas industry ranked dead last. Even the federal government ranked ahead (but just barely) of the oil and gas industry in the collective opinion of the general public.
³⁴
Add in the huge profits that the industry
has made in recent years, including Exxon Mobil's record $45.2 billion profit in 2008, at a time when Americans were paying record-high prices for gasoline, and the industry's need for an image makeover becomes even more apparent.
³⁵

Thus, along with their feelings of guilt, Americans are angry at the companies that provide them with the energy they require. And to top it off, many Americans are fearful. Their fears are evident in the findings of an early 2009 Zogby International survey that was conducted for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Zogby interviewed 1,000 randomly selected adults from across the United States about issues regarding energy and the environment. Of the questions that focused solely on energy, the most lopsided response came from a question dealing with potential shortages of hydrocarbons, where 70.6 percent of the respondents agreed that the United States “must move to renewable energy because we are rapidly running out of oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels.”
³⁶

If that Zogby poll were an election, it would have been a landslide. Perhaps this fear is understandable. Over the past few years, books, magazines, and newspapers have continually hyped the dangers of peak oil. Catastrophists such as author James Kunstler, who wrote the 2005 book
The Long Emergency
, have predicted that once we reach that peak, rapid declines in production will follow, and then, warns Kunstler, “epidemic disease and faltering agriculture will synergize with energy scarcities to send nations reeling.”
³⁷

Americans are fearful about energy because of the lingering images of the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1979 oil price shock. More recently, they have endured the supply disruptions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the price shocks of mid-2008 that sent gasoline prices to more than $4 per gallon.

Politicians frequently use those events to stoke the fear that the United States could somehow be “cut off” from the global oil market. For instance, in 2006, Bill Clinton gave a speech in California during which he said, “Think of the instability and the impotence you feel knowing that every day we have to have a lifeline from places half a world away that could cut us off in a minute.”
³⁸
Of course, it's worth noting any time that Bill Clinton mentions “impotence.” But he's hardly the only one stoking the fears of a possible embargo or shortage. In mid-2009,
Michael Moore, the liberal documentary filmmaker, published an essay in
The Daily Beast
in which he forecast a real-life edition of the
Mad Max
movies complete with oil-crazed survivors of a scorched planet battling each other for the last few liters of gasoline. In his article, titled “Goodbye, GM,” Moore assailed the “war” that he said was “being waged by the oil companies against you and me.” He went on to say that the evil oil barons “are not telling the public what they know to be true—that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.”
³⁹

The drumbeat of fear abounds in discussions about global warming. In June 2009, the Obama administration released a report on climate change that called for massive reductions in U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide. Without a major change in energy use, the report said, “Likely future changes for the United States and surrounding coastal waters include more intense hurricanes with related increases in wind, rain, and storm surges.”
⁴⁰
It went on to say that because of global warming, “crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged,” and that “coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.”
⁴¹
The report concluded that our only choice is to cut carbon dioxide emissions and that, “unless the rate of emissions is substantially reduced, impacts are expected to become increasingly severe for more people and places.”
⁴²

Although guilt, anger, and fear are key elements of Americans' gullibility when it comes to energy matters, the most important factor is ignorance. Most people simply don't understand how energy and power are produced. And that lack of knowledge, combined with widespread scientific illiteracy and innumeracy, makes for a deadly combination.

In 2007, I interviewed Vaclav Smil about energy issues.
⁴³
I asked him why Americans are so easily swayed about energy matters. His response: scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. “Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of
basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything,” he told me.
⁴⁴
Verifying Smil's claim is all too easy. A 2007 study by Michigan State University determined that just 28 percent of American adults could be considered scientifically literate.
⁴⁵
In February 2009, the California Academy of Sciences released the findings of a survey which found that most Americans couldn't pass a basic scientific literacy test. The findings:

In July 2009, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released the results of a survey of 2,001 adult Americans regarding science issues. Among the findings: Just 46 percent knew that electrons are smaller than atoms.
⁴⁷

Those findings shouldn't be surprising. Ignorance of the sciences and the natural world has plagued the world for centuries. This centuries-long suspicion of science, which continues today with regular attacks on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, was recognized by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow in the 1950s when he delivered a lecture called “The Two Cultures.” Snow argued that there was a growing disconnect between the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities, and that bridging that gap was critical to understanding and addressing the world's problems. Snow placed “literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” and noted that in between there was “a gulf of mutual incomprehension.”
⁴⁸
Snow then laid out a critical point about the general public's lack of understanding of energy and thermodynamics. As Snow put it:

Indeed, although most moderately cultured people will be familiar with
A Comedy of Errors
or
The Merchant of Venice
, the laws of thermodynamics are considered by many of these same people to be the domain of nerds and wonks. Thus, the first law of thermodynamics—energy is neither created nor destroyed—and the second law—energy tends to become more random and less available—are relegated to the realm of too much information.
⁵⁰
This apathy toward science makes it laughably easy for the public to be deceived, or for people to deceive themselves.

Alas, the apathy toward science in America is matched—or perhaps even exceeded—by the lack of interest in mathematics. Over the past few years, the United States has been inundated with depressing data about the state of the country's mathematical skills. And unfortunately, the data appears to reflect a grim reality.

A 2008 study published by the American Mathematical Society put it bluntly: “It is deemed uncool within the social context of USA middle and high schools to do mathematics for fun.”
⁵¹
The study went on to explain that “very few USA high schools teach the advanced mathematical skills, such as writing rigorous essay-style proofs, needed to excel.”
⁵²
Another report issued in 2008, this one from the U.S. Department of Education's National Mathematics Advisory Panel, declared that math education in the United States “is broken and must be fixed.”
⁵³
The report found “that 27% of eighth-graders could not correctly shade 1/3 of a rectangle and 45% could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions.”
⁵⁴
The report also found poor math skills among adults:

This scientific illiteracy and innumeracy gets exacerbated in energy discussions by an equally thorny problem: the many different ways in which we measure units of energy. We use several sources of energy, and each is measured and sold in a mind-boggling variety of units. Oil is measured and sold in barrels, tons, gallons, and liters. Natural gas is measured and sold in cubic meters, millions of Btu, therms, dekatherms, and cubic feet. Coal comes in long tons and short tons, but its pricing depends on several other factors, including heat content, ash content, sulfur content, and, most important, the distance between the coal mine and the power plant. Electricity is sold in kilowatt-hours, but electricity terminology spans other units, including volts, amperes, and ohms.
⁵⁶
Add in joules, watts, ergs, and calories, and things get even more complex. Furthermore, different entities use different metrics. For instance, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy publishes much of its data in millions of tons of oil equivalent. The Energy Information Administration prefers quadrillion Btu, or “quads.” (One quad is approximately equal to 172 million barrels of oil equivalent, or about 1 exajoule.) Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency, as well as many countries, uses joules.

This googol of energy metrics complicates energy discussions. It also makes it more difficult to move past feel-good ideas that will do little or nothing to actually address our future energy and power needs.

In order to move past the happy talk, as well as the guilt, fear, and ignorance, we have to address the issues of energy and power in a rigorous manner. We must take an approach that includes numbers, units, and precise terminology. Understanding the difference between energy and power, for example, requires a bit of elementary physics, as well as proper definitions of key terms. In the next chapter, I will walk you through the physics and the terminology so that you can see why America's discussions about “energy” are so misguided. Power is what we want. And lots of it.

Watt's the Big Deal? (Power Tripping 102)

E
NERGY GETS THE HEADLINES and the attention. It's the buzzword that pundits and politicos count on to pack a punch. Thus, we've been barraged by the ever-present “energy crisis” as well as other combinations: energy security, energy scarcity, energy management, energy policy, and dozens more. In the consumer world, we have energy bars, energy drinks, and, for consumer electronics, Energy Star.

My antique copy of the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
(printed in 1936) contains half a dozen definitions for “energy.” Meanwhile, its definitions for “power” cover nearly half a page. The word “power” now gets used in numerous contexts—political power, electrical power, brain power, black power, Chicano power, star power, flower power, power trip, power walking, power lunch, and computing power, to name just a few.