The Politics of Energy Efficiency: Blue States Lead the Red States

After the American Century

What a surprise. These are the states that are the most energy efficient: Massachusetts (1), California (2), followed by New York, Oregon, Vermont, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Maryland. This information comes from The American Council for Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE). To give a sense of what this means, in Maryland, number 10 on the list, "Marylanders have already saved over 700,000 MWh of electricity and over $91 million dollars since 2009." These are savings that can be spent or saved, every year.

Not a single state in the American South is in the top ten.  Was this an accident? Consider the bottom group, states with the highest per capia use of energy:  North Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia, Missouri, Alabama, and South Dakota.  These are all in the South and trans-Mississippi West. The citizens of these states are spending more on gasoline and heat and air conditioning than the efficient states, which are investing in alternative energies, giving tax incentives to improve insulation, and investing in energy efficiency projects. Illinois alone has invested $600 million, creating jobs and saving energy at the same time.

The ACEEE study shows that Republican-dominated states have a poor record. Look at the Presidential election of 2008.

 

All ten of the most energy-efficient states voted Democratic.

All ten of the least energy-efficient states voted Republican.

This is not a coincidence. It tracks the repeated Republican denials of global warming and their heavy financial support from the oil, gas, and coal industries. 

Wake Up Republicans: Government is not a Business

After the American Century

The idea that the US government could choose to default is a fundamental misconception. Government is not a business that can decide to fail. Default is not a valid government strategy. Government is the foundation of society. It is a contract between the citizens that cannot be broken, not a corporation that can be allowed to go broke because people do not want to pay taxes. Talk of letting government fail financially cannot be separated from a more general failure of trust between the citizens. Government is about mutual obligation. It is not an investment that one pulls out of. Government is a contract between the generations, ensuring that pensions are paid, that opportunities such as education remain available, that the infrastructure is maintained, that services such as hospitals and fire departments do not deteriorate. Republicans really do not seem to understand this. They have long argued that government is an evil that should be pared down to a minimum. But the idea that elected legislators are willing intentionally to let the government default goes far beyond that doctrine. Dangerously far.

Americans have lived with a stable system so long that they have no historical experience of the disasters that come with fiscal irresponsibility. Undermine the state government, and you undermine the dollar itself. I am not talking about the dollar losing a few percentage points against the Euro. I am talking about the Japanese and the Chinese deciding not to buy dollar debt anymore, because it is too risky. I am talking about interest rates above 10% that cripple the US economy. For a small inkling, a mere taste of what that might mean, look at Greece right now, with the difference that the EU can bail out Greece. But no economy is big enough to bail out the United States.The US taxpayers have to honor their own obligations.

The dollar has been the world currency for so long that Americans take it for granted. But its hegemony is hardly assured. Other economies look stronger right now. Even to flirt with default will scare away future investments. Should the Republicans get back into power. international investors may head for the exits. Even now, China and Japan will almost certainly plan to dis-invest in US government bonds in order to spread their risk.

The Republican Party once again is showing that it is not fit to rule. It is a reckless party with no fiscal policy, a deluded party that does not understand the dangers of this historical moment when US economic and political power are challenged. The Republicans are a dangerous party that threatens to do lasting damage to US financial security and its standing in the world.

On the Line: Reading Harvey Swados

After the American Century

As part of my research on the history of the assembly line in the United States, I have been reading Harvey Swados for the first time. The name I knew, but not the work, which remains interesting after half a century. His short story cycle, On the Line, describes the lives and aspirations of eight men who work together in a new automobile factory in New Jersey, c. 1956, the year when Swados himself was on the assembly line in such a plant.

On the Line first presents LeRoy, an African American who aspires to be an opera singer, but needs money for more voice lessons, and so goes on the assembly line. An injury cuts off his chance for a musical career, and he remains mired in the job. His partner in the factory is a young Irish immigrant, Kevin, who is at first stunned by the size, the noise, and the bustle of the factory, and saves money to buy himself a car. But then having tasted the material dream and its price, he goes back to Ireland. 

The other characters are a reformed alcoholic, a aging widower, a failed businessman in his 50s who needs the money, a high-school graduate who saves his paycheck for college, a foreman who has worked his way up from the shop floor, and finally Joe, the closest thing to a stand-in for the author - an older man who seems well read. He refuses to get psychologically trapped by any job and drifts from one factory to another. 

Swados is effective precisely because the characters are each revealed in their private as well as their work lives.  We learn of their marriages, children, homes, and problems, as well as see them at work. His goal was to get away from any romantic notion of a unified, rather homogeneous working class. At the same time, however, Swados was writing against the Cold War-inspired notion that the US was fast becoming a society with minimal class differences. This was the sociological orthodoxy for a brief time, but no one reading this book could come away believing it was true then, any more than one could believe it now.

These are excellent stories that can be read separately but gain in power when taken as a whole.
 I found Swados insightful and useful in researching America's Assembly Line (MIT Press, 2013).

Different Default Situations: US vs. EU

After the American Century

Both the EU and the US are struggling with massive public indebtedness, and in each case the problems emerge from bad decisions made during the last decade. The problems are quite different, however.

First, consider The United States. It seems hard to believe now but the US had balanced its budget and was rapidly paying off its national debt in 2000. The current fiscal woes are due to an excessive tax cut that overstimulated the economy, combined with massive military expenditures and a failure to regulate the banks. These problems all came from the White House, which dismally failed to protect the strong economy created in the 1990s. Bush overspent, undertaxed, and virtually abandoned regulation. The country needs years to get out of the mess he created, during which it needs to raise taxes back to where they were in 2000, particularly on wealthy people. But the Republicans, once a party of fiscal rsponsibility, have no intelligible economic program and they seem willing to let the nation go into default rather than compromise with the White House. In short, the American problem is firmly lodged in Washington, rooted in the failures of the Bush years. The problem is not impossible to solve from an economic point of view, but it is hard to resolve politically. The stupidity is, if you will, ideological.

Second, consider Europe. Here the problem is much different. The problem has emerged at the regional level - Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, all have weak economies and huge deficits. In contrast, some other members of the EU, notably Germany and Sweden, have strongly rebounding economies and do not have unbalanced national budgets. The problem here is that no single banking policy is appropriate for both the strong nations and those tottering on the brink of default. The stupidity in the EU is, if you will, a regional matter.

The US has a problem that could be easily solved by reverting to the tax code of the Clinton years. Possibly, something approaching this will occur, probably at the last minute. As Winston Churchill once said, the Americans always do the right thing in the end, but not before they exhaust all the other possibilities.

In contrast, it is much harder to see what the EU can do to solve its fiscal problems. The failure of Greece to pay its debts could set off a financial tsunami. Even the controlled default now being contemplated (or rather orchestrated in Brussels)  could have dire effects. The unity of the EU will be sorely tested if the fiscally responsible economies have to bail out those, like Italy, that are rife with tax cheating and black market labor. Why should Germans or French tax payers have to endure higher taxes when many wealthy in Greece continue to lie about their assets and pay less than they should?

History is not logical, of course, and it might be that the US will stumble into a completely unnecessary default, while the Europeans stumble through to a somewhat undeserved equilibrium. But the fascinating thing is to see how these wealthy countries have made such a mess of fiscal policy.  In a worse case scenario, default on either side of the Atlantic could trigger a larger world crisis, from which Asia would almost certainly emerge the stronger.

We are in for a perilous three months.

Al Gore's Energy Challenge

After the American Century

"I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources within 10 years."
Al Gore, July 17, 2008

Al Gore has injected some needed seriousness into the political campaign, helping us to move beyond the silly New Yorker cover. He has called on Americans to produce 100% of their electrical energy using alternative energy, in just ten years. Comparing the project to the successful program to land a man on the moon, Gore presents energy not as a problem but an opportunity. If American farmers grow crops for American biofuel plants, and if American factories produce wind mills, solar panels, and other components of an alternative power system, the US economy will prosper, and the nation will cease to be dependent on foreign oil suppliers. Gore has declared that it is technologically feasible, ecologically useful, and politically necessary to move decisively away from fossil fuels.

Gore's proposal is a logical development in his thinking. After presenting the public with the inconvenient truth of global warming and its dire effects, his plan offers a way out of the crisis. By presenting it months before the American presidential election, he puts it on the table as one of the major issues of the campaign, along with Iraq and the economy. Initial reactions from the two candidates suggest that Obama is far more receptive than McCain, even though his sun-rich home state of Arizona would profit from more emphasis on solar power. Obama declared, "I strongly agree with Vice President Gore that we cannot drill our way to energy independence but must fast-track investments in renewable sources of energy like solar power, wind power, and advanced biofuels." McCain did not reject Gore's plan, but was less supportive, as one might expect. McCain has championed off-shore oil drilling - i.e. increasing the American supply of oil - while Obama has rejected that idea. So, while Gore wants to lift energy policy making out of the morass of partisanship, this is not likely. But fortunately, both McCain and Obama are far more supportive of developing alternative energies than Bush has been.

Realism suggests that ten years will be too short a time horizon for a full conversion. to alternative energies. The shifts from an economy based predominantly on wood to coal, and from coal to natural gas and oil, each took considerably longer than a decade. But the point is not whether Gore's idea is strictly feasible in ten years. Considerable numbers of people are still burning wood, after all. Rather, the point is that a shift to a predominantly new energy regime is highly desirable, the quicker the better. Clearly it cannot be limited to revamping the approach to electricity production, but should extend to motorized transport as well. Hybrid cars have now proved themselves, and there is no reason to permit new cars that get less than 35 miles per gallon, and even those cars should be taxed heavily enough to make automobiles that get more than 40 mpg attractive. Strictly speaking, the US has oil supplies of its own, that it might continue to consume at 30% of the present level without imports. But the environmental impact of more CO2 is so undesirable that Gore is right about making a fundamental shift. The world, and the US in particular, desperately needs a new energy system.

But even the realistic hope that two-thirds of the fossil fuel energy regime could be replaced may be too optimistic. Unfortunately, all energy systems have considerable "technological momentum," the term that Thomas P. Hughes developed to analyze the ways that energy systems perpetuate themselves. Hughes is absolutely not a conspiracy theorist, who thinks that oil companies and lobbyists connive to keep the present system going. Rather, the enormous infrastructure and the ingrained habits of those who use it, has a powerful momentum that finds expression in the physical layout of cities and homes, the location of resources, the training offered by the educational system, the trillions of dollars invested in the present infrastructure, and on and on. There are millions of people whose jobs are largely shaped by the old energy system, and it will be difficult to move swiftly to a new energy regime, even if Gore makes this a major campaign issue, and even if the right legislation is speedily passed in Congress.

All the more reason for Al Gore to push as hard as he can on this vital issue, and all the more reason why the rest of us should be joining him.


Interested in the historical background to this discussion? Consult David E. Nye,
Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (MIT Press, in paperback), or
Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT Press, in paperback).

The Real Campaign Issues I: Oil

All the candidates are talking about change. One area that screams out for change is US oil policy. The United States is the world's largest oil consumer and polluter per capita, and yet it has resisted the Kyoto Accords. Rather than offering leadership, the US has been a stumbling block. This is not in its own national interest, and it is economically wrong-headed, as well as contributing to environmental degradation. 

The US spends billions of dollars a year on imported oil, and yet its cars are far less efficient than they might be. Indeed, while some mild requirements for miles per gallon have been imposed on automobiles, the gas-guzzling SUVs and small trucks driven by millions of Americans are exempt from controls. I even know one 80 year-old woman who drives a Humvee to the supermarket, getting about 4 miles to the gallon. This is in rural Connecticut, where the need for an armored car is minimal. Gas mileage for cars in the US is roughly the same now as it was thirty years ago, and it was better in 1988 than in 2008!  Could there be any connection between this policy fiasco and the fact that former oil executives, i.e. members of the Bush family, have been running the country for 12 of those 20 years? I am not suggesting a conspiracy, just inability to see that the world has changed. Only as his presidency has drifted toward its end has George W. Bush admitted that, in his words, the nation is "addicted to oil." But after making that admission in a State of the Union message, little has changed. Except the price of oil. It has kept going up. 

The US today could drive just as much and use less than half the oil it does today, if only it made a real effort. American cars today average less than 25 mpg. The Toyota Prius gets 55 mpg. The Honda Insight got 70 mpg. Detroit did not build these cars, and has consistently fought for lower standards, and that means more imported oil, primarily from the Middle East. Detroit has not shown any leadership, and it has backed candidates with a similar (lack of) ideas, notably George Bush and another former oil executive, Dick Cheney.

This is the old story. Do any of the candidates in this election want to champion a new story? The Democratic candidates seem to want a new policy for gas mileage, but the American public has generally resisted any forced changes in the automotive lifestyle. Obama has proposed to help Detroit make the transition to hybrid cars by having the Federal Government pick up some of the health-care costs the car industry has. As he points out, health care now adds $1500 to the cost of every car, which is more than the cost of the steel. In short, Obama has moved beyond mere rhetoric to look for a solution and a partnership. He argues that Ford, GM, and Chrysler really have no choice. If they want to stop losing market share, then they will have to begin making more fuel efficient cars.  Obama also champions substituting home-grown biofuels for oil, reducing the costly dependence on foreign oils. Obama has also said that he would appoint a Secretary of Energy Security, in order to keep focused on the problem.

Hillary Clinton has some of the same ideas. More efficient cars, bio-fuel, more solar and wind power. She introduced legislation in 2006 for a "strategic energy fund" that would put $9 billion over a five year period into energy research, and and she suggested taxing the oil companies to help pay for it. Clinton has noted that ExxonMobil made the highest corporate profits in history, and together with the five other large oil companies had profits of $113 billion in 2005. A tax of less than 10% on their profits from one year would be enough to pay for the research into alternative energies. 

In short, both Obama and Clinton see the importance of new energy policies. Both see the dangers of relying on foreign oil, the dangers of global warming, and the need to rescue Detroit from its own backward looking executives. Either, if elected, would push the US in the right direction. But how hard would they push? Jimmy Carter was educated as an engineer, and he understands thermodynamics. Unfortunately, he did not find a way to get the public to accept his energy plans. Instead, Ronald Reagan told the electorate what they wanted to hear, that the shortages were artificial results of red-tape and environmentalists tampering with the free market. Never overestimate the American voter when it comes to oil. Convenience and the cost at the pump may matter more than global warming or national security or preserving what is left of the automobile industry. But at least if either Clinton or Obama are elected, there is a chance that the US will have an intelligent policy.

Anyone interested in the story of how the US became the world's largest consumer of energy might want to go to the library and borrow my Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (MIT Press).

A blog on Electricity will follow next month.