Energy Politics by William Shepherd 1880 words

Those of us with long memories are sceptical about President Bush’s War on Terror. We remember Johnson’s War on Poverty and Reagan’s War on Drugs and how little they did to eliminate poverty or stop the global drugs trade. Like most government-sponsored rhetorical wars their effect was to inflate the verbal currency thereby deflating the horrors of military wars. Global warming is the new enemy and the War on Climate Change the latest example…spilling over into national energy agendas and setting them off in the wrong direction.

A hundred years ago Halford Mackinder wrote Democratic Ideals & Reality. Thirty years later Karl Haushofer founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik which adopted a couple of Mackinder’s chapters on its way to becoming a propaganda organ for Hitler’s Nazis. A couple of decades ago Haushofer’s Mackinder resurfaced at military academies in the USA, eventually finding public policy voice in the idea that the US could bomb the world into submission from 30000 feet. Boots and not bombs win wars. China is notable by its absence from neocon theories.

Mackinder’s geopolitics explained 19^th century imperial warmongering rather better than 20^th century total war…in part because he omitted giving the USA a leading role. Just as old generals are forever fighting the last war so old academics are forever locked into past orthodoxies. Neither offers much political guidance for the future. Most of Mackinder is good history and poor strategy but not all of it. The professor was good on power. He understood the difference between the viewpoints of the landsman and the seaman. His heartland lay at the centre of a one-world-island so the geopolitical reality of the next few hundred years…before the air ocean world nudges the seven oceans into geopolitical insignificance…will be a struggle between the landsman and seaman’s ideologies. But his best big idea was that politics is always and everywhere a struggle between interests and locality.

Had Mackinder given any thought to energy he would have acknowledged that here at least the gods have thrown their weight on the side of locality. Local energy catchment has enormous economic advantages over any piping system the monopolists might come up with. The energy truth about life on Planet Earth is that we are not short of energy. In 45 minutes the sun delivers enough energy to meet our energy needs for a year. J.B.S. Haldane made this point in 1923 when remarking that ‘if a windmill in one’s back garden could produce a hundredweight of coal daily (and it can produce its equivalent in energy) our coalmines would be shut down tomorrow’.

A quarter of a century ago Jay Forrester wrote a book called World Dynamics in which the world was viewed as a single integrated system. For the first time industrial growth was linked to pollution. Rachel Carson had set the mood 20 years earlier with Silent Spring but Forrester added intellectual flesh to the bones of her environmental fears and scepticism. Before Carson and Forrester nature had no waste and what there was could be disposed of in the sea or the sky…or deep underground in the earth. Out of sight was out of mind. With funding from the Club of Rome Forrester’s theoretical concerns about growth and pollution became a quasi-scientific link between capitalism and global catastrophe. Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter was a short detour along the way but otherwise it is a straight line from the Meadows’ Report on limits to growth to the Stern Report on climate change. Imminent global catastrophe will be avoided by the public purse throwing loads of money at the problem. The poor have no money and the rich never pay taxes so the middle class must be fleeced.

In Manchester last September the Prime Minister addressed the Labour Party Conference. He devoted part of his speech to UK Energy Policy. The Times condensed what Mr Blair had to say into 180 words. Here they are. ‘Ten years ago energy wasn’t on the agenda. Ten years ago I parked the issue of nuclear power. Today I believe without it we are going to face an energy crisis and we can’t let that happen. Global warming is the greatest long-term threat to our planet’s environment. Scarce energy resources mean rising prices and will threaten our country’s economy. In 15 years we will go from 86 percent self-sufficient in oil and gas to 80 percent imported. We need therefore the most radical overhaul of energy policy since the war. We will increase the amount of energy from renewable sources fivefold; ensure every major business in the country has responsibility for greenhouse gas reduction; treble investment in clean technology including clean coal and make sure every new home is at least 40 percent more energy efficient. We will meet our Kyoto targets by double the amount and we will take the necessary measures step by step to meet one of the most ambitious targets on the environment ever set anywhere in the world - a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050.’

A few weeks later on Guy Fawkes Day I published England’s Climate & Energy Politics. My principal concern was the poor quality of the science and the computer modelling behind climate studies. Get Google to find it for you. The 200-page booklet begins by contrasting a Sane Humane Ecological (SHE) approach to England’s energy needs with the Hyperexpanionist (HE) approach outlined in Blair’s speech. My 180 words ran thus. ‘Ten years ago it was blindingly obvious that energy self-sufficiency was the right energy policy goal. Ten years ago it was blindingly obvious that nuclear power was a dead-end technology. Nothing has changed. Global warming and the greenhouse effect are fantasy not fact. To imagine governments can stabilize the Earth’s atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. Human beings cannot control the climate and must stop meddling with it. There is no energy shortage. The sun takes 45 minutes to provide all the energy we use in one year. We will outlaw the use and development of climate weapons immediately. We will withdraw from the Kyoto Treaty immediately. We will decommission all nuclear power stations immediately. We will stop wasting electricity on space heating. We will adopt zero tolerance and polluter pays policies for emission of all substances into the landscape and the atmosphere. We will establish a Lord Lieutenant’s Department with cabinet status to direct the dismantling of the country’s national piped energy grids. Prince Charles will head the department, negotiate county disconnection dates, issue the money and provide the people.’

Set out here is the alternative movement’s dream of a sane, humane & ecological pipe- and cable-free energy world. Opposing this dream…and deeply mired in its 20th century global energy and currency infrastructure…are some of the most powerful commercial players on the planet. Piped energy means valves and meters and power over people, towns and states. These players will coalesce as saboteurs and conspirators to retain their centrally-controlled piped energy infrastructure…howbeit with ever decreasing carbon-content in their pipes paid for by the public purse. They must be branded as public enemies of the people and dealt with accordingly.

The first four policy recommendations require immediate action to outlaw the use and development of climate weapons, withdraw from the Kyoto Treaty, decommission all nuclear power plants and stop wasting electricity on space heating. Hence the public enemies identified are number one the military climate weaponry programmes in Russia, US, China and elsewhere; number two the one world government conspirators; number three the nuclear industry and number four those fraudulently claiming that energy need and electricity need are synonymous.

My next two policy recommendations are to adopt zero tolerance and polluter pays policies for emission of all substances into landscape, seascape and atmosphere. Hence public enemy number five is those who are using the fraudulent Carbonista Theology to limit private corporate liability from their responsibilities to eliminate all pollution and implement closed recovery & recycling systems throughout the supply production & distribution chain. Enemy six is the same as enemy five but the looting mechanism is different. Instead of avoiding paying the full public costs of their commercial operations the public purse is blackmailed into picking up the capital investment tab for staying in business and reaping future profits.

In an article entitled Energy Wars published five years ago in Fourth World Review…and included in my book on climate and energy policy…I discuss energy chemistry and the steady shift from carbon energy to hydrogen energy. The Carbonista Theology allows the costs of this shift in raw feed material to be dumped on the public domain thereby enhancing the profits raked in for private gain. Enemy seven is the national, regional and global economic & political forces intent on preserving the piping and metering mentality to energy distribution for oil, gas, hydrogen & electricity. Enemy eight is all those centralising forces opposed to real subsidiarity. National and international piping grids for energy, water, telephones, information are centralising and controlling devices. But to determine a policy response it is necessary to specify the nexus of power and to establish administrative structures at this level. Dismantling the national piped energy grids means closing the valves to the international grids, phasing out national piping infrastructures and building out local piping grids. During the transition it would make sense to keep open the North Sea pipelines for Norwegian gas and tap into the Channel Tunnel cables for French nuclear electricity.

Peacetime mobilization might well be needed. Why not give the job to the English Counties by empowering Lord Lieutenants rather than by throwing money at county councils? Establish a Lord Lieutenant Department with cabinet status…and give the minister six months to report its county disconnection dates to the Westminster Parliament. A parallel county structure separate from all existing administrative channels will be essential. Existing structures are incapable of implementing the energy policy the country needs. Indeed national power structures will do everything in their power to sabotage a SHE energy policy. It may be that the best way to introduce the countervailing power that will be needed is by re-energising the two moribund estates of church…the Lords Spiritual…and the monarchy which includes the Lords Temporal…because enemy nine is the parliament and its administration backed by enemy ten, the merchants and the money power…comprising the commercial banking system, the international network of central banks and the central banking debt-usury mechanism that creates, destroys and maldistributes credit.

The way to outflank these ten public enemies is by stripping them of their power which is rooted in their power over money and people. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Issuing money in England can be removed from the central and commercial banking mechanism and returned to county banks and local mints. Recruiting people for energy-work offers opportunities for creative public policy. Direct barter of A Good Day’s Pay for a Good Day’s Work for instance can provide a Home Free & Clear for a few hundred days work on the county-energy agenda…a policy at town and county level which would eliminate financial shenanigans from the residential housing markets. Creative local policies like this can make major inroads into the centralised control of people’s work and money choices.

Rye, Sussex

7^th February 2007 Draft for publication by Fourth World Review