Energy Victory!

During last night's Patriots game, my usual disdain for commercial breaks got me flipping channels. Luckily, I happened to stumble upon a compelling Book TV presentation by Robert Zubrin, a smart guy who recently published a book titled Energy Victory. As I listened to this man passionately share his interpretation of the current state of energy affairs, the fate of the Patriots paled in comparison. Here was someone using his creativity not to get into the playoffs, but to find Americans a way out of our energy bind.

Zubrin's description of the global oil economy was nuanced and complicated. At times, some of the journalists in the audience looked drowsy or confused. But the main thrust of his argument is that OPEC is in position to milk us for all we're worth, and we are helpless to stop them unless our government mandates that all vehicles sold in the US have "flex-fuel" capability.

Flex-fuel vehicles are able to operate on fuel that contains any mixture of ethanol and gasoline, and according to Robert, the technology for this exists today and would cost an extra couple hundred dollars per vehicle to install. He also disagrees with the Cornell study that found the energy cost to produce ethanol exceeds the amount energy it can provide.

He points out that global oil supply-demand is so inelastic that when OPEC reduced production by 5%, prices rose 50%... talk about power. So when we pay $3 per gallon, we can be damn sure that OPEC benefits. It's no coincidence that Abu Dhabi just had $7.5 billion laying around to buy a stake in Citi. Countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia each stand to benefit, and at the expense of America's pocketbook.

Or we could spend those dollars on ethanol. Farmers (yeah, multinationals like ADM, but they don't own all the farmland yet, so a lot of small farmers too) grow the feedstock for ethanol fuel. Most people in the third world are farmers. So what you find is that in an ethanol economy, money could go to the pockets of farmers around the world.

I think what's original about this guy was that he actually connects the dots from terrorism to oil to power to money to US policy. If we continue our current energy policy, we might as well send Osama Bin Laden a suitcase nuke for Christmas, and build a Wahabbi sect mosque in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

http://www.energyvictory.net/