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When History and Its Myths Interfere with Today’s Issues
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Justice Anthony Kennedy nailed it when he said the Supreme Court was in uncharted waters when considering same-sex marriage. He might also have said that this means that society is unburdened with myth and legacy on this issue and can consider it almost on it merits; whereas homosexuality is as old and permanent as time, marriage between homosexuals is a new concept in the organization of human affairs.
Actually, the justices are facing something antithetical to their purposes: a clean slate. For the rest of society, a clean slate is almost unachievable. But when it does happen — when law, conduct and invention are unhampered by the legacy of the past and myths that are codified into principles — wonderful things happen. For example:
1. The U.S. Constitution, where the old building blocks of political organization were rearranged into something totally new and marvelous.
2. The computer age, where ideas and inventions — largely because they weren't limited by previous ones — have changed the entire human system of work and communication.
3. Modern art, where millennia of tradition had established rigidities that defined what was art and its production, added to the sum of the medium and allowed a new voice of expression.
4. Rock and Roll, where a new form eclipsed the popular music of the time and was able to borrow from the blues, jazz and other sources without accepting their rigidities. It vastly enlarged the musical firmament.
The shadows of history and its attendant myths reach down into the present; sometimes informing and guiding, but also inhibiting.The old way of doing things, the old of thinking, the old slavery to myth is comforting and provides society with order and stability. But at the frontiers of human experience it's distorting. That's why innovators have to leave their old-line companies and branch out of their own, why new art is at war with critics and the artistic establishment, and why medical research is often inhibited by the traditions of medicine.The European Union, for all of its faults, was a bold attempt to free Europe from the bonds of its history and the internecine war which they created. The Middle East is in chaos, as ancient and modern history play out – from Biblical times through World War I and World War II. History won’t let go of it, denying it a new beginning. Ireland’s inability to shake history has cost it dearly, as has bitter relationship between Greece and Turkey. Ditto Kashmir and many other trouble spots.Happily, the implosion of the Soviet Union left little myth to perpetuate its failures; there's not a lot of yearning for a failed idea. The myth of the system's superiority perished with it.Alas, Congress is always convulsed by the past; not the past of ancient history, but the past of the last election. One of Washington’s wiser political figures, former Sen. Howard Baker, who later served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, told me that to understand Congress, you have to understand that it's a retrospective body, always reacting to the last election. Indeed.My reading of this is that if President Obama can't refocus Congress, take it to a new place with new ideas, even if they are new ideas about old issues, then Congress will perpetuate the rancor of the last election with its outrages, false facts and perpetuated myths. That’s what the president must be indicted for – not for being a Democrat or the tragedy in Benghazi, or for trying to revamp our health payment system.Inappropriately, Congress doesn't have a clean slate; uncomfortably, the Supreme Court has one. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Obama and His Oil Sands Brer Rabbit
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If there were an Oscar for political ineptitude, President Barack Obama would be a front-runner for the prize. The president’s possible approval of the 2,000-mile-long pipeline from the oil sands (previously known as the tar sands, and most correctly bitumen sands) of Alberta, Canada to the refineries and shipping terminals of the U.S. Gulf Coast is a tale of political calculation that has gone sadly wrong.Back in January 2012, when he was expected to give his approval and that of the State Department, to what is an international agreement, the president punted. Concerned about stout opposition in his own administration, and particularly from his Environmental Protection Administration chief Lisa Jackson, Obama demurred and requested more studies.This did two things: It antagonized the Canadian people, always sensitive to slights from the United States, and humiliated the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Joe Oliver, Canada's minister for natural resources, told me on the record just before Obama’s statement that he had had strong indications from the administration that the Keystone XL pipeline would be approved. In the event, he and the Canadian government were outraged and embarrassed.As though offending our trading partner and favorite neighbor was not enough, Obama gave the environmentalists time to mobilize — a mobilization so complete that it resulted in a demonstration on the Mall in Washington immediately after the president’s second inauguration.Not only did a broad front of environmentalists march against the pipeline but in the year since Obama kicked the can down the road, they extended and codified their objections not just to the pipeline, but also to the exploitation of the oil sands. Obama’s delay has allowed the environmental groups to declare a kind of non-governmental trade war against Canada.Originally, the environmental movement and its supporters in the administration were concerned with the effects of the pipeline in Nebraska and the threat it would pose to rivers and aquifers in the state. While the company that wants to build the pipeline, TransCanada, has agreed to re-routing and Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has signed off on the project, the environmentalists have downplayed the Nebraska issues and concentrated on the whole matter of the exploitation of the oil sands. The Natural Resources Defense Council has called oil-sands oil “the filthiest oil in the world.”This is a mighty assault on the economy of Alberta and Canada, as 44 percent of Canada’s oil exports come from the oil sands and they are scheduled to keep rising. If it were of less economic consequence, the protests might find more sympathy north of the border than they do. Mining the sands is a monumental undertaking, disturbing enormous tracts of earth and employing trucks and mechanical shovels, which are the largest on the globe. The disturbance to the earth is considerable and worth noting.Also worth noting are the vast quantities of natural gas and water used in the extraction and retorting of the sands. More greenhouse gases are released in the production of the oil than in regular oil fields; the oil sands extraction is calculated to be the largest contributor to greenhouse gases in Canada.However, Canadians are sensitive to these issues and are offended by the idea that Canada is a backward country with no regard to the environment. Canada maintains that evolving technology is reducing the impact on the environment year after year. The oil sands are going to be developed no matter what.There is a pattern of escalation in environmental concerns about big projects. Nuclear power gives a fine historical perspective on this escalation. Back in the 1960s, the first concerns about nuclear power were on the thermal effluent into rivers and streams. This escalated into concern about radiation, then safety, then waste and finally a blanket indictment of the technology.Bogdan Kipling, who has been writing about Canadian-U.S. relations from Washington for four decades, takes an apocalyptic view of the future U.S.-Canada relations if Obama wavers and does not approve the pipeline. In a recent column, he said that such an action would “decouple” the United States from Canada across a broad range of issues, social a as well as economic. “Such a decision would be sweet music to the ears of Canadian nationalists,” Kipling said.Now Obama finds himself between the swamp of his own political left and the rock of international relations. It did not have to be like this. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The Fuel Revolution that Is Changing the World — And Us
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Colorless, odorless natural gas is changing the world geopolitically and economically in ways undreamed of even five years ago.
It is a giant upheaval of which President Obama is both the beneficiary and the victim. He benefits because low natural gas prices are helping consumers and industry. And he is undermined by them because the cheap gas is savaging his dreams of “green” energy alternatives with scads of jobs attached.
The technologies which have brought on the gas boom also are contributing to enhanced oil production in the United States. Who would have believed that North Dakota would become the third-largest oil-producing state?
But the price of gas, now at historical lows, is also a political difficulty for Obama. His energy policy has been based on the old reality of shortage and a need for “alternatives.” In the administration’s scheme of things, the slack was to be taken up by the renewable sources ofenergy, wind, solar and wave power. With natural gas in plentiful supply and pushing out coal and new nuclear, the president is saddled with his failed attempts to push alternatives and to create a plethora of “green” jobs.
Yet without the boost that oil and natural gas are giving to the economy, it would be in worse shape than it already is.
A similar natural resources boom in the North Sea greatly aided Margaret Thatcher’s government and has underwritten Britain’s economy to this day, when production and British prosperity are both in decline.
New technology has brought the gas boom to the world and with it a change in geopolitics, soothing some tensions and exacerbating others.
The biggest excitement is in the Eastern Mediterranean, where there have been huge discoveries of gas — and sometimes oil and gas — off the coasts of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and around the Island of Cyprus.
The problems reflect the old tensions of the regions and some new ones, such as the growing estrangement between Israel and Turkey and the projection of Russian interests in the region.
Cyprus, itself a divided island since the Turkish invasion of 1974, is the closest member of the European Union to chaotic Syria and is being courted on several fronts by Russia.
Russia is worried about new gas supplies affecting its monopoly in gas supply in Europe, as well as the future of its naval base in Syria. As a result, Russia is pouring money and people (150,000) into Cyprus to keep its options in the Mediterranean open.
Cyprus would like to become a transshipment point for Israeli gas (when a gas liquefaction plant is built). But claim to reserves in its own territorial waters are being contested by Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots. About 63 percent of the island is controlled by 900,000 Greek Cypriots who claim to speak for the whole island.
With new gas everywhere, there will be a rush to find markets. Europe, for example, is hoping to ease its Russian gas dependence by building pipelines that will bring gas from Central Asia through Turkey avoiding Russia. Others, like Qatar, are looking away from Europe and to Asia for new customers.
The appeal of gas to electric utilities everywhere is undeniable. It burns with about half the greenhouse effluent than oil and coal. The power plants are easily sited, do not need huge cooling structures and the capital cost is low.
However, methane, which makes up 75 percent of natural gas, is a serious greenhouse contributor and needs to be kept out of the environment. The other components of natural gas are ethane, 15 percent, and butane and propane come in at about 5 percent each. Natural gas is the world’s most abundant compound.
While the case against the swing to gas is primarily environmental, there is an economic concern about costs in the decades to come. The environmental case is twofold:
• One, that although it produces less CO2, a principal greenhouse gas, than coal or oil, it still produces half as much as they do.
• Two, that hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking” affects groundwater, uses too much water itself in the process and may stimulate earthquakes.
Yet the chances of the world or the United States turning away from this new bounty are nil.
If the 19th century belonged to coal and the 20the century to oil, it looks as though the 21st will be the natural gas century. Reports of the death of fossil fuels are wildly exaggerated. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Energy in the Time of Elections: Claims and Counterclaims
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Where there's oil and gas, there's milk and honey.
That is the thrust of the American Petroleum Institute's report to the platform committees of the Republican and Democratic parties. It was previewed in Washington on May 15 by API President and CEO Jack Gerard, the oil industry's man on Earth, known for his tough attitudes to just about everything, but the Obama administration in particular.
In unveiling the report at the National Press Club, Gerard declared that the recommendations were without political slant and were delivered to both parties’ platform committees without favor; although it is generally known that the oil and gas industry — and Big Oil in particular — cares not a jot for the Democrats. In a slip, while reading a prepared statement, Gerard referred to the “Democrat Party,” which is a term used by conservative commentators and members of the Republican Party who cannot stand the thought of Democrats having a monopoly on the word democratic.
As expected, and in line with other recent utterances, Gerard called for accelerated leasing on federal lands, demanded more sensitive regulation, and declared his belief that the United States is potentially the greatest energy producer on Earth.
The White House shot back at API almost immediately, claiming it is the oil the industry that is lagging not the government.
Not to be outshot, Gerard said, “Once again, the administration is trotting out claims about idle leases to divert attention from the fact it has been restricting oil and natural gas development, leasing less often, shortening lease terms, and going slow on permit approvals—actions which have undermined public support for the administration on energy. It is also increasing or threatening to increase industry’s development costs through higher taxes, higher royalty rates, and higher minimum lease bids.”
Even if the administration is right this time, it has a hard sell ahead.
In the case of natural gas, there has been a giant windfall from shale seams; but that has been coming for some time, and the administration can take no particular credit. Similarly, oil imports are down from 57 percent to 45 percent, reflecting increased domestic production, something that helps more with the balance of payments than the price at the pump.
Gerard admitted that while natural gas prices are at historic lows because of new recovery and drilling technology, oil is priced internationally and that is no help to American consumers. API and its chief tend to conflate oil and gas to make a point. Likewise, they like to include Canada in “North American” energy.
But the energy claims of the administration are even harder to follow and more dubious. It likes to confuse fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil — with electricity and, in particular, with alternative energy, like wind, solar and, in a manner of speaking, nuclear.
Most energy gurus see the dawning of a switch from oil to electricity for personal transportation, for buses and some trucks. But that dawn is breaking slowly with consumer indifference, battery life questions and other problems, including the availability of rare earths for motors and wind turbines.
Experience suggests that energy is a lousy political issue. It is complicated; each side has its own facts and there is some truth to both sides’ facts.
At the end of the day, the energy debate is reduced not to the amount of drilling taking place on federal lands, or to the virtues of natural gas over nuclear, but to the price of gasoline at election time. If that is lower than it is today, President Obama garners votes. If it is up, no matter why, all the GOP and Mitt Romney have to say is that it is Obama's fault.
The money vote is known already: With a very few exceptions the energy money is on the GOP. But that is not new. What is new is that environment is not on the agenda. Better wait until 2016.
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Obama and Energy: What He Can and Can’t Do
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When the Obama administration seeks to explain its oil policy, it changes the subject mid-sentence.The most frequent practitioner of this verbal contortion is the president's press secretary, Jay Carney. It is as though he's a magician who has promised to pull a live rabbit from his top hat. This conjurer stands before his audience, recites some incantations and, poof, retrieves not a live rabbit, but a dead chicken.Carney, like others in the administration, starts talking about oil and switches to talking about "alternatives." The alternatives, with the exception of the nettlesome subject of biofuels (nettlesome because they produce little or no energy above what's invested in producing them), are ways of making electricity.The administration is adept at confusing these almost unrelated subjects.Oil is the stubborn problem. It affects every aspect of life and prosperity, from the balance of payments to war planning, from economic growth to our relationship with China. Worse, it may be in constrained supply for the rest of time, as the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – continue to suck up the precious commodity.New finds and technology relieve the gloom for a while, but as demand rises and supply struggles to adjust, the problem remains – even though conservative think tanks and trade groups fight the notion of structural shortage.But the United States isn't short of electricity and has no need ever to be. The electricity problem, if there is one, is environmental. Do we continue to burn coal on a massive scale while we search for an environmental fix? Or do we go wholeheartedly for nuclear – even though the Obama administration has abandoned the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada?Solar, wind, geothermal, wave, and even biomass energy come under the rubric of "alternatives" – and they're all electricity technologies.Then there's natural gas, thought to be exhausted in the United States, but now in abundance as a result of sophisticated technologies. That's another electricity fuel.It's enthusiasm for alternatives (a longtime love affair on the left) that has encouraged the confusing White House utterances about a policy of "all of the above." It's this that has spread the public perception that the president can do something about the price of gasoline. And it's this that makes him vulnerable to scorn over debacles like the loan guarantees to the solar-array manufacturer Solyndra.If Obama's reelection hopes aren't to be extinguished at the gas pump this November, he needs to separate oil from electricity – and the future from the present. He can't affect world oil prices, and he can't drill enough holes in the United States to change the world oil market.But he can change the debate, and push down the price somewhat, by taking up arms not against the oil producers, but rather against the oil traders, who are the market movers. They are concentrated in the New York Mercantile Exchange, where they daily bid up the price in a spiral that is unrelated to cost. The price of oil is set by traders, who use rumor, fear, and the knowledge that producers will be silent partners to jack it up.They aren't phantoms. They are real, flesh-and-blood people who manipulate the markets daily. What's happening to oil in the New York Mercantile Exchange is what happened to electricity prices in California when Enron's traders were running wild.There have even been shenanigans at the Cushing tank farm in Oklahoma, the installation that President Obama toured on Thursday. He might do well to read Leah McGrath Goodman's Fortune magazine article this month, on how ConocoPhillips warehoused oil at Cushing. That oil came in by the same pipeline that the new owners have now reversed, she writes, and it's now flowing to refineries by the very route it came in, but at higher prices.Goodman knows what she's talking about. The former Wall Street Journal reporter wrote The Asylum, the definitive book about the New York Mercantile Exchange and the madness of oil trading.Obama could jawbone the traders while providing more resources and moral support to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the poodle trying to do a pit bull's work.
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President Obama’s Troubles
May 20th, 2013
Guests Brian Kelly, U.S. News & World Report; Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News; Joe Davidson, The Washington Post
The Future of Drones
May 13th, 2013
Guests Claude Salhani, journalist and Amitai Etzioni, The George Washington University
Europe; its Problems and its Promise
May 6th, 2013
Guests Annette Heuser, Executive Director, Bertelsmann Foundation; Darren Gersh, Journalist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies
What’s Ado in Washington
April 29th, 2013
Guests Joe Madison, SiriusXM Radio
A Discussion of the Anti-terrorism College at the National Defense University
April 22nd, 2013
Guests Michael Bell and Sebastian Gorka, College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University