(My Responses)
(08/27/2008 10:27 AM)
Yes, It's The Oil-- But Not Quite the Way You Might Think.
Electricity is in the ascendant, and the oil industry is in
long-term, fundamental decline. Almost any reasonable
modernization of the energy and transportation sectors would tend
to increase the role of electricity at the expense of oil,
and this has been known for many years. The energy and
transportation networks, however, have been stagnant, because no
one could see the logic of putting much money into
them. The administration's energy independence policy, such as it
is, works out in practice to a desperate search for a non-existent
technology which would preserve the status quo ante, approximately
defined as the gas station affiliated with a major oil
company, with a big refinery in the neighborhood of Houston.
Let's play a silly little game. Let's construct a narrative about
2001, of the type which historians construct about Spring, 1861
and August, 1914. Such narratives are about how the social order
lost its ability to contain untoward events. The assassination of
the Empress Elizabeth did not lead to a European war, nor did
the more ambiguous events at Mayerling. By the day of
Sarajevo, something had shifted. In the military sphere, a
critical mass of generals on both sides had moved to the idea of
"better now than later." The better practitioners of this
kind of history rope in the Irish independence movement, the
British Suffragettes, and even the French president's
mistress. Naturally, they deal with the Austrian general
Conrad von Hotzendorf, and his participation in the
"Wagnerite" movement, and with the logic of
mobilization timetables, etc. Now, let's try to construct that
kind of narrative about 2001.
In 2001, the technological basis of society was changing rapidly.
There had been a long term movement to electricity, but during the
1990's, on top of this, speculative capital had funded a
wholesale overbuilding of the telecommunications system.
This fueled the rise of the internet. The internet fueled the rise
of open source software, and of blogs. There are two
threads leading out of this. One leads to electric cars. The
other leads to telecommuting.
In the 1990's, General Motors launched a project to build an
electric car. There were a number of reasons for this. Under the
rule of Roger Smith, GM had attempted to modernize itself by
purchasing an electronics/aerospace company, Hughes Aircraft, and
a computer services company, Electronic Data Systems. GM had an
inferiority complex vis a vis the high-tech world, and was
attempting to work it off. GM acquired partners,
Southern California Edison, the State of California, and the
Clinton Administration. The rationale for the electric car was air
quality, a sensitive topic in California. An electric car could be
powered by a coal-fueled generator in Arizona, on the other
side of the mountains, and thus, it would not
contribute to the smog situation. None of the partners had the
serious commitment necessary to carry an electric car to
fruition, but they were able to go through the motions
fairly inexpensively, and they could energetically
publicize what they produced, playing down the differences
between what was in effect a kind of engineering student's thesis
project and a mass-production vehicle. It was a game, in short, a
silly little game, in the same sense that military field
maneuvers are a game, with blanks instead of live ammunition.
However, from the point of view of the oil industry, not
looking too closely, it had certain scary
elements. The partners proposed-- in a hypothetical sort of way--
to put an electric charger into every parking place, so that
electric cars would be picking up power whenever they were
not moving. These chargers would of course be plugged into
the electric grid, leaving the oil companies out of the picture.
The oil companies panicked, briefly, before they realized that it
was only a silly game.
In the long run, to make electric cars work, you have to
build electric power into the road, so that the cars can
continuously replenish themselves while rolling along. This was
the big commitment which GM and its allies would not
undertake. It was the fear of the oil companies that
electric roads would somehow get financed.
In the wake of GM followed Toyota, with the hybrid car. Japanese
don't go in for the sort of amateur theatrics which
Americans do-- they are very polite to someone, until the day they
decide to kill him. The hybrid car used electricity
internally to use less gasoline and produce less pollution, while
not having the weaknesses of the pure electric car. It
simply brought the automobile up to the level of electrical
modernization found in a diesel railroad locomotive. One
competitor after another eventually moved to adopt the hybrid
system. The eventual result would, other things equal, have been
to reduce the gasoline market by somewhere between a third
and a half. Cutting wages by between a third and a
half is usually a formula for an extremely grim strike. Why should
the oil companies have been any different?
The next step was Enron, the oil companies attempt to deal
themselves into the wholesale electric business. Enron failed, on
the eve of 2001.
On the other side, the telecommunications industry was
taking off, not in terms of profits, indeed, but in terms
of output. The successive bankruptcies of overambitious
firms dumped cheap communication circuits onto the market, and
people began doing more and more things "over the wire." One of
the most alarming ideas that that of open-source, the idea that
one could run a technical organization doing important
business by the same quasi-anarchist methods by which
colleges were traditionally run. A "man of authority," such as
Dick Cheney or John McCain, either in government or in big
business, had traditionally not had to take seriously the
kind of bearded long-haired professor who was not in the habit of
applying for grant money. Suddenly, the rules were changing. The
long-haired professor could recruit students, working at their own
expense, and go from there. One might read Jane Smiley's novel,
_Moo_, as a parable. Something similar was happening with
blogs. Traditionally, it had been possible, to a degree, to
control a limited number of journalists representing national
media outlets by offering them special privileges. But there
were too many bloggers to be bribed.
There was a "green-techno nexus," in the sense that high-tech,
computer-related, industries tended to favor ecological
restrictions which they could meet, and which the older
"smokestack industries" could not.
Finally, computers and the internet were undermining the
recruitment basis of the military. The American military does not
want to be a foreign legion. The military recruits young people by
offering them job training and college money. It does not
like to recruit from places like New York and Los Angeles, because
there are so many other opportunities in these cities, and
someone who is still available is likely to be a
professional loser. The military prefers to recruit from small
towns where there is literally nothing to do, because they can get
a teachable sort of young person there. However, the internet
transforms geography, so that, in a manner of speaking, everyone
lives in the San Fernando Valley, or, alternatively, everyone can
take the train into Manhattan. The kind of person who goes
into the military to get job training and college money is the
kind of person who, if he winds up overseas, will learn a bit of
Vietnamese, or a bit of Arabic, out of a sense of necessity.
An army composed exclusively of Watts and Compton gangbangers
would not only be deficient in technical skills, but would also be
low on cultural sensitivity, and, by its very nature, would tend
to provoke desperate indigenous resistance.
The 2000 election was between George W. Bush, representative of
the oil industry, and Al Gore, representative of the technology
industry. Gore came very close to winning, even despite the
normal "throw the bums out" sentiment an administration in office
attracts, and if he had won, he would no doubt
have pushed for hybrid car mandates, and for accelerating
the deployment of the internet. And he might even have found the
government money to pay for electric roads.
Thus the whole setting for September 11, 2001 was an
administration with an ongoing sense of persecution, and a
sense of "needing to have its war now, rather than later,"
before the whole country became like California.
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Michael Schnayerson, _The Car That Could: The Inside Story of
G.M.'s Revolutionary Electric Vehicle_, 1996
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