energy Archive

[An open letter response to Kevin Phelan, Sr. Vice President, Sales & Marketing, BP Products North America]

Thank you for writing to me about how your company is doing everything possible to stop the leak and protect the shoreline. I had a feeling you’d be writing me; I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to get around to it.

I pass several BP stations regularly here in South Florida. I’ve noticed there’s rarely a car or truck in them, and the tone of your letter tells me that you’ve noticed that too. Maybe the number crunchers in your department believed that things would blow over. Maybe you figured we were so pissed off it was prudent to wait. Or maybe you just don’t give a damn.

My money’s on “don’t give a damn,” because your letter is just another attempt to hide behind yet another group of people whom your negligence and reckless disregard is slowly destroying. I’m talking about the “vast majority of [BP] stations [that are] locally owned and operated and employ more than 50,000 people across the United States.”

I do feel sorry for these folks, but I also wonder why they believed in you when your history as an oil company is one disaster after another, and the investigations into those disasters reveal that you knew better but preferred to try and save a buck. A close look at the refinery fire in Texas City or the tundra along the Trans-Alaska pipeline should have predicted what happened on the Deepwater Horizon.

If your independent gas station owners had been taking care of business themselves, they could have already done what thousands of Citgo independent resellers did when their brand became tarnished by its association with Venezuela. They rebranded their stations with a logo that helped sales rather than hurt them.

Yes, Mr. Phelan, I have a BP credit card, but don’t count on my support. I haven’t bought more than a tankful of gas from your stations in several years, and that probably won’t be changing at least as long as you keep hiding behind hollow words on form letters trying to drum up sympathy for people you’ve hurt. They didn’t hurt your brand: you did.

You know how to solve this, because you’ve promised to mend your ways each time you’ve been caught. You can start gushing money in the gulf like your hapless well; you can start selling gas to your resellers at tremendous discounts; you can really put safety first, even though that delays production in ways you once thought unacceptable.

All these things will be a magnificent departure from what everyone expects from you; the story will tell itself, and you won’t need to send weasel-worded letters to your customers.

Nearly forty years ago, I participated in an energy summit. I was young, inexperienced, hadn’t found my voice, and my job was merely to be a journalist at the most base level; to record and catalog what was said. I could have done more, but what I heard intimidated me. It was the first time I realized there are some problems that can’t be solved, so I organized my tapes, turned them in with a comprehensive index, and said nothing.

The summit was held at the beautiful Ventana Inn at Big Sur. Its participants included executives of oil companies, the Sierra Club, public policy institutes and regulators. The concept was we all sit down and have a freewheeling discussion about the problems. What we discovered was we all pretty much agreed on what the problems were; and that there was no politically viable solution. So we all did what I did: nothing.

We could solve this problem tomorrow with something as simple as a $2/gallon tax on gasoline. The primary function of this tax would be to reduce consumption, so revenue would be far from a straight line computed from current consumption. We would still, however, raise a shitpot full of money.

This money could be plowed back into paying the people whose livelihoods were taken away by the spill to clean it up, and to promote new methods of energy production. We’d still hound BP into bankruptcy, but any revenue we’d get from them in fines or damages could be plowed into green energy technology too, or go back into the economy in the form of debt reduction.

But the public outrage over millions of gallons of oil in the gulf would quickly turn to public anger at the imposers of the tax. There would be rumors of corruption; that the money was lining the pockets of the energy companies. The energy companies themselves would scream bloody murder and sue everybody in sight to stop it. Cheap energy long-term alternatives are unwanted competition, artificially inflated short-term prices simply cut into their bottom line.

Most socially responsible liberals would be outraged over the terrible effects on the poor. This solution is a progressive tax run wild because it makes energy inefficient systems worthless and within the reach of the poor, which amplifies the inequity.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had a vision of energy independence that has been worn away by the refusal by the right to pass a truly robust recovery package; one that not only bails us out, but helps us build a future. Until we do that, until we do something truly dramatic, we will simply repeat past mistakes.

Withdrawing from an addiction is painful, and until we are willing to walk through the pain, we will keep electing politicians who either promise cheap energy or promise alternatives but who know or learn the American people simply aren’t interested in solving the base problem.

That problem isn’t the oil in the gulf, that’s the symptom. It’s our denial of our cheap-energy addiction that put that damn hole in the sea floor in the first place without any Plan B to plug it.

Shortly after the 1950s became the 60s, I was one of those geeky kids who read Popular Electronics and took gadgets apart to see how they made their magic. I got in just on the end of that period where a big part of  Popular Mechanics was how wonderful the future, driven by science and engineering, was going to be.

I hit the tail end of that period; things became more noir starting in the 50s. We became xenophobic. Superman’s fight for “Truth, justice and tolerance,” in the comics became “truth, justice and the American Way” when it moved to television. And then we became downright cynical. Donald Fagen mocked it all, with his great lyrics for I.G.Y. A song set in 1957-58 about how wonderful things would be in 1976.

Here at home well play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

………………………………… –from IGY – Donald Fagen

I’ve been watching TED videos since shortly after they first came online. I’ve always loved them, and always learned, but this year it was different. The election of President Obama has restored science and reason to public policy. It no longer must hold equal footing with the assertion that Adam & Eve rode dinosaurs. We are not afraid of stem cells. We’re not afraid to hope.

Following the tweets from the many on Twitter who attended, and then watching the videos as they’re released from this years’ TED conference has brought me back to the way I felt reading the pop science and engineering magazines of my childhood.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. The presenters allude to it or say it directly in their presentations. The audiences erupt in spontaneous applause when they do. I’d guess that if you’re reading this blog, you’d feel that way too, and if you aren’t following TED, you’re missing out. They’re available as video podcasts on I-Tunes and through other “delivery mediums near you.”

It wasn’t but 20 years ago, we were dumping ASCII messages from BBS to BBS in the dead of the night. Today we send text messages instantaneously to hundreds of thousands of the likeminded and follow it up with high quality video.

We can leverage technology to escape our predicaments. We can develop energy industries that can save us from paying oil rich countries while simultaneously giving us a valuable export.

We can find ways to teach our children better, and use our knowledge to better understand the world and help it solve its problems, which will restore our tattered image oversees.

The Internet has shrunk the world to nearly manageable size, and our search for other worlds and in the ancient history of our own has shown us how much there is left to explore and learn. Some may disagree, but I think its a wonderful thing that with a few clicks of the mouse, you can find I.G.Y. as done by a Japanese cover band.

Scapegoating works well in America. Rove and Bush were such able masters of recasting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden as the cause of all our ills after 9/11, that they were able to drum up support for an unrelated war just by using them as a mantra.

But now we have new problems, one of our biggest is energy, and perhaps we can recast some Rovian tactics to motivate the Bush base. The left and the arugula-eating intellectuals don’t need any motivating, but the bubbas do, and I’ve got just the scapegoat.

The New Osama

Reddy Kilowatt.

Reddy was born way back in March of 1926 as the symbol of conspicuous energy consumption. There wasn’t a task he wasn’t suited for, nor a burden that couldn’t somehow be adapted for electrification. But then came the 1973 oil crisis, and the concept that “things work better electrically” dissolved in a sea of power bills peppered with fuel surcharges.

But Reddy, actually the mascot of the Alabama Power Company but licensed to local providers across the country, persevered. He’s still a trademark today with his own agent–Reddy Kilowatt Corp, a division of Northern States Power–to protect him. Maybe they can license him as scapegoat and sacrificial lamb.

Because Reddy Kilowatt is really a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the way we approach energy, from his adolescence when he tried to electrify everything, to adulthood as private pitchman for individual power companies that all own pieces of a national grid.

He’s been a spokesman for nuclear power, and has a history of preferring big centralized power generation using carbon fuels to localized power generation from renewable sources. This is a character to be hated and reviled, and if we can recast him as public enemy number 1, we might be able to appeal to the baser instincts of the baser base.

So let’s license Reddy and recast him as a terrorist. Someone whose ideas are dangerous, and who needs to be caught and executed at a federal level. Let’s just make sure we don’t convict him in one of the nine states that allow electrocution as a method of execution. You know he’d choose it if offered, there’s no guarantee it would kill him, and it would just plain send the wrong message.