nothing succeeds like success
Or, whatever:
A few years ago a little-known US Energy Department program helped produce a design technology for lightweight cars and trucks that in 2004 alone saved the nation 122 million barrels of oil, or about $9 billion.
Even without that breakthrough, the tiny Industrial Technologies Program routinely saves the United States $7 worth of energy for each dollar it spends, proponents say.
So, with energy prices spiking and President Bush pushing for more energy research, the ITP would seem a natural candidate for more funding. In fact, its budget is set to get chopped by a third from its 2005 level. It's one of more than a dozen energy-efficiency efforts that the Energy Department plans to trim or eliminate in a $115 million cost-saving move.
The push to solve the nation's energy woes are bumping up against the federal government's budget problems. To be sure, the Bush administration is anxious to fund its new Advanced Energy Initiative - long-term research into nuclear, coal, wind, solar, and hydrogen power. But to accomplish that, it is cutting lesser-known programs like ITP whose payoffs are far more near-term.
That last bit's actually an understatement - while efficiency is one of the least-discussed strategies when we talk about energy, it's also highly effective for tackling problems as far-ranging as enviro decline and peak oil. Paul Roberts, in his End of Oil, devotes an entire chapter to the science (and the politics) of the efficiency measures that came out of the Carter years (ironically, writes Roberts, those small greeen efforts would pay political dividends for the incoming Reganites). For Roberts, efficiency is the "on-ramp" to better energy usage and kick-starting a new energy economy.
Unfortunately, when you actually read the scenarios Roberts established back in 2003 and '04 - when his book was published - the scenarios he says lay the ground for this turn away from a hydrocarbon-exclusive America (and world) to something far more diverse energy-wise are happening.
What I fear for is that instead, because of the fact that the market is so tight, because it’s unstable, because scarcity is looming, and we haven’t even talked about environment constraints, that it’s very likely to have some sort of disruption. And that we are not going to do anything until prices spike not just $40, but $60, $70, or $80 a barrel. And then the question is: Is it just small enough to scare us into action or is it so big that it pushes us into recession and some sort of a war-for-oil? And then when we make energy decisions, they’re bad ones because we have not made any preparations.
We're in it. Like, right now. But as you can see from the Monitor piece, all the "energy decisions" are indeed "bad ones."
UPDATE: Anything the rest of the world can do, we can screw up better; and a word or two from the WashParkProph.
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