Power Surge: The Coming Price Hike in America's Energy Bill
April 26, 2008
Dr. Arthur Robinson publishes and edits Access to Energy: www.accesstoenergy.com. He also wrote the Robinson Curriculum, the best $200 deal in the history of education: www.RobinsonCurriculum.com.
Here he warns of a looming crisis in energy. It was caused by America's politicians. They are not being be blamed, nor will they accept blame.
Americans are going to suffer a major reduction in their per capita wealth over the next four decades. This is now inevitable. The price of energy guarantees this. It will rise.
Americans are not prepared for this. The question is: Will they identify the cause? If not, they will not force politicians to remove the straitjacket they have placed on America's energy production.
Our primary heavy industries are in terrible shape or already closed (take a train ride through Indiana south of Chicago. Miles and miles and miles of rusting former steel mills - this is repeated everywhere in essentially all infrastructure industries); we are desperately short of energy production; and our financial system is a debt-ridden disaster.
Americans are about to experience - nothing can now prevent this - a very sharp reduction in prosperity. The winds of this change are gently blowing. At $10 gasoline and government mandated electricity rationing, they will become more evident.
This can only be fixed by a return to the low tax, low regulation, low litigation world of economic freedom that prevailed in this country while our industrial base was being built. How many politicians do we have who can understand this and who are willing to do it? Without cloning Ron Paul, we do not have them. Moreover, even if these changes were made today, it would require at least a full generation of hard work to rebuild. It would also require capital - capital that we have already shipped abroad.
The current Presidential candidates are campaigning in a non-existent wonderland. They think that the US is "the world's only superpower" and still has great wealth that they can use for political and personal gain. This is not true.
In fact, we do not even have the engineers and industrial infrastructure to build the nuclear power plants and coal fired power plants needed to replace the foreign energy we can no longer afford. In our review article (it is at www.oism.org/pproject - please read it carefully), we point out that the energy problem can be solved by building one nuclear power installation in each state.
The chairman of one of our few remaining nuclear engineering schools commented on our text (before publication) that the text was right except that we should propose that the building of these 50 plants be staged over a period of 50 years. He says we would need to first rebuild the engineering schools, then educate the engineers, and then build the plants. The U.S. no longer even has a single iron foundry capable of casting the casing for a nuclear reactor. The wait for these from abroad is many years.
Nuclear engineers are in such high demand - we do not graduate enough to replace those retiring from our current nuclear installations - that the schools cannot induce them to remain in school for PhDs. With BS or MS in nuclear engineering, they are deluged with very high paying job offers.
There is no way whatever to prevent the loss of the 30% of our energy that is now imported. We simply do not make the goods and services required to purchase this energy in the world market. After that 30% is lost - coming to every community near you in the near future, Americans will begin to learn what they have thrown away over the past 40 years. With much of the remaining 70% is required for food production, heat in the winter, and other essentials, so the loss of 30% will mean a loss more than 60% of discretionary energy use. Air conditioning, recreational computer use, and summer vacation car trips are going to end. At least, we'll save a lot on road maintenance.
There is only one relevant question. When Americans are squeezed by this huge reduction in the technology that they have come to take for granted, will they finally understand that taxation, regulation, and litigation - put in by the politicians they elected - have caused this problem and then throw the baggage out?
More likely, the baggage will convince them to blame the industries that remain - tax the oil companies higher, etc. If this happens, we will descend to third world status, food rationing, and the danger of foreign conquest.
The only thing we can do for our country is to redouble our efforts to educate our people about the taxation, regulation, and litigation that is destroying their lives. As the crunch comes - and it is coming fast - they must understand. If they do not and the wrong choices are made, they will lose their country and their freedom