Dana Blankenhorn

How America Must Lead

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 25 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Last week I talked about why America will win the future.

Now I want to talk about how to do that, and our responsibility for making that happen. 

America will continue to lead because of the hard work we have all done in the last generation, not so much in Washington but in our lives and communities. 

All the many movements of the last generation -- the womens' movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, the fight for rights for the disabled and ethnic minorities, the environmental movement -- all of what I have called the AntiThesis to the Nixon Thesis, or the outright rejection of that thesis -- all have had an impact. 

All of them have taken us further down the road of progress than most other societies have even contemplated going, and what came to me most clearly during my recent trip was that elites elsewhere recognize that progress, and envy it.

What they have given our society is flexibility, mobility, an ability to adapt to change unparalleled in human history. The ruins of failed societies all around the world attest to this. Change is the hardest work a society can undertake. No society has succeeded at it like ours, and none has done more to unite people worldwide around the idea that change is both good and necessary.

The clearest proof is living in the White House right now. But we can't rest on that laurel. Here is what we must do:

1. Set high goals 
2. Learn what real leadership means 
3. Embrace the change process

  Let me take these one at a time:

Take What You Can Get

The President seems to frustrate his supporters at every turn.

• Rather than confront the military over its misadventures, he tries a Petreaus plan in Afghanistan. 
• Rather than confront Wall Street over its failures he appoints bank regulators whose experience includes the season of crime. 
• Rather than confront the Bush Torture Regime he seems to dither, refusing to endorse either a special prosecutor or a "truth commission," giving the former Vice President and the Republicans every opportunity to defend what they did in public. 

This is just as true regarding The War Against Oil as anything else. "Mr. Obama’s “new” energy policy is more of the same old pandering," writes Bob Gordon of The Auto Channel. He doesn't call us to a war against oil. He just negotiates higher mileage standards. 

Of course as frustrated as liberals are conservatives are, squared. They're mad as hell, but to them it feels like they're raging against the wind. He borrows trillions, literally trillions, he remakes the economy and all the rules, yet he remains enormously popular. It drives them crazy, and we can only pray the Secret Service can do its job.

But there is something else going on. It's something the media is only barely conscious of, so intent are they on triangulating him, on trying to pin him down. 

The Technology on Which Space Depends

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 16of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Why have so few of us reached space? Why is even the International Space Station a fraction of the size most sci-fi writers predicted a half century ago?

Cost. Specifically the energy cost of getting out of Earth's gravity well.

It's not that people have lost interest. When a company called Solaren announced a deal to install solar panels in space and sell the resulting power to PG&E early this week, so many people rushed to the rail that Solaren's site quickly exceeded its bandwidth limit and was taken down. 

The deal is pie-in-the-sky. It was the utility's presence in the story that made it newsworthy, but in fact that company risked nothing. If Solaren gets its system working PG&E will buy its power. If.

The Atlanta Blackout of 2009

The lights went out here around 10 AM and just came back on about an hour ago.

So a blackout you never heard of actually lasted longer than the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. (This home about a mile from my own was destroyed yesterday, writes DecaturMetro.)

I learned an important lesson. I'm completely unprepared.

I never replaced the laptop that blew up a year ago and so didn't have an alternate machine. I misplaced the stick memory to which I'd copied my passwords. Even if we had a burglar alarm system it would have stopped running without wall power, so I was forced to stay home.

Mostly I read, I slept, and I used my cell phone. I got cold because the heater requires electric power to turn on the gas. I couldn't eat because opening the refrigerator door would spoil all the food inside it. Had this gone on overnight no one in the house could have gotten to work tomorrow because all our clocks use wall power.

What is in a Word in the War Against Oil

Last night the President gave all those who agree we need a War Against Oil nearly everything we could have asked for.

To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.

So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.

And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.

He has a plan. It's tied to reducing hydrocarbon emissions. He did mention "clean coal" but he also (for the first time) advocated a cap-and-trade system to cap emissions, which could easily kill current coal plants in short order.

He even gave it the right priority. First. He said in his speech he would concentrate on three key challenges -- energy, health and education. Energy first. That's not an accident, it's a priority.

The only thing he did not do was use the word "war."

This was a mistake.

A Good Start in The War Against Oil But Just a Start

The President's Stimulus bill, just signed , makes a very good start toward fighting the War Against Oil. (Picture from Whitehouse.gov.)

But oil is a pernicious foe. Even now its advocates are taking advantage of some parts of the stim, and condemning the necessary next steps, in order to keep Americans enslaved to the oil power.

Let's start with the good news. Nearly 10% of this money is going into the low-hanging fruit of conservation and research:

1. Almost $11 billion will go into making government buildings more efficient.
2. Almost $10.5 billion will go into improving the efficiency of housing used by poor people, who are least likely to make the investment on their own.
3. About $16.4 billion is going into "supertrains" of one sort or another, either local transit or inter-city links. Trains are 10-20 times more efficient at moving people than cars.
4. There is $11 billion here for "smart grid" technology, which could allow utilities to buy as well as sell power.
5. There's $7.5 billion for building renewable power sources and transmission lines to get them to market.

There's some potential waste here, and a lot will depend on how well Dr. Stephen Chu and the Department of Energy do their work doling out the money.

• Some think of the "smart grid" only in terms of time-shifting power demand and getting more money from each kilowatt they sell, not enabling the purchase of power from urban solar farms or suburban windmill owners.
• Boone Pickens could easily grab that $7.5 billion to force construction of low-efficiency power lines from his West Texas windfarms to Dallas-Ft. Worth.

There's a big bet being placed here, namely that government can do things right. Republicans love condemning government and praising the free market, but it was the privatization of government and rejection of regulation that got us into this mess.

Now, for a warning and what comes next.

Obama's Lincoln

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every crisis President adopts Abraham Lincoln as their personal political savior.

The first Roosevelt wore a ring with a lock his his hair, the second hired a Lincoln biographer to write his speeches. Nixon talked to Lincoln's portrait.

What these Presidents were looking for from Lincoln was strength. Lincoln was hated in his time, both north and south. His own Republican partisans distrusted him as weak, and many southerners still consider him a war criminal.

Barack Obama has identified heavily with Lincoln. You may joke he's got the lobes for it. Both are long and lanky Illinoisians who seemed to come from nowhere at a time of crisis. For most that's all they see.

Today, in the Capitol Rotunda, the President revealed which of the many Lincolns of our imagination he is talking about.

The reconciler:

In the war's final weeks, aboard Grant's flagship, The River Queen, President Lincoln was asked what was to be done with the rebel armies once General Lee surrendered. With victory at hand, Lincoln could have sought revenge. He could have forced the South to pay a steep price for their rebellion. But despite all the bloodshed and all the misery that each side had exacted upon the other, and despite his absolute certainty in the rightness of the cause of ending slavery, no Confederate soldier was to be punished, Lincoln ordered. They were to be treated, as he put it, "liberally all round."

Note that the President did not quote any of the man's great speeches, just an off-hand comment that spoke to what the country most needed, a true peace of the heart.

Fighting the War at Home

I had not thought before how the current era is a reversal of the FDR era.

We've had the war. Now are we going to fight the peace?

It may well be true, as Joseph Stiglitz believes, that the Iraq War cost us $3 trillion. We know we put $1 trillion into the actual fight. Figure another $1 trillion in a phony real estate bubble, another $1 trillion of Confederate Money used to cover it all up, and you get to $3 trillion pretty quick.

War first, Depression after.

There was fear this would happen after World War II, and it was a background character in the film The Best Years of our Lives. What prevented that Depression was new demand, driven by the GI Bill and the Marshall Plan. It was summed up in a speech by Frederic March, playing sergeant-banker Al Stephenson:

There are some who say that the old bank is suffering from hardening of the arteries and of the heart. I refuse to listen to such radical talk. I say that our bank is alive, it's, it's generous, it's, it's human, and we're going to have such a line of customers seeking and getting small loans that people will think we're gambling with the depositors' money. And we will be. We'll be gambling on the future of this country.

Point is Republicans have always rejected the idea of stimulating demand, unless they could kill people with what resulted. Without the Cold War they would have crucified Truman, and the Baby Boom boom would not have happened.

It's amazing to me that the same people who thought nothing about laying out $1 trillion to kill people, and who ignored the theft of another $1 trillion covering it up, who called all this patriotic and ideologically sound, are now so uniformly condemning the President's efforts to stimulate demand and fight the war at home.

So let's be clear about this money. Let's be clear about where it comes from, where it's going, and what our choices are.

War Against Oil Still Being Fought

If you turn on the TV or listen to the mainstream media these days you would think that the War Against Oil was a one-time boom that is now going bust.

All eyes are said to be on the stimulus package, looking for cash to invest. Supposedly. Meanwhile our enemies in this war, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, are laughing themselves silly. America needs oil "like air, like oxygen to live, to survive.” You can almost hear the Bond villain laughter.

But this is not the reality. America is already the world's largest producer of wind energy, and will soon be number one in solar as well. Investors in the space remain optimistic. Some communities are starting to pay people who produce energy at their homes or offices.

It's true that the enemy is powerful, but its power is diminishing. The fact that oil prices are holding near the $50 level is good news. Everyone now knows that oil remains a permanent check on economic growth -- that as growth returns oil prices will go up and take away any gains. This is leading to a growing determination, especially in this country, to rid ourselves of this dependence once and for all.

The best way to guarantee continued success is by changing the business model. A carbon tax would do that. In the short run it would work better than a price floor -- if all industrialized countries adopt it. That's a danger for both proposals, and it's the main reason this Congress is unlikely to adopt it. (Instead we'll go with cap-and-trade, which is a short-term fix.)

The Real Benefits of a Hydrogen Economy

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 4 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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So far we've been selling the idea of a hydrogen cycle (instead of a carbon cycle) as nationalism, as environmentalism, or as a way to make our electrical grid more flexible and robust.

But there is another, even more important argument for the hydrogen economy.

Water.

For thousands of years the history of civilization has been a history of water. Water defines civilization. It can't exist without water.

Read Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, or watch Michael Wood's The Story of India, and you learn how central Asia, what's now the deserts of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and the "tribal areas" of Pakistan, are the real cradles of civilization.  Those civilizations were destroyed as water sources dried up. That's why the Ganges means life.

To give life water must be clean, and the most important technologies of our last century are those devoting to maintaining supplies of clean water. Water purification, water desalinization, these are the most expensive projects we have. And their reach is very limited. Man can't magically create water. He can only preserve, transport, and purify what he has available around him.

Until now.