Dana Blankenhorn

Halftime Show

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 15 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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The recent stock market correction makes for a fine half-time show on the current recovery.

Every economic cycle has these moments, when a premature end seems inevitable for one reason or another. It is often based on an incorrect assumption about what the underlying recovery is all about. In the 1990s, some people actually thought PCs and “multimedia” were driving the economy. In the last decade, people thought it was housing demand, not deficit spending on weapons.

So it is today. Cloud companies, social companies, and mobile companies are powerful, but Facebook, Google and Apple aren't why the economy is growing. These are all underlying trends that save money, they don't create growth.

Growth comes from making what didn't exist before. Clients and servers have been around a while. The Internet has been around a while. They're adjuncts, sideshows, and they're getting ahead of themselves. A correction can be a good thing.

In fact, this is an energy economy. I've said it before, but it needs to be repeated.

The War Against Oil as Foreign Policy

The map above is illustrative of why we need to make The War Against Oil the centerpiece of our foreign policy.

Even if you don't believe in global warming, I hope you will find the image compelling.

It's from Worldmapper, a project by the University of Sheffield in England and the University of Michigan. The idea is to scale countries to specific variables, rather than to their actual size. This gives you an idea of how they stack up on important variables.

The map above is for fuel exports. The date is 2002.

Notice, please, how well our current foreign policy challenges conform to the details of this map. Notice how big Saudi Arabia is, how big Russia is, how big Venezuela is, how big Iran is, and how Nigeria dominates the map of Africa. 

The Left's Biggest Mistake on The War Against Oil

The left's biggest mistake on The War Against Oil is that they want to analyze it to death.

Here's a good example. It's a long piece from the so-called Center for American Progress, a think tank, on What the Public Really Wants on Energy and the Environment.

Surprise, we want it both ways. We think the problem can be dealt with without inconveniencing us, by simply promoting technology and enforcing environmental regulations.

We also want a pony.

Why even Texans should fight the War Against Oil

My friends at Rice University have a study out that shows why even the most pro-oil Texans should be fighting the War Against Oil like they had turned into Al Gore's children.

As prices go up, governments increase their control of the resource, and extract it with less efficiency.

The study, from the Baker Institute, examines government-owned oil entities around the world and finds (surprise) that they have priorities other than financial gain. Among these priorities are creating jobs, keeping prices low for citizens and supporting other industries.

More important is the fact that the government monopolies act in a less-than-businesslike manner when it comes to the basic job of exploiting oil fields. This means they extract less and fields play out more quickly.

The Lost Generation

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter offered Americans a stark choice. (Picture from eBay, an item no longer available.)

We could either use conservation to generate demand for alternatives to oil, or we could try to avoid the problem entirely.

Conservatives called this the Malaise Speech. They beat Carter over the head with it. They elected a string of Republican Presidents on the strength of it. They said we could avoid the hard choices, that we could use our military strength to guarantee our oil supplies for decades to come, that we could go on about our business and avoid the problem.

We chose to avoid it. And a generation, my generation, was lost. How many other generations will be lost only time will tell.

The political message of our time is that Americans finally get it, that we finally understand how fighting wars for oil is a losing game, that we finally understand the need to confront our energy needs.

The question is, do we understand just how intense that concentration must be? That's why I've renamed this blog The War Against Oil.

My New Focus: The War on Oil

Since launching this blog a year ago I have spent a lot of time covering the cycles of American politics. I have described past cycles, shown where we are relative to those cycles, and created some fun games.

I explained how the Nixon political thesis under which we have all operated since 1968 -- a set of myths and values meant to sustain power -- are becoming obsolete by new issues it wasn't crafted to deal with. And I described how a new thesis, one based on Internet or Open Source values, is rising to meet these challenges.

There is a book in this, and if anyone wants to buy it I'll write it. But rather than continue hammering something few are reading I have decided to focus on the heart of the new crisis now enveloping us, the crisis which the Internet Thesis I have written about is meant to address.

This is The War Against Oil.