If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will have a million things to fix in this country. But when he has a moment to look abroad, to the country where he spent some of his youth, maybe he can also help end a great catastrophe in the making.

Senator Obama spent time in Indonesia... home to the critically dwindling populations of magnificent orangutans, arguably our closest cousins. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the situation is dire. People are murdering orangutans for bushmeat, or capturing babies (and killing their moms) for the pet trade. But perhaps their biggest threats are oil palm plantations and illegal logging.

Many folks focus on Detroit's failure to invest aggressively in alternative power for cars as evidence of a conspiracy.  The conspiracies take many forms, but they bring us to the counterproductive state of demonizing precisely the industries we need to fight our way out of the hole that republican administrations have dug us into.

If you think about it, it's not just that Detroit killed the electric car, but they weren't even capable of seeing what they needed to do regarding their profitability against the invasion of Japanese cars in the 70s.  It is common populist rhetoric that there was an intentional conspiracy to defeat alternative transportation technologies by the car makers. 

Was it also an intentional conspiracy that led Detroit to lose substantial market share to the Japanese beginning in the 70s?  I think not.  It was really the usual suspects: a conspiracy of arrogance and stupidity, and like many  of us who have been managers in large corporations, we know that this is not at all an unusual dysfunctional state for businesses to be in.

In any case- to the point.  We have to bypass the populist rhetoric however true or tempting it is to leverage for short term political gain.

Focusing on moving from where we are, we need to look beyond subsidies.  Detroit is asking for beefier subsidies for Plug in Hybrids, because the power carriers (batteries or fuel cells) are extremely expensive- beyond the range of effective subsidization.  Sure consumers ought to make the jump because they now make much more sense on paper than gas vehicles.  At least in the case of Lithium batteries, they pay for themselves over the life of the car.  

But guess what.  It isn't just Detroit that focuses on the near term.  It's us... 

While I support conservation as a minor component of our energy independence efforts, it has limits.  Pious ears do not want to hear the blasphemy that there is a point where conservation is more wasteful than generation.  I see fellow environmentalists fall into this trap, taking it as an article of faith that energy waste of any sort is always foolish.  That is a crucial error in conservation dogmatism, to say nothing of the central fallacy that conservation is somehow primary to energy independence or a CO2 free generation policy.

Although I bring up solar as a favorite example, the untapped power resources of ocean and wind (including high altitude) also vastly dwarf our energy demand.  But to drill down on solar as an example, most conservation advocates I read posts from have little grasp the magnitude of the power available.  They seem to have the notion that somehow US solar production would need to displace other uses anytime in the foreseeable future.  This is seriously mistaken.  One recent blog entry on Grist had the following surprizing statement:

"If we started covering large swathes of real estate with solar panels, we would find competition arising from other competing uses of that real estate."

There happen to be 250 thousand square miles in Nevada and Arizona deserts alone whose solar energy is now being used to heat sand.  What uses of this land would be displaced?    Folks that have any doubts about the energy available from this land should take a look at this Scientific American article.   Every year, 1320 trillion kilowatt hours of power in the form of solar radiation falls on this tiny fraction of the US and is used to heat rocks and scrub.  Our entire electrical output from all coal, gas fired plants and nukes etc is just 4 trillion KWHs.   So do the math.  Even if this small fraction of available wasteland were used by low efficiency thin film cells, we would have 40 times the entire electrical capacity of the US.  No Coal, No nukes, no gasoline for cars. 

Sure- there is ridiculous waste in construction today.  If insulation costs 20 cents per watt saved in heating costs, then it is wasteful to spend 50 cents per watt on thin film solar cells in the desert to generate that watt of power.  But what happens when these savings have all been identified and the cost of conserving an additional watt of heating goes up to 80 cents per watt? 

When the cost of conservation is higher than the cost of production, then conservation is more wasteful.   But if folks want to beat the prohibitionist drum attempting to shame people that it never "OK to waste energy", I doubt there is much to quench their missionary zeal.  Let me point out that this activity is in fact an indulgence in puritanical dogma, not sober thinking about energy policy. 

Allow me to pivot from this to make a final observation on the political consequences of this mistaken theme.  Jimmy Carter happens to be one of my heroes, but he erred when he allowed Reagan to take ownership of the theme of infinite expanses awaiting American ingenuity and industriousness to unlock.  Carter was prescient in his early grasp that we were running up against some hard limits, but if like him we allow themes of limits to be defined as our central message, then we run a campaign not against Reagan or whomever the republican is, but against fundamental American cultural themes such as Manifest Destiny and infinite horizons that are burned into the national psyche.  Ignoring the substantial force of these themes at your extreme political peril.  If you want to swing the center, you can't fall into the trap Carter fell into.

I'm only sharing this secret with you guys. I know a way that you can instantly save money on the gas you're purchasing. I don't think it's illegal, but if it is, I am saying up front that I didn't know. So, that's all I'm saying. I'm deliberatly going to code it so that those who are really sharp will get it and figure it out. Again, I don't know if this is illegal , so......

1. Tip Number One

2. Tip Number Two

3. Tip Number Three

4. Tip Number Four

5. Tip Number Five

Good Luck ! Don't Get Caught