Renewable Energy and US National Security

The other day a friend asked me: Is there any part of your book (Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies) that aligns with the major news stories of the day? Of course, the migration to clean energy is THE major news in a large percentage of what we read every day in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But I think my friend was after a finer point: What specific aspects of renewable energy pertain most directly to world events?

I answered that it’s essentially the second chapter on national security, my interview with James Woolsey, Director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency from February 5, 1993 until January 10, 1995. Here are abbreviations of a few key points that Mr. Woolsey raised:

The security of the grid. We don’t have the supply problem; we don't have the European-type problem of the Russians controlling the fuel for our electricity. We pretty much make our own electricity, but the aged nature of our transmission grid produces several big national security problems, including vulnerability of the transformers and other things terrorists could attack, hacking in the SCADA systems, and EMP (electromagnetic pulse).

Vulnerability with respect to oil. The supply network is potentially vulnerable; if you take out the right buildings in Louisiana, you could really screw up control of the oil pipelines.

The threat of pollution to the populace. Boyden Gray, in his piece in the Texas Review of Law and Politics, puts the cost in damage to peoples' health and medical costs total, at approximately $250 billion a year from the aromatics.

What Tom Friedman calls "Fill 'er up with dictators" -- the "oil curse." An autocratic state, when it depends for a huge share of its income on a commodity that has a lot of economic rent attached to it, that rent tends to accrue to the central power of the state. The 22 countries that count on two-thirds or more of their national income from oil are autocratic kingdoms or dictatorships.

I’m always interested to see how the push for renewables is treated in the press, and how we somehow find a way to whitewash the truth -– as astonishingly bald as it is: day after day, the US hocks its future to the tune of an incremental $1 billion to buy oil from the bad guys. If you can convince me that there’s nothing sinister about this, I’m all ears.

- Craig Shields is editor of 2GreenEnergy.com and author of Renewable Energy - Facts and Fantasies (published by Clean Energy Press, 2010)