We are now 7 years removed from the Great Crisis that brought us Barack Obama. (We are also no further removed in time from the movie poster at the right was from the end of the war it portrayed.)
For those keeping score at home, that means we are now playing the 1939 game, as that year provides the best analogy to our time.
In 1939, the world was slouching toward war. The West had returned to the austerity policies, negative growth and deflation of the crisis because bankers were back to making policy, and bankers don’t understand that money is a verb.
The bad guys of the time got this. Hitler ignored the bankers and re-armed his country. So did Japan. So did Italy. They demanded that money be spent, they directed it be spent on arms, and in the course of spending that money the economies of the Fascists grew rapidly.
In our time, bankers have far more control of the world than they did then, so austerity and deflation are more widespread. Austerity rules Europe, it dominates the U.S., and it’s becoming increasingly popular in China.
Only Vladimir Putin is prepared to ignore this reality and put money to work. He has sunk his currency, sunk his economy, but he has spent, believing that aggressive wars to win territory can succeed.
Here’s something you won’t read on the news. There are no such things as “Ukranian Seperatists.” There is the Russian Army, which has been invading that country, with increasing brazenness, for a year now. Those who claim this is some sort of internal Ukranian matter are giving Putin cover in his mad fever dream to re-create the old Soviet Empire.
But this is not 1939. Not really. Economic growth is no longer based on resources, on oil and gold. Gaining and holding territory while ignoring the people who live on it is now a losing strategy. Putin, of course, doesn’t believe this. Neither do many American conservatives.
Putin is one of the Fascist dictators of our time. The other lives in Riyadh, and there the situation is more complicated. Saudi Arabia is nominally an ally, but the medievalism on which that nation’s absolute monarchy rests is better expressed through movements like ISIS and Al Qaeda than it is through the government. ISIS is the ideology of Wahhabism, taken to its logical extreme. Wahhabism is the official religion of Saudi Arabia, and thus of much of the Sunni world.
This has put the Arabs into a struggle between a pure medievalism and something that might be more akin to 16th century Catholicism, the Medicis against the Popes, a precursor to the Reformation that is truly necessary if Islam is to embrace the challenge of a modern world. This is playing out in the oil markets, with the chaos created by ISIS moving to push prices higher, and the monarchy standing on the side of lower prices.
Neither side is really worth rooting for, something else the media won’t tell you. The Right may insist that absolute support for the monarchy is the only way to maintain order, but what kind of order is it that makes more than half of humanity second-class, that enslaves millions to build its great cities, and that absolutely rejects the concept of human capital while partaking of all the luxuries 21st century civilization is capable of?
The best solution is for both sides to go to blazes. And there is a way to do that. That is, keep pushing renewable fuels. Even at $50/barrel, every barrel of oil anyone buys from that region is still $50 in some combatant’s pocket, or maybe in Putin’s pocket, or maybe in some Koch-sucking American politician’s pocket, like Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz. It doesn’t matter who you buy your oil from. There are no truly good guys in this market.
Thus if you are really a patriot, if you really believe in America, science, futurism, and democracy, you have only one course open to you. Limit your driving. Support solar energy, wind energy, biofuels, and the cheapest renewable fuel of all, conservation. Make energy the defining political issue of 2016.
It makes no sense to continue pushing any fuel which the enemies of this nation have the power to control, even if Americans are among the suppliers. Thus it makes no sense for our policy to push shale oil, because that just goes into a pot alongside Saudi oil and Russian oil. Any of our enemies can manipulate us, then, by withholding product from the market – or having it withheld for them by a failure of technology (in Russia) or deliberate sabotage (what Arabs call terrorism).
The shining sun, the blowing wind, the growing crops and the molten rock beneath us represent energy that no one can take away. Every solar panel we build or install represents hundreds of kilowatt-hours that don’t have to be supplied by our enemies. The same is true for every windmill, and for every drop of bio-diesel or bio-alcohol our farms can supply, whether that’s from corn or non-food sources.
True energy independence doesn’t just mean burning domestic oil and gas. It means freedom from a marketplace our enemies can control. The neo-Communists of Russia, the neo-Medievalists of the Arabian Peninsula, are not and cannot be our true friends, because neither accepts the underlying concept of the 21st century economy – that it’s human capital rather than resources which is the gating factor of economic progress. It’s not your ability to pull shit to burn out of the ground that represents progress, it’s your ability to the abundance all around us, through human thought, through technology, which is the key to economic progress. This is the end the American experiment was always moving.
The 2014 election thus created an opportunity. Republicans have seized power and are anxious to use it against the environment, and against all the lessons of the last 5 centuries. They are controlled, all of them, root and branch, by the oil power that can put us under the thumb of the Saudis or the Russians.
Economic necessity demands we unite around a politics that drives oil out of Washington, once and for all. The war against oil is becoming political. That won’t mean a “final” triumph of one political party or another – there is no such thing. But it does mean that anyone outside the consensus of enduring energy abundance should become unelectable, no matter what party they pretend to come from.
