Introductory chapter for the new book, “The National Energy Solution”, by Biofuels Digest editor Jim Lane, available for free download.

Note to Digest readers: the introductory chapter in a new book, The National Energy Solution: An Inquiry into Values, by Biofuels Digest editor Jim Lane, is now available for free download.

Excerpted from the introductory chapter: “Highways and a Distributed Society”

My purpose in writing then, is to examine the concept of a national energy solution — not simply to describe or critique a series of possible or preferred scenarios — but to understand and describe those things in the culture that led us to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

For the way out of a dense jungle is found with a map, but is found by people — who have learned how to plan a journey, establish directions, and why to follow them, and when to follow them.

For solutions to become effective, “we, the people” must also become effective.

I am here, then, to make an inquiry into what happened and what went wrong, as Steven Covey admonishes us in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, first “seek to understand”, and thereafter “seek to be understood.”

In seeking to understand, I have chosen a path to travel that I know well, the road from Santa Monica to Las Vegas, which passes over more variety and abundance than any other I have seen in many years of hard and easy travel. There will be several side trips along the way – the San Bernardino mountains, the Imperial Valley, the Salton Sea, and the Coachella Valley – where we will explore terrain and ideas and values.

I want to see the land again, and the people, and the past. I want to understand what paths were chosen, and why they were chosen. How to choose new paths that are sustainable not only because the metrics are right but because the people can sustain themselves within the lifestyle that must follow.

And not because we become perfect people, virtuous in all our energy habits. Only A Stalinist would design a system that can attempt to create, and depend on, a perfect people and a perfect world. Courtesy of Armand Hammer, I saw enough of the old Soviet Union to convince me of the futility of systems that require a consistency of virtue. We will never be a perfect people. Though the Mayflower pilgrims came to America for religious freedom, less than half of the Plymouth colony regularly attended church.

That’s another reason to choose California. Nowhere in the world do we see yo-yo dieting like we see in California – burning off the pounds, followed by a return to the old ways. It cannot be the same with energy, for we lack the time to solve the problem more than once.

In southern California, also, I believe we can see it all in a concentrated dose. The staggering complexity of the problem: immense emissions, legislative paralysis, an economy in shock, a financial system adverse to very risks that must be taken to assure survival of finance, the weakening dollar, desertification, freshwater shortages, the problems of trade, sprawling freeways, congested cities, and the stunning imbalance between the wealthy and the poor. Not to mention a continuing love affair with the car.

Also, all the options that one could ask for to meet the challenge: algae, jatropha, coal, petroleum, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, a fertile soil, an educated people, a sense of urgency and mission, a biotechnology, energy and technology industry second to none, a financial structure used to risk and reward.  Not to mention a love affair with all that is new and better.

Whether you believe in climate change, or energy security, or global competitiveness — the time is now to solve the problem.

I have read a hundred plans for a national energy solution, and I have come to disbelieve and discount all of them. They are written by well-meaning people, many of them friends and all of them people that are to be admired, and I do admire them.

Their flaw is that they prescribe, and I have come to believe that the solution will not be a work of prescriptive science, but a collection of solutions discovered from life rather than made in the lab. Solutions that prescribe percentages and schedules and specific technologies have a raft of unintended consequences.

Vietnam was world of timetables and efficiency men. The Second World War was won with by setting a goal, marshaling great resources, and finding the way forward in the field.

Whether it is war, penicillin, the Q Microbe, or the de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, I believe that the scaling of the happily accidental discovery is at the heart of the solution.

As Churchill said, there is one person that knows more than anyone, and that is Everyone.

So I propose to discover and describe, rather than posit and prescribe. For as Digest columnist Rosalie Lober reminded me recently, “The market does what the market does”.  There is nothing that could be of greater interest and inspiration than the opportunity to encounter the beauty of newfound truths in the garden of their first flowering. Lucky me.

These acres that we will travel together were the last spaces of the old frontier. It’s been gone for such a short time that the American psyche retains its values. A belief in superabundance, self-reliance, the rights of the individual over the rights of the community, and the surety that happiness lies in invention, in a shining city on a hill that lies just over the arroyo and through the sierra.

I believe that, in order to move forward, we must not only seek to correct our emissions or energy mix, but also to find a means to harmonize the American way with the new ways that must surely come as we struggle to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

A nation that has never really gone “without” must find the answers within. That, perhaps, we must fight to establish a democracy of food, and a democracy of fuel, whereby vital goods are no longer produced in faraway places, priced and distributed by forces we can scarcely comprehend: that food and energy might be produced as near to the point of use as practical or feasible — is a way forward: energy by the people, of the people, and for the people. But let us, first, look at the problem and look at the solutions, and see what we find.

And so we begin a journey via small roads and large — from dusty county roads and massive interstate highways. Our subject is energy but our patient is as much the highway system, and the transmission and distribution of energy and commerce, as anything itself. For the biggest use of energy is moving stuff around, and creating liveable human conditions in all the places we have moved ourselves to in this beautiful, precious Republic of ours.

As a system of transport supply, the interstate highways are a success beyond its developers’ greatest hopes. By now, they are welded into the fabric of American life and the economy in ways that are supremely difficult to amend. The system of US roads are the greatest single contributor to America’s great single strategic security weakness, its dependence on foreign oil. Nothing has undone American national security more comprehensively in the past 50 years than the American romance with the car.

Please feel free to download the remainder of the first chapter, here. I will continue to publish chapters for free download by Digest readers in the days and weeks to come, although a complete, bundled version will be made available in traditional book form for those who like the format and are happy to wait.

This story was produced in partnership with Blog Action Day.

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