We Need The Entire elephant

Robert Samuelson's Washington Post op-ed "The Bias Against Oil and Gas" articulates a divide on how we see our energy future: oil versus clean energy. Samuelson draws an implied "choice between promoting renewables and relying on oil" from Obama's statement that "we can remain the world's leading importer of oil, or we can become the world's leading exporter of clean energy." But really there is no divide. Really, each is focusing on separate elements of the same, integrated challenge. Like blind men calling out their impressions of the elephant, Samuelson has his arms wrapped around a sturdy leg; Obama, the trunk. Getting from here to there relies on legs and trunk. We need both.


Oil is both the key to getting to where we are going, and it is not where we are going. Oil is a key component, it's a big, sturdy leg, of the way we transition to clean energy. From the opening of the last century, it has developed into a backbone of the way we live our lives, and we need oil to create an orderly transition to the future; we need oil to make and haul the stuff of clean energy. We need oil to move beyond oil. Our policies should acknowledge this, and make a place at the table for Chevron, and Exxon and Beyond Petroleum, and all their smart geologists and petroleum engineers, so that they continue to find and bring the oil we need.


But clean energy is the end vision, and a thing in its infancy. While Samuelson sees an Obama administration "fixated on 'green jobs' and wind and solar energy," the fixation makes sense if you apply the law of inertia to the economics and politics of the energy industry. Oil is a mature industry, a body in motion that will tend to stay in motion. But inertia requires adding energy, it begs a certain fixation, to get the clean energy industry moving. While this might read as a bias against oil and gas, it's nothing more than doing what is needed to get us where we're going. It's leading the elephant by the trunk towards the road we want to go down. We are all riding the same elephant here, and getting down the road is a far sight better than trying to hack the thing into legs and tail and trunk.


Photo: Vladimir Zivkovic on flickr