Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

4Brittle PowerAgency (DCPA’s successor), that research 4 is the basis for this book.Extensively reorganized, rewritten, and supplemented to make it useful to awider audience, it seeks•to analyze the full range of potential disturbances to energy systems, theircauses, their often unexpected effects, and their interactions with each other;• to show why traditional engineering measures meant to make energy systemsmore reliable in the face of expected technical failures may makethem less resilient against unexpected disruptions;•to identify specific design principles that can make major failures in ourenergy system structurally impossible;• to discuss how these principles can be embodied in efficient, diverse, dispersed,and sustainable energy technologies, and patterns of organizingthose technologies, which are already available and practical;• to show that such measures yield great inherent resilience—making failuresboth less likely and less dangerous—without added cost, and indeed atless cost than more vulnerable energy options; and• to describe how governments, corporations, communities, and individualscan actually implement a resilient energy policy for the United States whileat the same time meeting their own economic and security needs.Purpose and scopeThis broader concern with the security of energy supplies does not mean thatdependence on foreign oil is not a serious problem. When the Secretary ofDefense, referring to oil dependence, stated that “there is no more seriousthreat to the long-term security of the United States than that which stemsfrom the growing deficiency of secure and assured energy resources,” 5 he wasright in a wider sense, as this book will show—but also exactly as he meant it.The global oil problem is real, difficult, and urgent. Buying foreign oil costAmerica nearly ninety billion dollars in 1980 alone—equivalent, as DeputySecretary of Energy Sawhill put it, to the total net assets of General Motors,Ford, General Electric, and IBM, or to nearly forty percent of total U.S.exports. Further, the proprietors of much of the oil are neither friendly norreliable; and the far-flung supply lines can readily be cut by the Soviet Union,Colonel Qadafi, or the Palestine Liberation Organization. Oil is in any casea finite resource that will become scarce. These obvious dangers have led ourgovernment to take various precautions against interruptions of oil imports.Even those precautions are not enough: virtually all assessments of Americanoil dependence find that a major interruption of world oil trade would grave-