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

302National Energy Securitythis book focuses, the members and leaders of any community will be askingthemselves: How serious is this emergency? How long will it last? Who willhelp us? Without good answers—indeed, being bombarded by conflictinganswers from all sides—people will tend to wait and see, doing as little as willgive the appearance of muddling through. The ambiguity that stalls action isnot only a lack of information; it is real. The federal government currentlysays it will adopt a laissez-faire, free-market attitude, but it is not reckoningwith public pressures if gasoline reaches five or ten dollars a gallon and manypeople cannot afford it. Communities will then look to the federal governmentto impose rationing or release its reserves.But just as the International Energy Agency has worked hard on threeoccasions to ensure that its oil-sharing agreement was not triggered, so thereare reasons to think the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would not be used exceptin extreme emergency. Federal and state contingency plans, where they exist,are generally in disarray. Nobody knows whether they would be used, or, ifused, whether they would work. Who will pay for their implementation is acompletely open (and politically delicate) question. In localized failures in thepast, states and regions have proved reluctant to pay for making up eachother’s deficits. Local administrators who hope that these uncertainties willsomehow be resolved in a crisis, presenting them with clear options thatnobody can see now, are likely to be badly surprised.Capital availability Efficiency and appropriate renewables are alreadyattractive investments even before an energy emergency. The knowledge thatdemand for them may rise steeply during an emergency adds a further andmore speculative attraction. During an emergency, however, that speculativecharacter is more likely to tempt short-term profit-takers to buy stockpiles offuels, or shares of companies which hold such stockpiles. Thus the glitteringprofits to be had by speculating in oil at hundreds of dollars a barrel mayquickly dry up the flows of capital that can be much more productively usedto save oil. In just this way, tens of billions of additional dollars per year arealready flowing into heavily subsidized oil and gas drilling rather than goinginto better but less familiar investments in saving those same fuels.Furthermore, most energy-saving and resilience-improving investments mustbe made in millions of little pieces, not in the huge chunks with which capitalmarkets are accustomed to deal. Yet energy emergencies limit the jobs, disposableincome, and local revenues which provide precisely these local flows of capital.To the extent that federal funds are available, they are more likely to beused to bail out conspicuously hard-hit major industries, to supplement transferpayments to the unemployed and needy (notably to help pay their increased