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

46Brittle Powerthe Iranian revolution, to subsidize dozens of huge synthetic fuel plants—eachdozens of times the size of any that had been built before and many usingwholly unproven processes—may well turn out to be a mistake of this kind.Long lead times also create risk even if forecasting is perfect. When people considerin 1982 a billion-dollar commitment to a plant that cannot be finisheduntil 1992 and must then operate into, say, the 2020s, they want to know withconfidence the conditions of finance, regulation, and demand throughout thisperiod. But they want this certainty in a society whose values and institutionsare in rapid flux—a society that changes its politicians every few years. Ifdemocracies are to retain their flexibility and adaptiveness, they must remainfree to change their minds. This is not a problem of accurate forecasting butof maintaining political degrees of freedom essential to the American conceptof government. It means that the certainty desired by the promoters of costly,long-lead-time technologies simply cannot be given. This tension—perhaps afundamental incompatibility between the characteristics of many modernindustrial investments and those of a pluralistic political system in a changingworld—is bound to express itself somehow. It is an inherent source of vulnerabilityin those facilities or in the adaptability of our institutions or both.Certainly it points up a solid advantage of short-lead-time energy alternatives.Specialized labor and control requirementsModern society is becoming disturbingly dependent on skills possessed bysmall numbers of highly organized people. Air traffic controllers, for example,are virtually irreplaceable, at least on short notice. Their 1982 strike and dismissalhas caused widespread disruption, casting a financial shadow over theairline industry for years into the future. The sympathy strike by just a fewdozen Canadian controllers at Gander, Newfoundland snarled North Atlanticair traffic for two days. 48 A twenty-four-hour strike by fifteen hundred Britishcontrollers and allied staff (presumably five hundred per shift) did what Hitlerwas unable to do—close British airspace. 49Likewise, modern systems for the continuous bulk delivery of energy areexceedingly complex and require meticulous automatic and manual control—control which can be understood, run, and maintained only by a few highlytrained specialists. There are a few exceptions: railway loading operations arealmost unique in having so far largely resisted automation, retaining humanjudgement instead of computerization. 49 But gas and oil pipelines and electricgrids are already almost completely computerized. This is indeed essentialbecause of their complexity. And with the computers come new vulnerabilities,arising from both the equipment and the people who operate it.