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

Chapter Seven: War and Terrorism 69delighted: they felt, and responsible officials including Goering and Speer saidafterwards, that systematic targeting of power plants would have curtailed thewar, perhaps by two years. They could not understand why the Allies hadpassed up such an effective targeting strategy. 4 U.S. analysts later realized thatearly Allied bombing of major power plants and substations “would have hada catastrophic effect on Germany’s war production.” 5The Allies were also late to exploit similar opportunities to interdict theNazis’ liquid fuel supplies. On 1 August 1943, a single raid destroyed threehundred fifty thousand barrels of oil and half the refining capacity at Ploesti(Romania), then a key German source. But still earlier bombing of otherGerman oil facilities, especially those making aviation fuel, would have greatlycurtailed World War II. 6 By early 1944, about a fifth of the German oil supply—aboutseventy thousand barrels per day—was being made from coal intwenty-six synthetic fuel plants, most of which had been built in the Ruhr areaduring the 1930s. When those plants were belatedly targeted for precisionbombing, the synfuel output plummeted by more than ninety percent in justa few months 7 —starkly confirming German analysts’ fears. (Meanwhile, theLuftwaffe had delayed attacks on Russian power plants in the hope of capturingand using them. By the time the Nazis had been driven back, makingthis a forlorn hope, the plants were no longer within their bombing range.) 8Protection by dispersionIn striking converse to this centralized vulnerability, Japanese electrical productionin World War II was relatively decentralized. 9 Seventy-eight percentcame from small, highly dispersed hydroelectric plants that were not individuallyattractive targets. The largest single dam supplied less than three percentof Japan’s electricity. The more centralized thermal plants, though they providedonly twenty-two percent of the total electricity, were so comparativelyvulnerable to urban bombing raids that they sustained ninety-nine and sevententhspercent of the damage. The contrast between these centralized plantsand the dispersed hydro plants (seventy-eight percent of the output but onlythree-tenths of one percent of the damage) impressively demonstrates the militaryadvantages of not putting all one’s energy eggs in a few baskets.Similarly, North Vietnamese energy facilities were not a primary target duringthe Vietnam war because, like the Japanese hydro plants in World War II,they were too small and dispersed to be worth attacking. 10 But in the KoreanWar, the centralized hydroelectric dams on the Yalu River, serving NorthKorea and China, did become a target. The U.S. also bombed a concentratedenergy target—a Cambodian oil refinery—during the 1975 Mayaguez incident. 11