We Need a Big Stick Energy Policy
Energy, national security, and the importance of not being a little bitch.
This post is by Contributor Timothy Wood.
When the military starts taking something seriously, it’s probably time to begin worrying. The narratives around renewable energy paint a picture of Greta Thunberg, AOC, and Moonwind Stardancer joining hands to hug trees and commune with Gaia. The reality is rather more prosaic — and far more dangerous if ignored. It’s dangerous even discounting climate change. We’ve been taking everything we’re supposed to hold dear and defend — baseball, apple pie, and all — and piling it on the sacrificial altar of oil. Independence is important to Americans. We even wrote a Declaration about it. But we’re not independent, and we’re still relying on kings.
I know that not everybody grew up or works around military installations, but if you get to visit, something you may notice is that solar panels are absolutely everywhere. That isn’t done, at great expense, without a rationale. These are the people who have plans for everything. Their plans have plans. They have plans for how to invade Canada just in case. And they’re also planning for energy independence. Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics, and the logistics are pretty bleak.
Someone somewhere is probably waking up in a cold sweat right now and yelling about our “woke” military in an attempt to tie this in with the culture wars. That person is stupid. This isn’t some cringey marketing decision. It’s a matter of national security. History nerds remember fun facts like how the US arguably set the Pacific war with Japan into motion because we threatened to cut off their oil. We were the oil drug dealer and the Japanese were hooked. It was copper, iron, rare earth metals, and lots of other things, but oil was the deal-breaker. Unfortunately, we were also getting high on our own supply, and we haven’t stopped.
I’m not totally on that train where we supposedly invaded Middle Eastern countries to steal their oil. It’s more complicated than that, but it’s common knowledge that the main reason the region is geopolitically relevant is because of that black gold. Half the Middle East is basically Antarctica, but the hot version. There is an ongoing debate about when swaths of the region will simply be uninhabitable. Not “uninhabitable” as in the difference between Detroit today and Detroit when I was a kid, but “uninhabitable” as in surface-of-the-moon not-fit-for-human-life.
In the US, we love touting our national ideals: freedom, equality, democracy, opportunity. Every politician with a brain (and some without) stumbles over themselves to make sure they talk about how we’re the greatest country in the world. So central is this notion to the American ethos that we track these attitudes in public opinion polling. Even if you think we invaded Iraq in a bid to steal oil, you can’t deny that we justified it as spreading American values and standing up against tyranny. We have to. Otherwise we can’t live with ourselves. We created a superhero who is the embodiment of blind adherence to these values, dressed him in a Puerto Rican flag, and called him Captain America. We made a superhero whose catchphrase is “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” and named him Superman. We were even willing to overlook the fact that he was an illegal immigrant.
If there were a Captain Saudi Arabia, he’d be fighting against freedom — free speech, a free press, and the freedom of (and from) religion. He’d be really enthusiastic about having an unelected king as his leader. He’d carry a bonesaw instead of a shield and occasionally use it to kill and dismember journalists. It’s hard to overstate the contrast. In 1962, The Beach Boys were telling us how we should all go surfing. Saudi Arabia was deciding to finally ban slavery. The US was well behind the curve on the slavery issue and we knocked this out a hundred years prior. We were going surfing, and Saudi Arabia had on-the-books legal slavery.
When the Saudis finally allowed women to legally drive in 2018, the world congratulated them for being so progressive. That’s like praising Hannibal Lecter for doing Meatless Mondays. We should probably pause and consider why we hold the Saudis to such low standards and why our relationship is so sycophantically warm.
US foreign relations with Saudi Arabia are the geopolitical equivalent of the first minute of the “Purple Rain” music video: everyone stands around awkwardly for a bit and then the guy up front issues an apology. I started to compile a list of the instances where American presidents bent over to kiss Saudi ass, but soon realized I was starting to write a book. George Dubya invited them to his home. Obama dipped out on a trip to India to run over and congratulate their new king. Trump had to call a doctor after his erection lasted more than four hours. Biden was brought, basically on a leash, to fist bump a murderer after he vowed to hold the Saudis accountable. It goes on for as long as you care to look.
Do we care about our values? I think we do. I don’t think it’s pure cynicism all the way down. I think there are a lot of people who wave flags and shout America! and actually believe what they say. We’re supposed to be the shining city on a hill. On the flip-side, there are a lot of people who get characterized as critics of America, as being un-American, when what they’re really doing is challenging us to live up to our ethos, to follow through on what Dan Carlin calls the “marketing material.” And we should, but that requires not being somebody’s bitch.
The US burns through almost a million barrels of petrol per hour. Individual action is wonderful, but you’re not going to fix that by riding your bike to work. Your bike was delivered by a truck burning oil. We should have learned this supply lesson from the pandemic. Even the gas you put in your car is transported there by ship, by train, and by truck, all using power sources like gasoline and diesel. If the price of oil goes up, the price of tampons goes up, because you have to get them to the store. Some 70 percent of petrol products are used specifically for transportation. We need an energy Marshall Plan. A million barrels is something like 40 million gallons. Again, every single hour.
That’s why the military cares. What happens when the supply is disrupted? Look at any major natural disaster and see the lines snaking around the block to get to the gas pump. We’re hooked. Now think about transporting a lot more stuff — stuff many times heavier than a family car, and over much longer distances than a day trip, and you can see the vulnerability from the perspective of the military. I could tell you about being in a disaster area, or I could just point you to any zombie movie ever made. Zombies tend to stretch supply lines thin. Everybody’s trying to get to the military checkpoints, and we assume for the plot that the tanks and trucks have fuel in them and aren’t just for show.
This isn’t purely hypothetical. By the end of World War II, the Japanese were manufacturing airplanes and towing them from the factory to the airfield using oxen. The juggernaut of the Pacific, who rolled MacArthur’s ass right out of the Philippines,1 couldn’t fill the gas tank to tow their planes, because we had the oil and they were our bitch. The rest is, as they say, history.
Don’t read this like you’re the only one here who isn’t an oil cuck. You’re presumably fairly well-informed. You know about Ukraine, but you don’t really know about Yemen. The Sauidis have been waging a war in Yemen for long enough that it has dropped through the floor of our news cycle. If you exclude people who play Europa Universalis IV — because their kink is staring at maps and arguing over the Burgundian Inheritance — half of America couldn’t pick out Yemen on an unlabeled globe. It’s hard for a war to stay sexy and captivating when it started while Frozen was still in theaters.
And it’s still going. A current map of Yemen resembles take-out that’s been sitting in the back of your fridge since the day “What Does the Fox Say?” was released. It’s one of the largest ongoing humanitarian crises on the planet, with over 20 million people dependent on international aid. Yemen is home to all the greatest hits of a war in the developing world, like using rape as a weapon, child labor, raping children, and some 1.5 million pregnant or breastfeeding women suffering from malnutrition. That’s on top of almost 400,000 corpses.
That’s our war whether we ignore it or not, because we might get our cheap plastic from China, but the bombs falling in Yemen are Made in America™. We buy Saudi oil, and they buy American bombs. We can’t tell them to tone it down. We can’t take a stand on things we all agree on, like not raping children, because you don’t talk back to your pimp or you get slapped. We have the largest military and economy in the world, but they both starve without oil. We learned this during the Carter Administration, and we’ve spent 50 years not doing anything about it.
If you want to save the planet for the sake of saving the planet, more power to you. If not, get on board with a great American poet George Carlin. We’re not saving the planet. The planet is fine. It’s been through a lot worse things than pesky humans. What we’re saving is us. Embrace the most ‘Merica thing possible: speaking softly and carrying a big fucking stick. Call it BSE: big stick energy. Achieving energy independence isn’t some NoCal New Age woo-woo about Mother Earth or returning to “nature.” It’s about making sure our country keeps running amid wars or natural disasters. It’s about making sure we’ll never have to tow our planes to airfields with oxen. It’s about having real leverage in the global arena so that little girls in Yemen aren’t raped to death while fleeing homes blown up with the bombs we traded for oil.
Our national narrative isn’t a statement of fact; it’s an aspiration. Created equal. We, the people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It’s always been something we struggle toward but never truly are. But we have to struggle. We can’t stay still. There is nothing less American than bowing down to a king in a foreign land. And no amount of made-in-China and shipped-with-Saudi-oil American flags can mask that. It’s time to get off our knees and either stand up or sit the hell down.
See also: “To Win the World, Innovation is Our Most Powerful Weapon: China and the Geopolitics of Automation”
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Remember, MacArthur only said “I Shall Return” because he was flipping the Japanese the bird as he ran the fuck away from Corregidor to hide in Australia.
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