Talking Renewable Energy on a Conservative Radio Talk-Show

An old friend from high school has invited me to be a guest on his radio show which takes a conservative perspective on the topics of the day.  I’ll be on for an hour to talk to him and entertain callers’ questions about my views on renewable energy, electric transportation, and sustainability more generally.  When he called to schedule the interview, he promised that the talk wouldn’t be combative, i.e., he won’t call me a communist, a bleeding heart, etc.

I had to choke back my laughter when we announced these conditions: “You don’t know the hundreds of other similar situations in which I’ve found myself over the years.  Most of the talk radio shows that have had me on have callers from hell, and a few of them were hosted by right-wing attack dogs themselves.  There is literally nothing you could say or ask that could possibly offend me.”

The position of a conservative-minded show, of course, is that government is bad, and that unfettered private enterprise is good – and those who know me understand that I‘m not wholly opposed to this viewpoint; I’ve been a business owner almost my entire adult life, and I understand the value of taking responsibility for my own condition in life.  I simply think the situation isn’t as black and white as the ideologues paint it to be.

In the particular case of this upcoming radio show, I’m guessing that the concept is that renewable energy is receiving subsidies, therefore it’s part of the plan of our president (a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist) to cripple private enterprise through ever-increasing regulation, and, ultimately, to get as many Americans as possible on food stamps.  OK, I’m oversimplifying.  Maybe.  We’ll see.

But I thought readers might be interested in a few of my “talking points,” starting with a few of our government’s intrusion into transportation:

• Yes, government is pushing industry for better fuel economy and alternative fuels; it’s playing a role in the transportation of the 21st Century, just like it did in the 20th, when it subsidized domestic oil exploration, built the roads and highways, and consistently deployed the military to maintain access to oil from foreign sources.

• We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that our tax-payers are still writing checks in the amount of tens of billions of dollars annually to the oil companies, the most profitable industry in the history of the known universe, to make that business even more profitable. While the American voter hates this arrangement by a factor of approximately 70-30, he’s completely powerless to change it. There’s a word for that: corruption.  It’s the corruptive force of huge corporations, unchecked and unregulated, that has produced this outrageous ethical, economic, and environmental catastrophe.

• The involvement from government hasn’t been the tragedy that the right wing promotes.  Are our listeners aware that radar systems that came from government have virtually eliminated fatal accidents on our commercial airlines?  The annual risk of being killed in a plane crash for the average American is about 1 in 11 million, as compared with the annual risk of being killed in a motor vehicle crash, which is more than 2000 times greater (approximately 1 in 5000).

• And speaking of the government and the automobile industry, how many of us know the source of every single safety advancement, from seat belts in 1961 to anti-lock braking, air-bags, and the many dozens of other technologies that save more lives each year (though each one was fought tooth-and-nail by the auto industry itself)?

• Whence came the effort to put a man on the moon and began to explore vast regions of the universe?

• Taking the subject of transportation back down to Earth, have we considered where the Internet came from, that provides us our real-time traffic maps, our roadside assistance, the backbone for deployment of emergency medical services, not to mention the hundreds of other benefits we count on every day?

• Let’s conclude this by saying that government’s encouraging progressive concepts in transportation — pragmatic concepts that have proven themselves thousands of times over for their effectiveness in protecting your life and providing the safekeeping of your loved ones — are not entirely bad.

From there, let’s branch out into a few ideas on the larger topic of what’s happening regarding the destruction of our ecosystems and government’s responsibility to take action to mitigate the disaster, i.e., to use common sense and rationality to restrain the private sector:

• Even the ultra-right-wing Cato Institute acknowledges the concept of anthropogenic climate change.  Gone are the days when people who wish to be taken seriously can say that climate change is a hoax.  So where do we go from there?

• Some say that our civilization is not duty-bound to take preventative measures against climate change because we don’t have adequate visibility into the future.  This does not hold water with me.  Yes, we could be saved by a great number of things, e.g., a new technology or some unforeseeable event in the cosmos.  But society’s depending on the unknown to halt the destruction of our environment is not sane, responsible behavior.

• Some argue that, because the greatest damage from climate change will happen many decades hence, our imperative to mitigate that damage itself comes decades hence.  This is a similarly unsupportable position; it has no more validity than an oncologist who discovers a small tumor on my lung but does not advise me to stop smoking, since the greatest part of the damage has not yet materialized.

• I ’m guessing that my host, a believer as he is in free-market capitalism, will assert that there exists a self-correcting mechanism that minimizes environmental damage on the basis that capitalism abhors waste.  Again, this is specious.  What capitalists abhor is wasting money, not CO2, or small but lethal quantities of heavy metals.  The choice here isn’t between wasting harmful byproducts of fossil fuels or not wasting them; it’s between cleaning up the waste or not cleaning it up.  We have adequate proof over the past two centuries that, when industrialists are unregulated, they most often choose not to clean up after themselves.

Lastly, I appeal to patriotism.  If you really care about America, and I’m sure the vast majority of the show’s listeners do, here are a few things to consider:

• Our addiction to oil causes us to borrow half a billion dollars a day and send it to our enemies.  Our economic solvency declines at the same time that the strength and power of terrorists increases.  If you understand this, and if you care about our national security, I think you’re at a loss to defend an energy policy rooted in oil.

• The entire rest of the developed world understands something that we apparently do not: advanced solutions to energy are the defining industry in the 21st Century.  We, as a nation, can pretend that alternative energy is a hoax, that it’s an anti-capitalist plot, but doing so is nothing less than an invitation to China to hasten its ascent into the position as the leading economic (and military?) power.  Why on Earth are we following this outrageously stupid and masochistic course?  Again, it’s corruption.  Our government is owned by the oil companies, and guess what?  You might care about American jobs and the quality of life for the 300 million of us, most of whom come from families who made sacrifices to keep all of us safe and free.  But they don’t, as long as they’re maintaining their stranglehold on the world economy.  Any real American should be mad as hell about this.

• So what are the few remaining open issues?  It really all boils down to this:  In the absence of informed, enlightened people like you, dear reader, the private sector, if left alone, will happily suck the last molecule of crude out of the ground and mine the last lump of coal, and sell it to us.  And, just as happily, we’ll burn it to produce what we feel is our God-given right: cheap, abundant energy.  Yes, the consequences will be catastrophic, but no one wants to hear that.

• It was less than a year ago when the debate on the subject in the 2012 U.S. presidential election included only two ideas: Obama’s “all of the above” strategy – make no enemies.  Coal, nuclear, gas, renewables – let’s regard them as equals. Romney’s ridicule of anything but the very least-cost energy solution (fossil fuels) and the idea that we have some sort of obligation to protect our environment and long-term survival. The popular vote was very close (50%-47%), i.e., between the two, they received over 97% of the ballots cast.

So is my viewpoint popularly accepted?  Hardly.  But it is what it is.  If this guy wants to attack me, he won’t be the first, nor the last.