When We Want To, We Can Move Stuff Around: What About Clean Energy?
On this day in 1956, a few days before my first birthday, President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, which established the Interstate Highway System. I think of the implications of our vast network of highways frequently, normally in connection with the challenges we face in building out our aging and woefully inadequate national electricity grid.
When I tell people that we have a profound and urgent need to connect various regions of the country, bringing solar energy into our population centers from the deserts, wind energy from the plains, hydrokinetic energy from the Pacific Northwest, etc., people roll their eyes and explain that there will be legal objections that will keep this idea held up in court until the next Ice Age. While they may be right, we do have several legal precedents for using eminent domain for the public good, and the Federal Highway Act is just one among them. In fact, we’re pretty good at moving cars – and trains – and fossil fuels – all over this great land of ours. Do you suppose this could be extended to renewable energy? We’ll see.
Ha ha. Love to see it happen, but Obama ain’t no Eisenhower.
It’s certainly true that Obama doesn’t have the public support that Eisenhower did. But in fact, even Eisenhower himself didn’t have the support he needed at the time; in large measure, he sold the Highway Act to the American people on the basis that he claimed it was necessary to move troops and supplies around in the interior of the U.S. in order to protect us citizens from the prospect of foreign invasion.
20th Century fear. There was plenty of it to go around, and it motivated some of the great atrocities in the history of humankind. An eerie parallel to today’s world, perhaps.
Eisenhower presided over 90% taxes on the wealthiest and 4% unemployment with the promise to get the US out of the debacle in Korea that the Democratic idiots before him had gotten the nation into. Not only did he commit the lives of 170,000 men on Omaha Beach against the Nazis, he sent the 101st Airborne to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock. Let’s be clear, there is NOTHING Obama has with Eisenhower.
OK, where would you like to see us go from here? I’m guessing you’d like to see another person of Eisenhower’s character lead the nation. I don’t oppose that (though I probably would have voted for Stevenson had the voting laws admitted people of my age to the polls). But where would you find such a person today?
The thing I find most disturbing in all of this is that it seems the only thing anyone is willing to build transport systems for is oil. Interconnecting our disparate power grids so we can move energy from places that are generating it to places that need it? No way. How about a canal or pipeline system that moves snow melt and excess water from the eastern rockies to the south through America’s heartland to help aleviate flooding in the places that have too much water and drought in the places that don’t have enough and perhaps have some irregation along the way through the “breadbasket” while we are at it? No way!! But a pipeline to move the dirtiest oil from Canada to Texas through that same area? They are all in for that. The same with moving natural gas from areas where they are fracking to shipping ports. Once again all, in for that. Maybe we just need to find a way to take all this clean energy stuff and add the word “oil” to it.