[extropy-chat] POLITICS: oil and strategies

[Steve Davies]

> At 05:42 PM 6/25/2004 -0700, The Avantguardian wrote:
>
>
> >Take the top scientists from our universities,
> >put them on a military base in some desert, and give
> >them one year to come up with one or more alternative
> >energy sources to oil. The challenge would be to make
> >it so that the new fuel be easy to synthesize, store,
> >and allow existing gasoline and diesel engines to
> >operate on it with a minimum of upgrading.

Damien Broderick commented

> Fuel is not all that oil is used for.
>
> Plus: There's a lot of money and political clout in the existing oil
> industry. Some argue that cheap access to reliable supply is exactly what
> motivated the Iraq wars to begin with. Maybe so, maybe not, but the
current
> interests aren't going to be happy about any govt program to make them
> irrelevant--unless they're granted a very large piece of the action. I'd
> like to hear some analysis from historically knowledgeable people here,
> such as Steve Davies.
>
> Damien Broderick

This is right. The Manhattan Project is a misleading analogy because that
was a military research project with no immediate economic implications.
Generally speaking interests and groups that benefit from the status quo and
stand to lose from any innovation already exist and are relatively easy to
mobilise. By contrast the groups that would gain from innovation either do
not yet exist or are large and dispersed and so difficult to organise. The
conclusion I would draw is that the more government is involved the less
chance there is of major innovation because it's more likely that the
political decision making process will be nobbled by the established
interests. This can have the unexpected effect of stopping technological
development in one area but diverting it elsewhere. The classic example of
this is when the stagecoach companies in Britain used their lobbying power
to get the Road Traffic Act through Parliament to stop the development of
steam powered road vehicles (it required that any such vehicle be preceeded
by a man with a red flag 40 paces in front of it). The result was the
development of railways as a major form of transport - something that would
almost certainly not have happened otherwise. The other big conclusion I
would draw is the importance of having competing political entities - if the
established interests in one country block change, the capital and
innovative people will simply go somewhere else, to the benefit of the
ruling elite in that state.

Spike commented on Damien's remarks:

Yes to all this, and besides, we need no professors.  The
science is already in place, has been for a long time.  We
know what needs to be done.  To get to energy independence
we just need to build the windmills, the PV farms, grow the
corn.  Right now oil is so cheap and the infrastructure is
so well developed, the other stuff cannot compete.

Look a few years into the future of energy technology.  China
is coming up, as is India.  Those nations have over a billion
people each, and they are eager to industrialize to western
standards.  Oil can only get more expensive, which will give
alternate sources a chance.  Truly, we are on the eve of
construction.

spike

Again this is right. At the moment oil is cheap and accessible enough that
nobody has a sufficiently strong interest in finding an alternative and the
ones we have are not viable. Once this changes (which imo will be very soon,
for the reasons Spike gives) you can expect a sudden shift. I would expect
this to happen in China or Japan initially rather than the US or Europe,
because of the political situation that Damien describes.

As far as oil goes, people always think of it as an energy source. Fair
enough, but it's also our principal cource of complex hydrocarbons. Above
all, petroleum products are vital for modern agriculture. The thing to go fo
for a whole range of reasons is a technology (designed bacteria/algae
perhaps) that will synthesise elements into complex molecules in the way
that plants and organisms do. Quite apart from the oil question this would
have a massive beneficial environmental impact. Humanity's big impact on the
world still comes mainly through agriculture so reducing our need for that
would be a good thing in many ways.

Steve