Robert J. Samuelson has assigned himself the role of cold water thrower. Every time someone gets excited about a change that will benefit the nation — perhaps the whole world — he runs to the fridge for another bucketful.
Here is an example of his latest dousing:
“… Just once, it would be nice if a president would level with Americans on energy. Barack Obama isn’t that president. His speech the other night was about political damage control — his own. It was full of misinformation and mythology. Obama held out a gleaming vision of an America that would convert to the ‘clean’ energy of, presumably, wind, solar and biomass. It isn’t going to happen for many, many decades, if ever.
“For starters, we won’t soon end our ‘addiction to fossil fuels.’ Oil, coal and natural gas supply about 85 percent of America’s energy needs. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects energy consumption to grow only an average of 0.5 percent annually from 2008 to 2035, but that’s still a 14 percent cumulative in-crease. Fossil fuel usage would increase slightly in 2035 and its share would still account for 78 percent of the total.”
Samuelson, 65, has been writing scholarly articles about economics and politics for decades. He is a careful student who keeps his facts straight.
If he had been writing about the possibility of landing a man on the moon in, say, 1940, he would have drowned the idea in an icy shower. Abolish polio? Not a chance. Create the world’s largest democracy in India? Boy, what an impossible dream that was before World War II.
Samuelson’s cold water is, however, needed to keep the world’s decision-makers sober — so long as they can work on the solutions the world needs while wet and cold.
Is he correct about alternative energy sources? Yes and no. Yes, the world is going to be burning carbon fuels for a long time. No, because nuclear, wind, sun, biomass, tidal and other sources of non-carbon energy will continue to provide a growing percentage of the nation’s and the world’s energy consumption.
And most emphatically no because neither Sam-uelson nor anyone else can estimate how rapidly alternative energy production will grow if the economic and political incentives to grow it become large.
All of his projections are linear, that is, he assumes today’s pattern will continue.
But that isn’t the way the world has worked. Mankind moves through time in jerks and jumps and frequent 90-degree turns, not in a steady, plodding pace in a straight line.
Those who anticipate and plan for nothing but more of the same will always be wrong — and will always be throwers of cold water.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
