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A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash
What happened was inevitable. The way it happened was unconscionable. – Dr. Lillian Stone, Last of the Dogmen
It was the heart of the great depression. Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House and several Wall Street bankers and business leaders were sitting in their offices planning the overthrow of the American government. Among the conspirators were representatives of General Motors, Chase National Bank, Standard Oil, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, U.S. Steel, the Du Pont family and Prescott Bush, the future father and grandfather of two Presidents. In sounds like something out of a bad novel or some really cheesy late night movie on cable, except it really happened. In 1933, just after FDR entered the Oval Office, business leaders approached retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler due to his great deal of influence among veterans. They would give him up to $30 million in financial backing to help organize a bonus march of 500,000 veterans on Washington and then use the occasion to topple government. The President would be kept as a figurehead, a symbolic ruler, but power would be exercised out of the financial power centers where it belonged.
It never got beyond the talking stage because Butler realized that such a step was treasonous and testified before Congress about the plan. Many of the wealthy saw the New Deal as socialism. They hated the “cripple” residing on Pennsylvania Ave. with his wasteful programs to help the poor and middle class. He was a traitor to his fellow elites. For many business leaders, fascism and National Socialism were a positive alternative to the socialism that Roosevelt ushered in. They did not realize that these programs and policies they cursed so much not only saved capitalism, but brought them the kind of wealth they could hardly have dreamed of. It is called priming the pump and it is a concept we need to return to. Those programs created a huge middle class, made college affordable, and ushered in a wave of prosperity that we are still riding today. There probably is not a person reading this column whose family was not touched and lifted up by that broken little man in the wheelchair. I know that my family would still be sharecropping dirt farmers, scratching a living out of 40 acres, if it wasn’t for President Roosevelt. He saved us and the rich spit in his face. It is the way it is. Those helped out the most by some Good Samaritan are always the ones kicking and screaming the hardest as they are taken to safety. Someone needs to help us because if you have not noticed it is getting a little expensive at the gas pump.
There is some irony that the fuels pumping through the heart of our economy, oil and coal, are made of the remains of microscopic animals and plants that died millions of years ago. We are literary burning the bodies of the dead and it is killing us, heating up and changing the weather patterns around the globe. Maybe the scariest horror film made in the last few years is Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. New Orleans, the California wildfires, the Midwestern winter, the Iowa floods, and Georgia drought have been just sad appendixes of the film. The pale rider of the apocalypse, our dependence on oil, might be our offspring. We are like a junkie, it is killing us, our supply is drying up and we have not made any real efforts to find a replacement.
Somehow, Rush Limbaugh believes our oil reserves are magically growing. A real geoscientist named M. King Hubbert in the late 1950s, proposed that within a few decades the production of oil will max out and from which point the supply would grow smaller and more costly to access. If our consumption is not checked, an energy crisis will develop from which availability will drop and prices will increase dramatically. At the time, his theory was not taken seriously. Our love affair with the internal combustion engine was just beginning. Eisenhower would soon begin building our Interstate highway system. Cities across this nation were tearing up the rail systems that once formed the backbone of their public transportation systems. A year earlier, a Des Plains, Illinois businessman named Ray Kroc founded the first franchised restaurant for a chain called McDonald’s to service hungry motorists. The American dream had been relocated to the suburbs with their well manicured lawns made lush green with the help of petroleum products. An 1862 invention called plastic was popping up in the kitchens, garages, and toys of these little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Those left in the countryside were finding their lives much easier thanks to new herbicides and pesticides they could spread on their fields. The large trucks that rumbled down newly paved roads hauled their goods to market easily. Just four years earlier, the first commercial jet, the de Havilland Comet, had been introduced and air travel, once something exotic, was becoming more common place. In a few short years, we had become a cheap oil based culture and the rest of the world wanted what we had. But what happens to such a society when the oil dries up, is no longer cheap, and is leading to our own suicide?
It is a question that people like President Jimmy Carter asked in the 1970s. He began a conversation with the American people about how we need to start looking for alternative sources of energy. Yet, the first thing Ronald Reagan did when he entered the Oval Office was the very symbolic act of tearing down the solar panels that his predecessor had put up behind the White House. He was telling the American people what they wanted to hear. OPEC opened the tap and the good times rolled. Bigger cars, better times, don’t worry the bill is never going to come due. So, are we at peak oil? I don’t know, the current energy crisis is probably due to a lot of reasons. Still, the waitress is at the table with the pen and long black book and she has a stern look.
Still, we Americans are eternal optimists, but what are our alternatives. Hydrogen? It is what the President has been pushing, but his oil and gas buddies know that we are four or five decades away from making that a realistic possibility. Nuclear? Another red herring thrown out by Texas gentlemen who know that the supply of uranium is limited. If all the reactors we needed were built, which again would take decades to get on-line, we might squeeze two decades out of the supply before we found ourselves in the same boat we are today. Liquid coal? It is worse on the environment than oil. Gas? Biomass, solar, wind, and water? We are not investing in those technologies at the levels we should mainly because energy companies have not figured out how to put a meter on the sun.
What we are going through, the end of oil, was inevitable. The pain it is going to cause the most marginal members of our society is unconscionable. In the late 1970s, President Carter found this nation by the side of the road and tried to carry us to safety. We kicked, screamed, scratched, clawed and thirty years passed away. For the last half century, up to our current petroleum President, big government has promoted and pushed our current reliance of our black liquid drug. It is going to take government to help us make the turn towards alternative sources of energy. When President John Kennedy proclaimed that we would put a man on the moon within a decade, it was seen as a joke, something technologically impossible. One flying into Las Vegas and other Southwestern cities should be amazed by the vast fields of solar panels. Thousands of windmills should be powering the Midwest. Iowa farmers planting fence post to fence post should be the 21st century’s Texas oilmen. This takes the kind of vision that Eisenhower had when he built the highway system and had the kind of courage that few politicians have. We need a President and other leaders with a similar vision towards energy. Even though those who are currently making money off the current system don’t understand this, this transition will make them richer than they could ever dream. Where is that “cripple” when we need him?
Verdict: An Interesting Documentary