Ethics Newsline®

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Late last week, as the price of a barrel of oil surged $11 in a single day, I recalled a conversation I had in the fall of 1986 with one of America’s leading scientific thinkers, Freeman Dyson. The 1979 oil crisis was still a sobering memory, but Dyson, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who described himself as “obsessed with the future,” wasn’t worried about energy.

“I don’t regard that as a real problem,” he told me during an interview for the Christian Science Monitor. “If you have advanced biotechnology, I don’t see any difficulty in getting all the energy you want from the sun. It’s only a question of redesigning trees so that they produce something other than wood — gasoline, for example.”

This was before the age of email, laptops, cell phones, or the cloning of Dolly, the Scottish ewe. So does that mean, I asked somewhat incredulously, that we’d get fuel the way we get sap from a sugar maple in New England — by tapping the tree?

“I wouldn’t do it so crudely,” he explained. “I would have a sort of living, underground pipeline system, so that the gasoline would be delivered where you want it.”

For a man who designed a nuclear-powered starship and long had been a proponent of space colonization, energy sufficiency was simply a matter of inventiveness. But how far into the future would it be? “At the most,” he said, “50 years.”

We’re now about halfway there, and Dyson’s prophecies — about which he continues to write — no longer seem so strange. Last month on PBS, “NewsHour” reported briefly on Solazyme, a California high-tech startup that has reengineered the genetic structure of algae. Processed in laboratories for a few days, it produces oil very similar to the light sweet crude that nature requires tens of millions of years to create. Solazyme already is running several cars on its product.

Why can’t I buy some for my car? Because, obviously, the innovation is still under way. But that’s no excuse for other alternative-energy resources. Here on the Maine coast, the wind is typically steady and strong, and we have more sunny days than Michigan or the Pacific Northwest. But I have no windmill in the yard, no solar panels on the roof.

Now you can blame me for not being a tech-savvy early adopter like a few of our neighbors happily living off the grid in south-facing houses with basements full of batteries. But that’s not the point. Why aren’t alternative-energy technologies as common as cell phones and broadband — not restricted to the clever and the forward leaning, but spread across millions who only want their benefit and couldn’t care less how they work?

Because (the theory goes) the answers don’t lie in the technology but in the economy. As long as oil is relatively inexpensive, there’s not much demand for these new technologies. Let gas prices hit $10 a gallon (or so it is thought), and all of that will change.

But will it? If prices rise slowly, the boiled-frog syndrome may set in, with nobody thinking to leap out of the pot until it’s too late. If, on the other hand, the increase is sudden and sharp, the clamor for change could cause massive disruptions in family budgets, prompt panic at the gas pumps, and raise the specter of profiteering in alternative-energy products.

In fact, we have a better choice. Rather than waiting for markets to force painful adjustments, we can create policies to speed up change. Suppose, 10 years ago, Congress had legislated changes that vigorously promoted entrepreneurial solar and wind-power equipment. Suppose, as a result, my local Yellow Pages listed as many local firms selling and servicing this equipment as there are car dealers — and as many banks willing to finance it as to provide auto loans. Suppose I could realize substantial tax savings by equipping my home with equipment powered by wind or sun. Is there any doubt that, even though Dyson’s genetic wonder world still may be two decades off, our little Maine community already would be well on its way to energy sufficiency?

What’s holding us back? The answer has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with political will. In the end, our political progress depends on the moral choices we make and the ethical decision making we pursue. Effective national policymaking requires three things: agreement on shared values, methodologies for creating compromise when values conflict, and the moral courage to put those methodologies into practice. Around the politics of energy policy, we’re seeing a few proclamations about values. But as last week’s partisan muddle in the Senate over a global warming bill suggests, we’re seeing far fewer efforts to hammer out the compromises that create sound post-petroleum economic policy — and hardly any moral courage in leading the march toward that goal. Will we simply wait until the economic hardship falls so harshly and unfairly on the nation’s households that some of them are destroyed? Or are we ready to demand more responsible forethought from our policymakers — so that, as Dyson observed, energy continues not to be “a real problem”?

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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