Looking to Patton, Carson, and Gandhi

We still don't have a strategic and holistic energy policy. The threats embedded in our energy insecurities and failures are quickly becoming an issue in three areas - - security, economic, and environmental/social. We are fast approaching a day of reckoning - - pollution, climate change, health, and cost colliding with a world of two billion emerging customers.

In the September/October 2010 issue of World Affairs looks at this issue (Our Energy Future, Now by James Woolsey, Rachel Kleinfeld, and Chelsea Sexton) from the context of three voices from the past - - General George S. Patton, Rachel Carson, and Mahatma Gandhi. The authors write the following:

The first is General George S. Patton, the hard-bitten standard-bearer for crushing our enemies and ensuring American security, who worries about our weakness and vulnerability to those with malevolent intent. What sort of country have we become, depending on an electrical grid that is routinely hacked by the Chinese (not to mention American teenagers)? And how did we get into a situation where every gallon of oil we buy enables Saudi Arabia to increase a global commodity price that pours money into the coffers of Russia, Venezuela, and Iran - - and finances schools of terrorists.

Rachel Carson, our second ghost, woke the world to the fact that the chemicals and pollutants were creating miraculous new plastics and pesticides were also destroying human health and natural habitats. But from her perch in the afterlife, she has also noticed that although SUV-driving soccer moms surely have nothing against Bangladesh, their carbon dioxide emissions may nonetheless be slowly causing it to sink into the sea. She worries about the unintended consequences that our energy choices have on our health, pollution, and climate. She believes there are "malignant problems," caused not by malevolent intent, but by complicated, interconnected systems causing inadvertent side effects.

For the third set of problems, those faced by the wretched of the planet, we call upon their greatest spokesman: Mahatma Gandhi. The masses he spoke for live where the energy grids do not reach, or where corruption and neglect have left such grids useless. It is on these regions that farmers struggle to survive as climatic changes undermine the arability of the small plots of land they depend on for subsistence. It is in their villages that girls must decide whether to sleep in the cold and eat unheated food, or risk the chance of rape that accompanies the daily search for firewood. And it is in their huts that women die early of lung disease after years of crouching over the smoke of dung fires. Gandhi is also a spokesman for self-sufficiency and what it can do for prosperity in the village, as well as against tyranny. His charkha - - the small spinning wheel at the center of India's flag - - embodies these goals.