What good can come out of the murdering tide that now swamps New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Let's take a step back, be, as they say in the Crescent City, sang froid.
Among other things, Katrina has exposed the shaky pilings of American energy policy. Because of the devastation of oil rigs, fuel terminals, refineries and interstate pipelines, gasoline prices in the Southeast are over $3 per gallon and in some places of spot shortages are over $4. This was entirely predictable. In fact, last week the National Commission on Energy Policy issued a report detailing the acute vulnerability of the American economy to even minor strictures in oil supply and refining capacity. A reduction of just 4 percent of world oil supply could cause oil to soar to $161 per barrel, triggering a severe recession in the U.S., and $5 per gallon gas. One of the events modeled was a terrorist strike against the oil terminal at Valdez, Alaska, because, until recently, terrorism was the most imaginable threat. But any number of other scenarios can -- and as we have seen with Katrina -- will result in leaping gas prices and the cascading chaos they cause.
In the words of Curtis Mayfield, people, get ready. This country has hung by a thread of artificially low, publicly subsidized gasoline prices, and now, the thread is cut. The recessionary havoc of higher energy prices merely brings to the surface what has been true all along. We are just 5 percent of the Earth's population and consume more than a quarter of its energy. We use 20 million barrels of oil per day, most of that as fuel for transportation. Average vehicle fuel economy is the lowest it's been in decades. We import about 60 percent of our oil, much of it from the Middle East, supporting regimes that are at a minimum tolerant of Islamic extremism. We are, in the view of many energy security specialists, funding both sides of the War on Terror.
I don't mean to diminish the human loss and suffering caused by Katrina, or seem opportunistic, but this event -- this catastrophe -- ought to be a bright line in the history of fossil fuel. I'm convinced the storm itself was intensified by higher temperatures in the Gulf caused by global warming. It's abundantly clear even now that many of the resources that might have mitigated this disaster -- from funding for projects needed to shore up New Orleans levees, to adequate numbers of response-ready National Guard -- were redirected to the Persian Gulf to maintain a military hegemony in the world's richest oil fields.
So, now what? With the double-black-square hurricane flags as a banner, now is the time to declare war on oil. We should immediately reduce the national speed limit to 55 mph -- a liberal do-good measure so radical Richard Nixon first put it forward. We should raise gas-guzzler taxes four and five-fold. We should raise corporate average fuel economy by 50 percent in 10 years, and those kinds of vehicles that can't make those standards should not be built. We should set a national price of gasoline at $4 per gallon, limit oil companies' profits, and take the difference between price and cost as a gas tax to fund alternative transportation research and to help reorganize our economy.
We should immediately rescind the omnibus energy bill signed by the president, with its counterproductive giveaways to the oil and gas industry, and re-direct those funds to post-petroleum programs and policies. Among them: We need to have automated traffic control in metropolitan areas by 2015, so that the fuel-wasting stop-and-go of commuting traffic can be limited and even eliminated. We need to re-invent the short-range electric vehicle and fund crash programs to develop high-energy battery technology, photovoltaic and solar energy collection and other renewable, carbon-neutral energy technologies. Every vehicle sold in the U.S. by 2015 ought be a plug-in hybrid, regardless of whether it is powered by gasoline, diesel, bio-diesel or hydrogen. In short, we need to save this country from its perverting and dangerous obsession with oil, which corrupts our climate and our spirit.
The tragedy of the Gulf Coast will remain so only if we fail to act. The dead of New Orleans, some thousands it now appears, deserve more than to be victims. We should honor them as martyrs of a better future.
On Monday, September 12, this pieces airs live on 89.9 FM KCRW; live stream and podcast at www.KCRW.com and iTunes; archives at kcrw.com/show/rl.