The Ergosphere has a long energy article out. It's interesting, as far as it goes but the entire edifice rests on a few questions of geostrategy
Suppose that the US decided to take the following as national security issues:
- Dependence on foreign (particularly middle-east) oil and vulnerability to price shocks.
- Decreasing availability of N. American natural gas and price spikes.
- Air pollution and its consequent health effects.
- Increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
We have dependence on a lot of things that come from other places. A mutually interdependent trading system sees to that. If we were to view all of these dependencies as a national security issue, we might as well start planning the end of the Republic because the only way to secure ourselves (under that false idea of national security issues) is to take over the world. No thanks.
I was going to do a point by point analysis but once you see that a plan is built on a false idea of what is in our national security interest, there is no salvaging it. There is no point. There's some good facts sprinkled in there and the analysis is spot on, but it's spot on for some parallel universe where international specialization and trade is not win-win and we want to beggar other nations, not grow rich and secure together. That's not the kind of world that I would want to live in.
Posted by TMLutas at November 22, 2004 09:43 PM