1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts!

A Tinkle In Time

I have no particular brief against David Brooks' column today ("American Power Act") in terms of its overall message:

"The road to energy innovation is sure to be messy, but the U.S. is going to have to develop energy sources that are plentiful and clean."

In fact it is nothing if not amusing as hell to see one Conservative expatriate after another adopt the rhetoric and share the broad vision of History's Greatest Villain -- James Earl Carter --


30 years after they shit all over him, and their beloved St. Ronald Reagan both literally and figuratively ripped the solar panels off the White House and sold our collective futures down the river to OPEC.

But in addition to poking around in his written and spoken midden piles for lies, fraud and bad writing, I have grown accustomed to listening and reading Bobo Brooks through a very specific filter: The Great Project that he and various other Conservatives are undertaking to frantically distance themselves as far as from the Modern Republican Party they created, while bending every, single media opening towards the goal of burnishing its glorious (and usually fictional) past.

Of course, in this case, Ronald Reagan (the usual target of fawning Conservative revisionist paean-age) has an energy and public works record that is simply too fucking radioactive to touch, which is why Bobo apparently felt he had to reach his Mighty Fondue Fork of Journalism back...back...waaaaaay back...clear past the 20th Century and back a full a 150 years to find a Republican who wasn't a complete chucklefuck:

"In 1860, Samuel Curtis, a Republican congressman of Iowa, sponsored a bill to create a transcontinental railroad. The debate over that public-private partnership was long and messy. Democrats said the proposal was unconstitutional. Others rightly argued that it meant huge giveaways to the rich.

But the railroad effort, backed by Abraham Lincoln, swept forward.
..."

Of course, to make his long, long stretch worth the effort, modern energy policy would have to actually have something more in common with the building of the transcontinental railroad that Bobo's blunt assertions:

"Energy innovation is the railroad legislation of today. This country is studded with venture capitalists, scientists, corporate executives and environmental activists atremble over the great opportunities they see ahead."

Which is, of course, nonsense; there simple are no more vast government holdings of public assets to give away to plutocrats, which at its core was what made the Age of Rail possible.

Instead, a modern public/private energy policy partnership will have to be modeled on massive public investment in building an entire public/private infrastructure from the grade-school level up capable of delivering products and talent on a national scale.

For which a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

—John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

Such a project would need to be capable of moving theory into practice with the priority and zeal of national security crash project.

For which a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

...The Manhattan Project began as a small research program in 1939, which eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in present day value). It resulted in the creation of several research and production sites whose construction and operations were secret.

Project research took place at more than 30 sites, including universities, across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site in eastern Washington State; the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and the weapons research and design laboratory now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.

Any such undertaking would also need to be nation-wide and with a public-works charter focusing on helping the average American right where the live and work.

For which a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

The Roosevelt Administration believed that if private enterprise could not supply electric power to the people, then it was the duty of the government to do so. Most of the court cases involving TVA during the 1930s concerned the government's involvement in the public utilities industry.
...

And finally, to be successful, any national energy program would have to use the power and purse of the Gummint to frame the national goals and funds the hell out of them, picking winners and losers based on the best methods of delivery the private sector can competitively develop within those parameters.

For which, of course, a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users were formulated by the computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider, of the Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) company, in August 1962, in memoranda discussing his concept for an “Intergalactic Computer Network”. Those ideas contained almost everything that composes the contemporary Internet. In October 1963, at the United States Department of Defense, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs, at the Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA (the initial ARPANET acronym). He then convinced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this computer network concept was very important, meriting development, although he left ARPANET before anyone worked on his concept.

ARPA and Bob Taylor continued their interest in creating such a computer communications network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to put to use the computers ARPA was providing them, and, in part, to make new software and other computer science results quickly and widely available.

So why not use any or all of these much better, clearer, more familiar and much more timely analogies? Why this call-back to the age of steam, the horse cavalry and the Maximilian Affair?

Because history remembers the ARPAnet, rural electrification, the race to the Moon and the Manhattan Project as the signature accomplishments of Democratic Presidents (unfairly, given Dwight Eisenhower's early backing of the space program, but then again, by Modern Conservative standards, Ike was a dirty Commie anyway.)

And that does not serve the Great Project.