Tossing Mullet

The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind

Major kudos to Lulu’s in Gulf Shores for the groundbreaking effort to harness wind energy to power the “Bama Breeze,” a tiki bar at the popular restaurant owned and operated by the sister of Alabama’s unofficial poet laureate, Jimmy Buffett.

The use of wind power is the anthem being sung by no less an entrepreneur than T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman turned environmentalist, without abandoning his capitalistic goals.

Actually, to his credit, T. Boone makes the extraordinary point that sending our money by the “oil tanker load” to the Middle East may be fueling a variety of anti-American activities, including the possibility of paying for terrorism! Collectively, we may have closer ties to terrorists than Obama has to a leader in education reform in Chicago who believed in criminal disobedience to the Viet Nam war effort 40 years ago – as many did including the civil rights movement of the same tumultuous period in our country’s history.

But, honest to God, what better excuse should we need to reduce energy consumption than to effectively cut the budgets of the Arabs, Russians and Venezuelans? These countries have become some of the most anti-American, anti-modern, repressive countries in the world – largely due to the fact that they have control of enormous hydrocarbon reserves and keep their people happy with our money.

Thomas Friedman, in his latest book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” provides compelling arguments that our oil addiction is paying for not only support of outright terrorism, but funding the reversal of democratic trends in Russia and Latin America after the fall of communism. He calls it “the First Law of Petropolitics – As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down; and as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.” Go green and screw ‘em all!

The pressure to drill and tap out our own reserves is a cornerstone of American patriotism these days. As I have said before in this column, this is a dangerous trap because we absolutely adore gas at or below $3 per gallon. That makes Hummers look a lot better, for sure! We are a complacent lot with terribly short memories (go look at the new houses being built on the west end of Dauphin Island) and an un-American tendency to take the easy way out.

Friedman argues that his law could be interpreted as applying to America as well as these other nations. Many would argue that we have given up a lot of basic freedoms under the guise of anti-terrorism.

The Internet is full of amazing estimates of “domestic reserves,” like the Bakken Reserve under the Rockies that is estimated at 3.5 billion barrels of oil – big whoopee – are we going to level the Rocky Mountains for one year of gasoline for our cars? And there’s another monkey wrench in this plan. Those reserves are economically extractable only at the high prices of gasoline.

I suppose that there would be no price too high if we are going to achieve “energy independence” from outside sources – including technologies that would almost certainly impact Yellowstone Park. That’s OK if by doing so we give the proverbial finger to our Middle East tormenters. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!

SO! Go for it Lulu and let the Baldwin County EMC figure out that you might be doing them a favor by helping to produce electricity at your bar. I think it’s pretty cool that anyone is experimenting with the economics and it probably is not a financial plus at the moment because the technology is still badly scale limited. But as it becomes more attractive the costs of construction and installation will go down and the percentage of electricity attributable to wind power in the grid will increase.

Instead of complaining about a competitive technology being introduced by a lowly restaurant/bar and whining about the unfairness to the other co-op members, why isn’t Baldwin EMC leading the way in what could be the greenest thing we could do to “break it off” in some of Friedman’s “petrodictatorships.”

Then the conservative, pro-business editors of the local newspaper pile on, supporting the co-op position. Wow! Why don’t we build some more dams while we’re at it and prove that Alabama doesn’t care one whit about our addiction to antiquated energy sources. (Oops, I forgot that we’re in a climate change-related drought)

Nevertheless, if you analyze hydroelectric power, you’ll find that it is 300 times less efficient than converting chemical energy from oil. So charge forward to the past, for God’s sake and build some dams (it’s going to rain again). Wind has its problems with electrical storage issues, aesthetics, dumb birds and vagaries of weather, since it does take wind to turn the turbines. But it’s largely somewhere and the sun’s burning out is not something that keeps me up at night. The other issues are technological hurdles that we used to know how to address.

If you look at the long history of energy, we used animals and slaves to move things until somebody figured out how to burn wood and make steam engines – welcome the industrial revolution.

Then we found out in rapid order that coal was better than wood (more efficient) and oil was even better than coal. But with our backward-leaning tendencies and the emotional objections to nuclear energy (the most efficient of all) we can foresee a future of slaves and animal power. At least, air and water will be cleaner since we will have exhausted our petroleum and coal reserves.

So go for it, Buffetts, Jimmy and Lulu! Changes in attitude, indeed! Lead the way and the devil take the hindmost!

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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