WILD CARDS - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 190

and royalty payments companies make to the U.S. government in
exchange for the right to produce oil on federal lands. h ese charges
are a signal that oil in the ground is valuable to the American people;
low rates send the opposite (and incorrect) message to the market.
Disintegration of global trade and investment wouldn't lessen the
imperative of developing alternative sources of energy, but it would
make it more dii cult, and fraught, to do. Modern innovation systems
rely heavily on combining dif erent capabilities across borders; with
a much slower l ow of ideas and innovations between countries, the
pace of innovation would slow as well, potentially making the adop-
tion of new energy technologies more dii cult. Concerns about the
limited availability of rare earth metals, lithium, and other critical
supplies would take on new urgency, but the same physical reality
(availability of ample supplies in the United States or friendly coun-
tries) that makes the U.S. predicament relatively benign today would
continue.

m m m

Alas, one needn't look decades into the future to identify an impor-
tant economic wild card. On December 1, 2008, the National Bureau
of Economic Research certii ed that the United States had entered a
recession the year before. 20 One month later, the Congressional Budget
Oi ce (CBO) projected that the economy would return to its full
strength by 2015. 21 Unemployment would decline quickly, falling below
7 percent by 2012 and below 6 percent by 2013. But those estimates
turned out to be well of the mark. As of July 2012, unemployment
remained above 8 percent, a i gure that would have been higher but
for the fact that many had stopped looking for work. 22 History is lit-
tered with cases where a return to full economic strength following a
bit er recession took many years. h e U.S. economy operated below its
potential for a dozen years following the start of the Great Depression,
and it recovered in full only with mobilization for World War II. h e
recession that began with the 1979 oil crisis took nearly a decade to
wear of , and within a few years at er it had done so, the economy was
back in the doldrums. 23 Indeed, the CBO revised its projections in early