Challenging Times - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 174

By the 1970s, preoccupation with secure access to energy had migrated from the
boardrooms and war rooms to the street. Hence U.S. President Richard Nixon's insistence
on including the promise of “energy independence by 1980” in his 1973 State of the
Union address. That was the year of the first oil crisis, and Nixon understood the political
advantage of this promise. He deliberately modelled it on President John F. Kennedy's
1961 pledge to put an American on the moon. However, Nixon greatly underestimated
the difficulty of ending his country's dependence on foreign oil. Whereas Kennedy's
task depended largely on generous state funding and scientific ingenuity, Nixon's called
for a transformation of the very fabric of Americansociety. The mobility implicit in the
American Dream was, and still is, tightly bound to hydrocarbons. The only way, then, to
bring about 'energy independence' was either to develop viable alternatives or to discover
vast new oil fields in the United States. Although the promise of energy independence has
become a mainstay of U.S. politics into the twenty-first century, it is as far from realization
today as it was in 1973 (Yergin 2011 ) .
Every industrialised or industrialising country grapples with the problem of energy
supply. Germany is the most recent country to make a promise reminiscent of Nixon's, in
this case, to dispense with nuclear energy by 2022. While Germany's motives are more
about safety than geopolitics, the challenge will be the same: to develop alternatives,
discover new sources, and use energy more efficiently. In Germany's case, the departure
from nuclear power is likely to lead - in the short-term at least - to a greater dependence
on foreign energy resources, particularly Russian gas (Marquart 2011 ) .
The promise of energy independence remains so elusive because, not unlike promises
of full employment and uninterrupted growth, it is simply not realistic. Energy is the most
globalised ofallcommodities, andallcountries, importers andexportersalike, areboundto
the markets. While the promise of energy independence continues to beguile voters, it has
long since been abandoned by the captains of industry in favour of a more pliable concept:
energysecurity.This entails anacceptance that energysystems are globally interdependent,
and likely to become more so in the future, and implies a multifaceted approach to energy
supply.
5.4 The Environmental Cost of Energy
As a child, I travelled with my family a few times a year from our home in the west of
Irelandtovisitmygrandfather,wholivedinaredbrickhouseinDublin'sinnercity.Among
the many lures of the city for a young bumpkin like myself were sweetshops, streetwise
cousins, and the ubiquitous cacophony of traffic sounds. After a day playing outside in the
lanes around my grandfather's house, we children returned home with blackened faces and