The Other White Meat

Obama's spending fails to engage with the peak oil problem.

by David Faris

Republican criticisms of the Obama administration's spending practices are amusing as a form of metaphysical punishment. When people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rail against pork and say that the government can't create jobs, they should maybe check the employer on their paychecks. The fact that anyone takes these ideologically bankrupt scolds seriously after the last eight years is an enduring mystery of our political culture.

The bigger problem with the stimulus package and Obama's budget is that it comprehensively fails to engage with the galloping catastrophe that threatens to obliterate global prosperity. Left unengaged, it's a problem that will swallow what's left of the global economy whole, making the AIG bonuses fiasco look like a beef-and-beer gone wrong.

This problem is called "peak oil" — the point at which half of all global oil reserves have already been consumed, and the world enters a period of energy inflation, resource competition and endemic violence. Many observers believe we have already reached this point.

The Obama administration appears willing to throw gobs of money at alternative energy projects without questioning the fundamental paradigm that governs American social order. They believe we will find a new technology to enable what the critic James Howard Kunstler calls our "happy motoring utopia" — the organization of American society around highways, suburbs, strip malls and gas stations.

Preserving our way of life in this exact form is as extraordinarily unlikely as it is undesirable. No one has yet figured out a way to safely and efficiently power millions of cars and trucks with anything other than cheap petroleum. Proponents of electric cars seem not to understand that electricity has to come from somewhere, and that if you hooked up every car to the electrical grid our electric bills would blow the walls off our McMansions.

The spike in oil prices last spring did more than endanger an already-threatened economy — it led people to sell their cars, muscle onto trains and trolleys and abandon housing in the once-vaunted "exurbs." And this was with gas at $4 a gallon! Imagine the consequences at $10 or $15.

Imagining those consequences is something Obama does not appear willing to do, even as his administration spends elaborate sums making sure that every square inch of roadway in this country is maintained like the Hanging Gardens.

But someone in power needs to start asking questions about the likely effects of peak oil. What becomes of a food supply largely dependent on petroleum inputs and long-distance shipping if the price of oil triples or quadruples? How will we cope with skyrocketing oil costs if we don't start building railroads and subways? In other words, what is the shape of the reckoning to come?

The global economic depression means that this reckoning may be put off by a few years, but it is inevitable nonetheless. Obama and the Smartest Guys in the Room he has appointed to positions of economic power are trading short-term political gain for long-term pain. It's like buying a year's worth of OxyContin to treat a toothache instead of just getting the cavity filled.

The Republicans are right about one thing: There is indeed pork in Obama's budget. The Other White Meat is the continuation of America's doomed imperial policies — spending billions to maintain a ring of military bases around the Persian Gulf and continuing the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and continuing to invest in an infrastructure that will be rendered useless by peak oil.

We're all slurping at that trough, and we're long overdue for a new way of life — one that doesn't revolve around cheap oil and that instead builds a sustainable, just existence for us all.

David Faris is a City Paper contributor. To respond to this piece, visit citypaper.net/opinion.