Less: The Road Not Taken

Afghanistan: Is there anything we can do beyond the Finger Pointing Olympics we’ve been witnessing?

Can we learn something?

We know one thing for certain. The entire Middle East is a long tunnel with no cheese.

It was a long tunnel yesterday. It is a long tunnel today. It will be a long tunnel tomorrow.

It has been so for centuries, not decades. Name the period and Western culture – not just us Americans — can be noted only for its delusional, self-righteous and destructive approach to a different culture.

A Trillion Here, A Trillion There…

Over the last 20 years, according to a study done at Brown University, the combined cost of Afghanistan and Iraq has been $6.4 trillion, a mind-boggling figure. Other figures differ, of course, but the cost has always been in trillions.

To put the trillions in some perspective:

— $6.4 trillion would provide Social Security benefits for all retirees, retiree spouses and children of retired workers as well as all disabled workers for more than six years. Yes, years of income for millions of Americans.

— It would have done much the same for Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies — pay for about six years of benefits. Again, years of benefits for millions of Americans.

— $6.4 trillion would have provided about $28,000 to each of our nearly 230 million licensed drivers. That’s enough to buy a new Prius. It’s also the expected cost of the coming Tesla Model 2.

So it’s time to ask some questions.

Time to ‘Think Different’?

Could we have done anything differently?

I believe the answer is yes.

Then why didn’t we?

Because we’re stuck in a thinking habit.

We are literally wired to think about more, not less. Equally important, that change in thinking would have needed to start earlier than 9/11/2021.

When, you ask?

Not long after the first OPEC oil embargo in 1973.

That’s when we had an opportunity to make a simple decision. We could have found a way to consume less oil, not more. We could have decided we would not be held hostage by an unstable area with massive oil reserves.

The Road Not Taken

By 1976 we even had a blueprint for how to do it.

That’s when Amory Lovins’ paper “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken” was published in World Affairs. In it, he demonstrated that the least expensive energy we could find was in energy efficiency, not more drilling. The lowest cost “reserves,” he demonstrated, weren’t in new oil and gas wells, tar sands or more strip mining for coal. The reserves were in new energy-efficient trains, trucks and cars. They were to be found in remodeled houses, office buildings, improved industrial processes and more efficient distribution methods.

Rather than spending borrowed money to project military power in the Middle East, we could spend billions to mobilize domestic energy efficiency. The money would be spent at home. Jobs would be created at home. American workers and consumers would enjoy the benefits.

What’s not to like about that?

Nothing.

Dismissing the Messenger

Lovins, a physicist and MacArthur genius grant recipient, was quickly treated as a deranged tree-hugger. The oil and gas industry, intent on drilling more, criticized his idea as naïve and unrealistic. The auto industry, which had absolutely nothing to offer that would reduce energy consumption, agreed.

Result? America doubled down on more.  We took the easy, obvious path. We chose to drill more and spend an ever-increasing fortune protecting our access to oil reserves in the Middle East.

It was a colossal mistake.

“The issue,” Lovins told me 20 years ago, “isn’t the supply of energy, it’s about the delivery of hot showers and cold beer in the cheapest way.”  (He said that, by the way, from his house in Old Snowmass Colorado, a structure so energy efficient that it set a world altitude record for passive solar growth of bananas…)

A Solution with Less, not More

The difference between Lovins and conventional thinking is that Lovins saw an elegant solution using less. Most of us, including our leaders, think about everything in terms of more. (You can watch a video update on his ideas and how energy efficiency is working here.)

The good news is that we can learn our way out of this. Even better, we can learn about it from American researchers in cognition.  “Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less” is a brilliant little book. In it, Leidy Klotz , an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, explains how our culture forecloses thinking about solutions with less. Instead, it fosters thinking about solving problems with more.

Appropriately, “Subtract” is a short and easy read. It has just 254 pages of text. But it also has 33 pages of reference notes for deep divers.

What’s most important here is that this isn’t a finger-pointing book that damns American culture. It’s cross cultural research about how we humans are wired to think and how our thinking is pushed toward more, and away from less.

But we can learn to “think different.”

Sidebar:

Looking Back at Energy and the Middle East

Scott Burns, “Different Drummer, Right March,” 8/19/2001   https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/different-drummer-right-march

Scott Burns, “The Next Industrial Revolution,” 8/21/2001    https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/the-next-industrial-revolution

Scott Burns, “The Consumers Payback,” 9/11/2001  https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/the-consumers-payback

Scott Burns, “The Prius Solution: Defunding the Middle East,” 4/15/2003 https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/the-prius-solution-defunding-the-middle-east

Scott Burns, “Be the World Leader in Energy Efficiency,” 3/29/2005    https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/be-the-world-leader-in-energy-efficiency

Scott Burns, “The Value of America in Barrels,” 5/11/2008   https://scottburns.com/the-value-of-america-in-barrels/

Scott Burns, “How Much Is That in Barrels?”, 10/17/2020  https://scottburns.com/how-much-is-that-in-barrels/

Sources and References:

Leidy Klotz, “Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less,” on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Subtract-Untapped-Science-Less/dp/B08GCZJYSR/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2AD9HGA8ZXCLJ&dchild=1&keywords=subtract&qid=1630338953&s=books&sprefix=Subtract%2Caps%2C205&sr=1-1

Amory Lovins, “Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace,” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Energy-Paths-Towards-Colophon/dp/0060906537/ref=sr_1_7?dchild=1&keywords=Amory+Lovins&qid=1630339041&s=audible&sr=1-7

Verge, Amory Lovins on the Expanding Efficiency Cornucopia, 11/06/2019  https://www.greenbiz.com/video/amory-lovins-expanding-efficiency-cornucopia

Neta C. Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post 9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion,” https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US%20Budgetary%20Costs%20of%20Wars%20November%202019.pdf

Statista.com: Total number of licensed drivers in the U.S. 2019:  https://www.statista.com/statistics/198029/total-number-of-us-licensed-drivers-by-state/

Social Security Trustees Report, 2021: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/2021/X1_trLOT.html

Jeremy Johnson, “The Tesla Model 2: The End of All Other Model EVs,” 7/7/2021 https://www.torquenews.com/14335/tesla-model-2-end-all-other-evs

This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.

Photo: Pixabay

(c) Scott Burns, 2021