11`-20-07 by dugan
With crude oil closing today at $98 a barrel and the dollar hitting another record low, a solidly new book on cutting U.S. oil dependence suddenly looks compelling. Energy veteran S. David Freeman’s plainspoken "Winning Our Energy Independence" (Gibbs Smith, paper, $13.57 at Amazon) lays out the case for a government "moon shot" effort to develop sun and wind power.
The first time I met Freeman, he was newly appointed to head the LA Department of Water and Power. It was not an LA moment. Little guy, with a huge Western hat, fancy belt buckle and cowboy boots. A down-home accent unpolished by the big city. He’s also no spring chicken.
Yet… he’s forgotten nothing about his lifetime runniong big energy businesses, and gleaned big lessons from every success and error. He’s jammed it all into "Winning Our Energy Independence: an Energy Insider Shows How."
"Energy independence" is a phrase that draws scorn from most oil insiders. Impossible, can’t be done, there’s too much global interdependence and not enough market for renewable energy. The "it’s impossible" theme is also the core of Chevron’s new multimillion-dollar Hollywood-produced ad campaign.
Freeman begs to differ. Where the experts see wind and sun power as still not economically viable, he makes his case that when military, health and pollution costs of oil are factored in, wind and sun are cheap as dirt. It’s certainly an easier argument when gasoline is upwards of $3.00, oil keeps nudging $100 a barrel and the leaders of Venezuela and Iran are trying to puncture the whole U.S. economy.
Even cheaper than renewable energy is conservation: "The cheapest, cleanest and most reliable source of energy is the energy we avoid using," as Freeman says.
Conservation was Freeman’s mantra at the DWP, which was and to a lesser extent still is over-dependent on coal. But Los Angeles uses less electricity and water per capita than other cities, in part because of Freeman. All those subsidized low-flush toilets and rebates on energy-efficient major appliances made a dent.
It was Freeman who Gov. Gray Davis stuck with unwinding the state’s energy crisis in 2001, and today he’s head of the LA ports, juggling a cleanup of deadly pollution with a shipping culture that sees nothing but its bottom line.
That mule-strength stubbornness is the core of Freeman’s book.
Unfortunately, his folksy way of talking, persuasive in person, goes straight onto the page and reads occasionally as simplistic. Yet the cumulative effect is one of good sense, and damn the politicians who recoil at confronting the big issues.
If you’d like to know more about Freeman’s background and credibility, here’s an admiring column by Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Weintraub.