O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain,
America, America, God shed his grace on thee,
And from my hood with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.
Through much of American history and thought, there runs a persistent myth
that our great accomplishment or uniqueness is this social and political experiment we have been conducting for the last 200 years.
That because we operate on principles of equality and personal freedom,
what we have created here, the good and the bad, is our own accomplishment that people built America.
What we tend to forget is that while our society offered a wealth of opportunity,
the land itself offered wealth, an almost unparalleled abundance of natural resources, a mighty inheritance for us all.
Tonight we want to examine a special part of that treasure, the remarkable mother load of energy,
the great and ancient beds of coal, gas, oil, and uranium that lay waiting for us.
An inheritance we learn to mine boldly and use ingenuously.
But an inheritance without which none of this would have been possible.
Coal fired the rapid industrialization of America during the last half of the 19th century.
A rash of mechanical inventions transformed manufacturing.
But coal forged their gears and created the steam to run them.
Sweat and daring built the railroads, but coal smelted the steel and fed the firebox.
Innovation and energy meant more power, more speed, and more money.
America had tapped the first of its inherited muscle.
In the Atlantic, we were mining the great sperm whale for its oil,
until the seam of blubber began to play out and gushed in the oil era.
At first we only wanted the kerosene to replace the whale oil.
Gasoline was just a waste product, waiting for Henry Ford and his quadricycle,
and the Model A, and the Model T, and the assembly line to build them.
Ford's line would become a benchmark of American ingenuity,
and the automobile the primary symbol of individual freedom and economic opportunity.
This is how the Ford Motor Company put it in a 1953 public relations film.
The Model T was more than a motor car. It was the symbol of an industrial revolution.
For mass production and the assembly line were now able to bring the price down on all sorts of product
and put them within everyone's reach.
Mass production also created thousands of new skills, new jobs at higher wages.
And under this powerful stimulus, the nation's economy expanded enormously.
But the foundation of that expansion was an abundance of easily recoverable oil,
a cheap fuel to build and run a mechanized country.
Yes, we were enjoying the fruits of our labor and our wits,
but we were also cashing in on a buried treasure of petroleum.
Exactly a century ago, Thomas Edison's struggle with the incandescent light bulb finally ended,
and his bright idea suddenly sparked another overwhelming transformation,
the electrification of America.
Generating electricity marked a new technical sophistication.
We were now converting the raw power of our rivers
and the stored heat of the earth's fuels into a clean, mobile, highly refined energy.
In the beginning, it almost seemed magical.
As ready kilowatts spread to the farthest reaches of the countryside,
and the automobile grew from a curiosity to a necessity,
as more and more people used more and more energy,
fuel prices and electrical rates actually dropped steadily for 50 years.
It seemed we had tapped a never-ending gift of cheap energy.
That century of confidence of cheap, abundant American energy died suddenly in 1973.
The oil-rich OPEC nations cut off exports to the United States
following our support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War.
When the embargo hit, the U.S. was importing more than a third of its oil.
The result? Shortages, a panic at the pumps, and long, frustrating gas lines.
The embargo lasted five months.
When the spigot was finally turned back on, OPEC prices had quadrupled.
Most of the world sank into an economic recession, and the energy crisis was born.
The embargo, our energy heart attack, struck suddenly,
but the symptoms of the disease began to appear three years earlier,
when our level of domestic oil production peaked and then began to decline,
while consumption continued to rise unchecked.
So we began importing oil and a political vulnerability.
Since 1973, we have done enough diplomatic footwork to prevent another embargo,
but the abundance and exuberance of our youth has vanished now,
and we have arrived at an energy middle age,
our lives now punctuated by the aches and pains of this new frailty.
As 1976 drew to a close, the country was hit by one of the most severe winters in modern memory.
It came early, the freeze halting barges full of oil and coal,
while the intense cold created a record demand for fuel.
Natural gas shortages closed factories, forcing nearly two million out of work.
School closures sent a million and a half kids home,
and in parts of the country, the cold, the snow, and the fuel shortages brought cities and towns to a standstill.
In the eyes of some observers, the country stood on the edge of collapse.
Now I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages.
The 1973 gas lines are gone, and with the springtime weather our homes are warm again.
But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973,
or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter.
It's worse because more waste has occurred,
and more time has passed by without our planning for the future.
It's worse every day until we act.
Last winter, more numbing blizzards hit the northeast,
and this time the short fuel was coal,
with reserves running dangerously low during the long coal strike.
This winter brought finally a national energy bill,
and we seem to have averted any major energy calamities.
But supplies and prices are a constant concern,
and our energy problem continues to twitch like an exposed nerve.
The OPEC ministers presented the world with an early Christmas present,
a 14.5 percent oil price hike,
and then threatened another boost if the American dollar continued its decline.
The political unrest which overthrew the Shah of Iran
also closed down the oil fields of the world's second largest exporter,
and left her future in the petroleum market uncertain.
A warm fall kept Americans on the road a little longer this year,
so gasoline consumption rose unexpectedly,
and some oil companies were forced to allocate reduced supplies of unleaded gas this winter.
The once bright promise of nuclear power continued to dim.
Regulatory hassles and economic problems threatened some plants under construction,
while orders for new reactors remained low.
The Nuclear Regulatory Agency recently rejected the claims of its own plant safety study,
and anti-nuclear groups continued their grassroots opposition.
No nukes in the park! No nukes in the park!
No nukes in the park! No nukes in the park!
In Minnesota, resistance to the controversial high voltage power line heated up again this winter,
as another tower was toppled in December.
The Minnesota Energy Agency has spent the winter monitoring fuel oil supplies,
which are 45 percent below last year's level.
The agency rejected an application for a new oil pipeline from the west,
while farmers from Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota organized to stop an approved line from the south.
And the federal government recently released a study that marked Minnesota
as the state most vulnerable to future oil shortages.
The energy problem and the risks associated with it will be with us for the rest of our lifetime.
And so we seem now to have inherited a chronic problem.
And through its remissions, a new fever runs a constant beat of anxiety.
Most of us would probably rather not think about it at all.
But energy is the engine that runs America.
It enters our lives through many avenues, not just at the gas pump or the switch box.
It is impossible to ignore.
In a moment, we shall return to survey some of the ramifications of the way we are spending our inheritance.
Music
The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.
Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation.
The oil and natural gas that we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are simply running out.
In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about 6 percent a year.
Imports have doubled in the last five years,
and our nation's economic and political independence is becoming increasingly vulnerable.
Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption,
we now believe that early in the 1980s, the world will be demanding more oil than it can produce.
With that prediction of real shortages and massive price hikes by 1985,
Jimmy Carter propelled his energy plan into Congress nearly two years ago.
But as the bill meandered its way through the legislative maze,
the administration's doomsday calculations came under attack.
From a variety of arenas, new studies argued that slow economic growth and conservation
would push the oil crunch well back into the 90s or beyond the year 2000.
And events too seemed to ease the pressure.
Oil from the North Slope began to flow along the Alaskan pipeline
and actually created an oil glut on the West Coast.
The Mexican government announced that it now calculated its reserves at 200 billion barrels of crude,
larger than the mammoth Saudi Arabian fields.
The resumption of diplomatic ties with mainland China offered hope for development of her untapped supplies.
Here in the Midwest, we were greeted this winter with a confident new prediction of an end to natural gas shortages.
So what's the story behind the headlines?
Northern has substantial supplies of natural gas for your home or small business far into the future.
That's the story behind the headlines.
The energy suppliers are now saying, look, you know, we have plentiful supplies.
But the other side of that same coin is that they're going to cost us a lot more,
is that we don't get one without the other.
We can have cheap energy and no energy or we can have expensive energy
and as much as we want, practically speaking.
I think most people are coming around to the idea that the energy problem right now is an economic problem.
And that what's happening is that we see that economics works.
As prices go up, more supplies become available.
And that as people in the United States demand more energy, we're importing more high-priced oil, for example.
And there's lots of that available to import.
And the result is the prices just keep climbing.
Five years after the embargo, two winters after the great freeze,
our energy crisis has been demoted to an energy problem.
And the problem is being redefined as not one of shortages, but of prices.
A gallon of regular gas will rise seven cents higher this year, thanks to the latest OPEC hike.
America's inflation, huge balance of trade deficit and declining dollar,
will continue to push OPEC toward future increases.
New supplies will become available from Mexico, but her oil too will bear the OPEC price.
Deregulation of natural gas mandated by the National Energy Act will double gas prices by 1985.
And although this price spiral has stimulated more exploration for domestic supplies,
there is no indication that new American oil and gas will be any cheaper than imports.
We go to Alaska to get gas, and to build a pipeline from Alaska is going to be a very expensive undertaking.
We go out into the North Sea to find oil, and that's a very expensive place,
into the Atlantic off the coast of New Jersey and Maryland.
So that as we demand more and more energy, we keep moving into these areas where it's more and more difficult to get.
And just as a natural consequence of that, the prices go up.
I think as we go into the future on this thing,
the problems that the United States and Minnesota are going to be forced to solve
are not so much problems of energy supply,
but problems of the economic dislocation that are going to occur because of the high prices.
For example, the impact on poor people.
You figure you worked all your life for a retirement,
and it's the same thing as you've had all your life.
You're no better off. In fact, you're worse off.
You've got to watch everything you spend and everything you throw away and everything.
You try and conserve on electricity, and you turn off all the lights.
They say it's penny, and they were saying, well, it's penny cheap, it's penny cheap,
and then you get an energy crisis, and turn it off, turn it off, turn it off.
For Mercedes and Chris Keller, soaring energy prices have dimmed their hopes for a comfortable retirement.
Living off a rapidly eroding savings account and a small Social Security check,
the Kellers were unable to pay their electric bills last winter,
were threatened with a shutoff notice, and had to be bailed out with emergency fuel funds.
73-year-old Chris decided he'd have to go back to work to pay this winter's bills,
and the Kellers poured more insulation into their home on the east side of St. Paul.
And of course, I was anticipating a lower fuel bill.
Instead of that, it was higher, and I called them and spoke to them about it,
and they said, well, if you hadn't done it, if we hadn't done it,
you'd probably be paying a great deal more than that even.
While energy prices are a problem for everyone, most of us can and do adjust to higher prices
without major changes in our lives.
But in a world in which each new piece of energy is more expensive than the last,
a gallon of gas or kilowatt of electricity we burn just squeezes the vice tighter on the Kellers
and the more than 60,000 other families in the metropolitan area
who live on fixed or even poverty-level incomes.
The victims of the energy problem are legion,
and each new price hike or policy change seems to uncover new ones.
Moorhead, Minnesota, on the North Dakota border,
lived in peaceful coexistence with the railroads for decades
with the two main east-west lines that cut right through the center of town.
But when the energy crunch hit in the early 70s,
oil shortages and high prices suddenly made moving freight by rail look very economical.
It also forced development of more western strip mines,
and so more coal trains began passing through Moorhead
to feed power plants in Minnesota and points east.
Rail traffic has increased dramatically here in the past few years.
Thirty trains now pass through each day.
Thirty more are switched along the same set of tracks,
just two blocks apart through downtown.
Some operations block the streets for up to 20 minutes.
Before the rail boom, the city poured 25 million dollars
into redeveloping the downtown business district that lies between the tracks.
Now, with shoppers cut off by heavy, often unscheduled rail traffic,
business in the development area is stagnating.
The trains have also given the city another headache,
delivering its emergency services.
The hospital, fire, and police stations are all located north of the tracks,
while three-quarters of the citizens they serve live to the south.
I think that when the federal government put in their policy
on the utilization of coal as energy producing,
we really started a problem with cities like Moorhead
where we kind of get all of the impact of this energy movement,
but there's no one that's found out how to alleviate that impact
with some kind of funds that take care of a problem like this,
and the alleviation of that problem is very expensive
for a city like Moorhead to look at.
Moorhead's problem could be solved by a major underpass into downtown,
but the project would rip up many businesses, and the price tag is prohibitive,
12 to 15 million.
So far, Moorhead has been unable to convince Congress to finance the project.
So the way I see it, the people in the development end,
the people in the using end, are benefited.
All we get to do is watch the trains go by.
Moorhead's underpass and the Keller's fuel bills are solvable problems.
If we're willing to use our taxes to repair the damage.
But there are other conflicts in our energy system which no amount of money will solve.
Political problems, so stubborn and severe, they've been dubbed the energy wars.
Security Patrol, west-central Minnesota.
A former Vietnam medevac pilot and his jet ranger out checking the line.
The controversial DC power line built to ferry electricity from the Falkirk lignite mine
and Coal Creek power station in central North Dakota,
over 400 miles east to farmers and suburbanites in Minnesota.
This is center stage for one of the country's most intense and longest running energy wars.
I'll die here! I'll die here!
To hell with Moorhead!
I don't know their names!
What's my name? What's my name?
After more than four years of hearings and rehearings,
of farmers confronting surveyors, deputy sheriffs, construction workers and the State Patrol,
the line is up and test voltage surges periodically through its veins.
Last winter's daily confrontations are gone, but a guerrilla war continues.
Snipers continue to blast away at insulators,
and just after Christmas, saboteurs topple another $150,000 tower.
We broke out the champagne!
It's the best Christmas present I had.
It was tremendous. I felt really good.
I'm not going to deny it. I'm not going to be a liar. I felt terrific.
But I wish 20 more would have went down the same way.
I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed any time that I hear any destruction of that line,
because all I see is the member owners of this cooperative paying more and more money,
which really doesn't accomplish anything.
I think that everybody has to keep in mind that this line was built with force.
It wasn't built with the consent of the people.
The fact that the government sent out troops to build the line,
instead of trying to resolve the problems, led to this result.
The root of the problem is that people just won't let you do it to them.
Don't tread on me. The old colonial American slogan is a new one. Don't tread on me.
Luther Gerlach, professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota,
has studied the power line protest closely since its birth,
and he has also watched more than 60 other similar conflicts develop here and abroad.
I think that this kind of protest, this protest movement, really is what it's become,
is a general class of events. It will keep occurring, reoccurring.
It will be found in many cases in which you have the development of large-scale energy projects,
whatever they are, that people will do this very thing.
They will protest, and the protest is highly patterned, it's very predictable, step by step.
It's just not easily controllable.
In fact, I don't know how it can be controlled in any narrow way, except don't build a thing.
But it appears to us that the bottom line always keeps coming up,
no transmission line, you know, and no power plant.
And that's something that we can't compromise on, and we can't deal on.
It's a reality. The power plant is there. It's starting to operate.
We're starting to boil out. We're going to start testing out that system.
We've got the transmission line. We're testing it out.
That's a reality. It's there.
You know, you can't wish it away, and you can't say, hey, that isn't going to be a transmission line.
These people that own this cooperative have got over a billion dollars invested in this.
You can't throw away a billion dollar investment.
If Phil Martin was sitting right here in our shoes, what type of dollar sign he'd put on his wife and his children?
If that was his farm, what type of dollar sign would he put on that farm?
Most of the debate in the power line controversy is centered around the line's effects on the health and safety of nearby residents
and on the government's hearing process that put the line here in the first place.
But as the war escalated and farmers were radicalized, they began asking more basic questions about our energy systems
and about the shape of our society, questions that surfaced a few weeks ago
when a protest group showed up at the latest toppled tower to educate the workers repairing the damage.
There's so many alternatives. There's solar. There's wind. There's methane conversion.
Do you realize that with the consumption nowadays that people use, the electricity, right?
Listen, the electricity coming off of this line will be as expensive per kilowatt,
per generated kilowatt, as the most expensive right now of those alternatives, which is wind generation.
We're talking about $3,300.
It's going to cost you more by dumping a tower over here.
No, what it's going to do is it's going to allow the industry, the decentralized industry time
to turn these dinosaurs into an extinct species that they are.
There we are. You watch.
In a way, energy facilities, energy projects have become battlegrounds in which really wars of social change are being waged.
The whole debate's about to be centralized or decentralized, to be in harmony with the environment or to dominate it.
The whole question about the role of technology in our society comes into it.
Nowhere are arguments about technology, the environment, and centralization more concentrated than in the debate over nuclear power.
NSPE, which has successfully operated reactors in Minnesota for several years,
is now attempting to build an 1,100 megawatt nuclear plant in this rolling farmland near Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Local opposition to the plant has grown steadily since 1974, when a handful of farmers refused to sell their land to the utility.
At that session, the three commissioners have indicated they will attend.
Now, the Badger Safe Energy Alliance, a coalition of 17 groups of farmers and urban environmental activists,
is fighting the utility and the plant through a series of hearings.
The battle is being waged over some very specific questions.
Is Western Wisconsin growing fast enough to need so large a plant? Is nuclear the cheapest option?
Are reactors safe? Can radioactive wastes be safely stored?
But at the core of the opposition lies a basic frustration.
These people feel they are unable to control their own lives.
Rural people want to provide things for people in the city, but rural people don't want to get ripped off.
Now, you're talking about energy monopolies that are coming in and taking land away, and they're taking it away cheap.
They're stealing it. And they turn around and reap great big profits off of what the people in the cities are willing to pay.
They don't hire people in the local area. They create an economic situation that's as destructive to the area.
And then they expect the rural people to like it? That's insane.
How do you put a price tag on the sense of the loss of local control when decisions are being made at the NSP headquarters in Minneapolis,
the PSC in Madison, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington?
What's happened to the notion of local control, of local affairs, when that kind of phenomenon is taking place?
And I think a lot of people are saying, hey, we've just gone far enough on this. We want to change this.
We want to go back to having a little more control of the decisions that affect us.
And I see that with Proposition 13. I see that with opposition to nuclear power plants.
I see that with opposition to transmission lines. I see that with opposition to coal burning plants. Everything.
President McCarthy expects trouble every time NSP sets out to build a new facility.
It's a pattern he's seen develop over the past 15 years.
But NSP is convinced of the economic and engineering logic of its plan to build a large reactor in Wisconsin.
It's a situation which leaves little room for either side to maneuver.
What is the compromise? Building half a power plant? You know, building one that has half a turbine, half a generator?
You know, it gets pretty hard when you say, what are you going to do to compromise?
There is also little hope of compromise in our latest energy skirmish.
The fight brewing over a 500-mile corridor of farmland through Illinois, Iowa, and southeastern Minnesota.
The proposed route of a new pipeline to feed Minnesota's thirst for crude oil.
Our refineries are now supplied primarily by wells in western Canada.
But the Canadian government has begun to rapidly reduce exports to Minnesota.
The Canadian oil could dry up completely by 1985.
This prospect has sent Minnesota authorities scrambling for new supplies and a new pipeline to deliver them.
One prospect, the Northern Tier Pipeline, would ferry oil from Alaska's North Slope east from Puget Sound to Minnesota.
But the Minnesota Energy Agency recently vetoed Northern Tier, arguing that there simply isn't enough refinery demand to make the line economical to operate.
The agency has instead backed the Northern Pipeline, which would run from a spot near St. Louis north to refineries near the Twin Cities.
But this project has run into substantial opposition from over 2,000 farmers, whose land lies in the path of the line.
The farmers' major concerns are that pipeline spills would harm the huge water table that lies beneath their fields,
and the construction would interfere with the tiling systems, which drain the water to make their land more productive.
We just don't feel that tile lines and oil lines should be intermingled as close as they are and would be if put through this cropland.
Drain tile can be repaired with 100% certainty.
So we don't view drain tile, the cutting of drain tile and the repairing of drain tile, as being anything more than a routine matter of pipeline construction.
A pipeline can certainly have a leak.
It is by far the safest means of moving petroleum.
It has less of a spill problem than any other method of moving petroleum.
If there is a problem, we've got to live with it.
If there is a pollution problem from a spill, we're the ones that will have to live with it.
Passions seem muted among the line's opponents, but perhaps it's just a mask of confidence,
for they organized early and have acquired some powerful allies, including Governor Al Quay,
who was a 20-year congressman in this part of the state and who has publicly thrown his support behind the northern tier line from the west coast.
And Minnesota is the least of John Roper's worries.
Farmers in Iowa and Illinois have an even stronger cause.
But while the pipeline would burrow beneath their fields, all its oil goes to Minnesota.
This social protest is as much a real part of the conflict or a real part of the issue of developing energy,
as is technology or as is the economic scene or the geology, whether the resources are there or whether the ground can take the facility.
As is the climate, say, affecting consumption of energy because of the weather.
The social protest is as much a part of it. It's real.
Many utilities have gotten the message, and now they believe they will be able to alleviate citizen anxiety over future projects,
that they will be able to manage this problem too.
But a fundamental question remains, are the political and economic hassles of our current energy system temporary, just a sign of the times,
or do they reflect some fundamental flaw in the way we produce and deliver energy?
Is it time to look for a new path out of our energy maze, time to listen to the cadences of a different drummer?
In a moment, we will examine one man's map to a new energy future.
Music
November in eastern Montana, Highway 310, east from Billings to Mile City.
A little time off the freeway to explore the Montana Range, a pause before the next town and the next speech for Amory Lovins,
a young physicist and environmentalist who has become a pivotal figure in the debate over America's energy dilemma.
You can freeze in the dark because the energy isn't there.
Or if you'd rather, you can freeze in the dark because you can't afford to pay your utility bill.
See, there are all kinds of choices nobody really likes.
He laid out the choices for the energy establishment in a 1976 essay published in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs.
That article jettisoned Lovins and his ideas into the highest of circles, before congressional committees,
into oil company boardrooms, and to audiences with governors, premiers, prime ministers, and with President Carter.
Congratulations, you just saved $300 million.
Music
Lovins now spends several months each year on the road.
A latter-day circuit rider delivering his energy sermon from a variety of pulpits, spelling out the perils of our present path.
Well, that's obviously nuts. Or more formally, that leads to a misallocation.
More than perhaps any other single person, he has sharpened the focus on America's critical choice among future paths in energy.
We are gratified, and I hope I speak for all, at the opportunity to hear Amory Lovins address our dilemma. Amory?
Music
Armed with simple tools, an overhead projector, and a handful of graphs and tables, Lovins tries to demystify the energy problem for his audiences,
for students in Bozeman, for farmers wise in Billings, and for ranchers in Miles City.
Beginning with the common assumption that we are running out of oil and gas, he sketches in broad strokes the outline of two possible energy futures,
two paths we could walk to the year 2025.
Until a year or two ago, there was a strong industry government consensus that the energy future should be like the past, only more so.
A policy of strength through exhaustion, in which we push very hard on all of the depletable fuels we can find,
and convert those fuels into premium energy forms, fluids and especially electricity, in ever larger, more complex, more centralized plants.
This Lovins calls the hard path, a line of thinking he says has dominated the establishment's approach to the energy crisis.
We need more energy to fuel economic growth, so if oil and gas are disappearing they must be replaced, primarily with more electricity, and that means more coal plants and more nuclear reactors.
But according to Lovins calculations, this approach simply will not work, it's just too expensive,
with some of the new plants requiring investments 100 times as large as the oil and gas we now consume.
It's that roughly 100-fold increase in capital intensity that makes it impossible for any major country outside the Persian Gulf to use these big high technologies,
especially the electric ones, on a truly large scale, that is large enough to substitute for oil and gas.
They're just so expensive they're starting to look very much like future technologies whose time has passed.
And more to the point, argues Lovins, it's not electricity we need, for the oil and gas we are trying to replace are used primarily to heat our homes, businesses and factories, and to run our cars and trucks.
Our energy supply problem is overwhelmingly, 92%, a problem of heat and of portable liquid fuels.
More electricity is not a rational response to that problem because it's too slow and much too expensive.
Therefore arguing about what kind of power station to build, which is much of what passes for energy policy these days, is irrelevant.
It's like debating the best buy in champagne when all you really want is a drink of water.
And the trend in new power plant construction is toward ever larger plants, isolated from the customers they serve.
Spurred by fears of environmental harm from the facilities, we are centralizing our production of electricity.
NSP's newest coal plants were built 40 miles north of the Twin Cities near Becker.
The Prairie Island nuclear plant lies 50 miles to the south.
And the new coal creek station in North Dakota will send its billion watts over more than 400 miles of transmission line to customers in Minnesota.
We are often told that energy systems must be enormous to be affordable.
And there often are some real economies of scale in direct construction costs.
But there are also some equally real diseconomies of large scale, which we just haven't properly counted before.
For example, if you build a gas plant, refinery, power station bigger, more centralized,
you then need to buy a bigger, costlier distribution network to spread out the energy again to dispersed users.
We've got to the point in this country with electricity in 72 and with gas last year,
where if you're an average residential customer, you're paying something like 29 cents of your utility bill dollar actually to buy energy.
And the other 71 cents pays for getting it delivered to you.
That's a diseconomy of centralization.
The hardest part of the hard path, says Lovins, maybe its political problems.
That sense of injustice it creates among the citizens of Moorhead who sit and watch the trains go by, delivering coal to the east.
Or among farmers in western Minnesota unable to affect the erection of a power line.
Or among farmers in Iowa who won't tolerate a pipeline under their land just to deliver oil to Minnesota.
Or among farmers in western Wisconsin who are fighting the specter of a nuclear power plant right in their own backyard.
It's the familiar story where the energy goes to New York and Los Angeles,
while the side effects go to Montana, Appalachia, Navajo country, North Slope.
An arrangement considered admirable at one end, but sometimes unjust at the other.
As a result of which we have today over 60 energy wars going on around the country.
Serious conflicts between energy siting authorities or utilities.
And for the most part politically weak agrarian people who don't want to live in a zone of national sacrifice for the benefit of people a thousand miles away.
Over all of these domestic political problems, which are certainly serious enough,
looms a larger threat of nuclear violence and coercion in a world where we're told a few decades from now
we're supposed to have some tens of thousands of bombs worth a year of plutonium and other strategic materials
running around as an item of commerce within the same international community that's never been able to stop the heroin traffic.
Now those are some of the simple, direct, you might say first order side effects of this approach to the energy problem.
And yet they in turn interact with each other to make new, more complex side effects,
which together suggest I think that the cheap and abundant energy at which this policy is aimed isn't really cheap at all.
We're just paying for it everywhere else.
Lovin's antidote to all these political and economic perils is a modest energy curve he calls the soft path,
in which coal, oil, and gas are gracefully phased out.
Nuclear power's role is filled by a variety of renewable energy sources, the soft technologies.
These two paths also reflect two quite different views of what the energy problem is.
In the hard path it's assumed that the more energy we use the better off we are.
So energy is tacitly elevated from a means to an end in itself.
Whereas in the soft path how much energy we use to accomplish our social goals is considered a measure not of our success but of our failure.
The energy problem then that the soft path is addressing isn't just where do we get more energy to meet projected homogeneous demands.
It starts at the other end of the problem. It starts by asking what are our heterogeneous end use needs?
What are the many different tasks that we're trying to do with the energy?
And how can we do those tasks with a minimum, with, if you like, an elegant frugality of energy supplied in the most effective way for each task?
That emphasis on what's the job, what's the best tool for the job, which is the basis of all good engineering,
leads us, you'll see, to quite a different impression of what kinds of new energy supply makes sense.
The soft path proposes to replace the concentrated fuels we have traditionally mined from the earth
with a cornucopia of strategies to capture the diffuse, unused, renewable energy that surrounds us,
energy from the wind, the sun, and the earth.
The first step, increased efficiency in our automobiles, our appliances, and our homes to capture the heat we already lose.
We now know how to build, people are building, passively heated houses, solar houses,
where the building itself captures and stores the necessary heat and also keeps itself cool.
So the house will maintain itself at a comfortable temperature year-round in our most severe climates,
and we know how to do that at a lower capital cost than a normal house.
Two years ago, Don and Abby Morrier finished their passive solar home near Malaca, Minnesota.
They built it as an example of how simply and efficiently a house could be heated in this frigid climate.
A patch of forest breaks the north wind, the home is buried at the back, and the walls and roof are thickly insulated.
The south side of the house is all glass to capture the sun's heat, and the windows are hung with quilted shades
which are lowered on cold nights and cloudy days to keep the heat in.
The day our cameras came to visit was one of January's coldest, the wind chilled down to 43 below.
Inside, Abby Morrier and son Stephen basked in 70-degree comfort, warmed exclusively by the sun.
The house acts as a solar collector. It's just a box with glass on the south side,
and the sun comes in, heats up the air in the house, and it heats up the mass of the walls, and it's emitted.
The heat is emitted out again from the walls as the house cools down.
Efficient homes tapping into renewable resources are the kingpin of the soft path energy future.
But there are solar projects that don't fit the scenario, like the tower power in Sandia, New Mexico,
where more than 200 huge mirrors track the sun and focus its light into intense beams capable of generating
hundreds of thousands of watts of electricity, or the proposed orbiting of $25 billion satellites
to convert the sun's rays to electricity, beam it to Earth as microwaves, reconvert it to electricity,
and then distribute the juice to the customers.
Levin says all that electricity just isn't needed.
We wouldn't be abolishing big technologies, but rather saying that they've got an important, limited place,
which they've already filled up, and we can take advantage of the ones we've got, like the electric grid,
without expanding them further. That's what the argument's about.
This is in no sense an anti-technology program. It involves, I think, some very exciting and fulfilling
technical challenges, but of a different and to some people an unfamiliar kind,
making things that are sophisticated in their simplicity, not in their complexity.
He finds much of what we have already built too large and clumsy to fit gracefully into the efficiencies of the soft path.
Consider the two Sherco coal plants near Becker, where NSP has been conducting an experiment,
using the waste heat from its borders to warm the air and soil for a roll of commercial greenhouses.
That project has been quite successful and will continue as a permanent commercial venture.
However, these two acres of hothouses use less than one percent of the plant's waste heat.
If all the greenhouses in Minnesota were to tap into the system,
two-thirds of the heat would still be lost to the atmosphere.
From the vantage point of the soft path, plants like Sherco are simply too big and isolated to use their full potential.
What makes more sense to Lovins is to design smaller and more efficient systems,
like the greenhouse that sits in Karen Wilson's backyard.
One of the things that's different about the greenhouse is that it's very well insulated
in order to decrease the heat loss that you would get, and the only areas that are exposed to the sun
are the ones that you want to be exposed so that you maximize getting a lot of sunlight,
and getting a lot of sunlight means you're getting a lot of heat.
So we don't need any glass or clear areas on the north side, and that's all blocked off and insulated.
Mirrored flaps reflect more light and heat inside, and they close at night and on cloudy days to seal the heat trap tight.
Karen is now tending her first crops and monitoring the efficiency of her greenhouse.
The early returns indicate she will use only one-tenth the extra heat most greenhouses need.
Although the soft technologies are not cheap, they're cheaper than not having them.
They may or may not be cheaper than today's oil and gas, some are, some aren't,
but what you care about is that they're a lot cheaper than what you'd otherwise have to do to replace present oil and gas.
The specter of ever-inflating fuel prices convinced Denis de Grisel to invest an additional $15,000 in an extensive solar system for his new home near Lakeville, Minnesota.
We hope to live here a long time with the energy costs, everything going up.
I look out, see the sun coming in free, even though the big investment now, I hope in 15 to 20 years it'll be a good investment.
The system traps heat in conventional solar collectors, transfers it to the hot water heater, and an additional 1,500-gallon storage tank.
A heat pump then feeds off the warm water and heats the house.
It's been very good. It's been a real cold winter so far this year, and we haven't been cold yet.
With a fireplace and electric furnaces back up, the De Grisels lounge comfortably in their new home.
The family is pleased with its energy system, though they are still rankled by some of the roadblocks they encountered trying to build it.
And I called all the leading loan institutions in the Twin City area, and everybody said, no, we don't know enough about solar.
We don't want to get involved with solar. It'll never pay for itself.
There was all kinds of reasons why they wouldn't even talk to me about it.
As soon as I mentioned the word, I told them what I wanted to do, and left the word solar out, it was fine.
As soon as you mentioned the word solar, bang, it was closed door.
We need to clear away a long, messy list of what are called institutional barriers or market imperfections, which inhibit efficiency in soft technologies.
Lovens argues that despite new tax credits, soft technologies still are not given an even break in the marketplace.
That bank practices, building codes, the ingrained prejudices of contractors, all give an edge to conventional home design.
While our long history of subsidizing the development of fossil fuels and electrical systems with our tax dollars simply makes the traditional sources look cheaper than they really are.
It's already led us to the point where California, for example, is giving a 55 percent solar tax credit,
which it turns out cannot compete with the larger federal tax subsidies already being offered to things like Alaskan Gas and LNG.
So you start off with solar heat that's actually cheaper than the gas, and by the time you're through subsidizing both of them, which costs a lot of money, the gas looks cheaper. That's also nuts.
But for all the economic advantages Lovens sees in the soft path, it's the easing of our energy-related political problems that's the strongest element of its character.
The soft path has a different set of political problems, mainly those of pluralism, getting used to the notion that in a big, diverse country or state, central management is more part of the problem than part of the solution.
You can't imagine any energy future that's free of social problems, but you have to choose which kinds you prefer, and the kinds we'd face in a soft path are a lot easier and more attractive, and they get easier as they go, not harder.
I fear a change in which somebody out there has got a notion of what's good for me, and they're going to coerce me or force me and reconstruct my world around me to impose their notion of their utopia. That kind of change I get nervous about, and I think it's inappropriate.
Lovens consistently argues that there need be no great social upheaval to implement the soft path, that it's a purely technical fix for our energy problem.
And his optimism grows daily. He believes America is accelerating its pace down the soft path at the grass roots with a menagerie of pioneers, each choosing his own independent solution.
The Mariers and their homemade passive home. The DeGrizzelles with their high-tech system. Karen Wilson and her mirrored greenhouse.
Ted Acheson who dug out the lawn of his Edina home to plant a 20,000 gallon water tank and set about growing an enormous ice cube to cool his home next summer.
A Webster farmer named Lance Crombie, who lost one solar still to the revenuers, but is now a licensed distiller, manufacturing his own alcohol to heat his home, run his tractors, and sell to the rest of us at a handsome profit.
And Martin Yupp, designing and building windmills in his cluttered shop near Princeton, running his machinery as he has for more than a half century exclusively from the wind.
This is a terribly diverse country. That's one of our greatest strengths.
One of the reasons the soft technologies are moving so bewilderingly quickly is that they're small and simple and accessible enough that one person, even without a lot of technical training, can make a basic contribution.
You don't have to be a big research team working for 20 years.
As far as we know, there's nothing in the universe as powerful as four billion minds wrapping around a problem. That's what's starting to happen.
What seems clearest in our energy picture is that this is a time of great transition. The decisions we make in the next few years will determine the quality of our future.
Those years will be filled with intense arguments about the cost and effectiveness of the old and the new technologies, a difficult thicket of claims and counterclaims for any of us to wade through.
It will be important to maintain a broad perspective to remind ourselves that the inheritance of cheap, abundant fuel that brought us here is badly eroded.
Our energy path has left us teetering on the edge of a canyon, snuffing out one problem after another, trying to manage the situation, trying to keep our balance while we wait for a shiny new bridge to the future.
What we may find instead is that hope lies behind us in some ideas and values we rushed by on our fossil fuel dash to the present, and that our future lies in simply turning away from the cliff and walking onto more solid ground.
And there we may find a way to create a new and abundant energy inheritance for the generations who will follow us.
The choice is not just technical, it's philosophical and spiritual as well. It's a choice we all can make.
I'm Dave Moore.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee.
And from thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.