Rust Belt Philosophy

It's funny how revealing word choice can be, sometimes. According to Cliff May in his most recent article, "People say we’re addicted to oil but that’s imprecise and unfair." Notice that he can't bring himself to come right out and say that it's untrue. Addicted or not, though, May thinks that U.S. citizens have no reason to lower their expectations when it comes to energy consumption. "To those politicians and 'activists' who are demanding we do less, have less and learn to like it," he opines, "we should say: Stuff it. Americans have no reason to feel guilty about living like Americans." Let the fallacies commence.

May admits that radical change, such as the implementation of vastly improved mass transportation systems, is possible, "but that would require at least a generation of uncomfortable transformation leading to changes that would be profound." Specifically, he wants to retain "the idea and ideal of freedom [that] implies mobility." All of this centers around what people in the U.S. want, though - or, at least, what May thinks they want - and that differs significantly from his intended conclusion. The profligate use fossil of fuels has real moral consequences, but May never explains why morality should correspond directly with the wishes of the American people. And, as with all of his arguments, even if this one succeeded, he would not have proven that the U.S. is not addicted to oil (remember, addiction in and of itself has no moral value - just like our addictions to air and food don't make us morally worse people, the moral uprightness of our desire for oil says nothing about whether that desire qualifies as an addiction).

After having satisfied his uber-patriotic urges by expounding on the inherent American-ness of the gas guzzler, May offers his analysis on the underlying questions at hand. The conversation over how to address rising gas prices is "a confused and confusing debate," he helpfully informs his readers, "but it can be boiled down to this: On one side are those who believe the answer is for us to slash our demand for energy. On the other side are those who believe the answer is to greatly increase our supply." Here, May commits probably the most harmful error of his piece: he polarizes the debate. Most people, in point of fact, have some stake in both of those categories. For example, not even the environmental activists he derides actually only want us to cut down on our energy usage; they, too, want an overall increase in energy as science develops cleaner fuels. Furthermore, some people fall into neither of those categories. Since May describes the supply-side position as one in which people "say we should be aggressively figuring out how to squeeze more energy from a wider variety of sources – using advanced technology to protect the environment," he leaves out those supply-siders who simply want more gasoline. Apparently, May has successfully been able to block out the voices calling for more oil drilling both at home and abroad, more oil-conducive foreign policy, and so on. That doesn't, however, mean that these voices don't exist. Again, notice that nowhere here does May address the concept of addiction. Either of his proposed sides could be correct - or neither - and U.S. oil addiction could still be a very real thing.

May puts himself in the supply-side camp, because "[a]lmost anything you might do to improve your life requires energy,"* so he wants more of it. He thus questions his fictional demand-side opponents for proposing ideas that would make everyone's lives worse: "Consider the African farmer who wants to fuel his tractor or transport some surplus crops to market so he can earn a little cash with which to buy what in the third world passes for luxuries: a metal roof for his hut, a transistor radio, a wrist watch and a bicycle. You really think he should be told that he’s better off not getting 'addicted' to energy and to please keep his carbon footprint small?" This question is so foolish it hardly deserves an answer, but for the sake of the terminally foolish out there, here goes. The carbon footprint of May's hypothetical African farmer is so miniscule compared to that of even a relatively energy-conservative American that it practically might as well not exist, and everybody knows that. As a consequence of this knowledge, nobody - nobody - thinks that dirt-poor third-world residents should be required to reduce their carbon usage. Besides the fact that May essentially invented this position to argue against in the first place, he's now turned it into an utter straw man. And, once more, one must ask: what in the name of all that's holy does this have to do with the possibility that the U.S. might be addicted to oil? May has now run so far off the tracks that it's reasonable to assume that he no longer even knows where they are.

In the end, May just wants "our cars, trucks and buses [to] break their addiction to gasoline; they should running [sic] as well on ethanol, methanol, natural gas, electricity and who knows what other fuels decades down the road." If that happens, people in the U.S. can just keep on going like they always have been, right? Of course not! May displays an almost frightening lack of knowledge in this assertion. The science behind creating feasible alternative fuels entails significant changes in the economy and government policy, for starters, and these changes are sure to affect May's idyllic vision of suburban American extravagance. And let's not even get into the plausibility of automobile manufacturers being able to adjust quickly to new fuels. At least, seeing this last argument, we finally understand why May hasn't been able to argue successfully against the fact of U.S. oil addiction. Our cars, he says, are addicted to oil; also, we're addicted to our cars. Leave it to a blunderer like May not to put two and two together, but if we're addicted to cars and cars are addicted to oil, guess what - we're addicted to oil. Denialists - even competent ones - only make this problem worse. Incompetent ones, like May, only go to embellish the adage about the road to hell: not only are his good intentions serving as paving, they'll get him down that road first. Why, you ask? Because, while the rest of us walk, he'll do the American thing: he'll drive.

*In actuality, of course, everything that one might want to do requires energy. It'd be very interesting to hear May describe an activity that, despite requiring no energy at all, will improve one's life.

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Labels: conflation, economics, ethics, false dilemma, fantasy world, global warming, inconsistency, politics, science, straw man