Dispelling the Climate of Fear
Military Strength Civilian Energy Systems for Real Homeland Security in this Century of Risky Uncertainties
Climate of Fear
For nearly two decades since the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaeda extremists (15 of the 19 were Saudi Arabian citizens), the U.S. has been mired in a “war on terrorism”. Appropriations for national security are now $1.1 trillion per year. These wars have been overwhelmingly financed on credit by increasing the annual federal deficits; a tax liability now estimated at $6 trillion, or ~30 percent of the national debt.
Yet, as the citadel conservative think tank, The Cato Institute, found in a recent survey, the fear of terrorism has shown little sign of waning in the United States. While $1 trillion has been cumulatively spent just on domestic security, this has focused on airport and seaport checkpoints, border patrol and control, upgrading police departments, and maintaining nationwide communications surveillance by the National Security Agency.
A fundamental reason is that the threats posed by terrorism are inherently uncertain. Intelligence experts, even outfitted with state-of-the-art supercomputers, cannot eliminate this uncertainty. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld summed up, “There are known knowns; these are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
A case in point is another recent mega-security threat, cyber-attacks. Cybersecurity experts estimate cybercrime annually siphons off several trillion dollars from the global economy. Cyber sabotage and warfare have become a pervasive reality that threatens the very core of economic continuity and social stability, as recently reported (“U.S. Cyber Command operation disrupted Internet access of Russian troll factory on day of 2018 midterms” (Washington Post, 2/26/2019, Ellen Nakashima). Both the U.S. and Chinese military are vying for global dominance in advanced artificial intelligence (AI), expressly stated in recent strategic documents, which weapons experts view as the new, lethal, and accelerating arms race.
Cyber & AI Technology Revolution
The last great industrial revolution is swiftly being superseded with a new one driven by the convergence of powerful technologies, notably digitization, digitalization, electrification, Internetization, mass minimization, miniaturization and modularization, and AI-ification (mathematization and algorithimization) of every aspect and activity of the global economy. The upside of these techniques is the promise of extraordinary growth, prosperity, and wellbeing. The downside of this worldwide surge is the intrinsic threats and risks posed by cyber–activated disruptions and disasters.
Historically, as technology advanced, providing new game-changing attack modes and military options, economies were forced to adapt or face possible collapse. This is as true today, given we inevitably live in the Century of Uncertainties. An examination is urgently required of the portfolio of beneficial actions our nation (and other nations) can and must take to strengthen the economy and society’s resilience in the face of sudden, surprise cyber-attacks.
For example, since the 9/11 tragedies all U.S. nuclear reactors and oil refineries have remained on alert to possible physical- and cyber-attacks. In March 2018, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a report — Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and Other Critical Infrastructure Sectors — that cyber- infiltrators are undertaking wide-ranging assaults on the nation’s physical infrastructure, including the power grid, power plants, pipelines, and water facilities.
The Stuxnet computer virus attack, purportedly initiated by the U.S. and Israel on Iran’s large nuclear centrifuge complex in 2010, crippled that nation’s process for producing atomic bomb material. There is a black market for such devastating computer viruses now accessible by sub-national extremist groups through the darknet.
The massive engine of America’s gargantuan $20 trillion economy — energy — is of paramount concern. Americans annually spend six to eight percent of U.S. GDP on energy — $1 to $1.4 trillion — consuming the equivalent of 49 million barrels of oil per day (mboe/d), of which fossil fuels constitute 80 percent (about 39 mboe/d). Every aspect of the economy is heavily dependent upon energy to function. A sudden crippling or collapse of the nation’s large grid or pipelines would trigger significant economic losses and social disruption.
The Department of Defense (DoD) first recognized the importance of designing an energy strategy for economic and national security in the 1970s when foreign oil disruptions cost the nation several trillion dollars in lost economic product. DoD’s Civil Defense Preparedness Agency issued the first comprehensively detailed energy security risks report in 1980, Brittle Power, on the pervasive threats and myriad solution opportunities available to the nation.
A quarter-century later DoD sponsored a deep analysis focused on getting off foreign oil by the 2040s, Winning the Oil Endgame, which found ending oil dependence, starting with the United States but applicable worldwide, could be accomplished at a levelized cost of $15 per barrel of oil equivalent. For comparison, oil was $50 per barrel in 2005, rose to $110 in 2012, and averaged $70 per barrel in 2018.
Throughout the past half-century DoD and intelligence agencies have been monitoring the increasing vulnerabilities of the massive, heavily centralized, U.S. energy supply system to major attacks and disasters. National laboratories are steeped in R&D initiatives to help reduce or prevent such attacks, while energy and utility companies are working with federal agencies like the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), and the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC).
NIAC’s mission was to analyze our country’s capacity “to respond to and recover from a catastrophic power outage of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and consequence.” The NIAC findings and recommendations were detailed in a December 2018 report, Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage, How to Strengthen the Capabilities of the Nation.
Yet, the grim reality remains, multiple threats are now an ever-present reality that could disrupt U.S. foreign oil imports (equivalent to 100 billion gallons in 2018), collapse the electric-grid network (200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines), cripple the nation’s interstate oil and gas pipelines (2.4 million miles), or trigger wide-scale radioactive fallout from an attack on any of the nation’s 100 large nuclear reactors.
In service and decommissioned nuclear reactors with circles indicating potential radioactive fallout area
The Security Costs of Climate Uncertainty
On October 10, 2018, Hurricane Michael exploded across the warm Gulf waters hitting the Florida Panhandle with some of the strongest wind speeds ever recorded. Hurricane Michael roared across the land, with 155 mile-per-hour winds ripping apart one of America’s major military installations, Tyndall Air Force base. Aircraft hangars were torn asunder, heaved into the air like toys, and reduced to twisted sheets of metal scattered far and wide in the wake of the deadly storm. According to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the destruction to Tyndall amounted to $5 billion.
This climate-triggered weather disaster came fast on the heels of Hurricane Florence just a month earlier. That Category 4 hurricane caused an estimated $3.6 billion of damage to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
Navy Times reported in 2016 that sea-level rise was impacting coastal military installations like the major Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, and hundreds of yearly floods are projected to threaten 128 naval bases valued at $100 billion. A number of military installations, such as Parris Island Marine Corps Depot in South Carolina, could be 95 percent underwater in the latter part of this century.
The DoD has more than 5,900 military bases and installations nationwide, and 600- plus military facilities worldwide. The range of climate-triggered weather disasters – typhoons, storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires — are now recognized by DoD as a critical threat to national security on a par with terrorism. These disasters are occurring with increasing frequency and severity. One in 100-, 500- and 1000-year weather disasters are now recurring within several years.
DoD’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, which updates assessments of the nation’s strategic challenges, has emphasized, “The impacts of climate change may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, including defense support to civil authorities, while at the same time undermining the capacity of our domestic installations to support training activities.”
Navy Admiral Samuel Locklear, Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, sees climate destabilization as the pacific region’s largest security threat over the century. Climate disruption “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen … that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”
Retired Rear Admiral David Titley provides a historical perspective, “The parallels between the political decisions regarding climate change we have made and the decisions that led Europe to World War One are striking — and sobering. The decisions made in 1914 reflected political policies pursued for short-term gains and benefits, coupled with institutional hubris, and a failure to imagine and understand the risks or to learn from recent history.”
Climate disruption already causes immense damage, undermining economic security, causing social disorder, and even triggering cultural conflicts. As the global risk-mitigation insurance company Aon reported in 2019, “The costs to global economies reached $3 trillion between 2010 and 2019, which was $1.2 trillion higher than 2000–2009.” Such enormous destruction is due to the fact that, as NASA scientists calculate, the explosive force of a hurricane is equivalent to 10,000 nuclear bombs.
Moreover, the number of catastrophes worldwide is increasing over time. Regions repeatedly hit with weather disasters over a period of years, such as decade-long extreme droughts in Syria and Darfur, have driven climate refugees to seek new locations that have triggered ethnic clashes and religious wars. National intelligence and military officials identify the massive swelling of climate refugees in the coming decades — measured in many hundreds of millions of displaced people — as major crises of social destabilization and unending warfare.
Retired Army Brigadier General Chris King has cautioned, “This is like getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years. That’s the scariest thing for us. There is no exit strategy that is available for many of the problems. You can see in military history when they don’t have fixed durations, that’s when you’re most likely to not win.”
Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn (ret) was especially forceful and direct in his July 2018 article, “The threat Trump has to acknowledge at NATO,” which coincided with Trump’s visit to NATO. “If I were at the NATO meeting,” McGinn noted, “a key point that I would make to President Trump and allied leaders is that if we’re serious about dealing with migration, about containing threats in the Middle East, about maintaining economic growth and trade, then climate change must be a priority. For too long we’ve ignored a threat that is staring us in the face — that is statistically more likely to happen than war with North Korea because it’s already happening. To quote [four-star Marine General and former Secretary of Defense James] Mattis, ‘The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.’ Let’s start using it.”
Political hubris, arrogance, and willful ignorance is stonewalling any action, let alone the level of actions commensurate with addressing the mega-risks climate disruption poses to economic and national security. The major cause of climate disruption — the combustion of coal, oil, natural gas, and biofuels — accounts for 80 percent of global CO2 emissions.
The preponderance of public policies, regulations, and subsidies at both the federal and state levels continue to push a fossil-fuel-expansion agenda; estimates by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) annually since 2015 indicate U.S. fossil fuel subsidies exceed half a trillion dollars per year and more than $5 trillion per year worldwide. Preferencing fossil fuel over numerous market competitive options is a bad deal — for business and the economy, health and the environment, and most of all for national security.
The irrefutable climate science on the range of threats and risks, many already underway and becoming increasingly more severe and frequent, present clear warnings that delaying deep reductions of GHG emissions towards zero within the next two decades is raising the probabilities of triggering any of a dozen tipping points that would take centuries or millennia from which to recover.
Tipping point examples include Arctic permafrost thaw and thermokarst lakes releasing vast methane emissions, die-off of the Amazon rainforest, desertification of major food-growing regions, and melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves. While climate deniers flatly disregard the science findings and warnings, military leaders see the threats as menacing as major military dangers.
Multiple-Threats Reality
The looming risks are manifold and unpredictable surprises. They now encompass domestic subversives, foreign terrorists, military conflicts, cyber-attacks, technical or human errors, and climate-triggered weather catastrophes. As a result, the DoD has mandated all military bases, facilities, and installations transition themselves to “island-able” microgrids, powered by onsite renewables and distributed storage systems. Such a local power system ensures resiliency of operations, and capable of fully functioning even if the nation’s grid or pipelines collapse.
Revealingly, while military readiness of bases and installations is being addressed, the surrounding civil society may remain crippled during such crises, greatly reducing military readiness and effectiveness. The nearby civilian society in the midst of a disaster can undermine defense logistics for securing materials and personnel essential to military operations.
The ability to confront and comprehensively address such threats is why it is imperative to expand throughout civilian society the military’s exemplary model of onsite and locally distributed energy services. In short, the U.S. military provides both compelling reasons and decisive actions that need to be taken for establishing real and enduring domestic energy security, economic security, and defense security.
The Most Secure Domestic Energy Options
DoD’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review emphasizes, “Our actions to increase energy and water security, including investments in energy efficiency, new technologies, and renewable energy sources, will increase the resiliency of our installations and help mitigate these effects.” This is true throughout society and bears closer scrutiny.
Unbeknownst to most citizens, America is sitting on vast “reserves” of energy efficiency, comparable in size to the nation’s total fossil fuel reserves. Efficiency gains have been rhetorically supported by politicians since the 1970s, but then quickly ignored and/or actively opposed by most of them.
Opposition remains despite compelling evidence of efficiency gains being the least-cost-and-risk ways of delivering secure energy services at the point of use. Indeed, far from being exhausted, efficiency opportunities have been greatly expanding each decade (prompting the witticism that efficiency opportunities are low-hanging fruit that keep growing back).
Similar disregard and opposition by most utilities and politicians to solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind power also remain pervasive, despite these two emission-free options now joining the efficiency reserve as being lower in cost and risk than fossil, biofuels, and nuclear options. The three options are now less expensive than new proposed fossil/biofuel/nuclear options, as well as most existing operations.
And the solar “reserve” is massive — globally, an hour of sunlight is more energy than humanity consumes in a year. Cities receive huge daily deliveries of solar power that can be harnessed. The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently assessed the amount of solar power that can be generated by existing rooftops in each state. California, for example, could generate 74 percent of total electricity demand, while the nationwide average is roughly 40 percent of total power.
Not included are all the available ground spots for solar power canopies — on parking lots, along rail and highway corridors, on brownfields, abandoned superfund sites, peri-urban farms, etc. — which could double the amount each city could generate through distributed microgrids.
Nor do these estimates include any efficiency gains, which are as significant as the solar percentages in delivering energy services at the end-use. Taken together they comprise an immense national “strategic energy reserve” located in the heart of every city and community, offering unparalleled resilience against the aforementioned disruption risks. The grid connection design for this needs special attention, but no new technology.
Building Security Efficiently
Efficiency gains offer three vast pools of cost-effective energy services for buildings and industrial facilities. First, deep reductions in end-use demand are achievable through the construction of ultra-efficient, high-performance buildings, built to PassiveHouse, Net Zero Energy (NZE), and Energy-Plus building standards. The PassiveHouse reduces energy consumption by up to 90 percent in new construction, while NZEs produce onsite power that generates as much energy as consumed annually, and Energy-Plus buildings produce more than they consume each year.
Deep retrofits of the existing building stock could reduce energy demand by half or more. California is leading the nation, setting a 2020 goal to have all new residential buildings be NZEs, and a 2030 goal for all new commercial buildings to be NZEs, as well as half of all existing buildings.
Nationwide the existing building stock consists of more than 5 million commercial buildings covering 90 billion square feet (ft2), and 136 million residential buildings. New U.S. commercial buildings are expanding by roughly one billion ft2 per year, and more than one million new residences are being constructed annually. In addition to all new buildings constructed to PassiveHouse, NZE, and Energy-plus standards, deep retrofits of the nation’s total building stock over the next quarter-century imply completing an average of four percent per year.
Second, substantially more benefits and values can accrue from Beneficial Electrification (BE), a term that describes the electrification of end-uses that traditionally have been powered by fossil fuels (natural gas, propane, fuel oil, or gasoline). BE reduces costs as well as eliminate CO2 emissions and other harmful pollutants. Energy services include electrification of vehicles, space heating, and water heating.
Beneficial Electrification reduces end-use demand by many tens of percent, due to the inherent efficiency of electrification over combustion devices. BE also takes advantage of synergisms with the onsite and distributed solar power systems, and with the previously noted efficiency gains.
Third, widespread digitalization has given rise to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) being commercialized (e.g., smart lights and appliances, intelligent machines and equipment, building automation). This involves the use of smart sensor networks in buildings to monitor actual performance, which ensures the building is operating as efficiently as it was originally designed.
For example, one of the world’s largest IT corporations, Infosys, found that after designing and constructing ultra-efficient buildings requiring 50 percent less energy at no extra first cost, installing the sensor networks increased efficiency savings to 80 percent! [see slide below]
Not unexpectedly, the IoT’s great productivity upside also confronts a vulnerable downside of cyber intrusions and malicious malware attacks. With long-term projections of tens of trillions of smart wireless sensors embedded throughout every facet of society, this digitization poses a potential, ever-present threat of cyber disruptions. Especially because of its national and military security implications, there are major ongoing efforts by cyber-security experts to resolve this security potential through robust encryption algorithms and cryptographic blockchains.
The value of integrating these several pools of energy efficiency gains with onsite and distributed solar is that it enables buildings — which consume 40 percent of the nation’s fossil fuels and 72 percent of its electricity — to free up excess generated electricity to perform other essential services. These include charging electric vehicles, or selling energy for a profit into the grid, and increasingly, storing energy in onsite batteries for later use, as is now routinely done in many states and nations (e.g., California and Hawaii, Australia and Germany, island nations and emerging countries). These are among the concrete actions cities can implement to match the strong security of the island-able microgrid capabilities powering America’s defense installations.
Uninterruptable Mobility
Similar resilience-enhancing and security-strengthening strategies are abundantly available to cities for ensuring access to mobility and transportation services. One immediate action that would accrue security, economic, as well as health and environmental benefits is to build upon voter's expressed desire for the redesign of streets to make them safe for all ages to walk and bicycle.
Less than four percent of Americans currently walk or bike daily; compared to, say, Dutch and Danish citizens at six and 14 times that rate, respectively. The medical community has persistently advocated for cities to make streets safe for pedestrians and cyclists, arguing the health benefits would put a significant dent in the nation’s obesity epidemic and $3.5 trillion annual healthcare expenditures.
There is a wealth of experience and documentation of how cities already are implementing successful plans, programs, practices, and policies, resulting in catalyzing a rise in citizens’ frequency in walking and biking, integrated with transit. Cities that undertake “complete streets” with infrastructure designed for safe walking and cycling gain immediate results: Denmark analyses found cycling an hour each day correlated with an 18% reduction in the risk of death, and extending the cycling another 30 minutes drops the risk of death nearly 28 percent; cycling also is correlated with significantly lower heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, and diabetes; Denmark studies also found cycling an average of 2 miles per day results in 1 less sick day per year per person. Similar health and well-being correlations are associated with walking, where studies show walking can reduce the risk of death by 39 percent.
At the same time, cities are putting in place the durable adaptations that enable communities to swiftly respond to surprise disruptions and sudden disasters with far fewer costs and damages to their local economies.
Such fuel-efficient, re-designed localities could result in America’s fuel-guzzling cities, which consume nine to 12 barrels of oil equivalent per capita per year (boe/pc-yr), reducing their fuel consumption to just one to three boe/pc-yr. It is noteworthy that those cities worldwide renowned for their walkability, cycling, and easily accessible transit systems correlate strongly with being considered the most aesthetically pleasing by visitors and registering highest by their citizens for living pleasure and satisfaction.
Electrifying Movability and Transport Services
The entire transportation sector is already in the midst of radical changes promising to be far greater than those a century ago when Henry Ford first mass-produced the affordable car. This is being driven, as noted above, by the convergence of electrification, digitalization, computerization, Internetization, mass minimization, miniaturization and modularization, and AI-ification of global products and services.
It is not just that the decade-old smartphone enables citizens to perform scores of tasks that formerly required time- and resource-consuming trips to numerous commercial stores and public agencies. Smartphones, GPS, and social media platforms also have enabled the billion-rider-a-year, 50-million-driver on-demand ride-hailing industry, which Goldman Sachs and others see rapidly growing to a $285 billion a year mobility service within the decade.
As Tony Seba, author, entrepreneur, and Stanford Instructor of Disruptive Technologies, compellingly documented, the convergence of several disruptive technologies (Seba defines “a market ripe for disruption as a market where a new technology is 10x better or 1/10th of the price” than the current one) underpins the momentum driving fundamentally superior mobility options, notably ultra-efficient, high-performance electric vehicles (EV), and autonomous (self-driving) EVs. These include remarkable advances in lithium-ion batteries, LIDAR sensing technology, blazing-fast computation speed, Big Data access and storage, the accelerating evolution of deep-learning AI algorithms, the Internet Cloud, and smartphone apps.
Additional breakthroughs emerging commercially notably include crash-impact resistant carbon fiber auto composites and other super-lightweight materials that greatly enhance an EV’s mileage efficiency, recharge for longer range in less time, and can be paid for by needing fewer batteries.
Predictably, the military is heavily investing in advancing all of these technologies, given their critical role in delivering battlefield mobility with dramatically fewer fuel shipments that are vulnerable to disruption.
Compared to the ubiquitous internal combustion engine (ICE) an EV has 90 percent fewer moving parts (2000 vs. ~20), is five times (5x) more energy efficient, uses 10x less fuel, has 10x lower maintenance costs, and lasts 3.5 times longer (Tesla has a target for 7 times longer, or 1 million miles driven). The battery has accounted for one-third of an EVs total cost, but the 15x cost decline of EV battery packs since 2005 is helping EVs close in on the same purchasing cost of a gas-fueled vehicle. Analysts anticipate this will occur within several years, at which point EVs are expected to become the vehicle of first choice.
Ride-hailing autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) portend perhaps the most radical advances in mobility. In addition to the promise of eliminating nearly all vehicle accidents, which exceeded seven million in 2017 causing more than two million injuries and 35,000 deaths in the U.S., and removing traffic congestion and costs, the mainstreaming of AEVs could boost U.S. economic productivity by an estimated one trillion dollars per year.
Detailed analyses by Tony Seba and his colleagues at ReThinkX indicate that within the decade ride-hailing AEVs will become four to ten times cheaper per mile than buying a new car, and two to four times cheaper than operating an existing vehicle. The financial implications include freeing up $1 trillion per year in disposable income for Americans in the 2030 to 2040 timeframe.
Energy security gains result from a 30 percent decline in oil demand, driven by a 70 percent reduction in the number of required vehicles, as well as being electrically powered with renewables.
While America Sleeps
China is the world’s EV juggernaut, with 50 percent of market share (as it is for Solar PV and Wind power technologies). There are close to 500 Chinese EV companies producing nearly three times as many EVs as the USA. China’s government is pursuing an all-electric future, setting ambitious EV sales targets, accelerating AEV commercialization, and has announced a complete ban on the internal-combustion engine to be phased in. China is installing a London-sized electric bus fleet every five weeks, and 99 percent of the world’s 400,000 electric buses are operating in China.
Importantly, and not unexpectedly, China’s big EV push is motivated by the need to strengthen energy, economic, and national security, given China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest importer of vulnerable foreign oil supplies. But China’s leaders also fully recognize this will strengthen their leading position in the expanding global market for EVs and AEVs. The desperate need to clean up cities blanketed in toxic air pollution is also a key factor, given the intense anger by China’s citizenry suffering from the suffocating and health-debilitating smog.
Not lost on the Chinese is the recognition that three-fourths of expanding physical infrastructure worldwide this century (energy systems, new factories, buildings, vehicles, appliances, equipment, etc.) will occur in developing countries. Likewise, this is where the overwhelming majority of expanding global GHG emissions will occur. China’s commitment to achieving deep GHG reductions stems from their realization that the nation’s aggressive targets for an all-electric, renewables-powered, emissions and pollution-free domestic economy aligns with a commanding export business strategy for seizing the competitive advantage in these growth markets.
100% Solar-Wind-Water Powered Global Energy Market Opportunity
A number of detailed economic-engineering analyses in recent years find multiple benefits from using electrification efficiency, solar, wind, a miscellany of local renewables, and a myriad of energy storage options, to eliminate fossil fuels and biofuels by 2050.
These estimates indicate an emissions-free energy system worldwide would accrue direct savings and avoided costs of health impacts and destruction from climate-triggered weather catastrophes exceeding $50 trillion per year by 2050. It would also prevent the yearly deaths of more than four million people, and generate tens of millions of net new permanent jobs.
The benefits specific to the USA would exceed $4 trillion per year within three decades ($10,000 per capita per year), generate two million net new jobs, and prevent 62,000 premature deaths from eliminating U.S. air pollution.
Such central-planned, state capitalism is an anathema to some U.S. political and business leaders for a nation considered the bastion of free-market capitalism. However, comparing that socialist exercise to the strengthening of our nation’s security against a range of attacks is specious and disingenuous. The pragmatist asks for an alternative free-market plan, such as sketched above. Encouragingly, U.S. public opinion surveys have consistently found strong voter support for federal actions promoting efficiency, solar and wind power as top energy priorities, as well as strong support for government actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, a free market is an abstract ideal that in reality is indisputably dependent upon government-enforced laws, rules, and regulations in order to function. And while there has been non-stop debate since our country’s founding as to the delicate balance between an unfettered free market and the legitimate Constitutional responsibilities of the federal government, ensuring the provision of national security against hostile attack is an undisputed obligation. This is the government’s role in public-private efforts to solve large-scale complex “wicked” problems, military and beyond.
Homeland Real Securities
National security is undoubtedly a primary responsibility of government, but it is only as effective as it entirely understands and appropriately responds to the nature of the security threats, vulnerabilities, and risks. The burdensome reality of surprise cyber-attacks and climate disruptions completely redefines how to defend against these new, formidable, economic, and national security threats. Our nation’s centralized energy system installations have become, literally, the new battlefield targets. Real security now demands we remake our way of delivering energy services to the point of use so as to make them uninteresting targets.
Doing this immediately, rapidly, and steadfastly nationwide for the next several decades has several compelling reasons. First and foremost, the real defense security it can provide every community pays for itself many times over. It is totally opposite to the deficit financing and debt-accumulation of the past two decades of wars, which arguably has done little to remove the threat of domestic disruptions.
War financing mainly has been profitable for the shareholders of military-industrial- finance companies, as well as record profits for the oil companies as oil prices skyrocketed. But it has not focused on nor invested in the full range of real domestic security that is now imperative.
Instead, we have the building-, neighborhood- and city-scale military strength civilian energy-system transition highlighted above. It’s both technically feasible and economically attractive and offering real and durable security against a range of potentially devastating risks and threats. First costs can and should be financed through U.S. Treasury “defense” bonds.
Similar to war bonds, the zero-risk, sovereign-backed, real homeland securities, would get repaid out of the combination of the energy savings and solar generated power. The defense security bonds are fundamentally highly productive investments, enhancing the asset values of all citizens’ dwellings and business owners’ facilities, as well as improving cities’ economic multiplier effect as money spent on energy circulates within the community longer rather than immediately exported. At the same time, the strengthening of security measures is cheap insurance against the potentially catastrophic costs of lives and property that will result from remaining ill-prepared.
We can adapt now or collapse later. By adapting we avoid lost opportunities from ignoring the dramatically changing global market that the Chinese and other nations are reaping. Instead, the experience and learning curves generated from the aggregated actions of citizens and businesses in towns and cities across the country excellently position the demand for these new innovative products and services of U.S. companies in the international market, worth hundreds of trillions of dollars in the coming decades.
The national defense security bonds could be acquired by public banks, whether municipal, state or public actors, which in turn, can provide the ultra-low-cost financing essential for citizens and local businesses to undertake the transformational investments in their buildings and other energy-related assets.
Real Homeland Security, notably military strength civilian energy systems, is the real security framework through which Congress, state and local leaders, and citizens of all political persuasions should view what this nation urgently needs right now. They will find a win for national security, a win for the citizenry, and a win for the environment that all can agree upon.
