Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

DUST: the Inside Story of Its Role in the September 11th Aftermath

By Paul J. Lioy

Memorial Day 2011 has just passed, and during the Spring of 2011 another page in the fight against terrorism and the need to be prepared for the unknown. Tom Kean, who has commented widely about preparedness, is still correct because even with the death of Osama Bin Laden threats remain high against our country’s people and infrastructure, and his words should be a reminder that being prepared for terrorist events is an important part of our country’s responsibility to protect and defend. The 10th Anniversary of the deadly attacks on the WTC, United flight 93, and the Pentagon is also just around the corner. They will be solemn occasions that will provide an opportunity to educate those who were too young to remember or are part of the next generation. Since the publication of Dust: the Inside Story of Its role in Role in the September 11th Aftermath, I have talked to many individuals and groups, and recorded interviews, about the reasons for writing the book. In my discussions, it became clear that people wanted to know how the results of our analyses of the dust were used to understand exposure and health response relationships. In reviewing what has been written since publication of my book, the actual health effects experienced by the workers/volunteers remain highly correlated with the time of a person’s arrival at Ground Zero, and whether or not he or she was wearing a respirator during their completion of Ground Zero related activities over time. Based upon all my conversations with physicians and other environmental health professionals, my hypotheses remain consistent: the unknown or unquantifiable gases released during the jet fuel fires were part of the etiology of the diseases derived from the aerosol that contained the WTC Dust and inhaled by the workers/volunteers during the first days after the collapse of the towers. However, they cannot be realistically reconstructed in toxicological tests because they would have to include both the WTC Dust and combustion gases released by “uncontrolled” fires caused by the burning jet fuel.

The reader response to other important aspects of my story has come as sort of a surprise. Many were associated with the content of Chapter 12 which deals with the lessons learned and the lessons that still need to be learned from 9-11. These are linked specifically to the 5 Rs + 1: Rescue, Re-entry, Recovery, Restoration and Rehabitation. The Plus 1 is Resilience. Because of the natural events that have occurred since 9-11 (e.g. earthquake and Tsunami in Japan), and military actions overseas, I have had opportunities to describe the levels of completion or success using the 5 Rs for some of those incidents. As a member of the general public you can use my 5Rs to grade us all on the actions and the outcomes of those actions that can and do occur in natural and terrorist events.

Paul J. Lioy is a Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is Deputy Director for Government Relations and Director of Exposure Science at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute of Rutgers University and RWJMS-UMDNJ. Dr. Lioy is the author of Dust: The Inside Story of its Role in the September 11th Aftermath.

A Tale of Two Cities: Hong Kong and Dubai

By Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Celebrating Disappearance/Appearance

Hong Kong and Dubai have more in common than towers wearing architectural brandnames. Being hubs between what has commonly been called the “East” and the “West,” both cities have been submitted to spectacular developments that transformed them within a few decades from fishing villages deprived of any urban history into international metropolises. Both cities possess port locations that are central to trade and both cities have attracted massive international capital as well as large expat communities. Neither Hong Kong nor Dubai occupies a central position within its respective region as a producer of goods, but both function as centers of facilitation and are rather para-sites than sites. Dubai is the third most important re-export centre in the world just after Hong Kong and Singapore. Neither Hong Kong nor Dubai has transport rivers and, at present, neither city has a significant amount of raw materials. Though the foundation of modern Dubai depended very much on initial oil reserves that are no longer available, it is correct to maintain that both cities owe their present existence to obstacles that forced them to invest in non-traditional economies. Finally, both cities came to symbolize globalization and an extreme form of urbanity based on aggressive international capitalism.

Attracting international investments, but little “culture” (and being deprived of local cultural resources), for a long time, Hong Kong’s entire existence as a city depended on financial markets. Dubai’s existence can be defined in the same terms. As a matter of fact, Dubai has been quite commonly called “the Hong Kong of the Middle East.” Neither Hong Kong nor Dubai are “real” cities in the conventional sense because neither has preserved its historical context.

Hong Kong and the Celebration of Disappearance

In the 1980s, when Hong Kong owned the world’s largest container cargo terminals, the city’s image was that of a cultural desert determined by superficiality, internal fragmentation, consumerism, and the lack of urban history or local identity. Today all this is seen as typical for Dubai. However, a “cultural turn” promoting a local ethos based on a common language and a particular geographical location, seemingly reversed Hong Kong’s cultural situation in the 1980s, creating a film industry focusing on local stories and local people that would become famous as the Hollywood of the East. In popular music, Cantopop has been a local genre since the 1970s. This, together with a belief in typical Hong Kong virtues such as rationality and discipline, would give Hong Kong the cultural identity it needed, which changed the perception of the city. This individualist cultural system was even strong enough to oppose big businesses.

In a way, Hong Kong became a “postmodern” city: Hong Kong is neither “pre-modern” because it does not exhibit a continuous string of histories, traditions, and culture, nor is it “modern” in the sense of de-cultured, or simply functionally economic. Mike Featherstone has called this type of city, which decides to return to culture, style, and decoration, “postmodern” because here cultural elements are most often “decontextualized, simulated, reduplicated and continually renewed and restyled.”

It is for these precise reasons that it is wrong to characterize Hong Kong’s cultural ascendance as a straightforward process of acculturation. Ackbar Abbas describes Hong Kong’s “cultural self-invention” as a device that is linked, in a paradoxical fashion, to a complex concept of “disappearance,” which comprises at least three things: First, “disappearance” addresses Hong Kong’s frantic cycle of construction, demolition, and reconstruction that yields the impression of a constant disappearance of architectural substance. Second, as Hong Kong has been submitted to more and more aggressive and advanced stages of globalization, the newly built Hong Kong architecture remains restricted to that of the brandname kind. This tendency creates a global environment that, once again, threatens to erase the newly achieved local culture and makes the city “invisible” within an international context, letting topical cultural experience disappear into an anonymous international system. This internationalization concerns also the film industry as its productions have been more and more geared towards international (and Mainland-Chinese) markets. The third meaning of disappearance has to do with the “real” disappearance of Hong Kong as it is taken over by China and will presumably, sooner or later, be absorbed into an oversized motherland.

The first two developments are not unique to Hong Kong, but what is unique is the way in which Hong Kong copes with them. As a matter of fact, Abbas links all three developments (which partly overlap and are difficult to disentangle) to the nostalgic experience of the disappearance of colonial space, which created, in his opinion, not simply a space from which “the colonial” has disappeared, but rather a “colonial space of disappearance.” Abbas’ point is that “disappearance” does not lead to disappearance at all, but rather to a sustained “aesthetics of disappearance” creating, in the case of Hong Kong, the particular cultural space of a “floating identity.” Hong Kong cinema, for example, is eager to keep pace with a subject that is always at the point of disappearing.

Dubai and the Colonial Space of Appearance

Hong Kong will not disappear but it has installed its existence within a peculiar aesthetics of disappearance. Abbas actually believes that Hong Kong will remain almost unchanged for another fifty years. The floating state of Hong Kong’s existence makes it a true forerunner of Dubai, which seems to be suspended in a similar state of floating existence, though at the opposite end of the spectrum. Dubai will simply not appear. For this city, the act of becoming has been charged with such complicated connotations that “becoming” seems to have been eternalized. While Hong Kong revels in what is (almost) no longer there, Dubai revels in what is not yet there. While Hong Kong engenders the feeling of a déjà disparu rooted in an irretrievable, colonial ex-past, Dubai installs itself in a perpetual not yet there that speaks to us through the veil of an indiscernible ex-future.

Dubai has been financed by colossal debt from international banks and its neighbor Abu Dhabi, but “Dubai as an event” has from the beginning been staged as a spectacular and eternally postponed “not yet there.” Apartments were sold long before they were built and would change their owners five times. While in Hong Kong, property speculation causes the absurd state of affairs that sooner or later any building, no matter how new or monumental it is, will vanish from the map, in Dubai maps have been written in the future tense from the beginning. We assist in the creation of Borges’ map that covers the earth because the map is supposed to be the earth. At the airports of Dubai and Abu Dhabi expensive color catalogues of the most famous architectural attractions are handed to tourists for free though a large part of the buildings presented in these catalogues do not yet exist. They are scheduled for the (sometimes very distant) future. The only positive impression that these pictures yield is that of a déjà vu of a not yet there.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is assistant professor of philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait and the author of Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai (2007), Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan: A Comparative Philosophical Study (2009), and The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity (2010).

Anti-Nuclear, Anti-American: Is a Pan-Asianist Japan on the Rise Again?

By Christopher W. A. Szpilman

Pan-Asianism crops up in most unexpected places. Take the case of one Hiroshi Takashi. Hirose (b. 1943), a self-styled expert on nuclear energy, is a best-selling if controversial Japanese author. Since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, if not earlier, he has been crowing on about a looming nuclear catastrophe and, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster, he has emerged as a leading critic of Japan’s nuclear energy program. Although I agree with Hirose that nuclear power is replete with danger, I must note that his premises are largely false and his reasoning fallacious. But my goal here is not to dwell on the content of the anti-Western and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories Hirose propounds. I merely want to note that he can be legitimately described as a pan-Asianist. I realized this after I read Hirose’s Japan’s Destiny, Asia’s Destiny, published in 2004.

In this book, echoing the views of Japan’s prewar pan-Asianists, Hirose bemoans the moral decay and vulgarity of the United States and deplores what he believes is the slavish dependence of the Japanese establishment on America. Noting that America has fallen into moral decrepitude, is “spiritually stagnant,” and weakened politically by its military overstretch throughout the world, Hirose argues that “at long last we, the Japanese, have now a chance to lead Asia independently. No better opportunity than this will ever come our way….We must view Asia as our new paradise” (p. 374).

As Hirose sees it, it is the pernicious American influence that prevented Japan from remaining a genuine Asian country in the first place, because it caused the Japanese to lose empathy with their fellow-Asians. “After the war in Japan,” he says, “the feeling of friendship and solidarity with Asians was largely lost” (p. 382), presumably on account of the shameless deal with the United States by Japan’s leaders who swapped their (and Japan’s) Asian soul in exchange for material prosperity.

The conclusion is obvious. The long-lost empathy with their fellow-Asians can be regained, says Hirose, only if Japan “renounces its alliance with the United States.” Only then, he insists, Japan will be able to become the leader of Asia.

Such expressions of solidarity with Asia may come as a surprise when voiced by an anti-nuclear campaigner (for surely the problem of nuclear energy is not only limited to Asia but is of concern to all mankind), but they have much in common both with the views of many idealistic Japanese volunteers working to help the needy in war-afflicted Asian countries and, on the opposite extreme of the political spectrum, with the views of Ishihara Shintarô, a populist politician whose Pan-Asianist views we document in our Pan-Asianism: a Documentary History. Hirose’s case provides further evidence for the great relevance of Pan-Asianism to understanding modern Japan and Asia.

Christopher W. A. Szpilman is professor of modern Japanese history and international relations at Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka. He is the co-editor of Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volumes 1 and 2.

Let’s Create a New Month for Breast Cancer

By Sabrina McCormick, PhD

In a few days, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) will be over. Thank goodness.

I suppose I shouldn’t say that, but the endless reams of pink products get on my nerves. This might seem insensitive and even cruel. It’s not. In fact, it stems from a respect for the struggle that women have against a horrid disease, and the history of the Month that in no way gives those women the respect due to them.

My annoyance starts with my distaste for the marking of women who have breast cancer with girlish femininities. That is hardly where it ends. Rather, every time I see a pink teddy bear or banner about a fundraising walk, I remember who owns the month and therefore who is telling the world, yes, I mean the world, what to think about breast cancer.

Most people don’t realize that one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies owns NBCAM. In 1984, the Executive Directors of Imperial Chemical Incorporated, Cancer Care, Inc., and the American Association of Cancer Care Physicians met to discuss the growing breast cancer crisis, and how to educate Americans about detection and treatment. More and more women seemed to be succumbing to the disease, but few were using mammography, the only medical test for detection. In addition, the Company had taken a turn for the worse in the late 1970s thanks to over-investment in petrochemicals, plastics and agricultural goods. It reported that even after reorganizing and streamlining, it had to “make greater levels of profitability and market penetration, and change its product profile (Pettigrew 1985).” Pharmaceuticals were the next venture, and it would need a consumer base. That is when the first National Breast Cancer Awareness Week was founded.

Over the years, Imperial Chemicals became AstraZeneca, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and the owner of the NBCAM logo. Over those same years, the Month grew in popularity and consumption of pharmaceuticals grew. Today, Astra is a multi-billion dollar venture.

Here is my biggest problem with this scenario: women are still dying en masse. 40,170 women died in 2009, to be exact. Mortality is decreasing, but at what cost? 254,650 women got breast cancer last year. My film and book, No Family History, show the tremendous pain and suffering in the lives of women and their families even when women survive.

We need to take a new approach to this disease.

And so, I propose an alternative: National Breast Cancer Prevention Month. We are aware of breast cancer. Now, let’s prevent it. The idea is simple. During this month, we stop exposing ourselves to chemicals, toxins, and unhealthy living that leads down the road to cancer. During this month, we start to change what we consume, and so indicate to the companies making these chemicals that we will not support them. We spend this month telling our legislators we will not vote for them unless they protect us from these chemicals.

Let’s keep our daughters safe. Let’s stop breast cancer before it starts. Let’s stop buying pink and start thinking green.

Sabrina McCormick is a Science and Technology Policy Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences working in the Environmental Protection Agency, and she is also research faculty at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, and the author of No Family History: The Environmental Links to Breast Cancer.

The District of Columbia Obtains Some Relief from Congressional Oversight

By Ronald W. Walters

In the normal cycle of political change that has occurred in national government, the relationship between the District of Columbia government and the Federal government is undergoing a transition as well. As pointed out in Democratic Destiny and the District of Columbia, when Republicans are in power in the Congress, there is far more scrutiny of District affairs in the relevant committees in the House and Senate. Moreover, such scrutiny over City legislation breeds into the process inefficiency and a distortion of local interests acknowledged by local leaders. However, with Democratic control signs of a thaw have recently emerged, an example of which is that the District Budget passed with no riders, which enabled the local government to spend its own money to help poor women pay for abortions and to legalize medical marijuana. By the same token, same-sex marriage became law in the District as many couples immediately took advantage of the new right afforded them. Here, the difference in treatment by party was striking, since when Republican Senator Sam Brownback (Kansas) controlled the Committee in 2006, he threatened to block same-sex marriage if the City passed such legislation. However, this year, Democrats in the House, such as Stephen Lynch (Boston), and Daniel Akaka (Hawaii) in the Senate, head of the respective District Committees, fought off attempts by Republicans to kill the measure.

What this suggests is a mood of the Congress and the Obama administration to grant the District government more autonomy over its affairs. Constitutional controls are still operative that gives Congress ultimate veto power over District legislation and the local representative, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, still cannot vote on the floor, but can vote and sponsor measures in committees. Nevertheless, the Delegate has sponsored two bills that could legally expand City autonomy by allowing measures passed locally, such as the Budget and other proposed laws to go into effect immediately, rather than waiting 60-90 days for Congressional review.

This is a grand opportunity to expand local home rule powers because of the change in political cycles has also ushered in a President who is sympathetic to such changes. On the campaign trail, President Obama said that he would sign such measures into law if they were to reach his desk, meaning that they were not his first priority and that, as such, he probably would not campaign for them, but that if passed through the Congress he would be supportive. Perhaps this era could result in some of the perfecting changes in the original Home Rule legislation that could move District citizens close to the exercise of normal democratic rights and the City toward a more efficient process of governing.

Ronald W. Walters is director of the African American Leadership Institute and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, the author of Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics, and the co-editor of Democratic Destiny and the District of Columbia: Federal Politics and Public Policy.

Greenhouse Gases, Inaction, and Beyond

By Louis S. Berger

The world has been struggling with climate change issues for several decades, one major part of the dire threats to the environment and global survival that began to be identified more than 50 years ago in such pioneering works as Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring. Yet, on the whole, nations, especially the big powers, seem to be doing very little, perhaps just enough to give lip service, to deal with these looming catastrophes. A recent evaluation by Janos Pasztor, the UN Secretary-General’s top climate advisor, of the results of the recent Copenhagen climate conference sounds the dire warning that it is unlikely that the minimal plans that were agreed on there can prevent disastrous climate changes by midcentury. Obviously, we are not doing nearly enough.

Why this obviously inappropriate, inadequate response to an equally obvious global threat? It seems to me the only thread of a rational argument that might be cited in support of this criminally irresponsible inaction is the highly dubious claim that there really is no threat, that global warming is a scare tactic used by various groups to promote their nefarious self-interests, that the supporting data are cooked. To cite yet more scientific evidence seems to have no effect on this kind of militant opposition; it is based on zealously held dogma and thus immune to change via scientific rationality or data, or ordinary reasoning.

If we look at the groups that oppose the taking of these desperately needed measures, and at their arguments, we can get an inkling of one of the roots of this opposition: unrealistic beliefs about what is in one’s best interest. The positions of nations, corporations, segments of industry, reflect the presence of short-term, ill-advised, childish self-interests that masquerade as reasonable motivations, usually economic and competitive. Ignoring real and huge long-term costs, these groups in fact claim that it would simply be too expensive to make the proposed changes, take childish positions that amount to saying “Your country isn’t doing cutting emissions, so why should ours?” etc. The motives and alibis are not only short-sighted but also rooted in an unrealistic, unwarranted optimism, in a profound unwillingness to face up to reality unless it is staring one in the face, unavoidably already present (there is no more gasoline; huge numbers a dying from radiation poisoning; natural catastrophes abound). We find current positions based on magic hopes instead (science can and will fix everything, no matter how bad is has gotten; the situation really isn’t all that serious; there’s plenty of time, and we’ll worry about the problems tomorrow; let’s worry about this quarter’s profits and creating new jobs, etc.). Furthermore, these powerful groups are able to persuade the general public that there are no real global dangers, that proposed corrections are much too expensive, promoting a widespread apathy, even antipathy, that further abets the blocking of needed corrective actions.

It seems to me that this situation concerning global warming is but one part of a larger gloomy picture: one can see the same inadequate responses also being made to the other major general situations that pose severe threats to global survival: wholesale environmental pollution and destruction (e.g.,the problem of nuclear waste), nuclear holocaust, drastic overpopulation. Again, if we look at the situations dispassionately we can see that roots of the real problem are much the same: the resolute avoidance of reality that motivates opposition and/or inaction, poorly conceived self-interests, magic hopes.

The point I am making is this. Global threats are usually addressed as problems of what to do, how to do it, and when or whether to do it (e.g., build more nuclear plants? invest heavily in solar power?). If my claim that the root problem lies elsewhere, in the aversion to facing realities, is accurate, then the logically prior task is to correct these immaturities. I maintain that unless and until that is done, the current roadblocks to proper action will continue to stymie the needed countermeasures, at least until global destruction has become so present that it no longer can be denied; at that point it will be much too late. So, under my premise the primary question becomes: How are these unrealistic immaturities best approached and implemented?

I have outlined my answer in a recently published book, Averting Global Extinction. It sketches an approach incorporating ideas taken from the field of clinical psychology. The work is a first attempt to deal with this daunting problem of the unwillingness to face realities, and is offered as a starting point that will encourage others to explore and pursue the unconventional proposed approach to dealing with the threat to global survival.

Louis S. Berger is a clinical psychologist and the author of Averting Global Extinction: Our Irrational Society as Therapy Patient.

Is Energy a Public Good?

            Why do politicians get involved in the energy debate? Wherever a renewable energy forum appears, elected officials are sure to be present, using the open dais as an opportunity to make another pledge to clean-up our communities and our environment, to push for more green energy. Cynics believe this is just symbolic politics—elected officials appealing to constituents through public statements; pledging renewable energy incentive programs and offering various sums for “demonstration projects.” Is all of this chatter and policy of any importance? In reviewing the tremendous growth in renewable energy demand, the answer is: yes. The politicians and their policies are effecting change, they are moving the debate from the theoretical to the practical.

Green energy discussion groups and industry-related websites have proliferated in recent years. The phrase “sustainable community” has become a permanent mantra in public dialogue related to municipal development or re-development. Demand for “green energy” and the associated renewable energy technology is on the rise; solar panel shipments have taken a dramatic leap forward in recent years. The Chinese are attempting to gain a share of the international solar photovoltaic markets (WSJ, May 23, 2007, pg. C1, “The China Solar Hotbed”).

            US public policy is moving renewable forms of energy from a niche to center stage. However, externalities also exist, as pointed out in the WSJ article on the evolving food supply for domestic livestock (WSJ, May 21, 2007, pg. A1, “With Corn Prices Rising, Pigs Switch to Fatty Snacks”). Nevertheless, as a percentage of energy consumed, renewable energy has made paltry gains and is unlikely to make significant advances for quite some time. 

So, what is really happening? Is it the symbolic politics of the new millennium or is it something bigger? A substantive philosophical debate under girds the proclamations of officialdom; it is a debate certainly worthy of public attention. The debate is about the nature of energy as a good. Is energy a private good? Is it a public good? Or, is energy a marketable public good?

            What is the nature of goods? Goods can be thought of along two dimensions—in terms of rivalry and excludability. An auction is a way of considering rivalry in the marketplace. At an auction, an item is up for bid and the person with the highest bid gets the good or service. Essentially it is a “win-lose” scenario. Some individual or individuals “win” while others “lose.” Excludability refers to the nature of use of a good or service. If I’m using a good or service, can you simultaneously enjoy the good or service? Consider a canoe ride. When we pay to access a private lake, do we enjoy private use of the lake or do others use it simultaneously?

Private goods are goods that are both rivalrous and excludable—such as the auction item that was purchased. Pure public goods are neither rivalrous nor excludable—regardless of price, public goods cannot be exclusive because they are important to everyone, to every individuals’ very existence. A good example of a public good is potable water or clean air. Goods that do not fit neatly into either extreme category are often subject to political debate regarding their nature as marketable public goods or simply as marketable private goods. For example, private toll roads are not excludable—others travel down the road at the same time you do if they pay for the privilege. In traveling across the

            US or other developed nations, one quickly notices interstate systems. These roads can be justified because interstate roads can be seen as a marketable public good in a modern society—public interstate systems mean that products and services and people can more easily move around so as to meet their basic needs in a modern society. 

            So, is energy a—private good? Public good? Marketable public good? The history of the 20^th century would indicate that much of US energy policy is built around the notion of energy being, in some respects, a marketable public good—particularly when it comes to electrical energy. The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, for example, was a government program to provide cheap and affordable electricity to rural areas. At the time, private electricity generators were opposed to government projects such as TVA. They would effectively stunt their business. What would justify the great dam building exercise? Among other things, one could argue that it was an example of government accepting the idea that energy in one form was a marketable public good—in a modernizing society, electricity served a necessary function without which a large-scale modern citizenry could not easily exist. 

More recently, energy has move further down the path towards public goods status with policies that extend beyond our earlier goals—EP Act of 2005, for instance, covers a whole host of energy priorities. States effectively mandate green energy production shaping both significant aspects of energy supply and demand. Anxiety has created the perfect storm—energy supply, public health, and environmental policy are the key issues. An accepted reality, “peak oil,” threatens to disrupt the foundations of modernity; an oft-overlooked “commons,” the platform upon which all other interchange occurs. Concurrently, ever-tightening EPA emissions standards signal to any observer that fossil energy produces a public goods dilemma impacting the environment and public health.

Other nations of the world are further down this path. European nations have well-established standards on everything from the use of low energy light bulbs to public health and promotion of green energy. For the EU, the political debate has ended and the public nature of energy is widely accepted. In terms of energy supply, Hugo Chavez’s nationalization of Venezuelan petroleum could be viewed as certainly a very large step away from the private goods nature of one significant form of fossil energy.

            What happens is the U.S.A. when and if energy moves closer to the “public goods” category? As a public good, energy stands a high probability of being mismanaged. Over-consumption is a problem, commonly called the “tragedy of the commons.” One current concern focuses on Venezuelan oilfields--wells may suffer significant pressure drops due to mismanagement by government officials who are driven by different motives than private energy concerns once broadly entrusted with extraction and processing activities.   

On a positive note, the evolving energy dialogue will force a debate about the nature of modern society. In many ways, one could argue that modernity increases the vulnerability of the individual; potentially enlarging our notion of public goods. Conversely, there are those who would argue that we haven’t created more public goods; we’ve actually just expanded markets and we should let markets offer guidance. For the latter group, government encroachment on what is seen as a market will take us further down Hayek’s dystopian “road to serfdom.”  Alternatively, for those who favor the former perspective—the public goods perspective—a future involving increased government involvement in energy policy is seen in terms of social equitability.

Given what is at stake, the utterances of elected officials should be taken seriously and understood for what the words represent—a serious debate about the present and the future of a significant aspect of modern or post-modern existence.

CHRISTOPHER A. SIMON is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Alternative Energy—Political, Economic, and Social Feasibility (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Public Policy—Preferences and Outcomes (Longman, 2007).