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Columnists:
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Barry Brandman
bigpicture
dealing with addiction
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LET’S FACE I T. WE ARE ADDIC TED TO OIL. AND B Y WE, I MEAN THE
entire developed and developing world. Energy is at the core of economics. You cannot mine, make, move, or grow anything without it.
And what we demand most of all is oil. As we all know too well, the
acquisition and use of oil is at the heart of a host of problems: global
warming, pollution, political risk, and instability among some of the major
producers, to name a few.
We’ve been aware of this for a long time. Earth Day came to be in part due
to the blowout of an oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. In
Deepwater Horizon disaster on the Gulf of Mexico,
spilling thousands of barrels of oil into the sea each day.
Will this latest disaster spur further efforts to wean
the world off petroleum and toward the development
of new sources of energy? History suggests not.
“We are absolutely addicted and we have no
methadone. All we have is the hard stuff,” Larry
McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute for
Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University
Corpus Christi, told the Associated Press. “The reality
is we’re on it, this incident has happened and what we
have to do is figure out how we can move forward.”
Early on, we heard calls for at least a moratorium on
drilling for oil in the Gulf. But as Lisa Margonelli, the director of the New
America Foundation’s energy initiative and the author of Oil on the Brain:
Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, wrote in a fine op-ed piece in
The New York Times, that would not address the core issue. “All oil comes
from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we
consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for
us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria—places without America’s strong
environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them,” she wrote.
The issue is far bigger than what supply chain managers can address, but
assuredly, those involved in moving goods as shippers or carriers must be
part of the solution. Efforts like the Environmental Protection Agency’s
SmartWay program, the increasing attention to energy consumption in
distribution network and facility design, and the strong prospects for rail
intermodal linehauls all indicate that growing numbers of supply chain
professionals are on board. We are a long way from curing this addiction,
but we have taken the first step of admitting it.
A PUBLICATION OF
Editorial Director
