By John Trotti

I shudder every time I hear that our federal government is sitting down to solve some major problem, but nothing shivers my timbers harder and faster than when the subject is so redolent with vested interests as energy.

Here, let me swear a vile oath that I’m not out to challenge or disparage the grid system per se. It’s just that we should all question dependence on any centralized system—be it the transport of water, materials, fuels, or energy—in today’s world. This comes into shaper focus when we view our energy posture in an age so highly reliant on its abundant, economical, and efficient delivery.

While waves of outrage, fear, and incipient panic brought about by any failure of the grid invariably bring about demands—not only for a detailed accounting of what happened, but how government plans to prevent similar disasters in the future—the inevitable outcome is reviewed by a panel composed of electric utility experts appointed by electric utility officials who are engaged to study the situation, find that more money is needed to replace what just failed, and wait for the next failure.

There’s nothing sneaky or heinous here; it’s just that asking energy czars to question the systems they reign is pretty much the same as asking you or me to question the principles and values on which our lives are based…and toss them out. Such a startling outcome is possible, of course, but not highly probable without heavy-duty outside pressure. It’s the nature of institutions to resist change, and there’s much to be admired for such rigidity, but not where the change involved is so fundamental and pervasive that its supporting institutions are no longer relevant. And this, I maintain is the pass at which we now find ourselves.

Entrepreneurial Action: Facing the Future
It seems only yesterday that the difference between the old world (Europe) and the new (us) lay in the focus of our primary institutions…theirs sought stability while ours placed value in change. This difference, I believed (and still do), gave us an enormous advantage by allowing us to tap the energy and creativity of a very large part of our citizens and in so doing to ride the crest of change rather than flounder in its backwaters. But it seems we’ve allowed this vision to dim over the past several decades. The areas of command and control, once in the hands of predominantly local interests, have gravitated inexorably to higher and more remote levels of centralization, a situation ill-suited to the demands and changes taking place in our society. Then if you look elsewhere in the world, change is taking place unfettered by institutional thinking or an overriding concern for “stranded investment,” rendering us and our institutions increasingly irrelevant.

Over the last half-century, we have undergone a transition from a rural to an urban society, a trend that is accelerating, creating what amounts to an infrastructural meltdown. I’ve heard estimates for the repair, replacement, and upgrade of our primary infrastructure between now and mid-century of $15 trillion to $30 trillion…figures, mind you, predicated on fighting a rear-guard action. It’s one thing to screw up your courage enough to ask where such amounts of money might come from, but quite another to question our society’s ability to actually mobilize itself to utilize such an investment. In short, even if we could find the funds, could we actually deploy them in a meaningful way? I think not. Is there hope? You bet. Do we have the courage to meet the challenges, or are we so bound up—victimized may be a better term—by centralization that we will choose to watch from the mall as our once-proud traditions become a footnote in some future history book?

If ever there was a need for the entrepreneurial spirit to come to the fore, it is here in this arena, right now! The time for thinking that this creeping Big Brother mentality can pull us through is long gone. Instead, we need to take a penetrating look at the challenges we’re facing, determine what it is we want, and, perhaps even more compellingly, just what we’re willing to accept 10, 20, 50 years down the line, then quit acting like wimps. We may not like some of the casualties that this will bring, but only then will we be able to take actions necessary to the survival of our most important values. What might these actions be? Darned if I know, but I’ll bet they won’t include increased centralization.

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DE - May/june 2008