Power Trip: The Story of Energy: “War” (Alpheus Media/PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I stumbled on a show on KPBS that proved to be unexpectly compelling: the sixth and final episode of a series called Power Trip: The Story of Energy directed by experienced documentary filmmaker Mat Hames (though Beth Hames, presumably his wife, received co-director credit in the end titles) based on a book of the same title by someone named Melville Webber. I had trouble finding an online reference for this, partly because imdb.com listed it under the working title Thirst for Power since the whole thesis of the show was the connection throughout history between water and power. (Remember that water and wind were humanity’s first sources of energy that weren’t derived from humans or animals.) This episode was called “War” and made the case that the development of energy for transportation and actual weaponry made wars in the 20th and 21st centuries different from what they had been before. For one thing, they could be fought year-round (in previous eras, Webber and Hames argued, wars had been fought mostly in summertime and the armies had rested in winter to wait until frozen terrain became unfrozen and there was more light to see what was going on when you were fighting). Also, the ability to move conveyances first with steam power and then internal combustion (gasoline or Diesel) allowed the construction of giant military contraptions — tanks on land and submarines at sea.

Energy, and the need for natural resources to obtain it, also determined the actual conduct of wars, particularly who would fight whom, where and over what. Webber and Hames argued that World War I was the first “energy war,” not only in terms of the weapons used but why the war was fought — Britain had built a world-ranging empire largely through dominating the sea (which they had done, the show argued, first by replacing sailing ships with steamships and then replacing wood-fired steamships with Diesel-powered internal combustion ships) and Germany wanted to grab the resources as well as the colonies the British had conquered with it. I think the filmmakers rather overstated the case — when they argued that it wasn’t possible to transport water over long distances until the invention of motorized energy, with my usual sensitivity to claims of what I call “first-itis” I thought, “What about the Roman aqueducts?” They moved water great distances through gravity alone without any source of motive power at all! They made a stronger case for World War II as an “energy war,” not only because the armies that fought it were motorized (which meant they needed fossil fuels to run on) but because many of the military objectives were themselves energy resources (Russia began World War II on the same side as Germany until the Nazis double-crossed them and invaded largely to grab the huge oil reserves in the Caucasus and Ukraine, and the Japanese targeted the Dutch East Indies largely for the oil reserves there) and both sides targeted each other’s energy: Nazi U-boats aimed largely at sinking U.S. oil tankers delivering fuel to the European allies, and as the British were departing Singapore they trained their guns on their oil stores and blew them up rather than let the conquering Japanese get them.

The show then heads for more ideologically contentious territory, including the U.S. development of the atomic bomb — which itself required a lot of energy to refine uranium to make it fissile. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to locate the plant to do that in Oak Ridge, Tennessee because it was right next to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and its big dams at Muscle Shoals — so the U.S. relied for the energy to fuel the first nuclear weapon on a publicly owned energy company relying on a renewable resource!! Take that, advocates of the “free market” über alles! The show discusses the energy crises of 1973 and 1979, the growing power of the Middle Eastern oil exporters and the U.S. response, which was to develop “fracking” (short for “hydraulic fracturing”) to make the U.S. once again an oil exporter. It ignored the environmentalist critique of fracking, which is not only that it is environmentally destructive in itself (it injects toxic chemicals into the ground, where they can contaminate groundwater, and there’s evidence that it does enough damage to the substrata of the earth that it can cause earthquakes in places like Pennsylvania where there weren’t any, or weren’t many, before — reason enough not to do it in quake-prone California!) but it’s also releasing fossil fuels that would better be left in the ground.

One of the more bizarre results of fracking has been that it’s lowered the price of natural gas, to the point where it’s largely replaced coal as the fossil fuel of choice for electricity generation — though according to the latest reports on the California rolling blackouts (including an article in the San José Mercury-News, https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/17/california-blackouts-expose-problems-in-states-transition-to-clean-energy/), there’s a school of thought that outright blames the blackouts on California’s transition to renewable energy, to the point where solar and wind plants to generate electricity are now actually cheaper than gas-fired ones, so that’s what’s being built and therefore the state is losing the resources to keep the lights on at night when there’s no wind. For the most part the filmmakers ignored the environmental controversies around energy sources, including fracking as well as civilian nuclear power — though it touches on not only the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars (including the decision of the retreating Iraqis to torch the oil fields of Kuwait as they withdrew in 1991) but America’s decades-long cold war with Iran and the ambitions of Iran to construct a civilian nuclear program. The show stresses how many safeguards were built into the Iranian nuclear deal and, though it doesn’t come right out and say that President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of it was a mistake, it certainly depicts it as one. The latest outrage from the Trump administration over Iran was in this morning’s Los Angeles Times: it seems that Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have demanded that the United Nations Security Council impose the so-called “snapback sanctions” against Iran for allegedly violating the nuclear deal, and our historic Western European allies — including countries that are still parties to the deal — have basically told us, “Forget it. You pulled out of the deal, so you have no standing to enforce it.”