Several weeks ago, I began to become convinced that Obama would lose the election. This was after he pooched the first debate, giving an opening to Romney similar to that given by Carter to Reagan in 1980 after their debate---Reagan convinced the public he was a credible candidate and the public abandoned Carter, a weak and ineffectual leader. I thought Obama was shaping up to be another Jimmy Carter: a well-intentioned but unsuccessful president who would lose the election in only the last two or three weeks of the campaign.
I thought of another similarity between Carter and Obama: They both ran afoul of the issue of energy. In the Carter era, with the 1979 energy crisis, the focus was on national security and energy independence. Carter alienated many Americans with his message of austerity---he asked Americans to conserve energy, wearing a thick sweater, and he declared the energy issue to be the "moral equivalent of war." (Energy industry people took to calling that speech the "meow" speech.) Reagan's campaign evoked old-fashioned values of prosperity and patriotism, and while his first term in office was marked by a sharp recession (resulting from steps taken to stop the high inflation on the Carter years), a plunge in petroleum prices lead to the era of the SUV, and the theme of his successful reelection was "Morning in America."
Thus in the current era, we have a weak president who promotes renewable energy and is hostile to fossil fuel, blocking the Keystone pipeline that would have brought Canadian tar-sand oil to this country and (arguably) increasing American energy security. While remarkable amounts of money have gone to renewable energy and conservation (tax subsidies for hybrid and electric cars, and federal loans to solar panel makers and advanced battery makers), the true growth in energy production has been in fossil fuels. This is extraordinary and unexpected. The "fracking" revolution in natural gas has turned a fuel that was expected to become ever more scarce and expensive to one that is abundant to the point where the producers are getting whip-lashed by the collapse in natural gas prices. Long-haul trucking is converting away from diesel to natural gas, and the coal and nuclear industries (competitors to natural gas for producing electricity) are suffering. Even more remarkable is the growth in US petroleum production: Oil imports have decreased from a high of 60% of the oil we used down to 45%, and much of what we import now comes from the Western hemisphere, especially Canada. North Dakota has a boom economy from petroleum (the Bakken formation is producing 400,000 barrels a day, a significant amount given we now use about 19 million barrels of oil a day). "Peak oil" theorists are skeptical all of this will last long, but as best as I can tell, the mainstream geologists and the petroleum industry experts who have been saying that petroleum supplies are adequate for some time to come are being proved to be correct. (Peak oil theory has always been a minority position in the petroleum industry.)
Liberals and progressives fear and despise the Koch Brothers, the wealthy petroleum industry leaders who have spend enormous amounts of money to promote a libertarian small-government message and also to promote the interests of their industry. This includes efforts to deflect public concern about the danger of anthropogenic global warming, in a campaign reminiscent of the campaigns years ago by the tobacco companies to deny the science against their products. However, in a perhaps back-handed way, I have some sympathy for the Koch Brothers, if we look at things from their point-of-view. First, the Koch Brothers do not seem to be interested in "social issues"; they're libertarian. Second, they do support science, in spite of their efforts to tear down climate science---at least, David Koch supports NOVA on public TV. They also supported a major exhibit on human evolution at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. I saw this interesting and impressive exhibit several years ago. However, there was a curious subtext: climate change, in the form of the Ice Ages, as a driver of human evolution. Environmentalists have noticed this, suspecting the motive of the exhibit was to subtly promote the idea that we can adapt to climate change in our own era. But concerning climate science, even here I can see things from the Koch Brothers' point of view. It's well-known that they supported the research of Richard Muller, the UC Berkeley physicist who was skeptical of global warming but who verified the numbers for himself, and even reached the conclusion that most of the warming is indeed human-caused. But Muller said that we've had 1.25 degrees Celsius of warming, and he expected about that much more by century's end. This is hardly an insignificant rise in temperatures, but it would be at the low end of the range of predicted warming. If models built by mainstream climate scientists are correct, the warming could be much more. Perhaps the Koch Brothers expect warming but not a catastrophic level of warming, instead warming we can adapt to. Meanwhile, although they certainly have a strong vested interest in petroleum, they can't be faulted if they believe that starving ourselves of abundant fossil fuels will only lead to austerity and poverty. The petroleum industry is startling in its enormous scale and in the heroic feats of engineering that have developed hither-to inaccessible supplies of oil. Multinational conglomerates now spend tens of billions of dollars on single projects, which 20 years ago might have been $500 million. I can see why the Koch Brothers would be angry at the political threats to their industry and accomplishments. I can also see the disdain for green energy: intermittent and unpredictable sources of energy (wind and solar) simply will not be able to power our civilization, and all the efforts to build wind turbines and solar farms will not delay global warming in the slightest---China now consumes more fossil fuel than we do, and in any event, no one expects this to change for many decades.
But of course, I am not truly sympathetic to the Koch Brothers, if the threat of global warming is real---and I am very hesitant indeed to question the strong scientific consensus on global warming. I predict that in two decades or so, it will become abundantly clear that we are in deep, deep trouble on this issue, and when this happens, advanced nuclear energy (reactors that can burn present-day nuclear waste as fuel, or possibly the abundant element thorium) will become imperative. In the meantime, perhaps even the Koch Brothers can agree that we should do as much research both on climate change and on new energy sources, to be ready for the era when we must abandon fossil fuels and leave them in the ground, if indeed we must.
Returning back to the present election, only minutes away as I write (Dix Notch, New Hampshire will vote at midnight), it now appears that Mr. Obama will overcome his missteps in the campaign and win a narrow victory against his remarkably inauthentic opponent, Gov. Mitt Romney. I will vote for Obama, in part because of his support of gay rights, but largely because it is imperative that we do not allow Romney to win in a campaign of such relentless disregard for the truth and such relentless vilification and manipulation. I suspect that a reelected Obama will prove to be very fortunate, as the prosperity of the revival of fossil fuels lifts the economy. I think it would be very good for this country if the first African-American president ends his term in office as a successful leader, which he would surely be regarded as if the economy does finally accelerate in his second term. Of course, all of this is moot if Romney prevails---in that event, he would be the Ronald Reagan to Obama's Jimmy Carter.