The College Fix

In no area of our economy was our nation’s success more evident than in the transportation sector. In the course of half a century we went from mass-producing automobiles to mainstreaming commercial air travel to putting a man on the moon. Flying cars and a Mars colony were sure to follow.

Rather than advancing toward faster and more efficient ways of traveling, our progress in transportation technology seems to have stalled out in the late sixties. We are still driving cars that work pretty much as they did forty years ago. The Concord jet has been dustballed; and in this sense commercial air travel has actually gotten slower and less efficient.

What happened when Neil Armstrong’s boot touched the moon dust? It’s as if his action invoked some cosmic curse that kept us from progressing any further.

It’s All About Energy

Peter Thiel, the techno-visionary entrepreneurial wonder-child best known as a founder of PayPal, may have at least part of the answer to our progress problem. Thiel has lately fashioned himself into a public intellectual and futurist — a kind of prophet of America’s technological and economic decline.

Thiel wrote an essay for National Review last year that should be considered essential reading. In it, he framed America’s current economic stagnation as a battle between the startling growth in the high tech and finance sectors of our economy on the one hand, and our equally startling failure to muster any real innovation or growth in the energy sector.

Making the case that our economic survival hinges upon improving energy-efficiency technologies, as well as “the much-needed construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors,” Thiel prescribed a do-or-die course that, frustratingly, is as straightforward as it is politically unfeasible.

In the latest issue of The American Interest, political scientist Francis Fukuyama interviews Thiel on similar issues. It’s The End of History talking to The End of Prosperity. In the article, Thiel discusses the inadequacy of the green energy movement. “There certainly are a lot of areas of technology where, if it were progressing, we would expect a lot of jobs to be created,” he says. “The classic example would be clean technology, alternate energy technology. If you were to retool the economy toward more efficient forms of energy, one would realistically expect that to create millions of jobs. The problem with that retooling is that the clean technology just doesn’t work-namely, it doesn’t do more for less. It costs much more, so it isn’t working-at least not yet.”

If you think about it, some of the hottest political controversies of our time center around the energy problem — from Obama’s corrupt loans to the failed Solyndra enterprise, to the disastrous Deepwater Horizons oil spill. Politicians stand to lose a lot when their energy bets go bad. That holds true whether the mantra is “Kumbaya, and let’s go hug a tree” or “Drill, baby, drill.”

Our economy stands to lose even more. Fact is, new green energy hasn’t yet delivered on its alluring promises. Likewise, old dirty energy isn’t enough and is growing more costly all the time. (Have you checked out the prices at the pump this week?)

Rising energy costs have set us on a course for economic doomsday. Our current energy output cannot sustain a course of economic growth. Oil is not enough to fuel our transportation needs over the long term. And going green with solar panels and the like — as nice as that may feel from the standpoint of environmental stewardship — has not, by itself, proved to be a miracle economic solution either. In most cases, green energy is actually more expensive. Yet we have to power our supercomputers and heat our homes somehow.  So what can we do?

I think it’s time we split some atoms. We haven’t started construction on a nuclear power plant in this country in more than thirty-five years.  That fact may represent the greatest political failure of our age. Nuclear energy, of course, is not without its risks and problems. Fukushima, ring a bell?

But what other course do we have?

This article originally appeared in the International Business Times and is reprinted here with permission. Follow Nathan on Twitter @nathanharden