Three years ago Fourth World Review published a long essay of mine entitled Energy Wars. The main thrust of the article was that piping energy around the place made sense to monopolists and elites intent upon controlling and profiting from the demand for piped energy. But for the rest of us local energy catchment...the Woking Strategy...was the way to go.

In arguing my case I remarked on the dwindling importance of oil in the future of piped energy. Putting ignorance and cock-up aside...despite the fact that these loom large on the international stage where miscalculation seems to be the norm...this means that the Anglo-American grab for Iraq’s oil was an insufficient justification for the costs of an invasion and the maintenance of a permanent presence in Mesopotamia. Think of the people, the money and the energy costs. Wars use up an awful lot of energy. The Iraq War energy account might even be in net deficit.

Hence I argued that the real reasons for the invasion of Iraq were not oil but the extension of the techniques of Central Banking into the Moslem World and of course to shore up the State of Israel by more direct means than hand-outs from the long-suffering American taxpayer. Confirmation of the latter has recently come to light with the publication of the Walt and Mearscheimer report on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Incidentally in case you took my earlier remarks about this for an April Fool the lads from Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government have written a short version for The London Review of Books.

But my case also rested on my review of the future development proposed by energy producing industries in the fossil fuel business, the nuclear fission and fusion fiascos and the more hopeful worlds of hydrogen and solar energy (wind, wave, biofuels etc). It was in this context that I mentioned Buckminster Fuller’s proposal in his 1981 book Critical Path of a Global Electricity Grid and the emergence after its construction of the Kilowatt-Hour as the Global Reserve Currency to take the place once held by gold. Here is what Bucky had to say in Critical Path (page 206).

It is engineeringly demonstrable that there is no known way to deliver energy safely from one part of the world to another in larger quantities and in swifter manner than by high-voltage-conducted ‘electricity’. For the first half of the twentieth century the limit-distance of technically practical deliverability of electricity was 350 miles. As a consequence of the post-World War II space programme’s employment and advancement of the invisible metallurgical, chemical and electronics more-with-lessing technology, twenty five years ago [now fifty] ir became technically feasible and expedient to employ ultra-high-voltage and superconductivity which can deliver electrical energy within a radial range of 1500 miles from the system’s dynamo generators.

To the World Game seminar of 1969 Buckminster Fuller presented his integrated, world-around, high-voltage electrical energy network concept. Employing the new 1500-mile transmission reach, this network made it technically feasible to span the Bering Straits to integrate the Alaskan USA and Canadian networks with Russia’s grid, which had recently been extended eastward into northern Siberia and Kamchatka to harness with hydroelectric dams the several powerful northwardly flowing rivers of north-easternmost USSR. This proposed network would interlink the daylight half of the world with the nighttime half.

Fuller argued that electrical energy integration of the night and day regions of the Earth will bring capacity into use at all times, thus overnight doubling the generating capacity of humanity because it will integrate all the most extreme night and day peaks and valleys. From the Bering Straits, Europe and Africa will be integrated westwardly through the USSR and China; Southeast Asia and India will become network integrated southwardly through the USSR. Central and South America will be integrated southwardly through Canada, the USA and Mexico.

Bucky’s idea is a dream-come-true for the lovers of macro-engineering projects. But it has two fundamental flaws. Firstly security. The power line will always be down somewhere. How can anyone stop the Global Electricity Grid being blown up by insurgents?

Secondly who needs it? The underlying energy truth is that the energy commons is not for privatising. Energy is not a scarce resource. In half an hour our world gets all the energy it needs for a whole year. Nature is prolific. The sun showers us with thousands of times more energy than we will ever need. The only energy pipes we truly need are within our village or parish electricity and hot water grids. All the other energy being piped around is not for the benefit of the users but for the profits of the pipe owners and the energy commodity monopolisers.

Bernard Daly read my Energy Wars article on the internet and e-mailed me to ask whether the world electricity grid was the only way that an energy-backed currency could work. My answer was no. They can evolve from within our existing energy and monetary infrastructures. As a result the idea is gaining support. Tomorrow’s weblog will discuss Douthwaite’s thinking behind Energy Backed Currency Units (ebcus) and Special Emission Rights (SERs).