Energy and the World Cup

July 7, 2014
Months before the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament began on June 12, the US coach ignited a controversy with overtones for energy policy.

Months before the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament began on June 12, the US coach ignited a controversy with overtones for energy policy. Gravely offending native optimism in the land of the free and home of the brave, the coach, Jurgen Klinsmann, predicted defeat.

"We cannot win this World Cup because we are not at that level yet," Klinsmann told the New York Times Magazine in December. "For us, we have to play the game of our lives seven times to win the tournament. Realistically, it is not possible."

Maybe Klinsmann, who is from Germany, doesn't know how discordantly such pessimism strikes American ears. Maybe he didn't want to make a prediction almost certain to be wrong. Maybe he was craftily challenging his team to achieve the impossible by asserting impossibility. Or maybe he knew his provocation would give otherwise indifferent Americans something to find interesting about the World Cup.

'Don't do defeatism'

Whatever the motivation, Klinsmann's comments captured attention, most of it negative.

"He's not from around here so maybe he doesn't know this, but we don't do defeatism," wrote Gregg Doyel, national columnist of CBSSports.com, the day before the tournament. "At least we shouldn't. Even if we can't win, we don't think it."

Without doubt, such habits of the collective mind serve the US well. They incline the nation toward initiative and achievement. In concert with individual freedom, they enable the country to achieve much.

So Americans recoil when told they can't do something.

Americans don't like to be told, for example, that they can't sustain their way of life without consuming large amounts of hydrocarbon energy. Policy-making in the US thus floats on wispy dreams of a "carbon-free energy economy."

And woe betide the spoilsport who declares this can't be done.

Well, it can't.

Nature doesn't allow energy to be created from nothing, least of all laws and regulations. And nature doesn't deliver much energy ready-made for work. Most energy needs to be made useful.

Here, crude oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium have natural advantages. In comparison with other energy forms, they store much energy in little space. Making them useful costs relatively little.

This is the main reason hydrocarbons dominate the energy market. It is why politically more-fashionable energy forms have difficulty making inroads. The alternatives cost too much.

Americans hate to be told all this. They want to believe they can do whatever they put their minds to.

Yet not even energetic positivism can supersede the laws of physics.

What American can do about energy is spend a lot of money on inflated hope. For many years, they have done this quite well.

Hope is commendable. It just needs to be realistic. In fact, money spent on unconventional energy isn't wasted if it reveals something about energy no one knew before. Even then, however, the hopeful must heed the lessons.

What the US should have learned from billions of dollars spent in various ways over many years on clean coal, hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol, futuristic batteries, and all the rest is that affordable energy doesn't materialize in anywhere near adequate quantity from the mere exertion of political will.

Within the hard limits of what's now known about energy, American hope about energy, at least as it is expressed through politics fearful of carbon, is unrealistic. Yet the hope itself is hardly regrettable. Given constructive direction, it might extend those boundaries of what people know about energy in their world.

Displaying hope

Eventually, the US soccer coach displayed the hope he earlier seemed to lack.

Before the World Cup began Klinsmann instructed members of his team to book flights away from Brazil after the last match. He hoped his team still would be playing that final day.

This, of course, was not to be. Still, the US was much more likely to win the World Cup than it is to make fantasies come true soon about carbon-free energy.