Sounding Off:

Five years ago, 86% of global energy production centered on coal, natural gas and petroleum. The bulk of the remaining 14% was nuclear energy at 8% and a minuscule 6% effort for all others, including solar, biomass, geothermal and wind. In the past five years, little has changed.

The U.S. has 25% of global coal reserves. Accordingly, we are still blowing off the tops of mountains in Appalachia — never mind the toxic sediment finding its way into Appalachian streams. After all, we need it for our electric generating plants, more than 50% powered by coal.

Natural gas consumption is rising, but it never can be a permanent substitute for petroleum in the transportation sector. Transport of natural gas requires the building of such resources, which are not economic for a short-term solution.

Petroleum has reached peak production, a condition hastened by ever-present U.S. demand, but burgeoning demand from Asian countries like China, India, South Korea and Japan has put us over the top. Unlike 1973’s oil crisis, this peak is permanent.

It is curious that crude oil deposits have taken between 50 to 300 million years to form, and yet we have managed to burn roughly half of all global oil reserves in merely 125 years. However, when you consider the rate of consumption now, 85 million barrels of oil used per day (MBD), we will have perhaps five years before economic travail is evident. With a usage curve predicting 130 MBD within 10 years, how long before it shuts down our way of life, pushing up oil prices beyond affordability?

Many conservatives would dispute the peak oil claim. So we should make it clear that the world is not running out of oil itself, but rather its ability to produce high-quality, cheap and economically extractable oil on demand. Thus, Peak Oil is the point where world production has peaked due to reduced access of economically extractable oil.

So once you add global warming to Peak Oil, human beings could be headed for End Times, the language of the religious right. At any rate, the problem is urgent.

While the 1970s gave us a scare about the dwindling supply of oil and our foreign dependence, we have had a succession of leaders who failed as our stewards. But with global warming evidence mounting and with Middle East tension increasing, the cry for breaking our oil addiction has grown over the last decade, especially among prudent scientists.

But Congress, immune to long-range planning or even a modicum of visionary thinking, has ignored the clarion call. First the Gingrich Congress, ideologically bound to the past, managed little progress on anything other than trying to hang Bill Clinton.

In 2001, when the Bush administration entered office, Dick Cheney and the energy industry rewrote energy policy behind closed doors, setting progress back for a decade.

Next, after a Republican majority rubber-stamped a Bush-Cheney carbon-energy-fest, a 2006 Democrat majority cowered and cringed under Republican intimidation. Only now, with the Obama administration and a clear majority, are Democrats in Congress beginning to heed warnings about climate change.

But with a nation’s financial back broken with outlandish military spending and deep recession, the Democrat majority, many who participated in that rapacious spending spree, are still loath to find money for promoting new energy technologies.

We have heard the favorite strategy of conservatives — more supply. If we opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and began full production years into the future, we might find enough to provide 1 million barrels a day for 30 years. This would delay the oil crisis a few months and lead to a continuing high-carbon road.

Another false prophet for many is modern technology. Reason should tell us it is not a magic bullet, but is hardware and programming for running fossil fuels. It depends on an abundant underlying fossil fuel base.

For decades, we have had only two realistic strategies: increase the fuel economy of our vehicles and find one or more alternative fuel sources that are abundant, low-carbon and affordable. Both have been strongly fought by conservatives for a long time.

Even if we increase fuel economy for cars and SUVs to 60 miles per gallon by 2030, we would still need half their fuel to be zero carbon. One alternative fuel is even remotely plausible — carbon-free electricity.

That is why the focus is on hybrids and electric cars.

Meanwhile, the media is only posturing, talking of switching to energy-saving light bulbs and turning off lights. It doesn’t want to rouse us out of our comfort zone. The daily priority of media ratings takes long-range survival off its radar.

Leaders must know that we need to choose a new path now or one will be forced upon us, a path that could well lead to war, hunger, drought and dislocation. Not acting would be foolhardy, whether through self-delusion, greed or ideology.

By all evidence, our leaders still lack the courage to responsibly direct us, but then again, we lack the perception and the focus to force it upon them.

JIM HOOVER is a Huntington Beach resident.