Can I take a few minutes of your time and run something by you? I’m having dilemma and I need some honest answers only you can provide. 

Have you gotten smarter in the last 18 months? Have you been boning up on the provincial conflicts in Kandahar? Do you understand the context of Kandahar Governor Tooryalai Wesa’s call for increased negotiations with the Taliban? 

Let me explain my problem: I support President Obama’s decision to send more troops (or shall we say, his “Troop surge?”) to Afghanistan.  It’s the right decision to combat the Taliban’s increased violence in the region and Pakistani unrest.  And it would appear that I am in the majority which is new for me because when I supported President Bush’s troop surge in Iraq, I was so NOT in the majority. I just can’t figure out how the public has come to decide that THIS troop surge is copacetic and the previous troop surge was an impeachable offense. 

I have yet to see or hear any negative commentary about our Commander in Chief’s decision to double (that’s right America—double) the troop presence in Afghanistan. (To be fair, Cindy Sheehan is against it. But Cindy Sheehan thinks the surging troop membership at Girl Scout 6770 in Toad Suck, Arkansas, is a military conspiracy too.)  A local tribal elder in Afghanistan, Nani Kako, says more Westerners mean more targets for militants, which inevitably will lead to more civilian casualties.  Apparently, President Obama and American citizens aren’t buying it and we’re pressing ahead with our plans to send 17,000 more soldiers to the region. 

Although, Kako’s comments sound an awful lot like what Time Magazine wrote in December of 2006, “In Anbar province, where the presence of American troops on the streets of places like Ramadi actually prompts violence rather than heading it off.”

 Of this we can be sure: there’s no way the media is guilty of partisan politics just to support the policies of the new President. There’s no double standard. No free pass. No 100 day growing period. Just honest, factual reporting.  Right? 

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth,” Malcolm X said. “Because they control the minds of the masses.” 

The Democratic Party has a suite on the Lido Deck of the SS Speciousness, as well: nary a word of dissent from the party of change. “This strategy recognizes a point that I have emphasized for years,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said. “And one that I shared with the president following my visit last month to Afghanistan, which is that we must have a regional approach to countering terrorism.” 

 So long as that regional approach is championed by Obama and not Bush, Nanc? 

In a letter dated January 5, 2007, to President Bush she had written, “A renewed diplomatic strategy, both within the region and beyond, is also required to help the Iraqis agree to a sustainable political settlement. In short, it is time to begin to move our forces out of Iraq and make the Iraqi political leadership aware that our commitment is not open ended, that we cannot resolve their sectarian problems, and that only they can find the political resolution required to stabilize Iraq.”  

My how this party has changed indeed. 

President Obama’s statement announcing the troop increase went so far as to cast blame for Afghanistan’s unrest on his predecessor: "This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires," Obama said. 

Or maybe the Democrats have just been smart enough to learn from the success of the previous surge strategy, also overseen by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, even if they’re unwilling to say as much.

I’ll be honest, and I hope this isn’t hurtful, but I don’t really think you’re that much smarter. I think those of you were smart on these issues two years ago are still smart today. And those of you who didn’t know diddly a few years back, still don’t know diddly. I don’t for one second believe that Americans today have a fuller understanding of the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan and, as such, are now supportive of the President’s efforts to combat terrorism and the Taliban in an effort to defend America and the interests of liberty worldwide.  

No; I think this is simply one of the most egregious examples of media bias and fickle American politics I can remember in my lifetime.  Those of you who were aghast at the audacity of President Bush to send more troops to the Middle East and who are now sitting idly by ought to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask yourself why that is. 

The answer is the real problem with the American political process.

All around us we see signs of the United States beginning the long hard work of transforming its power consumption habits. Solar panels are popping up on your neighbor’s rooftops. Wind turbines reach for the breezy spaces above America’s amber waves of grain. Heck, even the tony Toyota Prius just got BAD press for being too OUTdated. I’m still driving an SUV and the Prius is already old news.

Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons (May 19, “TIME FOR A TRADE-IN”) recently wrote the story that Toyota’s hybrid technology (a gas engine and an electric engine sharing the work of powering the drive train) is old news. The new news is the “plug-in” hybrid, in which only the batteries power the drive train. The small combustion engine on board only serves to recharge the batteries. But alas, all that is new is somehow old again.

As it turns out—and there are scant few voices making this case (Simon Romero, NY Times, Feb 3, 2009, though is one of them)—the batteries that both of these hybrid technologies rely on, lithium ion, is only likely to shift an existing problem to a new part of the world. Part of America’s impetus to move away from the combustion engine is to decrease our reliance on foreign oil imports and all the attendant problems that come with it. But the hybrid engine needs lithium and, as it so happens, we here in the US don’t have much of it. Nevada once had vast resources but those have been tapped in the development of other lithium intensive operations over that last few decades. North Carolina closed its lithium mines when Chilean lithium was found to be cheaper, and these mines could be reopened, but the quantities are small compared to what exists in South America, and principally in Bolivia. The U.S. Geological Survey notes that 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and a sparse 410,000 in the United States.

In our rush to solve today’s problems immediately (oh, how very American of us—drive through problem solving) the public is likely to perceive that the development and deployment of cost effective hybrid vehicles based on the batteries in your iPod will be the end of our personal transportation dilemma.

Oh contraire, my friend.

It would appear that we will simply replace Iran with Bolivia; Ahmadinejad with Evo Morales, the far-left leaning, former coca growing president of Bolivia who recently opted out of America’s war on drugs in the region (TIME, Nov 4, 2008). If we’ve learned anything from Hugo Chavez it ought to be that making any South American country resource rich is not consistent in America’s best interests.

Neither I, nor Mr. Romero, are unique in our identification of this problem. As far back 1975, “the United States Geological Survey convened a symposium in Golden, Colorado, on lithium demand and resources prompted by the premise that lithium resources would be inadequate to meet future demand in fusion power generation (expected from the Year 2000 onward) and in load leveling storage batteries.” (http://lithiumabundance.blogspot.com/)

Industry, too, appears to see the writing on the wall. Our good friends at currently beleaguered GE are investing heavily in alternative technologies. GE announced on May 12 that they would invest $150 million and build a production plant for sodium battery technologies in Niskayuna, NY. (NY Times, http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/ge-announces-new-york-battery-factory/). This despite the fact they bought A123, the lithium battery maker that just recently inked a deal with Chrysler to provide them with LI batteries.

I have been saying for some time now that, as far as technology is concerned in the deployment of renewable technologies, we don’t have a technology problem. Wind, solar, geothermal and other technologies exist, they just need to advance. Except in the area of energy storage. The technology simply doesn’t yet exist to help us realize our goals. I attended The Energy Conversation in Washington, DC, last week (http://www.energyconversation.org/) and former CIA director Jim Woolsey spoke to the same point (thus demonstrating, once and for all, that I am indeed as smart as your average Stanford grad/Rhodes Scholar--or, more likely, that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then). Notwithstanding my misplaced vanity, the point remains that battery storage is an emerging field and lithium isn’t the answer.

As consumers, we need to understand the limitations of the technologies being offered to us. A lithium-ion plug-in hybrid may make tremendous sense for the next decade or so. But be wary of making large capital purchases (and by that I mean “car buying”) that don’t anticipate the demise of lithium.

With any luck at all technology will develop quickly enough that Mid-East scale problems will not develop in South America and we won’t be fighting a “war for lithium” in the mountains of Bolivia in our lifetimes. With any luck at all our national leaders are working TODAY to mitigate those possibilities tomorrow, whether through investments by our national labs in alternative technologies or strong, proactive foreign policy in South America (or, dare I suggest it? “Both of the above.” Nah, our leaders aren’t THAT smart are they?)