(This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. Go back to Part 1.)
The third most important challenge facing the U.S. is almost certainly our situation in energy. Quite simply, we're living on borrowed time. We're importing about 65% of our oil needs from foreign sources, mostly in unstable or even hostile places, which makes us incredibly vulnerable to any sort of disruption, which could come from a number of different sources.
Yet the U,S. is making no serious effort at the national level to reduce our excessive consumption of fossil fuel, something which could achieve the most dramatic effects the most quickly. Our standards for gas consumption in our cars and trucks, for instance, are essentially where they were 20 years ago.
We need a kind of Manhattan Project, a highly focused national effort to achieve energy independence, both in conservation and in boosting alternative energy technology and infrastructure, but the political will seems to be lacking. I won't go into detail here, but Peak Oil is rapidly approaching and we are unprepared.
The fourth most important challenge facing the U.S. is probably our crumbling infrastructure. As the American Society of Civil Engineers recently reported, a survey of the 15 most important infrastructure categories in the U.S.—including bridges, sewer systems, public schools and drinking water—resulted in an overall grade of "D".
As I've written previously elsewhere, "Infrastructure of all kinds is being starved for funds as the country directs more and more resources into militarism, unaffordable tax cuts, corporate welfare and pork-barrel politics". To put it succinctly, without an adequate infrastructure the United States will find itself increasingly deficient not only in global competitiveness but in its own quality of life.
Terrorism might be the fifth greatest challenge, but it's competing for that dubious honor with our increasingly dysfunctional health care system, the looming demographic crises of Social Security and Medicare, the debacle of the War in Iraq itself and dramatically rising world antipathy towards America's policies and moral stature.
We in the U.S. had better wake up, and soon, or we may find ourselves confronting a bewildering series of catastrophic tsunamis which the popular press will most likely proclaim "came out of nowhere". But they won't have come out of nowhere. They're predictable, and they're approaching us even now with great speed.
—jim sloman, 10.6.06
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