Milícias de PMs expulsam tráfico

Milícias de PMs expulsam tráfico

Vera Araújo

Na contramão da violência produzida em áreas pobres controladas por traficantes de drogas, 11 grupos, seis deles chefiados por policiais militares, estão impondo uma nova ordem que conseguiu banir o tráfico de 42 favelas do Rio, em Jacarepaguá e na Barra. Depois da fase de esconder a identidade nas comunidades conflagradas onde moram, das quais alguns foram até expulsos, esses policiais formaram grupos armados e resolveram banir os traficantes dos pontos de drogas. O subprefeito de Jacarepaguá, Fernando Modolo, define os grupos como milícias armadas e faz um alerta:

— Houve uma redução sensível de favelas dominadas pelo tráfico na região. Essas milícias armadas formadas por policiais têm seus aspectos positivos, mas podem se tornar nocivas a longo prazo, pois você tem a ausência do poder constituído. São “xerifes” se prevalecendo da força — explicou o subprefeito — Se esta é a única alternativa ao tráfico, que eles continuem a tomar conta das favelas, mas o ideal é que os “xerifes” não fossem necessários.

Os grupos contam principalmente com a ajuda dos moradores dessas áreas carentes para denunciar os traficantes. Em contrapartida, além da segurança, esses policiais aplicam um modelo de assistencialismo semelhante ao que os bandidos adotavam no passado, financiados pelo comércio e as indústrias locais, ocupando o vácuo deixado pelo poder público na área social. São distribuídas cestas básicas para as famílias mais pobres e material para reforma de casas atingidas por disparos em tiroteios provocados pelo tráfico.

Esses grupos se comunicam por rádio e vigiam as favelas 24 horas, para evitar represália dos bandidos. Na Vila Sapê, uma das favelas sem tráfico, PMs e moradores pintaram de branco os muros que tinham pichações com nomes das facções criminosas.

Duas favelas sob o domínio do tráfico

Em Jacarepaguá, a retomada de grande parte das favelas nas mãos dos traficantes não seria possível sem o apoio do comando do batalhão. Hoje, apenas duas comunidades do bairro ainda são dominadas pelo tráfico: a Cidade de Deus e a Caicó. Tomando como base dados do IBGE do ano de 2000, sobre a população que mora em favelas em Jacarepaguá, 111.448 pessoas conseguiram se livrar da opressão do tráfico. Apesar do trabalho de resgate do poder de polícia nestas comunidades, dois grupos de Jacarepaguá estão sendo investigados pela Corregedoria Geral Unificada, pela corregedoria da PM e pelo próprio 18 BPM (Jacarepaguá), por denúncias de apropriação de imóveis de moradores expulsos por eles.

Pelo Disque-Denúncia, de janeiro a dezembro do ano passado, quando tiveram início as investidas do “comando azul”, houve 47 denúncias contra grupos. Só este ano, de janeiro a 16 de março, foram registradas 14 queixas.

Moradores denunciam ainda que há policiais ligados a grupos de extermínio e às máfias do gás e do transporte alternativo (vans, Kombis e mototáxis). Há informações também sobre a cobrança de taxas nos valores de R$ 5, de moradores, e de R$ 10, dos comerciantes, referentes à segurança prestada pelos policiais. De acordo com as investigações da Corregedoria Geral Unificada, das 42 favelas onde não há tráfico, as denúncias envolvem duas comunidades.

Apesar do volume de denúncias contra os policiais, no interior das favelas o clima é de tranqüilidade. Crianças brincam o dia inteiro, inclusive à noite. Famílias ficam conversando nas ruas e becos bem iluminados até bem tarde da noite.

— Isso aqui era um inferno. Meu filho não conhecia nem a rua direito, quando os traficantes estavam aqui. Eles mandavam a gente dormir às 20h. Hoje temos paz — disse uma moradora da Vila Sapê, que pediu para não ser identificada.

Vizinha à Cidade de Deus, onde o tráfico arrecada R$ 800 mil por mês, segundo a inspetora Marina Maggessi, chefe de investigações da Polinter, a Vila Sapê ainda teme represálias de traficantes. Como a comunidade era da mesma facção criminosa da primeira, os moradores não querem mostrar o rosto porque são vistos como alcagüetes da Polícia Militar. Apesar dos riscos, moradores que ainda vivem sob o domínio do tráfico procuram os grupos de policiais e o próprio batalhão da área para sair dessa condição. Com recortes amarelados dos tempos em que havia tráfico na favela, o presidente da Associação de Moradores do Morro do Jordão, o comerciante Carlos Alberto Jordão, conta que há quase um ano os moradores respiram mais aliviados:

— Minha mulher já teve arma na cabeça só porque não tinha como trocar dinheiro para um traficante. Eles expulsavam e até matavam moradores, se desconfiavam que eles passavam informações sobre o tráfico.

Mas ex-moradores do Jordão desmentem Carlos:

— Trabalhei muitos anos para ter minhas coisas e, de repente, perdi tudo para os maus policiais. Eles são tão bandidos quanto os traficantes. Tenho tanto medo que é melhor deixar do jeito que está — contou um ex-morador expulso pelo tráfico.

Nas denúncias apuradas pela PM, não há informações contra policiais do quartel de Jacarepaguá. Segundo o comandante do 18 BPM, tenente-coronel César Couto Lima, que já trabalhou na Delegacia de Polícia Judiciária Militar da Polícia Militar, que investiga crimes praticados por policiais, todas as denúncias estão sendo investigadas pelo serviço reservado (P-2):

— Toda informação que chega ao batalhão é checada. Quando foge da nossa competência passamos para a corregedoria ou para os batalhões onde servem esses policiais. A PM não admite desvios de comportamento. Não compactuamos com grupos de “mineira” (policiais ou civis financiados pelo comércio para exterminar bandidos).

— Foi a confiança da população no nosso trabalho que fez com que os traficantes saíssem das favelas. Depois que as pessoas experimentam o prazer de não serem subjugadas pelos bandidos, eles não voltam mais. Se alguém faz uma denúncia e percebe que a providência é tomada, sem que ele se comprometa, ele ajuda e passa a ter um vínculo conosco. Eles mesmos impedem que o tráfico retorne. O mérito é da comunidade — explicou o comandante.

Já o comandante do 31 BPM (Barra da Tijuca), tenente-coronel Paulo Mouzinho, disse desconhecer a existência de grupos de policiais armados nas favelas de sua área:

— As favelas daqui são realmente tranqüilas. Sou capaz de entrar fardado e desarmado na maioria delas. Não tem tráfico pesado, mas acredito que não seja porque policiais militares façam este tipo de serviço.

-x-x-

Sargento foi o primeiro a expulsar bandidos


Dono de uma ficha policial impecável, repleta de elogios, o sargento da Polícia Militar Anderson Colombo, de 43 anos, foi o primeiro a afastar o tráfico do Morro do Banco, no Itanhangá, onde mora, há quase dez anos. O sucesso lhe rendeu o convite para se tornar presidente da associação de moradores local, cargo que ocupa há cinco anos.

— Não podemos nos encolher e ficar com medo. Temos que defender o local onde vivemos com a nossa família. Sou policial 24 horas — afirma ele.

Além do Morro do Banco, ele cuida de mais três favelas da região: Sítio do Pai João, Pedra do Itanhangá e Vila da Paz, todas no Itanhangá. Mas o que mais o aborrece é a falta de investimentos públicos nas comunidades que se livram dos traficantes. Colombo estima que 15 mil pessoas morem no morro, entre elas muitos jovens:

— É preciso ter uma ocupação social, para que o tráfico não retorne. Estes jovens precisam ter uma ocupação. Por isso, na época da campanha política, corri atrás para conseguir construir duas quadras de esportes para a garotada — contou.

Ao contrário da maioria dos colegas de farda que integram os grupos armados, o sargento Colombo não tem pretensões políticas.

— O pessoal me respeita muito e quero que continue assim sem política no meio. Não faço nada sozinho. Qualquer problema eu chamo o batalhão como uma pessoa normal — disse o policial.

Nas imediações do Morro do Banco, todos sabem que o policial mantém a ordem no local, mas mesmo assim já houve tentativa de o tráfico se instalar na comunidade. A qualquer movimento estranho na favela, o presidente da associação já inicia uma investigação.

— Teve um vez que um traficante tentou se instalar no morro. Ele não trazia a droga para cá, mas havia um movimento no seu quiosque lá embaixo. Mas ele próprio resolveu sair daqui — lembrou.

Apesar das medalhas que recebeu nos 23 anos de polícia, Colombo está há dez anos como sargento. Atualmente, ele trabalha no Grupamento Tático Móvel (Getam) e cursa direito. A ausência de tráfico fez com que os imóveis do Morro do Banco se valorizassem a ponto de uma casa custar R$ 40 mil.

Há 16 anos no morro, Francisca Santos não troca o lugar por nada:

— As crianças vivem felizes. Aqui existe paz. Só saio daqui para morrer no Ceará.

-x-x-

‘Os R$ 5 que eles pagam é doação’


Passos largos, corpulento, X. se acha o dono da favela. Desconfiado, ele chega de carro importado com insulfilme na comunidade onde vive. Salta do carro usando tênis de grife e boné para se esconder e dispara: “Você está filmando?” Diante da negativa, ele relaxa e vai para a sede da associação. Perguntado se é policial, ele de imediato põe na mesa uma pistola PT 380 com a inscrição PMERJ (Polícia Militar do Estado do Rio de Janeiro).
Vera Araújo

Por que você não me mostra a sua carteira?

X: Não quero que me identifiquem. A Corregedoria da PM já andou atrás de mim.

Você já fez alguma coisa de errado?

X: Não. Tudo que faço é dentro da lei. Não sou justiceiro.

Por que você resolveu tirar o tráfico daqui?

X: Sou criado nesta região. Logo que me tornei policial, tive que sair daqui, mas minha família ficou. Há nove meses, minha família foi expulsa daqui.

Você resolveu se vingar?

X: Não. Foi questão de honra. Eles mexeram com a minha família. A decisão de acabar com o tráfico era moral.

Então, o que você fez para expulsar os traficantes?

X: Eu e os primos tomamos a comunidade sem disparar um tiro sequer, sem bater em ninguém. Invadimos e saímos prendendo.

Ninguém foi morto?

X: Não. Pode ir na delegacia da área. Foi na moral.

Mas houve um preparo?

X: Sim. Vendi tudo que tinha para invadir. Você sabe quanto custa a munição?

Você cobra para fazer a segurança dos moradores?

X. Não. Os R$ 5 que eles pagam é uma doação para melhorias na comunidade. Dá quem quiser. Cobrar desta gente é uma ofensa. O dinheiro deles é sofrido.

Mas você não ganha nada? E aquele carro importado?

X: Aquele carro é da segurança de um empresário que eu faço.

Como você consegue manter a ordem por aqui?

X. Antes de a gente chegar, as pessoas morriam aqui na covardia. Falam muita coisa da gente por aí. Por exemplo: havia muitos moradores inadimplentes. O pessoal devia muito ao comércio e depois corria para a favela, pois sabia que eles não entravam aqui. Agora todo mundo paga suas contas direitinho.

Os moradores não ficam com raiva de vocês?

X. Tem morador que acha que somos heróis. Chegam a pintar com o azul e branco da polícia. Eu fico orgulhoso. É o Comando Azul. Eu só fico chateado quando alguém chama a gente de “mineira”.

-x-x-

Cidade de Deus na mira dos milicianos

Vera Araújo

A Cidade de Deus é o próximo alvo dos grupos formados por policias militares para tirar o tráfico das favelas. Praticamente o último reduto de traficantes na região de Jacarepaguá e Barra, a Cidade de Deus tem sua própria região administrativa e, de acordo com o Instituto Pereira Passos, há 38.016 moradores vivendo em 120,58 hectares, de acordo com dados de 2000.

O diretor executivo da Associação Comercial e Industrial de Jacarepaguá (Acija), Augusto Torres, é um dos que confirmam que a Cidade de Deus é o próximo passo para retomada das áreas conflagradas:

— Nós de Jacarepaguá vamos dar um exemplo para o resto da cidade. Vamos mostrar que é possível acabar com o tráfico de drogas. Mas quero deixar bem claro: não apoiamos a “mineira”. Estamos com o 18 BPM (Jacarepaguá).

As cenas de indústrias sendo invadidas por traficantes em fuga, toda vez que a polícia entrava numa favela, se tornam cada vez mais raras. Da mesma forma que os ônibus sendo incendiados, quando ocorria uma morte em confronto nas comunidades. Na semana passada, excepcionalmente, por causa da morte de um rapaz, uma fábrica foi invadida na Cidade de Deus.

— Os policiais militares têm mantido a ordem em Jacarepaguá. Por isso, temos doado material de construção para ajudar as famílias carentes a recuperar suas casas destruídas pelos tiros dos traficantes, na Vila Sapê — diz Augusto Torres.

Empresários reformam creches e escolas

No passado, a indústria Fink cedeu uma parte do seu terreno para a construção de uma creche na Vila Sapê, antiga Vila dos Crentes. Mas, com a invasão do tráfico, a creche ficou praticamente abandonada e totalmente depredada, como denuncia o policial que toma conta do local.

— A associação era esconderijo de produtos roubados — disse.

Nos últimos meses, com a expulsão do tráfico, os empresários reformaram a creche e estão recuperando a Escola Amiguinhos da Vila Sapê. Para proteger os moradores e evitar que os bandidos se instalem usando as indústrias da região como rota de fuga, a Cirja está instalando portões nos acessos à favela, como num condomínio fechado.

— Não podemos deixar que volte a ficar como antes — disse Augusto Torres.

Há o apoio dos empresários também na hora de oferecer empregos. Os moradores de favelas sem tráfico têm prioridade na disputa por vagas numa das fábricas da região:

— Tentamos ajudar de todas as formas. Só não damos dinheiro. Já entregamos oito cabines para o batalhão de Jacarepaguá e a nossa meta é de 12 a curto prazo. Já doamos também carros e rádios.

Na Estrada dos Bandeirantes, está sendo implantado o sistema de ronda eletrônica. Os policiais carregam um bastão eletrônico que, em contato com botões fixados em pontos estratégicos, é capaz de armazenar informações sobre a hora e o local da passagem das patrulhas.

Investimentos trazem retorno na segurança

O empenho de empresários, moradores e da polícia tem trazido bons resultados na estatística da criminalidade. Na 32 DP (Jacarepaguá) e na 41 (Tanque), delegacias que cobrem a área de Jacarepaguá, houve uma redução do número de roubos de carros, comparando janeiro de 2003 ao mesmo mês de 2004, ano em que os grupos de policiais surgiram. Foram 108 carros roubados em 2003 e 88 no ano passado.

A delegada da 41 DP (Tanque), Adriana Belém, disse que a redução da criminalidade é o resultado de um trabalho conjunto das polícias com os moradores e empresários de Jacarepaguá. Atualmente, não há praticamente tiroteios nas favelas da região, com exceção da Cidade de Deus.

— Nós costumamos brincar que Jacarepaguá tem um policial por metro quadrado. Aqui todo mundo se mobiliza e acredita no trabalho da polícia. Já trabalhei em várias delegacias, mas nunca encontrei um lugar onde tanta gente saísse de sua casa para ajudar a polícia — explicou a delegada, moradora do local.


Tanto para Adriana como para o diretor da Delegacia de Repressão a Entorpecentes (DRE), delegado Rodrigo Oliveira, em Jacarepaguá a única comunidade que ainda tem tráfico é a Cidade de Deus.

— Não chega nenhuma denúncia relacionada ao tráfico de drogas nas outras favelas. Há informações de que isso se deve ao trabalho dos policiais que moram nessas comunidades — disse o delegado.

Mas para o comandante do 18 BPM (Jacarepaguá), tenente-coronel César Lima, responsável pelo policiamento ostensivo, na Caicó, formada por cinco pequenas favelas, ainda há venda de drogas.

-x-x-

Em Rio das Pedras, a ‘mineira’ é a lei


O primeiro modelo de favela sem tráfico surgiu em Rio das Pedras, em Jacarepaguá, onde, de acordo com a associação de moradores, há 60 mil pessoas vivendo. O assunto é tabu entre os moradores, mas os mais corajosos contam que a lei e a ordem no local são mantidas pela “mineira”, grupo armado que mantém afastados os traficantes da região. Há informações de que, para ficarem livres do tráfico, moradores e comerciantes, além daqueles que trabalham com transporte alternativo, são obrigados a contribuir com um valor que varia de acordo com a renda da pessoa. Mesmo com a cobrança, Rio das Pedras é uma das favelas que mais crescem na cidade. Os chamados “puxadinhos” são comuns. Há até uma linha direta de ônibus, uma vez por semana, ligando um estado do Nordeste à favela.

Tudo teria começado com uma guerra interna em 1978, em que os moradores nordestinos enfrentaram os traficantes. Desde então, a “mineira” passou a fazer a segurança do local. Ex-presidente da Associação de Moradores de Rio das Pedras, Josinaldo Cruz, o Nadinho, não gosta de tocar no assunto, mas o prestígio na comunidade que não tem traficantes fez com que ele ganhasse as eleições para vereador pelo PFL. Procurado pelo GLOBO por mais de uma semana, o vereador não quis falar sobre o assunto. Mas, antes de ser candidato, Nadinho chegou a dizer que se o tráfico tentasse entrar na favela iria encontrar resistência.

Além das taxas cobradas pelo integrantes da “mineira”, há denúncias de que o comércio de gás também vem sendo manipulado por eles. Segundo um motorista de caminhão de gás, que não quis ser identificado, apenas uma empresa está autorizada a circular na comunidade. Rio das Pedras é um dos locais onde o botijão de gás custa mais caro: R$ 35, enquanto em favelas vizinhas ele custa R$ 5 a menos.

The Last Drop - Future water problems in Texas

The Last Drop

The good news is that Texas has an incredibly detailed plan for how to deal with the looming shortfalls in every one of its major urban areas. The bad news is that you can’t drink a plan.

by S. C. Gwynne

0915.2035

Everybody remembers September 15, 2035. Just as they can tell you where they were on September 11, 2001, they can recall what they were doing 34 years later on the day that Dallas and Fort Worth ran out of water. It came at the end of a brutal five-year drought. The population had been multiplying like bacteria, residents had done little to conserve their water, and municipal governments had not spent nearly enough money on building new pipelines and reservoirs. Finally, on September 15, a Saturday, the big water suppliers announced that they were shutting down the pipelines. That was the day nothing came out of the faucet. That was the day everything still living withered and died.

Does this seem like a far-fetched scenario, the sort of nightmarish confluence of human error and act of God that could never really happen? Then consider the events of the summer of 2006 in the northern and eastern suburbs of Dallas, a part of the area known to state water planners as Region C. An eighteen-month drought had left Plano, Richardson, Mesquite, and other suburbs in a precarious position, and there was still no rain forecast, no end in sight. As the cities smoldered, the huge reservoirs that served them dropped to ever more alarming levels. Jim Chapman Lake emptied to 15 percent of its capacity, Lavon Lake to 36 percent. People began to realize that there were no backups, no lines to other reservoirs. Water hogs were slapped with fines—more than six thousand levied in Plano alone. Locks were unceremoniously clamped onto delinquent sprinkler systems. Nervous citizens were told they might soon face a stage four emergency, a condition that would mean the end of nearly all lawn watering (and thus, soon enough, of nearly all lawns) and eventually strict rationing.

Luckily, that did not happen. Small rains came in late 2006, followed by very big rains in the spring and summer of 2007. Reservoirs refilled, the crisis was averted, life returned to normal. But for anyone paying attention, the episode was terrifying: 1.6 million people had come within a meteorological whisker of a catastrophic water shortage. And the drought of 2005—2006 was not even a particularly bad one. It was nowhere near as severe as the seven-year drought of the fifties, during which Dallas had to build an emergency pipeline to the Red River. That fix worked, but only because the population of Dallas proper was just 600,000 or so. Today it’s 1.2 million.

The simple fact is that Region C—which includes Tarrant, Dallas, Collin, Denton, Rockwall, and eleven other counties—is getting too big for its water supplies: Ever-increasing numbers of people and businesses are straining resources built to accommodate a much smaller crowd. Unlike the Panhandle and the Llano Estacado, which sit on top of North America’s largest aquifer, the Ogallala, Region C relies almost entirely on surface water; unlike rainy East Texas, its reserves of that commodity are quite limited. This makes Region C uniquely vulnerable to drought. The water contained in the twelve reservoirs that serve Dallas and Fort Worth is completely inadequate to meet future need. The state’s official projections for the water shortfall over the next fifty years are nothing less than astonishing.

These projections begin with explosive growth. Between 2010 and 2060, Region C’s population is expected to roughly double, from 6.6 million to 13.1 million. That will account for 28.5 percent of the state population. Water use will increase 87 percent, from 1.8 million acre-feet per year in 2010 to 3.3 million acre-feet in 2060. Meanwhile, as demand increases dramatically, existing sources of supply—rivers and lakes and groundwater in the area—will actually decline by 9 percent, mostly due to the silting in of reservoirs and the depletion of aquifers, leaving a shortfall of 1.93 million acre-feet per year. That is more than the entire current water usage in the area. (One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, which, broadly speaking, is enough to meet the water needs of two suburban families for one year.)

The water problems that Texas as a whole faces are comparable. Water planners predict that, like Region C, Texas is expected to roughly double its population by 2060, to 46 million. Surface water will be the source of most of the water for our giant urban centers, yet existing groundwater and surface water supplies will drop, by about 18 percent, leaving a mind-boggling statewide shortfall of some 8.8 million acre-feet per year—the equivalent output of 85 large reservoirs.

Every major city in Texas has its own unique water problem: San Antonio relies almost entirely on groundwater and will need to find new supplies in aquifers other than the Edwards, the pumping of which is now limited by law; El Paso, long reliant on water from the Rio Grande and Pecos rivers and groundwater from two primary aquifers, will have to desalinate brackish groundwater and reuse reclaimed water to survive; Houston relies on groundwater and surface water but must wean itself off groundwater, because the more it pumps the more the city sinks into the earth.

Of all these, though, the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth face the worst dilemma, a sort of perfect storm of failing supply and skyrocketing demand, made palpably real by the recent drought. This area is going to need a colossal amount of water in the future. By 2035 it will have exhausted all its existing supplies. Where will it get the water it needs? The answer is not clear-cut, but the problem may be starting to make itself understood. “The perception here changed after 2005—2006,” says Jim Parks, the executive director of the North Texas Municipal Water District, which came under fire after the crisis for failing to provide sufficient reserves. “People started realizing that it is not a God-given right that water is going to be in those reservoirs.”

Among the fifty states, Texas may rank near the bottom in many categories—including environmental protection (forty-fifth), quality of parks and recreation (forty-ninth), and availability of mental health care (forty-sixth)—but there is one area of public policy where it ranks indisputably first: water planning. No other state knows with such precision how much water it has and how much it will have in the future. Every five years the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), the state’s lead water planning and financing agency, produces a prodigious work of hydrologic scholarship known as the State Water Plan. Divvying up the state into sixteen regions, the plan pre-sents precisely articulated data on current and future supply and demand in each region and strategies for dealing with shortfalls. The 2007 version outlines more than 4,500 strategies to fix the fifty-year shortfall. All told, the price tag comes to $30.7 billion (Region C’s share is $13.2 billion). By contrast, the state of Georgia, whose principal city, Atlanta, came famously close to running out of water last year, has historically dedicated few resources to determining how much water it has, how much it will need, how well it can weather a drought, and what it will cost to fix its shortfalls.

Why is Texas so good at this? In part because its main population centers are located on the edge of what people used to call the Great American Desert. This historically treeless zone begins roughly at the 98th meridian, a line of latitude that bisects the state along the Interstate 35 corridor. With one foot in the semiarid or arid prairies and plains of the American West and the other in the rainy forests of the East, Texas has been hit hard, and often, by catastrophic droughts. The drought of the 1890’s killed off much of its nascent cattle industry. In the fifties a seven-year drought (Texas’s worst statewide drought ever) destroyed much of the state’s agriculture and caused 244 of the state’s 254 counties to be declared federal disaster areas. This led the state legislature to create the Texas Water Development Board, which published its first water plan in 1961.

The Last Drop

by S. C. Gwynne

(Page 2 of 4)

The board continued to meet, and its strategies grew more sophisticated, but by the late eighties it had become clear that its plans were not being acted on sufficiently. The planners in Austin were planning, but people in the rest of the state weren’t paying much attention. The short but viciously harsh drought of 1996 changed all that, leading directly to the unprecedented 1997 law requiring the regions of the state to come up with their own fifty-year plans. It also said that in order to be approved, any water rights or projects had to be included in the state water plan. It wasn’t until a decade later, however, that the water board got some real teeth. Legislation spearheaded by Republican senator Kip Averitt, of Waco, in 2007 gave the state the power to actually finance water projects, including more than three quarters of a billion dollars’ worth now in development. The water board now had some control over what got built and what didn’t. The bill also gave priorities in financing to cities with conservation plans and set in motion a process to establish a minimum “environmental flow” (or, an acceptable water level) for every stream and river in the state. These may sound like modest advances. In the world of water management, they were landmarks.

What all of this means is that there is, in fact, a plan for how to slake Region C’s thirst. It consists of four main strategies, staged to kick in at intervals over the next forty years: (1) Build four big reservoirs; (2) build pipelines to six lakes that are not currently hooked up to Metroplex water systems; (3) reuse wastewater, both in irrigation and cooling systems and by recycling it through rivers and wetlands; and (4) use less water (in the plan, conservation accounts for 11 percent of the future water supply).

On paper this plan looks sensible. Most of the water in the state is in East Texas—which gets 50 to 60 inches of rain per year, compared with the Metroplex’s 36 inches—so it makes sense for the big suppliers to look there for new water. It makes sense to build new reservoirs to hold that new water and to build new lines to pipe it to Region C. It makes sense to reuse water and to promote conservation. But in spite of how reasonable the TWDB’s plan might seem, it is going to be brutally difficult to carry out. Even to call it a plan may be inaccurate, since planning carries a certain expectation of accomplishment. Perhaps “vision” would be a better word. The TWDB’s problem, and ours, is that its vision is not shared by everyone. There are, in fact, significant disagreements over how the agency assesses our future water needs and how it proposes to satisfy them.

One of the best ways to understand the hurdles Region C’s water plan will have to overcome is to head for the bottomlands of the Sulphur River, about fifty miles outside Texarkana, in northeast Texas. Few of this area’s tiny communities can be found on a map. It is a place of small farms and ranches, dirt roads and oak forests, pastures and lovely rolling post oak savanna. It is also a land of creeks and sloughs and floodplains and the lush hardwood river bottom, and this has made it a big part of the proposed solution to the looming urban water shortages in the Metroplex. Region C’s basic strategy for the next half a century is quite simple: Lay pipelines eastward, to the rain-rich and relatively unpopulated regions of East Texas, where large dams and reservoirs will be built. The largest of these, by far, is the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir. At 72,000 acres (113 square miles), it would radically transform the Sulphur River area. Water planners insist that without it, Region C’s future will be in grave danger.

That’s not how Max Shumake sees it. Last November, I toured the river bottom with him from his hunting camp, a pretty place with an ancient single-wide, a couple of ATVs, and some chairs and tables with rifles spread across them. A dead bobcat hung splayed upside down from an old oak tree. Shumake and his family own 797 acres here. His view of what will happen to this land if Marvin Nichols gets built is stark. “Nothing that you see here will remain,” he said ruefully. “Cemeteries, churches, farms, ranches, and families that have been here for five generations. A healthy timber industry. Where you are standing now will be nine feet underwater.”

Shumake is the president of the Sulphur River Oversight Society (SOS), a local landowner group formed to oppose Marvin Nichols. It now claims six thousand members, the support of every state legislator in the area, and the backing of such environmental powerhouses as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation. SOS and other reservoir opponents say that between the 72,000-acre lake and an additional 163,000 acres of federally mandated environmental “mitigation,” the Marvin Nichols project will not only destroy ranches and farms of multigenerational residents but also obliterate wildlife habitat, submerge 30,000 acres of rare hardwood bottomlands, and disrupt more than forty miles of a river that has already been dammed twice. The local timber industry would lose up to 1,300 jobs and $275 million in annual revenue, according to the Texas Forest Service.

“We just don’t think it is fair,” said Shumake, “to ask us to give up everything so that North Texas can put up to sixty percent of its water into watering lawns.”

His argument has two parts: (1) Dallas and Fort Worth consume water at a rate well above other big Texas cities and want to build new reservoirs only to avoid having to adopt more-difficult measures, such as limiting lawn watering (which on summer days does indeed account for 60 percent of all municipal use), and (2) there are other untapped sources of surface water, such as Toledo Bend Reservoir, on the Sabine River; Lake Texoma, on the Oklahoma border; and Wright Patman Lake, farther downstream on the Sulphur River, that should be used first. Shumake may be a country boy, but last spring his group and its allies showed their political muscle, causing a major fight in the state legislature over the preliminary designation of the four reservoir sites. They lost that fight but sent a clear message: Dallas and Fort Worth are in for a long, bloody struggle over the building of Marvin Nichols.

It will be even harder to build Fastrill Reservoir, another of the state’s proposed water sources, located about 130 miles due south of Shumake’s camp, on the upper Neches River. City of Dallas water planners have coveted the upper Neches for damming and impoundment. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) beat them to the punch by declaring it part of a national wildlife refuge in 2006. Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Water Development Board were furious, warning that the future of Dallas’s water supplies was at risk and that the feds were intruding into state water policy. In response, both the City of Dallas and the TWDB filed suits against the FWS, while some 20,000 Texans wrote letters in support of the refuge. Whatever the outcome of the suit (and right now it doesn’t look good for the plaintiffs), environmentalists have vowed to fight to protect the roughly 25,000 acres of forested wetlands.

It was not always this difficult to build dams and reservoirs. In the early and mid-twentieth century, reservoirs reigned supreme in the world of water management. In Texas, the heyday of the “big dam era” lasted from the thirties to the eighties. After that, the popularity of reservoirs began to wane, mostly for environmental reasons: They displace populations, destroy habitat and rivers, and negatively affect the condition and salinity of coastal estuaries. Plus they’re hard to build. Even if you can jump the political, environmental, and bureaucratic hurdles necessary to get one approved, it is likely to take fifteen to twenty years to actually finish one—nearly the same time horizon as for a new nuclear power plant. Of Texas’s 196 major reservoirs, 169 were built before 1980.

The responsibility for building Region C’s new reservoirs lies with the three giant utilities that control 75 percent of the area’s water: the Tarrant Regional Water District, the North Texas Municipal Water District, and Dallas Water Utilities. Tarrant and North Texas are wholesalers, selling water to cities; Dallas Water performs both wholesale and retail functions. Because there is little groundwater in the area, these governmental organizations with elected boards have by nature and tradition always been reservoir builders, securing their water by damming rivers in the Trinity River Basin. Dallas Water has five reservoirs, Tarrant Regional has four, and North Texas Municipal has three.

To a large extent, the future prosperity of Region C is in the hands of these agencies, and if you listen to the people who run them (and to the governor and a large number of elected state officials), new reservoirs are crucial to supplying the population’s future water needs. Water planners have proposed nineteen across the state. But the experiences with Nichols and Fastrill suggest that many—even most—may never see the light of day.

Reservoirs are just a part of the problem Dallas and Fort Worth will face in their attempt to pipe water from rural East Texas. Shumake is right—one of the most logical sources of supply in the area is the giant Toledo Bend Reservoir, in far East Texas, a little-used reservoir that was completed in 1969 by damming the Sabine River. It is the largest man-made body of water in the South and the fifth largest, by surface acres, in the United States. The river above it drains an area of 7,190 square miles. It is also, most importantly, the largest pool of water in the state that remains untapped by any large user, capable of producing an enormous two million acre-feet of water per year (Louisiana has rights to half of that). For this reason, Toledo Bend figures heavily in the water plan as a major source for all three of the big wholesalers.

The Last Drop

by S. C. Gwynne

(Page 3 of 4)

But actually getting hold of its water will not be easy. First, there’s the fact that the only way to transport water from Toledo Bend to the Metroplex is via a two-hundred-plus-mile, mostly uphill pipeline. Estimated cost: $1.1 billion. Estimated time to secure all the environmental permits and interbasin transfer rights: maybe twenty years. Aside from that, there are the possible environmental protections. Though nothing quite so violent as a new reservoir is being constructed, taking large amounts of water away from a river’s ecology has profound effects over the long term. The Sabine River Basin is a complex ecosystem that includes habitat for all sorts of animals. Precious cypress-tupelo swamps flourish near the river’s mouth. A large drop in river flow means higher salinity in the Gulf, coastal wetlands, and other sensitive areas. All this will provide the opposition with considerable ammunition, especially considering the 2007 water bill’s directive to the Legislature to establish minimum environmental flows.

“Everything becomes a trade-off,” says Kelly Brumbelow, a professor of civil engineering at Texas A&M University and a leading authority on water management. “You can move that water around, but only if you are willing to accept significant ecological impacts. Only if you are willing to take all of these estuaries and riverine ecosystems in East Texas and sacrifice them.” For decades, a willingness to make those trade-offs has paved the way for new dams and reservoirs. But Brumbelow says this is changing. “The students I see around here,” he explains, “the ones who are going to be making the decisions twenty or twenty-five years from now, they’re much more comfortable with the idea of environmental protection.”

The most obvious solution to the water problem is to use less water. This notion is both crushingly obvious and completely ignored by the average Texas water hog, who blithely takes thirty-minute showers, fills and refills his backyard pool, and runs the sprinkler for two hours a day, four days a week. Except in times of extreme drought, conservation, especially in big cities, is just not high on anyone’s agenda. This may be partly because, in Region C at least, municipal governments and utilities have never tried to make the case that it should be.

As a commodity, water is valueless. The utilities are granted free permits for it by the state. They do not pay for the water. What we pay them is based only on what it costs them to store it, haul it from the reservoir, and pay the salaries of their employees. Though a number of private landowners are starting to actually sell their groundwater to cities like San Antonio and El Paso, the overwhelming majority of the state’s water has no commodity value, as does, say, a barrel of oil. Because of this, business and industry have never been compelled to view it as anything particularly precious. Water in Texas is an economic paradox: It is rare, yes, but it is also dirt cheap, something nobody has ever cared much about saving.

The key measure of water consumption is gallons per capita per day. According to the TWDB’s most recent data, Richardson is the biggest user among Texas cities, at 275 gallons. Dallas isn’t far behind at 238. Plano is at 225. By contrast, Austin uses only 177 gallons per person per day, and San Antonio 142. Though the numbers are almost certainly skewed against the Metroplex because of the presence of so much industry, the area has done so little to promote conservation that it remains vulnerable to criticisms such as Shumake’s that it is draining the rivers, lakes, and wetlands of East Texas merely to water its lawns.

What complicates water conservation is that the big water wholesalers, like Tarrant Regional and North Texas Municipal, are not in a position to enforce it. (Dallas Water, within the city limits, is an exception.) Only the buyers of their water, the municipalities, can set watering rules or other consumption limits. The result is a hodgepodge of unorganized, unorchestrated conservation practices that vary widely from city to city. The state, of course, could take control of the matter and mandate strict conservation, but don’t hold your breath. It is extremely difficult to try and set consumption limits in a state where rainfall ranges from 55 inches per year, in Beaumont, to 10 inches a year, in El Paso. People in Port Arthur do not usually need to water their lawns; in Midland, lawns and gardens wither quickly without frequent irrigation.

Perhaps more important, there are the obstacles of culture and tradition. Most Americans bristle at the suggestion that limits be placed on their personal freedoms. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have come to include luxuriant showers, daily dishwasher cycles, and backyard hot tubs and pools. What’s more, for many Texans, especially those in fast-growing suburbs, lawns and gardens are regarded as an inalienable right. The look and feel, not to mention the dollar value, of homes in booming, affluent communities like Southlake and Frisco is based on St. Augustine grass and decorative shrubs. This is real money, and people will not want to give it up, no matter how much they are harangued about the moral righteousness and environmental correctness of Xeriscaping with ornamental cacti.

That is not to say that anyone is giving up. Water awareness campaigns are in their infancy in most of the state. And San Antonio—now the water planner’s poster child for smart conservation—has had enormous success in curtailing consumption. The city offers all sorts of carrot-and-stick incentives to save water: up to $525 in rebates for replanting your yard with low-water plants, a $100 washing machine rebate to replace your old water hog, free water-efficient toilets. New laws were also passed in 2005 and 2007 that require drought-tolerant grass for all new homes and businesses and rain sensors for lawn irrigation systems; prohibit charity car washes, except in existing commercial facilities; and require annual checkups for any watering system covering more than five acres. The city is now aggressively seeking out and working with golf courses and other mega-consumers to develop plans to save water. The result is a per capita consumption rate so admirably low that San Antonio has become the benchmark for conservation around the state.

But while individual consumers and businesses get most of the blame for poor conservation, one of the worst water wasters of all is neither a person nor a company. It is the system itself. Leaks. Much of the infrastructure that carries our water was built during the big-dam era and is now forty to fifty years old and badly deteriorated. In Fort Worth, a 2005 water audit showed that 7.2 billion gallons of water were lost to leakage—a thumping 16.7 percent of all the water used in the city that year.

“This is one of the dirty little secrets of urban water utilities,” says Brumbelow, the A&M professor. “There are lots of older utilities out there that are not doing a good job of keeping up their infrastructure. We’ve seen losses as high as forty percent.” (An extreme example of this elsewhere in the state is the Rio Grande Valley, where old, unlined dirt canals are used to get the water out to the fields, allowing literally millions of gallons to seep away into the ground.) The problem is bad enough that the TWDB now requires all retail public water suppliers to do water audits every five years. But knowing you have a leak and fixing it are not the same thing. As with so many other examples of sagging American infrastructure, no one wants to spend the billions of dollars it will cost to replace all the pipes, valves, pumps, and other hardware.

The final form of conservation in the state water plan goes by the innocuous-sounding name of “reuse.” It’s a wonderful concept, in all its forms. It means, quite simply, that water we have already used we will use again. Let’s take the most ordinary example. You flush your toilet, sending three and a half gallons of water and waste down the drain. The sewage system ferries your deposit to a wastewater treatment plant, where it is run through a series of filters. Sixty percent of the water in that plant ends up back in your local river. (It may dismay you to learn that in many rivers, particularly the ones downstream of a major city, much of the water you see is treated effluent. It’s fairly clean, though, often cleaner than the “wild” river water it is dumped back into.)

Once the effluent has been returned to the local rivers, it can be used to water golf courses, fill cooling towers at power plants, or in other applications that do not involve consumption. Theoretically, it can also be put directly into a reservoir to be consumed, presumably by you. Because of the gross-out factor inherent in such a process, this does not currently happen (nor is it envisioned in the 2007 water plan). However, in the most sophisticated and ingenious use, the river-borne effluent is pumped into a reservoir to be consumed, but not before being filtered by an artificially constructed wetland.

The Last Drop

by S. C. Gwynne

(Page 4 of 4)

That may sound a bit rarefied, the sort of experimental technology found only at research facilities, but exactly this kind of reuse accounts for an enormous amount of the water intended to save the Metroplex. It will come in the form of two projects. This year North Texas Municipal will complete a $250 million, 1,840-acre wetland on the east fork of the Trinity River, just east of the city of Dallas. The low-quality, sediment-filled water, mostly effluent and urban runoff, will be pumped into one side of the wetland; seven days later it will emerge on the other side, cleaner than the water in most reservoirs. This project is critical to the water supply of those same suburbs that were stricken by the 2005¬2006 drought and will help to ensure that a similar near-catastrophe does not take place again. The East Fork Raw Water Supply Project will generate 102,000 acre-feet of water per year, approximately the equivalent of one major reservoir.

A win-win situation, right? Not exactly. Even with such benign, natural technologies there is controversy. Farther down on the Trinity, the Tarrant Regional Water District has built an even bigger wetland, one that will produce 188,000 acre-feet per year. But in order to get rights to that water, the utility had to endure eight years of tough negotiations with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the cities of Houston and Dallas, and various Galveston Bay organizations. Why? Because by reusing Region C’s effluent, Tarrant Regional would effectively be siphoning off water that would normally flow downstream in the Trinity to Houston and the Gulf. Houston depends on the Trinity for almost all of its surface water. (Which, by the way, means that on any given summer day some 95 percent of the water filling Houston’s two main reservoirs is effluent from Dallas and Fort Worth. Yes, that’s what I said: The toilets of Dallas supply the faucets and drinking fountains of Houston.)

“Reuse can add tremendously to the water supplies of Fort Worth and Dallas,” says Ronald Kaiser, a professor of water law and policy and the chair of the Texas A&M Graduate Water Degree Program. “But there are real limits to what they can do. If they reused all of their water, for example, several things would happen. The ecology of the Trinity would change dramatically. The river would run dry. But the big impact would be that Houston would come unglued because they have come to rely on those base flows.” Reuse—that great idea—will likely occasion major battles between Dallas and Houston in the coming years as these two thirsty populations compete for the dregs of the Trinity basin.

So if Region C doesn’t get its water from pipelines to East Texas, strict conservation, or reuse, where will it get its water? T. Boone Pickens thinks the answer to this question could be worth a lot of money. Never one to let an opportunity pass by, Pickens has come up with a scheme to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer and sell it to the big suppliers in Region C. The Ogallala is pumped on a massive scale, irrigating corn, cotton, wheat, and sorghum crops in the areas around Lubbock and Amarillo and accounting for about 40 percent of all the water used in the state of Texas. Of course, it is being slowly depleted and sometime in the next century will run completely dry. But in the meantime, Pickens has been buying up groundwater rights in the area. His idea is to get one or more of the Metroplex’s three big suppliers to finance the building of a pipeline for about $2 billion; once the pipes are up and running, he’ll sell Region C the water in them.

This may sound like a perfect, if somewhat ecologically irresponsible, match of supply and demand, but in fact Pickens’s water is extremely expensive compared with the alternatives. According to a recent engineering study, his water would cost some $2.60 per thousand gallons, more than three times what it would cost to get water from the new reservoir on lower Bois d’Arc Creek (one of the four East Texas reservoirs proposed for Region C). Pickens’ scheme also costs more than piping water in from Toledo Bend. According to the main suppliers, there are only two sources of water more expensive than Pickens’s—a large aquifer that stretches south and east of Dallas, called the Carrizo-Wilcox, and the Gulf of Mexico (though, due to its prohibitive cost, desalinated Gulf water is not yet in the picture).

But Pickens persists. His project relies on the near absence of state regulation of groundwater. This circumstance may be short-lived—most water experts expect more-stringent state groundwater regulation in the next 25 years—but for now groundwater from either Pickens or the Carrizo-Wilcox remains on the table for all three water suppliers.

“Boone’s thing is certainly feasible,” says Jim Oliver, the general manager of the Texas Municipal Water District. “Water from the Carrizo-Wilcox is also feasible. But their markup is incredible, and they want a whole lot more money than what we can build other reservoirs for. Boone is revising his model. But he is just going to have to get real.”

In the midst of all this uncertainty about the future of the region’s water supply lies a single, tantalizing possibility. A solution so complete, a water supply so prodigious that it could take Region C through the next two centuries and actually remove the need for East Texas reservoirs like Marvin Nichols and Fastrill. From an engineering and cost perspective, it is astoundingly simple and cheap. The project was not included in the plan because of its extraordinary political sensitivity, which you will understand immediately when you learn the source of this gigantic volume of water: Oklahoma.

This is not a new idea. Oklahoma, particularly its eastern half, is swimming in rainwater, more water than its population of 3.6 million people (a little more than half that of the Metroplex) could ever imagine needing or using. In the eighties, the City of Dallas was behind a bill in the Oklahoma legislature that would have allowed Texas access to water from Oklahoma reservoirs. It failed, as did a similar attempt in 2000 by an alliance of suppliers and cities led by North Texas Municipal. Both efforts were met with heavy political opposition: “The Texans are coming to steal our water” and so forth. Oklahomans were so upset that they slapped a moratorium on all out-of-state water transfers.

Then the folks at Tarrant Regional came up with a solution. What if, instead of sticking Texas straws into Oklahoma reservoirs, they took the water after it left those reservoirs but before it hit the Red River (which is so salty it needs treatment)? Water, in other words, that Oklahoma does not use, water that normally flows into the Red River and then down through Louisiana, which has more water than it knows what to do with, and finally out into the Gulf of Mexico. There are 8 million acre-feet of such water, more than four times what Region C will need fifty years from now and nearly the total shortfall for the entire state of Texas in 2060. Tarrant Regional’s proposal is to take roughly 4 percent of this water from three pipeline access points: Cache Creek and Beaver Creek, in the western part of the state, and the Kiamichi River, in the east. They are willing to pay for it, and they agree that they would never have any rights to water in the reservoir itself. (The water would be shared by the three big suppliers.)

But a large number of Oklahomans still hate the idea of Texans sniffing around their water, fearing that this would be the first step in a larger assault on their drinking and sporting supplies. Tarrant Regional has sued Oklahoma in federal court, saying that the moratorium is unconstitutional. If it wins that case, it would then be allowed to apply for permits. If it gets such permits, it would probably not have to pay for the water, which is why the Oklahoma legislature is already playing a high-risk game. Like everything else in the water business, this will likely take years to negotiate and settle and then many more years before the pipelines are completed.

The Texas Water Development Board’s 2007 plan offers an implicit warning to the people of Region C: Implement the four proposed strategies (new reservoirs, new pipelines, reuse, and conservation) or your farms will die, your businesses will go bankrupt, and your cities will dry up. But as we’ve seen, executing even just one of these strategies can be demonically complex. Water politics are by nature deeply adversarial. There are literally thousands of competing interests. It is almost impossible to put forward a plan of any kind that does not cause harm to someone, somewhere. The issue is a sort of paradise for lawyers. Programs like “interbasin transfer” promise hellish, multiyear court battles. The environmentalists and “NIMBYists” who have tried to stop Fastrill and Marvin Nichols are merely previews of the future conflicts that will rage in Texas.

These conflicts will pit vote-rich cities against rural areas, farmers against suburbs and exurbs, Dallas against Houston, the Metroplex against landowners in the Panhandle, environmentalists against business and residential water users, Texas against Oklahoma and Louisiana, and Texas against federal and local governments. And when all the smoke has cleared, there is no guarantee that anyone will have been able to avert that hypothetical water catastrophe of September 15, 2035. It is entirely possible that the state that knows everything about its water problems may be powerless to solve them.

Links referenced within this article S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php

Find this article at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-02-01/feature3.php?click_code=3ae47701fdff8cf7b5a769e5a5fb2157

The End of Oil is Nigh

The Gospel According to Matthew

For more than twenty years, an extremely successful Houston investment banker has been trying to convince the world that the end (of oil) is nigh. Now that people are finally starting to listen, is it too late?

by Mimi Swartz

2020.2025.2037

The Coronado Club, in downtown Houston, is an unlikely place to contemplate the end of life as we know it. Plush and hushed, with solemn black waiters in crisp black jackets, the private enclave practically exudes wealth and stability. Captains of local industry enter and exit purposefully, commanding their usual tables, wearing the best suits. Everybody knows everybody else. The light is flattering. The wine room is nicely stocked.

But here is Matthew R. Simmons, the head of one of the largest investment banking firms in the world, stabbing at his salad greens and heatedly discussing the chaos to come when, as he has long predicted, global oil production peaks and for the rest of our time on earth we struggle and suffer and barely endure under a diminishing supply of fuel until it disappears entirely. This idea is known as “peak oil,” and Simmons is its most fervent, and fearsome, apostle. As he puts it, “I don’t see why people are so worried about global warming destroying the planet—peak oil will take care of that.”

Slashing through his entrée, barely stopping for breath, he describes a bleak future, in which demand for oil will always surpass supply, the price will continue to rise—“so fast your head will spin”—and all sorts of problems in our carbon-dependent world will ensue. As fuel shortfalls complicate global delivery routes and leave farmers unable to run their tractors, we will face massive food shortages. Products made with petroleum, from asphalt and plastic to fabrics and computer chips, will also become scarcer and scarcer. Standards of living will fall, and people will not be able to pay their debts. Lending will tighten, and eventually there will be major defaults. Growth will cease, and hoarding will set in as oil becomes increasingly rare. Then, according to Simmons, the wars will begin. That is the peak oil scenario.

Simmons is an unlikely Cassandra in this, the energy capital of the world. He is a consummate insider—a friend of Mayor Bill White’s and of innumerable nabobs in the local as well as global energy business, a graduate with distinction from Harvard Business School, a Republican who advised presidential candidate George W. Bush on energy policy, and an extremely wealthy man. In 2006 his investment firm, Simmons and Company International, closed 35 transactions worth $8.7 billion and co-managed 19 offerings worth $6.7 billion. He lives with his wife, Ellen, in one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods and also owns a vacation house in Maine.

Yet at 64, Simmons opts to spend his days traveling the globe at his own expense, speaking at universities and business forums and to tiny alumni groups and just about anyone else, trying to convince an uninformed, uninterested populace that the end is very, very near. Like a lot of prophets, he has little patience for those who disagree with his message. He is an intense man, smallish and ruddy-complexioned, with a high, wide forehead and marble-blue eyes. Old ways of thinking—that the market will correct for skyrocketing prices, that the Saudis will always provide—drive him buggy. “Price has no impact on slowing demand,” he insists, as an anxious waiter hovers. “We’ve seen a stealth growth of eighteen million barrels a day, while the demand between the end of 1995 and last week went up tenfold.” What about when everyone said that Saudi Arabia was hiding vast reserves, ready to flood the world market and cause a price collapse? “That was the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he snaps. “What giant new oil finds have they reported in the last decade or so?”

Hardly anything escapes Simmons’s ire. He has no respect for those who, in his estimation, have not done their homework as diligently as he has. Daniel Yergin, one of the world’s foremost authorities on oil? “A silly person,” Simmons says. Ethanol? “A tragic scam.” Big Oil? “A brain-dead industry.” Pushing aside his plate, Simmons gives the top oil companies grades of D+, D-, D, and F, declaring, “The head of Exxon is a flake.”

“People used to talk about how tech had changed the name of the game in oil field development,” he reminisces, barely able to conceal his disgust with earlier industry predictions. “They said costs would come down. I thought it was BS. Tech sped up the decline curves.” He shoots his left arm nearly straight up, his palm stiff, like a rocket on takeoff. Then, hardly pausing to chew his food, he continues: “I spent two decades convincing myself that most conventional oil myths weren’t true. People thought I was nuts. They called me Matt the Alarmist.” Now he believes—“knows” might be a better word—that his conclusions spell doom for the American way of life unless people heed his warnings.

“The best we can hope for is a ten-year plateau,” Simmons says, skipping coffee. “This controversy is the single biggest risk for the twenty-first century.”

So can anything be done?

He looks sharply at me, the Coronado Club’s soft light reflected in his glasses, and shrugs, suddenly out of gas himself. “I’m a lot more concerned than I was three years ago,” he says.

the term “peak oil” was coined by M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with Shell in the forties and fifties. At the time, the United States was the largest producer of oil in the world. But in 1956 Hubbert predicted that American oil dominance would peak fourteen years into the future. Though he was considered a serious crank by some contemporaries, just about everyone now knows that Hubbert was right. American crude production has been in decline since 1970, resulting in our current reliance on—some might say addiction to—foreign oil.

Hubbert’s model proposed that production of resources with a finite supply could be expected to follow a more or less symmetrical bell curve, meaning that the rate of decline once the peak was reached would be the same as the rate of increase had been. In other words, if worldwide oil production peaked in 2000, as Hubbert predicted it would, the rate of production in 2010 would match the rate in 1990. While Hubbert was wrong about his second prediction, many peak oil theorists believe he wasn’t wrong by much—that, in fact, peak oil was reached in 2005. Others put the date further into the future. The most optimistic peak oil supporters estimate that production will begin to decline after 2037.

Meanwhile, the peak oil debate has become one of the most fractious of our time, with Simmons and other advocates squaring off against their critics, not just over the timing of this supposed disaster but indeed over whether it will happen at all. Analysts like Yergin, who runs Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), contend that we are decades away from a peak, that there is plenty of oil left in the ground, and that new technologies will soon come online to help extract it more efficiently. This view, known as “nondramatic peak oil,” has a number of proponents, including the U.S. Geological Survey.

Other critics dispute Hubbert’s premise itself, arguing that oil production may never peak (this idea has been dubbed “cornucopian” by peak oil followers). There’s even a radical idea, known as the Abiogenic Theory, that holds that most petroleum comes not from dinosaur fossils but from naturally occurring carbon deposits, possibly dating to the formation of the earth, which are being regenerated as we speak. All attempts to understand production are vexed by the fact that oil reserves are always subject to debate. Just as it can be difficult to determine the status of a weapons program halfway around the world, it’s never easy to verify a country’s claims about how much oil it has.

In fact, Simmons and many others believe that Saudi Arabia, the largest supplier of oil to the U.S., has been fudging its production numbers for quite some time. In 1989 the famously secretive country claimed to have 170 billion barrels of oil in reserve. In 1990 the number had risen to 257 billion, despite the fact that no substantial fields had been discovered in Saudi Arabia since the Ghawar Oil Field, in the forties. Furthermore, oil in a new field gushes easily from the ground, and the complex technology now required to coax the oil from Ghawar and other large Saudi fields suggests that they are in deep decline.

Simmons believes that the worldwide peak was reached in 2005. He estimates the rate of decline for all oil production at somewhere north of 5 percent a year. At the same time, the global need for oil is expanding exponentially, particularly as China and India claim their places on the world stage. In India energy needs are expected to grow 72 percent by 2025; China’s are expected to roughly double during the same time frame. In seventeen years the world’s demand for oil may well be more than 50 percent greater than it is today, while production capacity may well sink to 1985 levels.

Most of the globe remains oblivious to this impending crisis, but the number of people who have come to see its logic is growing. The once-skeptical Energy Information Administration, a U.S. government bureau that keeps tabs on oil production, is slowly buying the argument, as is Sadad Al-Husseini, the former executive vice president of exploration and producing for Saudi Aramco. Simmons spends much of his day strategizing via BlackBerry with other peak oil believers, like Colin Campbell, the famed geologist; David Rutledge, a Caltech electrical engineering professor and wireless-communications expert; Robert L. Hirsch, a senior energy program adviser at the government-friendly Science Applications International Corporation; Maryland congressman Roscoe Bartlett; Randy Udall, the son of former Arizona congressman Mo Udall; and yes, T. Boone Pickens.

The Gospel According to Matthew

by Mimi Swartz

(Page 2 of 3)

Simmons’s Web site, immonsco-intl.com, which had just shy of 10 million visitors in 2006 alone, is designed to spread the word with a helpful if somewhat daunting compendium of gloomy speeches, papers, and PowerPoint presentations (“A Hungry World in Search of More Oil,” “Autopsy of Our Energy Crisis,” “Summer’s Over: Preparing for a Winter of Dis-content”). There is an ever-growing list of Web sites devoted to peak oil: theoildrum.com, oilcrash.com, and peakoilblues.com, a site dedicated solely to the emotional fallout of declining oil production. All hail Simmons as a hero and pose the kinds of questions no one much wants to think about answering. For instance: “If your family were permitted to purchase only five gallons of gasoline per week, how would this change your lifestyle?” Or the somewhat perkier query: “Given the likelihood of oil shortages in the future, what might be good careers for young people making choices today?”

This growing anxiety may help to explain why one resource that seems to be in decline along with the availability of fossil fuels is the optimism that was always so intrinsic to the oil-and-gas business. It used to be that if you went broke today, you could always start over tomorrow, and in the meantime the country club would keep your membership on the books until your next well came in. But suddenly people in Houston and beyond are beginning to suspect that there might not be many more giant deposits—in the North Sea, the Middle East, Venezuela, or even the deep end of the ocean—so somebody had better start talking about life after oil.

That job has fallen to Simmons, thanks in large part to his evangelical zeal. “Peak oil is not as complicated a topic as people think it is,” he likes to say. But getting people to grasp the ramifications—and adapt—is much harder.

It is a suspiciously warm Tuesday in early December, and Simmons has just flown from Houston to Miami on a chartered plane to give a speech to the International Regulators Offshore Safety Conference, a worldwide organization dedicated to offshore rig safety. Simmons never charges for these presentations because he feels they are the perfect marketing opportunity for his investment firm. “Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs have spent billions of dollars on advertising. We don’t spend any,” he says, his eyes twinkling with the thought of more than a few pennies saved. “When I speak, I get a sublime introduction. It’s branding of the highest order.”

Today he wears a natty battleship-blue suit set off with a white monogrammed shirt and a theme-appropriate camel-patterned Ferragamo tie. Simmons’ speech is titled “Is Our Energy System ‘Sustainable’? ” He has already told me on the ride over that the answer is no, but after a decade of being known as Dr. Gloom, he likes to present his information as coolly as possible. “If you try to make it dramatic . . . well, it’s dramatic enough,” he says. He’s convinced too that “reasonably intelligent people can absorb bad news as long as it isn’t presented smugly.”

After what is indeed a very florid intro given by a Swede (more than twenty nations are represented at this meeting), Simmons takes the stage confidently. Screens on either side of him display his slides of doom. In about fifteen minutes, he goes through a variation on his usual speech. Our refineries are decrepit. Demand from developing countries will exponentially increase. Seventeen percent of our daily supply comes from only ten supergiant fields, and if their reported production numbers are correct, all are in decline. The North Sea is depleted. Brazil is problematic. The “easy era” of offshore oil and gas is over.

“These aren’t new fields,” Simmons tells the crowd. “The newer fields are aging at an even faster rate, because the production is so intense to satisfy demand.” He moves on to the incredible increase in the price of drilling ($2 billion to $4 billion is now the norm; estimates for a new project in the Caspian Sea are about $137 billion) and the protracted time it will take to get new wells online.

The optimism espoused by critics of peak oil is “faith based,” he tells the crowd, dependent on questionable reserve reports, the unproven ability of technology to come to the rescue, and the highly theoretical availability of vast Canadian tar sands to replace the light, sweet crude of today. To counter those who say that market corrections will bring oil prices down, he projects a slide showing that demand for oil is currently “insatiable” at a time when many oil basins have already peaked. Need is so great here in the U.S. and in developing countries that improved technology only speeds the depletion of what’s left in the ground. Oil demand, Simmons says, could exceed 115 million barrels a day by 2020, an amount that will still leave China and India “energy paupers.”

Simmons’s critics often cite past price collapses, which theoretically indicate that there remains plenty of oil that can be provided with the turn of a well-timed spigot. But price declines have been short-lived, Simmons says, and while production has accelerated over the past decade, prices have soared. The best he has to offer is that high oil prices—up to $200 and $300 a barrel—could have a positive outcome, but only if the profits are spent on exploring, rebuilding infrastructure, and closing the ever-widening economic gap among people in the politically unstable nations of the oil-rich Middle East.

Clicking to his last slide, titled “It Is Easy to Miss an Approaching Crisis,” Simmons quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: “Revolutions, before they happen, appear to be impossible and after they occur they appeared to have been inevitable.” The illustration is of a rearview mirror reflecting rusting oil barrels, a drilling rig, storage tanks, a list of rising oil prices, and the words “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

Afterward, Simmons makes his way quickly to the elevator. He usually stays around to pick up industry scuttlebutt about declining fields and faulty data, but he’s headed for South Africa the next morning, so he punches the button briskly.

A tall gray-haired man stops to say hello. “Great presentation,” he says.

“It’s not great news,” Simmons responds.

The man nods. “Most of us are gonna go jump off our balconies about now.”

Suicidal depression is not exactly the response Simmons would like his speeches to provoke, but it is preferable to the derision or indifference that his pitch used to receive. On the jet speeding back to Houston, with the Gulf of Mexico shimmering far below us, he explains his conversion from conventional businessman to pariah to, perhaps, visionary.

Born in Utah, in 1943, he grew up comfortably in a large, actively Mormon family believing he would follow his father into commercial banking. He had a hearty American childhood, reading Mad magazine and spending summers working on a cattle ranch. A naturally competitive child, he found his way in high school to the debate team, where he excelled. He still remembers the dicey topics—such as Nuclear Disarmament—and that he lost a state championship by being overconfident. The loss taught him that “the guy who had the best data owned the floor.”

After graduating from Harvard Business School, Simmons ignored the entreaties of professors who wanted him to teach and instead set about doing what he liked best, raising capital. He worked out of a small office in a tony section of Boston (“If you work on a shoestring, you don’t look like a serious person,” he says). His introduction to the world of oil and gas came in 1969, when he traveled to Palm Springs, California, to meet with Laddie Handelman, an offshore diving operator whom Simmons calls the Thomas Edison of deepwater drilling. Handelman wanted to sell his company, and Simmons put the deal together.

But this was only the beginning. Simmons was one of the first to see that the oil field—services industry could be more than just an adjunct to the oil business; instead, it could be—should be—a separate entity. (“The profit margins were so good!”) Soon his life took on a rhythm familiar to many oilmen. One year after the 1973 energy crisis, Simmons opened his own firm with his brother, L. E. Simmons, in Houston. They drew business from companies in Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska and from firms in the United Kingdom working in the North Sea. In 1975 he had an IPO for Handelman’s company, now known as Oceaneering, in which the investors’ value grew sixfold. Times were great. By 1979 oil was on its way to $50 a barrel, and Simmons was becoming a very rich man. Oil and gas had been good to him. He diligently studied the best journals and newsletters and thought he knew everything there was to know.

So, like everyone else, he was dumbfounded when oil collapsed in 1982. “For two or three years I couldn’t believe we’d survive,” he says, and in fact, Simmons and Co. came perilously close to shutting its doors.

The devastation, however, led Simmons to an epiphany. Instead of attributing his losses to plain old bad luck, he began analyzing the raw data himself. Looking at the numbers, he realized he should have seen the crash coming. Then and there he decided he would never again rely on “a club of energy economists.” He would rely on his own instincts and his own raw data and disregard the so-called experts.

Simmons’s research further suggested that the depression in oil prices was going to last for quite some time. He began traveling the country, offering this prediction and his analysis that the industry would not survive without consolidation. “Boy, did people in energy think that was stupid,” he says.

Still, Simmons persisted. “You know the Vietnam general who said in order to save the village we had to destroy it?” he told theoildrum.com in 2005. “To save the oil services, we had to destroy it. Some of the projects we worked on . . . we did a final analysis that said if these three companies come together, they can fire four thousand people and one thousand people will have sustainable jobs. I learned how to go to industry forums and tell people they all had AIDS.”

Simmons thought that people would listen to reason if it meant avoiding financial destruction. And many did accept his views. He put together the deal for the company that became Texas Eastern; he assisted the Norton Company in buying 50 percent of Eastman Christensen in the spring of 1989 and then, a few months later, handled the company’s $550 million sale to Baker Hughes. “What a wild way to end the eighties!” he recalls. Leaner and meaner, the industry surged forward.

Then, of course, oil prices collapsed again in the late nineties, the result of tremendous oversupply. The size of the glut was estimated at about 3.5 million barrels a day. Conventional wisdom held that this had been created by the failure of the Asian markets, OPEC’s overproduction, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Experts claimed that demand had peaked just as new technologies were getting the oil out of the ground faster than ever.

The Gospel According to Matthew

by Mimi Swartz

(Page 3 of 3)

Simmons’s private research showed something very different. He didn’t believe there was a glut at all. Instead, he thought the oil business was being ruined by bad math and a lack of common sense. “I don’t think we were understanding demand,” he says. During this time, he took a trip to China and got a glimpse of the future as he watched the country muscling its way into the modern age. He realized that, with developing nations driven by mobility and a passion for prosperity, “there is no glass ceiling to how big demand can grow.” As Simmons began to speak on this topic, he once again became the odd man out, disparaged this time for not being a trained economist.

In February 1999 oil was at $10 a barrel, and the experts believed that the price would stay low indefinitely. Instead, just a few days after the Economist published a story called “Drowning in Oil,” the petroleum ministers of Venezuela, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia took two million barrels off the market and prices went back up again, to $37 a barrel. Simmons, who had always suspected that the glut was a product of smoke and mirrors, was vindicated. He had come to distrust the International Energy Agency’s accounting. “I thought [that] either they had found data I’d never seen or they’re lazy,” he says. Or, perhaps, they just didn’t know: In 2000 Simmons served on a government energy task force; at meetings there was often no one else in the room who could name the largest oil fields in the Middle East, Mexico, or Angola.

Simmons went back to his studies, teaching himself not just more about oil but also about electricity and natural gas and how the businesses worked together. In February 2004, drawing on the lesson he’d learned in high school debate, he conducted a personal examination of the world’s largest oil fields, generating his own research data. His analysis suggested that production was already in decline throughout the Middle East. Though the Saudis were claiming to control 25 percent of the world’s oil field reserves, Simmons began to suspect that, in fact, their oil fields were aging rapidly and already required expensive and complex technology to extract their remaining reserves. This could only spell trouble for a world that was predicted to increase its oil needs by more than 50 percent by 2025. It seemed like a good time to hold the first peak oil conference. Fifty people attended the event, which was held in Sweden.

Shortly afterward, in 2003, Simmons was invited to Saudi Arabia by oilman Herbert Hunt. On a visit to an oil field there, he noticed the Saudis were using water pressure to get the oil out of the ground—a sure sign of an aging well. When he got back home, Simmons undertook another study, assembling 240 peer-reviewed papers on Saudi oil fields written by the Society of Petroleum Engineers—“It was about a foot tall,” Simmons says—and spending the end of a Maine summer reading through the stack, pinpointing evidence of decline. The research finally proved his long-held suspicions: Saudi supply was nowhere near what had been claimed for years.

But proving his hypothesis was bittersweet. Feeling something like a surge of panic, Simmons reported his findings in Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, a dense, four-hundred-page tome published by John Wiley and Sons in 2005. The book became an international best-seller, and Matthew Simmons became a true prophet of doom, the global authority on peak oil.

Mention the name Amy Myers Jaffe to Simmons and you will provoke a lot of sputtering. Jaffe is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, the associate director of the Rice University Energy Program, and a frequent oil authority in the pages of, among other publications, the New York Times. In her forties, Jaffe also happens to be startlingly beautiful—almond eyes, flowing auburn hair—with a distinctively nasal New England intonation you might find particularly annoying when and if she’s disagreeing with you, which is a position Simmons finds himself in regularly these days.

“The question isn’t what’s left under the ground but where is it located and do I have access to it,” Jaffe tells me. In her opinion—and she is far from alone—there is plenty of oil but geopolitical issues and resource nationalism in oil-producing countries prevent investment by American firms. In addition, internal political problems in those countries inhibit their production capacities. This notion impresses Simmons not at all: “I’ve never tried to integrate geopolitics with the physics of oil and gas,” he sniffs.

Like Jaffe, Daniel Yergin’s CERA believes there is enough oil in the ground to keep us going for quite some time—3.74 trillion barrels, as opposed to the 1.2 trillion barrels the peak oil proponents claim. The group has produced a $499 downloadable report titled “Why the ‘Peak Oil’ Theory Falls Down—Myths, Legends, and the Future of Oil Resources.” Yergin likes to point out that this is the fifth time the world has been said to be running out of oil and that new sources or technologies always appear on the horizon to save us. CERA has argued that oil production won’t peak but will follow an “undulating plateau,” which should leave us plenty of time to come up with a solution to the problem of diminishing resources.

These opinions aren’t as reassuring as they sound. If Simmons believes the end is upon us, CERA’s time frame is just a few decades away. According to one of its papers: “During the plateau period in later decades, demand growth will likely no longer be largely met by growth in available, commercially exploitable natural oil supplies. Non-traditional or unconventional liquid fuels such as production from heavy oil sands, gas-related liquids (condensate and natural gas liquids), gas-to-liquids (GTL), and coal-to-liquids (CTL) will need to fill the gap.”

Simmons does not believe that the great industry hopes of Canadian tar sands or South American oil shales can ever fill this gap in time. They simply cannot produce the volume necessary to sustain the current levels of 80 million barrels used around the world every day. Simmons further counters that CERA’s plan to use this remaining time to squeeze the last drop of oil from declining wells is a fool’s errand. Companies will be spending more to get less and less out of the ground. “I’ve always said Dan [Yergin] was a fabulous historian,” Simmons says. “He’ll write the best history of how we crash.”

Then there are those who argue that simple economics will keep the oil business from imploding: As prices go up, demand will go down, until the price goes down and demand goes up again. “These were the same old arguments as to why oil would never stay above thirty dollars a barrel,” Simmons counters with impatience. “Free markets do not work when demand outstrips supply.”

One way of looking at the peak oil contretemps is to say that Houston boasts two Ivy League—educated oil authorities who are equally pessimistic about the future of petroleum but who disagree virulently with each other about the reasons why. Peak oil critics and peak oil supporters lob the same accusations at one another—that both camps use fuzzy data, that they don’t understand oil reserves, that they don’t understand the way markets work in this day and age. The fact that both sides believe that we have to move from a petroleum-based economy sooner or later is constantly and conveniently—for the major oil companies—overlooked. “We agree there’s a problem but for different reasons” is the way Jaffe puts it. “We know we’re moving to a carbon-restrained world. We know there’s a high risk of war in the Middle East over the next ten years.”

Fortunately, each side does offer a few solutions that are not necessarily contradictory. For a Republican zillionaire who thinks Nobel Prize winner Al Gore’s movie was “crappy,” Simmons’s proposals are surprisingly green. First, he believes the workforce should be liberated from the nine-to-five grind, because 70 percent of our oil is used for transporting people and goods. “The biggest inefficiencies are long-distance commuting and traffic congestion,” he says. “People shuffle into work and get on the Internet. You can have staff meetings by webcam.”

Simmons also thinks we should put an end to the global food distribution system that allows us to have Chilean watermelon in December. “We can’t afford to do this anymore,” he says. We should also harness the power of the oceans and move more goods over water, a proposition that isn’t as quaint as it sounds. It’s currently being done off the coast of Washington State. Most important, the public should insist on data reform that includes quarterly reports on reserves and field production numbers. It isn’t just the Saudis who are stretching things, he says. Exxon Mobil, for instance, ran into trouble with its 2004 data; after the company boasted that it was replacing its own production to the tune of 125 percent, the SEC calculated that the actual number was 83 percent. “We’ve wasted four years,” Simmons says.

Jaffe’s solutions are more concrete but probably no easier to enact: Make the oil companies put more of their money into research and development instead of shareholders’ pockets, and make legislators commit to improved education so that more students will study science and math and speed up the technological curve.

Not coincidentally, both Simmons and Jaffe agree that if Houston doesn’t step forward and embrace these changes, it will lose its place as the energy capital of the world and that as Houston goes, so will Texas. At one time, the city prospered whenever oil prices were high; since then, the reluctance of the oil companies to innovate and the foot-dragging of anti-tax politicians to support education have changed the calculus. The economy is shifting away from a dependence on natural resources to a dependence on knowledge. Blue-collar jobs that once defined the city are rapidly disappearing. The population will be, increasingly, poorer and less educated. Meanwhile, Department of Energy funding for research that once came this way is heading out of state, to places like California and Virginia, where progressive, innovative thinking is more welcome. “If Houston isn’t the intellectual incubator for new carbon management,” Jaffe warns, “someone else will be.”

Simmons concurs, in his way: “If Houston grasps the issue and the magnitude of the issue, it can lead the way,” he says, allowing himself an uncharacteristic moment of hope. Then, of course, he reverts to type: “If we keep our head in the sand, we’ll be like Tulsa in 1965,” he says, referring to a city that, until the seventies, was more important in the world of oil than Houston. “I am trying to scare people. To tell them to wake up. This is a real defining moment.”

Links referenced within this article Mimi Swartz http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/mimiswartz.php Mimi Swartz http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/mimiswartz.php immonsco-intl.com http://www.simmonsco-intl.com theoildrum.com http://www.theoildrum.com oilcrash.com http://www.oilcrash.com peakoilblues.com http://www.peakoilblues.com theoildrum.com http://www.theoildrum.com Mimi Swartz http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/mimiswartz.php

Find this article at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-02-01/feature2.php?click_code=3ae47701fdff8cf7b5a769e5a5fb2157

Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism

Public Interest, Spring, 2001 by Brian C. Anderson

OF the major political thinkers of his generation--including Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott, and Leo Strauss--Bertrand de Jouvenel suffers from relative neglect. During the 1950s and 1960s, the French philosopher and political economist enjoyed a considerable reputation in the English-speaking world. He lectured as a visiting professor at Yale and the University of California-Berkeley, and his books garnered serious reviews in prestigious journals. But by the time of his death in 1987, his star had dimmed. Read through a span of recent political-theory journals and you will rarely encounter his name.

The neglect is not surprising. Jouvenel's thought does not fit into the two categories that unfortunately came to dominate academic thinking on politics during the 1970s and continue to rule it today: the arid left-liberalism of analytic philosophers like Ronald Dworkin, which reduces political thought to abstract reflection on moral and legal principles, and the nihilist radicalism of post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault, which irresponsibly seeks to blow up the bourgeois world to clear the way for who knows what.

Jouvenel's work, published over five decades in a series of learned, beautifully written books and essays, is anything but abstract. It harkens back to an older style of political thought (as old as Aristotle, really, but arching over the centuries to include Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville) that brings together moral and political philosophy and painstaking historical and institutional analysis.

His work is also a model of political responsibility. The philosopher Pierre Manent places Jouvenel in the sober tradition of liberalisme triste--melancholy liberalism--whose great representative is Tocqueville and among whose recent exemplars I would include Irving Kristol and Manent himself. These anti-utopians fully acknowledge the basic decency and justness of liberal democratic civilization. But they are also aware of its profound weaknesses--the erosion of moral and spiritual life, the hollowing out of civil society, the growth of an overbearing state, and the "joyless quest for joy," as Leo Strauss once put it, of a society dedicated chiefly to commercial pursuits. The task of liberalisme triste is to illumine the tensions and possibilities of this liberal civilization, in the hope of advising citizens and statesmen how best to cultivate the goods and avoid or at least moderate the evils that attend it.

Thankfully, there are signs that Jouvenel is sparking renewed interest. Over the last half-decade, two publishers--Liberty Fund Press and Transaction Publishers--have made available again to English readers some of his most important work. It seems an ideal occasion, then, to reconsider Jouvenel's contribution to political thought.

A life in the age of extremes

Bertrand de Jouvenel was born in 1903 into an aristocratic French household swept up in the political and intellectual currents of the early twentieth century. His father, Baron Henri de Jouvenel, was a well-known Dreyfusard politician and newspaper editor, and his mother, Sarah Claire Boas, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, ran a trendy Parisian salon, so young Bertrand met many of the leading artists, writers, and politicians of the day. Through his mother, a passionate supporter of Czechoslovak independence, he gained his earliest political experience, working as private secretary to Eduard Benes, Czechoslovakia's first prime minister, when barely out of his teens.

Jouvenel was close to both of his parents, who divorced in 1912, but his relationship to his father was sorely tested during the early twenties. After divorcing Bertrand's mother, Henri had remarried the novelist and sexual provocateur Colette. In 1919, the 16-year-old Bertrand, strikingly handsome-"all sinews and lank," observes Colette biographer Judith Thurman- entered a scandalous affair with his stepmother, then in her late forties, who had seduced the bookish teenager. In October 1923, according to one version of events, Henri surprised Bertrand and Colette in bed, definitively ending a marriage that had already soured. A remorseful Bertrand "was horrified to see myself, or to believe myself, the cause of this drama," hut continued the affair for two more years. He later patched things up with his father, but Colette always haunted him. Even as an old man, happily married to his second wife Helene (he briefly married war correspondent Martha Gellhorn during the early 1930s), Jouvenel had difficulty spe aking of his forbidden romance without emotion.

Jouvenel's formal education was more conventional than his love life. Subsequent to studying at the Lycee Hoche in Versailles, he graduated from the Sorbonne, where he read in law and mathematics. He later took up a succession of short-term academic posts that culminated in an appointment to the prestigious Ecole Science Politique in 1975. He always regretted not having a steadier academic career, which would have given him the opportunity to mold a generation of students as Aron and Strauss did. As founder and director of the think tank SEDEIS (Societe d'Etudes et de Documentation Economiques Industrielles et Sociales), an institution with many connections both inside and outside the academy, he did have a huge impact on the education of French elites by familiarizing them, through regular seminars and publications, with Anglo-American economic ideas.

Jouvenel's political education owed less to the academy than to his extensive work as a journalist, specializing in international relations, from the late 1920s until the Second World War. As political scientists Marc Landy and Dennis Hale observe, "To a degree unparalleled by any other chronicler of the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s, even Orwell, de Jouvenel witnessed the key events and came to know the key individuals firsthand." Jouvenel interviewed at length Mussolini, Churchill, and, in a world-wide exclusive in 1935, Hitler. His journalistic activities brought him to various European hotspots, including Austria during the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia during the Nazi invasion. This hands-on experience, note Landy and Hale, gave Jouvenel a feel for the stuff of politics, its tragic contingencies and mundane complexities, its resistance to abstract categories and utopian schemes, its dangers and decencies.

Like many of his generation, Jouvenel found his way to support for liberal democracy only gradually. At the age of 23, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Radical-Socialist candidate. For a while, disgusted by the decadence of the French Third Republic, he sought solace on the other political extreme, and in 1936 joined Francois Doriot's Parti Popular Francais, a right-wing populist--some would say quasifascist--party. He would leave the party two years later, however, because of Doriot's shameful support for the Munich Pact. His eyes now opened, Jouvenel signed up with the French Army intelligence to struggle against the rising Nazi menace. In 1942, following France's armistice with Germany, he worked for the French resistance, eventually fleeing to Switzerland with the Gestapo in pursuit. By now, he had become the full-fledged antitotalitarian liberal that he remained the rest of his life.

Jouvenel's flirtation with the radical right during the thirties came back to trouble him in the early 1980s, when the Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell falsely accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. Jouvenel sued for libel in 1983 and won. Raymond Aron, who had left his hospital bed against his doctor's wishes to testify on Jouvenel's behalf, dropped dead of a stroke immediately after telling the court that his longtime friend was "one of the two or three leading political thinkers of his generation"--and no collaborator.

In addition to his journalistic activities, Jouvenel published several books prior to the war, including, in 1928, L'economie dirigee (coining the term the French still use for economic planning), a 1933 study of the Great Depression in the United States, and three novels. After the war, he mostly abandoned journalism to concentrate on writing the treatises in political philosophy that won him widespread acclaim. Jouvenel's postwar works contain the three main themes of his mature thought: an effort to understand the hypertrophy of the modern state; a meditation on the common good in pluralistic modern societies; and an attempt to describe the dynamics of political life. Let us look at each in turn.

Beware the Minotaur

Jouvenel wrote his first major work of political philosophy, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, from Swiss exile as World War II raged and Europe lay in ruins. Its basic aim, one which runs through all of Jouvenel's postwar writings, is to examine how the modern state became so dangerous to human liberty.

The long shadow of the totalitarian state darkens every page of On Power. National Socialism and communism, in their quest to revolutionize the bourgeois economic and political condition, had desolated entire nations. Never before had such state power been unleashed. But even in contemporary liberal democratic societies, the centralized state had grown to a disturbing size. Jouvenel's libertarian ideal--"the recognition, or the assumption, that there is in every man the same pride and dignity as had hitherto been assured and protected, but for the aristocracy only, by privileges"--found less and less breathing room in the collectivist modern world.

Jouvenel's labyrinthine book is a kind of pathology of modern politics. Jouvenel reviews Western history to determine exactly when centralized authority--Power, or the Minotaur, as he alternatively calls it--first extended its reach and what allowed it to do so. The Minotaur started to stir, he discovers, in the twelfth century; it grew "continuously" until the eighteenth and has exponentially increased in size since then.

Jouvenel blames Power's growth on several permanent features of centralized government (following Jouvenel, I will capitalize the "p" in power whenever referring to the state apparatus). First, the central governing authority naturally seeks dominance. After all, flawed human beings occupy the offices of Power, and they often want to lord over everybody else. "Is not the will to Power rooted deep in human nature?" Jouvenel asks. The desire for dominion is not the whole story of human nature, as Jouvenel would readily agree, but every truthful account of political life--from the Biblical narrative of David to George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia--recognizes its eternal existence.

The second explanation for the concentration of Power is political rivalry. For political communities to survive military challenge, their leaders must be able to act decisively and forcefully. Fail to match your rival's punch-his capacity swiftly to mobilize his citizenry and levy their wealth or develop deadly new technologies--and you could quickly find yourself out for the count. To keep pace with powerful Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, for example, the respective dynasties of England and France had to take more authority into their hands, increasing the number of men under arms and hiking taxes. More recently, during World War II, the allied democracies used propaganda and state direction of the economy--Power-boosting tools generally shunned by free societies--to resist the Nazi war machine. The competition for military supremacy feeds the Minotaur.

The medieval moment

These two explanations, true as far as they go, still do not explain why Power started to expand when it did nor why that expansion intensified dramatically after the seventeenth century. For that, Jouvenel shows, greater attention to the logic of Western history is necessary. On Power exemplifies what I think is one of the great virtues of Jouvenel's political thought: In order to expand our perspective on the events affecting us, it shifts our attention from the immediacy of the present, which can be blind, to the past and, as we will see, to the future. In this book, Jouvenel breaks with the popular Enlightenment story--"pure fantasy," he deems it--of monarchs "to whose exactions there are no bounds" and modern democratic governments "whose resources are proportionate to their authority." The true picture, we learn from history, is much more ambiguous.

Consider the Middle Ages. Far from crushing men with arbitrary force, the medieval king inhabited a spiritual, moral, and institutional world that kept him tightly bound. The divine law, as the Catholic Church taught it, limited the king's authority, indeed all human authority, from above. The king was God's servant, with a sacred duty to preserve God's created order. That hierarchical order, among other things, made the king not master of, but simply first among, nobles--each a rival authority with land and forces of his own. To get anything done the king had to go, hat in hand, to his fellow nobles to beg for men and funds, all the while making sure the Church did not disapprove too strongly. In turn, the common law, a human artifact written within the framework of the divine law and borrowing some of its luster, limited Power from below with innumerable precedents and customs. Jouvenel remarks, "The consecrated king of the Middle Ages was a Power as tied down and as little arbitrary as we can conceive." G od was sovereign, not men; there was no absolute or uncontrolled human authority.

Some might accuse the Catholic Jouvenel of romanticizing medieval life. I think this is to mistake his point. Of course, kings often rudely violated the law, as Jouvenel admits, and the medieval mindset failed to extend to every man and woman full recognition of the dignity that is their due. But the law wove a religious and customary web around Power that prevented it from completely breaking loose and becoming absolute. Recall, Jouvenel says, that the Catholic Church's sanctions "brought the Emperor Henry IV to fall on his knees before Gregory VII in the snow of Canossa." In such a universe, Power could expand only slowly.

This complex web began to unravel when European kings, keen to boost their authority, threw their lot in with the people to heat down the nobles who kept Power in check. The people looked to the kings to free them from the petty and sometimes not-so-petty oppressions of the aristocrats, whom the kings, in top Machiavellian form, had successfully encouraged to ditch their age-old responsibilities to the plebs. From this alliance between kings and the masses arose, beginning in the fifteenth century and lasting until the eighteenth, Europe's absolute monarchies. The absolute monarchs, driving the aristocracy into the ground, centralized and modernized Power and wielded resources far greater than medieval kings. The Protestant Reformation also helped tear apart the medieval web and amplify monarchical Power by giving reformed princes leeway to redefine the meaning of divine laws and to disregard custom; Catholic princes, to keep up, began to skirt the Church's rules themselves. The Minotaur grew.

Democracy on trial

But what really triggers Power's dramatic expansion, Jouvenel suggests, is the birth of the democratic age, which finishes off the dying medieval order. The political scientist Pierre Hassner, a keen reader of Jouvenel, has it exactly right: On Power "is a generalization of Alexis de Tocqueville's idea that the French Revolution, rather than breaking the absolutism of the state, further concentrated power in the hands of the state." Jouvenel sees democratic times extending Power's reach in at least three different, but related, ways.

First and most fundamental is the triumph in the eighteenth century of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the idea that "the people," not some divine source or ancient custom, make the final call on all matters of law and social organization. "The denial of a divine lawgiving and the establishment of a human lawgiving," warns Jouvenel, "are the most prodigious strides which a society can take towards a truly absolute Power." Outside of small communities, popular sovereignty, taken literally, is absurd. The people themselves cannot actually govern and pretty soon others--often a single other--rule in their name. And these new rulers find it easier than ever before to direct and mobilize society.

Popular sovereignty erodes the restraints on what political communities can imagine doing. If the law is solely an expression of the people's will, where would the limits on it come from? Anything becomes possible: the rounding up of political opponents, the bombing of civilians, laws condemning minorities or the unfit to extinction, the creation of genetic monstrosities or genetic supermen.

In addition, popular sovereignty encourages the notion that the state is a tool directly to secure the people's well-being. Power is accordingly burdened with a surfeit of new responsibilities, from running jobs programs and providing welfare, to redistributing wealth and regulating businesses, to funding scientific research and guaranteeing education to all citizens. Some of this is reasonable and salutary, no doubt, but taken together it increases the state's sway.

Popular sovereignty also brings mass conscription: Since everyone ostensibly has an equal stake in Power, everyone must defend it. Historian Hippolyte Tame put it well: Universal suffrage and mass conscription are like "twin brothers ... the one placing in the hands of every adult person a voting paper, the other putting on his back a soldier's knapsack." The Sun King Louis XIV, the most absolute of absolute monarchs, would have loved to institute conscription for his endless wars across seventeenth-century Europe, but he felt himself powerless to do it. It was the French Revolution that first militarized the masses and sent them forth across Europe's battlefields.

The second way in which the democratic age extended Power was through the unleashing of relativism. Popular sovereignty meant self-sovereignty, the right of each individual to decide his own right and wrong. This Protagorism, as Jouvenel terms it, in which man becomes the measure of all things, summons the Minotaur to quell the social disorder it inevitably unleashes. In a later work, he gravely writes, "To the entire extent to which progress develops hedonism and moral relativism, to which individual liberty is conceived as the right of man to obey his appetites, nothing but the strongest of powers can maintain society in being." The social theorist Michael Novak would later make the same point: "For a society without inner policemen ... there aren't enough policemen in the world to make men civil."

Jouvenel pointed out that relativism calls forth Power a second way. The loss of objective standards is existentially unbearable, opening "an aching void in the room of beliefs and principles." The secular religions of communism and National Socialism would draw nourishment from this crisis of meaning, building up Power to truly monstrous proportions. In Jouvenel's stark account, totalitarianism is born of the modern world's moral confusion.

Finally, Power grows in the democratic age because of the erosion of civil society. Democratic regimes base themselves on the individual, and individualism tends to hollow out or utterly destroy civil society. The modern state wages a relentless attack on the "social authorities"--in today's policy jargon, the mediating structures of families, churches, businesses, and other associations that stand between the state and the individual and that constitute extra-individual sources of authority and meaning. The attack can he blunt and brutal, as in the totalitarian regimes' total repression of civil society. Or it can take a softer form, as when the bureaucratic and inefficient welfare state takes over from families the responsibility for rearing children. In either case, though on very different scales, one finds state Power vastly increased and individual liberties menaced or obliterated. In a social field in which there are but two actors--Power and the individual--humans cannot flourish.

Jouvenel does not have much good to say about the liberal democratic West in On Power. He does suggest the possibility of sustaining the flickering light of political and human liberty by supporting moral and religious belief in a "higher code" that would restrain human willfulness, and by educating leaders and citizens to be vigilant of Power, like their medieval predecessors. But he views the separation-of-powers doctrine advocated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal constitutionalists as a weak reed against Power's tank-like advance. Since all modern constitutions base themselves on the people's will, they will not long deter Power's advance.

In fact, Jouvenel's argument in On Power risks becoming a kind of reverse Marxism, in which history ends not in bliss but in the concentration camp. The gigantic state is "the culmination of the history of the West," he observes in the book's grim closing paragraphs, implying that there is not a lot we can do about it. Thankfully, the evolution of the democracies in the years since Jouvenel wrote the book does not bear out its gloomiest warnings.

Despite its excessive pessimism, On Power stands as a permanent warning to the citizens and statesmen of liberal democratic regimes that their freedom is difficult to sustain, for reasons inseparable from the logic of their own principles. And in Jouvenel's ensuing work, most evocatively in Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, he develops a more constructive political science, one which looks more positively upon liberal constitutionalism.

The upshot: The classical goods of complete harmony and thick community that the modern world has undermined--and there is no doubt that they are goods--are incompatible with other goods that we cannot imagine living without. Too many armchair communitarians, on the left and the right, simply fail to see this.

If Jouvenel rejects any return to Greece as destructive of our modern freedoms, however, he does not turn around and embrace the libertarianism that, say, Charles Murray serves up in What It Means to Be a Libertarian. In Murray's view, government should do next to nothing, refusing to make judgments about citizens' moral choices and giving the market and the institutions of civil society free reign, except when monopolists or thieves or murderers mess things up.

This thin understanding of the political, Jouvenel contends, is not an adequate governing philosophy for a modern liberal democracy. Indeed, to the extent that government, basing itself on the self-sovereignty of man, refuses to discriminate between moral and immoral choices, it surrenders to the relativism that already disturbs liberal societies. As On Power showed, such relativism beckons the state to restore the order it destroys and to fill the emptiness it creates in the soul.

For Jouvenel, the modern democratic state has a much richer moral task. It is to create the conditions that let "social friendship"--a common good compatible with the goods and freedoms of modernity--blossom. Jouvenel describes this modern common good as resting "in the strength of the social tie, the warmth of the friendship felt by one citizen for another and the assurance each has of predictability in another's conduct." To nurture this mutual trust is the essence of the art of politics.

Daniel J. Mahoney and David DesRosiers, in their illuminating introduction to the Liberty Fund edition of Sovereignty, correctly observe that the book "contains one of the richest accounts of the permanent requirements of statesmanship written in this century." Among the tasks of the liberal statesman are the following (this is by no means an exhaustive list): First, the statesman must prudentially balance innovation and conservation. Modern societies, severed from the past, are open, mobile, and constantly transforming. Government needs to respond to the constant flux with policies that attenuate some of its worst effects. For contrary to what "dynamists" like Reason magazine's Virginia Postrel think, human beings cannot live in a world that is always changing: Such a condition is profoundly alienating. Thus Jouvenel would be willing to use government funds to retrain workers displaced by a new technology.

One way of pursuing this balance is to anticipate future trends as much as possible in order to cushion their impact. Hence Jouvenel's extensive research in "future studies," given its fullest theoretical treatment in a fascinating but sadly out-of-print 1968 book, The Art of Conjecture (here again he shakes us from what I would call, if you can forgive the somewhat barbarous neologism, our presentism). The "art" in the title is a tip-off. In Jouvenel's view, there is no science of the future, only reasoned inferences from existing trends.

Next, the statesman must do nothing to harm and everything possible to help a culture of ordered liberty prosper short of imposing a state truth. As we have seen, the free society cannot survive if license prevails. At a minimum this means a statesman should be a model of self-restraint in his own life. (No Esquire crotch-shots or trysts with interns, in other words.) But one can imagine an array of policies-President George W. Bush is pursuing some of them right now--that would shore up, rather than weaken, ordered liberty without resorting to massive state coercion. Of course, the political leader cannot do this alone--not hardly. This is a task for all citizens of a free society, particularly those who participate in culture-forming institutions.

The statesman must also regulate "noxious activities" that threaten social friendship. Racists would get no license to march in a Jouvenelian liberal democracy. Parties that advocated revolution or violence would find no home there, either. Jouvenel believes civility is crucial to a free society.

And finally, the statesman must deflate hopes for a permanent solution to the political problem. There is no ultimate solution in politics, only temporary "settlements," as Jouvenel put it in a later book. To try to conjure up ancient Greece again or to dispense with politics almost all together (the communitarian and libertarian dreams, respectively) are both solutions, not settlements. Politics is our permanent this-worldly condition; to deny that fact is to create, or at least tempt, tyranny.

The good and bad of capitalism

Nowhere is there greater need for vigilance in cultivating the common good in modern democracies than with regard to the free market. To be sure, Jouvenel is a strong defender of the efficiency and productivity of a free economy. The capitalist dynamo has eased life for millions, giving them choices and opportunities and time unavailable to all but the few in premodern societies. Jouvenel knows that economic growth and consumer satisfaction are the imperatives that drive our societies.

But having more goodies does not constitute the good life. Quality of life is key to assessing a decent society. Like Pope John Paul II, Jouvenel argues that a strong moral culture and vigorous political institutions must serve as makeweights against the market. Thus Jouvenel would probably have had few qualms about cracking down on Hollywood violence and Calvin Klein kiddie-porn ads. For just as government has a responsibility to educate citizens politically, so too it is important to lift the preferences of consumers to higher ends. "We live in majority societies where beautiful things will be wiped out unless the majority appreciates them," Jouvenel pointedly observed during the sixties. A market society is praiseworthy only if the choices people make within it are praiseworthy.

Another area in which the market needs public oversight is the environment. In a highly organized modern society, Jouvenel wrote in the 1957 essay "From Political Economy to Political Ecology," "Nature disappears behind the mass of our fellow creatures." We forget what we owe it. I can imagine some conservative readers rushing to put Jouvenel back on the shelf at this point. But Jouvenel's green thumb is much closer to legal theorist Peter Huber's (or Theodore Roosevelt's) market-friendly conservationism than it is to Norwegian Arne Naess's antihumanist deep ecology.

The environment is for man, not man for the environment--that Biblical insight is one Jouvenel embraces. Promethean modern economies have made man master of the Earth, and that is potentially to the good, he says. But with mastery comes responsibility. In a 1968 essay entitled "The Stewardship of the Earth," Jouvenel sums up his environmental vision: "The Earth has been given to us for our utility and enjoyment, but also entrusted to our care, that we should be its caretakers and gardeners." This is sensible stuff. It means smart environmental regulations establishing wildlife reserves, cleaning up rivers, protecting endangered species, and punishing toxic dumpers, not trying to restore some pre-industrial arcadia (there is that anti-utopianism again).

If Jouvenel's support for the free market stops short of an idolatry of choice and the right to pollute, it enthusiastically resists government interventions aimed at redistributing wealth. "Only Hayek has rivaled Bertrand de Jouvenel in demonstrating why redistributionism in the democracies results in the atrophy of personal responsibility and the hypertrophy of the bureaucracy and the centralized state instead of in relief to the hapless minorities it is pledged to serve," enthuses the sociologist Robert Nisbet about a book Jouvenel first published in 1952, called The Ethics of Redistribution. In this short, profound study, Jouvenel ignores (though he agrees with it) the economic argument against the redistribution of wealth: that it eats away at incentives and so impoverishes everybody. Instead, he concentrates on the moral arguments against redistribution in an indictment of contemporary left-liberalism as damning as we have.

Jouvenel's three arguments remain unanswered. One is that redistribution quickly becomes regressive. Jouvenel shows that levying the wealth of the rich does not provide nearly enough economic resources to offer a subsistence minimum to the down and out. Instead, government must dip into the pockets of the middle class and even the lower middle class, who themselves receive income transfers. This insight, Jouvenel avers, upsets a widely held belief: "that our societies are extremely rich and that their wealth is merely maldistributed." Pursuing redistribution in the face of this truth, he adds, "involves the debasement of even the lower middle-class standard of life." Society becomes proletarianized.

The second argument against redistribution is that it corrodes personal responsibility. By providing for basic needs, the redistributionist state weakens the individual's independence and civil society's authority, threatening to make people into dependent drudges. This also reinforces the modern impulsion to centralization described in On Power.

Finally, redistribution, by confiscating higher incomes, means that the wealthy stop supporting life's amenities: no more grants to symphonies, museums, university endowments, parks, and so on. If these amenities are to continue to exist, the state must fund them directly. The state invariably will use a utilitarian calculus in deciding what to fund. One gray vision starts to prevail, not a thousand or hundreds of thousands of varied visions. Jouvenel implies that a bourgeois society is much more likely to support high culture than is a redistributionist state.

Jouvenel knew that the impulse to shake down the rich and give to the poor is a permanent temptation in democratic capitalist regimes. There will always be calls from those whom the market had not benefited to redress their plight through politics; and there will always be politicians ready to hear them out. Redistributionism is unlikely ever to disappear in modern societies, but we can try to limit its reach.

A real science of politics

Jouvenel's final contribution to the study of politics is a detailed analysis of its workings, not as a replacement for reflection on the good (as undertaken in Sovereignty) but as a supplement to it. The hope is to make political science useful to the statesman, who, as we have seen, has a responsibility of cultivating the social friendship and civility that vivifies the free society and slows the Minotaur's advance. Jouvenel's most ambitious effort in this vein is a difficult, chiseled book first published in 1963 and recently reissued by Liberty Fund Press: The Pure Theory of Politics.

This book focuses not on political statics (the juridical forms of constitutions and institutions) but on political dynamics: the phenomenon of "man moving man." One source of this influence is what Cicero called potestas: the authority that inheres in someone because of his institutional position. The U.S. military brass may not have liked the idea of draft-dodging ex-hippie Bill Clinton being their commander-in-chief, but their respect for the potestas of the presidency meant they jumped when he said jump. The other source is potentia: authority based on the raw ability to get men to do your bidding and follow your lead. It is the influence of an effective basketball coach or teacher, or, most importantly for Jouvenel's purpose, of the charismatic politician. It is as natural as rain.

Potentia can be a good thing in politics. Churchill's heroic rallying of the English people during World War II would have been unthinkable if he did not possess it. It can also be dangerously irrational, tapping into the volcanic forces that can sweep entire populations away in grand passions. How else to describe Hitler's Mephistophelean influence over the Germans? "It is profoundly unsafe to assume that people act rationally in Politics," Jouvenel somberly notes.

The ostensible aim of The Pure Theory of Politics is description. Jouvenel targeted the book to an audience of American social scientists who thought that the study of political life should be as free of values as the study of physics. Yet the book is a subtle critique of their abstract social science. Dry academicians said they looked at behavior, but what they meant were things like voting patterns, not strong behavior, behavior of the kind that Machiavelli chronicles with such cold lucidity.

Thus the real purpose of The Pure Theory of Politics is to remind liberal democrats, who often place unwarranted hopes in human reasonableness, that politics is not always, not often, guided by the light of reason; it is often messy, sinister, mad, and tragic, as Thucydides and Shakespeare--Jouvenel's chosen guides in this odd but beautiful book--teach us. Chastened by this lesson, perhaps today's leaders will see the fragility of liberal communities and strive to create the conditions for the growth of social friendship.

Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism has a lot to teach us, though for those who like their politics sunny-side up, it does not come as good news. Liberal democracies can attain true human goods, including meaningful freedom, social friendship, and widespread prosperity, Jouvenel reassures us. But these fragile societies must remain on guard, lest their many weaknesses--from the erosion of personal responsibility, to their tendency toward collectivism, to the abiding hope for final solutions--make dust of these goods.

BRIAN C. ANDERSON is senior editor of City Journal and author of Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

This is the sixth in our occasional series of "Reconsiderations." Previous essays have examined the works of Louis Hartz, Richard M. Titmuss, Herbert Croly, Marshall MeLuhan, and Frederick Douglass.

COPYRIGHT 2001 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Bibliography for "Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism"

Brian C. Anderson "Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism". Public Interest. Spring 2001. FindArticles.com. 07 Feb. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_2001_Spring/ai_73368521