Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 2, April–May 2009, pp. 225–235
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Every American president since the OPEC oil embargo and price shock of 1973 has proclaimed a goal of energy independence. Yet despite 35 years and $115 billion spent on research and development for alternatives, the United States imports more of its energy than ever before. The geopolitics of energy is at the centre of international concerns, and the spectre of climate change caused to a great extent by emissions from energy sources makes the search for low-carbon alternatives even more urgent.
In his speech at Denver’s Mile High Stadium in August 2008 kicking off his general-election campaign, Barack Obama said that as US president he would ‘set a clear goal’: energy independence within ten years. His language echoed President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 call to land a man on the Moon within the decade, one of the defining symbols of the technocratic and ‘big government’ approach to policy. It was also a subtle reference – a ‘dog-whistle’, in the parlance of partisan politics – to a plan proposed by former Vice President Al Gore the previous month to commit to producing 100% of the nation’s electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources within the same ten years. Gore made the comparison with the Apollo space programme even more explicit; it was a central metaphor of his speech. The comparison was also made explicit in the Democratic Party Platform.
Invoking Apollo as a metaphor for national technological efforts is not unusual. In the energy realm, a progressive think tank founded in 2001 devoted to catalysing a clean-energy revolution is even called the Apollo Alliance. Its ‘New Apollo Program’, launched in October 2008, calls for specific investments of $500bn over the next ten years to reduce emissions and imports and restore American technological and industrial pre-eminence. Though this programme, Gore’s plan and Obama’s initiative differ in details they share common approaches, a common vision and a common metaphor.
But Apollo, however remarkable a technological achievement, was not born or nurtured in isolation. Although Kennedy’s 1961 speech is now remembered almost exclusively as the launch-pad for the Moon landing, this was only one part of an address on ‘Urgent National Needs’ in the context of the Cold War struggle. In the equivalent of a State of the Union speech setting out his agenda, the new president called for increases in foreign military and economic aid and information programmes, military modernisation, civil-defence expansion and a nuclear test-ban treaty. Along with the goal of landing a man on the Moon, these were all framed as part of a ‘freedom doctrine’ aimed at confronting communism on the world stage.
Apollo was thus first and foremost a soft-power effort par excellence, to put down a marker for American prestige, though it may also have been motivated by, and had the effect of, stimulating the economy and in particular industries critical to national defence. President Dwight Eisenhower had already recognised the symbolic potential of space, transferring in 1960 all non-military aspects of space research and development from the Pentagon’s...
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Jeffrey Mazo is Managing Editor of Survival.
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