A couple of days ago, I took President Obama to task for relying too much on fossil fuels and his "all of the above" energy strategy. We need stronger leadership from the president on clean energy, and the Sierra Club will continue pushing him to provide it.
Tuesday, though, his administration took an important, historic step away from dirty energy when the EPA announced proposed new safeguards that would limit the amount of carbon pollution from new power plants.
On the face of it, this announcement seems self-evidently sensible -- like announcing that you're going to stop hitting yourself on the head with a rock. We know carbon pollution is bad for our health and our climate. We also know how to generate power with clean energy like solar and wind. So why keep hitting ourselves on the head by building more dirty power plants?
Believe it or not, it was only ten years ago that the conventional wisdom was that we had no choice besides dirty energy. Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force proposed a massive effort to build new coal-fired power plants all across the country. It was going to be a new "Coal Rush."
That Coal Rush never materialized. What happened instead was a coordinated grassroots movement that, to date, has stopped 166 proposed new coal plants from ever being built. How did we do this? By pointing out that the emperor has no clothes -- that building new dirty coal-fired power plants makes no sense economically, environmentally, or for the communities in which they'd be built. So Tuesday's announcement from Obama's EPA is as much a testament to determined grassroots organizing as anything else. And every person who has been part of this effort -- whether through comments, emails, or on-the-ground action -- deserves the credit.
For more than a hundred years, our country has relied heavily on coal to generate electricity. Along the way, we somehow learned to live -- and die -- with the problems that burning coal brings -- from unhealthy air to environmental devastation. We've blasted mountains, destroyed communities, and polluted watersheds. Our babies have been poisoned by mercury, our children have struggled with asthma, and our parents have died prematurely from respiratory disease, both from working in coal mines and also from breathing dirty air once that coal is burned. Our climate is already changing -- with once-in-lifetime unsettling weather events coming one after another.
These new carbon pollution protections won't put an end to that overnight. But they do put an end to the proposition that coal belongs in our energy future.
Is this a turning point in the transition to clean energy? That depends on what we do next. If we just switch our allegiance to another polluting fossil fuel like natural gas, then we've only traded our rock for a pipe wrench. Ultimately, the only way to stop hurting ourselves will be to do everything we can, everywhere we can, to accelerate the development of clean, renewable energy like solar and wind. Call it a "best of the above" strategy, if you will.
Yes, we still have a ways to go, but the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, as Laozi said. Today the Obama administration took an important one.
One important, final point: this particular fight is not yet finished. These are only proposed standards, not final ones. The EPA is collecting comments on its new carbon pollution standards. Let them know you support the strongest possible protections that will give us cleaner air and healthier communities.
Follow Michael Brune on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bruneski
Raise your hand if you support all of the above.
Inequality of wealth and political power has so far ensured that there is no consensus and shared conservation of consumption of energy. Al Gore is hated, not because of his rhetoric, but because he consumes vast amounts of energy while calling for the lower economic classes to tighten their already tight belts.
We have a sociopathic economic system that allows the most greedy and unempathetic among us to amass huge wealth and powerwith which they buy up the talents and allegience of the "brightest and best" so as to secure their own personal survival in a global civilization that is rapidly approaching collapse.
There will be little change form our current course until a signifigantly larger majority of people accept a much lower standard of energy consumption. Our rulers intuitively understand this and are consequently driving the lower weaker economic classes ever further into poverty worldwide by raising energy prices and constricting economies through austerity.
Electricity is electricity, so "baseload" can be created with better storage and management.
Then you'll say that's expensive, and then I'll say moving civilization inland and finding new sources of food and water is more expensive. Then what?
I guess as long as the coal stays safely in place, posterity will still be able to get to it.
Unless and until he successfully herds every suburbanite from their two thousand square foot three bedroom, two and a half bath rancher into a two bedroom nine hundred square foot or less apartment seven flights up in the "city"--having put their beloved pets to sleep because they could not take them with--you are not going to eliminate coal from the American equasion.
America is the Saudi Arabia of coal for crying in the beer, and you are not going to get the average family to double their kids up in a small bedroom somewhere they don't want to live in obesiance to ecological ideology. Get real!
It is endemic to all sides and unfortunately a failing of humanity.
"Under my plan, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers."
Barack Obama
Interview- San Francisco Chronicle (Jan 17, 2008)
So will the rest of us who are not similarly connected financially or politically.
Perhaps we need to acknowledge that the only reasonable alternative in the medium term is a hybrid of the two. Renewables for intermittent power and natural gas peaker plants to fill in the gaps when the renewables aren't running. And natural gas for transportation while we develop better batteries that should within a couple decades be able to produce a cost effective electric vehicle that has adequate functionality.
Despite almost 4 years under the "Green" President, and renewables are a tiny fraction of our power. The switch has been from coal to gas, period.
Obama is pro-fracking and pro-natural-gas. He's stated as much, many times this year.
Sierra Club - when will you get a clue! You're not really part of the equation. Your opinion doesn't really matter much one way or the other. Gas is killing coal, and Obama is exercising "benign neglect" and letting it happen. The Sierra Club and their minions deserve zero credit for this transition, because they had nothing to do with it.
There is no "choice" to be made here. The choice has been made. If you're voting for Obama in the fall, then you're voting for natural gas. If you vote for the Republican candidate, you're also voting for natural gas. If you're voting for somebody else, you might as well not be voting.
Pick a different cause. This one is done.
Black Swans, highly improbable energy innovations with deep implications, are being born.
Liquid coal is used, no burning required, in a revolutionary hydroelectric fuel cell. Ordinary water, fresh or salt, is all that needs to be added. Invented in Vietnam, 2,000 watt generators are scheduled to go on sale in that nation in June priced at $1,600.
See Moving Beyond Oil and Cheap Green at www.aesopinstitute.org for more about that innovation and a few others..
Severe solar storms can collapse critical power grids worldwide for months or years. That should sharply accelerate decentralization of electric power.
Nuclear plants without grid power for a few days become meltdown candidates.
See “400 Chernobyls?” on the Aesop Institute site.
An emergency is looming that is all but unrecognized. It can destroy millions of lives.
If we wake up soon enough and take action to prevent the damage, which other Black Swan technologies may make possible as soon as this summer, the nation might insure its survival.
And if we are spared the solar surprise, we will have produced a positive result - energy independence and permanent decline in the price of oil and gas.