The Environment and the Economy
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Good environmental policy is good economic policy. We are not only helping to save the planet in terms of global warming, we are also moving to get this country out of the economic crisis that we are in right now. Are we making some progress? We really are. In the stimulus package, for example, we are spending more money on energy efficiency and sustainable energy then in the history of the United States of America. We certainly have moved far more aggressively in the last year then Bush did in eight years. Here is what I think we have got to do. I think the low-hanging fruit and a real job creator is energy efficiency. As we struggle with the most significant economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is imperative that we create millions of good-paying jobs and, as I said, the interesting thing here is that good environmental policy is good economic policy.
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"I think the low-hanging fruit and a real job creator is energy efficiency
It really shouldn't be controversial to either party. The technologies utilized to do it tend to not transport well meaning the manufacturing stay's here along with the installation. It's also an important first step to protect against any energy innefficiencies of an energy changeover in the future.
It probably doesn't have the largest environmental bang for the buck, but may well have some of the largest economic bangs for the bucks of green action.
On a perverse note a fast efficiency switch might slow the implementation of green energy production as current innefficiencies drive a need to permit new production which can be constrained under existing EPA authorities.
It's also an important first step in isolating poorer populations from increased per unit energy costs it is only rational to expect in the short to mid term in any switchover.
Senator Sanders - one of the really, really, good guys. Thanks Senator.
Sorry Bernie. I like your track record but Cap N Trade tax is NOT good environmental policy ... and it will destroy American jobs.excep
Don't worry about Global warming. It is just the doomsday chant of the day. In 1976, these same type people were chanting about global cooling
See the Newsweek article from 1976
http://den
Maybe Bernie you've heard of the Hyperion hot tub sized $30 million nuke (122 sales, 2013 delivery) designed to provide heat and power to small communities, oil shale/sands etc. Every 7 to 10 years it spews a softball sized bit of waste that can be burned in a Gen IV reactor.
Meanwhile, Texas is promised 240 massive Chinese built multimegawatt wind turbines on 56 sq miles of concrete, roads and steel Chinese financed for $1.5 billion. 600 megawatts peak, 125 megawatts average, $12000 kilowatt baseload eqv excluding storage, transmission, and millions annually for load balancing natural gas. Same energy as two Hyperion units or electric power as five (buried under the bunkhouse) for between 10 and 25 times the cost.
Now in Arcadia Fl we have covering 180 acres America's largest solar photovoltaic plant, 5 megawatts baseload equivalent, 180 acres of arsenic,steel and concrete., cost $150 million. 7% the thermal or 20% electric energy of that Hyperion hot tub buried under a tool shed.
The Hyperion on energy equivalents is 1% of solar and 4% wind cost, a tiny percentage of either's civil resources, and provides 24/7 always on power.
Renewables make us feel warm and righteous dancing us down the road to the as little as ten years away climate driven economic and even civilization collapse while $2.5 trillion in nukes, paid for by ending the US $1 trillion annual fossil fuel bill could with an extreme effort here and abroad save us.
Hyperion's web site says they haven't yet actually developed any of their concept power units.
At $30 million for 25 MW of baseload electricity they would be comparable in price to alternative energy sources now being built, although potentially more reliable.
Their website says thay they are intended for remote areas, away from electrical grids, if they are ever built.
I personally wish them well, but their website is long on hype and short on details. Still, if they ever deliver, this idea could be very useful.
The Hyperion is just a version of the TRIGA reactor which is already used at Universities in the USA, and licensed for unattended operation. There is lots of details available if you look for them. The design is by a highly respected professor of Nuclear Engineering, Per Peterson. There is NO reason to doubt their specs as they do not require any new Science, just a basic engineering design, HO HUM!
They could be used to replace Coal boilers at existing sites. And the Hyperion is only one example of similar small Nuclear Reactors that have been designed, some built. Others Chinese HTR-10, Toshiba 4S, Nuscale, Babcock & Wilcox mPower, Sandia Labs Right Sized Reactor. And dozens of Naval Nuclear Reactors. Like the GE SG9, 50 MW, 33 yr refueling. Cost ? The entire sub is $2B for 50MW = $40k/kwe which is the price of Solar. This is for an ENTIRE SUB - THE MOST COMPLEX MACHINE EVER BUILT! The reactor is a trivial part of the Submarine - worth at most 5% of total value. SUB & Reactor designed in 3 yrs, built in 5 yrs.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent, Vermont. One of the best. One of the few.
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty society.
William Shakespeare
Nice you quoted Bill.
Cool!
Thank you Sen. Sanders. I wish we could clone you! We would put in an order for 99 of the clones. I greatly respect your ideas.
My question is why aren't the politicians repealing all of the laws that make it impossible for smart entrepreneurs to compete against the big oil and coal companies?
Why does someone have to buy million dollar government permits to start an alternative fuel company?
If the politicians want competition, they should just repeal ALL of their energy laws and allow the people to compete freely and NOT pass Cap and Trade.... Cap and Trade was created by Enron and Wall Street, to enrich the Wall Street bankers...
Say NO to cap and trade and carbon taxes, and YES to competition against the oil and coal companies.
Jeez-frick
Simple solution that will never, ever happen because of the embedded corporatism in our government. Sorry.
And you hit the nail on the head on the cap-n-trade scam.
You can curtail job loss if the government uses tax credits and tax cuts in an effective manner.
That's good but our current economic system will have to be change as well. Capitalism is predicated on unlimited growth potential and that is simply not realistic given limits of our technology, resources and the rapid expansion of the human population.
I agree with you. What is wrong with stable economic activity or economic activity that keeps pace with population growth? The only answer I usually come to is greed.
Hopefully enough people are getting burned out on this paradigm but with the education system essentially ruined by republicans we have found ourselves flooded with "Libertarians" that don't have a clue.
More good work from the good Senator from Vermont :) While I agree with those who point out the main flaw with wind turbines is the unpredictable and sometimes erratic generating capability, we should not look at turbines alone when it comes to replacing fossil fuels. We should be looking at massive solar farms in our desert regions as well as tidal power generation and other such innovative technologies. Just as we are seeing several solutions to replace fossil fuel automobile engines, the same will be true in the generation of power for the nation. We cannot let a flaw in one technology stop it from contributing to the overall solution.
Bernie is correct, there are whole new worldwide markets opening up for sustainable "green" energy in the future.
As long as the US government remains hostage to old technologies and bowing to fossil fuel industries who are incessantly lobbying elected officials, America will continue to lose ground and miss great opportunities.
Why keep polluting the environment whilst sending billions to the middle east?
Nothing against Mr. Sanders, but like all politicians, he makes noise without regard to the way things are.
“Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.
For every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.” This was reported in Bloomberg in March of this year.
The danger of mandating the development of wind energy is that of maintaining prices that are high enough for the private sector to make profit. This is what has happened in Spain, the price fixing of alternative energy has affected the energy market by raising prices artificially (in reference to the comment below, Denmark also fixes energy prices). Obviously if industry has to pay more for energy, they have to cut jobs. The problem is stimulating a green economy without blowing up energy prices across the board.
Environmentalists would argue (and rightly in my opinion) that sustainable energy is bigger benefit here in the United States considering we are losing jobs everyday in manufacturing AND more importantly, pollution is a real problem whether you care or not. We have the highest asthma rates among developed countries and such.
If you are going to talk about subsidizing energy let's bring into that equation the cost of the war in Iraq when we consider the cost of oil, and the cost of toxic spills created by coal and natural gas extraction ok?
So what?
Capitalism and the changing markets mandate unemployment.
It is our job as a modern society to have the ability to sustain those losses and retrain those workers into new jobs in an effective, productive way.
If we had a better mentality about social welfare, that is, we as a whole are responsible to make sure there is ample support and education to bring people into taxpayer status and not just barely sustain them while they find some form of work, abrupt changes in the economy and specific markets would never be an issue.
It matters not, in the grand scheme of things, if that coal miner is unwilling to learn a new trade, it is simply a fact of life that we would be willing to support that household until that worker can be retrained into a new profession.
Simply put, it is a cost of rapid progress that the free-market has always placed disproportionately on the individual and the government. It is a cost of business that never gets paid by those that profit.
Gabriel Calzada is an ExxonMobil funded, young associate professor. The quote from the right-wing "Americans for Tax Reform", quoting associate professor Calzada, is "...each green job that Spain creates prevents 2.2 other jobs from being created."
However, almost all other studies show that green jobs are in fact the best way to generate jobs and to both help the economy and the environment. Associate Professor Calzada, in his article, does not go into details to try to explain his statement, but sticks to generalities. This tactic is very convenient for right wing talk shows, but does not illustrate scientific usefulness, especially since the overwhelming bulk of studies show the exact opposite of what associate professor Calzada is advocating.
Historically, every major infrastructural endeavor has required economic assistance to start up. This includes the railroads, the network of hydroelectric dams, the interstate highway system, the nuclear industry, and now the alternative energy industry. What is different about the effort to develop the alternative energy industry is that it is in direct competition with Big Oil and coal, so that Big Oil, especially, is desperately funding misinformation campaigns against it.
Big Oil & King Coal are HUGE SUPPORTERS of the Renewable Energy Scam. They never mention Nuclear. Why because they know Renewable Energy will not even make a dent in their Fossil Fuel sales, but will suck funds dry from realistic options like Nuclear Energy. Don't believe me, here's a couple examples from British Petroleum:
http://www
http://www
All the SCAMS promoted. Hydrogen, Biofuels, Wind, Solar, CCS. No mention of Electric Vehicles or Nuclear. It's called a BAIT-AND-SWITCH SCAM and it's worked perfectly well since the Fossil Fuel Lobbies started it in the late 90's. Unfortuneatly the gullibility of the Public can never be overestimated.
Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).
Flemming Nissen, the head of development at West Danish generating company ELSAM tells us that “wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Recent academic research shows that wind power may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, depending on the carbon-intensity of back-up generation required because of its intermittent character.
Denmark'se
Do you have a source for that?
Check out:
http://bra
Denmark has 881 gm CO2 emissions per kwh of electricity generation. France has 83 gm CO2 emissions per kwh of electricity generation.
Wind turbines have reduced the need for new coal fired electrical plants, and have also reduced the base-line requirements for already existing coal plants.
The most recent Scientific American magazine (Nov. 2009) states that we could fill all of our (the world's) electrical needs with renewable energy by 2030 if we want to. "The cost of generating and transmitting power would be less than the projected cost per kilowatt-hour for fossil-fuel and nuclear power." The authors of the article estimate that wind turbines could provide about half of the energy needed, and would need about 50 square miles of total land area, worldwide. The authors estimate the cost at about $100 trillion dollars over twenty years, for the entire planet.
Interestingly, China is already outspending the USA in terms of the percentage of GDP that they are putting into renewable energy development.
There is plenty of reliable information available from journals such as Scientific American, and I encourage everyone to go to source materials instead of political blogs to get their advice.
If you look at that Scientific American piece online you will find that the 65 comments so far have pretty well debunked the authors wind. solar, and nuclear cost estimates.
The best senator in Washington.
I'm gonna have him cloned in China for a buck fifty so we can have one for our state too.
Make me one too for Iowa.
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