Even renewable energy hawks -- most of us anyway -- will concede that the United States cannot go cold turkey from oil tomorrow, or shut down all coal-fired power plants this week, or flip the off-switch tonight on nuclear power.
What we should not concede, however, is the need for the most aggressive possible push to get renewable energy on line. It should be our top national energy priority for many reasons, ranging from environmental protection to national security, and from economic vitality to social equity.
President Obama's recent "Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future" is as close as he's come so far to issuing a comprehensive national plan for the transition to clean energy. I credit the president for understanding that energy efficiency and renewable energy are a practical, vital and near-term part of our national energy mix.
Not everyone gets that, or admits it. In a recent example of cluelessness, USA Today published a vigorous defense of plastic grocery bags by Jonah Goldberg, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Goldberg panned the president for being "convinced that we can 'win the future' with such boondoggles as high-speed rail and impractical fads such as wind and solar energy (emphasis mine)." USA Today notes that Goldberg is a member of the newspaper's Board of Contributors, as though defending grocery bags and classifying renewable energy as a "fad" qualifies as a contribution to public discourse.
What's really impractical, of course, is the idea that America can compete and thrive in the 21st Century with the same finite dirty fuels that powered us the past 200 years. From childhood asthma to foreign wars, there are myriad reasons fossil energy industries should be, and inevitably will be, dead men walking. There are populist arguments for renewables, too -- a fact our struggling middle-class families should recognize. A staff report for the vice president's Middle Class Task Force notes:
Green jobs have the potential to be quality, family-sustaining jobs that also help to improve our environment. They are largely domestic jobs that can't be offshored. They tend to pay more than other jobs, even controlling for worker characteristics...After decades in which the middle class has not gotten its fair share of the rewards from American growth and prosperity, the green sector of the economy represents a source of high- quality, well-paid jobs for the middle class.
Or as Van Jones put it last week during his speech to Power Shift 2011:
The stereotype is that solar power is just hippie power. But it's also cowboy power, farmer power, rancher power and Appalachian mountain power.
Sadly, invoking the real power of renewable resources is where the president's blueprint falls short. As I pointed out in Part 1 of this post, the president has joined the "all of the above" club that argues we need all forms of energy to meet our rising demand. A plan that fails to acknowledge the relative costs and benefits of different energy resources -- and to favor those that give us the most benefit with the least life-cycle costs -- is not a roadmap to the future. It's the path of least political resistance, a reelection strategy rather than a national policy.
The president's blueprint has other shortcomings mixed among its good parts. For example, its definition of "energy security" needs to be broader and cleaner. If we define "energy security" accurately as an economy powered by sustainable resources that increase our financial and military stability, protect the environment throughout their life cycle, conserve critical finite resources such as water, and don't leave future generations with costly and toxic liabilities, then nuclear power and coal simply cannot qualify.
Second, while it acknowledges that America has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and that oil prices are determined by a quirky global market, the president's blueprint nevertheless promotes more domestic petroleum production as a path to greater security. However, since the United States does not control the oil market, more domestic production won't protect us from skyrocketing gasoline prices and supply volatility. That point needs to be made to the American people again and again, if only to immunize us against ludicrous Beckisms like that of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) who earned points as a demagogue when he blamed rising gas prices on the Obama Administration's "dubious environmental goals."
If you want to end an addiction to oil, it is not enough to change who supplies the drug. You have to stop using the stuff before it kills you, or permanently damages your life. The Obama Administration has done some historic therapy on America's oil addiction, including new vehicle efficiency standards, but the president's blueprint doesn't lay out the path to full sobriety.
Third, by describing a future in which we burn oil and coal indefinitely, the president calls into question the depth of his concern about climate disruption. Clean coal is a mirage. The president's goal to reduce America's oil imports a third by 2025 is not sufficiently aggressive to address global climate change. Oil is oil. It produces carbon emissions whether it comes from the Persian Gulf, Canada, the Gulf of Mexico or the Interior West.
Nor is the blueprint aggressive in ending our dependence on other finite fuels. On the contrary, it proposes that we produce more natural gas, nuclear energy and coal power in a suite of clean energy technologies that generate 80 percent of America's power by 2035. That brings us back to the definition of "clean".
So long as the coal industry devastates ecosystems during extraction, injects carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or underground, and creates other poisonous pollutants and liabilities such as toxic sludge and ash, coal cannot qualify as clean.
So long as nuclear power produces deadly wastes we aren't willing to manage, terrorist targets we can't fully protect and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in an increasingly unstable world, nuclear power cannot be classified as clean. Neither can natural gas, so long as the industry has not found a way to extract it benignly without methane emissions, saline and radioactive wastewater, or the use of secret fracturing agents.
The idea that energy efficiency and renewable resources can't meet America's energy requirement is a self-fulfilling premise. When conventional wisdom is that renewables will be no more than a marginal contributor to our energy portfolio in the foreseeable future, policy-makers and private investors are less inclined to take the moon shot that would allow sustainable energy to achieve its full potential.
The operative questions in contemporary U.S. energy policy include these: Will the president put his full weight into winning congressional approval of the policies and resources we need to achieve a genuinely clean economy? Will he push Congress aggressively to end taxpayer subsidies of fossil energy? Will Congress recognize that in the 21st century, energy efficiency and renewable energy are the bedrock on which U.S. security and prosperity must be built? Will the American people continue to tolerate a Congress that's behaves like a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil, coal and nuclear energy industries?
We are watching corruption, timidity, money, greed, the insatiable appetite for power, fear of the next election, and garden variety stupidity rule America's energy policy. Sadly, that has been the case for a very long time. It has become a perverse tradition handed down from Congress to Congress and White House to White House, even under presidents who have had the best intentions. It need not be this way. And if we really want to "win the future," it cannot continue.
What's next? In Part 3, I'll talk about how members of Congress who vote against low-carbon energy are voting against jobs in their own states. In Part 4, I'll cite some of the analyses of the past few years that conclude renewable energy can make a far more sizeable contribution to our energy mix than President Obama's energy blueprint and congressional convention acknowledge.
Follow William S. Becker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sustainabill
Karl Grossman: Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rkupers2/English
It is a transitional step, one which can be implemented quickly and would change our dependence on foreign oil.
David Blume has decades of on the ground experience implementing permaculture and ethanol systems around the world. If you take even 10 minutes to read some of his web site it will change the way you view ethanol as a fuel.
http://alcoholcanbeagas.com
We are first of al dealing with a cartel secondly corporations whos profits are based on the availability of their product. I wonder how many large reserves of oil are being kept offline or not even being developed. It works for DeBeers in relation to the diamond industry. Why wouldn't it make sense for the oil industry to do the same with such auniversally used commodity?
This is where the real investigation needs to take place. I swear I remember the oil companies touting huge find of oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico about 10 years ago that were said to be able to almost end our dependence on foreign oil. Since then nary a peep about such finds. How much oil shale could be in our own upper midwest since it's been found in such abundance in Canada? There is a multitude of leases the oil companies have not taken leases on in America. Here's where an investigation into manipulation would do good. I know people will shoot this down claiming free market forces would prevail etc. I have one word DeBeers.
At the 2011 Hydrogen Conference earlier this year, Genesys-Hydrogen gave a very informative presentation about its Radiant Energy Transfer.
It is one of the all of the above solutions which politicians won't discuss by name.
Green energy is at about 1-2% of total, and has been doubling every year or two for a while. That doubling rate is normal for high tech industries. It's called the "S" curve. That means green energy can replace fossil and nukes in 7-15 years.
Trouble is, the fossil and nukes companies have 100 times as much money to buy the politicians. Rahm and Axelrod lobbied for the nuclear power industry. Chu's official DOE report, the one referenced in the presidents plan, uses 4 year old green energy numbers compared to future fantasy 2016 fossil and nuke numbers. The fix is in. Obama and the DLC democratic sell outs charmed us.
Vote for the Kucinich Progressive Caucus folks for all offices but the pres. Give Obama some real citizen's rep to compromise and find the center with.
The houses would generate more electricity then the people were using. The overage could be in batteries, for later, when people are home, and also sold back to the grid, so any company wanting a new factory in a sunny state could be offered free power for the first five years.
Combined wind and solar, scaled to an individual house will pay for itself, within 7 years, just as an electric bike will pay for itself in gasoline savings within one year.
Why aren't we doing this, besides the one - two million jobs such a nationwide rooftop program would create. Because Money & Power (Barack Obama's supporters) want to control the power so they make more money. Giant wind turbine fields cannot compete with natural gas prices, on paper. But for a residential home owner, a deal between you and the wind, between you and the old gold sun, without Boone Pickens casting a shadow in the middle, the above measures save money and pay for themselves!
I am an independent write-in candidate for president. This is my program.
michael s lev in son dot commie
The solar shingles are installed in the same manner as regualr shingles and look the same. These shingles are different than solar PANELS which are heavy and are placed on TOP of rooftop shingles.
If we all were able to do this it would eliminate our need for coal, natural gas, nuclear reactors, fisheries killing hydro-power dams and end our dependence on foreign oil/gasoline which is primarily used to fuel gas powered cars in the U.S.
This would also allow us to stop covering pristine desert areas with solar panels.
An electric car powered by rooftop solar is 2000 times more efficient than a gasoline powered car.
With government guaranteed home loans, and the permit requirements nationalized, by Executive Order, (my plan as president), we will also create 2-3 million jobs. Let me take this opportunity to invite you to visit my page michaelslevinson and see my Clipper Ship program, the ships to be powered by the sun and driven by the wind, with college students getting their undergrad education while crewing the ships.
Win, Win, Win -- only the oil producers would loose but most of them are hostile nations anyway.
That would be a real effective oil policy, not just more useless talk, talk.
Hydorocarbon fuel will have to go eventually. It's just a matter of time.
Visit www.renewableenergyworld.com to see what the world is doing with or without us.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/22/earth-day-2011-worlds-most-polluted-places-_n_852617.html?ir=Green#s268313&title=Linfen_China
4 of the 10 sites were due to mining or smelting of materials for batteries!
Maybe electric cars are not the saviors we were hoping for!
The point being, there is a HUGE difference between democratically owned, point of use solar power and efficiency and the so-called "Big Renewables" industry, which is dominated by the fine folks at Chevron, BP, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, et. al. The former is not only a solution to our jobs, pollution, property values, local economies, particulate pollution and grid congestion problems, but it also breaks the back of Big Energy monopolies, which is EXACTLY why we have not been allowed to have proven policies like PACE loans and German style feed in tariffs to transition - at NO net cost - to a clean energy economy.
If Big Energy can't rip us off, and kill our planet while they are doing it (yes Big Solar and Big Wind and Big Transmission are extremely destructive), we aren't gonna get our government's support...
as for the basic economics, here are our choices: Chevron kills off our publicly owned deserts using our money and charges us a huge premium for the power or WE save our deserts, create more jobs, charge a premium for the power and WE GET THE MONEY INSTEAD OF CHEVRON while improving property values.
the recent LA Business Council/UCLA study done about the impacts of a feed in tariff in Los Angeles showed a substantial REDUCTION in energy bills of non-solar-generators after 10 years when compared to doing nothing, which absolutely will not be the case if Big Energy produces all our solar and wind and builds out a bunch of unneeded transmission.
food security does not depend on anything i am mentioning and your tax dollars are already being spent on solar - only on the WRONG kind. i am merely suggesting that WE should benefit from those dollars (short and longterm) instead of Chevron.