Part two in our series from guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director, the Presidential Climate Action Project.
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, “All of the above” is no energy policy, 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 points 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.
– Bill Becker is Senior Climate Policy Advisor at Natural Capitalism Solutions.
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Excellent essay, Bill, thanks.
Your sentence “Will the American people continue to tolerate a Congress that behaves like a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil, coal, and nuclear industries?” says a lot.
We need a new media company, financed by Google. They should even go retro, and buy newspaper racks in towns like Oklahoma City, and put them next to the ones owned by USA Today. Google also needs to start a TV network with daily UTube updates.
The biggest problem we have is that the American people have been successfully lied to by people with great resources and sophistication. Few know how egregious and dangerous these lies have been. When they have a chance to hear the truth, they will wake up. Your essay is a great example of what the entire country needs to hear, and if it’s delivered to the people, they will pay heed.
Here’s another lie:
Nuclear power is reliable. Besides the Surry reactor in Virginia going down due to wind damage in the electrical switchyard, a reactor in Georgia has gone down because of a turbine problem.
At least neither are ‘nuclear’ disasters, we’ve already got a big one in Japan.
http://onlineathens.com/stories/042211/new_818359254.shtml
Lots of nuclear power is out of production in America this spring
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/19/us-utilities-nuclear-idUSTRE73I7HC20110419
And geologist Jeffrey Park, director of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, said in a recent – separate – article: ‘History tells us that more megathrust earthquakes could occur in the next decade, but we have no evidence that the recent rate of nearly one megathrust per year will persist for longer than that.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1379187/U-S-fears-overdue-megathrust-earthquake-trigger-tsunami-decimate-unprepared-north-west.html
“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.” Well said, as a general statement of revulsion, but coal will be required to meet the world’s accelerating power demand until something else can take its place.
Wind and solar for baseload power is not an energy policy either, because of well-known insoluble problems of intermittency, lack of storage, and interconnection with the grid. Lots of this clean power goes to waste; one estimate is 25 TWh of curtailed wind in 2010.
For a long time the embattled proponents of wind and solar have used abhorrence of coal to justify a quixotic quest to immediately supplant coal for baseload power. This is a negative-sum scenario, where both sides lose: wind and solar look silly, and coal gets a black eye for powering prosperity.
How about a different way for wind and solar to be useful, such as by cleaning up coal emissions? A hybrid power system for the grid. For example, surplus wind and solar for electrolytic dissociation of CO2 to enable downstream oxygen recycling (instead of upstream air separation) for oxyfuel combustion. Use CO2 as a way to put curtailed energy to work. By getting widely deployed doing this clean-up job, in intimate connection with the existing grid, wind and solar might find a way eventually to take over.
liquefaction such an appropriate sounding word….
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42652990/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Japan’s liquefaction occurred over hundreds of miles, surprising even experienced engineers who are accustomed to seeing disaster sites, including from the recent earthquakes in Chile and New Zealand.
Other areas vulnerable
The study raises questions about whether existing building codes in other vulnerable locations can enable structures to withstand massive liquefaction, including in areas of Oregon, Washington and California.
“We’ve seen localized examples of soil liquefaction as extreme as this before, but the distance and extent of damage in Japan were unusually severe,” said Scott Ashford, a study team member from Oregon State University.
“Entire structures were tilted and sinking into the sediments, even while they remained intact,” said Ashford, who is based in Corvallis, Ore. “The shifts in soil destroyed water, sewer and gas pipelines, crippling the utilities and infrastructure these communities need to function. We saw some places that sank as much as 4 feet,” or 1.2 meters.
The duration of the Japanese earthquake, about five minutes, could be the key to the severity of the liquefaction and may force researchers to reconsider the extent of liquefaction damage possible.
“With such a long-lasting earthquake, we saw how structures that might have been okay after 30 seconds just continued to sink and tilt as the shaking continued for several more minutes,” Ashford said. “And it was clear that younger sediments, and especially areas built on recently filled ground, are much more vulnerable.”
An event almost exactly like Japan’s is expected in the Pacific Northwest from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the new findings make it clear that liquefaction will be a critical issue in the young soils there.
Nuke plants, certainly have to be reassessed in for risk management.
Basically, they are looks like they are nuked, history in certain regions and from a cost perspective everywhere really.
In response to Mr. McCutchen: A great of work is being done on each of the issues you believe make renewable energy “insoluable” for baseload power. My guess is those solutions are easier to find than overcoming the technical, legal and liability problems of large-scale carbon storage, not to mention the variety of damage related to coal power’s life cycle. Natural gas, not coal, is the transition fuel to an ultra-low-carbon economy. The environmental problems associated with gas extraction also are likely to be much easier to solve than the range of problems inherent in carbon capture and sequestration.
In regard to finding solutions, a public investment in storing energy makes far more sense to me than taxpayer subsidies for storing poisons. If the fossil energy industries have a future, they are quite capable of finding it for themselves. Public resources, which are scarce enough these days, should be dedicated not to resources that are finite and whose costs are destined to rise, but in resources that are renewable, that provide long-term stability, that are inherently less problematic, and whose costs are coming down.
There’s lots of information available on the research underway to solve the problems you mention. Two examples that I pulled quickly from the internet are these:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/12/energy-storage-and-the-grid
http://www.nrel.gov/learning/eds_energy_storage.html
“wholly owned subsidiary”?
It’s past time to recognise that the economy (and civilisation generally) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.
I’m curious:
What happens to air travel in your vision of the future? Do we have to give it up and go back to riding balloons and Zeppelins?
I can’t power a Boeing 747 on electricity, much less on solar power or wind power.
So if I need to travel to Europe on company business, how will I get there and how long will it take? If our Secretary of State needs to get to an international crisis point quickly, how will he or she get there and how long will it take?
The end of air travel would have enormous implications, including:
1. A large and permanent cut in the U.S. GDP, as overnight shipping vanishes.
2. The end of overnight shipping would also mean the end of 80% of organ transplantation, as those of us waiting for organ transplants would only be able to get organs from donors within driving distance.
3. Hawaii might need to leave the Union, since high-speed rail among the states of the continental U.S. would leave Hawaii out of much intrastate commerce.
4. The end of the U.S. Air Force would mean the end of the U.S. as a military power. It would now be at the mercy of any rogue state that defies the world and builds a fleet of jet bombers anyway.
@ Wilmot #4
I’m unclear what you mean by “electrolytic dissociation of CO2″. The process would really be chemical reduction of CO2 (adding electrons); plants do this when they use solar energy to convert CO2 to high energy sugar (C6H12O6) and O2. Plants actually don’t do that very efficiently, and we can’t do it easily either.
It makes much more sense to use excess solar or wind energy to split water to make H2, which stores the energy in chemical form, can be used in fuel cells to recover electricity, and can be converted to hydrocarbons if needed (e.g. for air travel, @ Steven #9). We are much closer to doing this reaction efficiently, although it is also quite difficult. (see work of Dan Nocera.)
The big problem is that once ancient fixed carbon from coal comes out of the ground it’s inevitably going to get into the atmosphere, even if it takes a detour through algae, sugar, or (temporary) storage in a reservoir somewhere.
Bill at 7. & Sarah at 10. -
In case you’ve not seen it, the book “The Methanol Economy” by the Nobel chemist George Olah offers some interesting perspective on the issue of energy storage.
His premis is that very large Hydro could be built in areas remote from human power demand specifically to produce electricity for combining carbon from airborn CO2 and hydrogen from water to supply methanol [CH3OH] in globally significant quantities.
While I doubt the carbon efficiency of mega-hydro – both through embedded energy and through reservoir CH4 emissions – and see offshore-wave vessels as plainly offering a better primary energy option, the concept of using methanol as an energy store is very attractive. It is of course far less problematic than hydrogen in terms of containment and transport, and is exceptionally swiftly bio-degraded in the event of leakage – having a half-life of only a few days. It is also far less prone to explosions.
The potential applications of methanol are exceptional in their breadth – from the ‘direct methanol fuel cell’ to external combustion engines (eg stirling) to internal combustion engines to combined cycle gas turbines. Methanol’s energy density at ~55% of that of petrol means that further refining would also allow its use as a feedstock for aviation fuels.
Moreover, alongside the potential for storing ‘surplus’ energy (due to grid constraints or low demand) from wind, solar, tidal, and other intermittent sources, the application of biomass-pyrolysis for biochar for the necessary global carbon recovery program yields co-product syngas (CO + H2) that holds ~30% of the fuelwood’s energy potential, and is readily converted to methanol.
The scale of the carbon recovery initiative, and thus of the co-product syngas output, will necessarily be very large indeed, meaning that its potential yield of methanol could again be on a globally significant scale.
In combination, methanol from dedicated remote offshore wave power, from intermittent renewables’ surplus power, and from biochar’s co-product syngas, offers the sustainable potential to address a useful fraction of the coming liquid fuel scarcity, as well as enhancing the economics (and thus the deployment rates) of both the renewables and the critically urgent carbon recovery initiative.
The fact that scarcely anyone has heard of the methanol option I’d personally put down to its potential to take over a substantial fraction of the global market for fossil liquid fuels, with production occurring in any nation where trees grow well &/or with decent non-fossil energy potentials. Both the petro-dollar’s backers and Big-oil fear being weakened by this option’s global advance, when in reality it could be making up for their looming decline.
Regards,
Lewis