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American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy

Climate Hope in a Prison of Despair

Image: Holman, Despair of the Defenders of Jerusalem, Wikimedia

There is a Way Forward From Here

August 4, 2010
By Craig Severance

The U.S. Senate has rejected taking action on a significant climate or energy bill this year.  Heads are hanging in despair, moans of anguish are rising, and arguments are breaking out about who is to blame.  

Earth Not Waiting.  While Washington has failed to act, the Earth is showing accelerating strains from our continued dumping of warming pollutants to the atmosphere. 

The latest alarming news: the phytoplankton that produce 50% of all the Earth's oxygen and form the base of the ocean's entire food chain are now dying off.    World temperature records continue to be set monthly in this hottest of all years and hottest of decades on record.  Panicked scientists are frantically warning "the urgent need to act cannot be overstated".

When We See the Iceberg it Will Be Too Late.  We are as passengers on the Titanic desperately trying to convince the Captain to change course.  The iceberg isn't yet in sight, so few believe us.  When it finally looms into view and everyone rushes on deck with deer-in-the-headlight eyes, it will already be too late. 
 
Is There Any Hope?  Action must be taken now.  If Congress will not act, is there any hope in this Prison of Despair?

Hope is here ---  a light can still shine . . . 

Image: Hope in a Prison of Despair, De Morgan (WikiMedia)

Here's how: 

Click here to read full article.



What Will it Take to End Our Oil Addiction?
    
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill                               Peak Oil Coming Sooner Than Expected

May 29, 2010
by Craig Severance

It's time we moved on to something else, or this is going to kill us. 

Not only are world oil supplies running out, but what oil is still left is proving very dirty to obtain.  We need to kick our oil addiction now if we expect to preserve any hopes of economic prosperity, or unspoiled habitats.   

"This is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like."  We have the Deepwater Horizon oil spill now precisely because the easy to obtain oil is already tapped. You don't drill in mile deep waters if you have somewhere else you could go.  

The worst is yet to come. If we don't kick oil now, we will see more disasters as oil companies move to the Arctic offshore, clear more forests for tar sands, and rape the American West to develop oil shale.  Worldwide droughts, floods and dead seas will also ensue from global warming caused from burning oil.

Richard Heinberg of Post Carbon Institute said it best: "This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet. The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end our dependence on the stuff." 

We Can Do That.  I said in my recent Peak Oil article "The End of the World as We Know It" that we need to adapt to Peak Oil, but we can do that.  This article explains how.

Click here to read full article.

1. Capital Needs.  Expanding nuclear power requires enormous amounts of capital,  For instance, some members of the U.S. Congress have said the U.S. should build 100 more new nuclear power plants.  Yet, building 100 new nuclear power plants would require a capital investment of at least one trillion dollars, and this would still meet only only a fraction of U.S. energy requirements.  In the throes of a world financial crisis, will economies have the resources to devote such enormous resources to just one industry?  Where will the funds come from?  Will other energy priorities such as energy efficiency, the Smart Grid, and expansion of renewables be eclipsed by nuclear power's needs?  Even more broadly, is it ethical or wise to devote so much of an economy's total resources to just electricity production?  For instance, do we really want the elderly who now struggle to pay $100/month electric bills to now have to find a way to pay $200/month?  Or, would it be better to limit the share of resources devoted to electricity by helping electric customers cut their usage?  Also, on the societal level, capital is limited.  In many developed countries key needs such as roads and bridges, public water and sewer systems, basic scientific research and development, and schools are all falling into decay because of a lack of capital investment.  In developing countries, these key infrastructures are not yet even in place.
2. Climate Change.  Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has said for many years that the pursuit of nuclear power will make climate change worse -- because adopting it as a climate protection strategy simply won't work.  It will be too expensive and too slow to get the job done.  This would not be such a disaster (many things don't work) if nuclear power didn't take all the money away from doing the things that actually do work.  Also, as Dr. Benjamin Sovacool of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy published here in 2008, nuclear power "is in no way carbon free or emissions free" even though it is better than coal, oil, or natural gas.  Because of carbon emissions needed for uranium mining and milling, uranium enrichment etc., Dr. Sovacool concluded after reviewng 103 studies on the topic, that nuclear power produces significantly more emissions than renewable energy technologies.  Putting most of your money into a technology that is more costly, slower, and less effective is a strategy for failure -- and climate change is an issue where the world cannot afford to fail.
3. Employment.  Finding a solution to crippling unemployment is now an urgent matter for many countries.  We cannot "stimulate" forever -- it is crucial that limited capital resources are invested most effectively.  Investments in efficiency and renewables will create more jobs than investing in new nuclear power plants.  The jobs created in new nuclear power are so highly technical there may not even be a trained nuclear work force available to fill those jobs.  As reported by the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009, the nuclear industry is already facing critical shortages of the nuclear engineers needed to keep today's existing fleets of nuclear power plants operating safely, let alone having the added staff needed to expand.  It is not nuclear engineers who are out of work -- there aren't even enough ot them -- but the construction workers we all know in our own families and communities.  Jobs are needed in every community, not just a few concentrated locations where a massive new power plant may be built.  Efficiency and distributed power sources spread more new jobs, to those who need them, in more places.
4. Economic Dependence .  America, most of Europe except Russia, and in fact most countries of the world other than oil exporting nations are all suffering from a major drain on their economies due to the need to pay for imported energy.  Nuclear power won't help most countries become energy independent,  because only a handful of nations in the world possess significant uranium resources.  Nuclear power is actually just another form of imported energy.  Is it wise for a country to invest tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in new power plants that depend on fuel imports from often unstable countries, and countries within the former Soviet sphere of influence?  Efficiency and renewables (and for some nations natural gas) utilize a country's own resources.  Keeping dollars from leaving a country can create just as much economic activity as bringing new dollars in. 
5. Military Security.    America and the EU nations have invested major military resources to protect access to imported oil.  Nuclear power does little or nothing to reduce oil dependence to lessen the need for the military resources devoted to oil.  Far worse, however, is that nuclear power creates stark new military security threats of its own that may require investment of major military resources to keep terrorists and weapons-intent countries from building nuclear weapons.  Nuclear power grew out of the nuclear weapons program, and the nuclear fuel cycle still produces the elements -- uranium and plutonium -- which can be used to make nuclear weapons or radioactive "dirty bombs".  The nuclear industry argues that any nation or terrorist does not need a nuclear power plant to make a bomb,  they just need uranium enrichment.  This is true.  However, the only "legitimate" reason to enrich uranium is to use it in a nuclear power plant.  The continued promotion and sale worldwide of "civilian" nuclear reactors thus gives nations the excuse to operate uranium enrichment programs, as we have seen in Iran.  In addition to this looming threat of new nuclear states, an even more frightening prospect is that weapons grade material will fall into the hands of terrorists. Terrorists are not deterred by Mutually Assured Destruction as are nuclear states.   Some nations are separating out the plutonium from spent nuclear fuel and mixing it into new fuel, and also stockpiling huge quantities of plutonium.  The unused fuel containing plutonium is shipped to nuclear plants, making it vulnerable to attack in transport.  The large plutonium stockpiles may also be attacked with the purpose of either seizing the material for bomb making or contamination of populations with radiation.   Western nuclear plants cannot explode with an atomic Hiroshima-style blast.  However, the continued sale and use of nuclear power plants may allow those intent on creating such horrendous destruction to gain access to exactly the  materials they need..

Nuclear Power Makes No Business Sense.  The above problems are very serious in nature.  To address them however may require some simple common sense.  What is the purpose of nuclear power: simply to boil water to make kWh's.  It is not the only way to make kWh''s.  Thus, if nuclear power makes no business sense, and there are alternatives to nuclear power, the problems noted above can be avoided except for existing plants.  We won't need to make things worse by builiding new nuclear power plants. 

Click here to read entire article.



Job Losses Push Need for Energy Bill

February 10, 2010
by Craig Severance 

America's urgent need for new job creation may be the driver that pushes the Senate to pass a jobs & energy bill this year.  After the loss of 8.4 million jobs in the current Great Recession,  Congress is searching desperately for any means to create new jobs.

Unemployment vs. Deficit "Conundrum".  As former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Saturday on National Public Radio, "we as a nation save too little and we borrow too much, both individually and the government."    In Paulson's new book On the Brink, he argues that Americans' relative lack of savings helped to propel the financial crisis. 


Paulson: "Conundrum"    

However, Paulson acknowledged to NPR host Scott Simon, the "conundrum" is that to spur the economy, we now need to spend more and create more jobs.  Paulson did not offer a solution to this impasse.  

Indeed, this contradiction is now paralyzing the nation's political life, as Americans are worried about both high unemployment and record deficits.  The Obama Administration and Congress are now walking a tightrope between these anxieties.

Investment as Solution.  The solution to this jobs vs. savings conundrum is to invest money now, into projects that when completed will help us individually and as a nation to save more. 

For instance, an investment now into energy efficient buildings would create desperately needed construction jobs, but pay for itself with increased energy savings.  

Investments in an advanced electric grid using renewable energy will create the engine to power the economy, without skyrocketing fuel costs. 

Investments to wean our cars and trucks off imported oil can stop the transfer of wealth of trillions of dollars from the U.S. economy that is now building the economies of oil exporting nations, many of them hostile.  These dollars can instead remain in the U.S. to build our own economy.

Measures which spur investments that help us to save thus meet both the urgent need for more jobs and make structural changes to help America thrive through thrift. 

Click here to read the full article.



Tax Policies to Help Climate Action, Create Jobs

November 11, 2009
by Craig Severance, CPA 

The Senate Finance Committee, Chaired by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT),  held a Hearing Tuesday over the "future of jobs" in the context of the proposed energy and climate bill.   The strange list of witnesses -- including polluter industries who hold few prospects for job creation in a new energy economy -- seemed to only distract the Committee from its primary responsibility, which is to use the powers under its jurisdiction to contribute real solutions.  

Will Finance Committee Senators use the power of their Committee over Federal tax policy to actually do something about climate change, and America's 10.2% and climbing jobless rate? 

Or, will the Committee be pushed to give more breaks to the very polluters who are causing the climate catastrophe?

Tax a Powerful Tool.  The ability to tax --  or to give tax breaks -- is one of the most powerful tools of the Federal government.    It is discouraging the tax committees of Congress-- Baucus' Senate Finance Committee and Rep. Charles Rangel's House Ways & Means Committee -- have done little to examine how the Federal Tax Code is actually encouraging energy waste.  While other Committees have led the way on energy and climate legislation, the tax committees have been sitting on the sidelines for most of this year. 

Source: Architecture 2030

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