FIGHTING FOR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
From: Dr. Jai Maharaj (usenet_at_mantra.com)
Date: 09/20/04
- Next message: Axel Vogt: "Re: Bessel Function - J0(x)"
- Previous message: Randy Poe: "Re: GPS versus source dependency / ballistic theory"
- Next in thread: Eunometic: "Re: FIGHTING FOR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE"
- Reply: Eunometic: "Re: FIGHTING FOR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:41:01 GMT
FIGHTING FOR AMERICA'S ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
Forwarded message from fidyl@yahoo.com
[ Subject: Fighting for America's Energy Independence
[ From: fidyl@yahoo.com
[ Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004
Fighting for America's Energy Independence
By Matt Bivens
The Nation
April 8, 2002
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12804
Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, took to the Senate
floor on February 27 with an impassioned plea for a small
federal subsidy that has fueled an explosion of activity
in the wind-power industry. "Congress is messing around
back and forth, stuttering, and not getting it done,"
Dorgan complained.
The so-called wind production tax credit (PTC) Dorgan was
championing is tiny as subsidies go -- over a decade it
has cost roughly $55 million -- and remarkably effective.
Wind is the fastest-growing energy industry in the world,
and last year was the US wind-power industry's best ever,
with power capacity equivalent to that of roughly six
coal-fired power plants coming online -- minus coal's
pollution. "The exciting thing is, [wind-power growth] is
happening all over the country -- it's not just
California," says Christine Real de Azua, a spokeswoman
for the American Wind Energy Association.
Nevertheless, the wind PTC struggled to get a proper
hearing. Finally, on March 8, Congress approved a meager
two-year extension, which wind's supporters had tacked
onto the unemployment insurance bill. That's a short time
frame for investors to do much planning, though, so
Dorgan and others continue to push for at least a five-
year extension.
Judged just on its merits, this would probably pass with
bipartisan support. But Congress is tentatively committed
to gargantuan new subsidies to coal, oil, gas and nuclear
power -- the only disagreement so far is exactly how
obscenely enormous they will be. So the five-year wind
PTC will be held hostage, to provide green window
dressing for less admirable legislation. The Republican
energy plan, touted in the President's State of the Union
address, would dole out $35.6 billion over ten years --
or about $125 per American -- to the oil, gas, coal and
nuclear industries. The Democratic Senate energy bill is
larded with almost as many tax-funded mega-giveaways to
polluters. By contrast, the wind PTC has, to date, cost
every American about 19 cents.
The good news is that wind power and other renewables
don't have to depend on federal leadership. An energy
revolution of wind, solar and clean-burning hydrogen
fuels is fast approaching -- thanks to engineers and
entrepreneurs, farsighted state governments and business
realities: Renewables have been steadily dropping in
price. They are winning victories in the marketplace even
while swimming against the federal riptide of subsidies
to Big Oil and King Coal.
'Greenery, Market Forces, Innovation'
America is the Persian Gulf of wind. The Energy
Department estimates that wind in the Dakotas alone could
meet two-thirds of America's electricity needs; Texas
could meet the last one-third. But there are good winds
across America -- in a ranking of the top states for
wind, California, the wind-power poster-child, comes in
at a lowly seventeenth. Solar power is equally bountiful:
The Union of Concerned Scientists says 100 square miles
in Nevada could produce enough solar electricity to power
the nation.
Worldwide, solar -- like wind -- is experiencing growth
rates reminiscent of the computer industry. Germany has
harnessed a world-leading 6,000 megawatts of wind power -
- roughly equal to twenty coal-fired power plants -- and
has decided to phase out nuclear power entirely by 2025.
Japan and Germany are putting photovoltaic solar panels
on thousands of roofs, while Spain and the Philippines
last year agreed to bring solar electricity to 400,000
rural Filipinos. A similar program has been under way in
South Africa since 1999, with Nelson Mandela's vocal
support. And Ireland just announced what will be the
world's largest offshore wind park. Eddie O'Connor,
managing director of Ireland's utility Eirtricity, says
offshore wind could provide two-thirds of Europe's
electricity by 2020. "The resource is there, the
technology is proven, the costs continue to drop -- all
that is needed is the political will to see it happen,"
O'Connor says.
Most important, wind and solar power can now be
efficiently stored by using them to create hydrogen, a
fuel that generates only drinkable water as waste.
Electricity generated from wind or sunlight can be used
to zap water -- "electrolyze" it -- to harvest the H from
H2O. That hydrogen can then be used in fuel cells to
produce heat and electricity or to power automobiles.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute envisions wind
farms producing electricity by day and hydrogen for cars
by night. "None of this is as pie-in-the-sky as it
sounds," reported Fortune magazine in November 2001.
"Potent commercial forces are bringing the hydrogen
economy along faster than anyone thought possible only a
few years ago."
Britain has already announced that every tenth car sold
there by decade's end must be powered by hydrogen or some
other zero-emissions fuel. Hydrogen fuel-cell systems can
be found across New York City --from the Condé Nast
building to sewage treatment plants to a Central Park
police station -- and across America -- from a post
office in Alaska to the space shuttle. Automobile and oil
companies have set up well-funded hydrogen-fuels
divisions, and major car companies are racing to bring a
hydrogen car to market. Toyota intends to start selling
one in January of next year. "Greenery, market forces and
innovation are reshaping our industry and propelling us
inexorably toward hydrogen energy," a Texaco executive
told Congress last year. The executive director of
advanced technology vehicles at General Motors agreed,
telling a petrochemicals conference, "Our long-term
vision is of a hydrogen economy." No less a person than
Henry Ford's great-grandson, Ford Motor chairman William
Ford, says hydrogen will put an end to "the 100-year
reign of the internal-combustion engine."
Costs and True Costs
Twenty years ago, a kilowatt-hour (kWh) from sunlight
cost about $2.50. Today's photovoltaics turn out
kilowatt-hours for 20-25 cents -- a tenfold drop in cost,
but still expensive. For this reason, solar is still
dependent on government support. The Energy Department
has a much-ballyhooed "Million Solar Roofs Initiative" --
but it has no real money. Instead, solar is being brought
in by innovative local governments, especially in energy-
anxious California. The Sacramento Municipal Utility
District leads the nation with ten megawatts of solar
power installed, and last year it tripled its staff and
contractors to reduce a six-month backlog of residents
eager to buy its subsidized solar roofs. San Francisco
voters in November approved a $100 million bond issue to
install up to twenty megawatts of solar roofs on schools
and thirty megawatts of windmills.
Wind is more competitive than solar; it once cost 40
cents per kWh but is now routinely under 5 cents -- even
without the wind PTC of 1.7 cents per kWh. With the wind
PTC, wind power is competitive with energy from newly
built and supersubsidized coal (5 cents per kWh) and
natural-gas plants (4 cents at current low gas prices),
and is cheaper than energy from a new nuclear plant (7
cents per kWh). Those ballpark averages come from the
government's Energy Information Administration, and they
reflect what it would cost to set up a new power plant
from scratch and run it. If you leave aside the massive
construction costs of big polluting plants -- which isn't
a very helpful way to think about energy -- then coal,
nuclear power and gas are all in the 2-3 cents per kWh
range.
But cents-per-kWh quotes are deceptive: They say nothing
about the economic and human costs of pollution-created
problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) say coal dust kills 2,000 miners each year and has
cost taxpayers more than $1 billion a year since the
1970s in related health and pension benefits. The Justice
Department has paid nearly $200 million in compensation
to about 2,000 uranium miners and millers for their
cancer (the mines fed nuclear weapons, not just nuclear
power). The government has also spent $1.48 billion
cleaning up uranium mine tailings -- mounds of
radioactive slop left behind in places like Mexican Hat,
Utah, and Ambrosia Lake, New Mexico. And dozens of
uranium and coal miners are hurt and killed each year in
accidents.
There are other status quo costs as well. Last year we
depended on foreigners for 55 percent of our oil. As
noted in a bill before Congress to drill in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, America "spends over $100
billion per year for foreign energy and equally
significant amounts on our military presence in the
Persian Gulf oil arena." Status quo costs also include
1.56 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide -- to say
nothing of more poisonous particulate matter -- put into
our air in 2000 alone, just by energy generation. That in
turn drives health problems like our asthma tragedy:
Asthma affects every twentieth American, including 5
million children. In 1998, the CDC says, asthma killed
more than 5,438, put a half-million people in hospitals
and led to 100 million days of restricted activity. The
CDC puts the asthma price tag for 1998 at $12.7 billion.
Find this dollars-and-cents stuff tedious? The American
Lung Association cuts to the chase: A March 2001
literature review offers solid evidence that power plants
are killing us off by the thousands. One study cited
attributes 30,100 deaths every year to power plant
emissions.
While we're on the subject of costs, consider that the
cheapest and safest form of alternative energy is --
using less. Vice President Cheney says we will need 1,300
new (300 megawatt) power plants, "more than one new plant
per week, every week for twenty years running." Put aside
for a moment that those plants could all be wind- or
solar-powered, and consider: Had Cheney consulted less
with Enron and more with the best government scientists,
he'd know that a three-year study found that an
efficiency program could cut projected electricity demand
by 20-47 percent -- the equivalent of from 265 to 610 of
Cheney's plants. Bill Prindle, a buildings expert with
the Washington-based Alliance to Save Energy, has a list
of proven efficiencies that slim Cheney's 1,300 plants
even further, to just 170.
This is not about "conservation" -- i.e., living without
air conditioning or making other virtuous sacrifices --
but about "efficiency" -- high-tech solutions like better
lighting and appliances. Amory Lovins, co-founder of the
Rocky Mountain Institute, calls it installing
"negawatts." "Negawatts" are the cheapest, cleanest,
most-quickly-installed -- and, by the way, the most
terrorist-proof -- of all energy sources. As Lovins has
noted, a 0.4 mile-per-gallon improvement in the average
vehicle would save as much oil each year as we'd ever get
from the Arctic refuge. The National Academy of Sciences
concluded in July 2001 that a 40-mpg average, nearly
double what we have now, is within quick reach.
Efficiency spending often pays for itself. Cool Companies
(www.coolcompanies.org), set up by an efficiency advocacy
group, offers such anecdotes as one about a business that
invested $370,000 in improved lighting, saved $700,000
that year on its energy bill and also racked up
productivity gains of nearly $14 million over the same
period. Unfortunately, the market needs help -- education
and a regulatory shove -- to fully harvest similar
savings. That's because those who design and construct
buildings rarely pay the light bill or the salaries of
future tenants. Builders are rewarded for, and buyers are
worried about, keeping initial costs low -- which are
easier to comparison-shop than future life-cycle costs.
An entrepreneur with a choice between wind for 3 cents
and coal for 2.9 cents would buy coal. But a responsible
society would crunch the numbers. Solar power and
efficiency do not have secret costs that include
thousands of deaths, millions of dollars in lost
productivity, billions of dollars sent to the world's oil
dictatorships and tens of billions spent policing the
Persian Gulf. This doesn't mean we should look with
loathing upon the oil and coal industries -- after all,
they provide heat for our homes and fuel for our cars.
But it does mean we should question a government that
ignores cleaner alternatives and instead shovels our tax
dollars into pollution-creating furnaces.
Consider the billions of tax dollars we give to polluters
each year. This largesse is sprinkled throughout our tax
code in ways that thwart easy analysis. So estimates of
the subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power yield
wildly different numbers -- from the US Energy
Information Administration's conservative estimate of
$2.7 billion in 1999 to guesstimates as high as $80
billion a year. In search of less spongy data, Norman
Myers and Jennifer Kent wrote Perverse Subsidies, which
identified $21 billion the United States hands over every
year to fossil fuels and nuclear power. "If taxpayers
were aware that a good chunk of their taxes were going
down the rathole into these subsidies, they'd be marching
on the Mall," said Myers in an interview. "But it's hard
to get the message to the taxpayer because these
subsidies are so numerous and so varied, and some are so
covert."
Myers and Kent also found that renewables get at best a
tenth of the subsidies the dinosaurs do. They calculate
that the $90 million or so the United States spends on
solar research wouldn't be enough to pave two miles of
Interstate highway. Meanwhile, the wind PTC costs us
somewhere from 0.2 percent to 0.025 percent of what the
supersubsidized polluters pull down. Critics of
renewables have seized upon the wind PTC to argue that
wind is not "market ready." Fair enough -- but then, what
is?
Apollo Projects
House minority leader Richard Gephardt called in January
for "an 'Apollo Project' to develop environmentally
smart, renewable energy solutions." Among other things,
he proposed 100,000 hydrogen-fueled cars by 2010. Five
days later, Gephardt gave the Democratic response to the
State of the Union address and mumbled something
unmemorable about energy. Democratic Senator John Kerry
and independent Jim Jeffords have called for harvesting
20 percent of our energy from renewables by 2020, and
Jeffords has offered an excellent bill to mandate that.
But the emerging "Senate energy bill" is a much messier
offering by Tom Daschle and Jeff Bingaman. Already
Daschle-Bingaman has declined to demand real fuel
efficiency, and had adopted a far less aggressive 10-
percent-by-2020 renewables standard -- even while larding
in so many new subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear
power that Public Citizen derides the bill as "Enron-
influenced, Exelon-tested and Exxon-approved."
So the Democrats are slouching timorously toward perhaps
someday actually standing for something. Gephardt is
right, of course: We could still leap to the front of
this coming revolution. An Apollo Project for clean and
secure energy might, for example, put a hydrogen pump
next to every gasoline pump -- doing for hydrogen-fueled
cars what Eisenhower's Interstate highway system did for
gasoline cars. Estimates of the price tag for such a
project range from $20 billion to $100 billion. Or we
could kick off a renewables procurements policy. The
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research suggests
spending $20 billion a year buying solar panels, fuel
cells and fuel-efficient vehicles for federal and local
government use -- as a way of pushing those technologies
into true mass production.
A common response to such proposals is to tsk-tsk:
"Prohibitively expensive!" "The government can't pick
winners!" But we are already showering billions of
dollars every year on the dirty energies of yesteryear.
Even if we don't want the Apollo Project, shouldn't we be
dismantling the Anti-Apollo Project of perverse
subsidies?
Then again, if we ended the subsidies to the dinosaurs,
who would bankroll the GOP? In 2000, oil and gas gave $13
to presidential candidate George Bush for every $1 to
candidate Al Gore. Coal gave $9 out of every $10 to
Republicans. And according to the Center for Public
Integrity, the top 100 officials in the Bush White House
have the majority of their personal investments, up to
$144.6 million, sunk in the old-guard energy sector.
The Green Scissors Campaign, an alliance of
environmentalists and taxpayer watchdogs, parses the
Bush-backed energy bill giveaways: $21.2 billion for oil
and gas, $5.8 billion for coal, $5.9 billion for
utilities and $2.7 billion for nuclear power. That same
oilman's orgy included, for green window dressing, a wind
PTC extension, but while the wind PTC couldn't get a
hearing on its own, nuclear power certainly could. Last
fall House Republicans worked furiously on legislation
that, in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, hands
taxpayers the bill. This federal insurance program for
nuclear power was approved under rules that keep everyone
anonymous -- rules usually reserved for noncontroversial
matters like renaming post offices. A White House
statement praised this sneaky vote: "To assure the future
of nuclear energy, [taxpayer-subsidized] liability
coverage must continue for nuclear activities." (In other
words: The White House concedes that nuclear power can't
survive in a free market.) This subsidy, the Price-
Anderson Act, awaits Senate action along with the rest of
the subsidy binge; it is already part of the Daschle-
Bingaman bill.
Arguably, fossil fuels and nuclear deserve no subsidy at
all. But with the "free market" Republicans leading and
the Democrats meekly following, we encourage dangerous,
dirty and terrorist-friendly energy infrastructures
(often in the name of security!). That's not to suggest
despair; from California to Europe, renewables are
emerging as the business and political favorites. But it
is to ask, impatiently, how much longer Americans will be
expected to overpay for energy -- in health costs,
environmental damages and misused taxes. The people of
America are being overcharged; it's time to ask for a
refund.
End of forwarded message from fidyl@yahoo.com
Visit:
http://www.pcrm.org
Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send
peace, but a sword.
"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in
law.
"And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
- Matthew 10:34-36.
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
purposes of research and open discussion. The contents of this post may not
have been authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the
poster. The contents are protected by copyright law and the exemption for
fair use of copyrighted works.
o If you send private e-mail to me, it will likely not be read,
considered or answered if it does not contain your full legal name, current
e-mail and postal addresses, and live-voice telephone number.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views expressed by others are
not necessarily those of the poster.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted material the use of
which may or may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This material is being made available in efforts to advance the
understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democratic, scientific, social, and cultural, etc., issues. It is believed
that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research, comment, discussion and educational purposes by
subscribing to USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more information
go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article for purposes of
your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.
- Next message: Axel Vogt: "Re: Bessel Function - J0(x)"
- Previous message: Randy Poe: "Re: GPS versus source dependency / ballistic theory"
- Next in thread: Eunometic: "Re: FIGHTING FOR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE"
- Reply: Eunometic: "Re: FIGHTING FOR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Relevant Pages
|
