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Democrats Are Blowing Our Best Chance for Clean Energy

Democrats Are Blowing Our Best Chance for Clean Energy
By Kelpie Wilson
AlterNet
Posted June 30, 2008.

How the Dems sacked one of the most important opportunities to turn around our energy future.

Take some of Big Oil's obscene profits and invest the money in developing clean renewable energy for the future. This is the Democrats' big idea on energy and it's a good one, but right now Democrats are botching it badly.

Last month, Congress failed for the tenth time this year to pass an extension of the renewable energy tax credits that have nurtured the infant wind and solar power industries in the US but are set to expire at the end of 2008. The tax credit extension should have been included in the big renewable energy bill that Congress passed at the end of 2007, but Republicans blocked the provision because they didn't like closing oil tax loopholes to pay for it.

Some Democrats, like Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, got it, and shifted the approach. Cantwell drafted a bipartisan bill, cosponsored by Nevada Republican John Ensign, to renew the tax credits without requiring a budget offset that would draw a Republican filibuster or a Bush veto.

The problem is that a contingent of House Democrats has continued to insist that no renewable energy tax credit extension be passed unless it can be paid for by cutting some other budget item or by adding revenue -- like increasing taxes on Big Oil. These "pay-go" rules are supposed to establish Democrats as the anti-deficit party and the House leadership has been unmovable on the principle when it applies to renewable energy.

But Democrats seem to have a double standard, turning into bendable Barbies when it comes to bailing out bankers or funding the Iraq war. Solar energy industry lobbyist Scot Sklar said that Congress has all sorts of "creative bookkeeping" techniques it can use to justify new spending, they just don't want to do it for renewable energy. The question is, why?

Talking peak oil in the Heartland

Talking peak oil in the Heartland
by Kelpie Wilson
Published Jun 10 2008
by Energy Bulletin

Arriving in Grand Rapids, Michigan for the ambitiously named “International Conference on Peak Oil and Climate Change,” I could see that the airport was undergoing a major expansion. The soaring, optimistic curves of the new Gerald R. Ford International Airport seemed at odds with recent news about sky-high jet fuel prices and crumbling airlines – the new reality that was the subject of the conference.

Peak oil refers to the moment in time when the world achieves the all time maximum volume of oil production. World oil production has been flat for more than two years now, and a growing collection of geologists, environmentalists and economists say that peak oil has arrived, to be followed soon by an inevitable decline.

For those who expect an alternative fuel or technology to replace oil, the conference held out no hope. Keynote speaker David Goodstein, professor of physics at Caltech, and author of the book, Out of Gas, went through all of the alternatives: coal, natural gas, biofuels, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear and showed how each one has severe physical limitations in the real world. For instance, here is his take on nuclear energy:

“To produce enough nuclear power to equal the power we currently get from fossil fuels, you would have to build 10,000 of the largest possible nuclear power plants. That’s a huge, probably nonviable initiative, and at that burn rate, our known reserves of uranium would last only for 10 or 20 years.”

Even given that the post-oil economy will have to depend on more than one technology, many speakers emphasized the difficulty of building massive new infrastructure at a time when energy and materials are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive.

The upshot is that we have waited too long for this to be an easy transition. Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines, was particularly stark in his assessment. He said that during their lifetime, the baby boomers will have used up half of the world’s recoverable resources, leaving very little for future generations. He said that famine and massive dislocation of populations is inevitable and potentially billions of people will die: “The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed yet – look at New Orleans and Baghdad.” And yet, he said, we cannot give into despair because “what we do right now will make an enormous difference in how many survive. We must act.”

Paradoxically, I found the 200 or so conference attendees to be an optimistic crew in some ways. Most crucially, the early advent of peak oil and peak coal will place a physical limit on direct human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.