We Can't Wait for Politicians to Embrace Clean Energy

Politicians in Washington are years away from embracing a massive investment in clean energy. We must start an energy revolution ourselves.

Conventional wisdom among environmentalists today says it would be unwise to pass a major climate change bill too soon. As long as the Bush veto looms and Republicans retain the filibuster club in the Senate, any climate change bill that passes through that birth canal is likely to be a stunted, shriveled thing. Better to wait until a strong bill can be passed than establish a weak policy now.

But energy is supposed to be different. President Bush has admitted that America is "addicted to oil," and he is a big booster of technology as the solution to global warming. At his major economies meeting on climate change in September, Bush called for an international fund to help developing nations finance clean-energy projects to stem climate change. But when he refused to offer a funding commitment or any other mechanism to implement the plan, international delegates turned up their noses and said they would wait till 2009 to engage the US on climate.

You might expect that Bush would be more willing to put his money where his mouth is where the US is concerned, but that does not seem to be the case.

Both houses of Congress passed energy bills last summer. The Senate, in particular, made a big effort to produce a bi-partisan consensus. Environmentalists are calling the new energy bill "a down payment on efforts to combat global warming." But President Bush has not come out in support of either the House or Senate version of the bill.

Meanwhile, getting both houses of Congress to sit down and reconcile what are two very different bills has been difficult. In early September, Democrats sent discouraging signals about any bill passing this session. Perhaps they heard from their constituents, because by the end of the month, Senator Reid was promising to appoint conferees soon. It was to have been last week and has now been postponed until after the Senate gets back from its Columbus Day recess. On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with other Democrats to discuss bringing an energy bill directly to the floor.

There is no question that public support for clean renewable energy is at an all time high. This is showing up at the state level where 31 states have now passed some sort of mandate to produce energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources. The National Governor's Association is proceeding to coordinate programs as best it can in the vacuum of federal energy policy. At an NGA forum on renewable energy, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (a Republican) said, "Energy is the defining issue of our time. The public is way ahead of the politicians ... there is enormous running room for policy makers to make significant advances ... there's an urgency to this issue, and none of us, Democrats, Republicans, politicians and the public have acted as urgently as we need to."

With such strong public support, why have the Democrats found it so difficult to produce an energy bill?

Cars, Coal and Nukes

One problem has been Michigan Rep. John Dingell, who chairs the House energy committee. Backing the position of Detroit automakers, Dingell refused to allow any increase in CAFE fuel mileage standards.

And while the House bill has no CAFE increase, the Senate bill lacks a Renewable Energy Standard (RES). The House passed an RES requiring utilities to generate 15 percent of their power from renewable sources (mostly solar, wind and biomass) by 2020. The US is one of the few nations left that has not adopted such a standard, but Bill Wicker, on the staff of Senate energy committee Chair Jeff Bingaman, said that the Republicans "blocked every effort" to include a national RES in the Senate energy bill.

Matt Letourneau, energy policy aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, the ranking member of the Senate energy committee, said that a national RES would be unfair to some regions of the country that don't have abundant renewable resources, particularly the Southeast. He said the standard is too high and it is "not possible" to get 15 percent of the region's power from renewable energy.

But Scott Sklar, a solar energy lobbyist, said that there is plenty of renewable energy in the Southeast. "The Southeast is biomass rich and solar rich. Solar could provide 5-6 percent of the region's power, wind, 1-2 percent, and biomass, 10-15 percent. The waste biomass from Hurricane Katrina alone could provide power for 30 years." Utilities can also substitute up to 4 percent of the target with increases in efficiency.

Lynn Hargis, a former attorney with FERC, who now works for Public Citizen monitoring energy regulation, said that the real problem is giant utility companies in the South like Duke, Entergy and Southern Company that want to make huge profits selling cheap coal-generated power in unregulated markets.

The Senate bill also includes loan guarantees of up to 50 billion dollars for nuclear power. Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen calls that "an unprecedented financial obligation" and says that inclusion of those loan guarantees in a final bill would "overwhelm any benefits" from the other provisions.

Analysts say that loans to build nuclear plants are distinctively "sub-prime" with the risk of utilities defaulting running well over 50 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Taxpayer billions wasted on boondoggle nuke plants are taxpayer billions that can't be spent putting solar panels on roofs or developing better batteries for electric cars.

Scott Sklar is less concerned about the loan guarantees. He says that any energy bill able to get past a Republican filibuster and a Bush veto will include loan guarantees for nuclear power, so there's no point in fighting it. He predicts that the Democrats will pass an energy bill by January or they "won't survive" the pressure from constituents, and that the bill will include lighter versions of the RES and CAFE standards along with renewed production tax credits for solar and wind power.

But if the RES and CAFE provisions are watered down even more than the current versions, what will that do to our climate policy down payment?

A new analysis released by Environmental Defense shows that if we do nothing, US greenhouse gas emissions will rise 35 percent by 2030. If all of the best provisions from both House and Senate versions pass and are vigorously implemented, emissions would climb only 4 percent above today's levels by 2030. But because many of the provisions allow flexibility, if they are not implemented aggressively, they will allow emissions to grow 22 percent by 2030.

Combine this flimsy "down payment" with the sub-prime nuke loans, and you don't end up with much value. We need to do a lot better than this if we are going to prevent the worst ravages of global warming and hang on to our planetary home.

Scott Sklar says it is possible that Democrats could produce a final energy bill that is stronger than both current versions, but they would have to "ram" it through.

Democratic leaders could bypass a formal conference committee and strike a bicameral deal to put an energy bill directly on the floor in both houses at once. Nancy Pelosi indicated on Wednesday that she would pursue that option. A strongly progressive energy bill might not survive a Bush veto, but at least it would energize the progressive constituency that is ready for a real energy revolution.

Struggle Behind the Scenes

Meanwhile, a series of skirmishes over coal between utilities, politicians, agencies and environmental groups is taking place right now.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Henry Waxman sent a letter to the US EPA objecting to their permitting of a coal-fired power plant in Deseret, Utah. Waxman said that the recent Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court decision requires EPA to address the coal plant's greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Sierra Club is following up with a lawsuit.

On September 14, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed five of the country's largest energy companies, demanding that they disclose the financial risks of their greenhouse gas emissions to shareholders.

Some environmental groups are targeting banks that invest in coal power plant construction. Rainforest Action Network is planning protests at Citi Group and Bank of America branch offices around the country on November 16. "We're going upstream," said a RAN spokesperson. "Without bank financing, utilities can't actually build any of those plants."

Peter Montague of Environmental Research Foundation reports that since the beginning of 2006 at least two dozen new coal-fired plants have been cancelled. Montague says, "A small but effective citizen's movement has managed to box in Big Coal."

Politicians are starting to declare themselves against coal. Barack Obama released his energy and global warming plan this week, saying he would oppose all new coal-fired generation that did not include carbon capture and storage technology.

Just last week, Tampa Electric Co., a Florida utility, announced it was canceling plans to build a coal plant with carbon capture and storage because of uncertainties around the technical feasibility. Florida is one state that has been very clear that it won't allow any new coal-fired generation without carbon capture and storage. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that it will take ten years of testing for the technology to mature, if we start today. But today there is not even one demonstration plant anywhere in the world that incorporates the complete cycle of carbon capture and storage.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid also opposes new coal plants and has introduced a far-reaching bill (S. 2076 -- the Clean Renewable Energy and Economic Development Act) that limits the federal financing of power transmission lines to those that carry at least 75 percent renewable energy. It applies the same standard to new power lines crossing federal land. This would keep Big Coal out of some of the new energy corridors that may be established under the Energy Policy Act (EPACT) of 2005.

But King Coal is hardly down for the count.

In early September, FERC designated a set of new national power corridors in the Northeast under the EPACT. State regulators and environmentalists are suspicious about the location of the corridors which seem designed to funnel cheap coal power from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast -- where states have already committed to reducing greenhouse gasses, but power demand is high. Under the EPACT, federal regulators can override state concerns. Environmental Defense is considering a lawsuit.

Power to the People

Michael Peevey, the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said in a recent opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle that the old energy paradigm, where large centralized generators convert fossil fuels to electricity which is sent over transmission lines to homes and businesses, is over. Solar, he says, is a "disruptive technology" that is changing everything. He says the California Solar Initiative passed last year is on track to power one million homes by 2017.

And in California, it is not just homes getting powered; it is also people who are getting empowered.

Van Jones, an environmental and social activist and cofounder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, was interviewed on the radio program Living on Earth last week about the impact of solar jobs on the American workforce:

There's a wonderful program, which I just can't stop bragging on, called 'Solar Richmond,' where they got a modest amount of money, got 20 guys -- you know low-income African American, Latino, Phillipino, one African-American woman. For nine weeks these guys got up, this young woman got up, every morning. They had to be there at nine o'clock. They had to learn these skills. Nine weeks later they did their first installation. There were local TV cameras there, solar employers were there saying, 'Hey, we need workers.' And you know, the look on these young people's faces. Often these are the young men who are always seen as the villains and yet here they are, nine weeks later, African American, Latino, with the baggy pants, the hair or whatever, but they've got their work boots on, they've got their orange jerseys on, and they're doing this work. And they are the ecological heroes.

One of the stupidest news stories on energy I've seen was a piece on CNN Money last week that said economists were "split" on whether renewable energy would create millions of new jobs. The article quoted experts at the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley affirming that installing solar arrays, building wind farms and producing biomass would create at least a million new jobs, not vulnerable to offshore outsourcing. To counter them, the article quoted the chief economist at a Manhattan consultancy, who said it would be unrealistic to count on job gains in the solar sector since the technology hasn't taken off yet and there is no way of knowing if it ever will. "You certainly don't want to move all sorts of money into an area that's not going to be viable," he said.

Sadly, there are still too many people like this brain-dead economist running things in this country. And there are still too many unfortunates living in the past, like the auto workers who have given up almost everything to hang on to production lines making Detroit Dinosaurs -- those gas guzzlers no one will want in a few years time when oil supply peaks and gas prices shoot up to the moon.

The future belongs to "Solar Richmond," and all we are waiting for now is for those who think they are in charge to catch up with rest of us so we can build this beautiful new future together.

Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor.

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No to nukes

It's tempting to turn to nuclear plants to combat climate change, but alternatives are safer and cheaper.

JAPAN SEES NUCLEAR POWER as a solution to global warming, but it's paying a price. Last week, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake caused dozens of problems at the world's biggest nuclear plant, leading to releases of radioactive elements into the air and ocean and an indefinite shutdown. Government and company officials initially downplayed the incident and stuck to the official line that the country's nuclear plants are earthquake-proof, but they gave way in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Japan has a sordid history of serious nuclear accidents or spills followed by cover-ups.

It isn't alone. The U.S. government allows nuclear plants to operate under a level of secrecy usually reserved for the national security apparatus. Last year, for example, about nine gallons of highly enriched uranium spilled at a processing plant in Tennessee, forming a puddle a few feet from an elevator shaft. Had it dripped into the shaft, it might have formed a critical mass sufficient for a chain reaction, releasing enough radiation to kill or burn workers nearby. A report on the accident from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was hidden from the public, and only came to light because one of the commissioners wrote a memo on it that became part of the public record.

The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. No U.S. utility has ordered a new nuclear plant since 1978 (that order was later canceled), and until recently it seemed none ever would. But rising natural gas prices and worries about global warming have put the nuclear industry back on track. Many respected academics and environmentalists argue that nuclear power must be part of any solution to climate change because nuclear power plants don't release greenhouse gases.

They make a weak case. The enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste ensure that ramping up the nuclear infrastructure will be a slow process — far too slow to make a difference on global warming. That's just as well, because nuclear power is extremely risky. What's more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

Glowing pains

Modern nuclear plants are much safer than the Soviet-era monstrosity at Chernobyl. But accidents can and frequently do happen. The Union of Concerned Scientists cites 51 cases at 41 U.S. nuclear plants in which reactors have been shut down for more than a year as evidence of serious and widespread safety problems.

Nuclear plants are also considered attractive terrorist targets, though that risk too has been reduced. Provisions in the 2005 energy bill required threat assessments at nuclear plants and background checks on workers. What hasn't improved much is the risk of spills or even meltdowns in the event of natural disasters such as earthquakes, making it mystifying why anyone would consider building reactors in seismically unstable places like Japan (or California, which has two, one at San Onofre and the other in Morro Bay).

Weapons proliferation is an even more serious concern. The uranium used in nuclear reactors isn't concentrated enough for anything but a dirty bomb, but the same labs that enrich uranium for nuclear fuel can be used to create weapons-grade uranium. Thus any country, such as Iran, that pursues uranium enrichment for nuclear power might also be building a bomb factory. It would be more than a little hypocritical for the U.S. to expand its own nuclear power capacity while forbidding countries it doesn't like from doing the same.

The risks increase when spent fuel is recycled. Five countries reprocess their spent nuclear fuel, and the Bush administration is pushing strongly to do the same in the U.S. Reprocessing involves separating plutonium from other materials to create new fuel. Plutonium is an excellent bomb material, and it's much easier to steal than enriched uranium. Spent fuel is so radioactive that it would burn a prospective thief to death, while plutonium could be carried out of a processing center in one's pocket. In Japan, 200 kilograms of plutonium from a waste recycling plant have gone missing; in Britain, 30 kilograms can't be accounted for. These have been officially dismissed as clerical errors, but the nuclear industry has never been noted for its truthfulness or transparency. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained six kilograms.

Technology might be able to solve the recycling problem, but the question of what to do with the waste defies answers. Even the recycling process leaves behind highly radioactive waste that has to be disposed of. This isn't a temporary issue: Nuclear waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. The only way to get rid of it is to put it in containers and bury it deep underground — and pray that geological shifts or excavations by future generations that have forgotten where it's buried don't unleash it on the surface.

No country in the world has yet built a permanent underground waste repository, though Finland has come the closest. In the U.S., Congress has been struggling for decades to build a dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but has been unable to overcome fierce local opposition. One can hardly blame the Nevadans. Not many people would want 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood or transported through it on the way to the dump.

The result is that nuclear waste is stored on-site at the power plants, increasing the risk of leaks and the danger to plant workers. Eventually, we'll run out of space for it.

Goin' fission?

Given the drawbacks, it's surprising that anybody would seriously consider a nuclear renaissance. But interest is surging; the NRC expects applications for up to 28 new reactors in the next two years. Even California, which has a 31-year-old ban on construction of nuclear plants, is looking into it. Last month, the state Energy Commission held a hearing on nuclear power, and a group of Fresno businessmen plans a ballot measure to assess voter interest in rescinding the state's ban.

Behind all this is a perception that nuclear power is needed to help fight climate change. But there's little chance that nuclear plants could be built quickly enough to make much difference. The existing 104 nuclear plants in the U.S., which supply roughly 20% of the nation's electricity, are old and nearing the end of their useful lives. Just to replace them would require building a new reactor every four or five months for the next 40 years. To significantly increase the nation's nuclear capacity would require far more.

The average nuclear plant is estimated to cost about $4 billion. Because of the risks involved, there is scarce interest among investors in putting up the needed capital. Nor have tax incentives and subsidies been enough to lure them. In part, that's because the regulatory process for new plants is glacially slow. The newest nuclear plant in the U.S. opened in 1996, after having been ordered in 1970 — a 26-year gap. Though a carbon tax or carbon trading might someday make the economics of nuclear power more attractive, and the NRC has taken steps to speed its assessments, community opposition remains high, and it could still take more than a decade to get a plant built.

Meanwhile, a 2006 study by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research found that for nuclear power to play a meaningful role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the world would need to build a new plant every one to two weeks until mid-century. Even if that were feasible, it would overwhelm the handful of companies that make specialized parts for nuclear plants, sending costs through the roof.

The accelerating threat of global warming requires innovation and may demand risk-taking, but there are better options than nuclear power. A combination of energy-efficiency measures, renewable power like wind and solar, and decentralized power generators are already producing more energy worldwide than nuclear power plants. Their use is expanding more quickly, and the decentralized approach they represent is more attractive on several levels. One fast-growing technology allows commercial buildings or complexes, such as schools, hospitals, hotels or offices, to generate their own electricity and hot water with micro-turbines fueled by natural gas or even biofuel, much more efficiently than utilities can do it and with far lower emissions.

The potential for wind power alone is nearly limitless and, according to a May report by research firm Standard & Poor's, it's cheaper to produce than nuclear power. Further, the amount of electricity that could be generated simply by making existing non-nuclear power plants more efficient is staggering. On average, coal plants operate at 30% efficiency worldwide, but newer plants operate at 46%. If the world average could be raised to 42%, it would save the same amount of carbon as building 800 nuclear plants.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government spends more on nuclear power than it does on renewables and efficiency. Taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear industry amounted to $9 billion 2006, according to Doug Koplow, a researcher based in Cambridge, Mass., whose Earth Track consultancy monitors energy spending. Renewable power sources, including hydropower but not ethanol, got $6 billion, and $2 billion went toward conservation.

That's out of whack. Some countries — notably France, which gets nearly 80% of its power from nuclear plants and has never had a major accident — have made nuclear energy work, but at a high cost. The state-owned French power monopoly is severely indebted, and although France recycles its waste, it is no closer than the U.S. to approving a permanent repository. Tax dollars are better spent on windmills than on cooling towers.

Source: Los Angeles Times Editorial, July 23, 2007

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No future for nuclear energy

Here they go again. After thirty years without a firm order, the atomic power companies are pushing their radioactive, costly technology for a comeback on the backs of you the taxpayers.

The old argument in the Seventies was that nuclear powered electricity would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. With only three percent of our electricity coming from burning petroleum, the pro-nuke lobby is now jumping on the global warming bandwagon. Uranium, they argue, does not release greenhouse gases like coal or oil.

What nuclear lobbies ignore is all the coal and oil that needs to be burned to enrich uranium, to transport radioactive wastes with protective highway and rail convoys and provide security since they would be a priority target for sabotage.

Apart from that, let’s start with the technological insanity of the nuclear fuel cycle-from uranium mines and their deadly tailings, to the refining and fabrication into fuel rods, to the multi-shielded dome-like nuclear plant, to the necessity for perfect operation of the facility, to the still unresolved problems of the location and containment of hot radioactive wastes and contaminated material for the next 200,000 years!

All this for one objective-to boil water into steam. A pretty complex chain of events in order to boil water. There are far better, cheaper ways to meet the electricity needs of today’s generation without burdening future generations for centuries with the deadly waste products.

Back in the Seventies, before the public rose up and said no to nuclear power, helped by Wall Street’s reluctance to finance these trouble-prone plants, the Atomic Energy Commission projected the construction of 1000 atomic power plants in the U.S. by the year 2000. There are today 103 plants.

Placing the predicted 100 plants up and down the California coastline would have been an act of peerless recklessness, especially given the earthquake faults.

Just this week, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck Kashiwazaki, Japan and disabled a gigantic nuclear power plant which the New York Times reported, “raised new concerns about the safety of the nation’s accident-plagued nuclear industry.” It turns out that this plant, owned by Tokyo Electric Power, may be sitting directly above an earthquake fault line.

Each day, reports show damage greater than believed the day before, including radiation leaks, damage to exhaust ducts, burst pipes and other “malfunctions” beyond the fires. Several hundred barrels of radioactive waste were toppled.

The problem with nuclear power is that it gets one bite of the apple.

Just one major meltdown could provoke a demand to close the industry down by overwhelming adverse public outrage. You see, way back in the Fifties and Sixties, the Atomic Energy Commission, a booster-regulatory agency for atomic power plants, estimated that an “area the size of Pennsylvania” would be contaminated in such a disaster.

Remember, Chernobyl in Ukraine is still surrounded by vacant towns and villages following the 1986 tragedy. Radioactivity found its way as far as sheep in England, nuts grown in Turkey and elsewhere.

Do you know any other industry producing electricity that has to have specific evacuation plans for miles around it, is inherently a national security risk, cannot be privately insured without Congress mandating severe limited liability in case of massive casualties and requires massive taxpayer subsidies?

A most concise, authoritative case against the electric atom was recently released titled “Why a Future for the Nuclear Industry is Risky” by a group of environmental health and social investment groups. (See www.cleanenergy.org)

In the introduction to the report, the case against nuclear energy was summarized this way: “Wind power and other renewable technologies, combined with energy efficiency, conservation and cogeneration can be much more cost effective and can be deployed much sooner than new nuclear power plants.”

Yes indeed, efficiency or conservation, with a national mission, can cut in half the waste of energy, using currently available technology and know-how, before the first privately capitalized nuclear plant opens. One scientist once described the primary output of electric generating plants as “heating the heavens.”

If this insensitive industry cannot be revived by Uncle Sam’s tax treasury, Wall Street certainly has given no indication that private investment would take on the risk. Investment money is pouring presently into wind power, solar and other renewables and this is just the early springtime for these benign sources of energy.

The International Energy Agency sees a 25% cost reduction for wind power and a 50% cost reduction for solar photovoltaics from 2001 to 2020. Without Wall Street’s private capital and with rising construction and operating costs in other countries, the prospect for nuclear power being competitive, even deducting decommissioning costs, and the many
millennia of waste storage costs, is not there.

Add a major accident and you’ll see, in addition to casualties and contaminated land and property, every private investor running for cover while the bill is passed on to taxpayers.

Here is a suggestion to put the industry’s propaganda to rest. Will any high nuclear industry executive debate physicist Amory Lovins at the National Press Club filled with electric company leaders? If so, please visit http://www.rmi.org and contact Mr. Lovins.

by Ralph Nader, July 21, CommonDreams.org

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