What form of transportation burns the most fuel per traveler? Air travel. In midterm election campaigns, many Democrats sharply opposed GOP policy on energy and the environment. Some called for reducing tax breaks and subsidies to oil corporations. Now that the Democrats have won control of both houses, what will they do with it? Provide new incentives to develop cleaner alternatives? Raise gas mileage standards?
Even Democrats are divided. Representative John Dingell (D-Michigan), who will chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is a friend of the auto companies. He advocates “market solutions” and opposes mandating higher fuel efficiency standards for cars. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), however, who also considers herself a friend of auto, co-sponsored a clean energy bill that would subsidize alternative energy, push for energy independence, and put upward pressure on fuel mileage.
What lies in our future: more dirty energy from coal plants? Pollution from fossil fuels contributes to thousands of cases of lung disease and asthma in the US each year. As our demand for electricity grows, we can burn more fossil fuels that continue to pollute the air with mercury and climate-changing greenhouse gases. Or, we can use clean, affordable renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.
Initiative 937
Voters in Washington state chose the latter course in the recent election when the “Clean Energy Initiative (I-937)” won by 52 percent. The initiative requires the largest electric utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020. The reduction in air pollutants will be like taking two million cars off Washington’s roads.
The initiative requires utilities to offer their customers conservation opportunities including cash rebates for energy efficient appliances, home weatherization, and lighting, heating, and cooling systems for businesses. The initiative includes new efficiency upgrades at existing hydropower facilities. Similar legislation has been enacted in 20 other states.
Backers of I-937 included a broad coalition of utilities, businesses, labor (the United Steelworkers, SEIU, and Aerospace Machinists played a leading role), farmers, the League of Women Voters, the Audubon Society of Washington, even a group calling itself the Republicans for Environmental Protection.
Supporters hope that the initiative will kick-start energy efficiency and renewable energy projects across the state. That will help create thousands of family-wage jobs in engineering and construction, especially in rural areas, and provide crucial additional income to rural landowners. Farmers hosting wind projects will earn more than $5,000 a year per wind turbine, helping keep family farms alive.
Can We Do It?
Readily available renewable resources and conservation opportunities can easily meet future energy needs. A recent study cited by I-937 backers identified enough untapped renewable energy to power approximately 1.4 million homes in the Northwest (about 2,000 average megawatts (aMW)). Another study found that there was an additional 2,500 aMW of very low-cost energy efficiency available to the region’s utilities.
Wind and solar energy resources are diverse and robust. There is more than enough to meet growth needs with appropriately sited projects – and avoid those projects that would endanger wildlife or harm communities. There are two ways to generate power from sunshine:
1. Photovoltaic cells. These include the solar panels. 2. Power towers, in which mirrors focus sunlight on a boiler that generates steam and electricity.
Solar devices don’t work in the dark, so electric storage and transmission capacity needs to be developed.
Developing solar resources could have side benefits. In an article titled “Save the Environment and Make Jobs for the Poor” in the November 16, 2006 issue of The Oregonian, Darren Freeman wrote: We need a green job corps. The safest communities aren’t those with the most police and prisons, but those that have the best education and jobs for young people. The same kids we are throwing in the garbage can of failed schools and prisons are the same kids who could be putting up solar panels. They are so creative and energetic, but nobody has given them a grand call or a high mission. There is a hole in the soul of America right now. People want to be brought together and do something great and noble again. But can we afford clean energy? Coal prices in the West leapt 150 percent between 2003 and 2006. Natural gas prices have tripled since 2002. Solar energy currently costs 40 cents per kWh.
Current Energy Costs (per kilowatt-hour)
Coal: 5.5 – 6 cents Natural gas: 7 cents Wind power: 5 – 7 cents Solar: 40 cents
Government incentive programs, together with low prices secured by volume purchasing can get solar energy prices down to 12 cents per kWh – and photovoltaic prices have been declining an average of 4 percent per year over the past 15 years.
Alternative Fuels
As a nation, we are addicted to foreign oil. Clearly there’s a need to wean off this stuff. Increasing use of more fuel-economic vehicles and improving the grid of mass transit people-and-commodity-movers is a big piece of the puzzle. Biofuels fuels – derived from living plants – are being promoted by several corporations and their political agents as “The Answer” to our fuel woes. There are two major types: ethanol – grain alcohol, mainly derived from corn in the Midwest at about $1.30 a gallon and dropping, and biodiesel – mainly from soybeans and canola seed for about 50 cents a gallon.
Biodiesel is a non-toxic, biodegradable fuel that can be made from a range of new or waste vegetable oils, animal fats, and oilseed plants like palm. Used in its pure form in diesel-engine vehicles, or blended with gasoline to boost car performance, biodiesel has significantly lower emissions than petroleum-based diesel when burned.
According to a 1998 report by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory cited by Renewable Energy Access, biodiesel use results in carbon monoxide reductions of approximately 50 percent over regular diesel, and carbon dioxide reductions of 78 percent, on a net life cycle basis.
Normally, used cooking oil from restaurants is a waste that has to be treated and disposed of. But recycled cooking oil, filtered and cleaned, is a source for biodiesel. The exhaust smells like french fries. A small refinery can produce up to one million gallons of biodiesel per year, at about 50 cents per gallon.
According to Shaun Stenshol, owner of Maui Recycling Service in Hawaii, a diesel car engine needs little modification to run on used cooking oil and gets about 35 to 45 miles a gallon. A tank of biodiesel is good for 550 to 600 miles, and it makes no difference in the car’s performance.
Crops are grown right here in the US, so no wars for foreign oil, and no destruction of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. No oil tankers rupturing off coasts, spilling gunk over shores and wildlife. It creates jobs, plus, Willy Nelson likes the idea!
Bio Boondoggle?
Unfortunately, there are some big flies in Willy’s soup.
In a October 13, 2006 posting on the Renewable Energy Access site, Jan Steinman said that “The used cooking oil waste stream will never supply more than a few percent of today’s transportation needs. We need to ‘power down’ before we can hope to supplant more than a few percent of petroleum use.”
In an article titled “The Real Scoop on Biofuels,” published in the November 1st issue of Common Dreams, Brian Tokar, who directs the Biotechnology Project at Vermont’s Institute for Social Ecology, makes some interesting points.
There are serious concerns about this rapid diversion of food crops into production of fuel for automobiles. Fuel producers are already competing with food processors in the world’s grain markets. The grain required to make enough ethanol to fill an SUV tank just once is enough to feed a person for a whole year.
Every domestic biofuel source – the ones currently in use as well as those under development – produces less energy than is consumed in growing and processing the crops. The entire soy and corn crops combined would only satisfy 5.3 percent of current fuel needs. This puts a serious strain on food supplies and prices.
Switchgrass, for example, can grow on marginal land and presumably won’t compete with food production, but it requires 45 percent more energy to harvest and process than the energy value of the fuel that is produced. Wood biomass requires 57 percent more energy than it produces, and sunflowers require more than twice as much energy than is available in the fuel that is produced. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” said David Pimentel in a Cornell press statement this past July. “These strategies are not sustainable.”
Even Brazilian sugarcane, touted as the most impressive biofuel success story, has its downside. The energy yield appears beyond question: ethanol from sugarcane may produce as much as eight times the energy that it takes to grow and process. But the same hectare of land cleared to grow sugarcane could absorb 20 tons of CO2 if left alone. Brazil is using half its annual sugarcane crop to provide 40 percent of its auto fuel, while increasing deforestation to grow more sugarcane and soybeans.
If sugarcane and soy plantations continue to encourage deforestation in the Amazon and in Brazil’s Atlantic coastal forests, any climate advantage is more than outweighed by the loss of the forest. And, the Amazon forest is rich in biodiversity.
This is bad news for wildlife; endangered species in particular. Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests are being bulldozed for oil palm plantations – threatening endangered orangutans, rhinos, tigers and countless other species – in order to serve the booming European market for biodiesel.
Tokar asks, “Are these reasonable tradeoffs for a troubled planet, or merely another corporate push for profits?” (For more on this, see: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1101-32.html)
Farmers are feeling increasing pressure from consumers to grow foods more organically with less chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Crops grown for industrial and fuel purposes are exempt from that pressure, so are more likely to pollute groundwater supplies. The impacts of pesticides, nitrate runoff into water supplies, and the increased demand on water will likely increase as “energy crops” like corn and soy begin to displace more drought tolerant crops such as wheat in several Midwestern states. Aquifers – underground reservoirs – are already being depleted. The Oglala aquifer, a great reservoir of water underlying the western plains, has been pumped nearly dry.
How About Electric Cars?
To solve the automotive problem, the major proposals are for electric and hybrid electric/fuel cars – the more miles per gallon, the better.
When you pull into a parking lot in many northern locations, you’ll see plug-ins mounted on posts. For decades, parking lots in Canada have had these to connect a variety of headbolt, dipstick, block heaters, and other devices to prevent freezing damage in subzero temperatures. They’re already in place. They can also be used to recharge electric car batteries.
Unfortunately, the “market solutions” gang is holding things up again.
The movie Who Killed the Electric Car gives a new meaning to the term “Vehicular Homicide.” The EV1 from General Motors, a quiet and fast electric car that produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline became incredibly popular in California in the mid-1990’s, gathering a loyal base of drivers. An electric car that worked was on the market and in demand. But within a few short years, GM and the makers of other electric cars began pulling them off the road and having them destroyed, claiming that they weren’t viable and there was no real demand. The film dissects a complex web of deception and greed involving oil companies, car manufacturers and the government. (see: http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/)
But even electric and bio-fueled cars won’t solve the transportation woes of our metro areas. If all we do is just swap them for fossil fuel guzzlers, people will still suffer road rage and waste time in traffic jams. To solve those problems requires sound planning, creating more bicycle-friendly opportunities, improved mass transit, and inter-city rail service.
Nuclear Power
Nuclear power has pretty well been proven to be a losing proposition. Too many problems, including radioactive waste management problems, risk of accidents and contamination. The security measures necessary for safe storage and transport of nuclear materials would spur the creation of a police state.
Conservation
According to Brian Tokar, the solution lies in technologies and lifestyle changes that significantly reduce energy use and consumption.
What form of transportation burns the most fuel per traveler? Air travel.
The #2 “offender”: cars. Ask yourself: can I bike or hike instead of driving to work, school, the store, or to the library? Or take a bus? Carpool?
Whenever possible, buy food grown locally from your local co-op instead of food shipped long distances.
Plant some trees. Each pound of wood, leaves, etc. a tree grows is a pound of carbon dioxide filtered out of the air.
There is no single answer; no magic bullet to deliver us into an energy-sustainable society. Visualize an interlocking, coordinated grid of wind farms, solar panels and towers, biofuel processing plants and outlets, more and better public transportation, and other elements. That’s what we’ll need: many pieces to put this puzzle together. And, we’ll need something that is anathema to the “market solutions” clique that got us into this predicament: good, comprehensive planning at a higher level than capitalism can tolerate. In short, our most urgent need is an ecologically informed socialist society – the sooner the better.
To gain a better understanding of why our North American transportation system got into such a sorry condition, and how automotive and gas corporations and their “market solutions” cronies spurred the growth of poorly planned suburbs, the car-dependent culture, and long commutes in single-occupant vehicles, the movie Taken for a Ride is definitely worth watching. (http://www.newday.com/films/Taken–for–a–Ride.html)
