The reader who asked me about this article on renewable energy from RealClearScience poses this follow-up:

So the article didn’t stress the importance of a “level playing field” which I understand is of major importance. So, your overall impression is that the article mentioned obvious problems in green energy without emphasizing the most important one. Correct?

Thanks for your note, and yes.  The article’s purpose was to bring new people up to speed on renewable energy in the least offensive way possible, which required talking around the central issue, which I would summarize as follows:

Big Energy has simply bought the relevant set of representatives within government, and, as a result, a rapid migration to renewables is impossible in the U.S.  Note that this stands in contrast to the Europeans and the Asians who are light-years ahead of us in the most important industry in the 21st Century.

With respect to commitments that represent a significant percentage of our GDP like the national highway system, the space program, or a revamped energy policy, market economics alone would never allow any of them to be possible.  Right now, if you want cheap energy, you burn coal.  Until there is considerable investment in renewables, the payback period from which would be unacceptably long for private investors, renewable energy will continue to limp along.

The other side of this is public relations — a field in which the energy barons can afford the very best.  As long as the common voter can be made to believe that there is no problem with fossil fuels (“drill baby drill”), Big Energy can continue as the most profitable industry in the history of mankind. Of course, they’re doing it at the expense of every person and every other living thing on Earth, but they seem to have no compunction about that.  

Maybe you think I’m exaggerating, or at least oversimplifying.  Have you seen this ad from the (ultra-conservative) Heartland Institute?  This is the level to which this conversation has sunk.  Dear reader, if this doesn’t make you sick, I’m not sure what will.  

This is why I wrote this piece the other day on the Koch Brothers. I’ve taken some flak on this as I knew I would.  Too bad.  :)

Again, thanks for your interest. 

Germany has installed enough photovoltaics that, at this point, coal-fired power plants are beginning to become unprofitable. This is driven by a combination of factors, e.g., that coal isn’t asked to provide power at the peak of the day, when both the sun and the price of electricity are at their zenith. Of course, most of us cheer when coal runs into trouble, but issues like this raise some fantastically interesting questions about the future of power generation – and transportation – as we migrate from fossil fuels into more sustainable modalities.

Let’s look at the U.S., where coal accounts for over 40% of our electricity, and solar and wind are under 5%. As much as we’d like to turn off all our coal this afternoon, it’s not even a remotely practical idea. So what exactly is the plan whereby we scale coal back over a period of decades while building out renewables, energy storage, smart-grid, etc? Well, there isn’t one – at least not a written one.

One could ask an analogous question about transportation: What is the plan for providing an ever-decreasing amount of gasoline and diesel as an ever-greater segment of our transportation is electrified? Again, it doesn’t exist – at least not publicly.

But to think that Big Energy is sitting around watching as its empire melts away is folly of the first order. This industry, led by the world’s most powerful people, is working 24 hours a day to maintain its monopolistic positions, as shown from the glimpses we get into the truth via an occasional breach of secrecy. Google “ExxonMobil Global Warming Denial Machine” and read some of the 444,000 articles on the subject, in which you’ll learn how:

 ‘ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy & Policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years.’

Or Google: “Oil Companies Proposition 23 Junk Science,” and take a peak at the 172,000 stories about the covert campaign to destroy California’s fight to clean up its skies.

As always, there’s good news and bad news. Here, the good news is that there actually IS a plan. The bad news is that it’s being written by the oil companies and by people like the multi-billionaire Koch brothers, hell-bent, as they are, on further enriching themselves at the expense of destroying the only planet we have.

I almost dropped my coffee when I heard him say this on CNN!  The changes would take effect on January 1, 2011, and save $36.5 billion over 10 years, according to the budget proposal.

Of course the Petroleum industry issued a statement immediately as follows:

“With America still recovering from recession and one in 10 Americans out of work, now is not the time to impose new taxes on the nation’s oil and natural gas industry,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.

“Imposing new taxes would reduce our nation’s energy security by discouraging new investment in domestic oil and natural gas production and refining capacity and pushing those investments — and American jobs — abroad,” he added.

Hogwash!  What is wrong with this statement above is there has NOT been a single new oil fefinery built in the USA in 25 years while this tax subsidy was in place and now that there is the threat of it being removed, BIG oil is saying there won’t be any new investment in oil refineries??

What they are really saying is that it is a different future we are talking about – not just changing how we get energy, but changing what we do with it. However, it means not only a radically different structure of the economy, but a change in who runs American industry. And this is what the Big Oil companies are fighting to the death. They want to keep the same people in charge who have driven things to crisis, because they are the people who they put in charge. The same bankers, industrialists, politicians, writers, lobbyists, and assorted other elites, who have wildly thrown away a generation on an orgy of consumption.

Today should be celebrated news for those of us who embrace the Electric Revolution and finally see some light at the end of the tunnel.  In future articles I will attempt to prove how Edison and Tesla were right, and how Ford and Standard Oil were wrong, and how the future of energy will shift away from the refining & burning of cheap Oil to the generation & storage of cheap Elecricity through renewable energy sources.

Until next time – celebrate today!

Perhaps the  most obvious example of this lies in the politics behind Big Energy.  Here are a few points of consensus:

• A “cozy” relationship exists between government regulators and those they ostensibly regulate.

• This relationship is spawned from the fact that regulators often come from — and later return to — those industries.

• Political campaigns are financed largely from contributions from the corporate giants whose interests the legislators are asked to regulate, presenting huge and obvious conflicts of interest. 

All of this may sound like “old news” — so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning.  Yet here is a variation on this theme — perhaps more intersting — that actually comes up in our my conversations even more often that this “the fox is guarding the henhouse” discussion above:

The political cycle is two years.  Advocating an idea that does not produce demonstrable results in that time period is political suicide.  Such support has no upside, and will be used by the supporter’s opponents as evidence of stupidity or corruption.  Yet investment in renewable energy — in all its many forms — is long-term (certainly more than two years) by nature.  Throwing money quickly and carelessly at the energy problem without thinking it through is guaranteed to produce failure — including gross inefficiencies, and, ironically, more ecological damage.

And guess who wins when renewable energy projects misfire?  That’s right, it’s the status quo boys, heartlessly pumping their oil, greedily mining their coal, and recklessly splitting their atoms. 

Again, I point to our political machine as the true culprit underlying the horrible environmental effects that the energy industry is wreaking on us.  In particular, if we do not see intense grass roots efforts demanding a total reform of campaign finance law, it appears that we are doomed to sit idle while the last few billion barrels of oil are sucked from our earth and its exhaust fumes dumped into our skies.

I’d love to hear readers’ comments here.