Say Adios to Campaign Finance Reform

January 21, 2010

PhotobucketI have to laugh. Yesterday I happened to mention campaign finance reform, hoping, in my boyish naivete, for a miracle that would somehow enable our leaders to push for legislature that favors people, rather than corporate interests. But what happened today? We received news of the precise opposite.

The US Supreme Court announced this morning that it has found major provisions of campaign finance reform to be unconstitutional, paving the way for corporate and union money to mute the voices of individual citizens like you and me.

Corporations, defined under law as “fictitious persons,” are given enormous power to achieve their only goal: making profit. Human beings on the other hand, i.e., voters, are given no special powers outside of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and have a multitude of interests and duties. We’ve now granted corporations, on which the law has conferred these unnatural profit-making powers, the right to exert extreme pressure on the political process — at the expense of human voters.

ExxonMobil made $85 billion last year. I wonder if they’ll be able to use some of that money to influence legislation in a way that further tilts the playing field in the direction of fossil fuels. Hmmm. Let me think about that one….

By Craig Shields | Posted in Renewables - Politics | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Renewable Energy and the Job Market

January 18, 2010

PhotobucketI spent a bit of time on the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in preparation for today’s post, looking at some numbers surrounding employment in the US. Here are a few approximate numbers that I feel are relevant:

Unemployed people looking for work with skills appropriate to (or who could be easily trained for) designing and building renewable energy systems: 3 million

Highschool and college graduates entering the workforce over the coming five years with these skills who will find it hard to find work given the current and foreseeable economic climate: 12 million

People working in fossil fuel industries, e.g., coal miners, who may be well advised to look for work elsewhere as the world moves — at whatever pace — to clean energy: 2 million

Total of above: 17 million

Now, let me offer this high-level summary of the subsidies bestowed onto Big Energy in the US. It is estimated that the US oil and gas industry receives anywhere from $1 billion to $35 billion a year in subsidies from taxpayers. What, you ask? Don’t we know that number with any greater degree of accuracy? No. The exact number is extremely hard to nail down — even for those who try to do it honestly and objectively — given the 10-or-so different programs (loans, deliberately lax legislation and enforcement, tax breaks at many different levels, etc.) that could be referred to as subsidies for fossil fuels. But it’s substantial by any account.

And in some cases it’s more egregious than others. For example, we taxpayers pay up to 90% of the cost of building nuclear power plants; the nuclear industry couldn’t stand on its own for a nano-second. And to me, the mega-billion dollar subsidy for corn ethanol is even more galling. As I’ve written abundantly elsewhere, corn ethanol will down in history as one of the biggest rip-offs ever perpetrated on the American public.

So here’s a simple suggestion: if we’re going to subsidize something, why can’t it be something that contributes to the public good? Why does it have to cause cancer, jeopardize national security, promote terrorism, stimulate global warming, or cause a dangerous waste situation that will last hundreds of thousands of years?

Why not consider this: PULL the subsidies for oil, coal, corn ethanol and nuclear. Create a level playing field, and see how long fossil fuel businesses last in a fair, competitive environment (about 10 minutes).

Or, if you want to do something progressive, direct that money to renewable energy. Where do you think we’d be right now in the maturation of — you pick it — solar thermal, hydrokinetics, wind, etc. – if we had had the wisdom and the courage to send that money into research and development of those technologies, as opposed to merely making Big Energy even Bigger?

Let’s make a change here. Per the numbers above, there are 17 million people who will thank us immediately — not to mention the billions of other people on earth today — and those of future generations — who will be beneficiaries as well.

By Craig Shields | Posted in Renewables - Business | Tagged , , , | Comments (8)

Cancer Rates and Fossil Fuels

January 2, 2010

PhotobucketChip Aadlund writes:

CO2 is a problem and a huge one, but it doesn’t compare with chemical pollution. From 1973 to 1999 childhood cancers increased 26 percent. Acute childhood lymphcytic cancer is up 61 percent, brain cancer up 50 percent and bone cancer is up 39 percent. this does not include the problems caused by the chemicals leaching into food and water from containers causing dramatically reduced numbers of male babies along with reproductive issues.

Chip: Thanks very much for this. I’m reminded of some of my previous posts on the externalities associated with fossil fuels and how to quantify them. Ironically, it’s far easier to find numbers for the things that carry nowhere near the level of tragic impact as the things you’re talking about here. For example, we add up the cost of treating a case of lung cancer, but ignore the suffering of the victim and his family.

I believe that in 50 years the energy companies will be subjected to the aggression that the tobacco industry is receiving today in terms of class-action lawsuits and broad societal condemnation. We see it starting already, with pieces like 60 Minutes treatment of coal ash a couple of months ago.  (This was the quintissential 60 Minutes hatchet job — but it’s a good sample of the scorn that’s coming down the pike — both fair and unfair.)

I point out to Chevron and its shareholders that the average wrongful death award in the US is in measured in seven figures; that adds up fast, people.

People talk about the high cost of PV, wind, geothermal, etc. But that’s only because most of the true cost of coal and oil is passed along to the family of some anonymous eight-year old kid slowly dying in a hospital bed. Given any even remotely fair-minded treatment of renewables, clean energy is the bargain of the century.

Thanks again for writing.

By Craig Shields | Posted in Renewables - Business | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The True Cost of Fossil Fuels

November 29, 2009

PhotobucketHere is a new post on a subject that I think lies at the very crux of the discussion on renewable energy: identifying the true costs of fossil fuels. Yes, the migration to renewable energy is expensive, but it’s the bargain of the century when one honestly and carefully adds up all the costs — obvious and hidden — associated with coal and oil — not to mention nuclear.  As long as we as a civilization live under the delusion that “gas prices are low,” we’re destined to follow irrelevant discussions on the subject of its alternatives.

The most obvious candidates for inclusion in this list of costs are healthcare, global climate change, and ocean acidification.   While no one suggests that quantifying the cost of the damage in any of these categories is easy, I call readers’ attention to this recent article in the New York Times that opens a discussion on the subject, quoting a report from the National Academy of Sciences. The article concentrates on the healthcare issues, and points to a cost of about $120 billion a year in US alone (less than 5% of the world’s population), due largely to the thousands of premature deaths caused by air pollution.

Of course, these figures don’t put a price on the enormity of the human misery associated with these premature deaths — most of which are cancer.  It’s ironic that we’re talking about the cost of treating people who are slowly succumbing to agonizing deaths, while not even mentioning the suffering of the patients — and that of their loved ones. 

To be fair, these costs are even harder to quantify. In a way, one could argue that these are all cases of “wrongful death,” insofar as we actually have the technology at hand to make the move to renewables, but we find it politically infeasible to stop mining coal and pumping oil.  It certain makes one wonder if the energy industry will be facing the same type of class-action lawsuits (not to mention public loathing) that has greeted the tobacco industry over the last half century. 

In any case, articles like this New York Times piece indicate that we’re starting to ask ourselves the right questions.  And as always, that’s a prerequisite to finding the right answers.

By Craig Shields | Posted in Renewables - Business | Tagged , , , | Comments (17)

The COP-15 Summit — An Irresistible Force?

October 29, 2009

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What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?  This paradox is most often discussed in the context of God’s omnipotence (“Can God create a stone so heavy it cannot be lifted, not even by God Himself?”).

I’m reminded of this ancient philosophic conundrum when I contemplate the future of the energy industry. The “Conference of Parties” (COP-15) summit is now only a  little more than a month away. . . and world-renowned economists are calling for it to create a market worth $1 trillion. . . per year. . . for decades. And to me, trillion dollar markets call to mind the notion of an force that is certainly very large indeed, if not irresistible.

Yet if there were ever an immovable object, it would be the traditional energy industry, dominated as it is by oil and coal.

I presume there are at least a few truly progressive, independent and honest people in Washington who are trying to stand up on our behalf against the force of the fossil fuel industries. Yet they are utterly powerless to defend us from the atrocities of these corporate giants. Want proof? We just came through eight years of an administration that consistently voted against funding of the development of lithium-ion batteries, against fuel efficiency standards, against mandates on renewable portfolios, against enhanced geothermal, and against the extension of tax credits for renewables. Looking for an immovable object? You just found one.

I know that sounds pessimistic, though my aim is not to depress readers. I don’t think of myself as a cynic; I think of myself as a pragmatist. And it’s that spirit of pragmatism that provides the motivation by which I write on this blog every day and spend a few hours on my book on renewables; it’s really all I can do to inform and, I hope, to inspire readers to get involved themselves.

In any case, I suppose we’re all about to see what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.

By Craig Shields | Posted in Renewables - Politics | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)