American Voters Have No Appetite for Sacrifice — But What About Prosperity?
Neil Auerbach is Managing Partner of Hudson Clean Energy Partners, a group with over $1 billion under management. He made a number of points in his presentation at the American Council on Renewable Energy conference in Washington this afternoon that I found interesting.
He began by noting that “99.9% of people who have studied global warming believe in the overall theory. But this doesn’t take root in Washington. Why not? Because it implies sacrifice,” suggesting the obvious — that the concept of sacrifice has only negative value politically.
“But how about growth? How about profit?” he asked. Auerbach then went on to look at the trajectories for huge profit in low-carbon production energy, which is projected to grow to $2.2 trillion annually by 2020.
This will not happen primarily in nuclear or CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), but in renewables. Why? The answer is simple: cost. Auerbach took the audience through a brief presentation about the history of introducing new fuels, pointing out that generally, it takes a while for a new fuel to achieve scale and thus become cheap. Coal, for instance, used to be only 5% efficient – thus hugely expensive. When natural gas was introduced in the 1950s, it was horribly expensive, but became less so when economies of scale were achieved decades later. But nuclear doesn’t tell the same tale. There, the costs have risen steadily as the industry has matured since its inception in the 1970s.
On the other hand, free-fuel forms of power generation have this cost reduction phenomenon going on in spades. Wind is the second most successful power source in terms of bringing down costs as it was introduced to the power mix, and the trend is likely to continue as China redoubles its commitment to wind development. But the clear all-time winner is solar. For every doubling of product volume, there has consistently been a 20% reduction in the price per Watt.
So it appears that we don’t need belt-tightening, which is fortunate, since Americans just don’t do sacrifice. And we don’t fear catastrophic environmental collapse, as we, for some reason I don’t claim to understand, are unique in the world for our tendency to laugh off the passionate entreaties of the scientific community.
We may need a bit of patience for another few years, however, as wind, solar, and the others become less expensive and take us to the point of grid parity (at which energy from clean and fossil fuel sources will be available at the same price). Or, if we want to make this really interesting, we could remove the subsidies for the oil and coal companies that come out of tax-payers’ pockets and give us artificially cheap energy from fossil fuels — at which point we can stand back and behold the explosion of renewable energy.
It’s long been increasingly plain to me that the continued delays in front of renewable energy mainstreaming in the US have nothing to do with the logic of ‘eco’ (-nomics or -logy), and everything to do with fiercely stubborn greed and a willful promulgation of ignorance on the part of dirty fuel and other fiscally powerful interests, and their pocketed lackeys in our three ring circus in WDC.
There is one central issue that has become the tangled root of this thicket of roadblocks now facing enlightened progress on every front, from solar/wind/hydro to rational health, education and fiscal policy – the severing of which would free our nation to finally approach its grand potential. Buried at the base of all the thorny challenges that lay between our beautiful children and a bright future is the ravenous hydra of regularized bribery.
Until we shift our leadership selection processes permanently from the auction block, and firmly muzzle, shackle and yoke the great paper beasts of commerce that we’ve created – and which now claim our birthrights from beneath us – we and our progeny will suffer under the most craven and fearsome grafting of cowardice and greed imaginable.
At bottom, my hope springs from the belief that we Americans care about each other, and that in our hearts we must realize that together we can accomplish through cooperation and sharing what we cannot ever hope to achieve guided by the law of the jungle.
A government of We the People has its proper and indispensible place in the service and defense of We the People, in providing for all out of the sacrifice of all those very things which the realm of commerce cannot and should not be expected to provide – energy generation and transportation infrastructure, fire protection, law enforcement and the judiciary, kindergarten through university education, healthcare, basic nutrition, military defense and the strict regulation of all commerce to require of it genuine long-term benefits (or at the very least that it do ho harm) to the population at large and to the natural world upon which that population will always depend.
We have seen that laws are made necessary by the unrestrained passions of our species. Do any of us truly believe that chartered legal fictions helmed by avaricious ambition shall strive to preserve our liberty and lead us to the Promised Land? Can such a position be supported in light of facts in evidence such as slavery, child labor, poisonous food-like products and expensive but worthless medicines, debtor’s prisons, foreclosure fraud and every form of corruption conceivable?
As has been so clearly revealed again and again in the internal communications of “health insurance” and “financial services” firms, the very deepest fear that these paper giants have is fear of us – the little people – and what we might do if we woke up and did something, anything, to save ourselves. They know something that far too many of us have forgotten.
The answer, sisters and brothers, is to free from the bloody claws of avarice our best tool for the exercise of our collective power – our government – and to then use it as it was always uniquely intended in our nation: to form a more perfect union, establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Where to begin? In all of time, from the beginning of consciousness until our last breath, there is only one moment when we can have any influence at all – now.
Act… now.
Wow, that’s wonderful writing as always, Cameron. Thanks. You’re 100% right that ignorance and apathy are the weapons of the oppressor — and at this point in history, very powerful ones.