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Part II: David Roberts | Unified Green Field Theory    [

    Part I: Harmonizing Shades of Green
    By David Roberts
    TomPaine.com

    Wednesday 10 January 2007

    It is up to greens to make sure that in 2007, a year full of possibility on energy and environmental issues, change moves in the direction of long-term sustainability and justice. Powerful forces will be pushing the other way. They - chambers of commerce, dinosaur corporations, think tank and government shills - tend to speak in a unified voice.

    The good guys - the side of clean energy and emissions reductions - are a rump coalition of liberal environmentalists, libertarian conservationists, conservative evangelicals, geeked-out entrepreneurs and paranoid defense hawks, among others.

    That's a lot of cats to herd, and the green movement-that-isn't usually produces a cacophony. Diagnoses and solutions range wildly in spatial and temporal scale, emphasis, cost and feasibility. Everything from light bulbs to organic food, to flex-fuel cars to a carbon freeze tax - no, make that a cap-and-trade program - clamors for attention.

    Before I suggest a positive agenda most elements of the green coalition can agree on (in my dreams, anyway), it's important to understand why circumstances are uniquely aligned for action, and forecast a few of the forces against which greens should consciously countervail.

    Circumstances favor progress. Greens confront opportunities in 2007 that haven't come around since the energy crisis of the 1970s. A new consensus is coalescing.

    Public awareness is high, thanks to Al Gore and whole cavalcade of events and media coverage this past year. In addition to a few counterintuitive new members of the green coalition (among them God and Wal-Mart), pop culture trendsetters embraced green as the new black. Everybody's talking about it.

    Virtually every winning Democratic candidate in the dramatic November elections was vocal about alternative fuels, energy independence, and (to a lesser extent) global warming, issues that have largely been stripped of their effete, elitist connotations. Particularly at the state and local level, Republicans are blazing environmental paths, part of the coast-spanning Schwarzenegger/Pataki Axis of Non-Crazy. Bush and his political appointees represent an increasingly isolated, reactionary anti-green corporatism. Green is emerging as one of the few areas ripe for efficacious bipartisanship.

    Business elites have also seen a vision of our fossil-free future and are aggressively preparing for its arrival. Corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart, DuPont, and GE are focusing on efficiency. Venture capital is pouring into the clean energy sector. The mighty giant of American entrepreneurialism awakes.

    Nonetheless, certain political and corporate interests hope to stall progress, or at least use it to further entrench and enrich themselves. There will be the obvious polluters and the old battles, but also a new set of politically-connected industries pushing solutions better for their bottom lines than the public interest. Only a united green front can counter their influence and push in more sustainable direction.

    Ethanol.

    The recent hype around ethanol stands primarily to benefit Big Corn: Archer Daniels Midland alone stands to receive about $2 billion of direct or indirect government largesse in 2007. Big Auto's also getting a piece: For every "flex-fuel" car they crank out, American automakers receive a credit against their federal gas mileage requirements. They put those credits toward making more gas guzzlers while the vast majority of flex-fuel car owners don't even live in areas where E85 is available, much less use it.

    Add to this the fact that corn ethanol's energy balance is modest in the most optimistic assessments. Not to mention that corn production is environmentally devastating. Not to mention that ramping up ethanol will increase food prices, and there isn't enough arable land in the U.S., even if we wanted to level all of it for chemical-intensive monocrops, to supply both sustainably.

    Different green constituencies will offer varying levels of support to corn ethanol and its much-discussed but rare successor, cellulosic ethanol. But they should all be able to agree that the backing of multiple large corporate lobbies and a network of powerful farm-state legislators is enough for ethanol, and other, less-heralded sustainability options would benefit from their attention.

    "Clean" Coal.

    Following closely behind ethanol on the energy hype scale is coal liquefaction at what are commonly referred to IGCC plants, usually accompanied - at least rhetorically - by carbon sequestration. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle plants burn somewhat cleaner and can more easily separate out the CO2 so that it can be injected underground. This is how coal companies justify their continued existence.

    But where are the IGCC plants adjoined by working sequestration operations? Good luck finding them. IGCC technology is substantially more expensive than traditional coal plants. Sequestration, which is highly speculative, adds another 30-60 percent to the cost, along with huge new demands for energy and water. Meaningful commercialization and deployment are likely decades away. Even if that bright day arrives, "clean coal" still involves the environmental devastation of coal mining, the generation of substantial mercury and particulate pollution, and a per-kilowatt energy costs no better than wind and far worse than energy efficiency.

    Nuclear Power.

    The threat of climate change has given the nuclear industry its best talking point since "too cheap to meter" went inoperative. A few fear-stricken greens have fled into the nuclear embrace, much to the delight of man-bites-dog loving pundits. But nuclear's problems have gone nowhere. Each nuke plant is fantastically expensive, uninsurable, subsidized out the wazoo, vulnerable to terrorist attack or accident, and constantly generating waste that we still don't know what to do with. Nuclear is a market Frankenstein, kept alive with jolts of taxpayer cash and bully-pulpit support from political, military and business elites.

    Note that all these are supply-focused solutions. The same focus is behind the perpetual push to drill and mine more places (offshore, ANWR, Rocky Mountains, Appalachian Mountains). It's behind the implacable opposition to carbon emissions limits. It goes to the very animating spirit of U.S. power elites.

    The green agenda threatens all that. The decentralization and democratization of energy production and the development of a more conscious, thoughtful consumer lifestyle will yield an economy powered by less cheap oil and more valuable human labor - along with a foreign policy conducted from a position of security and independence. Justifications for imperial adventures will be harder to come by.

    If greens hope to make any progress, they must use this time of immense possibility to join together and push in the same direction.

    Go to Original

    Part II: Unified Green Field Theory
    By David Roberts
    TomPaine.com

    Thursday 11 January 2007

    I've argued that 2007 promises to be a year of great ferment and opportunity for greens of all stripes. It's more important than ever that they get their act together and start pushing, as one, in the direction of sustainability and justice.

    The bias of U.S. capitalism - in hock to the Chinese, awash in consumer debt, tottering atop a rickety real estate boom - is toward ever-escalating energy production, material consumption and concentration of wealth.

    Pushing back against this tide will require a greater degree of coordination than the green movement has typically shown. Of course it would impractical to expect too specific a common agenda. Picking winners is a dodgy business, and each bloc in the green coalition has its own idiosyncratic interests. But if they can work out a common overarching chorus, one with which everybody from security hawks to conservationists to evangelicals can sing along, greens may finally start reaching beyond the choir.

    I hereby propose just such an overarching message, a mere five words long: Use renewably generated electricity, efficiently, or URGE2 (watch for the bumper sticker!). As far as greens are concerned, everything that advances that goal should be supported. What doesn't should be ignored or opposed. Let's pick it apart a little.

    Mine Negawatts.

    The cheapest source of new energy, as greens are practically hoarse from repeating, is not using it. Boosting efficiency will allow us to slash the growth of energy demand and offset the (for now) higher prices of renewable energy. Energy analyst Amory Lovins famously said that what we want is not energy itself but "cold beer and hot showers," i.e. the services energy provides. The goal of energy policy should not be to increase supply at any cost, but to encourage the provision of end-use services at minimal net energy cost.

    Thousands of Americans - many more thousands to come with Oprah and Wal-Mart's backing - are discovering negawatts through a rather unlikely source, the once-homely light bulb. Compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) provide the same illumination as luminescent bulbs using far less energy. Greens should tie that simple, widely grasped fact to a whole panoply of similar examples: Cars can go farther on the same fuel; manufacturers can produce the same goods with less energy; power can be generated and transmitted with less loss. Low-hanging fruit is everywhere, just like lightbulbs.

    Entrenched elites will always push for more supply. It's up to greens and their allies to beat the drum for demand reduction.

    Electrify.

    For the most part, we use two basic kinds of fuel. Liquid fuels - oil and natural gas - directly power our vehicles and heat (some of) our homes. Other sources - coal and hydro, also natural gas, nuclear, wind and solar - are used to make electricity.

    The simple fact all greens need to internalize is that it's easier to find clean, renewable sources of electricity than it is to find clean, renewable liquid fuels. The logic is inexorable: We need to shift almost all power use to electricity.

    This will be a long, complex and likely chaotic process. We'll probably need somewhat greener liquid fuels like ethanol, liquid natural gas (LNG) and gasified coal as bridges. We'll have to vastly improve the resilience and intelligence of the electricity grid, and develop much more effective means of electricity storage. There will be exceptions - e.g. direct solar heating. Different greens will disagree about how fast to proceed and what steps to take.

    But electrification has got to be the end goal.

    That means dialing back the ethanol frenzy. It means pushing for plug-in hybrids and eventually fully electric vehicles, as well as an electrified national high-speed rail system. But primarily it means escalating the fight against public enemy No. 1: oil.

    Kill Coal.

    Coal is the enemy of the human race. It is corrosive to the communities and ecosystems where it is mined. Coal-fired power plants spew particulates and mercury pollution in to the air, cutting short some 30,000 lives a year. Those power plants are also responsible for 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions; electric power generation is the single biggest source of global greenhouse gases. The industry funds deliberately deceptive propaganda campaigns about global warming. Coal barons like Massey Energy's Don Blankenship openly purchase state government officials to fight off labor and environmental enforcement.

    So-called "clean coal" is an improvement, if it is coupled with carbon sequestration. But, as I've argued, the full cost of coal liquefaction and carbon sequestration will make coal power uncompetitive with, for example, wind.

    The quickest way to kill coal is by putting a steep price on carbon emissions, enforcing existing Clean Air Act provisions on particulate pollution, and passing a tougher federal mercury pollution law.

    Upgrade the Grid.

    Dirty sources of electricity must be phased out in favor of renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal, hydrokinetic, cogeneration and biomethane.

    All these sources share one of two characteristics, typically cast as fatal flaws: they are either intermittent ("the wind doesn't always blow") or localized ("the sun doesn't shine in Seattle"). It is often taken for granted that only coal, natural gas and nuclear can provide reliable "baseload" power.

    It's not true. Intermittency can be beat with good storage, and localization, in a robust, decentralized energy grid, is a feature, not a bug.

    Finding good power storage technology means devoting time and money above all to battery technology (both lithium and nano), but also worth investigating are hydrogen fuel cells, pumped storage, molten-salt storage, ultracapacitors and any other gizmo that has a shot at pulling it off. Soon enough, some combination of efficiency and flexible storage technology will render the problem of intermittency irrelevant.

    While there will always be a place for large-scale infrastructure - big generation projects, long transmission lines - green advocacy should push in the direction of decentralization. To the extent any region can rely on a distributed array of clean, small- to mid-size, locally appropriate energy sources, it prospers. It creates more local jobs and becomes more economically independent. And its energy system becomes more resilient in the face of accidents, natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

    The green coalition is vast and varied, but there isn't a constituency within it whose interests would not be served by URGE² (watch for the t-shirt!). Less land would be despoiled by drilling and mining. Energy security would be improved. Imperial military adventures would be (even more) unnecessary. Fewer low-income and minority children would suffer from asthma or mercury poisoning. More high-quality, high-skilled, unionized jobs would be created. Political and economic power would be less concentrated in a few hands.

    Entrenched elites will always favor switching out one set of large-scale, concentrated sources of energy for another. But that's a mug's game. It's up to greens to lobby on behalf of the broader public interest.

    In 2007, a time of great change and instability, a time when a butterfly's wings can create a hurricane, greens should for once join forces and push in the same direction. Imagine what could happen.