What we need to do NEXT Part 3

Folks-
This is the third part of my work. This part focuses on Energy and the Environment, areas being neglected as the economy unravels.

Energy and The Environment
In the economic crisis that has finally gotten covered by the press in the last couple of months, we have somehow forgotten the environment. Global warming isn’t going away. Pollution isn’t going away either. For the last 8 years or more, both of these issues have gotten short-shrift from the Republicans. We need to get back on-track on these subjects.

The first thing we need to do is cut tax rates for green power companies. Specifically those that build and use wind turbines and solar power. Current tax breaks for these companies are set to expire this year, right when we need them the most, and Congress has yet to extend them. Not good.

Next we need to invest in research on these areas so we can introduce our technologies to the rest of the world. If we fail to do this, we will be buying these technologies from other countries instead of exporting them. The more of these companies that are producing green energy for us, the better. Not only will it create jobs here, but it will bring back wealth that we have been shipping out to other countries by the shipload. And we need it back, badly.

In my opinion, the Pickens Plan isn’t perfect, but it’s a really good start. Nobody in political power has come up with anything better that could be implemented. I strongly recommend we adopt it in some form.

I remember a study that was done sometime before I was born that came to the conclusion that nuclear power plants didn’t make economic sense. It cost more in energy to build and remove a nuclear power plant than the plant produced in its useful life. These power plants are being used for longer than was expected at that time, and for longer duty-cycles without incident. It’s time we funded a new study on this important question, and if the answer ends up being that the energy cost of building, fueling, and decommissioning these plants is still larger than the energy produced in it’s useful life, we need to bury this technology once and for all instead of bringing it up over-and-over again. If, however, it turns out that newer information shows the opposite, that a nuclear power plant produces a net-gain in energy, then we need to carefully implement them in a safe and secure manner. Either way, the debate needs to end.

Earlier this year we had a wake-up call over Peak Oil. Speculators pulled their money out of financial stocks and put it into oil futures and ran up the cost of oil, giving us a picture of what the world will look like in a few years if we don’t start cutting our oil usage. We really need to get off of oil as a fuel as quickly as possible. Not just because we use so much oil as fuel, but also because oil is our only feedstock for plastics and the only source of jet fuel. There is no biological alternative for either of those yet. Once oil is gone, so are single use medical items and jet airplane flights, including passenger planes and military planes. Don’t like sharing needles? You may not have a choice in the future. Unless we stop using oil and move over to alternatives, our future may start looking more like the past.

One of the best things we can do to fight the problem of peak oil is to stop burning so much of it for transportation. We can stop using nearly as much oil as we are by converting our fleet of personal cars to electric with diesel powered generators that kick in for longer trips. The conversion of our fleet to electric should be done by giving auto makers tax breaks and research dollars to move over to electric. Heavier taxes should be imposed on purely gas driven cars, which in my mind includes Toyota’s Prius and all other hybrids on the market today. Giving owners of electric cars breaks on solar power installations would also help get people to buy these vehicles.

Other things we can do to reduce our reliance on oil as fuel would be to start designing our cities so that cars were less necessary. Urban sprawl and suburbs are the real reasons most people have cars. If you live a long distance from where you work, a car becomes the best way to get to work each day. Design cities so that they are more compact, so that there are well defined living, working, retail, and industrial areas, and suddenly public transportation, bicycles, and walking become viable alternatives.

This also has the interesting side effect of stopping the conversion of farmland to paved-over housing subdivisions. I’ve been watching this happen to Silicon Valley (formerly the Valley of Heart’s Delight) all of my life. I live on a side street of Blossom Hill Road, named so because it used to run through orchards. Now it runs almost continuously through retail and housing areas from one end to the other, a run of more than 10 miles. I sense that we will probably want most of that farmland back at some point. It would be better not to pave it over in the first place.

Special Earth Day Post

By Ed Smallwood

I promised after MLK Day that I would attempt to be more topical; that I would attempt to remember special days more often. This Special Earth Day edition is my first attempt to do so. Look for my Special Free Comic Book Day Edition next month (the joke is: I’m not joking.) Rest assured that this Tuesday (the actual Earth Day) I will return to my usual purely political rantings.

All humor aside, Earth Day used to be really important when I was younger. It was supposed to bring attention to environmental issues, hopefully so we could do something about it before it was too late. Somehow in the last decade or so, it has become almost irrelevant. We have allowed it to disappear and today I am wondering: “Why?”

It certainly isn’t because we don’t need it. I’m sure many holidays have disappeared because they outlived their usefulness. Earth Day can hardly be considered to be one of those.

It can’t be because nobody is concerned about the environment. I have a hard time turning on a newscast without something being mentioned about Global Warming or Carbon Emissions, even if something much more important is happening, like The Pope marrying Britney Spears and Robert Downey Jr. while paparazzi have a shootout over the rights to crash into their limo before they disappear permanently from a Dutch colony.

Is it because we have Republicans in the White House? I doubt that would be the cause. Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, under the Nixon administration.

So what could the cause be? Is it because we’re so concerned about the environment all the time that having a special day to raise awareness is unnecessary? I would like to think so, but I doubt it.

Actually, I believe that we have never had as urgent a need for Earth Day as we do now. If we use it to it’s fullest, we should be going to Earth Day celebrations and using that time to network, to start to apply more pressure on our legislators to take the environment much more seriously than we have in the past several years.

Under the current administration, environmental regulations have been loosened, at a time when they are becoming more important. California has petitioned the EPA for a variance that would allow the state to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from cars the way they do other smog producing emissions. First the EPA stated that they had no authority to do so, and after California sued them in the Supreme Court, and the Court told the EPA that they do indeed have that authority, the EPA has decided to ignore California’s request on the assumption that they actually don’t have to pay attention to the most populous state in the Union.

The President first stated that he didn’t believe that global warming was happening. He later changed his stance to the idea that it was a natural event that we didn’t have to worry about. He has recently changed his mind again to agree that it is human caused, but his solution to the problem hasn’t changed much: Let polluters trade Carbon Credits. This would allow some polluters to put out much more carbon dioxide than they do now, under the assumption that others would put out less. This is a non-solution.

My gut feeling at this point is that we have a much bigger problem with global warming than we realize; that it is much further along than we have been told by a media that doesn’t understand the problem. The main evidence, and problem, that I can point to is that the permafrost is melting. This may not sound important, but it is huge. The permafrost is the land area starting around the Arctic Circle and going north of there. This is land that has been frozen solid essentially since the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago. Think about that for a bit. Many of the things that live in that part of the world that have died over tens of thousands of years were left in a frozen state. It is a giant ice-box, storing tens of thousands of years of leftovers. Now, it’s on a defrost cycle. Think of what happens to the food in your freezer when you have a week-long power outage.

Now think of all of the grasses, rats, mammoths, and other now-dead things rotting and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere. Over 10,000 years worth. That could easily amount to much more greenhouse gas than our entire civilization has ever released.

Considering how long carbon dioxide stays in the air (about 30 years on average,) my feeling is that we would have needed to go carbon neutral 20 or more years ago to prevent our current situation.

Now that I’ve scared the bajeezus out of you, we can still fix this. We have time. The temperature is not going up too quickly yet, however we do need to get on top of this problem as quickly as possible. I keep hearing people saying that we need a World War II type mobilization to fix this problem, and I think they have something there. It is possible, and things like this have been done in the past.

So let’s use Earth Day this year to start this mobilization. Go over to the Earth Policy Institute and purchase at least one copy, preferably several more, of the book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown. This book has the best roadmap of what needs to be done in my opinion. After reading it, you will want to lend it out. Trust me on this—virtually everyone I know that bought a copy of the last edition of the book bought at least one other for someone else. Next, Contact your Representative in Congress to let them know you are paying attention, and remember their reaction this November. You can also buy them a copy of Plan B 3.0 (the more you buy, the better the price gets.) And don’t forget to vote this November.