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Clean Energy Transition: Renewable Energy and Oil
Meeting the Challenges of Global Warming and Peak Oil |
The energy crisis we face requires a crash program on a massive scale to deal with the interrelated problems of global warming, peak oil and gas, structural unemployment, the polarization of income and wealth and global trade imbalances leading toward economic stagnation.
The Clean Energy Transition I am calling for builds upon a proposal developed by Ross Gelbspan, the Pulitzer Prize winning Boston Globe reporter and editor, who has been the Paul Revere of global warming, sounding the alarm over the last decade. Gelbspan's articles and books (The Heat Is On and Boiling Point) in the last decade have focused on global warming and exposed the funding of anti-global warming "science" by largest oil and coal companies, notably ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal. In 1998, Gelbspan brought together a team a team of scientists, economists, and retired oil industry executives at the Harvard Medical School to develop a Clean Energy Transition plan.
The goal is the 70% carbon reduction that climate scientists say is needed stabilize the global climate. The time frame is 10 years, the time frame now advocated by such leading climate scientists as NASA's James Hansen and Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, current chair of the International Panel on Climate Change, the largest scientific collaboration in world history involving over 2000 scientists. Pachauri says we must have a 70% carbon reduction in 10 years "if humanity is to survive."
The Clean Energy Transition involves four interrelated policies:
1. Switch federal energy subsides from nukes and fossil fuels to energy efficiency and renewables (about $25 billion),
2. A $300 billion-a-year Clean Energy Fund for technology transfers of efficiencies and renewables to developing countries.
3. A fossil-fuel efficiency standard that would rise by five percent a year.
4. A Workers Superfund to provide all workers with jobs endangered by the Clean Energy Transition, such as the 50,000 coal miners in the US, with full income and benefits as they make the transition to alternative work.
This Clean Energy Transition would:
• Ignite a global engine of job creation and sustainable economic development.
• Enhance US national security and world peace by spreading good will instead of resentment toward the United States over wars for oil.
• Secure sustainable supplies of energy as oil and gas become scarce and expensive.
• Stabilize energy costs at affordable levels.
• Reduce US trade deficits by cutting oil imports.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.
• Create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in New York retrofitting our buildings, industries, and infrastructure for the efficient use of renewable energy.
The early gains in carbon reduction would be met by efficiencies, estimated at 30% readily achieved in the first six years. Thereafter, the carbon reductions would come mostly from renewables coming on line, including wind, solar, biofuels, and geothermal.
The biggest hurdle is not the technology, which already exists and is improving steadily. The biggest hurdle is whether there is enough labor to fill the jobs required for this crash-program time frame. The efficiency measures would retrofit our existing built environment, from buildings to appliances. They would create far more jobs per dollars invested than military spending.
Funding through Peace Conversion
Gelbspan's group proposed a ¼ cent per dollar "Tobin Tax" on international currency transactions to fund the Clean Energy Fund. I do not oppose a Tobin Tax to fund international sustainable economic development, but we do not have the time to negotiate the required agreements among nations to implement it for the Clean Energy Transition.
Instead, I call for the US to initiate it unilaterally and immediately with peace conversion of $300 billion from the over $600 billion US military budget. The US spends as much on its military as the rest of the world combined spends on its militaries, according to figures complied by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The US military budget funds an offensive global occupation force, not defensive force protecting American soil.
Recent Pentagon studies have identified global warming and peak oil as the greatest security threats to the US. The Clean Energy Transition demilitarizes our response by making friends instead of enemies around the world by bringing renewable energy technologies instead of oil wars and foreign military occupations to other countries. The Clean Energy Transition replaces the vulnerability of centralized power generation and national grids to sabotage by terrorists with decentralized energy systems based on local renewable energy sources. Its stimulus for job creation and economic development addresses the root causes of terrorist attacks from among the few billion desperate people in poor countries against the rich countries with their few hundred billionaires.
Global Warming
The US, with 5% of the world's population, is releasing 25% of the world's greenhouse gases. But China and India, which are growing explosively, are going to blow the lid off current carbon emissions if they do not transition rapidly to clean, renewable energy systems.
The polar ice caps and glaciers are melting. The oceans are rising. The tundra is thawing, releasing a millennia of geologically deposited carbon and methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. Infectious diseases are migrating. Deserts are expanding. Arable land is shrinking. Hurricanes are more destructive as they are powered by the increased energy of warmer seas. Carbon in the atmosphere is dissolving into the oceans as carbonic acid that is turning them into giant acid lakes. As a consequence, the coral reefs are dying and the plankton, which are the foundation of the ocean food chain and central to the carbon fixing and oxygen releasing cycle of the planetary biosphere, are threatened.
These are the consequences we already see from the 1 degree Fahrenheit rise in the global climate in recent decades. Scientists now predict a 3 to 10 degree Fahrenheit increase in the 21st century.
Peak Oil
The US and the world are facing the most serious energy crisis in history. Modern economies run on oil. But we are fast approaching the day when oil production will peak. The most optimistic projections put the peak of oil production off about 30 years. Many analysts believe we are at or near peak oil production now. In either case, it is a crisis we must deal with now.
World oil demand is expected to grow from 86 million barrels per day (mbd) to 120 mbd by 2020, largely due to growth in demand from the US and the fast growing economies of China and India. Yet the OPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia, have not been able to increase production for 20 years. Many analysts believe their reserves are overstated because OPEC apportions the amount each country can sell according to the size of their reserves. Growing demand and declining supplies means escalating prices, shortages, and the potential for resource wars over oil.
If we do not move now and quickly to renewable alternatives, industrial civilization could face economic collapse.
Hillary Clinton's Energy Policy: Pandering to Corporate Interests
Clinton proposes to fund a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund with a two-year fee on major oil company profits that exceed a 2000-2004 profit baseline. But oil companies can avoid this windfall profits tax by taking a tax credit for investments in renewables. She proposes all kinds of tax credits to be funded by the Strategic Energy Fund, including for renewable energy, efficient cares purchased by fleet owners, installation of ethanol pumps at gas stations, and homeowner and business efficiency investments.
There are two problems with these tax credits. First, low and moderate income people cannot take advantage of the tax credits, so they are left out of the subsidies for transitioning to efficiency and renewables. Second, it keeps the decision-making power with the private interests instead of a democratic public process.
The technologies Clinton favors in her energy policy speech are the wrong technologies.
A big part of Clinton's energy policy is ethanol to fuel America's vehicle fleet. But she does not rule out corn ethanol, which has a low or negative net energy yield. After oil-based inputs of fertilizer, pesticides, and machinery which are needed to grow the corn, the ethanol barely produces more energy than what went into making it and by some estimates, the ethanol produces less energy. While promoting corn ethanol may appeal to voters in the Iowa caucuses, it is not a good energy source to promote.
Clinton seems to realize this when she proposes that the Strategic Energy Fund provide loan guarantees to cellulosic ethanol, which has an energy yield of over 15 times the energy put into making it. Cellulosic ethanol, which uses fast-growing, low-maintenance agricultural feedstocks, is indeed a biofuel worth pursuing, but it should be done instead of, not in addition to, corn ethanol.
In her energy speech, Clinton said we need to do more on mass transit, but made no commitment from her Strategic Energy Fund to build it. Instead she focuses on making the car-dependent transportation system work with hybrids, ethanol, and increased fuel-efficiency. One of the major reasons Western Europe has a higher standard of living than the US even though they have one-half the energy, is because it has extensive mass transit systems and cities designed to minimize the need for car-dependent transportation. A serious energy policy must make a major commitment to mass transit and sustainable urban design.
Clinton's support for increased fuel-efficiency standards is right out of the administration of her husband. After promising to raise Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in their 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton and Al Gore failed to do so for their full eight-year administration. Instead they took their standard approach of having the corporations and government negotiate voluntary agreements. This is what Hillary Clinton now proposes in her energy speech.
The voluntary approach clearly did not work. Auto fuel efficiency plummeted during the Clinton administration. One cannot get a car today with the fuel efficiency of the most fuel-efficient cars made in the 1980s and 1990s. And that includes the hybrids on the highways, where their gas tanks, not their batteries, provide all the energy to power the vehicle. Yet Clinton proposes to continue with the same approach that led to this dismal result.
Another example of Clinton's corporate environmentalism is her approach to coal. She says in her speech that "our domestic strategy must involve coal." She follows the corporate line of the coal companies who are promoting so-called "clean coal" where the carbon is pumped underground instead of released into the atmosphere. The problem is this technology is unproven and there are more cost-effective renewable alternatives.
To encourage the coal companies to move toward "clean coal", Clinton proposes cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions. A market for pollution rights is classic corporate environmentalism. The DLC has long promoted this market-based alternative to the performance standards established by the environmental legislation of the early 1970s. Cap and trade systems do a worse job of stimulating pollution control innovation than performance standards because they lower the cost of compliance and thus the incentive to innovate. If the market performs perfectly, emissions trading produces the same overall reduction in emissions that a traditional performance standard with the same emissions limit would. But for localities where producers buy pollution emission permits instead of investing in pollution reduction technology, the result is an increase in pollution in those communities.
Finally, Clinton wants to go forward with nuclear power as an energy source, saying it does not release greenhouse gases. While it is true that no greenhouse gases are emitted from the generation of electricity by nuclear plants, the industry as a whole, from uranium mining to transporting waste, does generate greenhouse gas emissions. Clinton proposes government support for research and demonstration projects and reforms of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to deal with nuclear power's persistent problems of cost, safety, proliferation, and waste. After more than 50 years experience with nuclear power, those problems have not been resolved. Why throw more good money after bad?
An Energy Policy with Public Control and an International Scope
Instead of corporate welfare incentives for the giant energy, auto, nuclear, and agribusiness corporations, we would use the taxpayers' money more efficiently and effectively through a program of public investment and public works to build a renewable energy infrastructure for our civilization. Local governments, spending the money directly or contracting with local businesses, should administer much of this investment.
Another fundamental flaw in Clinton's approach is that it is directed at the US only. The energy crisis is global. If China relies on its large coal resources to power its rapid industrialization, global warming will continue even if the US is completely powered by renewables. The US has been trying to deal with the energy crisis militarily ever since the Carter Doctrine which said in essence the US will intervene in the Persian Gulf region to secure oil supplies if necessary. The military interventions of all of the succeeding US administrations down to the current Bush administration have seen the Carter Doctrine in action. It has also led to the current quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is time for new approach. Instead of trying to secure oil by force of arms, it is time redirect those resources from the military to a Clean Energy Transition that will render fossil and nuclear fuels obsolete and provide every country with sufficient energy from local renewable sources to provide a decent standard of living.
Create National Oil Company to Accept Venezuela's Offer to Cap Oil Prices at $50 a Barrel for the Next 200 years
We should create a national oil company to help protect American consumers against the rapidly escalating price hikes for gasoline.
The national oil company would take advantage of the offer by the Venezuelan government to sell oil at only $50 a barrel for the next 200 years, well below the current world price of around $70 a barrel. $50 a barrel means about $2 a gallon at the gas pump.
We must break the Big Oil's monopoly control of our energy supplies. ExxonMobil and the other oil giants rejected the Venezuelan offer. A national oil company would serve as a New Deal style yardstick corporation whose competition would prevent Big Oil from gouging consumers. The national oil company would go into the international market and, for the first time, offer the OPEC countries a selling outlet in the US other than the multinational oil giants.
The national oil company should also be mandated to begin a NASA-like drive to develop wind, solar, and other alternative sources of power. It could do this because, unlike the oil companies, this publicly controlled company corporation would have no vested interest in stifling renewable energy sources that compete with Big Oil's fossil fuel reserves.
While the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster for the Iraqi citizens and American consumers and taxpayers, it has been a huge windfall for the private American oil companies. They are literally making out like bandits. The five oil giants have seen their profits soar from $34 billion in 2002 to $113 billion in 2005, including $36.1 billion for ExxonMobil alone. The value of their oil reserves increased by more than $2.3 trillion. Yet rather than call for new taxes to recapture some of this windfall, the Democrats and Republicans trip over themselves to make proposals to instead reduce the government's revenues by cutting a few pennies from the sale taxes. Such nonsense is linked to Big Oil's tens of millions of campaign contributions.
Oil geologists disagree on when global oil production will peak. Some say peak oil production is imminent. The most optimistic put it off about 35 years. But all agree that sooner or later the finite supply of oil will force prices up inexorably as increasing demand meets diminishing supply. Rising demand from fast-developing China and India are accelerating this day of reckoning. Hawkins argues that a national oil company with access to oil at a fixed price would greatly assist the United States in the transition to more sustainable energy sources based on renewable energy. Hawkins also says that such a transition is needed to reduce the growing impact of carbon emissions on global warming.
By getting a long-term commitment at $50 a barrel for oil, Venezuela would be able to tap its huge reserves of extra heavy crude oil, which is more expensive to refine. By "officially" expanding its reserves to 312 billion barrels (compared to Saudi Arabia's 262 billion), Venezuela would be able to increase its production quota under OPEC rules, providing a guaranteed market for as long as 200 hundred years. The deal would seem to benefit both Venezuela as well as oil importers such as the United States.
Hawkins cautioned against relying on Venezuela's extra heavy crude oil, also known as tar sands, oil sands, or bituminous sands, for the long term for environmental reasons. Venezuela and Canada each have about one-third the world's heavy crude oil reserves. However, Venezuela's heavy crude is far easier to extract and refine with less environmental impact than Canada's due to its higher purity and the higher ambient temperatures of Venezuela which make extraction far easier. Yet its high sulphur and particulate content gives heavy crude a higher environmental impact when burned as fuel.
Venezuelan heavy crude should be seen as a transitional source of energy as we build clean, renewable sources, including wind, solar, biofuels, solar and wind generated hydrogen for fuel cells, and geothermal heating and cooling. Above all, we must increase our efficiency in energy use, most especially in the transportation sector through a massive expansion of mass transit and freight rails.
Without such a long-term commitment to stable oil prices, the US economy would be subjected to repeated price shocks likely to increase in severity over time, leading to a succession of economic depressions accompanied by runaway inflation. A nationally owned oil company makes the most sense because it is as clear as day that the private oil companies in America are out to fleece consumers and taxpayers at every opportunity. |
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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