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Energy Policy Statement
(Rochester, NY, June 26) At a new conference in Rochester on Monday before the opening of a conference on “Opportunities in Alternative Energy 2006” sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton’s NewJobsNY project, the Green Party candidate for US Senate, Howie Hawkins, released the following energy policy statement.
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RENEWABLE ENERGY FOR JOBS, PEACE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The Goals of a New Energy Policy
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, resource wars for energy endangering national security and world peace, structural unemployment and the polarization of income and wealth, and global trade imbalances leading toward economic stagnation.
The world needs to radically change how energy is produced and used. It must convert from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables while dramatically increasing the efficiency of its use of energy. Failure to make this transition to the efficient use of renewables will lead to massive economic, environmental, and social disruptions
America’s wreckless conversion of farmland and forests to suburban sprawl is not sustainable. The inefficiencies of making people travel dozens of miles for work, school, shopping, and recreation, mostly as single passengers in cars, cannot be maintained with any combination of energy sources, whether nuclear, fossil, or renewable. An effective energy policy must also include a new federal urban policy that encourages the creation compact, mixed-use communities where people can walk or bike or use mass transit for the great majority of their trips to jobs, schools, shops, and parks.
Energy policy must also prioritize a fast reduction of the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to mitigate the global warming that climate scientists have demonstrated is already heating up the planet.
Energy policy must also promote equity with policies that offset the acute burdens now being born by low and middle income people as the costs of gasoline, heating fuel, and electricity for daily necessities rise. Energy companies like Enron, ExxonMobil, and giant utility conglomerates should not be permitted to make obscene – and like the Enron gaming of power distribution in California, criminal – profits by manipulating energy markets.
We can reduce per capita energy consumption while improving our quality of life, but we cannot do so within the current patterns of industrial production and urban sprawl.
Energy policy must also be demilitarized. The US cannot secure its energy needs or its national security by commandeering oil and other resources through swollen military serving as a global occupation force. Instead of fighting the rest of the world for the last oil reserves, we should be leading the transition to renewables and energy efficiency. The financial and labor resources to lead this transition must come by converting a major part of US military spending to investing in the energy transition. The energy crisis provides an opportunity to start making friends around the world instead of enemies in resource wars.
Clinton’s Energy Policy: Too Little, Too Late, and Too Weak
The energy policy proposed by Hillary Clinton at the National Press Club on May 23 was too little, too late, and too weak. Clinton’s policy is too little because her goals for reducing foreign oil dependence and producing US energy from renewables by 2020 are grossly insufficient to address the many facets of the energy crisis, from national security and economic stability to trade deficits, global warming, and the approaching peak of oil production.
Hillary Clinton proposes to reduce foreign oil dependence by 50 percent by 2025. Clinton’s goal doesn’t even match President Bush’s goal of a 75 percent reduction in Middle East oil imports by 2025 enunciated in his “oil addiction” remarks in his State of the Union speech in January. However, neither Clinton nor Bush present a realistic plan to achieve either goal. In the energy policy I will outline below, oil will be rendered completely obsolete as an energy source by 2025 by a combination of energy efficiency and renewable sources.
Clinton’s policy is too late because the threats to our economy, security, and environment posed by trade deficits, global competition for limited oil reserves, and global warming cannot wait another 20 years. The Boston Globe was right to blast Clinton in an April 17 editorial as a “climate change no-show.” Not only was she part of the inner circle of Bill Clinton’s administration, which bullied the world with arm-twisting and horse-trading to water down the Kyoto Protocol and then failed to even submit it to the US Senate for ratification. But in April, she refused to sign a letter from all the Democratic US Senators, except her and John Kerry, asking the EPA for a waiver to allow California, New York, Massachusetts, and eight other states to set carbon reduction goals based on higher than federal standards for car emissions.
And Clinton’s policy is too weak because it relies on the same corporate interests that have led us into this mess to get us out of it – if we fork over billions in corporate welfare. Clinton’s energy policy is right out of the playbook of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organized corporate wing of the Democratic Party.
The Clean Energy Transition:
Renewable Energy for Jobs, Peace, and the Environment –
A Global Public Works Program to Rewire the Planet with Renewable Energy
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:
- Switch federal energy subsides from nukes and fossil fuels to energy efficiency and renewables (about $25 billion).
- A $300 billion-a-year Clean Energy Fund for technology transfers of efficiencies and renewables to developing countries.
- A fossil-fuel efficiency standard that would rise by five percent a year.
- 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.
Investments in energy conservation and efficiency create far more jobs per dollar invested while cutting costs for households and businesses than our present inefficient government subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy production.
The Clean Energy Fund would promote an urban policy that finances the rebuilding of our cities and towns on a sustainable basis. We cannot sustain the wasteful energy pattern imposed by suburban sprawl. We have to halt sprawl. We have to stop allowing agriculture land near our population centers to be converted to housing developments and centralized malls dependent on an car-based transportation infrastructure. Federal urban policy should encourage the growth boundaries implemented with good success in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan region.
Funding mass transit systems and bike and pedestrian corridors in urban areas should be a priority for the Clean Energy Fund. Our politicians enabled the auto and oil giants to privatize and run into the ground the American railroad and street car system which was the best in the world prior to World War II. Today the US rail and urban mass transit systems are the worst in the industrial world. Not only is investing in mass transit needed to sustain our settlements and economy, it creates more jobs. A billion dollars spent on light rail transit creates 7,000 more jobs than a billion spend on highways.
The Clean Energy Fund should also help finance the restoration of sustainable, organic farming in and around our urban areas. Energy-intensive factory farming, with its heavy dependence on oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and fuels for machinery will not be sustainable as world oil production peaks and prices skyrocket. Many European countries, China, and, in recent years, Cuba all provide good models of organic farms serving regional urban markets in the industrial age.
The early gains in carbon reduction would be met by efficiencies, estimated by Gelbspan’s group at 30% readily achieved in the first six years. This would lead to a substantial reduction in energy use, especially in the US where per capita energy use is double that of Europe. In the US, the goal should be to reduce energy consumption in half in 10 years.
As energy and conservation efficiency improvements run into diminishing returns as they become more widespread, the carbon reduction goals would be increasingly met by renewables coming on line, including wind, solar, biofuels, and geothermal heating and cooling.
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.
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 world economy is based on an unsustainable energy use pattern that is squandering our inheritance of stored solar energy in the form of coal, oil, and gas. These fossil fuels took hundreds of millions of years to form, but we are using them up in one big splurge of a hundred years. The patterns of industry and urban settlement enabled by this quick depletion of fossil fuels cannot be maintained as these fuels deplete.
US oil production peaked in 1970. The most optimistic projections put the world peak of oil production off about 30 years. But oil geologists who employ the same predictive methodology as those who correctly predicted the peak of US oil production believe we are at or near peak oil production now. In either case, peak oil is a crisis we must address without delay.
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 energy-inefficient 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. While we cannot maintain our present patterns of industrial production and urban design, we can improve out quality of life by redesigning our production systems and settlement patterns on a sustainable basis.
This transition to sustainability means we cannot allow a small class of super-rich people to concentrate income and wealth and power in their hands. Sustainability means a fair distribution of income, wealth, and power so that all of us are ensured a decent measure of good food, housing, education, health care, and discretionary income.
Unless action is taken immediately and rapidly, the wasteful energy use patterns of the US combined with declining supply and increasing demand for oil will at least result in price shocks that destroy economic prosperity. In the absence of plan to change our energy sources and efficiencies, conflict over declining supplies of oil will result in resource wars until there are no more resources. Global warming will only add to this danger.
Peak oil means that we must fundamentally change our profit-oriented economic model that depends on constant growth to function. This mindless growth is to the planetary biosphere what a cancerous tumor is to a living organism: it grows and grows without any sense of balance or reciprocity until it kills its host. Peak oil thus means that we must create a democratic economy where people equitably share the fruits of their labor that creates level production that is ecologically sustainable within the physical limits of material resources and energy.
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 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 F rise in the global climate in recent decades. Scientists now predict a 3 to 10 degree F increase in the 21st century.
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 been the Carter Doctrine in action. And it has 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.
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 the $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.
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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 address 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.
Clinton’s 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 the wrong technologies.
A big part of Clinton’s energy policy is ethanol to fuel America’s vehicle fleet. But she makes does not rule out corn ethanol, which has a low or negative net energy yield. After all the oil-based inputs of fertilizer, pesticides, and machinery to grow the corn, the ethanol barely produces more energy than went into making it and by some estimates, 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 using about one-half the energy is because it has extensive mass transit systems and cities designed to minimize the need for 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 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 than 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?
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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