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TechnoratiIn his Washington Post column last Friday, EJ Dionne writes that Al Gore is playing "his usual role of unpaid party visionary by arguing that we can ease the climate crisis, the economic crisis and the crisis of dependence on foreign energy all at once." While Republicans attempt to exploit high gas prices with a "drill, drill, drill" election year slogan, Gore explained in a speech yesterday at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC "that the technology for alternative fuels - wind, solar and geothermal - is far more advanced than we realize," and that we should pursue a 10-year goal of obtaining 100 percent of our electricity from renewable sources and clean fuels.
Gore said: "...when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them.... our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges - the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change... But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we're holding the answer to all of them right in our hand. The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels."
In the audience was Senator Bernie Sanders, who spoke with Vice President Gore backstage about his new bill, the 10 Million Solar Roofs Act of 2008. A truly independent voice in the Senate, Sen. Sanders has been a leader in pushing the Democratic Congress in a progressive direction - and energy policy is no exception.
Last year I wrote of Sen. Sanders' green collar jobs amendment which passed but currently awaits funding. Now his 10 Million Solar Roofs legislation - whose cosponsors include Republican Senators Arlen Specter and John Warner - offers yet another transformative alternative to oil dependence as usual. The bill would provide homeowners, businesses, non-profits and state and local governments with rebates covering up to half of the cost of photovoltaic systems which average $20,000. In order to qualify for the federal rebates, stringent energy efficiency standards would need to be met. Some experts say that if 10 percent of the existing rooftops in the US were equipped with properly installed systems, they could supply 70 percent of peak energy demands during summer months.
"My bill picks up in a sense where California left off," Sen. Sanders told me in an interview. "California and oddly enough New Jersey are the leaders in the country in providing incentives to help people and businesses put up photovoltaic units on their roofs. California had a 10-year, 1 million rooftop project, we're saying that we can do 10 million rooftops in the course of 10 years. Now, number one, if you do that, it provides a helluvalot of electricity, which means you don't need coal-burning plants, it means you don't need nuclear power plants. Number two, what rooftop electricity does, it really makes people more conscious about sustainable energy in a way that even solar thermal [plants] won't - because that's just another power plant. The idea of having rooftops all over this country producing electricity is, I think, an extraordinary thing. You're going to have 10 million individuals, homeowners, businesses, involved in producing electricity.... So, I think this will aid in improving our consciousness about how we utilize electricity, how we produce it, and so forth....And the goal also is not only producing the electricity, it's when you start using that much photovoltaic, the cost of that stuff is going to go down."
Sanders recently took a trip to Nevada and New Mexico for a Congressional field hearing on solar energy. In Nevada, he saw two major solar installations, including the Nevada Solar One project in Carson which is now providing electricity to 17,000 homes. "That's small," he told me. "Right now on the drawing board - people don't know this - but... there are about a dozen plans for the Southwest, these are called 'concentrating solar plants' or sometimes people call them 'solar thermal plants.' These are the same technology, electricity-generating technology, as coal or gas. The same bloody thing except the fuel now is from the sun. There is one plant that Pacific Gas and Electric plans to build within a couple of years that will provide electricity - one plant - for 400,000 homes, the equivalent of a small nuclear power plant. So, there is huge potential in concentrating solar."
In fact, he said the Southwest "turns out to be an optimal place to on the planet" for solar thermal plants. It's estimated that with an aggressive approach 15-20% of the US electricity needs could be produced just from the region. "So when Gore says that in 10 years we should produce 100% of electricity from sustainable sources, 20% of that can come just from [there]," Sen. Sanders said. "And then you can have another huge amount from photovoltaics. Then you got wind, then you got geothermal, then you got biomass. It is a doable deed."
Sanders challenged the myth that a state like Vermont can't produce solar energy - and it's important to differentiate between solar thermal plants and photovoltaic panels. "The country that is probably leading the world in photovoltaics I believe is Germany," Sen. Sanders said. "Germany's solar exposure is worse than Vermont's.... It is a technology that can be used in 50 states. Photovoltaics can work, and it's important to know that because [the notion that it can't] is a myth."
Sanders sees his bill and the production of solar thermal plants as a piece of a much larger picture - and one that won't happen any time soon without a change of administration and a new President.
"It's certainly not going to happen under the Bush administration," he said. "Here's where I think we're at: if we have a president - if Senator Obama is prepared to do what Al Gore just was talking about yesterday. And to understand that, one, we have a planetary crisis. Number two, that the importation of hundreds of billions of dollars of oil from dictatorships in the Middle East is a geopolitical disaster, it's a major economic problem. If Obama is prepared to make this a major priority - Gore was talking about the man on the moon analogy, other people talk about the Manhattan Project analogy - if he's prepared to do that then these 10 million rooftops become absolutely part of that.... It's part of an overall energy approach to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, and, by the way, environmental concerns. We're focused on greenhouse gas emissions, we forget that this coal is making a lot of people sick as well.... Of course there will be economic dislocation... [and] we want to protect the coal miners who will lose their jobs. But at the same time you are going to create major industry after major industry in terms of sustainable energy. I think at the end of the day we create millions of jobs in net and it's absolutely an economic win. It's a question now of taking on the fossil fuel industry, and the huge amounts of lobbying money and campaign contributions. At the end of the day we can reverse global warming, we clean up the environment, we create good jobs, we break our dependence on foreign oil - hey, that's a pretty good agenda, huh?"
It is indeed. This Sunday, former politician Al Gore will be on Meet the Press where he will once again lay out his visionary agenda. Meanwhile, we are lucky to have at least one visionary politician inside the Senate who relentlessly pushes this desperately needed transformative agenda.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher of The Nation.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
16 Comments so far
Show AllThe only thing Katrina knows about the environment is her front lawn, no doubt sprayed with pesticides.
Take her self appointed savior Obama. Obama is now using Hillary's fund raising arm which are also called "bundlers" i.e., corporate investments earmarked by, and for, special interest groups. If you check out opensecrets.org you will also see that Obama has taken huge corporate donations.
With regards the environment, here are some facts that poor little Katrina avoids:
In May of 1998, Obama voted for a Bill condemning the Kyoto Treaty while in the Illinois Senate.
Obama pays lip service to the issue of environmental sustainability (no argument here) saying that climate change is "one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation." Yet while he was an Illinois state Senator he supported numerous Bills drafted on behalf of the Coal Industry according to legislative records. He also acknowledged his very strong support for coal during his run for the US Senate in 2004 by affirming in a speech, "there is always going to be a role for coal."
Furthermore, Obama's campaign has accepted contributions from the coal industry to the tune of $539,597.00 for both Presidential and Senate campaigns as reported by the Center for Responsive Politics.
A key feature of Obama's environmental plan calls for "technologies to reduce coal emissions." But any authentic environmentalist will tell the scope of obfuscation in his statement: in the words of Meg Boyle (Global Warming Policy expert for Green Peace) recently said, "Those technologies are risky and expensive" and "They cannot deliver in time to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change." Nor are they support by the Coal Industry who would need to implement them to be effective. Obama's environmental agenda is what is called "green washing" by any authentic environmentalist. This differs substantially with the lip service environmentalists like Katrina.
Frank ODonnell, President of the non-partisan Clean Air Watch noted that Obama is "Trying to straddle two political irreconcilable positions: taking decisive action against global warming while keeping a healthy coal industry" and "Obama's record certainly suggests that environmentalists aren't going to be calling the shots in his Administration without input from the [coal] industry."
In the Illinois State Senate Obama cast the following votes:
1997, he voted to divert sales taxes to fund grants to reopen closed mines.
2001, Voted for legislation that offered 3.5 billion in loan guarantees to build coal fired power plants with no concomitant protections to control carbon emissions.
2003, he voted to allow 300 million in taxpayer backed bonds to build or expand coal fired power plants
In 2005 in the US Senate, Obama voted for a Bill opposed by most Democrats which contained 9 billion in Coal subsidies.
In 2007, Obama sponsored a Bill calling for 8 billion in subsidies to a technology to convert coal to liquid fuel which the Sierra Club said that liquid coal, "releases almost double the global warming emissions per gallon as regular gasoline."
Obama presidential campaign asserts two linchpins to his current environmental plan: Nuclear energy and Bio fuel. Both inimical to our Earth Mother. Nuclear has never resolved the spent fuel problem, i.e., radioactive waste outlives the containers they are stored in by hundred of years, and the current political solution is to bury the waste in Neveda. With regard to bio fuels, as more airable land transitions to higher paying crops for bio fuels, thus taking away land for food crops, food prices will soar, and world wide starvation increase.
Obama, like McCain are both anti environmentalists whose policy objectives will diminish life on planet Earth. Hope may get a lot of mileage in the belt way where Katrina feeds from the same polluted trough, but it has nothing to do with the reality of the Obama's anti environmental record.
Katrina knows absolutely NOTHING about sustainability and it is surprising to me that Gore even endorsed Obama given that his visonary proposals will fall on deaf ears in any Obama Administration predicated on Coal, Nuclear, and Bio Fuel. Katrina is leading all the sheeple toward the precipice.
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ubrew,
If a mechanical engineer specializing in pneumatic systems says compressed air is inefficient, I'd believe him.
I am an EV experimenter, and even if your claim of 64% efficncy is correct, this is still far less than a Lithium-ion powered battery-electric power, which can be about 80-85% efficient.
On July 22nd, 2008 1:39 am ubrew12 wrote:
"A solar panel is just sand and dirt, to which energy has been added.
Why are they so expensive? It's the cost of the energy.
Think about that for a minute. The Cost Of the Energy??? What's a solar panel for???
People need to look more carefully at the industrial engineering of the solar panel, with an eye to using the processes output as energy input. Until that happens, solar panels will continue to be overpriced for no good reason other than that a 'lowest common denominator' capitalism gives them that price. This capitalism insists the 'cost of energy' be drawn on the open market (it's analysis frankly blows up if you suggest 'energy' could come 'free')"
ubrew12 you said that solar panels are just sand and dirt to which energy has been added. Sorry its not that simple. First the competing uses of silicon are in the computer chips in that computer you just blogged on this site with. Second, while it is true that silicon is plentiful, just go to any beach or desert, the doping agents are not. They are made of rarer boron, arsenic, phosphorus and occasionally gallium. Gallium is a rarer and expensive dopant than the others and is used in high grade low noise amplification applications like UHF and microwave communication receiver circuits.
Right now the competing use of silicon is in the computer industry where I work. It will probably be that way for a little while longer. The photovoltaic panel markets that were subsidized until recently by state funding, especially in New Jersey until New Jersey pulled funding, drive or crash the market respectively. So it's no grand capitalist conspiracy.
The industry will need a set of crutches, state funding, until it gathers its own legs. So far New Jersey is in a fiscal short fall and so are the other states like California that fund this enterprise. The good news is that the cost of coal is going up and those photovoltaic panels are going to come down in cost when the cost of solar is cheaper than coal and that is not to far off in the future.
Let's have a show of hands.
Everyone against burning coal, raise you hands.
Everyone against importing oil, raise you hands.
Everyone against nuclear, raise your hands.
Everyone against more drilling in Alaska, raise you hands.
Everyone against oil sands from Alberta, raise your hands.
Everyone against more refineries, raise your hands.
Everyone against windfarms, raise your hands.
Everyone against Al Gore, raise your hands.
Everyone against rasing your own garden, raise your hands.
Everyone against elbow grease, raise your hands.
Everyone, all of the above, all together now, jump up and down and holler. once again, NOW!
What have we accomplished? Nada.
What have we learned? Zilch.
What do we do? All of the above, all over again.
A solar panel is just sand and dirt, to which energy has been added.
Why are they so expensive? It's the cost of the energy.
Think about that for a minute. The Cost Of the Energy??? What's a solar panel for???
People need to look more carefully at the industrial engineering of the solar panel, with an eye to using the processes output as energy input. Until that happens, solar panels will continue to be overpriced for no good reason other than that a 'lowest common denominator' capitalism gives them that price. This capitalism insists the 'cost of energy' be drawn on the open market (it's analysis frankly blows up if you suggest 'energy' could come 'free')
Remember: 'lowest common denominator' capitalism also thinks a Big Mac and fries is FOOD, that '57 channels and nothing on' is ENTERTAINMENT, and that a Hummer is TRANSPORTATION (rather than exploitation).
'Lowest common denominator' capitalism is the wrong paradym for costing a solar panel (or, in fact, ANY energy producing product whose major cost IS energy).
But try telling that to 'free-market' conservatives like Bush.
First, the environmental impacts should be considered in making solar energy, just like they should for coal, oil etc. Is the production of solar panels environmentally friendly? If production gears up, will corporations just trash the environment and use 'going green' advertizing to make money rather that the intent of many of the purchasers, which is to make a smaller footprint on the planet?
Second, Obama is talking about 'clean coal.'
Third, this is just one of the reasons why I am voting for Third Party, or Green Party or Nader. But I will not be voting for any democrat or republican who is putting the corporate interests ahead of what we need to live sustainably. This includes Obama.
Mike E. Mikey said: "Do you realize how inefficient a thermodynamic process it is to compress air in the first place?"
Are you sure? You would need a compressor capable of changing its blade angle with the pressure of the air, and a turbine likewise capabile, but shouldn't you be able to get 64% of the energy you put into it?
If California were to build a solar power plant in the desert the size of Lake Mead, it would generate all the power California uses. No other power sources would be needed.
From ~zaz~ (July 21st, 2008 4:06 pm)
"...gizmag.com/go/7000/ Check out these compressed air vehicles."
I took a quick look at that. Do you realize how inefficient a thermodynamic process it is to compress air in the first place? VERY. Study some thermodynamics. This looks like a hoax. I've spent most of my professional life dealing with pneumatic systems and I assure you that compressed air is one of the least efficient ways to store energy. If you don't believe me, go buy an air compressor and check out your electric bill.
There is absolutely no reason that California, Oregon, and Washington east of their mountain ranges, as well as Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico could not become the Saudi Arabia of solar power. The same holds true for most of the flat land prairies between the Rockies and Appalachian ranges with respect to wind power.
For what we are spending on the stupid and senseless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we could have national single-payer health coverage, a very solvent social security, and renewable energy sources that do not require polluting the atmosphere, ground or water.
Let China and India buy all the oil that OPEC can pump--but I'll bet you even money that our example would inspire them (and the Arabic middle east) to similarly invest in the same non-polluting energy sources we did. It certainly worked that way with oil. It all boils down to leadership and quite frankly the leadership of the United States is appalling on this matter. Bravo Bernie Sanders and the people of Vermont for having the good sense to keep electing him to political office.
Bernie says, "It's a question now of taking on the fossil fuel industry, and the huge amounts of lobbying money and campaign contributions..."
- Anyone who believes the Democrats are going to "take on the fossil fuel industry" must be snorting illicit substances. No such idea was even mentioned in the Dem Party presidential primary "debates" (except by the 2 candidates who were banned from the debates).
Hooray for Bernie and Gore! Here is the chance that we would never get in a Republican Administration.
Just heard today about a person I work with actually ordering something like this compressed air vehicle.
Won't be delivered until next year though.
But will be happy to report what it's advantages and limitations are!
http://www.gizmag.com/go/7000/ Check out these compressed air vehicles.
How bad will "it" have to get before renewables are seen as "normal" and coal,etc. seen as "abnormal"?
My grandparents and parents used less energy than I do. We're talking very broad social change. Change in expectations and culture.
If any of you know my previous posts you know that I'm a big advocate of a broad-based approach. But the reason for that stance is because I see absolutely no political will.
But suppose a real leader in this country were to stand up and paraphrase JFK and say: "I believe before the next decade is out, that we should take on a goal to be generating 100% of our power through renewable resources. .... We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard...."
That would create a serious funding sea-change. And then, I believe, anything like that is possible.
Indeed, if this had been said by a President Gore the day after 911, setting this country on a path of energy independence that would have divorced our politics from the vagaries of oil producing nations, today we would be largely close to realizing that goal if even 1/2 the resources were thrown at the problem as have been flushed down the bung-hole of wars.
Ahhh...but you see, America is just not the great nation it once was. Nor are Americans the great people they once were.
So I will continue to hope, encourage, advise, and write to congressmen. But without that kind of leadership we are, I'm sorry to say, doomed to follow some blind alleys (hydrogen economy, ethanol, biodiesel) some dangerous technologies (nuclear, carbon-neutral coal), and some complete red herrings (off shore and US drilling, and just regular coal burning).
Sorry to bring it up again, but I'm really not. Once again birth control is not mentioned. Producing 100% renewable energy by 2020 will not produce 100% renewable by 2022 as more people move away from home. An energy policy without a committment to free contraception and sex education is not an energy policy at all.