I have been thinking about what the youth climate movement’s Statement of Principles might look like if we were to start to put them into practice. Here are some thoughts:
We call on our leaders to follow these guiding principles as they make decisions that will determine our future:
- A just climate policy must be scientifically based – The US must enact mandatory caps on greenhouse gas pollution that ensures the peak and decline of global carbon emissions before 2015 towards a minimum of 80% emissions reductions below 1990 levels before mid-century in order to avoid a climate catastrophe.
In Practice: Pass national climate legislation. In my opinion, passing the Safe Climate Act in the U.S. House and the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act in the U.S. Senate are critical to getting us on the right track.
2. An ambitious plan to revolutionize our energy, agriculture and transportation systems with measurable targets is essential. We must immediately shift all federal funding and subsidies away from dirty energy towards research and implementation of clean technologies.
In Practice: I think a good first step would be to pass the CLEAN Energy Act of 2007, which passed in the House during the first 100 days push. The Senate version is still seriously lacking leadership. The bill would channel $13 billion in Big Oil subsidies to clean, renewable energy and efficiency.
3. A just climate and energy policy cannot rely on any forms of dirty energy such as so-called “clean coal” or nuclear power. We must recognize the disproportionate impact of global warming and dirty energy on low-income, people of color and indigenous communities and ensure a just transition that improves and supports their physical, social and economic health.
In Practice: A first step would be to end the wasteful and dangerous federal clean coal promotion program, which has received billions in subsidies over more than 20 years. Between 1948 and 1995 the nuclear industry received more than $61 billion in federal subsidies and has received billions since. The other critical piece of implementing this principle is including the principle of “Just Transition” for workers and communities in energy policies and programs. Good resources on just transition are here.
4. We must prioritize major reductions in total energy use. Cost-effective energy conservation and efficiency measures can cut energy demand by more than half. All of our remaining energy needs, including transportation, can be met by zero-emission renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. No combination of “alternative” fuels (from corn, coal or otherwise) can replace our oil addiction. Highly efficient, zero-emission electric cars and plug-in hybrids can be fueled up with wind-powered electricity more cheaply and conveniently than we can fill up with oil, biofuels or hydrogen.
In Practice: A great initiating action in the area of clean energy and efficiency investment would be an ambitious government program for green-collar jobs to weatherize homes, install solar and wind, and make buildings more efficient. Another solid action would be for the auto manufacturers to build plug-in hybrid vehicles (sign the Plug-in Partners Petition).
5. The development of a just climate and energy policy must include all stakeholders, not just business, government, and large environmental groups. Because every American, no matter their age or economic status, will be affected by climate change, it is crucial that a broad and diverse group, including communities that are disproportionately impacted by the energy industry, have seats at the table as this policy is crafted. As the generation that will inherit the impact of the decisions we make today, young people must be given a particularly important seat at the table.
In Practice: Some ways to do this include a) demanding the 2008 Presidential candidates hold a global warming debate hosted by youth and impacted community members, b) Congress holding hearings on climate change with impacted community members and youth, c) Politicians holding town hall meetings on energy and climate and utilities and companies being required to hold real, legitimate hearings with the community before constructing any new dirty energy facility.
These suggestions are only a start. In order to see real improvements in peoples’ lives in time to avert a climate crisis, it is essential for our generation to articulate exactly the solutions that we want to see and fight to make them a reality.
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This sounds like a refugee from the 1970’s naiively believing that energy conservation can
accomplish very much. As veryone has by now realized (although perhaps not this overly
optimistic fellow) high gas prices has NOT led to any reduction in demand. Consservation NEVER works, because it’s based on a false assumption : that people use energy frivolously. The only way carbon emissions are going to bereduced significantly is thru nuclear power and carbon sequestration
and those few alternative energy technologies that actually make economic and environmental sense , like Seadog or Aquamarine wave machines, tidal amchines in the Gulf Stream, and Enviromissions type
solar towers. The geothermal heat pump and LED lighting devices are the only feasible conservation
methods that have any merit. Setting carbon limits is a really dumb technique. It has led already to the errection of wind turbines that are 20 to 30 times more expensive than nuclear, yet have NO ability to replace coal plants nore even forestall the need for news ones as the demand grows 2% every year. Wind power is unreliable, uncontrollable garbage that forces the fossil backup power that
MUST be present whenever wind is in the system to produce 10 to 16% MORE emissions because of the reduced efficiency required in backing up wind. THAT is what carbon requirements have wrought - useless environmental disasters like wind turbines. Technology is what’s required, not hysteria
prompting stupid decisions on equally stupid technologies, like wind. Those two nuclear plants that
Mitsubishi is building in Texas will , by themselves, produce more power than all those 7500 $2 million apiece atrocious wind turbines can produce. AND they can meet peak demand requirements
and produce that power for less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour, while wind’s true costs (without the massive government subsidies) is between 8.5 an 12 cents. And wind is dirtier and pretty much destroys the value of 750,000 acres of land. And after nuclear fuel has been reprocessed and reused,
anyonne who claims there is anything dangerous about the remaining nuclear waste is living in the
1970’s.
Wow, thats just ignorant. I have never seen such a recitation of half-truths, outright distortions, and misunderstood basic concepts about renewable energy and particularly wind energy. Even suggesting that Nuclear energy is competitive or even feasible in ‘the free market’ is laughable, considering its history of feeding at the public subsidy trough since the 70s you reference so much. While wind does need some spinning reserve, it is needed anyway for emergency unmapped energy spikes.
The idea that wind destroys the value of land and is dirtier than nuclear is ludicrious. I don’t know where you got your anti-wind talking points…but maybe they should check in with any of the major Utilities: like FPL or Xcel, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Academy of Sciences, or even GE. All of those companies or scientific groups have nuanced positions on wind and nuclear, but they all contradict your ‘facts’.
Kent,
Thank you for taking the time to put forth some provocative ideas in this debate. I want to start by bringing this back to the subject at hand: the principles and policies that we should uphold in order to solve the climate crisis and transition to a clean energy future. The two key arguments you make in your comment in my view are:
1. Energy conservation is not a practical way of reducing carbon emissions because people are not using energy frivolously.
2. Setting a cap on carbon emissions is a bad idea because it leads to investment in technologies like wind power as opposed to technologies like nuclear.
I assume this means that you are opposed to the two pieces of legislation I mentioned, the Safe Climate Act and the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, for the reasons you mentioned.
Beginning with the first point, that energy conservation is never a good idea. I have actually never heard someone argue against the concept that there is waste in our energy system that can be reduced through effective energy efficiency and conservation methods. Usually people point to the fact that our economic system does not put a high dollar value on efficiency and conservation methods. First of all, this is a very strange argument. If you have traveled anywhere outside of the United States, you know that the average American’s way of life is very different from the average Chinese person, French person, Brazillian, Mexican, Irish person, or African. This is not all because we use energy more frivolously, which we absolutely do on average. It is largely because we design buildings and infrastructure to be larger and more consuming than others around the world. While you might argue that larger, more consuming infrastructure is a product of a better standard of living, I would argue that this is not entirely the case. You mention LED lighting and geothermal heat pumps as positive energy conservation technologies. As you know, these technologies allow us to reduce energy use while barely noticing it in our day-to-day lives. There are literally dozens of other examples like these of technologies that the average person can install in their home or business that do the same thing as conventional technologies without reducing quality. Many of these technologies such as day lighting and green roofs have actually been shown to enhance quality of life indicators in many instances.
The other important point to make about energy conservation is that it has been proven that changes in price of energy can and have led to extraordinary energy reduction efforts. The most recent example is the California energy crisis of 2001.
* From 2000 to 2001 electricity costs in California rose from $30 per month to more than $300 per month at the high points, leading ultimately to PG&E going bankrupt and several other utilities nearing the verge.
* “In early May 2001, the National Electric Reliability Council grimly forecasted hundreds of hours of rolling blackouts in store for California during the summer of 2001.6Not one blackout occurred that summer. The demand reductions that helped avert these disasters were no accident. The state
leveraged a host of policies and incentives already in place to help Californians reduce their energy demand… Relative to 2000, energy use was down an average of 7.9 percent during the critical summer of 2001 and peak demand was down an average of 8.4 percent.” - NRDC Report: “Energy Efficiency Leadership in California: Preventing the Next Crisis”
Ironically, a major factor that led to the California energy crisis was cutbacks to conservation:
“Programs to conserve energy by improving energy efficiency have reduced electricity demand in California by almost 10,000 megawatts (MW) since 1975, a major success story. But during the deregulation debate, California utilities slashed their energy conservation budgets by more than half. These cutbacks created a “need” for as much as 1,800 MW of added power plant capacity.” - UCS Report
The NRDC Report referenced earlier details how Californians locked in about a quarter of the extraordinary demand reductions achieved in 2001 during the crisis and have the opportunity to do far more than that in the coming years.
As powerful as it was, the California example is just the tip of the iceberg for energy conservation opportunity. In response to an immediate crisis of decreased supply and record-high prices, Californians reduced their electricity consumption in a very short time period without changing any infrastructure. The real opportunities come as Kent suggests, through technology. By looking at the concepts of sustainable design and life-cycle cost analysis from the very beginning of the process and putting in the right incentives to do so, we can do an enormous amount to reduce energy demand. However, that potential is not endless.
This is where renewable energy becomes critically important. This is where I want to address your second point:
2. Setting a cap on carbon emissions is a bad idea because it leads to investment in technologies like wind power as opposed to technologies like nuclear.
Setting aside the inherent virtues and problems with wind and nuclear, the point you make about a carbon cap doesn’t make much sense. First of all, I think we can all agree that carbon is a negative externality (a form of waste in the economic system that is not being accounted for in the cost of things) in the current economic system that we are trying to reduce. Currently, the system is set up to encourage the burning of carbon just as it is set up to encourage the consumption of any other material. There are a number of ways to internalize an externality in the economy. One of these methods is to put a limit on that item and set up a system to trade emissions reductions for the right to emit above the limit as was done with CFCs in the 1990s, which deplete ozone in the atmosphere. There are a whole bunch of inherent problems with a carbon cap and trade system. However, I would argue that the problems are not with the “cap” part of the system, but with the trading scheme. You argue that capping carbon leads to investment in wind power over nuclear power. Can you explain why this would be true? As I said in my article, there have already been over $60 billion in subsidies leveraged toward the nuclear industry from our tax dollars since 1948. Even with these supports, nuclear power remains too expensive and too high a risk for large-scale private investment.
In my opinion there needs to be a leveling of the playing field in regard to subsidies before discussing the price of any technology. As I explained in my “Anatomy of Addiction” article, the raw facts about energy subsidies in the United States are that clean, renewable energy such as wind and solar have historically received, and continue to receive far fewer federal research and development dollars, fewer tax breaks, and less investment than extractive technologies like nuclear, coal, and gas. If these subsidies were leveled the price of wind would inevitably drop substantially. Even without this, wind is cheaper than natural gas in some parts of the country already. Yes, your point is well taken that wind power is intermittent. We need more than just one technology to solve the climate crisis. We need a system to place a cost on burning carbon and the investment and research dollars as well as human ingenuity and will to build solutions that will be sustainable.
I’m sorry but I find it very difficult to accept the sustainability of a technology that produces highly radioactive waste that lasts for tens of thousands of years, contains an enormous, centralized infrastructure cost that has to be placed miles away from the electricity demand centers because of the inherent safety issues, requires the long-term exploitation of indigenous peoples in order to mine the raw material and store the waste, and for a million other reasons has not succeeded at producing electricity for a price lower than natural gas or coal despite billions more in federal tax breaks and research and development dollars.
What exactly are the mechanisms that you support to respond to global warming?
My recollection is that nuclear is cheaper than coal on a life cycle cost basis and cheaper than gas when gas is above 5-6 USD/mmbtu. The problem with nuclear is that it is capital intensive. 60% of the life cycle cost of a nuclear plant is construction. Most investment institutions have found that too risky in the past. It will be interesting to see what happens with the new reactors being built in China if more stability in costs and schedule can be achieved.
As for the other issues, my guess is that further U exploration can find other deposits away from indigenous cultures and the smaller volume of nuclear waste (versus coal) actually helps the solution. When the combination of global energy growth and global warming combine, my guess is that wind, nuclear, efficiency, and carbon sequestration will all be part of the mix.
Just a really quick point to respond to the comment that - “further U exploration can find other deposits awat from Indigenous cultures” - well, Australia holds approx 42% of the world’s uranium and most of it is in our deserts (esp Northern Territory, South Aus and Western Australia) which are inhabited by many remote Aboriginal communities descended from more than 500 Indigenous Australian nations. There is massive opposition from Aboriginal communities here to the mining of uranium and dumping of the waste on their land. The govt recently announced they would force a nuclear waste dump on an Aboriginal community in Mukarty, NT, against the wishes of many traditional owners. A campaign is building to stop it, just like a nuclear waste dump was stopped by the Kunga-Juta Aboriginal women in SA last year. The nuclear industry is the biggest example of environmental racism in Australia that I have ever seen.
My recollection is that uranium is relatively abundant (e.g., more plentiful than tin). The Japanese have even shown you can extract uranium from the ocean by floating filters near ocean currents. You can also use laser enrichment on the current tails supply as well. There are other supply options for uranium.
I realize that most folks do not like nuclear, but it will be tough to eliminate coal, increase energy in the developing world, and not increase nuclear.