Local Energy News

Former Vice-President Al Gore is calling for all electricity in the U.S. to be produced from carbon-free sources within 10 years. News reports are hailing his plan as a “green gauntlet”, and many news outlets are incorrectly reporting that his plan calls for all electricity to come from renewable energy.

Gore’s plan instead calls for 20 percent of electricity to continue coming from nuclear energy.

That would mean adding at least 22 gigawatts of new nuclear power – or about 22 new reactors, just to meet the projected growth in electricity demand. Dozens more reactors would also be needed to replace older nuclear facilities that are due for retirement within ten years.

The 103 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. are now 26-years old, on average.

The video newscast containing this story is here.

The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign, The 2030 Challenge, Build Green Santa Fe, The Apollo Alliance, Green Cities, Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, The Green Gauntlet, and Smart Growth America – all of these programs have great sounding names and, perhaps, they give us hope about the direction our country is headed in tackling our energy and climate problems.

Why then, with so many programs already underway, does Local Energy News continue to report discouraging news, and highlight the lack of progress toward our goals? I do it because I believe that the only thing more damaging than great sounding programs that don’t really address our problems is the widespread belief that we are actually dealing with our problems, when we aren’t.

The folly of false hope is that it allows us to continue down false paths, reducing our chances of getting to the right path soon enough to make a difference. I don’t see many of the programs that have been put forward as being “good enough for now” or “a great start”, I see them instead as attempts to placate the public while the powers that be continue with their business as usual.

We don’t need to be energy experts to differentiate between programs that sound green, and those that truly are. All we need to do is ask different questions. For example:

Did the decision to allow private ownership of critical infrastructures, such as the electric power grid, leave us vulnerable to investor-owned monopolies and their profit motives?

Do new energy policies we are considering promote local self-reliance, or do they reward interests outside our communities and put control of our water and food in someone else’s hands?

Do our policies reward a particular energy technology, which we may or may not know enough about, rather than simply rewarding projects that meet the goals of our community?

Let’s not settle for saying that we want to “increase renewables” or “reduce carbon”. Let’s try setting broader goals, like “diversity of supply”, increased local ownership, use of local fuels and labor, and retention of energy dollars in the local community.

If you want to build a housing complex for seniors living on a fixed income, as Santa Fe just did, we shouldn’t allow the developer to install electric heat—the most expensive kind of heat—after giving the electric company the right to raise rates whenever it wants to. It takes no special knowledge of energy issues to know that you can’t protect the seniors in your community under such conditions.

It’s getting pretty late in the game to claim that we still don’t understand the energy game. Let’s ditch the whole conversation about “renewables” and “carbon” and start talking about local, independent businesses providing energy from fuels that we harvest locally.

That, more than any great sounding program, will get us where we need to go.

The video newscast containing this story is posted here.

Crude Oil prices have fallen from last week’s high of more than $145 dollars per barrel, and are trading today at around $138 per barrel. They’re heading back up today, however, on news that Iran has been test-firing missiles in response to U.S. and Israeli threats.

And, the Department of Energy released it’s Short Term Energy Outlook yesterday, predicting that oil prices would average $127 per barrel in 2008. Last year’s average price was $72 dollars. The report also shows that world oil consumption has continued to rise despite seven consecutive years of rising prices. Worldwide consumption is expected to increase through 2009, although U.S. consumption is expected to decline.

The video newscast containing this story is posted here.

The State of Pennsylvania could reap nearly a billion dollars in additional tax revenue by implementing a natural resource depletion tax. That, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which recently completed a national survey of depletion tax policies in use in the United States.

Their study was prompted by recent sharp increases in the value of mineral resources, and recognition that the State residents who own the resources are not benefitting from their newfound wealth. Adding a depletion tax, which is paid by the company that extracts the resource, or updating an out-of-date tax structure, would increase tax revenues in Pennsylvania by $840 million dollars annually. New Mexico could enjoy another quarter billion in tax revenues by updating it’s severance tax policy, and California could balance its state budget with the $2.3 billion it would raise.

The report appears on the company’s website at www.ilsr.org

The video newscast containing this story is posted here.