Entries in Commentary (10)
Drilling Offshore in the Age of Hurricanes
Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 10:20PM 
This commentary aired September 2, 2008 on KUNM.
There’s nothing quite like a hurricane bearing down on the world’s largest collection of oil and gas rigs to remind you just how bad an idea it is to drill offshore. Now, I know Hurricane Gustav was no Katrina or Rita, the pair that delivered the one-two punch to the Gulf in 2005, opening up 600 separate oil spills and dumping 750,000 gallons of crude oil into a fragile, coastal waterway. What’s that? You didn’t hear Katrina and Rita left behind one of the worst environmental disasters of all time? Well, a lot of news outlets reported that not a drop of oil was spilled, and Presidential candidate John McCain recently repeated this myth when he cited those two hurricanes as evidence that it’s now “safe” to drill offshore.
Even Barack Obama, in his acceptance speech last week, said that we need to do more drilling offshore. At least he called it a “stop-gap measure”, and boy, is it ever. We are already drilling fifty thousand new oil and gas wells a year in the United States, and the amount of oil and gas we produce STILL declines every year. We can’t possibly put holes in the ground fast enough to increase our domestic production of oil and gas. Every new well we drill simply offsets declining production from the other wells. Ten years ago we were offsetting those declines with about 15,000 new wells a year. Now it’s 50,000, and ten years from now, if you follow the trend, we’ll need 150,000 new wells a year. It’s like running on a treadmill...you can’t possibly win.
Perhaps the greatest reason of all for not expanding our drilling efforts in the United States is that scientists have discovered a clear link between the rate at which we un-earth carbon-based fuels and the rate at which our climate is destabilizing. Here again, there’s been a lot of confusion about this. From all the reports, you’d think climate change was caused by not having enough air in your tires, or using the wrong kind of light bulbs. But it’s not. Climate change doesn’t care how efficiently we use energy, or what we decide to do with it. The only thing that matters is how fast you dig up the buried carbon resources and release them into the atmosphere.
With this in mind, how can we say we are serious about addressing our climate problem while we push for more drilling? Instead of lamenting the fact that our domestic oil and gas reserves are depleting, shouldn’t we celebrate it? Are we finally getting a look at the end of oil, when we stop unearthing the carbon that is destabilizing our planet? I’m ecstatic!
Now, I’m fully aware of all the dire predictions about how our country would come apart if we stop buying energy from the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear companies. But seriously, if we took the two-trillion dollars we will give them this year and instead built a public infrastructure to harness and distribute renewable energy, would everyone have enough?
Isn’t it possible that the assertion that nothing else is feasible, that we have to keep handing two-trillion dollars a year to the companies that make dirty energy based on non-renewable, planet-killing fuels, is false?
To fix our climate, we need to start leaving carbon-based fuels in the ground. I say we set them aside, declaring them “protected wilderness areas”. The legislation for doing that is already in place – we do it all the time. You just say, “This area must be left untouched so that our children can have a decent future,” and your all done.
Now, if you still feel like you need more reasons to not drill offshore, check out the National Hurricane Center website. There are three reasons right on the home page, and their names are Hanna, Ike, and Josephine, and they’re headed for our shores.
Telling the Truth About Oil, Wind, and Water
Monday, August 18, 2008 at 06:13PM 
With the news these days dominated by Michael Phelps winning Olympic gold medals, John Edwards confessing to marital affairs, and Paris Hilton deciding to run for president, I barely even want to know the details of Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia – its neighbor to the south. Russia isn’t even a super-power anymore, and from what I hear, they’re just acting out some leftover anger from the Cold War days. It’s not like Georgia has any oil, does it? (Full commentary is posted here.)
Community Ownership of Energy Systems
Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 08:42PM 
Whether it’s the oil companies, the electric utilities, or the gas companies, it’s always the same story: Jack up the price, bribe a few politicians, get some great tax breaks, and jack up the price again. It’s as if the guys who own the energy companies have all the fun.
If ownership of energy systems is what empowers you to make the rules, is it time for new ownership? If members of the community owned the energy systems, would they make different rules – rules that serve the best interests of their local community?
After researching community-ownership of energy systems for a long time, I’ve found a model that I really like. It is based on a cooperative business model, but with a unique twist: the function of the cooperative is to own controlling interest in limited-liability corporations (LLCs) that do energy projects. By owning a majority stake in the energy companies, the cooperative ensures that they operate in the public interest.
The cooperative starts new LLC’s from the ground up, or buys controlling interest in existing ones – either way, the important thing is ensuring that they serve the common good. The LLCs should turn a profit – the more the better, since community members own them – but they have a higher purpose than just making money. The energy projects are chosen to best serve the community where they are located through local job creation, local retention of energy dollars, and improved energy security and self-reliance for the long term.
There’s already an example of this business model in action in Massachusetts. It’s called Coop Power, and it’s on the web at www.cooppower.coop. They quickly raised $300,000 through membership fees, and then leveraged this money to get grant funding, equity investment (which they plan to buy back), and conventional loans – enough money to fund a $6 million biodiesel production plant. Neat, huh?
Creating Local Energy Markets
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One of the greatest myths of our time is that renewable energy isn’t quite ready to compete with so-called “conventional” sources of energy. More research is needed, we are told, because renewables are still too expensive. So onward we march, powering our homes with coal and filling our gas tanks with imported go-juice, all the while shipping bagfuls of cash out of our communities to pay for it.
There is a lot of evidence that this myth about renewable energy is false. Many countries smaller than ours are installing renewables faster than we are, creating jobs and increasing their self-reliance while lessening their environmental footprint. So, why does the myth still play so well in the United States?
One reason is that the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear companies here are actively engaged in energy policymaking, and they repeatedly tell the myth to lawmakers at all levels of government. Using carefully crafted messages backed by well-funded research, they tell the same story again and again: We wish we could...we look forward to the day when we can...but right now, we just can’t.
The key to telling a lie is delivering it alongside the truth. And it is, in fact, true that we haven’t figured out how to turn bloated, investor-owned monopolies and their overpaid executives into agents of community sustainability. If that were the plan, renewable energy would never be ready.
There is, on the other hand, a way to roll out renewables right now that would stabilize energy prices, create good jobs, retain energy-dollars in the local community, and provide secure and sustainable energy for the long term. It isn’t being proposed by either of the major party candidates for president, who instead keep insisting that renewables aren’t enough, and that we need to develop nuclear power as well as some strange substance they are calling “clean coal”.
No, it turns out that renewables can serve all of our needs, and the transition can happen quickly if we would just provide one thing that’s missing: a market. If we set up a market whereby independent energy suppliers could trade with independent energy consumers, we’d be all done.
Now, there have already been many attempts to create local markets for energy, but nearly all of them have been shut down by incumbent energy suppliers. I know this one guy who was trying to sell high-efficiency cogeneration systems, until one day he discovered that the utility was offering cut-rate electricity to his prospective customers in exchange for an agreement that they don’t buy one of his systems. He sued the utility, but as soon as the utility realized they were going to lose the case, they settled out of court. Did the utility retreat in shame, and amend their practices? Hardly! Instead, they drafted a law making what they were doing legal, and persuaded their state legislature to enact the law. Now, whenever a customer even thinks about putting in a clean, efficient, on-site system to generate their own power, utilities can offer something called a “load-retention rate” to entice them not to do it. That’s just one of their tricks – the list is long.
If lawmakers and regulators are unwilling to keep incumbent energy suppliers from obstructing the market for local, independent renewable energy, we’ll need to create this new market ourselves. All we need to do is organize all the energy consumers who already want to buy clean, locally generated power and heat, and form alliances with the local, independent energy producers. The only hard part will be fighting against an enormous, entrenched opposition of dirty energy suppliers, but in reality, we have all the power we need to pull this off.
Because next year, as we set out to spend another two-trillion dollars meeting our energy needs, we can simply decide to give the money to independent energy companies right here in our community.
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