Comments on the Republican Energy plan....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 6-10-2009

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

In today’s online news relating to energy I found an AP story that listed some of the ideas in the new proposals for energy by Republicans that came out earlier today.

Some things in it I liked. Some things in it I felt were mixed review items but which might be used in part to gain their cooperation for a bill with more aggressive methods that would actually get passed and enacted. One thing was clearly harmful; but has a legitimate concern behind it.

1. The thing I liked most is that most of the items are proposed as solutions instead of only listing attacks on other proposals they disliked. We need solutions -- not rejections of other proposals however justified.

2. They said they liked incentives to switch to cleaner energy sources. Since adding clean sources is the most important single part of energy policy since that will enable the rest and incentives DO work, I think incentives should be
encouraged.

It will allow some businesses to make a lot of money. But that also means we will have more renewable energy faster. That’s critical. So, I agree that rewarding those who get the job done makes sense. And we absolutely should do so.

3. The Republican proposal is to build 100 new nuclear plants in the next 20 years.
This is a point on which a win-win compromise might be built.

First the good news:

More than half the population of the United States lives in the East or Eastern Midwest from Chicago and St Louis on the West to Boston to Miami in the East and it will be a decade or two before we can get power lines built to bring wind energy from the center of the country & solar from the West to those cities. It also WOULD help to provide night time energy, and energy growth for the Eastern part of the country to build more nuclear power plants. That way we need build no more coal burning plants and can use the existing ones less and/or close the most polluting ones sooner.

Nuclear power releases no CO2 whatsoever as well.

The bad news is that by adding the complete security costs to ensure these nuclear plants are extremely terrorist resistant and the costs to build them and manage their waste even half way safely, the 100 plants goal is likely not financially doable. And building the plants is simply not safe or worth doing if these safety features aren’t fully funded.

Second, in the second half of the 20 year time period, power lines connected to renewable energy generation further to the West and improved energy storage will begin to come online.

So, a good compromise might be to agree on a first step of building 25 to 40 nuclear plants in the next 10 years. Then if that goes well and the power lines and renewable energy sources fail to show up, we could add more nuclear plants in the following 10 years. But if we barely can build 20 of the planned nuclear plants safely in the first 10 years and the power lines and renewable energy sources DO come online as expected, we can stop there.

4. They are reported as proposing that a trust fund using royalties from oil and gas be used to build more renewable energy.

This also might be a win-win compromise that could work. Rather than completely reverse the tax incentives the oil and gas industries now have it might smooth the transition to leave some of them in place and then have the oil and gas industries use much of the rest to invest in building renewable energy sites. That would provide them some ownership in the new energy sources and an incentive to develop them that they do not now have.

5. They also propose that we increase drilling and production of oil and gas from offshore and “fast-track” new refinery construction.

This also might be a win-win compromise. Adding new use of oil and gas is a BAD idea for global warming. But if these new sources of oil and gas are used ONLY to replace oil and gas that we now import it would strengthen the United States economically and increase national security. We do have large and untapped resources in the Gulf of Mexico we can tap into.

And, new refineries can be built that preplan to blend biofuels &/or liquid fuels from coal with petroleum as they come online. That will both ease the transition to using mostly biofuels AND give the existing companies an incentive to gradually build that business which will help speed it up.

6. They do NOT set mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or for producing electricity from renewable sources.

Here they revert to saying what NOT to do. But their stated reason makes some sense. We do want to minimize the negative impact on our economy of the energy transition while we are trying to climb out of the severe recession. That part of their idea is sound.

The problem is that NOT setting such mandatory targets will mean we get less done when we cannot afford to make that choice.

The second but grave problem is we cannot make the energy transition or slow global warming enough without global action. And, if we don’t show we are serious by setting mandatory targets, we may lose enough global cooperation to be disastrous.
So, this part of their proposal is simply not acceptable as stated.

However, their concern it is designed to prevent is legitimate.

First, we must remember that if we fail to bring renewable energy online to help contain price increases, the continuing increases in the costs for fossil fuels will derail the economy anyway.

So, to the extent mandatory targets speed up the transition to renewable energy they will HELP the economy.

However, it may make good sense to make thing like cap settings and carbon taxes initially less and increases contingent on actually having the renewable energy in place to switch to.

Then we need to use things like incentives and feed-in tariff utility financing for renewable energy and a full national commitment to build more renewable energy and make our economy much more energy efficient to ensure we have the renewable energy to switch to.

THAT combination will allow us to ratchet up the caps and carbon taxes in time but will also avoid harming the economy overall because we won’t do this until we’ve made it safe for the economy to do.