My analysis & message for Tom Campbell running to be a senator from California on his energy policy....

Today's post: Wednesday, 5-5-2010

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.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.

And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.

Today’s post:

Tom Campbell is running to be the senator from California and hopes to be elected even running against Barbara Boxer who has been strong backer of clean and renewable energy.

Tom has three points in his favor.

He is extremely intelligent and reasonable and well informed.

He favors a strong economy and mostly has policies likely to create one, notably that he favors cutting the capital gains tax which favors the kind of innovative companies we need to have a strong economy and which are plentiful in California.

His stated energy policy is miles and miles better than the kind of uninformed or worse policies of many of our local California conservative Republicans.

However, I’d like it to be much better to help him be the Republican candidate as he is a very, very competent man and would likely do a mostly good job if elected. But even more important, I think his policy needs to be a lot better in case he IS elected.

I supported him for US Congress once and emailed him my comments on his currently stated energy policy.:

Your current stated energy policy:

Energy policy must support job and economic growth.

Energy costs now exceed labor costs in many of the manufacturing plants in America. Automation from the last century is now ubiquitous and requires competitive energy costs.

Technology is changing both the transportation and the generation side of energy. From nothing a decade ago, biofuels are now powering more than 8 percent of our transportation needs; this must grow along with other technologies such as those used in electric vehicles so that our falling demand for foreign oil can continue reducing our reliance on expensive imports.

On the electricity front, our current lowest cost provider - nuclear - must be re-introduced. Wind can also play a competitive role.

Recent large finds of domestic natural gas must be developed as do nascent programs in solar, fuel cells, and fusion technology.

Not bad!

But to raise all the money you could now from the technology executives and venture capitalists who support clean energy, to get enough moderate but well informed voters to have a chance against Barbara Boxer, and to do the job I personally would like to see you do if elected, you need a much stronger and more developed policy.

1. At the University of California at Berkeley my individual major was creating beneficial social change. While studying for that I discovered two things.

a) The technology used in the economy forces changes in the society; and the beliefs in the society change what technology tends to be developed.

b) There is close to a one to one correlation between the amount of energy in productive use and the size of the economy.

That last one has HUGE implications.

In a very real sense, ONLY an energy policy that causes more safe and reliable energy to be available at reasonable cost and one that increases the efficiency with which we use it will grow our economy and create jobs.

If you want to increase jobs and build a strong economy at all well, this must be done well. It is the most critical and important economic policy imaginable.


We do NOT yet have such an energy policy in the United States.

The energy we get now from fossil fuels is not safe.

Coal mining is not now safely run or responsibly mined to avoid harming the communities where it’s mined. Though it’s unfortunate, it now seems that offshore drilling for oil is not safe. Coal, petroleum, and natural gas still tend to create all three kinds of air pollution when burned: particulates, spreading of toxic chemicals such as mercury, and oxides of Nitrogen. The United States economy still depends on petroleum and is now importing it in ways that put our national security at risk.

The energy we get now from fossil fuels about to become extremely unreliable and too unsafe and expensive to use besides.

Due to peak oil predicted by well-informed Kuwaiti scientists recently to occur in 2014 combined with population growth and hopefully a world wide economic recovery, petroleum will both double and redouble in price and begin becoming less and less available.

Most atmospheric scientists are saying that life and agriculture as we now know them are already at risk from the global warming already caused by the CO2 humans have been releasing from burning fossil fuels. This too will soon create huge and not previously needed costs to just compensate. It also suggests we need to release far less CO2 into the air world wide than we have been to survive. (No effective way to grow food or severely disrupted food supplies have destroyed human civilizations before in history.)

To put it bluntly, we are NOT ready for this. And, we aren’t making progress fast enough. So we are in the most grave danger of economic collapse as these effects worsen.

Many voters really don’t yet know this set of things. But the energy policy of a candidate is the most critical thing to know about him or her because of these things.

As Bill Clinton’s campaign once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It is indeed!

And, even uninformed voters dislike having few jobs available and sky high energy prices.

But that’s exactly where we are now headed because of our horribly lacking energy policy.

2. Biofuels tend to be inefficient to produce and some use more energy to create than they release when used.

But making biofuels with organic wastes or agricultural wastes not now used productively or from algae grown on land not usable for solar or food generation or which turn CO2 from burning fossil fuels into biofuels all DO make sense.

(One path to clean coal is to turn it into methane, generate electricity with the methane using efficient fuel cells like those recently developed by Bloom Energy, and then feed the CO2 to algae to make biofuels. The release into the atmosphere that remains is the water used to make the methane from the coal. Virtually no air pollution need be released if this is done well.)

And the more of such biofuels we make and use in the United States, the less dependent we will be on the oil that’s dangerous to use now and about to be too expensive or even scarce to use.

So more biofuels can be useful but only if it’s these kinds of biofuels.

3. Clean electricity generation.

a) We should build more nuclear plants; and we may be forced to do so by these realities.

But, be aware that this is one of the MOST EXPENSIVE ways to make clean energy.

True, in energy returned for the energy input into mining the uranium and building the plant it returns so much more energy than this costs, it SHOULD be cheaper.

But the other costs are dramatically higher if nuclear is even close to safe to use.

The political difficulty in locating a nuclear plant and the massive upfront costs to build one make nuclear plants close to un-financeable. If they are to be built, the U.S. government will need to provide a strong downpayment on their start up costs and guarantee the loan on the remainder. That’s NOT cheap.

But that’s the little problem! The big problem is that there is no safe place to put the waste which takes longer to become safe than human civilization has lasted.

The solution to that is to use breeder reactors where the waste becomes more fuel and never needs to leave the nuclear plant.

But the cost goes UP to do that safely! You need triple fail safe security provided 24-7 by the most capable and best trained and equipped people in the U.S. military to ensure the resulting nuclear weapons grade fuel in the reactor never gets used by terrorists who would otherwise be sure to do so.

So, yes it’s a legitimate clean energy source we should use more of. But it’s so frightfully expensive to do safely, we’d best bet most of our money and time on much faster and less expensive kinds of clean energy.

b) Wind generated electricity in some forms is already cost competitive. We need to develop much more than we have from such forms and in areas already well served by transmission lines or which are near distribution networks.

But we also need to build far better transmission lines from the areas in the country that have more wind than electricity users to the areas where the reverse is true. This will take time. But we build the Interstate Highway System. So building an Interstate Transmission Grid to move electricity generated by wind and solar to market IS doable and extremely desirable.

Texas has done a great job with these first two things. California and the rest of the country need to do them also.

Third, smaller scale wind generators are not yet cost competitive. But they can double output in areas that already have the more cost effective big windmills. And, they can be deployed in as many as a few hundred more locations. Since we must have more clean energy before we crash the economy from lack of cost-effective petroleum, a case can be made for making up the difference in current costs to have such small scale wind generators installed NOW until fossil fuels begin to cost MORE and that subsidy is no longer needed.

c) Natural gas IS cleaner to burn than coal or petroleum to generate electricity. And the fuel cell technology developed by Bloom Energy can make generating electricity take less land and generate even less air pollution than burning natural gas. Even better, burning natural gas releases less CO2 per kilowatt than coal or petroleum since the molecules burned have relatively less carbon and more hydrogen.

So, yes, we will certainly develop the new natural gas sources. But the environmental costs and the dangers to nearby residents will make this a very, very expensive source of energy.

d) The most important and glaring lack in your plan is that massive deployment of thin film photovoltaic solar cells on: most rooftops and on canopies over almost all parking lots; thin film solar generation on vacant land nearby to distribution networks; and massive building of solar thermal plants in the United States AND in Mexico can come close to supplying 100 % of our power needs and is already close to being cost competitive.

(Mexico has three times our solar potential. And if we got some of their solar electricity in exchange for helping them build it -- and locating some jobs there that run off of their electricity would provide enough jobs there to largely solve the immigration problem.)

Did you know that Germany has already perfected a way to cause such solar deployment and now has something like HALF the world’s installed solar because of it?

Last year in California was a banner year for solar. But Germany installed OVER NINE times as much!

Given the need for more clean energy from the solar available here, we absolutely must use their methods. (Craig Lewis of the FIT Coalition is working on getting this method used in California & I think deserves your direct support.)

We have dramatically more solar potential than Germany. When we install at their rate, solar will deliver us enough clean electricity to make a real difference.

Your likely opponent, Barbara Boxer, is informed about solar and will deliver on helping us have more. If you’d like to be our Senator, I think you should also outdo her on supporting such solar developments.

4. Helping to save California’s pioneering efforts to switch from fossil fuels to clean ones by supporting a NO vote on the proposition that turns them off.

We can have slightly cheaper gasoline and utility bills in the short run but dramatically higher gasoline and utility bills within about five years.

Or we can have gasoline and utility bills go up 2 to 6 % now but stop going up nearly so much after that depending on how California votes on this issue.

Then after that, California’s economy will just hold together as the world runs out of oil because we have enough renewable energy developed here OR our economy will collapse because we didn’t keep a policy to have it built when we had the chance.

The only economy the Texas oil companies sponsoring this proposition care about is their own.

In addition, keeping California’s renewable energy standards will create jobs here if we keep these standards in place. If we fail to do so, most of these new jobs will not be created here.

It seems to me, as I hope it does to you, that during a recession keeping a policy that creates new California jobs soon and protecting our economy from running out of affordable energy later, is dramatically MORE important than holding down short term gasoline or utility rates just slightly.

Moreover, the independent and informed swing voters that you need I think agree with this.

Many conservative Republicans do not. They don’t have the information on the likely longer run economic consequences to our economy or care more about the campaign funds they get from the oil companies.

With your already existing venture capital supporters, many of which support and make investments in clean technology companies, you don’t need the oil company’s money.