ENERGY OF OUR OWN

by Jo Campbell

Renewable energies of all kinds have practical advantages. Most vital to the United States at the moment is that one which makes them ours. Renewable energies are not subject to ransom.

The sun, the wind, the hot rock and flowing water beneath our feet and in our riverbeds are our very own. We do not have to commit young lives and billions of dollars to their security.

Renewable energy consultant and author Dr. John J. Berger, believes the Federal government should spend more for renewable energy research and development. In his latest book, Charging Ahead, The Business of Renewable Energy and What It Means for America, Berger documents the threats to the development of renewable energy.

According to Berger, US spending on renewable energy R & D is only about $266 million a year. "By contrast the US spends some $20 billion each year just subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. That number comes from a study called, Federal Energy Subsidies: Energy, Environmental and Fiscal Impacts" published by the Washington, DC-based Alliance to Save Energy.

"The spending pattern ought to be the other way around," Berger said in an interview. "We're spending too much on fossil fuels and too little on safe, non-polluting renewable energy.

Berger said that there is also US government spending for the military protection of oil interests in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Ed Rothschild, former Energy Policy Director for Citizen Action, national consumer and public interest organization, has reported on these expenditures at length. The outlay, conservatively estimated, is around "$50 billion a year - and you can see it now in operation - for the military costs of defending oil exports from the Persian Gulf. This is $50 billion which the US taxpayers fund. Military experts have estimated between $40 billion and $60 billion, he said, so the $50 billion is a conservative compromise.

"This includes the forward positioning, the costs associated with keeping troops on alert, the naval operations that occur regularly, and so forth," said Rothschild in an interview.

"Some years it may be more," he pointed out. "The cost of the current operation because Saddam Hussein sneezed -- and all of a sudden we are rushing to deliver handkerchiefs or whatever..."

An important element of the cost, Rothschild said, is the destination of all that Persian Gulf oil.

"Out of all the oil that is exported from the Persian Gulf, the US gets a very small percentage," he said. "The bulk of it -- 85 percent or more -- goes to Europe and to Asia. Not to the United States. So here we are as citizen taxpayers subsidizing (protection of) the oil that is not even coming here. It is going to other people and those governments are not carrying any of the cost of defending that region.

"Some of them did contribute during the Gulf War. That was a one-time multi-national effort. But the day-to-day operations of protecting the sea lanes, the installations, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis falls to US taxpayers and the US military -- our men and women who are the front lines in that region."

Besides the strategic costs in maintaining US oil interests, Rothschild detailed costs through international tax benefits, risk insurance and other expenses borne by the government. This tax money clearly could be used in other ways.

Berger is sure of this. He points out; "One of the many beauties of the non-polluting energy technologies is that they are domestic. And we will get a tremendous economic bounce by gradually reducing the $650 billion that we export every decade for oil and natural gas and carefully investing it in developing and deploying renewable energy systems. Imagine what that would do for our economy!

"That money would be recycled through the domestic economy. A multiplier effect would occur as we redirected the flow of money and built strong, domestic, non-polluting energy industries. These, in turn, could export their technologies around the world. The US could then sell into the new multi-trillion dollar markets in renewable energy technologies that the World Bank says are going to emerge in developing countries over the next forty years.

"By emphasizing non-fossil fuels we could have a windfall in savings." He said, adding, "We would save on the environmental damage, and on public health costs that are being incurred every year by our use of fossil fuel technologies. That is a huge amount of money. Studies have shown that we are spending on the order of $150 billion a year on those damages.

"If you also add the unknown environmental and weather-related costs of climate change to the costs that I've just described, it amounts to trillions of dollars per decade as a result of our commitment to fossil fuels. By increasing our use of renewable energy, however, we could avoid tens of billions of dollars in environmental damage to the air, water, and in medical bills for respiratory illnesses."

Berger advises that a first step in the transition to greater use of renewable energy is the setting of an ultimate national goal -- a renewable energy economy. The sooner we come to rely on renewable energy for a sizable portion of our energy supplies, the sooner the US can stop incurring the tremendous costs of pursuing fossil fuel technology, and the better off we will be economically and environmentally.

"Time is not on our side in terms of the climate, or in terms of the fossil fuel resources," he said, "but before we reach the resource limits we will reach the environmental limits as developing nations attempt to emulate our national standard of living by using large amounts of fossil fuel energies."

As a nation, we need to begin the conversion process. As a nation, we can afford to accelerate the transition to renewable energy. What we cannot afford is the dilly-dallying about climate change, and paying the ever-steeper costs of our over-dependence on fossil fuels.

Electric power plants only last for from 20 to 40 years before they must be replaced or retired. The rebuilt plants should be renewable energy facilities, Berger said. We ought to stop building more coal-fired power plants. Instead, we ought to make our new capacity reliant on wind, solar/thermal electric, photovoltaics in grid-connected rooftop and standalone applications, and for building-integrated uses.

Many people think that because the sun does not shine 100 percent of the time, and because the wind does not blow 100 percent of the time, or because electricity cannot be put into your gas tank, that we cannot have a renewable energy economy. That is not correct. A variety of complementary renewable energy technologies can be deployed in integrated systems that supplement each other and that initially use today's utility grid for back-up power.

Where does the opportunity to accelerate the development of renewable energy capacity rank in public priorities? Berger believes it could become a much higher national priority if an intensive nationwide public education campaign were conducted on renewable energy and climate change by the nation's environmental and safe energy organizations. They might also be joined in sponsorship by progressive members of the business community, such as segments of the property-liability insurance industry, which has become concerned about the risks of climate change due to excessive fossil fuel combustion.

"We need to have intensive and protracted public debate about energy in the US as part of a larger public education campaign on climate safety and renewable energy. We ought to take the issue of our need for clean, climate-safe energy directly to the American people and through the American people to Congress," said Berger. "That will to some extent counterbalance the tremendous influence that fossil fuel industry lobbyists have on Congress and the Administration.

"When citizens vote people out of office who are not willing to move us toward renewable energy, that is when we will have some of these more supportive policies" he said. "As a nation, we can move mountains, and we have done it when we had to. We just need to muster the necessary political will.

"People in Washington tend to follow rather than to lead, One can despair and become cynical. Yet that really does not get you anywhere. You have to be optimistic. You have to recognize that renewable energy systems are making great technological progress and we can expand our reliance on them.

"Just as we made a policy decision to put a person on the moon and to build an interstate highway system and to connect schools to the internet," said Berger, "so we need a national policy decision to rebuild our electric generating system and to make it clean and sustainable."