Instead of fossil fuels, invest dollars in clean-energy supplies
By Rory Cox and Robert FreehlingTuesday, March 11, 2008
Re: Joe Desmond's March 2 commentary, "Radicals, energy policy don't mix."
Pacific Environment has just published a new report called "Collision Course" that makes a case for what is really common sense: California cannot reduce greenhouse gases while at the same time increasing its commitment to consuming fossil fuels.
Importing liquefied natural gas from overseas would be a huge commitment, tying us to long-term fossil-fuel purchase contracts amounting to many billions of dollars. A better choice is to invest these same dollars in clean energy, and state law already commits us to do this.
The main problem is that many people think that needing energy means that this need must be met with fossil fuels. But there are other options.
State law requires California's utilities to use 20 percent renewable energy by 2010 and to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020. It is state policy that by 2020, one-third of our electricity should come from renewable sources. These are wise policy decisions supported by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Desmond, who works for Northern Star natural gas, recently critiqued us in these pages for being "fixated" on greenhouse-gas emissions. We plead guilty.
The relentless rise in global temperature has already resulted in serious problems that are a mere foreshadowing of things to come: unprecedented wildfires in Southern California, killer heat waves in France, diminishing cropland in Sudan that has led to civil war, the rising price of food due to crop failures and melting polar ice caps. Most scientists agree that this is the result of greenhouse-gas emissions.
We acknowledge, with Desmond, that renewable technologies have environmental impacts. But none even remotely compare to the damage to the climate brought on by burning fossil fuels.
That is why we support the California Energy Action Plan — co-published by his old agency, the California Energy Commission — that states efficiency and conservation are the best options to meet future energy needs. Without a doubt, the cleanest kilowatt is the one you don't use. Of course, that means using less natural gas.
The Energy Action Plan says that the next best option after efficiency is renewables and distributed generation (or smaller generating facilities located closer to customers.) Desmond mentions that utilities are having problems meeting their renewable mandate.
However, if utilities and energy planners would follow the Energy Action Plan and invest in distributed generation, the problem of "locations and transmissions" for far off renewable energy that Desmond mentions would be reduced.
Desmond writes about LNG as if it were just more of the same natural gas that California is already using. But there are major differences. Domestic natural gas is now piped to us from gas fields in the U.S. and Canada.
LNG is shipped in supertankers that likely will come from politically challenging regions; about 80 percent of the world's available natural gas is in the Middle East (particularly Iran and Qatar) and the former Soviet Union. LNG dependence comes with all the same hazards as foreign-oil dependence, including price shocks, possible supply disruptions and expensive wars.
There is simply no good reason to expose California rate payers, as well as our troops, to this vulnerability. The LNG process also adds 15 to 25 percent extra greenhouse-gas emissions over that of domestic natural gas.
A clean, efficient and locally oriented energy supply has many benefits. A number of studies have demonstrated that it will provide more jobs and investment at home while protecting the environment and improving our security.
This may sound radical. But there's a growing consensus that says it's just common sense.
— Rory Cox is California program director at Pacific Environment and Robert Freehling is research director at Local Power. Both groups are in the coalition Ratepayers for Affordable Clean Energy. "Collision Course" can be downloaded at http://www.raceforcleanenergy.org/.
No comments:
Post a Comment