We Need a Better Grid and Renewable Energy ASAP

My power went out this afternoon unexpectedly for several hours.  I know other people in some countries go through this or worse all the time, but it threw off my entire day.  I went to a nearby coffee shop to use my smartphone to at least read online,  but then discovered my phone was quickly running out of power too.  It made me realize how much we depend on our electricity and how easy it is to become completely disrupted when power is turned off for a few hours.

The coffee shop had free wi-fi and was packed with people working on laptops.  It got me to thinking that we need more reliable power than we have.  If this had been January, people would have been freezing in their homes.  The U.S. power grid is overtaxed and meant for an earlier era, not 2010 where so much is demanded of it.   It was meant for 50 or 100 million people, not 300 million, who are using it more than ever.  And we need uninterrupted power.  Anyone who thinks we could transition to living more simply, without electricity, without power, is dreaming.  Our brains and work habits are now wired for the internet and the increased use of it will take more power, not less.  That means that we will have a difficult time conserving energy in the future.  There are more appliances and heating systems in use in the United States by far than 20 years ago and it increases every year.  Add a few million electric cars to that and the amount of power needed will grow even more.

We don’t have to have a future of less power.  Why conserve solar power or wind power if there is an abundance of it.  If we start using renewable power all the time, conservation won’t be an issue.  The sun and wind and geothermal power are sources that are free and infinite (at least as far into the future as we can imagine). We need to jump start renewable power and a better more reliable way of transporting power to people.  If we don’t, power outages and brownouts will become common everywhere.

We need more power in the world — but not coal.   There is good news about the rebellion against the coal industry, from Ted Nace, originator of Coal Swarm.  He has a new book out called Climate Hope, and was recently interviewed by Alternet.

Discussing his books Gangs of America and Climate Hope, Coalswarm founder Ted Nace talks about the rise of corporations and Big Coal, the growing network of grassroots movements against coal, and why, despite the non-binding resolution coming out of Copenhagen, we should have hope.

Christine Shearer: Especially since in that 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, “corporate personhood” came not from the actual judicial decision but from the court reporter’s notes on the case.

Ted Nace: Yes, and that’s just the most well known of a long string of court decisions endowing corporations with greater and greater rights, none of which are grounded in the actual language of the U.S. Constitution.

Christine Shearer: Were you surprised by these findings, how corporate power expanded and came to take its modern form?

Ted Nace: The big surprise for me was to see that even from the very beginning – the eighteenth century discussions on how to arrange the American system of government – people were already expressing a great deal of nervousness about the dangers of the corporate form. The framers of the American system of government went to great lengths to limit corporate power, for example by requiring corporations to renew their charters every 20 years and requiring each corporation to adhere to a particular beneficial function. Those measures worked for nearly a century or so — until just after the Civil War. Then, due to Supreme Court decisions such as Santa Clara and an assortment of changes in state incorporation statutes, the corporate legal form began to morph and the “modern” corporation came into being, which was much more legally privileged and also much larger than what had come before. It was like a second American Revolution, and I think our society hasn’t even begun to cope with it.

Christine Shearer: Your most recent book, Climate Hope, describes a grassroots network of communities fighting – very successfully – the construction of new coal plants in this country. How prevalent is coal and the use of coal plants in the U.S.?

Ted Nace: There are about 600 coal-fired power plants around the country, supplying half our electricity. Recently there were plans afoot to add another 150 coal plants. From a climate perspective, coal is far and away our worst problem because the remaining reserves are so much larger than those of other fossil sources like conventional oil and gas. NASA climate chief James Hansen says that phasing out coal emissions is “80% of the solution to the global warming crisis.” In other words, phasing out coal is really the “silver bullet” for stopping global warming. Conversely, Hansen warns that if we don’t somehow constrain the burning of coal we risk triggering the “Venus Effect” of runaway feedbacks that would render Earth completely uninhabitable. (For the details on this scenario, see Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren.)

Christine Shearer: Do you see connections between the national use of coal and your research on corporations?

Ted Nace: We have a clear planetary crisis and a clearly defined solution, yet our ability to implement that solution is being blocked by the well-financed lobbying and PR sponsored by the coal and utility companies.

Christine Shearer: Could you tell us a bit about the communities discussed in your book, and why they focus on coal?

Ted Nace: Two communities affected by coal represent the diversity of those impacted by coal: one is Little Village, a Latino barrio in Chicago, the other is the Navajo reservation in New Mexico—both suffer very high rates of asthma and coronary heart disease caused by nearby coal-fired power plants. Wherever there are coal mines, plants, or waste dumps, there are health effects: 24,000 deaths per year nationally from fine airborne particles, hundreds of thousands of infants exposed in utero to excess mercury, toxic drinking water in areas near mines and power plant ash dumps. Mining destroys large amounts of forest land and agricultural land, and mountaintop removal—the most destructive type of mining—results in downstream flooding. In return for all this damage, the coal industry provides relatively few jobs. Only about 1 in every 1,000 workers are employed in coal mines or power plants in the United States. Study after study has found that phasing out coal in favor of renewables would create a large net gain in the number of jobs in the electricity sector. In fact, wind industry jobs actually surpassed coal mining jobs in 2008, so the comparison isn’t theoretical.

Christine Shearer: How many plants have been cancelled, and what have been some of the successful tactics to keep new plants from being constructed?

Ted Nace: At least 110 proposed coal plants have been stopped so far by local citizen opposition. Stopping a coal plant always involves a combination of tactics: regulatory interventions, direct actions like sit-ins and blockades, bank boycotts, lawsuits. In general, the idea is to scare away the financial backing for the plant, push regulators and judges to use whatever legal handles are available, and convince utilities that coal is simply too much trouble compared with attractive alternatives like efficiency measures, wind, and solar.

Christine Shearer: Many within these movements have been skeptical of “clean coal.” Could you explain why?

Ted Nace: “Clean coal” is like whack-a-mole. You can take the ash out of the smokestack, but then where do you dump the ash? Each time you clean up one pollution stream, you create a new one. Then there’s the problem of cost. Yes, it’s theoretically possible to separate out the carbon dioxide that causes global warming, compress it into a liquid, and pump it deep underground. But the development of this technology at a commercial scale is a couple decades away, and even then it’s estimated to be more expensive than wind, solar, geothermal, etc. So why not just adopt the clean alternatives?

Christine Shearer: Why aren’t we adopting the clean alternatives?

Ted Nace: Clean alternatives are definitely being adopted across the country, but federal policy still overwhelmingly tilts toward subsidizing “clean coal.” For example, the Waxman-Markey bill provides $60 billion in subsidies for clean coal, which is an astonishing amount considering that the aggregate value of the entire coal industry, as measured by the value of its stock on Wall Street, is about $50 billion. This sort of huge subsidy is a simple reflection of the political clout of Big Coal.

Christine Shearer: In addition to writing Climate Hope, you also started the wiki CoalSwarm – could you tell us a bit about it? . . . . .

You can read the rest of it here. I also left out most of the large introduction.