Month 8, Day 12: Common-Sense Deficit Syndrome? GAFB!

Sometimes I just want to bang my head against a wall.

Solar industry officials are pleading with President Obama to restore billions of dollars in renewable energy loan guarantees that Congress is at least temporarily cutting to pay for emergency education and Medicaid help to states and other policy priorities.

The loss of these loan guarantee funds could help “send solar development into a tailspin that will be difficult to reverse,” according to a letter to Obama sent Monday from Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

House lawmakers Tuesday are slated to approve a $26.1 billion state education and Medicaid funding package the Senate passed last week that would be partially paid for by slashing $1.5 billion in renewable energy-loan guarantees approved in last year’s economic stimulus bill.

What Al Gore said

“These rescissions put into jeopardy the green jobs that the administration has touted as part of our clean-energy future and put us further behind the rest of the world,” Gore said on his website Monday afternoon.

I’m not a professional Leftist; I’m more of an amateur. But by Grabthar’s Hammer, I am pretty fucking pissed off about this.

My emotional state is concealed, however, by my erudition.

Dear President Obama and Speaker Pelosi —

It is of the utmost importance that the $3.5 billion which has been taken from the renewable energy and transmission loan-guarantee program be restored. While deficit reduction must be part of our thinking, there is no alternative to pursuing renewable energy with all our attention, enthusiasm and funding.

We cannot continue to burn oil and coal in the years to come. Not only is our national security complicated by our financial entanglements with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, our long-term survival is at stake. With atmospheric CO2 well on track to be over 400 ppm within a year or two, the fight against global warming has already been significantly compromised. In order to maintain a world climate suitable for human survival and prosperity, we must change our energy economy without delay.

If the United States is to maintain a role as a world leader, then we cannot afford to shrug off the problems of smaller states; we cannot afford to wait for India and China to reduce their carbon footprints before acting on our own. The laws of physics pay no heed to political exigencies; greenhouse gases know nothing of election-year strategies. The problem of global climate change is the defining one of our generation, and we must tackle it on all levels: as individuals, as communities, as regions, as states, as a country, and as part of a global society.

At this moment in the world’s history, cutting funding for renewable energy is a grotesque abdication of our responsibilities to one another and the planet as a whole. Please act with dispatch and resolve to ensure that financial resources are restored to renewable energy programs. Failing to spend that money is a foolishness we cannot afford.

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders

Month 8, Day 11: Paying The Piper By The Note

The New York Times ran an article on Portugal’s transition to renewable energy. It’s a good piece and well worth the read.

While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.

Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”

My letter to the Times (I’m hoping for a third time in print this year!):

If Portugal’s citizens pay twice as much for their energy as Americans do, it’s tempting to seize on this as compelling evidence that renewable energy sources are doomed to failure in the marketplace. But such an analysis leaves out the crucial fact that America’s citizens have only paid for a fraction of their fossil-fueled energy consumption over the last century. We have bought our “cheap energy” on credit, deferring the expenses of cleanup and restoration to some point in the future. Now the bill is due, and it’s bigger than most of us expected. When the costs of environmental destruction, public health crises and global warming are factored in, Portugal’s “pay-as-you-go” renewable energy economy looks more attractive every day. America needs to make the switch soon; our dependency on oil and coal is both environmentally and economically unsustainable.

Warren Senders

Month 5, Day 30: Remembering The Fallen

This one is going to my local paper, the Medford Transcript. But I’m also sending a copy to the President.

In 1962, President Kennedy gave America a meaningful goal: by the end of that decade, we would put a man on the moon and bring him back safely. Although JFK couldn’t live to see it, we succeeded with time to spare, and the world was never the same. It is time for a new American president to give America another meaningful goal: shifting our energy economy entirely to renewable sources by 2030. Voices of political pragmatism will deride this as “unrealistic,” and point to all the reasons we can’t. But the ongoing geocide in the Gulf of Mexico is one of many reasons that we must. The laws of physics don’t adjust to political exigency, and the choice is ever clearer: if we don’t kick the fossil fuel habit, we will kill the planetary ecosystems upon which we all depend. The transition will call upon all of our ingenuity and resourcefulness, and it may well be the biggest challenge our nation has ever faced. But as John F. Kennedy said, “We do not do this because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.” We need to hear those words again. President Obama, are you listening?

Warren Senders