NEWS
Green solutions worthy of attention
09/20/2008
Cheaper energy won’t be found by expecting Big Oil to break America’s addiction to oil
Published: September 20, 2008
President Bush said it best: America is addicted to oil. We currently spend more than $1 trillion a year on our fossil-fuel addiction, and if we are to believe the rhetoric of Big Oil, the answer to kicking the habit is to drill for more.
But if you’re trying to quit smoking, you don’t ask the Marlboro Man for help, and if you’re serious about quitting your oil addiction, you don’t ask Big Oil for help either.What America really needs is better energy choices. We deserve energy that is cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels. The good news is, we can and we will end our addiction and create better energy choices.
Many examples exist of how to accomplish this goal of developing cleaner energy. One such example comes from an unlikely source—animal waste. Fibrowatt LLC plans to build a plant that will generate energy from poultry litter in Surry County. The plant will be designed to produce up to 40 megawatts of renewable energy without introducing new greenhouse gases into the environment. At 40 megawatts, the plant would annually generate enough energy to power about 30,000 homes.
Imagine a world where all people can plug a car into the same outlet they use to charge their cell phones; imagine if we could heat and cool our houses not with expensive gas or oil, but with geothermal energy piped in from beneath our own back yards; imagine flipping on the television and knowing the big game was being brought to you by cheap, clean electricity generated from solar panels on the roof and not from dirty coal. That’s the near future, if we want it.
All of these alternative-energy technologies are available now. And all of them are part of the solution that will free us from our addiction to fossil fuels, reduce our energy bills, recharge America’s economy, create good paying jobs and solve the climate crisis.
We’re not there yet because we lack a national energy policy that requires more and better choices. That’s why this nation still runs on 1950s-era fossil-fuel power—that and because Big Oil largely has been running the show and dictating our "choices." And the strategy has paid off nicely—last year, the five biggest oil companies made $123 billion in profits. All while our energy prices just kept going up.
We now stand at a crossroads in this country—we can continue to drill ourselves deeper into a hole or we can demand better choices.
The technology exists today for renewable wind, solar, biomass and geothermal resources to provide large-scale energy generation. And the technology solutions that help families reduce their forced dependency on fossil fuels are the same technologies that will solve the climate crisis, clean the air and help protect America’s wildlife habitats and natural resources for our children’s future.
With a few incentives that Congress has the ability to create now, large increases in renewable-energy production could be brought online in the very near future, giving Americans real energy choices.
Congress should help lead a clean-energy revolution and develop "made-in-America" solutions. Instead of handing billions of dollars in subsidies to the oil and gas industry over the next 10 years, Congress should use that money to promote clean, renewable energy and extend clean-energy tax credits to the wind, biomass, geothermal and solar industries. These tax credits would help build an industry that in 2006 generated 8.5 million jobs and nearly $970 billion in revenue in America.
In addition, a major green jobs report, released Aug. 9 from the Center for American Progress and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, concludes that investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy could create 62,000 new jobs in North Carolina and 2 million nationally in a two-year period.
Most important, Congress must pass comprehensive, cap-and-trade-based climate-change legislation. The Climate Security Act, which gained 54 supporters in the Senate this past spring, would reduce our oil imports four times more than we could by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, off our beaches and in the Rocky Mountains combined. And it would save Americans $180 billion through the year 2030 on foreign-oil expenditures alone, according to the Department of Energy.
Instead of chasing the last barrel of oil, we need to be chasing a new energy economy that reduces dependency on expensive fossil fuels. American families deserve a consumer-friendly, clean energy policy that invests in renewable energy and energy conservation and protects the wild places in this country. The choice is really quite simple.
■ G. Richard Mode of Morganton is the affiliate representative for the North Carolina chapter of the National Wildlife Federation.