On a different note, here's an excellent piece on renewable energy. Too long to post it all, but it's worth reading.
Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, took to the Senate floor on February 27 with an impassioned plea for a small federal subsidy that has fueled an explosion of activity in the wind-power industry. "Congress is messing around back and forth, stuttering, and not getting it done," Dorgan complained.
The so-called wind production tax credit (PTC) Dorgan was championing is tiny as subsidies go--over a decade it has cost roughly $55 million--and remarkably effective. Wind is the fastest-growing energy industry in the world, and last year was the US wind-power industry's best ever, with power capacity equivalent to that of roughly six coal-fired power plants coming online--minus coal's pollution. "The exciting thing is, [wind-power growth] is happening all over the country--it's not just California," says Christine Real de Azua, a spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association.
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Nevertheless, the wind PTC struggled to get a proper hearing. Finally, on March 8, Congress approved a meager two-year extension, which wind's supporters had tacked onto the unemployment insurance bill. That's a short time frame for investors to do much planning, though, so Dorgan and others continue to push for at least a five-year extension.
Judged just on its merits, this would probably pass with bipartisan support. But Congress is tentatively committed to gargantuan new subsidies to coal, oil, gas and nuclear power--the only disagreement so far is exactly how obscenely enormous they will be. So the five-year wind PTC will be held hostage, to provide green window dressing for less admirable legislation. The Republican energy plan, touted in the President's State of the Union address, would dole out $35.6 BILLION over ten years--or about $125 per American--to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries. The Democratic Senate energy bill is larded with almost as many tax-funded mega-giveaways to polluters. By contrast, the wind PTC has, to date, cost every American about 19 cents.
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Wind is more competitive than solar; it once cost 40 cents per kWh but is now routinely under 5 cents--even without the wind PTC of 1.7 cents per kWh. With the wind PTC, wind power is competitive with energy from newly built and supersubsidized coal (5 cents per kWh) and natural-gas plants (4 cents at current low gas prices), and is cheaper than energy from a new nuclear plant (7 cents per kWh). Those ballpark averages come from the government's Energy Information Administration, and they reflect what it would cost to set up a new power plant from scratch and run it. If you leave aside the massive construction costs of big polluting plants--which isn't a very helpful way to think about energy--then coal, nuclear power and gas are all in the 2-3 cents per kWh range.
But cents-per-kWh quotes are deceptive: They say nothing about the economic and human costs of pollution-created problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say coal dust kills 2,000 miners each year and has cost taxpayers more than $1 billion a year since the 1970s in related health and pension benefits. The Justice Department has paid nearly $200 million in compensation to about 2,000 uranium miners and millers for their cancer (the mines fed nuclear weapons, not just nuclear power). The government has also spent $1.48 billion cleaning up uranium mine tailings--mounds of radioactive slop left behind in places like Mexican Hat, Utah, and Ambrosia Lake, New Mexico. And dozens of uranium and coal miners are hurt and killed each year in accidents.
There are other status quo costs as well. Last year we depended on foreigners for 55 percent of our oil. As noted in a bill before Congress to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, America "spends over $100 billion per year for foreign energy and equally significant amounts on our military presence in the Persian Gulf oil arena." Status quo costs also include 1.56 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide--to say nothing of more poisonous particulate matter--put into our air in 2000 alone, just by energy generation. That in turn drives health problems like our asthma tragedy: Asthma affects every twentieth American, including 5 million children. In 1998, the CDC says, asthma killed more than 5,438, put a half-million people in hospitals and led to 100 million days of restricted activity. The CDC puts the asthma price tag for 1998 at $12.7 billion.
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Consider the billions of tax dollars we give to polluters each year. This largesse is sprinkled throughout our tax code in ways that thwart easy analysis. So estimates of the subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power yield wildly different numbers--from the US Energy Information Administration's conservative estimate of $2.7 billion in 1999 to guesstimates as high as $80 billion a year. In search of less spongy data, Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent wrote Perverse Subsidies, which identified $21 billion the United States hands over every year to fossil fuels and nuclear power. "If taxpayers were aware that a good chunk of their taxes were going down the rathole into these subsidies, they'd be marching on the Mall," said Myers in an interview. "But it's hard to get the message to the taxpayer because these subsidies are so numerous and so varied, and some are so covert."
Myers and Kent also found that renewables get at best a tenth of the subsidies the dinosaurs do. They calculate that the $90 million or so the United States spends on solar research wouldn't be enough to pave two miles of Interstate highway. Meanwhile, the wind PTC costs us somewhere from 0.2 percent to 0.025 percent of what the supersubsidized polluters pull down. Critics of renewables have seized upon the wind PTC to argue that wind is not "market ready." Fair enough--but then, what is?
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A common response to such proposals is to tsk-tsk: "Prohibitively expensive!" "The government can't pick winners!" But we are already showering billions of dollars every year on the dirty energies of yesteryear. Even if we don't want the Apollo Project, shouldn't we be dismantling the Anti-Apollo Project of perverse subsidies?
Then again, if we ended the subsidies to the dinosaurs, who would bankroll the GOP? In 2000, oil and gas gave $13 to presidential candidate George Bush for every $1 to candidate Al Gore. Coal gave $9 out of every $10 to Republicans. And according to the Center for Public Integrity, the top 100 officials in the Bush White House have the majority of their personal investments, up to $144.6 million, sunk in the old-guard energy sector.
The Green Scissors Campaign, an alliance of environmentalists and taxpayer watchdogs, parses the Bush-backed energy bill giveaways: $21.2 billion for oil and gas, $5.8 billion for coal, $5.9 billion for utilities and $2.7 billion for nuclear power. That same oilman's orgy included, for green window dressing, a wind PTC extension, but while the wind PTC couldn't get a hearing on its own, nuclear power certainly could. Last fall House Republicans worked furiously on legislation that, in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, hands taxpayers the bill. This federal insurance program for nuclear power was approved under rules that keep everyone anonymous--rules usually reserved for noncontroversial matters like renaming post offices. A White House statement praised this sneaky vote: "To assure the future of nuclear energy, [taxpayer-subsidized] liability coverage must continue for nuclear activities." (In other words: The White House concedes that nuclear power can't survive in a free market.) This subsidy, the Price-Anderson Act, awaits Senate action along with the rest of the subsidy binge; it is already part of the Daschle-Bingaman bill.
Arguably, fossil fuels and nuclear deserve no subsidy at all. But with the "free market" Republicans leading and the Democrats meekly following, we encourage dangerous, dirty and terrorist-friendly energy infrastructures (often in the name of security!). That's not to suggest despair; from California to Europe, renewables are emerging as the business and political favorites. But it is to ask, impatiently, how much longer Americans will be expected to overpay for energy--in health costs, environmental damages and misused taxes. The people of America are being overcharged; it's time to ask for a refund.
thenation.com
BTW I may comment on other stuff here if I ever bother reading back through the last 2500. Unless someone would care to give me a 10-line summary... I doubt it'll need that much <g> |
