Energy solutions: real and imagined

by: Clem Guttata

Sun Mar 01, 2009 at 16:07:26 PM EST

Nate Loewentheil, Executive Director of The Roosevelt Institution, is guest blogging this weekend for our fine friends at http://itsgettinghotinhere.org. Nate's got a great post up liveblogging from a panel at PowerShift 2009 called Getting to the Truth: Pulling the Curtain Back on False Solutions to Our Energy Crisis. (emphasis mine)

Julian Drix of Rising Tide opened the panel with a critical insight: before we know if we're taking a step on the right path, we need to know where we're going. And if we don't have a destination in mind, we're going to get mighty lost.

Some options are clearly wrong while others may appear promising; we need to think clearly of all of the costs involved in a given technology or strategy before embracing it. We can smell out these "false solutions" with five criteria, according to Drix; solutions that appear to be move us forward might be:

   * Environmentally and racially unjust
   * Disguised corporate strategies
   * Not actually effective in reducing carbon emissions
   * Not scalable
   * Encouraging of destructive behavior

This is one of the great challenges of the moment. Entrenched industries--like nuclear, coal, and fossil fuels--already have huge resources available for Public Relations budgets. They can flood the public with promises of false solutions.

Clean coal is a more obvious myth, as Rebecca Tarboton of Rainforest Action Network disclosed with no great surprise but great emotional appeal. The coal industry is in a fight for it's life, and its pretty clear why: clean coal is a meme, an invention, a term lacking in any content. The entire notion depends on the technology of carbon capture and sequestration, which is not only undeveloped but prohibitively expensive. Even if the technology was in place, it would be completely impossible to actually sequester the carbon-if we sequestered 60% of the carbon emissions, it would exceed in volume all of the oil we extract and burn in the United States each year. We might be able to meet these technological challenges, Rebecca noted (this is America, after all!), but the impact of coal extraction itself makes the entire industry downright criminal (check out www.appalachianvoices.org).

Clean coal and nuclear energy are insidious in their simple appeal-we already do it, and we can just do it better, industry experts assure a nervous public. This nervous public wants to go green in the easiest ways possible, and this provides ample ground for corporations to step in and profit.

Unfortunately, it is not just "industry experts" busily assure the nervous public. Too many of West Virginia's elected politicians are aiding and abetting the clean coal greenwash, also.