The defining moment for national security: the last watt and global warming... by gimleteye

In the quest to reduce carbon emissions and save the planet for our species, the easiest way forward is an urgent conservation campaign based on mandates, orders, and necessity.

We have become tone-deaf to the fact that the gears and ratios of energy production applying to carbon emissions are a form of social engineering that will knock humanity straight off the planet, unless some logic is quickly introduced into the public debate.

In Florida today, conservation could reduce electricity demand by 25 percent without a massive change in our standard of living. It is the easiest, least expensive, and best use of time. And time is running out.

The reason conservation is part of the "suite of solutions" advocated by corporation like Florida Power and Light is that its executives are compensated not for saving energy but producing more of it.

Corporations and executives could just as easily be compensated by units of energy conserved. For that to happen requires political leadership to wring the last watt of productivity through a combination of pricing and conservation, before permitting another industrial scale power plant to be built.

Consider Juneau, Alaska where on April 16th an avalanche in rugged terrain wiped out 80 percent of the city's power supply delivered from a hydroelectric dam forty miles to the south of the city. To fund the reconstruction of distribution lines, the local utility immediately raised rates to consumers, 400 percent. Check out what happened, then: no one died. Electricity consumption in Juneau dropped 30 percent.


Building new power plants is a dangerous, costly and diverting from the need to change our patterns of consumption.

We want to have our cake and eat it too; we always have. Florida's utilities have sold Governor Crist and the legislature and local Chambers of Commerce on the dire need to build more capacity. Rebuffed from building more coal plants, FPL is trying to shoe-horn a massive new nuclear complex at Turkey Point, at sea level and on the edge of America's threatened national parks.

One of the nation's largest electric utilities, with a major portfolio of alternative energy through wind power, FPL will spend $100 million of my and your utility payments in the next year to drum up plans and a public relations campaign to persuade the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve its new nuclear reactors. Already, the public interest in water supply and conservation has been deformed by the successful efforts of the utility to influence local and state elected officials. And that's just the start.

FPL's plants will cost upwards of $20 billion and by the time they are operational will be running smack into the effects of sea level rise. In other words, even before consumers have paid for those nuclear reactors, there will be massive cost increases to service the facility because of its geographic location. Of course, in the meantime $20 billion will have paid for a lot of braces, college tuitions, and vacations for the families of lobbyists, engineering companies, cement manufacturers, and so forth. But maybe not.

In The Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibben notes that we have to start lowering carbon emissions NOW, taking his cue from the nation's leading climate scientist, James Hansen.

"Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that if we didn't act, there was trouble coming. He didn't just say that if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

His phrase was: "if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever-more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto protocol, which was already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta's tar sands.)

We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

We are all on the wrong track, with the effort to put nuclear power at Turkey Point. This is going to be an ugly and unnecessary war; a waste of time and energy. Most importantly, this war will divert us from the real need to reduce consumption dramatically NOW.

I've seen it happen before: well-meaning engineers and bureaucrats, just trying to pay their own bills, take up the cause and cudgel against the public interest, persuaded to one degree or another of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, rules. In Florida, as elsewhere, the utilities have the gold.

But I would much rather that the public decide to generate power through appropriate pricing and compensation of utilities for conservation. Global warming is real. It is here. And if we don't change our habits of consumption, now, we might as well all run off the same cliff together.

And that is exactly how the presidential candidates should put it, to the American people.


Click on "read more" for the full Juneau story, as reported by The New York Times.




May 14, 2008
New York Times
JUNEAU JOURNAL
A City Cooler and Dimmer, and, Oh, Proving a Point

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
JUNEAU, Alaska — Conservationists swoon at the possibility of it all. Here in Alaska, where melting arctic ice and eroding coastlines have made global warming an urgent threat, this little city has cut its electricity use by more than 30 percent in a matter of weeks, instantly establishing itself as a role model for how to go green, and fast.

Comfort has been recalibrated. The public sauna has been closed and the lights have been dimmed at the indoor community pool. At the library, one of the two elevators was shut down after someone figured out it cost 20 cents for each round trip. The thermostat at the convention center was dialed down eight degrees, to 60. The marquee outside is dark.

Schoolchildren sacrifice Nintendo time and boast at show-and-tell of kilowatts saved. Hotels consult safety regulations to be sure they have not unscrewed too many light bulbs in the hallways. On a recent weekday, all but one of the dozens of television screens on display at the big Fred Meyer store were black — off, that is.

Yet even as they embrace a fluorescent future, the 31,000 residents of Juneau, the state capital, are not necessarily doing it for the greater good. They face a more local inconvenient truth. Electricity rates rocketed about 400 percent after an avalanche on April 16 destroyed several major transmission towers that delivered more than 80 percent of the city’s power from a hydroelectric dam about 40 miles south.

“People are suddenly interested in talking about their water heaters,” said Maria Gladziszewski, who handles special projects for the city manager’s office. “As they say, it’s a teachable moment.”

Until repairs are completed, possibly by late June, the city’s private electric utility will depend almost exclusively on diesel fuel. Hydropower is one of the cheapest and cleanest power sources, while diesel, at around $4 a gallon, is one of the most expensive and dirtiest.

With the first bills based on the increased rate scheduled to be sent out this week, fear is in the air. So is the laundry. Dryers eat up watts, and local stores ran out of clothespins because so many people started hanging their laundry outside. Never mind that it rains 220 days of the year and rarely gets truly warm here amid the fjords and forests of the Inside Passage.

“It takes about two days to get them dry,” Linda Augustine, 66, an elementary school teacher, said as she used plastic clothes hangers to dry blue jeans and T-shirts under the awning on the back porch of her mobile home. “And I don’t iron my clothes now. You massage them to get the wrinkles out while they’re still on the hanger.”

The new rate is about 53 cents per kilowatt-hour, up from about 11 cents — around the national average — before the avalanche. The average residential bill before the avalanche was about $86 a month.

The greening of Juneau has made for an unexpected moment in the spotlight for a city some Alaskans would like to see play a lesser role. Clear skies in Juneau reveal sheer, snow-capped mountains lining the Gastineau Channel and bald eagles coasting over the water the way crows might elsewhere. But the city’s remote location and abundant dreariness, coupled with the fact that Anchorage — a nearly 600-mile flight away — has the state’s economic power and 10 times Juneau’s population, have long led to calls to move the capital.

“Before this event on April 16, the public discourse in Juneau in terms of its future was all focused on the perennial threat of having the capital relocated,” said Mayor Bruce Botelho. “It was the subject of three different pieces of legislation, all of which had hearings this year.”

Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican from an Anchorage suburb, has shown little interest in spending time in Juneau, one of the state’s few Democratic strongholds. While plenty of Juneau residents are irate that the electric utility, Alaska Electric Light and Power, could not prevent the avalanche damage and then passed on its costs to customers, they have also blamed Ms. Palin for rejecting a request for public money to help residents handle big bill increases.

“We need all the help we can get right now,” Ashley Richardson, of the Juneau People’s Power Project, said at a small protest on the Capitol steps on Friday. “This is not our responsibility.”

The governor has requested help from a federal loan program for small businesses hurt by the rate increase. Officials at the electric utility say they are looking at ways to ease the pain by allowing more residents to spread the higher costs over many months. The local United Way and other groups have received a city grant to help lower-income residents with their bills.

What the avalanche has underscored, however, is that Juneau is largely on its own, whether in meeting the energy challenge or facing the broader question of its future. The gold rush that helped create the city ended a century ago, and other resource-based industries, like other forms of mining and logging, have faded amid environmental pressures and economic changes. State government and tourism are the anchors now.

Many residents say they were at least relieved that the power problems started as the days were growing longer and warmer. Some, seeing a silver lining, wonder if the electricity challenge, and the conservation it has prompted, might spur a new economic creativity for a city recommitted to energy efficiency. (While residents have recently rushed to convert to compact fluorescent light bulbs, Juneau is still working toward mandatory curbside recycling and it has yet to complete an audit of its carbon footprint.)

Mr. Botelho, who said his in-box had been filling with messages from environmental start-up companies that want to make Juneau their proving ground, called the situation “the opportunity to be our own knights in shining armor.”

Evidence of the civic self-discipline is updated daily on the Web site of Alaska Electric Light and Power. The day before the avalanche, the city consumed 1,006 megawatt hours of electricity; on Friday, the number was 625.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company