[GPSCC-chat] MH Times Column for Friday - Clean Energy Nation

[Wes Rolley]

I submitted the following column for this Friday.

It was my intention to use this column to review /Clean Energy Nation/, 
the recently published book by Congressman Jerry McNerney and local 
writer Marty Cheek. While I will mostly write about that, I can not help 
but mention another book: /The Fate of Greenland/ by Philip Conkling ... 
[et al.]. It provides an essential element that is missing from /Clean 
Energy Nation/ .

I am an active blogger who has paid a lot of attention to the problems 
of climate change and the relationship to our national energy policy as 
well as the effect of both on water resources. If you have a similar 
background, there is little that you will learn from reading /Clean 
Energy Nation/. Most of the book takes you through things that you 
already know: fossil fuels are a finite resource that have a limited 
future; the continued use of fossil fuels is not sustainable for an 
extended period of time, future supplies of coal, oil and natural gas 
will be increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain.

If you happen to be a confirmed climate change denier, you probably will 
not be convinced by what anything that McNerney and Cheek have written. 
As long as there are those like meteorologist Joe Bastardi (late of 
Accuweather) who are willing to publish nonsense as fact, we will 
continue to have such problems.

Still, thanks to their knowledge and research, there are things that I 
did learn. Clean Energy Nation is a well documented book with an 
extensive bibliography and end notes to identify the sources for their 
statements. For example, relating to the feasibility of replacing 
current fossil fuel driven electric generation with nuclear, we are 
given the fact that this is probably less sustainable that continued use 
of fossil fuels.

"The rich uranium ores required to achieve this reduction are, however, 
so limited that if the entire present world electricity demand were to 
be provided by nuclear power, these ores would be exhausted within nine 
years. Use of the remaining poorer ores in nuclear reaction would 
produce more CO2 emissions than burning fossil fuels directly. "

McNerney and Cheek are unique in viewing these problems through the lens 
of political history. This is appropriate in that the problems we have 
now are much more political than technological. They managed to cover 
almost all areas of concern beyond the obvious ones of electricity 
generation and transportation: public health, agriculture, education, 
national security. Each is summarized so that it is easy to understand 
where the impacts come from without slogging through too much detail.

What I missed in CEN, but found in /The Fate of Greenland/, is the 
recognition that there is an aspect of our current situation that should 
give a sense of urgency, should create a political will for action now, 
rather than stumbling along hoping for a technological miracle that is 
not likely to happen.

In a book filled with wonderful photography of Greenland now, 
underscoring the rate at which it is currently changing, the 
contributors to /Fate of Greenland/ lay out the scientific data which 
warns us that the climate may change very quickly, at times in less than 
a decade. Such tipping point events as they chronicle are part of the 
language of global warming, but not with the astonishing level of facts 
that are laid out here.

This sense of urgency has both an ecological and an economic basis. 
While most of our attention is give to the ecological, generating a 
Reganesque rolling of the eyes as they mutter "there they go again" the 
economic issue is not so obvious. I wish they had clearly stated this 
one fact: For every year that the world delays addressing climate 
change, transforming to a clean-energy union of nations, it will cost 
our economies an additional $500 Billion, That is a burden we are 
loading on to our grandchildren.

In this election cycle, it appears that the denial of climate change, or 
at least a plan to limit any action to combat it, is a prerequisite for 
selection as a candidate in the Republican Party. It will take strong 
political leadership to change America. "... if we are to create a 
better tomorrow for ourselves and for future generations of American, we 
need to use effective communication and share an inspiring vision in our 
quest to become a clean-energy nation."





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