Energy: The issue defining our generation

Let’s face it: The United States stumbled out of the starting blocks into this century. This administration has supremely screwed things up, that’s a fact. I can’t help but feel a bit despondent when thinking that I spent the prime years of my life growing up in a Bush-run America. Everybody has a defining issue for the upcoming presidential election (hmmm. economy, anyone?). My foremost concern is energy policy. The issues of the economy, jobs, national security, and climate change are all underlying derivatives of energy. It is the lifeblood of modern civilization. I, like many others, feel that just as the 19th century belonged to coal and the 20th century to oil and gas, the 21st century will belong to solar, wind, tidal, biofuel (lipid algae biodiesel is poppin’ son!) and geothermal power, along with plug-in hybrids and smart grids.

Can we expand renewables fast enough? Most definitely. Recent trends in the use of mobile phones and personal computers give a perspective on how quickly new technologies can spread. Sales of solar cells are doubling every two years. Wind turbine manufacturing capacity is growing 25 percent annually.

And while we’re at it, lets just get the nuclear option out of the way. Nuclear power plants cost over $10 billion just to construct. They cost millions more to run and maintain, storage and security costs are through the roof, and they rely on a rare and expensive fuel to function. Nuclear power will continue to provide a fraction of American energy, but it is nonsensical to declare that nuclear power alone will provide us with the most affordable prices. Nuclear is over-hyped; if you examine the entire fuel cycle, from digging up the uranium, enriching it, transporting and building the very concrete-intensive reactor, it is definitely not carbon-neutral.

With the current economic crisis, it might seem a bit overbearing to mention another eminent market failure. But if you think the mortgage meltdown is troubling, wait until the markets discover the real price of carbon and realize that our entire economy is, essentially, built on a planetary accounting fraud. In late 2006, Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, released an earth-shaking study on the future costs of climate change. He discussed the failure of the current market to incorporate the cost of burning fossil fuels into its accounting, which he speculated to be in the trillions of dollars. With the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal (air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, etc.) can exceed the direct costs, namely those of mining the coal and transporting it. As a result of these neglected externalities, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating price distortions. In our modern high-tech civilization, it is easy to forget that the economy is wholly dependent on the earth’s natural systems and resources. What we need is a true cost analysis, which includes more than just the accounting costs of utilities and includes the costs our environment and common areas have to bear.

We are nearing a crossroads. Our generation will ultimately decide between one path headed toward economic decline and another headed toward sustainable economic progress. If we choose to fully to commit to the latter, the change will be painful. We’ve spent the last eight years with a White House full of former oil executives pushing the status quo rather than preparing America for a wide-scale energy transition. Considering where we should be at this point, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Building a new energy economy will involve massive workforce upheaval, require enormous government policy initiatives (research, smart incentives and tax breaks), and a focus on private investment. Just in Silicon Valley last year, venture capital investment in renewable energy and clean technology rose 173 percent to over $1 billion.

The last time we took such issues seriously, in Jimmy Carter’s day, it was called an “energy crisis.” Thermostats were turned down across the land and we went into R&D overdrive. And that crisis was only about the price of oil, which topped out at all of $78 a barrel in today’s dollars. Few were talking about global warming or blood for oil (see: Iraq).

Today’s energy crisis is on a different scale.

Greenhouse gases, geology, and geopolitics give us no choice but to change our ways. The truth is, that change has already begun. Just as in the last three years we’ve gone from debating the validity of climate change to being confronted daily with the rapidity of glacial melting, so too will the shift to a post-fossil economy soon be painfully evident. We can – as we did when confronted with the Great Depression or World War II – overhaul our society and economy and emerge stronger, or we can get swamped by change, watching helplessly as other nations ride the wave of post-carbon innovation. You decide.

Ben Eckold is a business senior with a minor in sustainable environments. “The Green Spot” will run every in this section every Tuesday. The column features a variety of writers on environmental and sustainability issues.