Fracking the Future

Americans seem to be so deeply mired in oil culture that we're never going to escape.

As I wandered through various websites on my Sunday morning catch-up-with-the-news efforts, several stories caught my attention--from Good, Grist, the Times, and other sites that keep me apprised of the world's goings on (since I can't really rely on the Daily Poop to cover much that doesn't happen locally). I tend to focus on energy issues out of habit, and a number of stories resonated with what I've been noticing about a general reluctance to take alternative energy sources seriously in this country.

I was watching Bill Maher's Friday night show on HBO, Real Time, only because there was absolutely nothing else on, and both the Beloved Spouse and I were too tired to do anything but veg. I find Maher mildly amusing at best, and more often irritating, but his guest was Alexandra Wentworth who is both very funny and married to George Stefanopolis. We stayed with the show until the end, mostly out of inertia. Maher's peanut gallery (consisting of Eliot Spitzer, Erin McPike, and Steve Moore) went on to comment on various news items as Maher brought them up. Moore (a Libertarian, co-author of Return to Prosperity) [note: I originally, and mistakenly, referred to this as "Return to Posterity], when talking about clean energy (wind and solar) kept insisting that it's "not economical" and we have to keep fracking and pumping in order to fuel (pardon the pun) future economic recovery. But as any good logic teacher knows, simply asserting something over and over again doesn't make it true; and Moore lacked the time to back his assertion up with any evidence.

But this general notion--that the only "economical" solution to our dependence on foreign oil is to pump more of our own, or find a "bridge" (like natural gas) to tide us over--seems to be embedded in the "conservative" world view at the moment (which doesn't seem all that conservative, upon reflection). Pundits and politicians alike consistently dismiss renewable resources as not cost-effective, or uneconomical. Then they bring up Solyndra as a whipping boy: see what happens when you fund this sort of thing?

Well, according to David Roberts's article in Grist from Friday, the whole Solyndra episode seems to amount to nothing more than a bad call on the part of the Obama administration. The year-long investigation into the loan has turned up, in Robert's words, "Bupkis. Nothing." All efforts to locate wrong-doing have produced nothing more than evidence that it was "a decision made based on merits, undone by economic shifts in the international solar market, with embarrassing political optics. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing. There is no 'scandal.'"

Opponents to alternative fuel sources seem to want this to turn out badly for purely political reasons. Prove that the administration proceeded with this deal for corrupt reason, and it'll tar (again, pardon) the whole industry.

Another story that gave me pause (and reminded me that folks are constantly trying to invent alternatives to fossil fuels) came from Good: Fuel Gets Fruity: Converting Produce Scraps into Gas. Biofuel made from readily available materials seems to be popping up all over the place. Someday, perhaps, we'll all have home scrap-digesters instead of LP gas tanks or natural gas lines running into our homes. As much as I like cooking with gas, I'm working on eliminating the need for it, since I really do think we're running out, and it bloody well terrifies me anyway. Recent evidence also points to the possibility that natural gas isn't as clean as we're being told it is, and is thus much less promising as a cleaner "bridge" fuel that can help us wean ourselves from oil and coal.

The recent move to take another, closer look at the Keystone pipeline drew the ire of the right (we need the jobs and the oil, they say, even though most of the jobs would be temporary and the oil itself would be exported). But according to another article in Grist, by Jess Zimmerman, anti-Keystone folks are finding new allies in the Tea Party: those who don't like the fact that if the pipeline builders can't buy your property from you, they'll just take it via eminent domain.

If only people could see that reliance on fossil fuels is every bit as dangerous to our rights as the taking of property against our will. Don't basic rights to clean air and water come under the notion of a right to life and liberty?

Perhaps because there aren't measurable price tags attached to the breathability of air or the drinkability of water, we can't see them in the more concrete sense that we can property values (even though these are tied to issues of clean air and water). And how do we begin to attach economic value to the ability of future generations to grow crops on land radically altered by changing rain patterns and mean temperatures, or to make a living from polluted fisheries?

What if the idea of prosperity had more to do with well-being than with cash? A transformation in the national psyche from a monetary model of the good life to one based on sustainability and long-term viability seems to be in order. But there seem to be only small glimmers of hope that our national preoccupation with the cash value of what we're leaving our kids (rather than the kind of a planet they're going to inherit) is going to change any time soon.

Image credit: The photo is of the Urban Planet building at Shanghai's Expo 2010. According to its designers, "The exhibition was characterized by a dichotomous structure illustrating the two-faced character of the city as both a consumer of environment and as a place for innovation and technology in the service of an ecological renewal for the future." (via Wikipedia)

Power to the People

It seems to me that there are a number of ways in which to address community energy needs, so I’ve been thinking about local power sources for some time (see my earlier post, Not-So-Bad News from Nowhere) and was pleased to read about Hawaii’s efforts to do just that in yesterday's New York Times.

Of course, “local” in this sense is easy to identify, since we’re talking individual islands in a small archipelago. But the state's program to reduce its dependence on foreign sources of fossil fuels is laudable, since there are so many ways to generate power in this particular venue.

Wind, geothermal, wave, sun, algae: all provide potentially useful ways to run the fridge, without inflicting damage on our lungs, genes, or the environment, and they’re wonderfully diverse. One of the major stumbling blocks to alternative energy on the mainland seems to be a lack of imagination. It always seems to come down to one or the other, or maybe a couple of things. But fossil fuels are still big in the mix; nobody appears to be interested in completely phasing out the use of coal or oil or natural gas. Not when there are millions and billions to be made in fostering dependence on these sources. And don't forget nukes--the only "clean" alternative, as long as you don't count the problem of waste disposal.

Several things occur to me that might help solve our collective problems. One is to reduce our population, and thus our future power needs. Folks who are understandably worried about the debt we’re leaving to our grandchildren might want to consider reducing the number of people who will potentially suffer from our current profligacy (and this isn't just about energy, or even The Deficit). Some people like having lots of kids, and I can understand that. But having a couple of kids instead may be a much more sensible option these days, given not only the cost of providing a passel of young’ns with a decent education and standard of living, but uncertainties about the future as well. I guess it's a sign of optimism that I see so many three- or four-kid families these days, and that was probably okay in the past, when a parent (read: Mom) could stay home with the little ones during their early years. But having big families in problematic economies, when steady jobs with a future are still in question, seems at the very least unwise.

In most developed countries, populations are staying fairly steady, or even dropping (causing problems with maintaining ways of life that have been supported in the past by large numbers of offspring, and requiring influxes of foreign workers). This, of course, opens a huge can of lumbricids, and requires its own set of solutions. But one of these solutions leads to the second of my recommendations for the power problem.

We really need to re-think consumption patterns: not only our use of power for electricity, heating, transportation, and the like, but also our expectations about stuff. How much stuff (plastics come to mind immediately, but all other consumer goods should be under the microscope, too) do we really need?

Now, I’m an avowed materialist. I’m also a packrat, a family historian, a passionate recycler, and a lapsed archaeologist. I tend to keep stuff. Which means that I shouldn’t keep getting more stuff, but I do. Books and notebooks are stacked on either side of this laptop as I type, and I show few signs of beginning to manage my addiction. But if I were, according to my own advice, to think carefully about how much I really need that new book on marine algae formation and climate change, I might be able to reduce my related needs, such as more bookshelves to hold the books and magazines (which I’m really reluctant even to pitch in the recycle bin) that keep ending up on my desk .

Happily, I’m not also addicted to buying clothes or tchotchkes, and have long been able to resist buying stuff just because it’s cute, even though I sometimes rue not having picked up the funky bird bath at Tuesday Morning that would have looked great in my silly garden.

Cheap stuff is, in the end, no bargain. We should all be following William Morris’s rule about having nothing in our houses that we don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. That might not exclude the birdbath (it does, after all, bathe birds), but maybe it would keep us from buying some piece of useless crap just because it’s cheap. It also costs energy and resources to produce, and if it isn’t useful or beautiful, it probably shouldn’t have been made in the first place. After all, I can always make a birdbath out of the bent-up copper fire pit the neighbor’s tree fell on, or an old bowl and a tree stump.

In addition to not having so many kids and not buying stuff we don’t need (I know, putting those two items together seems heartless and unsympathetic, not to mention somewhat crass; but I simply must maintain my reputation as a snark), we really do need to be less single-minded about energy production in the first place.

Source diversity is a really good idea in its own right. Why can’t we all have nifty wind generators or solar collectors on our rooftops, or small windmills in our yards? (Well, here's one reason why the latter might not be the answer.) Why can’t we go back to using waterwheels to grind grist where it’s practical, or steam generators in places with geothermal activity? Why can’t there be smaller, less-centralized power plants that reduce the possibility of widespread blackouts?

If the problems are complex, I see no reason why complex solutions can’t be viewed as a challenge to entrepreneurial imagination and embraced in their multiplicity. As I rail to my students every quarter (to explain why lots of people make houses that look like pueblos, and why it didn’t take aliens to inspire pyramids in so many cultures), similar problems lead to similar solutions. But those solutions don’t have to be one thing. They can be many, and regionally appropriate, and focused on the actual needs of the community.

And if we stopped thinking that the only way to reflect progress is to “grow” bigger and broader suburbs with outrageous power needs, we might already be on our way to energy independence through a practical combination of conservation and innovation.

I know I’ve left water out of this disquisition, but it’s a different (although related) problem. And right now, after more than a week of rain, I’m up to my nose in it—so I’ll save that issue for another time.

If I've piqued anyone's interest in either alternative energy sources, increased energy efficiency, or distributed power generation (a term in wide use that describes the decentralization I'm talking about), here are some sources:

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory
The New Rules Project: Designing Rules as if Community Matters, especially its article on Distributed Generation in Local Plans (also linked above)

The Survival of and Potential for Decentralized Power Generation, by Harry Valentine, at Electric Energy Online

Image source: Landscape with Windmills, by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900), via Wikimedia Commons. Check out windmills around the world on Wikimedia while you're at it.