Throwing Good Money After Bad

The above expression has always struck me as a bit esoteric.  Its an expression I have seen and heard a lot and yet the meaning of it never quite seems to fit the words themselves. The best definition I have seen of this expression is as follows:  "To spend more and more money on something that will never be successful."  The best example I have seen lately of this expression comes, not surprisingly, from our friends in the coal industry. 

It seems that Kentucky Power Company, a privately held power company serving the eastern counties of Kentucky has proposed spending $980 million of the public's dollars in order to update its 800 MW Big Sandy Power Plant near Louis, Kentucky in order to meet the recent regulations on air pollution which are finally being enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

We have to admit that this is a good news/bad news type of story. The fact that coal-based utility companies are finally being held accountable for the tons of pollutants they have been putting into the atmosphere is a very good thing.  We are thrilled that the EPA is, at last, being allowed to do their job by the Obama administration given that they were completely hog tied during the administration of George W. Bush, the oilman. Still, nearly a billion dollars spent on a single power plant that will only be marginally less polluting after this is all done?  Isn't this a perfect example of throwing good money after bad, and in this case, a whole lot of good money?

I realize that a billion bucks probably is not what it used to be, but that's one thousand million dollars and that's still a pretty good chunk of change. Why isn't Kentucky spending that money on a renewable energy plant, either wind power or solar power, instead of trying to retrofit an old coal plant that has already seen too much use.  Kentucky has plenty of sun and given the incredible price drop in the cost of solar panels in the last couple of years Kentucky Power could build one heck of good solar power plant or wind farm for what its planning to spend to put lipstick on one very ugly pig! 

Solar has gone through an unprecedented decline in costs in recent years and solar plants are going up all over our country.  One big solar project currently under construction is the Topaz solar project in San Luis Obispo County, California.  This plant will be a 550 megawatt plant and will cost $1.2 billion to construct, only a little less than what Kentucky is proposing to spend just to clean up an already well aged coal plant.  The solar PV plant will put out no pollution, zero, have no significant environmental impact, will not contribute to global warming and will last at least 50 years.  When you look at all energy costs (see Dr. Paul Epstein's recent Harvard study on coal costs) the energy from a solar or wind plant will cost less than the energy from the coal plant. Moreover, solar photovoltaic plants are incredibly straightforward in design and require very few people to maintain them.  The maintenance costs alone would be a fraction of what they would be for a coal plant.   Wouldn't that be a better deal for the people of Kentucky!

The numbers are about the same if Kentucky were to look at building a modern Wind Farm instead of fixing an old coal plant.  Eastern Kentucky has plenty of wind resource.  A large wind farm could easily provide the same amount of electricity at less cost than coal. Costs for modern wind turbines have also gone under significant decline and the current cost of a megawatt of wind energy appears to be just a little over $1 million per megawatt.  That means that for a couple of hundred million less than they are now planning to spend to clean up the old coal plant Kentucky could have a totally non-polluting wind farm that would last much longer than a coal plant and produce the same amount of energy.  Once again, it would put out zero pollution, no contribution to global warming and could move Kentucky into the modern energy era. Once again, a better deal for the people of Kentucky!

There is a saying that there is nothing so powerful as an idea who's time has come.  I would like to believe that is true since renewable energy is definitely an idea who's time has come.  However, it may be the case that it has run up against an even more powerful force, the power of human inertia, the tendency of senseless humans to keep on doing what they have always done even when it no longer makes any sense.  The plans of Kentucky Power strike me as a perfect example of inertia.  They are going forward with spending massive amounts of public money on coal, even when coal no longer makes any sense, either for the people of Kentucky or the people on our planet. 

The time has come to realize that if we are really going to stop global warming we are going to have to do something about coal.  Coal is without a doubt the single biggest contributor to global warming.  It is not enough to build new solar farms and wind farms. If we are going to escape the ravages of a too warm planet, we must eliminate coal from our energy vocabulary.  To do that we have to stop throwing good money after bad and start replacing, not repairing, the thousands of coal-fired energy plants that are killing us and our planet.

Magical Thinking and the Republican Party

Everyone engages in a little magical thinking from time to time. I personally have engaged in a ton of it at times. For example, at one point in my life I constructed a very nice fantasy involving the re-emergence of fairies from the middle ages. They were ever so useful. There was the Coffee Fairy who would bring me fresh coffee every morning. There was the Tax Preparation Fairy who would magically calculate my taxes every year with the outcome always ending up in a big refund. There was the Dishes Fairy who ..... well, you get the idea. Unfortunately, like Linus and the Great Pumpkin, my fairy people never actually did appear and so now, years later, I am still forced to deal with the dreary tasks of every day life.

At least I have the comfort of knowing I am not the only one engaging in magical thinking who has been disappointed. During our recent 2010 elections here in California it became increasingly evident that the Republican Party and its now embraced off-shoot, the Tea Party, are even better at engaging in magical thinking than I am. A recent Pew Poll of Republican Party members released in October found that "A 53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence."

What is particularly interesting about this poll is that it actually represents a major retrenchment from polls taken just a few years ago (2007) when only 31% of the Republicans said global warming didn't exist. It seems that in this age of hyper-partisan politics even science is in play. Based on recent comments from the Republican leadership it appears many leading Republicans are approaching it from another perspective. According to John Shimkus of Illinois, God not science should be the source we should be relying on. At a a climate hearing last year he said "The earth will end only when God decides it's time to be over. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.". Shimkus may be right but in the meantime I think I will buy a wet suit because first, I have a hunch God wants us to clean up our own messes, and second, the actual scientific data is pointing in the opposite direction.

I don't claim that scientists are infallible, just that when taken as a very large group they tend to be right most of the time. Currently many of them have begun to change some of their thinking about global warming. Unfortunately, it is not in the direction our friends in the Republican Party would like to see things go. It turns out that scientists are finding that global warming may be much worse than they originally thought. In particular, the antarctic is warming at a rate that is truly alarming.

According to a new report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey the ice shelves in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula appear to be disappearing because of climate change. This summer's loss of ice was much worse than any of the scientists had predicted. "The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming," says USGS scientist and lead author Jane Ferrigno. Since 1998, the ice lost from just one of the five ice shelves in the study totals more than 1,500 square miles, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Its not just the antarctic that is at issue. Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago. Scientists from two leading climate research centres have also recently released what they described as the "best evidence yet" of rising long-term temperatures. Their report looked at 11 different indicators, each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s. Peter Stott, the head of climate modelling at the UK Met Office, said despite variations between individual years, the evidence was unequivocal: "When you follow those decade-to-decade trends then you see clearly and unmistakably signs of a warming world".

OK so given the most current data the scientists have provided it seems the world is getting warmer. What are we going to do about it? It appears the Republican strategy is not only to deny the problem but to try and make it even worse. This year the California Republican party, egged on by some very wealthy Texas oil millionaires, decided to try and repeal or at least postpone the current California environmental laws (AB32)that could have at least minimized the increase in global warming pollutants. Unfortunately for the Republicans, those wild and crazy California voters rejected this proposition (Proposition 23)and decided to continue fighting global warming.

I am sure this was a big setback for the party in Red, but I think I see their problem. The Republican strategy of magical thinking where they simply imagined all of the scientists were wrong and that global warming would magically go away was simply not enticing enough for the average voter. I mean if you are going to create an imaginary world at least create a really good one. Personally I would suggest that it involve strong doses of Pamela Anderson, a repeal of all taxes, and most importantly, the resurgence of the Coffee Fairy!

Dan Daniel
Editor, EnergyBible.com

Is Religious Environmentalism Taking Hold?

In creating the EnergyBible.com Website one of our goals was to provide the broadest and most complete perspective on the issues of energy use and renewable energy. Towards that end we have included within the site information about moral and spiritual perspectives on the environment because we have found that for many of us issues such as global warming, energy use and environmental stewardship are not simply political issues, they are moral ones. So from time to time on this blog we will be talking about what is going on in the world of faith-based organizations as they, like us, struggle to find the best solutions for out planet moving forward. This week there was a lot happening on that front.

Most of the major religious organizations have been debating envionmental issues for some time. However, as the scientific realities of global warming have begun to sink into our consciousness many organizations are seeing pressure from within to begin to become more actively involved in addressing environmental issues. This was the case with at the Southern Baptist Convention this week . The Southern Baptist Convention is a conglomeration of Southern Baptist churches and they have a yearly meeting, which (just to add to the confusion) is also called the Southern Baptist Convention. This week at their annual conference 44 of their leaders made a significant departure from the Southern Baptist Convention’s official stance on global warming by backing a declaration calling for more action on climate change, saying its previous position on the issue was “too timid.”

In many ways this action represents a major step forward in the area of religious environmentalism. The Southern Baptist church is a huge organization with over 16 million members and is the largest denomination in the United States after the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, the Southern Baptist Church has always been extremely conservative when it comes to environmental issues. This may be about to change given that its current president, the Rev. Frank Page, signed the initiative, “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.” Two past presidents of the convention, the Rev. Jack Graham and the Rev. James Merritt, also signed. These church leaders stated that “We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,”

As recently as 2007 the Southern Baptists passed a resolution which took a very skeptical view of global warming. In contrast, the new declaration says that “Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. ”The document also urges ministers to preach more about the environment and for all Baptists to keep an open mind about considering environmental policy. The leaders said that current evidence of global warming is "substantial," and that the threat is too grave to wait for perfect knowledge about whether, or how much, people contribute to the trend.

Because the Southern Baptist Convention is an aggregation of individual churches such announcments are not in any way binding upon the individual churches. This is not the Catholic Church we are talking about. Yet because many of the signatories were both present and past church leaders it is likely that many Baptist preachers and members will give such announcements considerable thought. That strikes us as a good thing. A basic tenet of the Christian faith, and for that matter of most faiths, is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I sincerely believe that most of us would like to live in a clean, pollution free world where no one suffers as a result of our mishandling of the environment. I also sincerely believe that most of us want to survive period! Global warming threatens all of this. We certainly would not want our neighbors doing things that might threaten our environment and therefore our own existance. Consequently we should avoid doing these things ourselves.

Exactly what is the best way to go about our lives such that we don't cause damage to the environment, our neighbors and ourselves is not always easy to see. It will require better understanding of the planet, of the environment and ultimately of our own nature. It was towards this end that the EnergyBible.com Website was created. As we continue to study and research the field of renewable energy and the environment, we hope you will share your own learnings with us so that together we can come up with the most effective solutions. Should you have any knowledge, experience or opionions that you think would be helpful please don't hesitate to write to us. We look forward to hearing from you!