Dr. Wilk is a recognized expert on nuclear disarmament and has been active for the past 27 years in public health advocacy organizations and medical organizations concerned with preventing nuclear war and addressing other threats to global survival.
Ed. note: This week's Mulch is pint-sized and will run on Monday rather than Friday. We'll be back to our regular schedule next week.
Some people live off the grid, eat local food, and have an energy footprint so minuscule that even the canniest hunter couldn't track them down. But the rest of us buy from supermarkets, get our energy from at least in part from traditional sources like coal, and occasionally forget to turn off the lights when we leave the house. For those of us who are still living with one foot in the old energy world, here are a few helpful hints about what you should buy and what the consequences of shifting to "clean energy" sources like natural gas and nuclear energy are.
Green consumption
Mother Jones' Julia Whitty points out a useful tool for correcting any misconceptions about how green a company actually is. It's an assessment that graphs public perception of a company's environmentalism against its practices. Besides making sure you've got the right idea about Starbucks or Nike, Whitty writes, "You can also get a pretty good sense of how sectors perform in relation to other sectors: food and beverage, bad overall; technology, better overall."
One of the biggest energy expenditures that many of us indulge in is airplane travel. Just one flight can enlarge your carbon footprint dramatically. Although flying may never be truly green, Beth Buczynski reports at Care2 that one airline is moving in the right direction. British Airways is planning the first "sustainable jet fuel" plant.
The plant will make a biofuel, which generally has plenty of drawbacks, but this one sounds pretty good. The company says it will source its raw materials from local waste management facilities and produce relatively harmless waste products.
Hot air from natural gas companies
But the hazards of many "clean energy" sources make going off the grid sound better and better. More and more information is coming out about the environmental hazards that accompany the mining of natural gas, one of Washington's new energy fascinations. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report on natural gas late last week, and Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones that Halliburton, a major player in this industry, admitted to using 807,000 gallons of diesel-based chemicals in the extraction process, which involves pumping large amounts of water deep into the ground.
"Even though the natural gas industry is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, it's still required to limit the amount of diesel used in fracturing, under a December 2003 agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency," Sheppard writes. "Halliburton and BJ Services appear to have violated the agreement, according to yesterday's disclosure."
That doesn't inspire confidence in these companies' assurances that their techniques will not contaminate water sources.
Another meltdown
Nuclear power sounds better than ever to the government, investors, and even some environmentalists. If you need a rundown of the issues involved in nuclear energy production, Grist's Umbra Fisk has answers to questions like "is nuclear really better than coal?"
One of the strongest objections to nuclear power, however, is the financial risk of investing in nuclear infrastructure. "Nuclear power offers all the fiscal risks of a "too big to fail" bank, with the added risk of being too dangerous to fail as well," writes Sam McPheeters for The American Prospect.
"And although current nuclear defenders love to crow about the free market...the industry operates with an exponential financial handicap over all other energy technologies, gas and coal included," McPheeters explains. "Factor in overruns, plant cancellations, and chronic mismanagement, and the only genuine advantage nuclear holds over renewable energy sources is that its infrastructure currently exists."
Maybe it's time to invest in solar panels after all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
If you were to look out to the horizon of the clean energy field right now, you would see the hazy outlines of nuclear reactors. President Barack Obama announced this week that two new nuclear plants will go up in Georgia, built on the promise that the federal government will guarantee $8.3 billion in loans-nearly the entire estimated cost of the project.
"It is a slap in the face to environmentalists," says Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive. "Though these will be the first nuclear reactors constructed in more than three decades, Obama still labeled them, somehow, as part of the "technologies of tomorrow.""
The president's announcement wasn't the only environmental downer this week. Expectations for the next international climate negotiations, to be held in Mexico at the end of 2010, are already low, and yesterday Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate negotiator, said he would step down this summer and join the private sector. To top it all off, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now faces sixteen lawsuits that would block its ability to decrease carbon emissions, including one backed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
A nuclear error
Although the Georgia reactors would be the first new nuclear construction in the country in decades, they mark the beginning of what the Obama administration hopes will be a shift towards nuclear energy. In the 2011 budget, President Obama proposed an expansion of the loan guarantee program that funds projects like these from $18.5 billion to $54.5 billion.
These nuclear projects deserve close scrutiny. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman details the problems with the Georgia reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) already rejected the initial designs for the plant. That means the estimated cost could well exceed the projected $8.5 billion, which Wasserman says, was low at the start.
"Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each, in some cases to more than $12 billion today," he explains.
Risky business
In the past, energy firms like The Southern Company, the Atlanta-based group that is building the plants, could only imagine securing funding for new nuclear projects. These projects have a high risk of failure, and private investors do not dream of touching them.
Inter Press Service's Julio Godoy reviewed several European studies on the feasibility of financing nuclear plants. One study from Citibank concluded that "the risks faced by developers ... are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially," Godoy reports. These risks include uncontrollable construction costs, long delays, and the possibility of low power prices that would not support that plants' operation.
That's one reason that green advocates disapprove of nuclear energy: The money could be better spent elsewhere. "People tend to think that environmentalists have some sort of allergic reaction to nuclear because they're scared of radioactive waste and unsecured nuclear materials," writes Aaron Wiener at The Washington Independent. "But when it comes down to it...It's simply a bad investment to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a nuclear sinkhole when proven technologies such as wind and solar would provide guaranteed benefits."
Wind to fly on
While the administration lavishes attention on nuclear, other clean energy industries are trying to move forward. In Wisconsin, a Spanish company is opening up a plant to build wind turbine components, which will bring much-needed jobs to the Milwaukee area, as Kari Lydersen reports for Working In These Times.
There's always the threat, however, that gains like this will be rolled back by competition from China. Clean energy jobs can still be sent overseas, Lydersen points out. She argues that the United State could be providing a boost to the solar and wind industry in order to keep jobs here.
"Manufacturing in the United States could be driven both with incentives to the actual producers - like the tax break to Ingeteam [the Spanish company building the Wisconsin plant] and support for renewable energy through renewable energy portfolio (RPS) standards and other incentives," she writes.
China as competition
From a purely environmental perspective, China's headway into green technology is not a problem. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum reminds us that the whole world can benefit from advances in clean energy, wherever they happen. Climate change is, after all, a global crisis. But Drum concedes that fear of Chinese competition does serve some purpose:
"I've lately become more receptive to the idea that, for better or worse, the only way to get Americans to take this stuff seriously is to kick it old school and start hauling out that old time Cold War evangelism," he says. "Frame green tech as a matter of vital economic and national security superiority over the Reds and quit worrying overmuch about whether that's really technically accurate. Just figure that it's close enough, it's language everyone understands, and it'll do a better job of motivating development than a couple hundred more PowerPoints about receding glaciers."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The prospects for achieving comprehensive climate and energy legislation this year, let alone a bill with enough teeth to cut climate-warming pollution in a serious way and tip the playing field toward clean energy, have dimmed considerably over the past few weeks. But other legislative opportunities are cropping up that hold keys to getting our country's response to the climate crisis on track.
The declining momentum for comprehensive climate and energy legislation is not surprising, considering the diminished resolve among Senate Democrats do anything big. Increasing numbers of Democratic senators have indicated that they would be comfortable running for the hills and passing an "energy-only" bill -- in other words a modest bill that lacks a cap on carbon pollution and contains industry-friendly policies. This approach resembles that taken in energy bills passed during the Bush administration. If senators decide they want to move in this direction, they've got a place to start. A polluter-friendly energy-only bill passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last June.
President Obama offered only tepid pushback against such inclinations last week. And while Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the key Republican working with Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to craft a comprehensive bill, albeit a compromise one (e.g. one with more nuclear and offshore drilling), has said he is not ready to settle for a "half-assed" energy-only fallback, this is not very reassuring. Sen. Graham has indicated that one of his intentions in working with Democrats is to craft a bill that's even friendlier to corporate polluters than other, already polluter-friendly proposals.
While frustrating, the dismal prospects for achieving strong legislation this year need not forestall progress in the fight against global warming. There are other pressure points around which progressives can mobilize, not only to propel our country down a path to clean energy, but also to help crash the party polluting corporations have thrown with funds from our federal treasury. These include ending billions in subsidies to fossil fuel industries and stopping an expanded taxpayer bailout of the nuclear industry.
There is an article in today's Salon called "The pastor who clashed with Palin" By David Talbot which concerns itself with Sarah Palin's religious fundamentalism as it relates to government.
The primary focus of the article is the interactions between Palin and Howard Bess, a retired Baptist preacher from Wasilla's nearby neighbor town Palmer, Alaska. Bess, the author of a book entitled "Pastor, I am gay," originally came into conflict with Palin over book banning, and eventually on other social issues as well.
One issue was abortion. This from the article:
Soon after the book controversy, Bess found himself again at odds with Palin and her fellow evangelicals. In 1996, evangelical churches mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital's community board and ban abortion from the valley. When they succeeded, Bess and Dr. Susan Lemagie, a Palmer OB-GYN, fought back, filing suit on behalf of a local woman who had been forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. The case was finally decided by the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled that the hospital must provide valley women with the abortion option.
The thing that shook me up the most in the article was a quote from another local progressive that raises the issue of Palin's knowledge, beliefs and clear danger if she were to become president:
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board," said Munger, a music composer and teacher. "I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, 'Sarah, how can you believe in creationism -- your father's a science teacher.' And she said, 'We don't have to agree on everything.'
"I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."
Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. "She looked in my eyes and said, 'Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'"
And this from Bess:
Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That's trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It's her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she's ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia.
It is the clear danger of extreme religious views combined with the age and health history of John McCain that should make all voters review the potential of a radical creationist with a finger on the nuclear (noo-clee-ar) button.
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