Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Climate Change - Still A Big Secret

I read with great interest over the past couple of weeks articles in the New York Times about innovative and unusual ways people are heating their homes these days. Two of the articles “Wall-to-Wall Warmth – Dec 18 and “No Furnaces But Heat Aplenty – Dec 26” gave examples of increased energy efficiency in home heating, while the third article “Burning Coal at Home is Making a Comeback – Dec 27” discussed how a very old fuel is finding new markets with homeowners because of reliability of price and supply. I recommend all three – but “No Furnaces” was my favorite. I love hearing about how a comfortably temperate home can be achieved with a 95% reduction in energy usage compared to the typical design. Such stories give me hope.

Yet nowhere in any of these three articles was the subject of climate change in general, or the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in particular discussed. Home heating has significant implications for addressing climate change. The New York Times is doing a very good job covering climate change explicity through its Green Inc. and Dot Earth blogs and with great reporting by writers like Andrew Revkin. However, what is needed further is to have articles outside the explicit climate and energy reporting to provide points of departure for introducing readers to the urgent problem of climate change.

One such example of a missed opportunity was a recent article on wireless chargers for electronics. In this article, Intel Moves to Free Gadgets of Their Recharging Cords, the author points to an MIT study that shows wireless charging to have “demonstrated efficiencies of 50 percent at ranges of several meters.” That means one must use twice the energy for the convenience of wireless charging. The article does not calculate the increased energy cost of such inefficiency or the increase in greenhouse gases as a result. To give you a rough idea of the magnitude of our use of digital electronics, we dispose of 426,000 cell phones every day. Making the ones we keep twice as energy hungry does not seem a step in the right direction, and certainly deserves to be called out as antithetical to the general aim and urgent need for increased efficiency.

Those with the biggest megaphones need to find every opportunity to discuss this issue of climate change, to help the public learn the urgency of the problem, how humanity is impacting climate change and how climate change will affect our lives. I wished these otherwise interesting and well written articles in the Times could have done more to frame their discussions around the climate change issue.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

America’s Oil Dependency – Addiction or Policy

Today many Americans discuss our nation’s energy problems in the frame of “oil addiction”. Such talk is found at the corner bar, in the news media, and even in a President’s State of the Union address. While the term addiction conveys a seriousness and gravity, it also conveys a sense of helplessness, a lack of control and ultimately a lack of responsibility.

In truth America’s dependency on oil is more complex than addiction. It is in part a function of decisions and policy made by us the people through our elected representatives. Further, it is the consequence of interrelationships and interdependencies within our economic system and between government and the private sector that have made cheap oil the energy policy of the land for over half a century. The nation deserves a deeper understanding of the subject of national energy policy than the term addiction allows:

  1. Addiction implies uncontrolled or compulsive use of something. Addicts see their fate as beyond their control and often feel powerless to change their circumstances. Addiction frequently follows the path from helplessness to hopelessness and ultimately to victimhood. So the message of oil addiction may imply, directly or indirectly, that America is not in control of its oil consumption but is instead a powerless victim of it.
  2. Most addicts see no alternative to their habit. They will do whatever it takes, including act compulsively and irresponsibly, to get the next dose or fix. The message of oil addiction can subtly convey the idea that oil is irreplaceable and that America must adopt whatever national policy is required to feed the habit, even accepting compulsive or irresponsible actions by government.
  3. With addiction there is a sense that complete recovery is unlikely if not impossible – it is said that once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. And while controlling the addiction may be possible, this usually implies a very long and very difficult period of withdrawal with many steps along the way. Therefore oil addiction may imply an inevitable and perhaps even a perpetual tie to oil, that can never be ended, but only perhaps reduced, and then only through a very prolonged and measured transition.

The more America thinks of oil and energy in terms of addiction, the more likely our citizens will accept dysfunctional economic, political and environmental policy as an inevitable consequence.

We need to be thinking instead about what we want from our national energy policy and what it is capable of providing. Can we adjust the policy to reduce dependency on a politically and economically volatile commodity like oil? Can a sound policy help provide cleaner, renewable forms of energy to our economy? Can it stimulate job growth and wealth creation in the U.S. instead of sending billions of dollars overseas?

Policy that enables a transition away from oil and other fossil fuels may represent one of the greatest opportunities for insuring both America’s prosperity and the stability of the earth's climate system in the 21st Century. Hopefully the new government in Washington will begin making informed decisions about energy policy very soon. This will be a change in itself, since addicts are incapable of making informed decisions.

Andrew J McKeon