Clean Energy Springfield

The Washington Post covers the coal rush today. This popped out at me:

Even after a pledge last month by a consortium of private equity firms to shelve eight of 11 planned coal plants as part of their proposed $45 billion buyout of TXU, the largest utility in Texas, many daunting projects remain on drawing boards. Any one of the three biggest projects could churn out more carbon dioxide than the savings that a group of Northeast states hope to achieve by 2018.

Ouch! And of course, the reason? "Utility executives say that the coal expansion is needed to meet rising electricity demand as the U.S. population and economy grow." Bruce Nilles, of the Sierra Club, promotes the Springfield energy plan, but the Post gives it a pretty brief and desultory mention.

Grist has a couple of good responses. David Roberts says we need to change the terms of the debate, while Gar Lipow says we can phase electricity emissions out in a decade if we choose to. Heady stuff: all wind, with a better grid and 12 hours of storage. Sadly, all of that stuff is outside of our hands, and Lipow himself emphasizes that this doesn't even touch the issue of efficiency and conservation, which is where I think we can really shine at the local level.

Two "Ouch!"s in two days is certainly too many, but I'm not sure what else to say:

Even the awe of Immanuel Kant’s famous “starry skies above” is lost to modern environmentalism, so obsessed is it with what data, graphs, and a good PowerPoint presentation can show.

Curtis White, of the Illinois State University, targets the rationalists among us environmentalists. White says that we need to reconnect with earlier spirituality in our respect for the Earth. Maybe he just hasn't seen the right PowerPoint. Normal isn't too far away...

So, people like us talk a lot about CFLs. But everything has a catch, and one of the biggies for CFLs is their mercury content. (Although it's important to note that they still contain less mercury than coal plants release into the atmosphere through the use of incandescents.) Still, it's important to do right, and that's why it's good that the Illinois EPA, Sangamon County, and City of Springfield offer a yearly hazardous waste collection at the Fairground. This year, it's on April 21 (click here for other dates and locations in other counties), and here's what they will and won't take.

I didn't make it last year, but I had a CFL blow out a couple of months ago that I stuck in a draw. If I were smart, what I'd do is get a crate, designate it for hazardous waste, print out the list of what's acceptable to deposit, and put stuff into it throughout the year, so that it's just a matter of taking the one crate every year.

Sadly, though I've seen signs for this year's collection around work, it doesn't look like the marketing is out there yet. In particular, I can't find a website for it, other than the EPA's, which is limited to what the EPA itself will guarantee. So, how about Springfield and Sangamon County? Let's see a website for this.

Federal judge rules that the Army Corps of Engineers is violating its own laws when it approves the coal-mining operations known as mountaintop removal.

One thing that's always important to keep in mind is the lifecycle of energy costs--not just the monetary costs, but the total impacts across the lifecycle of an energy source. Now, one thing that you hear with (for example) oil is that rising costs leads to greater exploration and makes it possible for oil companies to get oil that was too expensive to extract at a lower price. Often times, one of the reasons that oil is too expensive is that you have to do more stuff to get it out--dig deeper, process more--and those things, generally speaking, increase the environmental impacts of oil production. Metal mining in Montana, for instance, releases enormous amounts of toxic pollutants into the environment simply from the massive amount of discarded material that ores are extracted from.

The same pattern holds for coal. The coal rush that we're still in the middle of is pushing mining companies to go for ever-more complete extraction strategies. And thus you get things like mountaintop removal and longwall mining, where there's simply no reasonable way to do it without ruining the land.

To be sure, I don't think any source of energy is exempt from this. Wind farms can be, in their own way, public "bads"--not nearly as bad as coal, but not perfect. Which is why increasing our efficiency is so important. It's also why including as much of our energy-extracting infrastructure on-site is important--it's easier to blend solar panels into a roof than it is to hide a wind farm, and of course geothermal pipes are entirely hidden.

GO WATCH A MOVIE: For an earlier example of this kind of problem, check out Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider, which is set in the context of Them Dastardly Corporations mining hydraulically--literally, blasting away mountainsides with water cannons in pursuit of cheap gold.

UPDATE: GO WATCH AN INTERNET MOVIE: Grist links to an internet TV investigative series on mountaintop removal in West Virginia.

Well, not really, of course. But since everyone else is talking about Dave Bakke's column about the city's website, I figured I'd chime in. In particular, I like Marie's comments about the website's failings in terms of web design, content, and structure.

Handily enough, I came across today Politicopia, a wiki of bills before the Utah legislature, started (if I'm remembering correctly) by blogging state rep Steve Urquhart. Seeing some of the bigger ordinances that city council deals with, or even more detail on development issues, would really open up the process.

Similarly, from my experience sitting in on city council sessions, either for the clean energy plan or just out of interest, I think there needs to be a better explanation of the process that council goes through for the interested public. There's no real explanation of the consent agenda, debate agenda, how the committee structure works, how first and second reading works, nor of the actual process of passing an ordinance, including when you have to jump up and down to get someone's attention to let them know you want to talk. Davlin, whatever else you think about him, likes to move stuff through fast, and you've got to know when to jump in if you want to comment.

I think Cecilia Tumulty has a lot of potential in this regard. (At a neighborhood association meeting prior to the election, I had the chance to tell Tumulty some of what I've said above.) She's done some good stuff, content-wise, with the Clerk's webpage (giving it, in fact, it's own site now), although her latest changes haven't yet trickled through to the main site (for instance, the link to the city council agendas from the city's main page gets redirected to her clerk's main page).

Obviously, the first thing to say about the pipeline explosion is: Thank goodness no one got hurt. And further: thank goodness that the many utilities running variously toxic and explosive fuels and chemicals around the country are staffed with engineers good enough to ensure that this happens infrequently.

Nonetheless, this is a necessary reminder of the essentially volatile character of much fossil fuel energy. One provocative social theory of the 1990s characterized much of the world today as a "risk society," where risk management and control are the preeminent virtues. However, the paradoxical effect of minimizing risk in daily life is that the risk essentially gets concentrated, and when something goes wrong, it goes wrong big. (If this sounds familiar, it's because it's partly the motivating idea behind Jurassic Park, a decent read because Crichton doesn't pretend to be able to lecture paleontologists on their craft.)

One of the virtues of most renewable energy is that they minimize risk without centralizing and compounding it. Indeed, one benefit of well-designed, thermally efficient buildings is that they can better withstand power outages.

One more reason why clean energy isn't just about global warming.

Whenever I give our presentation on CES and on the clean energy plan, I always try to say that all forms of energy generation are problematic. While there is a ton that we can fairly easily do to reduce carbon emissions, we are still a ways away from having the kind of sustainable energy system that produces no burdens.

Last week, the New York Times offered two reminders. First, a recent study finds (unsurprisingly) that wind farms don't offset local air pollution (like smog and acid rain). This is where the engineered and accounting modes that dominate climate policies right now run into local realities.

Second, buses, particularly school buses, continue to spew pollution, despite the availability of retrofit technology. Of course, the problem is money.

The SJR carries a sad little piece by a George Mason professor of economics on ... climate change, gun control, and income taxes. I was at first interested to see how climate change and gun control work together, and how income taxes affect the both of them. But no, it's just about a paragraph and a half of "gotcha" editorializing on each topic. It's the most bizarrely unconvincing op-ed I've ever read.