We often hear that clean, free and inexhaustible renewable energy can replace the “dirty“ fossil fuels that sustain our economy. A healthy dose of energy reality is needed.
Over half of our electricity comes from coal. Gas and nuclear generate 36% of our electricity. Barely 1% comes from wind and solar. Coal-generated power typically costs less per kilowatt hour than alternatives--leaving families with more money for food, housing, transportation and healthcare, Enterstageright.com reported.
By 2020, the United States will need 100,000 megawatts of new electricity, Energy Information Administration (EIA) analysts forecast. Unreliable wind power simply cannot meet these demands.
Wind farms require subsidies and vast stretches of land. To meet New York City’s electricity needs alone would require blanketing the entire state of Connecticut with towering turbines, says Rockefeller University Professor Jesse Ausubel. They kill raptors and other birds, and must be backed up by expensive coal or gas power plants that mostly sit idle-Ðbut kick in whenever the wind dies down, so factories, schools, offices and homes don’t shut down.
On a scale sufficient to meet the electricity needs of a modern society, wind power is just not sustainable.
For three decades, US demand for natural gas has outpaced production. In fact, gas prices have tripled since 1998, to $13 per thousand cubic feet today, and every $1 increase costs US consumers an additional $22 billion a year.
With Congress and states making more gas prospects off limits every year, this trend is likely to continue--further driving up prices and forcing us to import increasing amounts of expensive liquefied natural gas.
We simply cannot afford to halt the construction of new coal-fired power plants, though some are trying to do exactly that.
Chesapeake Energy Corp. supported anti-coal initiatives in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. The scheme was intended to drive up the price of natural gas, and thus profits, by making coal less available and more expensive--with little regard for poor families.Ê
As Kansas discovered after its environmental chief blocked a proposed new coal generator, coal projects also come with transmission lines to carry intermittent wind-generated electricity and more reliable coal-generated power. Wind farms typically do not. Now a dozen Kansas wind projects are also on hold.
Former Clinton Administration environment staffer Katy McGinty engineered the lockup of 7 billion tons of low sulfur Utah coal, worth $1 trillion. Current and proposed air and water quality regulations would make it even more difficult and expensive to provide adequate coal-fired electricity. But the facts support more coal use, not less.
According to air quality expert Joel Schwartz power plants fueled by coal are far less polluting than 30 years ago. Just since 1998, their annual sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions have declined another 28% and 43%, respectively and new rules will eliminate most remaining emissions by 2015.
Coal-fired power plants are now the primary source of US mercury emissions only because the major sources (incinerating wastes and processing ores containing mercury) have been eliminated. US mercury emissions are now down 82% since the early 1980s; America accounts for only 2% of all global mercury emissions; 55% of global emissions come from volcanoes, oceans and forest fires; and two-thirds of mercury deposition in America comes from other countries, Schwartz adds.
Nevertheless, new EPA (United States Environment Protection Agency) rules require a further 70% reduction in mercury from power plants by 2015.
That leaves carbon dioxide and catastrophic climate change as rationales for opposing coal. The latest UN-IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change) report again reduces projections for future temperature increases, polar melting and sea level rise. Moreover, increasing scientific evidence suggests only slight warming, climate change controlled primarily by solar cycles, and no storm, drought or sea level trends that exceed historical experience.
Yet, claims about imminent catastrophes have become increasingly hysterical, as a prelude to international climate negotiations in Bali. (The fact that delegates to this event will spew forth an estimated 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide during their air travel to and from the island paradise is apparently irrelevant, at least to them and the news media.)
The inconvenient truth is that these climate chaos horror stories are based almost entirely on computer models and digital disaster scenarios. They are no more real than the raptors in “Jurassic Park.“
China and other rapidly developing countries will build 1,000 new coal plants during the next five years-Ðwith few of the pollution controls that we require. That means even major sacrifices by American workers and families won’t affect global temperatures, even if CO2 is the primary cause of global warming--which many scientists say is not the case.
We need every energy resource: oil, gas, coal, hydroelectric, nuclear--and wind, solar and geothermal.
We cannot replace 52% of our electricity (the coal-based portion) with technologies that currently provide only 1% of that power (mainly wind).
Roy Innis

The UK may appear to have reduced emissions, but this has been achieved partially by closing down high carbon polluting industries, only to later import carbon intensive goods from overseas, notably China and other developing countries.

Britain’s emissions of greenhouse gases have risen by nearly a fifth over the past two decades, rather than falling as the government claims, a new report has revealed.
The United Nations leaves out aviation, shipping and the carbon content of imports when it adds up greenhouse gas emissions, according to experts from Oxford University, Telegraph.co.uk reported.
If these factors are included, it is claimed, Britons’ lifestyles have a much greater effect upon the climate than the modest decline in emissions recorded by the government.
The report says the implications are stark. Britain has not yet--as ministers claim--broken the link between economic growth and emissions.
Reducing the consumption of fossil fuels would demand much more radical policies, according to the paper by Dieter Helm, an energy expert at New College, Oxford, and two colleagues, Robin Smale and Jonathan Phillips.
Their report, Too Good To Be True? The UK’s Climate Change Record, says the official focus is on the production of greenhouse gas emissions in Britain.
When the country’s emissions are analyzed using the UN climate convention’s method, its performance is impressive, according to the report. That way of recording emissions shows Britain achieved a fall of 5.3 percent in emissions between 1990 and 2005, though there has been a slight rise recently. It has already beaten its Kyoto target of 12.5 per cent by 2008-12.
However, when international air travel--which Britons are more prone to than other nations--shipping and consumer goods are included, the trend is “adverse“. This means that emissions are continuing to rise and are not under control as the government believes.
Prof. Helm said: “The UK may appear to have reduced emissions, but this has been achieved partially by closing down high carbon polluting industries (hence lowering carbon production), but then importing these carbon intensive goods from overseas, notably China and other developing countries.“
He said the implications for this week’s talks in Bali were “profound“.
In Bali, Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organization, told an informal meeting of trade ministers that a potential global market worth £225 billion was being held up by tariff barriers on green goods.
A list of 43 energy saving products, from wind turbines to bicycles and from gas condensing boilers to fuel cell cars, all attract tariffs, according to a study by the World Bank.
Susan Schwab, the US trade representative, said: “The average tariffs on these are from three to 20 percent. The question is how we can do a better job.“

Biofuel does not have to be used for transport (vehicles), it should be used, for example, in tractors' engines.

The growing promotion of environmentally-friendly biofuels is raising questions for Africa: are such fuels a threat to food security or a golden opportunity to cut down on fossil fuel bills.
According to AFP, some 300 experts from the continent and further afield in the Americas and Europe, gathered earlier this month in the impoverished capital of the non-oil producing west African nation of Burkina Faso to debate the pros and cons of biofuel generation on the continent.
“No matter what we say, today biofuels represent a pragmatic solution in light of the energy problems in relation to soaring oil prices,“ said Paul Ginies, managing director of the Ouagadougou-based International Institute for Water and Environment Engineering.
Generation of biofuels could help provide solutions to transport costs and reduce expenditure on energy in rural areas by between 30 and 40 percent, argued Ginies.
Biofuel farming should not be perceived as being in competition with food production and other types of agriculture, he stressed.
“These two types of production are very well reconcilable. Our ambition is that they can help one another,“ Ginies said, noting that biofuel byproducts could serve as livestock feed or fertilizer for food crops.
But Moussa Hassane, managing director of the National Institute of Agronomy Research in Niger, insisted that Africa should be wary of the sudden interest in biofuels.
“Why the particular interest in biofuel production now in Africa? Africa has always been a leading raw material reserve tank for the West,“ he said.
“Africa constitutes the ideal site for the production of biofuels. But of what benefit is that to the continent? Could that be done without posing a danger to food production?“ he asked.
Maurizio Cocchi of an Italian renewable energies non-governmental organization Energy Transport Agriculture also urged caution.
“I am happy that African countries understood ... the environmental risks and threats to food security related to biofuel production. There are still uncertainties that would require research,“ he said.
Daniel Ballerini, of a French bio-energy development research institute Enerbio, suggested that biofuels be reserved for certain limited uses.
“Biofuel does not have to be used for transport (vehicles), it should be used, for example, in tractors’ engines. I am not for the use of biofuels in cars as long as the problem of food security remains,“ he said.
“We should not use good land for the production of energy, we should cultivate biofuel crops on land that is less favorable for food crops,“ he said.
Experts elsewhere see the growing demand for biofuels coupled with the high prices of fossil fuel to have a dramatic impact on millions of people, especially in Africa where food prices are beyond the reach of many.
Escalating food prices have affected almost every nation on the continent, so far sparking violent protests in parts of West Africa, home to the greatest number of the world’s most poverty-stricken countries.