By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
The news this week is really quite bad. I want to look away. But let’s just sample a few items first.
Top of the list — and the planet — the Arctic ice has thinned to a volume more than 60 percent less than what it was in the late 1970s, according to new research from the University of Bremen. Scientists now think that we could be without a Northern ice cap within 30 years, far sooner than predicted by the Interplanetary Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
No ice cap means the Earth will have less reflectivity, meaning it will absorb more heat into the oceans, meaning it will be hotter. I want to make that really simple, because I am sure that climate deniers will come up with some twist that somehow makes not having an Arctic ice cap out to be a good thing. I’m not sure what that would be. But I’ll bet those people who’ve been cheering for the death penalty and for letting uninsured people die during the GOP debates could come up with something really mean-spirited.
Another story about losing our cool: Snowboarders and pro skiers are lobbying in Washington this week to try to get lawmakers to understand that glaciers, and therefore snow sports, are in jeopardy in this warming world. Apparently the climate denial juggernaut in DC is so entrenched that we need Olympians to explain what should be obvious: Hotter average global temperatures means less snow. If policymakers wanted to acknowledge this they could merely look at the factual information available on Glacier National Park, which has lost most of its glaciers over the last century, and now holds on to only 25 where once there were 150. This is scary. But nothing can be done of course because oil companies fund campaigns, not park rangers.
Final downer tale from the mail: Oceana reports today that European fishing fleets are overfishing far more than previously thought, thanks to generous government subsidies. Apparently America isn’t the only rich nation set on ruining the planet. Over-consuming European fishing fleets are threatening fisheries despite having pledged to institute sustainable practices. Sadly, Oceana is one of just a handful of organizations worldwide calling out how “human activities” are endangering marine life. And though it’s been shown in microcosm that controlled fishing yields healthy fish populations, we seem a long ways from protecting the food chain. How many consumers and diners ask about the provenance of their fish? Exactly. As the Oceana report points out, oversight is needed.
Where’s the good news? I always ask this question of doctors I see and people I interview. This week I found a bright spot in a recent story by a fellow green blogger, Karl Burkart. Naturally it’s about green energy.
His piece “How Would You Spend $7 Billion” notes that a transmission line/wind energy project designed to carry wind power out of an exceptionally high-wind area in Wyoming to the populated far Southwest could capture enough green energy to power the city of Los Angeles for about the same price — $7-8 billion – as the Keystone XL pipeline project that’s slated to slog dirty oil 1,700 miles across the US heartland from Canada to Houston. The proposed pipeline has become a lightning rod for activists because it threatens the environment at every turn, from its strip-mining extraction which annihilates forests to its energy intensive refinement. And its predecessor, a shorter pipeline completed in 2010 has been leaking like a sieve.
These aren’t the same types of energy, obviously, but as Burkart rightly notes, we will soon be powering our electric vehicles with wind power and solar power. In fact, I could power my electric car (if I had one) right now with wind power because here in Texas I’m already on a 100-percent wind power electricity plan at home.
Burkart reports that the Sierra Madre Wind Project coupled with the TransWest Express System to transmit the energy, could send power from wind farms in Wyoming to an energy hub in the Las Vegas area, delivering 9 million MWh’s (megawatt-hours) of wind power to population centers in the West, enough to power 1.8 million homes.
The wind project and transmission line would produce about 18,000 jobs, considerably more than the 3,000 to 4,000 jobs that the US State Department has estimated the Keystone pipeline would create. (Pipeline owner TransCanada says the pipeline would generate thousands more than that.)
This massive wind project is unproven and could fall short of its promise. But even if the capacity did not reach the hoped-for potential, the effort appears likely to produce an enduring source of energy that produces zero carbon emissions. You can argue about birds and whirring and site issues all day long, but at the end of the day the environmental metrics favor this type of power.
The Keystone project, on the other hand, is dredging up a vast area of forests in Alberta to access oil a thick, tricky oil, releasing the carbon held by the forests and producing a second round of carbon emissions when it’s burned. All told tar sands bitumen generates an estimated three times the carbon produced by regular crude drilling. And that isn’t saying much.
It’s true that the pipeline could bring in about 500,000 barrels of oil a day to the US, but that’s only about 2.5 percent of what we consume, as Burkart notes, hardly the answer to freeing the US from Middle Eastern oil.
So to sum up: Tar sands oil costs a lot more to extract, requires large quantities of water, ruins forests (sorry TransCanada you can say you’ll put them back but it ain’t the same), fails to displace the Saudis and is more corrosive when it leaks, which we know it does.
Wind energy, on the other hand, leaves useable land beneath wind turbines, consumes no water during production and risks no harm to land, streams or aquifers. It powers homes, and by extension, electric cars, and the power produced won’t be exported, which may not be true of the tar sands oil.
That’s such a good news story. And there’s more like it on the way. This week the American Wind Energy Association will be releasing a positive report on Small and Community Wind projects showing that the sector added 25.6 megawatts of new capacity in 2010. That’s good for both the environment and the economy.
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