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Nation Must Get Real About Greener Energy

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 16, 2008

Environmentalists determined to escalate the fight against climate change are delighted with President-elect Barack Obama's promise to make burning carbon more expensive.

Consumers are right to be concerned. Almost everyone wants lower emissions, and many Republicans, including Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, support cleaner power plants and more efficient cars.

But as the theoretical need to reduce greenhouse gases meets the necessity of paying household electric bills, certain political and economic realities must be faced. Today's economy is simply too weak to support sharply higher energy prices. The energy debate needs to focus first on how to save money and create jobs.

Earlier this year, Obama said, "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."

Rushing to make coal power unaffordable might also bankrupt Florida, a state heavily dependent on coal and natural gas. It's easy to discourage TECO from building another coal plant, as the regulatory uncertainty already has done.

It's much harder to figure out how Hillsborough County is going to get enough clean electricity to reduce the county's carbon footprint by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, which is Obama's goal.

Beyond the talking points on energy are many troubling obstacles.

The public supports investing in clean technology, but which technologies will Congress favor? Probably those making the most generous campaign contributions.

Heavy government involvement will have consequences the public may never see.

For example, if tax dollars are invested in today's windmills, an inventor on the verge of making a better wind turbine will be put at a competitive disadvantage.

And if the government invests willy-nilly in research, how do you make sure it pays off?

The Internet is full of schemes to solve the energy problem, including a proposal to build a chimney three miles high that could harness the power of hot air rushing up to the cold heights.

Another reality is that the climate problem is global. In a recent thoughtful article on climate change in Foreign Affairs magazine, Carter Bales of Wicks Group of Companies and Richard D. Duke of the Natural Resources Defense Council conclude that "even if the wealthy countries cut their total greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by midcentury, aggregate emissions from the developing countries cannot be permitted to continue increasing long after 2020."

Agreement is building that the United States and other advanced countries should help backward countries develop cleaner sources of energy. That's easier said than done.

Who will track global emissions and enforce a cleanup? Bales and Duke correctly observe that only after the United States cleans up its own energy will it have the credibility to lead worldwide. That raises the question of how it can build political support for higher short-term fuel costs while pollution from the rest of the world is canceling out any environmental gain.

With China building a new dirty coal plant every week, TECO's decision not to build a clean coal plant here is insignificant.

And with local electric bills going up, ratepayers are in no mood to pay more to help China or anyone else.

The challenge of helping the rest of the world energize with green technology will be even tougher if lower production costs in the dirty countries steal U.S. jobs.

The Foreign Affairs article concedes that "the prospect of sending tens of billions of dollars a year to developing countries - much of it to China - will not go over easily on Capital Hill, where displeasure over the U.S. trade deficit is already acute."

In the present economic climate, such a transfer of money won't go over at all.

Another complication is that more is involved than cleaner smokestacks. Values and lifestyles are part of the debate.

China says its one-child policy makes it cleaner than countries where big families are common. By avoiding 300 million births, China says it has already saved the earth the equivalent of the entire U.S. population, so it has earned the right to pump more pollution into the atmosphere.

Such disputes will further pit conservatives against liberals and make compromise solutions unlikely.

The best approach for the nation and Florida is to aggressively seek energy solutions that bring immediate economic benefits, such as home-grown bio-fuels, tighter development patterns, more transit and conservation.

The federal government should invest in pure research and let the market decide which technologies make sense.

The only way the clean-energy revolution will take off here and around the world is if it can power itself.

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