The Cities for Climate Protection
Campaign, The 2030 Challenge, Build Green Santa Fe, The Apollo
Alliance, Green Cities, Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, The Green
Gauntlet, and Smart Growth America – all of these programs have great
sounding names and, perhaps, they give us hope about the direction our
country is headed in tackling our energy and climate problems.
Why
then, with so many programs already underway, does Local Energy News
continue to report discouraging news, and highlight the lack of
progress toward our goals? I do it because I believe that the only
thing more damaging than great sounding programs that don’t really
address our problems is the widespread belief that we are actually
dealing with our problems, when we aren’t.
The folly of false
hope is that it allows us to continue down false paths, reducing our
chances of getting to the right path soon enough to make a difference.
I don’t see many of the programs that have been put forward as being
“good enough for now” or “a great start”, I see them instead as
attempts to placate the public while the powers that be continue with
their business as usual.
We don’t need to be energy experts to
differentiate between programs that sound green, and those that truly
are. All we need to do is ask different questions. For example:
Did
the decision to allow private ownership of critical infrastructures,
such as the electric power grid, leave us vulnerable to investor-owned
monopolies and their profit motives?
Do new energy policies we
are considering promote local self-reliance, or do they reward
interests outside our communities and put control of our water and food
in someone else’s hands?
Do our policies reward a particular
energy technology, which we may or may not know enough about, rather
than simply rewarding projects that meet the goals of our community?
Let’s
not settle for saying that we want to “increase renewables” or “reduce
carbon”. Let’s try setting broader goals, like “diversity of supply”,
increased local ownership, use of local fuels and labor, and retention
of energy dollars in the local community.
If you want to build a
housing complex for seniors living on a fixed income, as Santa Fe just
did, we shouldn’t allow the developer to install electric heat—the most
expensive kind of heat—after giving the electric company the right to
raise rates whenever it wants to. It takes no special knowledge of
energy issues to know that you can’t protect the seniors in your
community under such conditions.
It’s getting pretty late in the
game to claim that we still don’t understand the energy game. Let’s
ditch the whole conversation about “renewables” and “carbon” and start
talking about local, independent businesses providing energy from fuels
that we harvest locally.
That, more than any great sounding program, will get us where we need to go.
The video newscast containing this story is posted here.