Imagine a Government Promoting Local Self-Reliance in Energy

Rising energy costs are a big problem, creating a direct financial hardship for those who can least afford it. High energy costs hit hardest in rural communities, where many residents commute long distances to low-wage jobs, and rely on propane – one of the most expensive fuels available – for home heating. Together, these two factors are threatening to destroy the rural communities that are the heart of this great country.

Big problems deserve big solutions, but so far, the proposals to address the energy crisis coming out of Washington have failed to contemplate the magnitude and scope of the energy problem.Even the presidential candidates, given a national stage every day to present a new platform on energy, have not taken the opportunity to put forth ideas on the scale needed to address the energy crisis in this country.

Let’s assume for a moment that the reason our politicians have put forth no credible plans for solving the energy crisis is that they don’t have any idea how to do it. In that case, here’s a fresh perspective: rather than trying to create an energy supply that can sustain our economy, let’s instead create an economy that can be sustained by our energy supply. It goes something like this:

Every town in America should immediately conduct an economic leakage study to characterize the loss of dollars from the community, particularly for importing food and energy from outside the community. Next, identify the greatest opportunities to reduce the losses through local production of food, fuels, and electricity.

Federal, state, and local governments must enact policies and fund programs to build economic resilience and security by applying the principles of local self-reliance to food and energy. For food, that means providing funding and support for community gardens, small farms and farm cooperatives, and local farmers markets. For thermal energy, it means creating opportunities and incentives for local, independent companies to heat local schools and businesses with solar and biomass energy. For transportation fuels, it means setting up small-scale, regional fuel cooperatives to grow, process, and deliver fuel from a diverse array of regionally appropriate biofuel crops. And for electricity, it means transferring ownership of the entire wires infrastructure to the public sector – and operating it the way we run our national highway system – for the public good.

Imagine unleashing the awesome power of government on a set of policies and programs that promote community self-reliance in food and energy, putting an end to the perverse incentives and programs that have created the least efficient, most polluting, energy and food system the world has ever known.

Imagining a government like this – one that works in the public interest – is imagining a revolution that is long overdue.

A video newscast containing this story is posted here.

Invest Two Trillion a Year in Dirty Energy? That's Insane!

Doing the same thing over and over again, and each time expecting to get a different result, has frequently been used to define the word “insanity”. If we accept this definition, then members of congress and utility regulators must be insane.

Holding forty hearings on oil prices, taking testimony from the same oil company spokespersons and their highly-paid shills, and expecting to gain new insight, is insane. This, while scores of real academics and nonprofit institutions perfect decades of research on oil decline and their proposals for an orderly phase-out of petroleum, and continue to go unheard.

It is every bit as insane to expect nuclear power utilities –  the same ones that sold us the first round of the polluting, expensive, and dangerous generators under a slogan of “too cheap to meter” – to now doom their industry by developing renewable energy. They would rather spend money on advertisements telling us how green they are, and then use our money to pay for the ads.

This year, residents, businesses, and industries in the United States will spend $2 trillion buying energy derived from oil, gas, coal, and nuclear fuels. At the end of the year, the fuel will have been consumed, we will be poorer by $2 trillion dollars, and the companies we gave this money to will be richer and more powerful. Then, we will head into 2009 with another $2 trillion dollars in hand, give it to them again, and expect a different result.

That is also insane.

Who is telling us that renewable energy is expensive, unreliable, inefficient, impractical, and insufficient to meet our energy needs? Could that message be coming from the same companies that sell us energy from sources that need to be mined and pumped again and again, year after year?

Is it possible that if we instead took the $2 trillion dollars – just one year of energy expenditure, and gave it to small, independent businesses to build public infrastructures that capture and deliver renewable energy, that every American could then have their energy needs met by local, renewable resources? We need to stop saying that what we want is renewable energy, and start saying that we want our energy dollars to go to small, independent, community-based businesses.

Renewable energy is easy to build from the technical and economic perspectives. But between us and renewable energy stands a giant that feeds on $2 trillion dollars a year, and uses the money, above all else, to convince us and our government that we need to keep feeding it.

Until that stops, we will keep getting the same result. Unless, of course, I am insane.

The video newscast that includes this commentary is here.