In 2019, 181 CEOs of member-companies of the Business Roundtable announced that the purpose of a corporation must now be defined as delivering value to all stakeholders, including employees, communities, and the environment. Pitched as a dramatic redefinition of the […]
I decided to start Capital Good Fund (CGF) in response to the 2008 financial collapse because I feel that, in the face of calamity, it is far better to take action than to lament. From day one–indeed, from the time I moved to Providence, RI for a masters program in environmental studies at Brown–my interest has been the intersection of poverty and the environment (my masters thesis deals with this very topic–you can check it out here). Why? Because it turns out that the poor bear the brunt of environmental destruction. Consider this: low-income Americans spend 17% of their income on energy, compared to 4% for the rest of the population. This makes them far more vulnerable to energy price volatility. At the same time, low-income families are more likely to live in neighborhoods with poor indoor and outdoor air quality. What’s more, by virtue of more often living in low-lying areas, they are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change (something Hurricane Katrina clearly demonstrated) and less able to evacuate from and rebuild after a storm.
Unfortunately, for the first couple of years as Executive Director of CGF, I’ve had to focus my efforts on the more immediate challenges of fundraising, building infrastructure, developing policies and procedures, and so on. In addition, I’ve had to accept that just tackling poverty is hard enough without incorporating an environmental justice component. That said, I never gave up on the idea of using equitable financing in order to tackle poverty and redress environmental degradation.
Ever since Bell labs developed the first working solar photovoltaic cell in the mid 1950s, people have both lauded the potential–and indeed the poetry–of solar power, while others–the “realists” and “pragmatists”–have derided it as a niche technology whose costs and inherent limitations would always prevent it from overtaking good ol’ fossil fuels and nuclear power as the dominant source of energy for the world. Unfortunately for the naysayers, the geopolitical, social, environmental and economic impacts of both fossil fuels and nuclear power–which require massive subsidies, cause billions of dollars in health issues, and are tremendously expensive to regulate and clean up after (see my recent article on the spill of coal sludge in the Tennessee Valley)–have begun to far outweigh the supposed affordability and abundance of traditional energy sources.
So while countries like the United States avoided implementing strong subsidies for solar energy and other renewable sources, visionary leaders in Germany and Spain enacted powerful subsidies for renewable energy and compelled utilities to buy that energy at higher rates in order to stimulate the market and create jobs. Sure, the pragmatists might have argued–and probably continue to argue–that the money being spent on these subsidies, which amounts to roughly 20 cents per month per utility customer in Germany, could be better spent elsewhere. But in the meantime, Germany has developed into a leader in solar energy, creating tens of thousands of jobs in the process. Now, according to the New York Times blog, Green Inc., it seems that visionary leadership has begun to bear fruit. In fact, “On Tuesday, First Solar, a global photovoltaic cell maker based in Tempe, Arizona said it had reached an “industry milestone” by reducing its production costs to the point where making solar cells that produce one watt of power costs $1.”
Image Credit: J. Miles Carey/Knoxville News Sentinel, via Associated Press
Coal Is An Awful Energy Source
For all the efforts of the coal industry to make it seem like it’s possible for there to be such a thing as “clean coal” (Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection has been running some great ads dispelling that myth), yesterday’s disaster in Tennessee has demonstrated yet another way in which coal is a nasty, dirty, awful source of energy. What happened was the following, as described by the New York Times: a “breach occurred when an earthen dike, the only thing separating millions of cubic yards of ash from the river, gave way, releasing a glossy sea of muck, four to six feet thick, dotted with icebergs of ash across the landscape.” The ash is actually fly ash, “a byproduct of the burning of coal to produce electricity” that “contain[s] significant amounts of carcinogens and retains the heavy metal present in coal in far higher concentrations.” This isn’t the first time such a breach has occurred, though it is probably the worst, having destroyed 15 homes and released 2.6 million cubic yards of toxic heavy metals. So add toxic sludge to air pollution, climate change, danger to miners, and mountaintop removal to the dangers posed by coal mining and the burning of coal to generate electricity. Isn’t that enough to convince America to switch to renewable energy?
I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be found in its original context here.
Ask most people about the benefits of residential renewable energy—geothermal, rooftop solar photovoltaic and solar thermal, and backyard wind turbines, primarily–and the response is usually the same: they are good for the environment, raise property value and lower or eliminate utility bills. While undoubtedly true, these responses present an incomplete picture of the benefits of distributed renewable energy. In certain instances, such as last week when a single ice storm left over 1 million homes and businesses in New England without power, a residential energy system can mean the difference between seeking shelter and being able to shelter others. Other times, particularly during peak demand, renewables stabilize the grid and lower costs for all utility customers.
The Grid Can Fail, and It’s Expensive When It Does
America’s electricity grid is an engineering marvel, but it is also old, outdated, overstrained and susceptible to failure from storms, terrorism, accidents and high energy demand. And when the grid fails, not only is the loss of power inconvenient, it is also dangerous and costly. For example, the 2003 blackout that stretched from Canada to New York was estimated to have an economic cost of “between $7 and $10 billion. . .due to food spoilage, lost production and overtime wages” as well as the cost of repairing and upgrading the affected parts of the grid. While the 2003 grid failure was one of the most extraordinary outages to hit the United States, smaller scale blackouts, particularly from storms and natural disasters, are rather common.
I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be seen in its original context here.
Despite the recent (and undoubtedly temporary) drop in energy prices, the fact remains that because of the economic downturn and an aging housing stock, many families will struggle to heat their homes this winter. At the same time, the need to create jobs, stimulate the economy, create sound investment opportunities and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions has never been greater. There is no silver bullet for solving all these challenges, but an innovative financing mechanism for renewable energy and energy efficiency could go a long way toward putting the country on the right track. Here’s how it works.
Homeowners Need Efficiency Upgrades–But Can’t Afford Them
Imagine you are a low-income homeowner in Providence, Rhode Island. Chances are your home is 100 years old: the walls are barely insulated, the windows single-paned, and the boiler a relic of the 1950s. In the winter your heating bills are such that you can hardly afford to run the heat, often leaving your family shivering. And even though a $10,000 investment would dramatically lower those heating costs and pay for itself within 5 years, you can hardly pay for the mortgage–let alone $10,000 in efficiency upgrades.
I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be seen in its original context here.
We already know the numerous reasons why bottled water is bad, including the energy and water it takes to manufacture, ship and discard the product, as well as the fact that tap water must meet more stringent water quality standards. But here’s the interesting thing: fossil fuels are essentially bottled energy. And just as the green alternative to bottled water is tap water, the logical alternative to fossil fuels is renewable energy. Why? Well, here are just a few reasons (hint: both depend on current flows and are locally available):
1) Like bottled water, fossil fuels are mined from countries around the world, processed, shipped and then, finally, consumed. This process is wasteful and contributes to environmental degradation, to be sure, but perhaps the greatest downside of a global energy supply chain is that it makes for unstable geopolitics. This may sound like an argument against globalization, but it is nothing of the kind; rather, it is an argument against the globalization of energy. Think about it this way: Thomas Friedman has argued that no two countries that have a McDonalds–that is, two countries that have opened themselves up to global markets–will go to war with one another, because they stand to lose more than they gain. That theory more or less holds up as long as we are talking about consumer products, fast food chains, and the like, but it falls apart when we start talking about natural resources. Simply put, energy and water are not Barbie dolls and McDonalds; nations cannot do without them, and therefore the countries rich in fossil fuels hold too much sway on the global stage.
I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be seen in its original context here
The thing about fossil fuels is that they enable utilities, planners and policy-makers to, in effect, be dumb. Because fossil fuel is essentially stored solar energy, the fuel can simply be pulled out of the ground, transported to a large power plant and burned. No attention needs to be paid to wind speeds, cloud cover or tides. Of course, we know that the entire supply chain of conventional energy–from extraction, to processing, to transportation and on to burning the fossil fuel–lead to social, political and environmental degradation, the costs of which are getting higher and higher.
Moving to renewable energy sources helps mitigate those costs, yet it also forces societies to be smart about energy. To put it simply, that’s because renewable energy sources are variable, and different regions can posses vastly different renewable resources. This variability can be a problem for utilities, because they need to constantly supply enough power to meet demand. According to a recent study by the Rocky Mountain Insitute (RMI), “In the past, utilities believed that they had to compensate for this variability by installing more traditional, fossil-fueled power plants. The more wind or solar power on the grid, the thinking went, the greater the need for backup generating facilities to be there when the wind or sun wasn’t.”
I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be read in its original context here
We Don’t Need Better Panels but Rather Better Politicians and Bankers
One of the key aspects of Gore’s challenge to produce 100% of America’s energy from renewable sources within a decade is his belief that we already have the requisite technology to do so. And in fact, most experts will tell you that while meeting his challenge will require a lot of innovation, (we need to develop better grid control and energy storage systems, for instance) the main challenge is not technological but rather political and financial. In other words, we’ve got the engineers and designers, but we lack the right kind of politicians and bankers.
The political challenge is best exemplified by the fact that the Congress left for its summer recess without having extended crucial tax credits for wind, solar and energy efficiency. As Thomas Friedman pointed out, “both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits—which expire in December—to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas.” As a result of political infighting, dozens of renewable energy projects slated to begin next year have been put on hold.
I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. The article can be seen in its original context here
Last Thursday Al Gore gave a speech, the full text of which can be read here, that challenged America to “to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.” It was a speech that should have inspired and excited Americans of all walks of life at least as much as, if not more than, President Kennedy’s famous speech calling on America to put a man on the moon within a decade. Instead, Mr. Gore’s idea has been met with a chorus of criticism, with the naysayers claiming that it would be too costly, too impractical, and too risky to attempt to meet such a goal.
Apollo and Gore’s “Moon Shot”–A Flawed Comparison
The comparisons between America’s mission to the moon and Gore’s “moon shot” proposal, while useful, are flawed. Both represent great challenges, yet it must be remembered that in 1961 we did not possess the technology to get to the moon; we do, however, have the technology to achieve 100% renewable energy. But perhaps more importantly, although the Apollo program was great for national pride and beating the Soviet Union, it was by no means essential to our nation. Switching to renewable energy, on the other hand, can not only dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, it can also help us regain our stature in the world, create jobs, rein in unpredictable energy costs, lower health care costs, get us off foreign oil (provided we also electrify our transportation system) and force American companies to innovate in ways that will be good for them and good for America.