Leadership and Crisis (26 page)

Most of us take it for granted that we can easily and affordably fill up our cars and drive 300 miles. Similarly, we assume that on hot Louisiana summer days or cold Minnesota nights, we can adjust the thermostat to a comfortable level for just a few dollars a day. But affordable, reliable energy doesn’t just happen by itself. Private companies have made huge capital investments and taken big risks to develop our energy supply. And without affordable energy, it’s nearly impossible to develop or maintain a prosperous society. The historical transition from human labor, to animals, to windmills took
thousands of years. But with the steady supply of cheap energy delivered by fossil fuels, technological progress has exploded like never before in history.

Securing a plentiful, affordable energy supply is a vital national goal. There are two main plans discussed in Washington today to achieve it: the liberals’ all-in bet on “green energy” as an alternative to fossil fuels, and the conservatives’ equally one-sided preference for those same fossil fuels. I favor a comprehensive, all-of-the-above approach. We need to unite the public sector, meaning the federal government and our universities, with the private sector behind a common strategy of research and investment. It will be an Apollo mission if you will—except instead of landing on the moon we will try to harness the power of the earth, wind, and sun. Creating and developing a diverse domestic energy supply at low cost should be our unifying goal. The way I figure it: God put oil and natural gas here for us to use. And God gave us creative minds to develop new and better ways to create energy. So let’s cut through the ideology and use some common sense.

My mom studied nuclear physics, my dad is a civil engineer, and Supriya is a chemical engineer. Thanks partly to this family environment, I am an enthusiastic advocate of expanding the frontiers of science and technology. From my work in policy, I have also learned that free enterprise, not government planning, is the key to human ingenuity and innovation. It is capitalist innovation, not the heavy hand of government-imposed rationing, that helps our economy grow faster and with comparatively less energy than ever before. In 1973, it took 1,400 barrels of oil to support $1 million worth of gross national product (GNP). By 2003 that number had shrunk by more than half.
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So I wouldn’t bet against America’s ability to develop immense green energy sources. In Louisiana, we’re doing our part. We are working on developing cellulosic ethanol (sugar cane stalks) as a source of energy; we have implemented aggressive tax credits for solar panels and compressed natural gas; and our companies are experimenting with harnessing the power of the Mississippi River and manufacturing the modular components for nuclear reactors. Indeed, we announced that Shaw Modular Solutions would be building the first facility focused on constructing components for new and modified nuclear reactors in the United States. An innovative manufacturer named Blade Dynamics has started a factory in New Orleans to produce advanced blades for wind turbines. We actively supported their efforts with performance-based grants and other incentives. Another company named Dynamic Fuels just completed a facility in Geismar, Louisiana, south of Baton Rouge, that will convert animal fats to fuel. We were eager to work with them.

But let’s be realistic. A lot of people are portraying green energy as a panacea that will quickly solve our energy problems. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said America needs “an energy policy that will reduce energy prices, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and reduce pollution.”
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It sounds so easy—one can only wonder why such a simple solution hasn’t already been tried. Ask that question, and you’ll often hear wild conspiracy theories about Big Oil and Big Coal. In reality, while green energy offers tremendous future potential, the technology is still extremely expensive. Coal costs about 4 cents a kilowatt-hour. Compare that to 12 cents for wind and even more for solar, both of which are far less reliable than coal.
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Do you really want your utility bills to triple? Over time, technology will narrow this gap in price and reliability, but you can’t snap your fingers and make unworkable markets work.

Green energy still needs to overcome other problems as well. For example, wind energy requires enormous landmass—the land covered by a wind power station needs to be about 2,000 times bigger than a nuclear plant to generate the same amount of electricity.
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While there are some suitable locations for wind farms in small pockets in the Midwest, West, and Southwest, there are relatively few good areas in the eastern half of the United States.

Even where a good location exists, green energy projects are often opposed by their supposed liberal champions. A case in point is the windmill project off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that was opposed by members of the Kennedy family who reportedly didn’t want the view spoiled from their nearby compound. After
eight years
of lawsuits and government studies, the federal government finally approved the project in May 2010.
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Liberals may support green energy in theory, but in practice they all too often shout NIMBY—Not in My Backyard.

And of course you can’t control the wind (just like the hot air coming out of D.C.); it’s intermittent and sometimes it completely stops (unlike the hot air coming out of D.C.). So even when you have a wind energy facility, you need back-up capacity, which means building a traditional plant that burns coal or natural gas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for harnessing wind. But we can’t pretend windmills can miraculously power the U.S. economy—no single energy source can.

Solar plants present the same sort of challenges: they only work efficiently in some locations, solar radiation is rarely constant, and the plants require large tracts of land. (To replace a power plant such as California’s Diablo Canyon plant, for example, would mean replacing a three square kilometer nuclear plant with a solar plant spanning 687.5 square kilometers.
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) And while there is great potential for
building large solar facilities in the southwest, transporting the electricity long distances through power lines means we will lose a substantial amount in the process through what they call “line-loss.”

Technological innovation will make these technologies more efficient, affordable, and marketable. But it’s going to take time. The notion that green energy can quickly replace our dependence on fossil fuels is a myth perpetuated by folks who refuse to face reality or who don’t care about our prosperity, or both.

Along with solar and wind power, we need to continue research on biomass, geothermal, hydrogen, hydrokinetics, harnessing CO
₂
for enhanced oil recovery, converting methane emissions from landfills into energy, clean coal, and other alternative energies. This doesn’t mean, however, the government should dictate which sources are developed. Government can help by offering targeted tax credits for a wide range of potential energy sources, but in general the government should let the market decide which of these technologies will succeed and in what form. The market will tell us if solar is best on farms for large-scale generation or on rooftops for use in individual homes or on traffic signals to assist our transportation system. Government bureaucrats should not be picking winners and losers, and should not favor with benefits one technology over another. That inevitably politicizes the process, with the winner being whatever industry has the best lobbyists.

One green technology largely ignored by the Left is nuclear power. You heard me right, nuclear energy is in fact a green technology, and it’s one of the best options we have to simultaneously make our country’s economy grow and protect our environment. Nuclear power is safe, reliable, emission free, and can create a steady supply of energy. One reactor can produce on average as much power as thousands of
wind turbines at a fraction of the cost—and it doesn’t threaten birds, as the blades of some windmills do.
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The main impediment to expanding nuclear power is what you might call the Three Mile Island Effect. Promoted for thirty years by environmentalists, the Effect cites the 1979 nuclear accident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant as proof that nuclear power is unsafe. Of course, public safety has to be paramount in the nuclear industry, as it should be in every energy industry. But the implications of the accident have been grossly overstated for political ends.
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And don’t forget, technology has improved remarkably in the last three decades. Yet, thanks to the myth, no new nuclear reactors have been built in America for thirty years. President Obama’s declared support for developing two new reactors is a step forward.
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But instead of two, we should build a hundred.

There is no excuse for us to be lagging behind many other countries in nuclear power. Today we get about 20 percent of our electricity from America’s 104 nuclear power plants. But France gets 79 percent, Sweden 45 percent, South Korea 38 percent, and Belgium 56 percent of their electricity from nuclear reactors.
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My mom came to America in 1971 to study nuclear physics because we were the worldwide leader in nuclear energy technology at the time. She left the field in the late 1970s because the Carter administration effectively ended the industry’s growth.

While conservatives need to embrace the possibilities of green energy, liberals need to recognize that fossil fuels, particularly those developed in the United States, will dominate our energy supply for the foreseeable future. The Left has to understand that the Alaskan
Wildlife Refuge, ANWR, is not a four-letter word—okay, bad example, because that acronym is four letters. But the bottom line is this: scaling back domestic drilling, and preventing drilling in ANWR, won’t cut our use of oil and natural gas. It just means even more of our supply will come from foreign countries.

Today, liberal opposition to the development and use of fossil fuels stems largely from their fears of apocalyptic global warming, or what they now call climate change. (This new phraseology is convenient, of course, since the climate is always changing.) Al Gore has been warning for twenty years that we are on the verge of ecological calamity if we don’t dramatically cut our carbon emissions. Back in 1992, in his book
Earth in the Balance
, Gore claimed cars are “posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront.”
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And to think this guy almost became president.

Global warming alarmists claim the science of global warming is settled, though that’s far from the truth. We now know, through the leak of thousands of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the source for much of the information that the United Nations uses for its alarmist climate change reports, that some of the top scientists behind the global warming panic have been suppressing information and trying to blacklist dissenting scientists. Their collusion and suppression of data violated core tenets of the scientific method, which demands open scrutiny and the testing of hypotheses. When someone won’t share data, you can only assume they have something to hide. Instead of circling their wagons and attacking their critics, climate researchers should publicize their data. Global warming should not be a faith-based theory.

The science on global warming is far from settled, and we need to continue to debate, measure, and discuss our impact on the environment. But even the true believer in apocalyptic global warming needs to face the fact that we will rely on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Hot air from hysterical activists won’t heat a single home.

I acknowledge that global warming may in fact be a significant problem for mankind. I certainly believe our economic activities should be balanced by environmental concerns, and that we should harness science and technology to raise efficiency, increase conservation, and reduce our emissions. But, overall these doomsday scenarios are not fact, they’re conjecture presented with a bizarre religious fervor. Skeptics of the scenarios are shrilly denounced as modern-day heretics. I for one am not going to be intimidated by this.