Power Hungry (45 page)

Iowa has unilaterally insisted that it must have the first presidential primary. As a result, a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of people in a relatively small, rural, agricultural state have undue influence over the selection of the person who will become president of the United States. And that also makes Iowa ground zero for the corn ethanol boondoggle, a farm subsidy program that masquerades as an energy program. (Iowa calls its primary a “caucus,” but it is, in reality, a primary.)
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Barack Obama was pro-ethanol when he went to Iowa, the biggest corn ethanol producer in the United States, and his win in the Iowa primary was key to his winning the White House. His key contenders—John McCain and Hillary Clinton—were both ardently opposed to the corn ethanol boondoggle until they decided to run for president. Once they launched their campaigns for the presidency, both of them became ethanol evangelicals because they understood the need to win in Iowa.

The United States must reform its presidential primary system. The first step in doing so is to reduce Iowa's importance in the selection process. The state's powerful agriculture lobby has corrupted our presidential selection process and in doing so has made support for corn ethanol a litmus test for any candidate aiming for the White House. One of the first steps in reforming our energy policy must be the elimination of the corn ethanol outrage. But that won't happen as long as Iowa maintains its stranglehold on the presidential primary system.

France is run by engineers. The United States is run by lawyers. And that difference goes a long way in explaining why France has a forward-looking energy policy and the United States has, well, no stated energy policy at all.

Engineers build things. Lawyers sue people who build things. One of the greatest challenges in the making of a smart, forward-looking, no-regrets energy policy in America is the paucity of knowledgeable people in positions of power on Capitol Hill and in Washington who truly understand energy.

Congress is dominated by lawyers who want to make policy and write super-long, super-complex bills. The 2005 Energy Policy Act, for instance, was 550 pages,
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and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was 310 pages.
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In 2009, the House passed another energy bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, that amounted to 1,428 pages.
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When printed out on standard paper, the 2009 bill (also known as Waxman-Markey) creates a stack nearly 7 inches tall. These mammoth bills are written by lawyers, for lawyers (and of course, lawyer-lobbyists). The result is an ever more fragmented and complicated U.S. energy policy that has little effect on overall energy-consumption patterns.

The over-abundance of lawyers in American government can be seen by looking at the Senate. In 2007, 60 of the 100 senators had law degrees,
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and in 2009, only 3 had engineering degrees.
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The House had exactly 1 registered professional engineer in 2009: Joe Barton, a Republican from the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
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(Just for reference, the House had 13 medical doctors, and the Senate had 2 doctors.)
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Barack Obama is a lawyer, and so was Bill Clinton. In France, the most prestigious school is probably the École Polytechnique. In the United States, it's Harvard Law. France has about 46,000 lawyers (about 1 for every 1,300 citizens),
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whereas the United States has about 1.1 million (about 1 for every 280 citizens).
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If the United States is to move forward in a constructive way on energy policy, it must begin putting more people into positions of power who not only like to build things, but who are also scientifically literate and numerate. Unless or until there is greater numeracy among policymakers, the nation will continue to get lousy energy policy promulgated by lawyers who have no concept of physics, numbers, scale, or, most essentially, the difference between energy and horsepower. As Stan Jakuba has told me many times: “People will take years to debate an energy issue but not a semester of physics.”

Of course, electing more engineers and fewer lawyers will require us to have an education system that is capable of producing more students who are savvy in math and science. And given the parlous state of the American education system, particularly when it comes to mathematics, this challenge is particularly daunting. The United States must get more serious about teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. America's future competitiveness depends on it.

If the United States is going to embrace N2N, it must emulate some of the energy policies of Iran and France.

Though that statement will anger many flag-waving Americans, the simple truth is that those two countries are embracing natural gas and nuclear power. Of course, Iran's pursuit of nuclear power has led to widespread controversy, with the true intentions of the country's leaders under suspicion—but that only further underscores the need for a strong IAEA, the only international agency with the capability of assuring that Iran does not use its nuclear facilities to build weapons, as well as the credibility to make its findings heard in the international arena. And although some critics argue that Iran doesn't need nuclear power, the country's electricity demand is soaring. Between 1990 and 2008, Iran ranked eighth in the world in terms of the speed of growth in electricity demand.
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Over that time span, Iran's electricity generation nearly quadrupled—and given the country's young population (the median age is twenty-seven), that electricity demand will almost certainly continue its rapid growth.
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Regardless of Iran's nuclear plans, the data show that both Iran and France have dramatically increased their consumption of natural gas. At the time of the Arab Oil Embargo, France was getting just 8 percent of its total primary energy from gas. By 2008, that number had risen to 15 percent. Meanwhile, gas accounted for 27 percent of Iran's primary energy back in 1973, and thirty-five years later gas was providing 55 percent of the country's primary energy.

Iran has launched the world's most aggressive natural-gas-vehicle adoption plan. Between 2007 and 2008, the country tripled the number
of NGVs on its roads. By mid-2009, Iran, the biggest auto producer in the Middle East, had about 1.5 million NGVs on its streets and was adding new NGVs at a rate of about 100,000 a month. Between the summer of 2008 and mid-2009, Iran more than doubled the number of NGV-refueling stations on its roads, bringing the total to about 1,000 locations—approximately the same number as now exist in the United States.
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At this rate, Iran will surpass Pakistan as the country with the most NGVs before the end of 2010. (Pakistan has about 2 million NGVs.)
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Before going on, let me state the obvious: It will take years to add significant numbers of new NGVs to the U.S. auto fleet. Moreover, even a hundredfold increase in the number of NGVs in the United States will not result in “energy independence” or put much of a dent in foreign oil imports. But just as Iran is putting its copious quantities of natural gas to use in its transportation sector, it makes sense for the United States to increase utilization of natural gas as a way to hedge against potential oil price increases.

One promising technology that could make NGVs more viable is the use of “adsorbed gas tanks.” Adsorption occurs when a gas or liquid accumulates on the surface of a solid, and adsorption technologies facilitate the storage of natural gas at far lower pressures, about 500 pounds per square inch, than those required in standard natural gas tanks, which generally store gas at more than 3,000 pounds per square inch. Two universities—the University of Missouri and the University of California, Los Angeles—have developed adsorption technologies that are awaiting commercialization.
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Substituting adsorbed natural gas tanks for high-pressure tanks (which are akin to scuba tanks) would lower costs and allow carmakers to conform gas storage tanks to the shape of the vehicle.

Regarding nuclear power, no other country has embraced the atom as tightly as France. In 1973, nuclear power was providing just 2 percent of France's primary energy. By 2008, that percentage had risen to 39 percent, the highest rate of any country. Today, France is the world's most nuclear-dependent nation, getting nearly 80 percent of its electricity from its fleet of fifty-nine nuclear reactors—the majority of which have a standardized size and design.
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Along with their embrace of fission, the French have taken a serious approach to nuclear waste. And they have a place to put it: After decades
of operating the world's second-largest fleet of fission reactors (the U.S. fleet is the biggest), France compacts or vitrifies all of its high-level radioactive waste and safely stores it in an area covering about 1.75 acres, which is about the size of one soccer field, at a site near La Hague.
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The United States, meanwhile, continues its feckless, reckless, decades-long bender of denial, the recurring theme of which appears to be the notion that if only we ignore the nuclear waste problem long enough, maybe it'll go away.

In the years to come, if the United States wants to encourage nuclear power production, Congress will have to take a more dirigiste attitude. Although some free-market critics of nuclear power, including Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute, believe that such intervention makes for bad policy, the reality is that the U.S. government has already made huge commitments to the nuclear power industry in the form of insurance, waste disposal, and loan guarantees.
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Over the past two years, Congress has extended massive handouts to the renewable energy sector for wind power, solar power, and batteries. Extending more federal support—funding, oversight, and research grants—to the nuclear sector will provide far bigger paybacks than the funds that are being given to the wind and solar sectors. That's not to argue that the United States should aim to exactly replicate the French model. That won't happen. The U.S. electric utility sector is highly fragmented, with electricity being provided by a mish-mash of cooperatives, investor-owned companies, and municipally owned utilities, and that diffused ownership necessitates a different approach than what we see in France. But that should not prevent the United States from moving forward with nuclear power initiatives.

The French have shown that nuclear power can be managed and managed well. In particular, France provides a workable model for dealing with nuclear waste. The United States should learn from that example.

I have spent a fair amount of time in and around coal mines. Thirty years ago, while living on the Navajo Reservation, I spent many days digging live piñon pine trees from land that was soon to be strip mined. (I sold
the salvaged trees to nurseries and homeowners.) While living on the reservation, I stayed warm on winter nights by burning coal in the castiron stove that sat in the middle of a one-room hogan near Fort Defiance that I was renting from a Navajo family. Years later, while living in Denver, I used my pickup truck to deliver half-ton loads of coal to homeowners who wanted low-cost fuel for their stoves and fireplaces.

I get it. I understand why we use coal. Coal consumption and coal mining are not going away. Coal-fired power generators provide about half of U.S. electricity, and their share of the power market will remain sizable for decades to come. But that doesn't mean that I have to like watching (albeit from a great distance) while big swaths of Appalachia are flattened. For years, Congress, along with the past few administrations, including the Obama administration, has winked while the coal industry razes Appalachia.

More than 1 million acres of Appalachian mountains and forests have been leveled since the mid-1990s.
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The coal industry insists that this type of mining is essential because it is cheap. But although it may be cheaper to get coal out of the ground by using mountaintop removal than by using underground mining, the environmental effects are horrendous.

Smart energy policy goes beyond fuel mix, carbon output, and import levels. It's also about land use. That is evident in the myriad fights over high-voltage transmission lines and wind farms—and those fights are going to continue for a long time. But the siting of wind turbines, electric transmission lines, and oil wells is fundamentally different from the leveling of wide swaths of mountains.
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The EPA has finally begun taking a harder look at some of the federal permits needed by coal companies eager to increase their mountaintop-removal operations.
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In August 2009, Ken Ward Jr., a hard-nosed writer for the
Charleston Gazette
who has documented the years-long battles over mountaintop removal, reported that coal-industry officials have admitted that much of the coal they are now producing via mountaintop removal could also be mined economically using shafts.
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I want energy sources that disturb the smallest possible amounts of real estate. That necessarily excludes mountaintop removal. Simply put, mountaintop removal should be prohibited.

The world is awash in natural gas. And while that reality slowly sinks in, the countries of the world continue to waste vast quantities of it. In 2007 alone, about 5.3 trillion cubic feet of gas were burned off as waste, or in industry parlance, flared. That quantity of gas is the equivalent of about 30 percent of the European Union's total annual gas needs.
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Put another way, on an average day the world flares about 14.5 billion cubic feet of gas, the energy equivalent of 2.6 million barrels of oil per day.
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