U.S. Energy Policy: A Review of “Apollo’s Fire”

John Rawlins has a B.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He retired in 1995 from the Westinghouse Hanford Co. at the Hanford site in Eastern Washington. Currently, he teaches physics and astronomy at Whatcom Community College.

Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy

by Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks
Island Press; 2007
416 pages; hardcover; $25.95
ISBN-10: 1597261750
ISBN-13: 978-1597261753

Part 1

Reviewed by John Rawlins

In the April 2008 issue of Whatcom Watch I reported on a large number of commentaries about using the biofuels ethanol and biodiesel as transportation fuel substitutes. The negativity of those reports is now hitting the mainstream media, as illustrated by an article in the April 7, 2008, issue of Time Magazine. The cover page for the issue shows an ear of corn sheathed in 100-dollar bills, and the headline says, “The Clean Energy Myth.”

Also on the front cover is the following: “Politicians and Big Business are pushing biofuels like corn-based ethanol as alternatives to oil. All they’re really doing is driving up food prices and making global warming worse – and you’re paying for it.” The actual article title is even more damning: “The Clean Energy Scam,” (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article 0,9171,1725975-2,00.html) and I wonder how many midwesterners are busy canceling their Time Magazine subscriptions.

So what companies currently advertise in Time Magazine? Mostly I saw drug company ads, with a few investments companies, and no articles bashing either of those interests. There were certainly no biofuel company ads! And after running this story, Time Magazine is unlikely to attract any ADM (Archer Daniel Midlands) ads.

One important idea not mentioned in the preceding succinct summary statement is that none of the large-scale biofuel schemes are sustainable either. Furthermore, the ecosystem damage inherent in developing large-scale biofuel production would likely reduce the planet’s post-carbon carrying capacity for humans (through reduction of good topsoil).

All these points and more appear in a detailed critique of biofuels by Alice Friedemann at the following address: http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=1.

As Friedemann eloquently points out, the most essential natural resource in our over-populated, post-carbon environment will be good topsoil. Protecting local topsoil (and nourishing depleted local topsoil back to life) needs to be our number one priority in preparing for the coming hard times.

In the following review of the book “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy,” by Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, I will assume the reader is familiar with the flood of objections to biofuels that blossomed in the past year. I will also assume the reader is familiar with the original 11-article series on energy and climate change that appeared in the September 2006 – August 2007 issues of Whatcom Watch. To be fair with Inslee and Hendricks, I also assume that they wrote the book before this flurry of negative findings related to biofuels.

Jay Inslee is presently the representative of Washington state’s First Congressional District, which includes areas just north and west of Seattle. His educational background is in economics and law. Bracken Hendricks is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. I was unable to learn anything about Hendricks’ educational history.

The following Table of Contents provides an overview of the text:

1: A New Apollo Project for Energy

2: Reinventing the Car

3: Waking up to the New Solar Dawn

4: Energy Efficiency: The Distributed Power of Democracy

5: Re-energizing our Communities, One Project at a Time

6: Homegrown Energy

7: Sailing in a Sea of Energy

8: Can Coal or Nuclear be Part of the Solution?

9: What’s it Going to Take?

10: An American Energy Policy

First, we owe Inslee and Hendricks standing applause for undertaking the effort to collect data and write this book. For organization, background, writing and inspiration I’d give them an A+. For motivation and detailed recommendations, they still have some work to do.

The motives for calling for a major energy overhaul are: (1) Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) (i.e., human-induced worldwide climate change); and (2) the fragile dependency of the U.S. on foreign countries for 60 percent of the oil we use (with the implication that some of those governments are unstable, undesirable, etc.).

Whatcom Watch readers will likely understand that, long before AGW begins to take a serious toll on most U.S. residents, peaking of fossil fuels is very likely to undermine our entire built infrastructure and result in some level of economic collapse. Inslee and Hendricks do not even mention this much more imminent threat. That is not necessarily a fatal flaw because many of the responses to fossil fuel peaking are exactly what they propose in this book to deal with AGW mitigation.

Inslee and Hendricks overlook the urgent need to deal with the declining North American natural gas supply. And the time scale for effecting change in energy policy needs to be much shorter than the authors assume. In addition, they apparently remain unaware that U.S. coal and world uranium supply rates may also peak during the next several decades.

One of the most serious problems in recent (since 1970’s) U.S. history has been the failure to sustain a long-range sensible energy policy. Each party seems to have its favorite energy sources, and each party likes to support energy research and development in very different ways. The result has been that the U.S. really has had no effective energy policy for at least three decades, because it changes every four to eight years as a new administration comes to town.

Energy infrastructure takes decades to build; the present U.S. energy industry was largely in place by 1975, and it took seven decades to build. The huge investment (presently worth of tens of trillions of dollars) means that changing that infrastructure will also require decades of intense effort. We are just now seeing hints of the consequences of almost total reliance on oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy (in that order), combined with a long-term energy policy vacuum.

Unless the two major parties can agree on the motives underlying energy policy, and unless they can agree on a long-range energy policy plan for all elements of that policy (including funding), a several-decade emergency type program to address energy policy is highly likely to be a waste of time, money, and effort. At this point, I don’t see any signs of such agreement – or even of recognition that we have a problem. We still have a large number of federal elected politicians who profess not to believe the scientific conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and only a tiny fraction of those same politicians appear to have awareness of (or concern for) fossil fuel peaking predictions.

One important facet readers should keep in mind is the issue of funding. Federal spending is likely to become more and more constrained in the future decades as the economic downturn deepens because of peaking of available oil and natural gas. The funding needed to make large-scale emergency-like changes in our energy infrastructure will likely be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year for at least a decade or two. I don’t see any way to develop that kind of federal funding without some combination of major tax hikes and/or deep cuts in our defense (military) budget — and that obviously could become a political showstopper unless (again) both major parties are in consensus.

In spite of my skepticism regarding the effort proposed by the book, I remain extremely supportive of the authors’ work and urge anyone interested in energy policy to get a copy and read it. If nothing else, it will be a valuable resource to communities wondering how to cope with decreasing energy supplies and increasing energy prices. And if a miracle happens and the two parties can learn to work together on energy policy, the book is an excellent starting point for discussions. I found it relatively straightforward to plug my knowledge of fossil fuel peaking into what I read in the book and to offer some suggestions for modification. In the following I will focus on sections of Chapter 10 (proposed energy policy) in which I see need for more work.

I generally agree with the strategy adopted by the authors: given the need to replace our entire energy infrastructure and much of the rest of our built environment (cities) during the next few decades, we need to conserve as much energy as humanly possible as well as spend money as quickly as possible to develop and build all conceivable, sustainable alternatives.

Of course, what energy resource peaking means (not considered in the book) is that conservation will be forced rather than voluntary, and that infrastructure replacement may well suffer from lack of available energy and funding. Lack of attention to declining energy resources is a major problem with the logic in this book and the policies it advocates, with the result that enacting Inslee’s present recommendations could end in failure.

In addition, if peak oil occurs within the next few years we have waited thirty years too long to start this effort, and an economic downturn of unprecedented proportions is highly likely and will complicate our adaptation efforts. The 2005 Hirsch report to the U.S. Department of Energy supports that contention with language very similar to what I’ve used: http://www.pppl.gov/polImage.cfm?doc_Id=44&size_code=Doc. The three authors of this report are high-profile energy policy consultants with combined expertise in the areas of energy and economics.

First, I would call the proposed project something other than “Apollo.” The U.S. developed the moon missions in response to the embarrassment of Russia’s successful first space launch of an earth-orbiting vehicle (Sputnik). It was a major effort, but an energy infrastructure overhaul will be much larger and take much longer. The moon missions were optional, as opposed to urgently needed. Countries which did not opt for moon landings did not go out of business. Failing to deal with energy problems can and will put countries, including the U.S., into economic decline. An appropriate alternative Greek mythology figure might be Hercules.

In this section there is discussion of funding coming from both public (taxes) and private sectors. I believe the funding figures are an order of magnitude (factor of ten) too small, and that the authors need to consider the possible sources of funding – whether from more taxes or from existing programs. The decision on funding level and sources must represent a bi-partisan consensus to assure long-term programmatic success.

The combined incentives of mitigating long-term AGW effects and declining conventional energy resources mean that the U.S. and the world need to begin thinking about true sustainable living conditions. Current thinking about what that means includes equity between generations for thousands of years into the future, as well as equity between countries. International agreement on the meaning of the word “sustainability” would seem to be an excellent starting point for developing long-range energy policies. This will, of course, necessarily need to include limiting world and country-by-country population levels. In a sustainable world, there would ideally be no waste – all materials would either be re-used or recycled, and there would be no net greenhouse gas emissions.

A shotgun approach to developing energy conservation and alternative energy production approaches seems appropriate, subject to the condition that we only fund ideas likely to result in high ERoEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested). In a world short of energy, the last thing we need is a result like the present U.S. ethanol program that requires more energy input than energy produced from the ethanol – in effect, another energy user. The present U.S. expanded ethanol program came about in spite of previous peer-reviewed evidence that it would result in an energy deficit.

I agree completely with the key policy priorities identified in this section:

1. “meeting energy demand through energy efficiency”

2. “getting off oil”

3. “rewarding renewables and carbon-free electricity” (subject to the ERoEI limitation)

4. “building cities as if energy matters,” and

5. “capping carbon emissions” (meaning greenhouse gas emissions).

The subsequent sections of Chapter 10 provide detailed ideas supporting these five policy priorities.

Next Issue:

In the June issue of Whatcom Watch I will provide detailed responses to these ideas. My comments principally derive from the general limitations of the book identified earlier: lack of consideration of energy resource constraints (with concomitant severe economic impacts) and inclusion of large-scale biofuels as a transportation replacement for oil.