Commentary: Good Energy Policy Begins with Asking Good Questions

The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign, The 2030 Challenge, Build Green Santa Fe, The Apollo Alliance, Green Cities, Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, The Green Gauntlet, and Smart Growth America – all of these programs have great sounding names and, perhaps, they give us hope about the direction our country is headed in tackling our energy and climate problems.

Why then, with so many programs already underway, does Local Energy News continue to report discouraging news, and highlight the lack of progress toward our goals? I do it because I believe that the only thing more damaging than great sounding programs that don’t really address our problems is the widespread belief that we are actually dealing with our problems, when we aren’t.

The folly of false hope is that it allows us to continue down false paths, reducing our chances of getting to the right path soon enough to make a difference. I don’t see many of the programs that have been put forward as being “good enough for now” or “a great start”, I see them instead as attempts to placate the public while the powers that be continue with their business as usual.

We don’t need to be energy experts to differentiate between programs that sound green, and those that truly are. All we need to do is ask different questions. For example:

Did the decision to allow private ownership of critical infrastructures, such as the electric power grid, leave us vulnerable to investor-owned monopolies and their profit motives?

Do new energy policies we are considering promote local self-reliance, or do they reward interests outside our communities and put control of our water and food in someone else’s hands?

Do our policies reward a particular energy technology, which we may or may not know enough about, rather than simply rewarding projects that meet the goals of our community?

Let’s not settle for saying that we want to “increase renewables” or “reduce carbon”. Let’s try setting broader goals, like “diversity of supply”, increased local ownership, use of local fuels and labor, and retention of energy dollars in the local community.

If you want to build a housing complex for seniors living on a fixed income, as Santa Fe just did, we shouldn’t allow the developer to install electric heat—the most expensive kind of heat—after giving the electric company the right to raise rates whenever it wants to. It takes no special knowledge of energy issues to know that you can’t protect the seniors in your community under such conditions.

It’s getting pretty late in the game to claim that we still don’t understand the energy game. Let’s ditch the whole conversation about “renewables” and “carbon” and start talking about local, independent businesses providing energy from fuels that we harvest locally.

That, more than any great sounding program, will get us where we need to go.

The video newscast containing this story is posted here.