Written by William F. Pickard   

Robert Reich was so on target in his 12 June RSN op ed: “jobs [are] returning with depressing slowness”, and “most of the new jobs [do] pay less than the jobs that were lost” when that inexcusable real estate bubble burst. No less disconcerting is our realization that, despite 23 of the 25 most recent Nobel Laureates in Economic Science being at American institutions, we nevertheless continue to wander in an economic policy wilderness.

Damn it !!! People want to work, and there are plenty of things that need doing but aren’t getting done. The civil infrastructure is crumbling. ̓ Most every classroom could use a teacher’s aide. The social safety net is looking frayed. And on and on ...

Yet, as attractive and compassionate as Reich’s ideas are, they are incomplete. Important notions are missing: notions like “climate”, and “energy”, and “environment”, and “renewable”, and “sustainable”, and “water”; notions without which one is left palliating societal symptoms rather than eliminating the root causes of those symptoms. Patching today’s safety net, kind though that act would be, does little to promote a Renewable Future. While a robust Renewable Future is a sine qua non of a sustainable safety net. With money as scarce as Congress thinks it is, we can’t do everything. So we’d better put our horse before our cart and focus on our Renewable Future!

If medical science informed you that your lifestyle carried with it only a 1 in 4 chance of dying miserably while still young, sensible people would clean up their acts. Well, majority scientific opinion holds that sunset of the Age of Fossil Fuel will be well under way by 2070; and if these pessimists are dead wrong and it’s really 2120, that doesn’t cheer me very much! Prudence insists that we focus forthwith upon our Renewable Future and pray that a sustainable safety net is the first fruit of that endeavour.

America’s gurus in Economic Science are by no means unified on steering our economy. America’s gurus in Energy are no less lacking in unity on the issue of steering us to a Renewable Future. Only in Energy the BIG issues are much, much clearer. First, once (Sooner than you think!) the fossil fuel is gone, there will be massive dependency upon sun and wind; the other renewables will never satisfy our wants. Second, sun and wind are intermittent, and either we engage in massive electricity storage during times of abundance or we learn to hang tough during times of shortage: there’s nothing quite like overcast skies, subzero temperatures, and no electrical energy to test toughness. Third, intermittency can be assuaged by using both sun and wind and spreading one’s electricity grid over a huge area, if one can tolerate both the associated geopolitical issues and the much increased transmission loss over distance.

Item One, the technologies of generation by sun and wind are not yet mature. For example, the issue of concentrated solar thermal generation versus photovoltaic generation is unresolved; and, within each of these two strategies, there are lots of competing visions. Given that we are in a hurry, the obvious route to reliable comparative data is to throw money at the problem. Remember how many different fighter planes the United States produced during World War II? We learned by experimentation. The fittest survived and determined the evolution of our air superiority fighters, leading ultimately to the F-15 Eagle. In practical terms, “throwing money” could cost 20 billion a year between now and 2025. But that’s chump change compared to what we spend on energy each year. And if we succeed, we bestride the future.

Item Two, the technology of massive electricity storage transcends “not yet mature”: it is downright immature. Really, really exciting prospective technologies abound. But if you’re hard-nosed enough to insist that they be “of verified price and performance”, “off the shelf”, “affordable”, “scalable”, etc., you won’t find many takers. Given that we’re expected to need humungous quantities of storage by 2070, it looks as if coping with the storage challenge could also benefit from having big money thrown at it. That money will not be private money because massive storage is not needed today; and sensible private investors shy away from schemes that require infrastructure development now for money making opportunities a generation from now. If big money is to be thrown, it will have to be thrown by big government – otherwise known as tax and spend liberals who inexplicably believe that energy security is a sine qua non of military security.

Item Three, suffice it to say that providing areas over a thousand kilometers in extent with low-loss anvil-rugged grid backbones will also be unspeakably pricey.

Although experts disagree as to whether it is a rigid paralysis or a flaccid paralysis, Congress is in fact paralyzed,. Coaxing Congress to redirect extant streams of money seems an exercise in futility. But one sneaky way of proceeding might be to put a Sustainability Surcharge on our present sources of primary energy and earmark this surcharge to pay for our transition to a Renewable Future. Here’s how it would work.

Each year, America consumes roughly the energy equivalent of 17 billion barrels of oil. Suppose that a Sustainability Surcharge of $5 were to be slapped on each of those nonrenewable equivalent barrels. That would immediately raise $85 billion a year in revenue that could be applied to energy-related Research, Development and Demonstration of the Three Items listed above. Because the present RD&D community would require several years to ramp up to the useful expenditure of $85 billion a year, the $5 surcharge could be phased in gradually and might even not be noticed. After all, the real price of gasoline is now less than in 1950. Eventually, the surcharge could even be tweaked upwards as winning strategies were identified for each of the Three Items and construction subsidies seemed advisable for funding the transition to a Renewable Future.

Objection One: The surcharge strategy is regressive. Nonsense! Because energy undergirds everything, the surcharge would rapidly diffuse through the price structure of the society. Therefore the rich would be soaked more because they consume so much more. Contrariwise, everyone in the community – rich and poor alike – would continue to receive the same egalitarian access to public schools, fire, police, waste disposal, etc. The 47% should come out ahead!

Objection Two: The surcharge strategy is blatant socialist meddling. Nonsense! If it is, then so is the Department of Defence. The reason we have a DoD is that privatized defence has been tried unsuccessfully – as with the city of Brasov (formerly Kronstadt) in Romania, whose guilds manned its bastions and whose riches were repeatedly sacked by invaders. Megaprojects lacking in immediate return on investment are not well handled by entrepreneurial capitalism, which is why defence, public health, the judiciary, etc. are commonly managed by central governments – even though their success rates are less than enviable. Once bumbling bureaucracy has stumbled onto a successful transition trajectory to a Renewable Future, it can step aside and let eager entrepreneurs push onwards to completion. It can also tax the entrepreneurs.

Objection Three: It can not be proven that an expensive crash program of research is needed right away. You’re right! But, conversely, it can not be proven that it isn’t needed. Do you believe that private enterprise will provide solutions when the time is ripe? Really? You mean like it provided adequate flood walls for New Orleans? You mean like it provided flammable battery storage for the Dreamliner? You mean like after a century of development effort it still hasn’t provided the auto industry with a satisfactory electric traction battery for our cars?

Do you believe that the Age of Fossil Fuels is rapidly approaching its end?
Do you believe that we’ll be scuppered if we don’t create a Renewable Future?
Do you believe that the technology for that creation is woefully immature?
Do you believe that decisive action is needed PDQ?
Have you got a better idea for raising the cash needed?


William F. Pickard, older 'n' dirt, is a retiree from Washington University in Saint Louis, where he studies energy sustainability.