Most U.S. States Can Be Energy Self-Reliant

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, but finally have the time to put up something.  I feel like I normally share bad climate- and energy-related news: ice sheets are melting faster than expected, temperatures are rising more than expected, new and dire effects are being discovered, Congress is stupidly delaying progress on legislation, etc.  There is plenty of good news in the climate and energy arena.  People are taking matters into their own hands and actually doing something, and it’s becoming commonplace that they’re doing much more than replacing light bulbs in their house.  This is one of those cases – but on a larger scale.

The New Rules Project in Minnesota released a second and updated edition of a report they originally issued in 2008, “Energy Self-Reliant States“.  In this expanded edition, each state is assessed for commercial potential, not technical potential, of renewable electricity.  The large picture: 64% of states can be self-sufficient in electricity from in-state renewables.  An additional 14% can generate 75% of their electricity within their own borders.  It argues for a decentralized energy approach, which makes the most sense to me.  Why depend on your neighbor for electricity when you don’t have to, whether that neighbor is the state next door or another country.  Keying on that decentralized approach, the report notes that 40 states could generate 25% of their electricity just with rooftop photovoltaic (PV) power.  Generating energy exactly where it is used is by far the best way to go.

You can go to the website I link to above and download the report to see results for your own state, read more about the methodology, etc.  I’m going to concentrate on my own state: Colorado.

Colorado is one of the most advantageous states when it comes to renewable energy potential for electricity.  The report classifies Colorado as being able to generate more than 1000% of our electricity from combined renewable resources (solar plus wind plus geothermal, etc. – note this does not include concentrated solar power, another potentially large source), based on 2007 usage, as seen in this figure:

Climate Change News – 5/22/09: Sea Level Rise Estimates, Oil & Military, Emissions in a Recession

Here are some of the climate-related news stories that I’ve seen this week:

A new study proposes that if the West Antarctic ice sheets melted, global sea level rise would only be 10 feet, not 20 as previously estimated by other studies.  The new study’s author claims that enough of the ice sheet would remain grounded on the Antarctic continent so that only some of the melting ice would find its way directly to the world’s oceans.  If true, this would be at least some good news in the sea level rise arena. One take-away message is that we still don’t know nearly enough about ice sheet and glacier dynamics to reliably forecast their future conditions.  These are interesting results – since they challenge previous findings, they need to be explored further.

Though not my chief concern over fossil fuel usage, a group of retired military officers argue in a recently released report that energy security and efforts to reduce the risks of climate change should be included in the nation’s national security and military planning.  From the article:

The concerns extend beyond America’s dependence on foreign oil, the report says, because no matter what the source, America’s dependence on oil “undermines economic stability, which is critical to national security.”

Also, the report called for modernizing the nation’s electric power system. The country’s “fragile domestic electricity grid makes our domestic military installations and their critical infrastructure unnecessarily vulnerable to incident, whether deliberate or accidental,” said the report.

The report raised alarm about three converging concerns: A future global oil market shaped by limited supplies and increasing demand, rising fossil fuel prices caused by regulating climate-changing emissions, and the impacts of climate change on global insecurity.

Another casualty of the 2008-09 recession?  CO2 emissions.  Many people were curious how the worst recession since the Great Depression would impact emission trends. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions declined by 2.8 percent last year compared to 2007.  The Energy Information Administration attributed the decline to a 2.2 percent drop in energy consumption, largely because of high gasoline and diesel prices last summer and the sharp economic decline in the last half of the year.  It’s not the way anybody wanted emissions to be reduced – millions of Americans are unemployed and our economy is in tatters.  Meanwhile, Cons and ConservaDems watered the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation down significantly, as I’ll cover later.

What’s In The News 9/16/08

Republican John McCain wants to raise taxes. On health care from your employer. Does your health care count as income? John McCain thinks so and he wants to tax it.

Gas gouging again?

Chicago’s worst rain in 137 years. Since records began, Chicago hasn’t seen as much rain in one 24-hour period as they did Saturday. Severe weather events like this have been predicted as a result of global warming. Strong tropical systems will continue to inundate inland regions hundreds of miles away from the ocean. Records will continue to fall.

Action item: forward the video.

What would have happened if Bush and Republican John McCain had successfully shifted Social Security to the stock market? And how has McCain’s campaign responded? They’re still calling everybody a bunch of whiners!

Sarah Palin lies again. She wants to work on energy security and government reform, citing her record as a preview. Let’s see – record fossil fuel drilling in Alaska under her watch. She killed a wind farm project. Twice. She has appointed her unqualified high school friends into agency leadership posts. She vetoed a government transparency project. America, pay attention. This is the version of energy security and government reform that Republicans Sarah Palin and John McCain would bring to the executive office. They’ve proved Republicans can’t govern. Don’t give them a bigger stage on which to show those skills.

Sarah Palin thinks she is better than the rest of us. And ends up looking guiltier because of it. If there really wasn’t any ethical lapses involved with her firing of the public safety commissioner, she should cooperate fully with the investigation. That has bipartisan support: Democrats and Republicans came together to figure out what happened. (By a unanimous 12-0 vote). But Sarah Palin doesn’t want to answer to her constituents until after the November election, despite promising Alaskans that she was running on an accountability and transparency platform.

Representative Christine Scanlan and the interim wildfire committee has released 11 ideas for legislation in next year’s Colorado Legislature dealing with the lodgepole pine beetles. I’ll have more on these in the future.

ohwilleke has a very good write-up about Troy Eid’s snide attack on bloggers. Quick, convene the blogger ethics panel!

Sarah Palin said she will provide renewed attention to kids with special needs. I hope it’s not the kind of attention she paid them in Alaska, where Sarah Palin cut the Special Olympics budget in half. I can’t wait for the wing-nuts to tell me cutting the budget really isn’t cutting the budget again.

Foreclosures are setting records, inflation is high, unemployment is rising, real income has been stagnant for seven years. Taxpayers have bailed out one investment firm. Another was left to fail. Merill Lynch has been bought out. The biggest insurance firm in the nation is begging for cash. American automakers want a taxpayer bailout. But Republican John McCain continues to say the fundamentals of the economy are strong. McCain was correct back in January when he said he didn’t understand economics as well as he should. Of course, none of his seven houses are under threat of foreclosure. And he still has his job. For now.

Republicans think you’re on your own:

The prevailing view in Washington argued against bailing out homeowners who made bad financial decisions, buying houses they couldn’t afford, or the lenders who wrote those loans.

Republicans removed responsible oversight from lenders and now the economy is in a tail-spin. Republican John McCain wants to continue this disastrous economic policy.