Less costly ways to go green

Al Gore recently issued a bold challenge. He dared our nation to replace fossil-fuels for generating electricity within 10 years. He's afraid that we're headed toward Armageddon-magnitude catastrophes soon if we continue on our present path. He hopes his and similar major initiatives will stop global warming in its tracks.
 
He proposed the greenhouse gas-free electric energy test to nudge America's next president to rally us, including corporate and political leaders, to take needed action. Comparing his proposal to previous monumental national undertakings (the Marshall Plan, setting foot on the moon, the interstate highway system and Social Security come to mind), he promotes his proposal as doable.
 
However, are we sufficiently worried about global warming to invest the dollars to meet the challenge? While the science exists to succeed? Will we act to assure our species' survival?
 
Commentators questioned whether Gore's challenge is realistic. Some calculate that it could cost up to $4 trillion. I found his answer to the cost wanting. A better response would include comparing these costs against those of licensing and building additional coal-fired generating or nuclear plants, and new transmission lines to satisfy our insatiable energy appetite.
 
Further, and ultimately most important, what costs will our descendants pay as we continue carbon-fouling our increasingly fragile atmosphere?
 
On the heels of Gore's challenge, multi-billionaire T. Boone Pickens joined the alternative fuels bandwagon. He's promoting wind power (which he seems positioned to monopolize with wind generators on the Great Plains) and solar energy as alternatives to America's foreign oil dependence.
 
While both efforts are laudable, they hold common weaknesses: both require dependence on and expansion of existing transmission lines. Better that we embrace a wholly different, seemingly 19th century paradigm for alternative energy generation and its transmission.
 
Since the 1970's Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute has offered ways to generate/use energy differently. Had we listened to him then, today's world would be environmentally friendlier, having avoided many contemporary ecological threats.
 
Simply, Lovins would have us make efficient use of existing energy resources, embrace a diversity of alternative fuel sources, reject massive energy-generation facilities and generate energy locally.
 
Rather than spending trillions of dollars for greater generating, storage and transmission capacities, he first recommends increasing our end-use efficiency. Installing better building insulation, double and triple-pane windows, low-flow shower heads, Energy-Star appliances, weather stripping, fluorescent lighting, etc. will substantially lower our electricity needs.
 
This approach, he contends, is the largest, cheapest, most benign, most quickly arranged, least visible, but most neglected means to enhance energy services.
 
Take Lovins' home in Snowmass, Colorado, as an example of this approach. It makes maximum use of the sun and wind and passive heating and cooling; no outside electricity. Yet the home performs so well that bananas grow inside - at 10,000 feet.
 
Daily we learn of electricity generation breakthroughs. Improved techniques hold greater energy efficiencies. Each discovery comes at a lower cost than its predecessors.
 
Meanwhile, reliance on massive generating plants is increasingly problematic. Coal-burning plants are major polluters. We are unable to dispose of nuclear waste. And with continuing threats of international terrorism, we remain unwisely dependent on a massive grid to transmit electricity. It's been calculated that a few well-positioned sharpshooters could easily knock out energy transmission lines to major metropolitan areas-certainly a national security vulnerability.
 
Lovins thus calls on us to maximize local energy generation. Windmills, solar panels and co-generation plants are obvious, as is capturing the heat from the asphalt in our streets to heat/cool homes and offices.
 
Meanwhile, governments can foster greenhouse gas reductions. One approach would be tax breaks and credits to all who install pollution-free devices for energy production. Another way would have communities, as conceived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fashion revolving loan pools made up of largely private funds. Borrowers would repay their loans for their energy-saving projects from the savings in their subsequently reduced energy bills.
 
While Gore and Pickens presented worthy proposals, we should first look at lessening the electrical waste in our own homes. By decreasing our electrical needs and shoring up local generating projects, Americans can dramatically eliminate much of the costs associated with becoming fossil fuel-free in electricity production, as the former vice president seeks.


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Gary Knox is a retired Yuma area school superintendent and guest columnist for The Sun.