A Plan for the Solar Revolution
(Page 2 of 8)
April/May 2009
By Denis Hayes
The successive administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, bobbing along on a sea of cheap oil, did little to promote energy efficiency or to shift America’s economy to renewable energy. And for the past eight years, the United States was led by a president whose energy policy began and ended with Arctic drilling.
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The energy situation in the United States is much worse today than it was when President Jimmy Carter left office. Since 1981, our oil imports have grown from 1.6 billion barrels per year to 3.7 billion barrels. Meanwhile, many experts expect world oil production to peak within the next few years. Since 1981, our annual greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels have grown from 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to 5.9 billion metric tons. Climate scientists tell us we’re already above the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — 350 parts per million — and this greenhouse gas persists in the atmosphere for centuries. That means that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we would have to not only reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but within a few short years we would need to start removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than we put in. It’s possible to take carbon dioxide out of the air by changing land use practices, such as changing our system of agriculture (see The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat). But it also means we need to take a hard look at our carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, which is where about 80 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from.
So where do we go from here? On July 17, 2008, Al Gore gave a speech that served as the coda to An Inconvenient Truth. By far the boldest proposal in his speech was this: “I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon sources within 10 years.”
To no one’s surprise, Joe Lucas, spokesman for an association of coal-burning utilities, harrumphed that Gore is “not in the mainstream.” Lucas is right. Mainstream thinking is precisely what got us into this mess. Gore is operating in the gutsier tradition of Jimmy Carter’s “moral equivalent of war.”
But what does “the moral equivalent of war” actually mean? Let’s consider World War II.
In the four years after Pearl Harbor, America produced 324,750 military aircraft, compared to just 4,000 the previous year. America produced more bombers than did all other nations on both sides of the war combined. We also quickly produced 22 aircraft carriers, 349 destroyers, 422 submarines and 88,410 tanks and self-propelled guns. By the end of 1945, the war was over.
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