Open to Letter Orrin Hatch

Contents

                            3018 Old City Park Road
                            Moab, Utah 84532-3472
                            June 16, 2007

The Hon. Orrin Hatch
104 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-4402

Dear Senator Hatch:

In the next few weeks you will have the opportunity to vote on a package of energy, fuels, and transportation initiatives.  I urge you to protect our future by supporting strong fuel economy, renewable energy, and renewable fuels initiatives while voting down industry-sponsored measures that would lead to increases in greenhouse has emissions per gallon of transportation fuel consumed.

    Vehicle fuel economy: Achieving a 35 mile-per-gallon average fuel economy for cars and trucks by 2020 is equivalent to cutting $3 per gallon gasoline prices by $1 for consumers, and would save 1.3 million barrels of oil per day if the U.S. vehicle fleet currently averaged 35 mpg.  Proposed loopholes for automakers would undermine this needed consumer fuel cost relief and work against America’s energy security.  The last time CAFÉ mileage standards were raised, we had identical protests from American automakers that they couldn’t meet the standards and it would be economically ruinous to the consumers for them to attempt to do so.  This was a crock, as we now know: automakers quickly figured out how to raise fuel economy of vehicles, vehicle prices did not inflate unreasonably, and the automakers enjoyed higher profits than before.  It is a crock this time around, too.  Just about every automaker in the known universe outside the U.S. is producing automobiles that make better than 35 mpg, perform well, are safe, and are durable.  As you know, Toyota is taking over from General Motors as the world’s largest automobile manufacturer because they offer on the whole a better value to consumers for their money.  Bluntly, imposing higher fuel efficiency standards on American automakers is the biggest favor anyone could do for their future survival, because it will shock them into being competitive on the world auto market.

    Renewable energy standard: A standard that requires utilities to produce 15 percent of electricity from clean, renewable sources by 2020 will save consumers $16.4 billion on their utility bills, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and permit us to make progress on reduction of greenhouse has emissions to prevent reaching the tipping point for catastrophic and irreversible climate change.  This goal is immanently feasible to achieve with off-the-shelf technology:

On November 30, 2006, 450 renewable energy policy, financial, and technology leaders attending the 5th national policy conference, “Renewable Energy in America: Phase II Market Forecasts and Policy Requirements” in Washington, D.C., announced their collective future deliverable renewable energy capacity to be 550 to 700 gigawatts by the year 2025.  This assessment was an evaluative response to the “25x25" policy goal of producing 25 percent of U.S. energy from renewable sources by the year 2025.  The industry panel projection of an achievable capacity ranging from a low of 550 gigawatts represents a 50 percent overshoot of the “25x25" policy goal by 2025 as the worst-case scenario.  In other words, using off-the-shelf and late-stage developing renewable energy technologies, the U.S. can certainly generate 25 percent, and possibly as much as 40 percent of all its energy needs from renewables by 2025 if the investment is made to install this generating capacity.  Conference presentations may be accessed at <www.acore.org/programs/06policy.php>.

Princton’s Dr. Stephen Pacala and colleage Dr. Robert Socolow demonstrated in a 2004 Science article that it is possible to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions now with what they called “silver buckshot:” a portfolio of existing technologies such as solar and wind energy, along with reduced deforestation and increased energy efficiency.  To compare options, Pacala and Socolow created a common unit called a “stabilization wedge” which represents 25 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions avoided over 50 years.

The Phase II conference forecasts are consistent with the American Solar Energy Society’s projection that renewable energy can more than offset the 1.1 to 1.3 billion tons of carbon emissions required per year by 2030 in order to limit the effects of solar warming.  The ASES’s report can be accessed at <www.ases.org>.  I am a member of ASES’s Utah chapter.

Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council commissioned a study by German Aerospace: Energy Revolution: A Blueprint for Solving Global Warming.  The study concludes that 80 percent of the world’s energy can be produced from renewable sources with currently available energy technology, resulting in a 50 percent reduction of carbon dioxide emissions globally and a 72 percent reduction in the United States.

    Biofuels: Energy produced from organic matter can play a positive role in our fuel future, but only if we develop these resources to avoid environmental and economic effects that could be worse than those associated with petroleum-based fuels.  For example, ethanol from corn is projected to consume one third of the U.S. corn crop in 2010, after actually consuming 16 percent in 2006.  The result has been a precipitous rise in corn prices, and a flow-over effect increasing prices for wheat.  The USDA is now predicting eggs will be 23 percent more expensive by the end of 2009 because of the rising cost of chicken feed due to animal feed competing with vehicle fuel for edible grains.  In biodiesel, soybeans can produce 50 gallons of fuel oil per acre and palm oil 650 gallons of fuel oil per acre; this is leading to cutting of rainforest in Brazil to grow soybeans and oil palms, with the result that the amount of carbon dioxide released from cutting the rainforest will take a century to recover by using biodiesel instead of fossil-petroleum-based diesel fuel.

    “Liquid coal”: It is proposed to take billions in taxpayer dollars to build 10 or more plants which would convert coal into liquid vehicle fuel, with subsidies if this coal-derived fuel cannot directly compete with petroleum-derived fuels on the market, and guarantees that the U.S. government would buy the coal-derived fuel.  For every mile driven, coal-based fuels produce twice as much greenhouse gases as petroleum when emissions of the entire fuel cycle are calculated.  Technologies to capture the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by the coal-to-fuel industrial process are currently experimental, not mature and to be counted on.  According to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we could spend $70 billion to replace just 10 percent of current gasoline use with coal-derived fuel.  We’d be far better off investing public R&D money maturing existing technologies for producing biodiesel from algae and dryland crops we can grow domestically on marginal farmlands, such as rapeseed, sunflowers, and hemp; and ethanol from cellulostic wastes rather than edible food crops to replace gasoline.  Any biofuel is far better for our ability to lower net carbon dioxide emissions because the vegetation grown to make the fuel absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to form its tissues, so the carbon dioxide released by burning the biomass-based fuel does not increase the net carbon load in the atmosphere.  Any fuel which is derived from fossil carbon which has been sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years, like coal or petroleum, increases the carbon load in the atmosphere when burned.

I have a very large article on renewable energy technology state-of-the-art which I am continuously updating with new information as I receive it.  I would be pleased to run off a copy to send to a member of your staff to use as briefing material.  The bottom line which this book-in-the-making supports is that we could set about building a national energy production and distribution system tomorrow morning, using nothing but already-developed components and techniques, which the Department of Energy and Stanford University have already calculated is capable of delivering the quads of energy projected to be needed by the U.S. from all sources in the year 2050.  This energy system would not have to have a single fossil-fuel, nuclear, or dammed hydroelectric energy source in it, would produce zero carbon dioxide emissions end-to-end, and would be capable of operating sustainably as long as the sun shines.  It is entirely feasible to start building this energy grid today technologically, and we jolly well need to do it.

Sincerely yours,


Richard Lance Christie
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Letter to Orin Hatch by Lance Christie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.peacefuluprising.org.