Editor’s note: This commentary by Hans C. Ohanian, a physicist and author of half a dozen physics textbooks who lives in Charlotte and was a member of the Charlotte Energy Committee for several years.
Middlebury College has a stellar reputation for teaching foreign languages, and I have often enjoyed the Komödien that students perform at year’s end to display their skills. But the Sustainable Energy Summit comedy on May 16 fell flat, despite a distinguished cast consisting of Ernest Moniz, our Secretary of Energy, as leading actor; all the usual Vermont luminaries — Leahy, Sanders, Welch, Shumlin — as supporting cast; and GMP’s Mary Powell as soubrette. The Middlebury Summit shook and squeaked and brought forth a mouse, or rather a litter of little naked blind mice, unlikely to help us survive the climate juggernaut coming our way. No serious, in-depth, critical thinking was in evidence. And nowhere in the one-and-a-half hours of speechifying did anybody present any graphs, charts, or numerical data — no, not even a picture of a disintegrating iceberg.
Not that Vermonters need icebergs to understand climate change. Winter ice conditions on Lake Champlain give us a clear indication of global warming by the accelerating increase in the number of years the ice failed to close — from one failure in 1850-99, to four failures in 1900-49, to 23 in 1950-99, to nine in the short interval 2000-14. If the Middlebury Summiteers are blind to the lake, the updated national climate assessment (New York Times, May 6) and satellite-radar observations showing the irreversible disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet (New York Times, May 12) should have sufficed to lend a sense of urgency to the proceedings. Instead, the Summiteers mouthed self-congratulatory platitudes about the economic opportunities in the clean-energy industry. They all seemed clueless. Climate disaster? Bring it on … and let’s make some money out of that.
The summit was supposed to give us Moniz’s federal perspectives on climate change, renewable energy and energy efficiency, and to teach him about Vermont’s progress toward a clean-energy future. But Moniz merely gave a muddled, incoherent recital of old news from the Department of Energy, and the Vermont politicos gave campaign speeches about their own contributions to local business activities, as though they were addressing a job fair instead of an energy discussion.
Sanders, in the role of the mouse that roared, began the proceedings with a grandiose proclamation: “I believe that this small state can lead the nation and that the United States can lead the world.” But if the rest of the world really were to adopt the farcical clean-energy and energy-efficiency measures of Vermont, then God help us. Most of Vermont’s energy policies are uninventive, injudicious, poorly suited to local climate conditions, and extravagantly expensive; and some do more harm than good, when all the collateral damage is considered. These policies are opportunistically contrived to exploit a medley of subsidies, grants, feed-in tariffs, tax credits, and saleable energy credits, and to promote Vermont’s energy businesses and their profits, while selfishly avoiding the changes in lifestyle that affluent societies must adopt to cut back on greenhouse gases. With such policies, all is lost and we are damned to disastrous upheavals in global climate.
Leahy pushed for his pet project of cow power. Moniz politely refrained from criticism, but expressed no enthusiasm. Cow power with methane digesters is a load of BS. It works in Vermont, more or less, but it cannot be applied nationally or globally, because it hinges on an abundance of cows. If Vermont were to convince the rest of the world to follow our lead and acquire more cows, the climate problem would become immeasurably worse. Milk, cheese, butter and meat have extremely high carbon footprints, and more worldwide consumption of such foods would increase carbon emissions catastrophically.
If Vermont really wanted to make a dramatic gesture of unselfish leadership in carbon-footprint reduction, we should kill the cows and thereby instantly eliminate 10 percent of our anthropogenic carbon footprint. By providing dairy farmers with extra income from cow power, ultimately paid for by increases in our already high electricity rates, Leahy is promoting production of even more milk for a market that is intermittently already so oversaturated that farmers survive on “margin-insurance” handouts from the Department of Agriculture. A system of methane digesters operating with abundantly available municipal sewage (“humanure”) could possibly be made to work nationally and globally. But that is the kind of thoughtful innovation that seems beyond Vermont’s abilities.
The much-touted solar PV and wind installations in Vermont show no evidence of leadership or innovation, except in numbers per capita. Weather conditions in Vermont are not favorable to PV and wind installations. There is not enough sun, and there is likely to be even less when the Vermont climate becomes more cloudy and rainy. And there is not enough wind, except on mountain ridges, where the wind is turbulent and likely to become even more so, and access roads are a major expense and a major trauma for the forest environment. The capacity factors of existing commercial Vermont PV and wind installations are among the lowest in the U.S. — we would do better to manufacture these PV and wind devices here, and ship them abroad, to sunny, windy, but poor regions in Africa and South America, perhaps under a lend-lease program.
The much-touted solar PV and wind installations in Vermont show no evidence of leadership or innovation, except in numbers per capita. Weather conditions in Vermont are not favorable to PV and wind installations. There is not enough sun, and there is likely to be even less when the Vermont climate becomes more cloudy and rainy.
Energy-efficiency modifications of houses — ranging from minor “weatherization” to the extreme exhibitionistic stunts in “zero-net-energy” houses — are of questionable value unless linked to behavior modification of consumers. In an affluent consumer-oriented society with incomes that exceed what is needed for the necessities of life, any savings achieved by enhanced energy-efficiency will most likely be diverted to discretionary spending, such as purchase of high carbon-footprint consumer goods, all-you-can-eat pig-outs, vacation travel, and a second home for wintering in Florida. A rough rule of thumb is that every dollar you spend on consumer goods or recreational activities increases your carbon footprint by one or several kilograms of CO2. This tends to make energy-efficiency a zero-sum game, and to avoid this pitfall we must educate consumers to invest their energy savings in ecologically beneficial activities, rather than self-indulgent upgrades of their lifestyle.
Vermont and U.S. carbon footprints are outrageously large compared with the average worldwide footprint. It is arrogant to pretend that a country with the second-largest per capita carbon footprint (by a statistical quirk, Luxembourg exceeds the U.S.) can set a laudable example for the rest of the world. Americans would do better to apologize for the damage they have done to the environment. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s anthropogenic carbon accumulated in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era was contributed by 90 large corporations, the largest of them American. This raises questions of legal liability, which readily explains why so many corporations are vociferous climate-deniers — they might have to pay immense penalties if held accountable for the worldwide damages caused by disastrous climate change.
And the daft Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan with its goal of 90 percent renewable energy by 2050 formulated by our pliable legislators rests on a basic misconception. It’s not renewables we need, dummy, but a reduction of carbon footprint, and 90 percent renewables does not necessarily imply a 90 percent reduction of carbon footprint. One obvious example of this mismatch is cow power, where the carbon footprint of the cows is very large, and maximum deployment of methane-digesters would reduce this large footprint by only a few percent.
Another example is the cute renewable biomass heating plant on the Middlebury campus. This plant claims to be carbon neutral, but this neutrality is (at best) attained only in the long run, over a time span longer than the time span needed to heal the forest from the trauma inflicted by harvesting of the woodchips that the plant burns. In the short run, logging operations in a patch of forest degrade its ability to absorb carbon, and the burning of harvested woodchips deposits CO2 into the atmosphere. As the patch of forest gradually heals, it reabsorbs CO2 and finally attains carbon neutrality, over a span of, say, a hundred years. But until this restoration is complete, we have an enhanced amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and an enhanced rate of global warming, which leaves us with extra accumulated global heat. Even worse: the expected lifetime of the biomass plant is only 30 years, so when it is demolished, we will inherit a not-yet-repaid carbon footprint and a not-yet-healed forest. How does this legacy of carbon damage and environmental damage compare with the damage caused by a conventional oil-fired plant over a 30-year span? Maybe Middlebury’s renewables team knows the answer to this question, and maybe that is why they are now trying to switch from woodchips to willow-shrubs grown on a newly established plantation. It remains to be seen how much this will help their carbon balance sheet.
The best use for our Vermont forests is not to cut them down for firewood, but to leave them alone, so they continue to grow and absorb carbon. As emphasized years ago by Bill McKibben (The Atlantic, April 1995), Vermont forests are in a condition of vigorous growth. Studies by the U.S. Forest Service show that, on average, an acre of Vermont forest sequesters 2 tons of CO2 per year, and the total sequestration of CO2 by all our forest is larger than the total production of CO2 by all Vermonters (and their cows). Our forests are absorbing all our carbon footprint, and we don’t need the expensive gadgetry that our legislators and the renewable-energy industry want to sell to us.
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In the long run, when our tree population ages and growth becomes less vigorous, emissions from rotting deadwood will return some of the carbon to the atmosphere. But that is not an obstacle in the short run, which is where climate change lurks. And if we want to maintain carbon sequestration in the long run, we can do so by selective harvesting of wood, not for burning, but for conversion into charcoal (“biochar”), a scheme recommended by James Hansen (NASA’s leading climate expert, now retired) and by Al Gore. Ground-up charcoal is an excellent conditioner for agricultural soil, and charcoal buried in soil is very stable and remains sequestered in the soil for hundreds of years. Such a scheme is exceptionally well suited to the rich natural resource inherent in our forests. Experimentation with this scheme would indeed be an innovative approach to the climate problem. So what are we waiting for? The next Irene? Leaders with more vision?
At one point Moniz announced that climate action must be swift and aggressive. And then he announced (drumroll and fanfare!) that he has issued new energy-saving regulations for electric motors and walk-in coolers. That, apparently, is what passes for aggressive climate action and visionary leadership in the Obama administration.
Nuclear energy was a topic notable for its absence at the Middlebury Summit. Moniz recounted that at his confirmation hearing he promised to speak out on energy issues, and that was why Sanders voted in his favor. But regarding nuclear energy, did the cat get his tongue? Nuclear physics is Moniz’s specialty, and in the past he has strongly argued the case for nuclear energy as a necessary part of the solution to our climate problem, as have many other distinguished physicists, such as Steven Chu (Nobel-Prize winner and Moniz’s predecessor as Secretary of Energy), Burton Richter (Nobel-Prize winner and ex-director of the Stanford Accelerator), and James Hansen. Nuclear research and technology is one of the areas in which the U.S. still holds an undisputed position of leadership and innovation. Moniz could have told us much about that, but he preferred to stick to a bland, soothing script with little content.
Vermont Yankee is now water over the dam, although I am still hoping that the folks at Entergy might have a trick up their sleeve. Entergy might propose that instead of throwing away millions for an expensive cleanup of the Yankee site, they could install a row of several new, supersafe, sealed, small modular reactors and resume production of low-carbon and low-cost nuclear energy. Can you imagine Vermont as a leader in the innovative and safe use of nuclear energy?
