Susan appeals to the Middle East and world to look to the “empty” US states to push clean energy agenda.
The whole world and generations into the future will suffer because the US is unable to pass climate policy. The US lumbers like a wounded giant on the world stage, already beginning to clumsily sink islands and flood nations. Our ignorance kills you because our voters are bombed with lies by the dirty energy industries that control our media.
Here’s the solution. Money bomb our empty states with reverse propaganda: The US needs clean energy propaganda to fight dirty energy propaganda. Why target our empty states? Because empty states control US policies. Empty or full, every state in this country gets two Senators. As Americans, we don’t have one man: one vote. We have one state: one vote. Two, actually. (Yes, we have other branches of government, a president and so on, but the US Senate can make or break climate policy.)
Populations of fewer than a million people in the ten emptiest states control our Senate. Our huge empty states such as Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, get two Senators each to represent under 1% of US voters each. And California, gets just two senators too, to represent 12% of US voters.
Tying voting power to huge states, not people, has the effect of amplifying the votes of a rural North Dakotan by twelve votes to one urban Californian.
The Right controls the media in rural states to control that twelve vote advantage.
The media landscape has been controlled by the Right to keep people ignorant in these states. You’ll see what I mean if you drive through the states, and also the rural areas of urban states too. Only far right wing talk radio can be heard in these regions.
Currently the North Dakota voter can hear nothing other than fascist radio as he drives the vast tundras to work and back in a hypnotic state.
Fox News is on in all the public places. Rush Limbaugh keeps up a steady feed of lies about climate change. Rural internet connections are slow. Newspapers are just fluff.
But, with money, this can be reversed. Clean energy interests could counter these lies by purchasing the media time that the Right used to turn the voters in these states into dolts.
How do I know this would work? Because it just happened here.
The oil industry tried to take out California’s climate bill because it would be a foot in the door to nationwide US policy within a decade or two. (Democratically controlled California has long championed the policies that eventually seep out nationwide: more efficient cars, appliances, building codes, renewable energy standards.)
The usual array of shady front groups for dirty money funded Prop 23, and rounded up the local Tea Party to push it in the rural hinterlands of the state. At one point it seemed that we were doomed, because talk radio and Fox News rules practically from the back of the Berkeley Hills to the border.
But somehow, a coalition of clean energy interests, youth justice organizations, carbon traders, anti-asthma advocates, environmentalists and VC funders sprung into action, money bombing the hinterlands with an equally powerful reverse propaganda machine.
Clean energy interests spent more than dirty energy interests. The result?
Even voters who didn’t care enough about other choices on the ballot, such as senator, or even governor, drove to the polls to say No on Prop 23. It can be done. A clean energy consortium killed a dirty industry funded ballot measure designed to prevent our climate bill from taking effect next year.
Prop 23 was voted down 60-40.
So please, World: money-bomb America with good sense!
Image: Rob Jones
If you would like the truth bomb about renewable energy in the form of wind and utility scale solar power–the truth is that neither of the technologies is financially sound investment due to their extremely poor capacity factors and reliability. Distributed solar on existing rooftops is not exactly a financially sound investment either but at least it does not utilize more land space, it generally produces power more-or-less when the peak demand occurs, and it can be used where it is produced without having to transmit it upteen-hundred miles.
The poor capacity factors and unreliability mean there has to be a sizable chunk of their capacity backed up by a nuclear or fossil facility running at part or even very low load. The only backup energy that can be started and loaded with any appreciable haste are standby diesel generators and simple-cycle gas turbines, neither of which have heat recovery to catapult them into efficiency ranges above 40%. The money thrown away on wind farms (including subsidies funded by taxpayers)and huge solar arrays (which alter the ecology of the shaded land) would be better spent erecting newer, more efficient fossil powerplants and nuclear plants to replace the older ones; however, the uncertainty of our ill advised consideration of a renewable energy standard paid for with taxpayer funded subsidies and the even dumber consideration of carbon capture and sequestration means few investors want to hazard money for a facility that has to compete on an unlevel playing field. Instead, they leave the older, inefficient plants in place and they run a large percentage at varying loads to provide backup power–thus little if any CO2 emissions are offset by wind or solar.
Actually, Mark, coming from the fossil energy sector as your email shows, your argument is a bit out of date as there is plenty of data out now on just how much adoption of renewable power does cut carbon emissions.
As early as 2008, it was clear:
http://www.industryweek.com/articles/eu_kyoto_signatories_on_track_to_meet_goals_17569.aspx
By 2009, lots more data
http://climateprogress.org/2009/11/12/europe-exceed-kyoto-target-european-trading-system-has-worked/
Germany, the world’s wind and solar leader, has cut CO2 emissions BELOW its targeted Kyoto Accord goals since adding 20% renewable to the grid. It expects to be 100% renewable by 2050. By switching to renewable energy, the EU as a whole has cut emissions about 13% (the first Kyoto target was to get just 8% below 1990 levels by 2012, gradually adding more till by 2050 to get 80% below)