They’re undermining us again?

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee voting through a provision that would kill the U.S. military’s ambitious biofuels program. Last night, the Senate Armed Services Committee did the same, and worse. It voted not only to block purchase of any fuel more expensive than fossil fuels, but to “prohibit the construction of a biofuels refinery or any other facility or infrastructure used to refine biofuels unless the requirement is specifically authorized by law.” Congress micromanaging military energy strategy: What could go wrong?

“But David,” you’re saying, “Democrats have a majority in the Senate. The committee has 14 Democrats and only 12 Republicans. How could this happen?”

Jim Webb (D-Va.)

Check out the list of Dems on the committee. It’s a Who’s Who of cravens, warmongers, and preening faux centrists — some of the most reliably disappointing Dems in the Senate. But last night, only two of them voted against energy security and the best judgment of U.S. military leaders. (It goes without saying that every Republican voted against innovation; it’s now reflexive for them.) The two Dems flipped the final vote [PDF] 13-12 in favor of overriding the military.

Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)

What ostensible Democrats had the vindictiveness, myopia, and dishonor necessary? Why, Jim Webb (Va.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), of course. Webb has long been a big booster of oil and coal, but voting to constrain military strategy in the name of preventing competitors to fossil fuels is low even for him. Manchin is, by all accounts, just dumb as a box of hair. His close election in 2010 convinced him that to survive he has to lunge right at every opportunity, so he lunges with abandon. He’d probably shoot a pool of algae with a rifle if his brain trust told him to. Above all, he is a servant of the coal industry, which needs to block biofuels as way to bully the military into using expensive and polluting coal-to-liquid fuels.

James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

Webb and Manchin, self-serving jerk and belligerent dunce, find their mirror image in the leaders of this backroom Republican insurgency against U.S. military policy: Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Inhofe’s against clean energy because ARGLE BARGLE. McCain, though, used to be in favor. He used to talk about climate change quite a bit. Proposed a bill or two on the subject, as I recall. But ever since he lost to Obama, he has been increasingly bitter.

John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Now he says, “Adopting a ‘green agenda’ for national defense of course is a terrible misplacement of priorities” and “the president doesn’t understand national security.” National security, to an overcompensating narcissist like John McCain, means war, threatening war, or doing something “tough” to show the world we’re ready for war. He doesn’t see how using less oil fits into that.

It is an unbelievable rebuke and insult to military leaders for Republicans in Congress to do this, but then again, Republicans in Congress have always had more fealty to fossil fuels than the military. Just imagine what will happen after November 2012!

The bill — the Pentagon budget for next year — still has to pass on the floor of the House and Senate, and then go to conference committee, and then to the president’s desk. At any of those junctures, these amendments could be stripped out. But things aren’t looking good so far.

Fill ‘er up — with biofuels? (Photo by U.S. Army Africa)

The U.S. military’s “going green” is not a singular phenomenon. There are several different things going on under that rubric, with different rationales and different effects. Some of them make such obvious strategic, economic, and environmental sense that no one really can, or does, oppose them. But one in particular — the biofuels initiative — is much less clear-cut. Before discussing that, though, let’s try to pick apart and categorize the green initiatives underway at the Department of Defense.

First off, there are attempts to reduce fossil-fuel use in the theater of war, mainly Iraq and Afghanistan, through more efficiency (insulated tents, LED lights) and the use of distributed renewables. These efforts directly enhance battlefield effectiveness. They make fighting units lighter and faster. They reduce the need for fuel convoys, saving lives and money. They are unimpeachable — even Republicans in Congress will hesitate to second-guess the military’s tactical logistics decisions.

Second, there are attempts to make U.S. military bases more independent of civilian power grids, which are vulnerable to accidents, blackouts, or attacks. In part this is being done by generating power on-site. Solar power for bases has become far more affordable, thanks to plummeting solar-panel prices, but there are also experiments underway with wind, geothermal, and biomass. Bases are also increasing energy and waste efficiency and experimenting with smart microgrids. These efforts seem somewhat more vulnerable to political attack, but I’ve not yet heard of any.

Third, there are efforts to find new liquid fuels for the military’s vast land, air, and water fleets. This one is the biggie, from the standpoint of sheer quantities of energy and money. It’s the most difficult. And it’s also the most controversial, in terms of Republican opposition and environmental risk.

There’s been work on hybrid military ground vehicles, but as far as I know, there’s no prospect of electricity substantially powering ships, planes, and tanks. There’s also very little being done on natural-gas vehicles for the military, at least that I’ve been able to find.

So that means biofuels. A lot of biofuels. Mind-boggling amounts.

Thus far, the military has been careful to avoid biofuel crops that compete with food crops, which are, as all good Grist readers know, a bane — and, climate-wise, not much better than gasoline. Instead, it is trying to stimulate markets in biofuel alternatives like cooking oil, algae, animal fats, and camelina.

It’s a fascinating and laudable effort, but there are two potential problems. First, all these alternatives are wildly expensive. (The algae fuel is $424 a gallon!) That’s to be expected — they’re all experimental. The military’s theory is that it represents a big enough customer to single-handedly create a market sufficient to drive down the cost to competitive levels.

That’s not entirely crazy. The military is the country’s biggest energy consumer: “In fiscal year 2009, the DOD consumed 932 trillion Btu of site delivered energy at a cost of 13.3 billion dollars.” Roughly three-quarters of that went to “mobility fuels” for the fleets. That’s close to $10 billion a year, or, put another way, 360,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s not enormous on a global level — only about 2 percent of U.S. consumption — but it seems large enough to provide biofuels with a serious kickstart. Innovation is never certain, but the military is going about it in a smart way, from labs to field tests.

Still, fuel costs are squeezing DOD’s budget today (see this new briefing from Third Way). Driving down the costs of biofuel alternatives fast enough, at a large enough scale, would be a stunning and, as far as I know, unprecedented achievement.

Which brings up the other possible problem, which is, what if the effort succeeds? It’s one thing to brew a few hundred thousand gallons of algae fuel. It’s another entirely to brew several billion gallons every year. Is there enough cooking oil in all the world’s McDonalds for that much fuel? Enough space to grow that much camelina? These fuels appear benign in their current small-batch phase, but if they were to scale up that much, that fast, it’s hard to say what kind of environmental or social problems might crop up.

Also, the main problem with oil, from a military strategic standpoint, is not so much anything about oil itself, but just the fact that it so dominates the fuel mix. The military is dependent on a single, volatile supply chain over which it has little control. The best move from a strategic standpoint is to diversify. But what if, at the end of all this, the military just ends up dependent on one or two forms of biofuel, with volatile supply chains of their own?

Even if those fuel supply chains are domestic — even if, by some miracle, enough non-food biofuel can be produced within the U.S. to fuel the military — is it really healthy to have the military so dependent on one or two domestic industries? Those would become industries that, for national-security reasons, can’t be allowed to fail or even substantially shrink. They’d be one more addition to the military-industrial complex, one more advocate for military expansion. It’s a recipe for corruption.

None of this is to say that congressional Republicans are right and DOD should just scrap the whole thing. But it is to say that the biofuels initiative is different from the other military “greening” initiatives, more economically and environmentally fraught. Getting lighter and faster on the battlefield saves money and lives; it is self-justifying. Making military bases more self-sufficient is self-evidently a smart strategic move. But shifting from oil to biofuels on a grand scale is a huge, audacious, expensive, and extremely risky gamble. It absolutely warrants close oversight and public discussion.

Photo by the U.S. Army.

The U.S. military recognizes that dependence on fossil fuels is a threat to U.S. strategic influence and its own operational effectiveness. With that in mind, it’s trying to make itself lighter and leaner, reducing energy consumption at bases and on the battlefield while working to develop fuel alternatives for its ship and plane fleets. Republicans have been quietly grumbling about this for a while; now they are openly opposing it. The GOP wastes no opportunity to boast of “supporting the troops,” but that support apparently ends where Big Oil contributions begin.

Let’s look at a few examples, shall we?

GOP tries to block use of cleaner fuels

Last week, the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee proposed a new Pentagon budget. Tucked away inside it was a provision that would prohibit the Department of Defense from buying any alternative fuels that cost more than conventional fossil fuels. TPM has the story.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan laments that this provision would kill the $12 million “Green Strike Group” program the Navy is running, which would field a strike group running entirely on biofuels (and a nuclear-powered carrier) for a naval exercise in June. The Navy hopes to have an entire “Great Green Fleet” in the water by 2016.

But the language is far broader than that. It would effectively prohibit military field-testing of any non-fossil fuel. After all, if alternatives were already cheaper than fossil fuels, they wouldn’t be alternatives. The Air Force couldn’t experiment with fuel blends for its jets. The Army couldn’t fuel its “Green Warrior Convoy.” This provision would explicitly ban the military from being an instrument of energy innovation.

GOP tries to push use of dirtier fuel

But wait! There is one expensive alternative fuel that congressional Republicans support. You see, Section 526 of 2007′s Energy Independence and Security Act prohibits the military from buying fuel that is more carbon-intensive than crude oil. Earlier this month, Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) offered an amendment to an appropriations bill, later passed by the House, that would bar the military from enforcing Sec. 526.

Why, you ask? “Placing limits on federal agencies’ fuel choices,” says Flores, “is an unacceptable precedent to set in regard to America’s energy policy and independence.”

Yes, I’ll let that irony sink in a moment.

Why are Republicans so keen to get rid of Sec. 526? Are there dirtier-but-cheaper fuels the military could be using?

Well, no. Instead, Republicans have seized on the idea of using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to liquid fuel (a technology made famous by Hitler — don’t tell the Heartland Institute). Building a plant to do this requires enormous capital investment, running one requires enormous operational and maintenance investments, and the result is … fuel more expensive than oil. This is to say nothing of the fact that it requires mining and transporting coal on the front end and releases up to 2.5 times as much CO2 as oil when burned.

So, let’s pause and review. The Republican position on military fuel choices is as follows: Congressional restrictions are an “unacceptable precedent” when they prohibit dirtier fuels, but necessary when they prohibit cleaner fuels. Also, it is unacceptable for the military to pay more for cleaner fuels, but necessary for it to pay more for dirtier fuel.

If you were cynical, you’d almost think that the issue had nothing to do with Congress’s relationship with the military, or with costs. You’d almost think Republicans just support fossil fuels and oppose clean energy, no matter the context.

Photo by Eric Tastad.

On Thursday, President Obama will visit TPI Composites, a wind manufacturer in Newton, Iowa (population, 15,254). There, he will reiterate his support for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal support program that has helped drive wind’s rapid expansion in the U.S. The PTC is now in peril, as Congress appears unlikely to renew it when it expires at the end of this year. The loss of the PTC would put tens of thousands of current jobs — and almost 100,000 future jobs [PDF] — at risk.

Newton’s experience is incredibly illustrative, so let’s recount a little history.

Vulture capitalism

Newton used to be the “washing machine capital of the world,” with five washing machine manufacturers. One by one they closed, until there was only Maytag, which at its height employed around 4,000 Newtonians. Then, in 2006, Maytag was the subject of a bidding war. On one side was Chinese manufacturer Haier Group, in partnership with none other than former Romney employer Bain Capital (Romney was gone by then). On the other was Whirlpool.

Whirlpool won, but it would have been vulture capitalism either way. The Maytag plant was summarily shuttered and the jobs sent out of state.

Manufacturing jobs return on the wind, with bipartisan support

Since then, Newton has turned itself around, in no small part by attracting several wind-turbine manufacturers, including Trinity Structural Towers and TPI Composites.

It’s not an unusual story in Iowa, which is a leading wind-power state. Almost 19 percent of the state’s power came from wind in 2011 and the industry employs some 6,000-7,000 Iowans. According to wind industry estimates, since the state passed a renewable energy standard in 1983, some $5 billion in wind investment has flooded the state.

Unsurprisingly, these developments have left wind power with broad bipartisan support in Iowa. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has defended the wind industry and the PTC against attacks from the right. Even Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), one of the most notoriously bigoted right-wing nutbags in all of Congress, has said, “Now is the time for stability in the wind industry, and the PTC offers just that.” When they were in the state, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Thaddeus McCotter (remember him?) all posed next to a wind-turbine blade made by none other than TPI Composites, to show their support for the industry.

(Side bar: A new analysis [PDF] shows that “adding more wind power to the electric grid could reduce wholesale market prices by more than 25 percent in the Midwest region by 2020.”)

But Romney hates wind

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

And here he is in Colorado, smirking about the wind industry losing 10,000 jobs since 2009. That’s true, of course — it’s gone from a high of 85,000 to around 75,000 now — but mainly because the industry is nervous about the future of the PTC. Which Romney wants to kill for good. Thus insuring far greater job losses.

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012′s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

Going solar in Afghanistan. (Photo by U.S. Marine Corps)

This is my contribution to a dialogue on the military and clean energy being hosted by National Journal.

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To understand the promise of renewable energy for the U.S. military, it helps to start as far from Washington, D.C., as possible. (This is true for most forms of understanding.) Start far from the politicians, even from the military brass, far from the rooms where big-money decisions are made, far out on the leading edge of the conflict, with a small company of Marines in Afghanistan’s Sangin River Valley.

Not long ago, for a three-day mission out of a forward operating base in Afghanistan, each Marine would have humped between 20 and 35 pounds of batteries. One of the reasons Marines are so lethal in such small numbers today is that they are constantly connected by radios and computers. But radios and computers require a constant supply of batteries, brought by convoy over some of the deadliest roads on earth and then piled on the backs of Marines in highly kinetic environments.

In late 2010, India Company, from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, tried something new. They packed Solar Portable Alternative Communications Energy Systems, or SPACES — flexible solar panels, 64 square inches, that weigh about 2.5 pounds each. One 1st Lieutenant from India 3/5 later boasted that his patrol shed 700 pounds.

“We stayed out for three weeks,” he said, “and didn’t need a battery resupply once.”

This is a small example, of no great economic or geostrategic significance, yet it carries a profound lesson. It is a lesson that, in the unfolding age of energy insecurity, can be expressed as something like a universal law: reduced dependence on energy supply lines means greater autonomy, flexibility, and effectiveness.

The U.S. Marine Corps prides itself on being the U.S. military’s ship-to-shore expeditionary force — light, fast, and lethal, able to deploy quickly and operate autonomously in hostile or austere circumstances. So they have been the most sensitive to the chafing restrictions of what Gen. James Mattis, a Marine commander in the first Iraq war, famously called the “tether of fuel.”

That tether, the convoys crisscrossing Iraq and Afghanistan, not only slows the Marines and restricts their range of motion, it also gets them killed — one killed or wounded for each 50 convoys or so. And it is wildly expensive. By the time fuel is convoyed up through Pakistan or down through Russia, over the Hindu Kush mountains or across the Amu Darya river, and out from the big bases to the forward bases, sometimes on helicopter, fuel that costs the Marines $3 a gallon at the pump can reach a “fully burdened cost” of as high as $400 a gallon. It’s fair to say that Marines running diesel generators at forward operating bases in Afghanistan are using some of the most expensive fuel in the world.

With that in mind, Marines are field testing insulated tents, portable solar panels, LED lights, and systems to purify and cool local water. I reported on their efforts for a story in Outside last year, and every source I spoke to had the same thing to say: There may be some grumbling about the energy effort in the middle ranks, from officers set in their ways, but among young Marines on the front lines, and among the brass in the top ranks, there is nothing but enthusiasm.

It isn’t about “greening” anything or cooling the climate. “Other people are busy saving the planet; this is about saving Marine lives,” Col. Bob Charette, director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, said recently. “I’d kiss a polar bear if it meant getting one Marine off an IED-filled highway.”

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has said that both the Navy and Marines will reduce fossil-fuel consumption by half by 2020. The Army and Air Force have also adopted aggressive goals. The military gets it: Reduced dependence on energy supply lines means greater autonomy, flexibility, and effectiveness. It’s not only true in the theater of war. It’s true for the great military fleets at sea and in the sky. It’s true for military bases in the U.S. or across the world, dependent on civilian power grids subject to attacks or blackouts.

And it’s not just true for the military. In a time of rising fossil-fuel prices and increasingly apparent climate dangers, the tether of fuel binds all of us — homes, businesses, communities, and whole economies — to a future of vulnerability and instability. Using less energy and generating more of our own is about more than dollars spent or saved. It’s about self-determination. That makes for a more effective military and a more secure, productive society.

Photo by rustman.

A version of this post originally appeared on Climate Progress.

In an attempt to keep the political war against renewable energy in the headlines, Republicans held another hearing to question the value of government investments in the sector.

Looks like 10 political sideshows on Solyndra weren’t enough.

If the hearing were being used as a chance to objectively assess where the industry stands, that would be one thing. But the title of the meeting gave away the real political intent: “The Obama Administration’s Green Energy Gamble: What Have All The Taxpayer Subsidies Achieved?”

Actually, those green energy investments have yielded substantial returns. While the political grandstanding goes on in the House of Representatives, here are five important things you should know about how promotion of clean energy has supported American businesses and consumers:

1. The 1603 grant program supported up to 75,000 jobs and 23,000 renewable energy projects during the height of the recession. When the recession hit, it was very difficult for project developers to find banks that were willing to utilize tax credits. So a cash grant program was created to give companies an easier way to finance projects. While it’s very difficult to know the exact influence of the grant on each project, the program played a major role in maintaining momentum — helping support $25 billion in gross economic activity, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

2. The production tax credit helps leverage up to $20 billion in private investment annually. With this key tax credit in place, the wind industry has dropped costs by 90 percent over the last few decades. It’s helped states like Iowa reach 20 percent wind penetration — bringing that state over 215 businesses that support 5,000 workers. Across the rest of the U.S., the entire industry supports 75,000 jobs, with 30,000 in manufacturing. However, up to 37,000 of those jobs could be at risk due to congressional lawmakers’ inability to extend the tax credit.

3. The loan guarantee program is expected to cost $2 billion less than budgeted. This program has gotten a black eye due to the bankruptcies of a few companies — most famously Solyndra — that received guarantees. But according to John McCain’s national finance chair, Herb Allison, the cost to taxpayers will likely be far less than initially thought. In fact, over the last 20 years of experience, the U.S. government has shown a knack for managing risk — with loans and loan guarantee programs only costing tax payers $0.94 for every $100 invested.

4. Home weatherization grew 1,000 percent from April to June of 2011, creating 14,800 jobs. After a slow ramp-up, efficiency programs supported by the stimulus package have helped weatherize hundreds of thousands of homes. In addition to supporting the retrofits of individual homes, the Obama administration has supported the Better Buildings Initiative, a program that has leveraged billions of private dollars to upgrade more than 4 billion square feet of public and private buildings in the next two years. That’s enough demand to support over 100,000 jobs.

5. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) has supported dozens of potentially groundbreaking technologies in advanced materials, renewable fuels, electricity generation, waste heat, and battery storage. Helping enhance America’s lead in technological innovation, ARPA-E — initially funded through the stimulus package — has helped inventors, companies, and university labs boost their work. This program has immense bipartisan support for promoting the “innovative research that makes America great and has fueled our economic growth for generations.”

Despite these successes, Republicans continue milking the Solyndra bankruptcy for an election-year story that doesn’t hold up — dragging the rest of the clean energy industry into the mud.

The sector has gone through some high-profile shake-ups and bankruptcies, so it’s the duty of lawmakers to understand how taxpayer dollars are being deployed. That’s a supportable endeavor. But holding yet another hearing to lambast the president for a so-called “gamble” in clean energy isn’t productive for anyone.

When it comes to purchasing clean energy, the more the merrier. (Photo by Hepburn Wind.)

We join together with our fellow humans for the sake of saving a buck all the time. That’s why public transportation exists — it’s cheaper for 20 people to get on one bus than it is for 20 people to drive their own cars. (Oh right, and buses are also super cool.) Or think of roommates — sure, they never wash their dishes, but living with them saves us hundreds of dollars in rent.

Groundswell, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., wants to add clean electricity to the list of things that are better off shared.

Groundswell was founded by three guys who worked on President Obama’s campaign in 2008. “They had really seen the impact of community organizing in a political space,” says Elizabeth Lindsey, the group’s managing director. “And after the campaign, they were really interested in seeing how you could take that model and make a tangible difference outside the political sphere.”

To do this, Groundswell helps communities leverage their collective purchasing power to win the best possible deals on clean energy. They bring together nonprofits, community groups, churches, or individuals to make bulk purchases of wind-powered electricity, for example, or energy efficiency upgrades on homes and buildings. Buying as a group allows them to negotiate lower prices, and could potentially make this type of service available in areas where individuals and solitary community groups cannot afford it alone.

Reverend Tom Knoll of First Trinity Lutheran Church says his congregation saved $6,000 in a year by partnering with other Washington, D.C., churches to buy wind power. The church plowed the savings into charitable programs such as a food pantry, low-income housing, and job training programs. An added bonus was getting to know other churches, he says: “We don’t normally talk to one another, even though we may all be Christian.”

Lindsey, who worked in green workforce development before joining Groundswell, was attracted by the organization’s emphasis on job creation. “There were often government programs or nonprofit programs that were paying for training programs, but there weren’t necessarily jobs available for these individuals once the training had occurred,” she says. “When I first heard about Groundswell, I was really impressed by the fact that they were looking at the other side of the equation — not just, like, ‘We need to train people,’ but ‘How can we actually build a clean economy where jobs are actually created?’”

Lindsey also notes that together, groups can make demands that align with their values — like insisting on only working with contractors who provide health care for their employees or hire local residents or unemployed workers. “Because these groups are working together, they’re able to build in different social outcomes that they’d like to see,” she says.

But bringing clean energy to poor communities has been a challenge for the group. Although Groundswell does work in some underserved communities in D.C. and Maryland, even buying in bulk, costs can be prohibitive. “It’s expensive to get your home weatherized, and quite honestly, a lot of low-income communities can’t afford it,” Lindsey says.

Still, over time, Groundswell’s model of empowering communities may provide the missing link in the clean economy: consumer demand. Like the organization’s name, Lindsey says, “it’s a wave that builds over time. If you have one person, it’s great. But if you have five people, 10 people — we’re really building these powerful groups of consumers together.”

Still, environmental issues are getting talked about, often obliquely as part of larger discussions about energy — though the words don’t always mean what you might think they mean. And the words politicians don’t say can tell you as much as the words they do.

Here’s a guide to energy and environmental buzzwords you’ll be hearing, or not, this election year:

Gas prices
Republicans thought they’d get a lot of mileage out of this phrase, but now it looks like it might not get them too far. When gas prices were trending upward earlier this year, Republicans went all out blaming Obama and the Democrats. Now that gas prices have come back down, the Republican messaging has gotten muddled.  Still, the GOP is not quite ready to drop the issue.

Never mind that the president and Congress can’t do a damn thing to control prices at the pump.

Energy subsidies
“Subsidy” is a bad word in Washington these days, synonymous with “taxpayer giveaway” and “crony capitalism.”

If a politician wants to steer money to an industry, s/he’ll instead use words like “investment,” “support,” and “job creation.” See: Republicans defending oil and gas subsidies (an increasingly awkward endeavor), and Democrats defending clean energy subsidies.

If a politician wants to cut off money to an industry, that’s when the word “subsidy” comes out. See: Obama railing against oil and gas subsidies and other Democrats pushing the new End Polluter Welfare Act, and Republicans railing against subsidies for renewables and fulminating about Solyndra (more on that below).

Democrats would seem to have the upper hand with the subsidy buzzword this year, as most Americans are sick of supporting Big Oil and eager to support renewables.

Big Oil
Speaking of, “Big Oil” is a phrase you’ll only hear from Democrats this year. Obama’s particularly fond of it. Republicans don’t have a great rejoinder, as Big Solar and Big Wind don’t yet exist.

Keystone
If you hear a politician say the word “Keystone” this year, you can bet s/he’s a Republican.

Obama has been trying to please everyone on the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline — denying it a permit in January, then praising its southern leg in March. Predictably, he’s just managed to piss everyone off, so expect him to avoid the topic from here on out.

Republicans, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to keep the issue in the news — and they’re getting help from pipeline builder TransCanada, which recently reapplied for a permit. The GOP argues that Obama’s unwillingness to rubber-stamp the pipeline is hampering the economy and making America less energy secure — even though those arguments are false. Currently the GOP is trying to force Keystone approval into a big transportation bill.

Many Democrats, meanwhile, are walking on eggshells around this one. They don’t want to anger the green wing of the base, which showed its might by elevating Keystone into a national issue last year. But they also don’t want to be painted as anti-job or tick off any of the unions that want to help build the pipeline (the labor community is split on the issue). A poll released by Hart Research in February suggested that the Keystone fight is winnable for Dems if they articulate a clear message — say, that the pipeline would create as few as 50 permanent jobs, according [PDF] to researchers at Cornell University, and that much of the oil it transports would be shipped overseas. But savvy, strategic messaging is not a Democratic strong suit of late.

Solyndra
If you hear a politician say the word “Solyndra” this year, you can know s/he’s a Republican.

Republicans will keep harping on the bankruptcy of solar company Solyndra, which got a federal loan guarantee of more than half a billion dollars. They say it shows the folly of the federal government trying to pick winners in the energy sector and boost the economy through stimulus spending, and recent ads from GOP groups go further with salacious (and bogus) Solyndra-related charges. Romney slipped up earlier this year and said “Solyndra” when he meant “Keystone,” betraying the fact that Republicans see both issues primarily as cudgels with which to bash Obama.

Obama has been defending his administration’s Solyndra investment, albeit without mentioning the company’s name. His first TV ad of the campaign season went after his Solyndra critics. In March, he said, “Each successive generation recognizes that some technologies are going to work; some won’t. Some companies will fail; some companies will succeed,” echoing language from his State of the Union address in January. Other Dems have been less sure-footed in their responses to the Solyndra mess. Expect them to avoid the topic like the plague.

Clean energy
“Green jobs” is soooo 2008. “Clean energy” is now the phrase du jour if you want to talk about shifting to an economy based on renewables and efficiency — and so far, only Democrats do.

Obama is running hard on this theme: “I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy,” he’s said more than once. The president regularly visits cleantech companies and highlights the economic promise of cleantech jobs.

Republicans counter by talking about “energy jobs” — the kind that come from building pipelines and mining coal and fracking. “Drill baby drill” talk continues to resonate with the GOP base, while right-wing groups are trying to spark an anti-wind movement. Still, a handful of Republicans from states with big wind potential are calling for extension of a wind-energy tax credit that’s set to expire at the end of the year, recognizing that clean energy can be a job creator.

Poll after poll finds widespread support from voters across the spectrum for renewable power, so you’d think smart politicians would try to tap that vein.

Climate
In 2008, from the presidential candidates on down the ticket, Democrats and Republicans alike offered up plans for combating climate change. But you won’t be hearing “climate change” or “global warming” in many of this year’s stump speeches — and that absence speaks volumes.

President Obama recently told Rolling Stone that he thinks climate will become a campaign issue, but even he doesn’t seem to believe it. He didn’t even bother to mention climate change in his most recent Earth Day address. The president thinks he’ll reach more independents by talking about clean energy, energy innovation, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy (snatched right from the Republican playbook). Many of his fellow Democrats are following his lead and shunting climate into the shadows, still smarting from the ignominious death of climate legislation in 2010.

Mitt Romney doesn’t like to talk about climate change either because he’s flip-flopped on the issue. Most other Republican politicians bring up climate change only if they want to voice their skepticism. Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) is launching a new group to promote conservative solutions to climate change, but don’t expect that effort to gain much traction this year.

Yes, that’s right, the most critical issue ever to face humanity is getting less attention this election season than dogs.

A version of this post was originally published in SEJournal.

Not that long ago, some folks were arguing that clean energy — unlike climate change, which had been irredeemably stained by partisanship (eww!) — would bring people together across ideological lines. Persuaded by the irrefutable wisdom of wonks, we would join hands across the aisle to promote common-sense solutions. It wouldn’t be partisan, it would be … post-partisan.

Some day, I will stop mocking the people who said that. But not today. The error is an important one and it is still made regularly, especially by hyper-educated U.S. elites. They think clean energy is different from climate change, that it won’t get sucked into the same culture war. They are wrong.

On clean energy, the material/financial aspects of the conflict are the easiest to understand. Wind, solar, and the rest threaten the financial dominance and political influence of dirty energy. Last week, the Guardian broke the story of a confidential memo laying out a plan to demonize and discredit clean energy, meant to coordinate the plans/messages of several big right-wing super PACs funded by dirty-energy money.

At the bottom of that same piece, though, is one of the best expressions I’ve ever seen of the cultural and psychological aspects of the conflict. Witness:

Opposing Obama’s energy policies was a natural fit for conservatives, said Marita Noon, a conservative activist from New Mexico who was at the meeting. “The American way, what made CostCo and Walmart a success, is to use more and pay less. That’s the American way.” The president’s green policies however were the reverse, she said.

“President Obama wants us to pay more and use less.”

Not for the first time, it strikes me that conservatives understand the stakes of this struggle much better than liberals and centrists do, especially at a gut level. They’re on the wrong side of it, but at least they get it.

Photo by Walmart.

Noon is more or less correct: The American Way has been to carelessly consume high quantities of cheap energy, much of it embedded in disposable plastic crap at Walmart. Conservative leaders are telling their flock that there are endless deposits of fossil fuels all around them, if only those pesky Democrats and their regulations would get out of the way. The message is that the American way of life can continue forever, indeed that it is our patriotic birthright, but that Democrats want to take it from them. That goes deeper than energy. It’s about home and hearth.

And Noon is right that the alternative — barely hinted at by Obama’s policies, but sure to come into sharper relief in coming years — is to use much less, and more expensive, energy. You and I know that even if the per-unit price of energy goes up, consumer bills can go down, through efficiency. You and I know that it’s possible to use less energy while still enjoying the same high quality of life. You and I know that there’s no other choice, that cheap, abundant fossil fuels are a thing of the past.

But Noon and her ideological cohort are hearing otherwise. They’re hearing that American abundance, the bounty available to even the poorest Americans at Walmart, is under threat. They’re hearing that Democrats want to make America, the land of plenty, into Europe, the (imagined) land of tiny cars, cramped apartments, and high prices. Again, that’s about more than prices or watts. It’s about cultural identity.

Clean energy supporters can try, if they want, to convince people like Noon that clean energy can offer the same abundance — “use more and pay less” — that fossil fuels offered, through the magic of technology or innovation or whatever. But it’s dishonest. Reducing emissions enough to substantially slow climate change will inevitably involve being more judicious and intelligent in our energy use. Profligate, heedless consumption of disposable crap is going to have to be reined in. That will mean changing habits and land-use patterns. Insofar as those habits and land-use patterns are viewed as constitutive of a “way of life,” many will view that as a threat.

Remember, unlike wonks, average folk don’t think in terms of discrete political “issues.” They think in terms of broad cultural associations and identities. For the conservative base — about which I’ve written many times, see especially here — the issue of energy is wrapped up in a way of life that they view as under threat from multiple directions.

As I’ve said before, it’s unlikely that such people can be persuaded with evidence and reason. What they will eventually do is die off. In the meantime, the job is to define a new American way of life for young people, so when they take over they won’t view Walmart as akin to church.

See also: More on clean energy and the culture war

Whether German feed-in tariffs or U.S. tax incentives, opponents of solar rail at its perceived high cost. But a story making rounds this week, “why power generators are terrified of solar,” presents a powerful image that may flip this conventional wisdom on its head. Building lots of solar power can actually reduce electricity prices, to the dismay of utilities.

The story comes from Germany, where a decade of consistent policy has resulted in thousands of megawatts of distributed solar installed on urban rooftops and rural barns. This year, it was noted that the surge of “solar PV was cutting peak electricity prices by up to 40 percent.” The following graphic of prices on the German electricity exchange — which Craig Morris calls “the afternoon dip” — illustrates the effect. The left view is 2008, showing steady, high prices in the market throughout the afternoon. The chart on the right shows the same time period in 2012, where an abundance of solar has sharply cut afternoon power costs.

Click for a larger version.

What’s happened is the “merit order effect.” Because utilities have purchased all this solar capacity on long-term contracts, there is effectively zero marginal cost to taking the solar electricity onto the grid. And in Germany, there’s enough solar electricity on sunny afternoons to completely offset the traditional spike in electricity demand created by air conditioning. So, instead of taking electricity from expensive gas peaking power plants or diesel generators, utilities have low-cost solar filling the gap, undermining the previous price peaks.

The fall in wholesale power costs from so much solar represents a delicious irony. For years, solar advocates have justified high prices as necessary to help the market mature and — because solar is such a small part of total power generation — that solar will cost the average ratepayer very little. The truth is that the impact of solar may be large, but in the opposite direction.