Articles by Jon Rynn

How communities can choose renewable electricity, part 1

Recently, I had an opportunity to talk with Paul Fenn, who has written or helped write several pioneering pieces of legislation which allow communities to aggregate their electricity purchasing power in order to choose renewable energy. This policy framework is called community choice aggregation, or CCA (of course, if I mangle any of the specifics, it will be from my own lack of understanding).

When a CCA is created, the city or town or county can contract with an energy service provider (ESP) to provide the power for all residents of the area, if the residents so choose (so far, only about 5 percent of residents haven't signed up with various CCAs).

In the case of the San Francisco CCA, the electricity service provider (ESP) will produce 360 megawatts over three years: 103 from distributed renewables, mostly PV on buildings; 150 from a wind farm; and 107 from conservation and efficiency. That should constitute 51 percent of San Francisco's electricity needs (up to 20 states are pursuing CCAs). The utility still provides the transmission lines, billing, and electricity backup.

In 2001, San Francisco voters also passed a proposition to allow for "solar bonds" to be issued by the city (with an assist from Adam Browning's VoteSolar Initiative). These bonds will be used to construct the wind and solar electricity generating equipment and "smart grid" equipment which will be paid back by the revenue from the electric bills of the San Francisco residents who are part of the CCA. This mechanism gets around the biggest problem we've had with building wind and solar electrical generating capacity -- the lack of upfront capital.

Are low gas prices an inalienable right?

I'm listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) talk to Thom Hartmann on Air America. Sanders is arguably the best senator in decades, and understands, as he just explained, that we need to transform our energy system toward renewables.

But he also said something to the effect that "we have to get gas prices back down." I can't blame him -- particularly in his state of Vermont, rural people are getting slammed by high gas prices, because they have to drive long distances.

His main explanation of high prices (with which Thom Hartmann, an important progressive radio talk show host, seems to agree) is based on 1) oil companies ripping us off, 2) speculators pushing up the price of oil, and 3) OPEC keeping a lid on production.

While all of those are certainly a problem, and a windfall profits tax that Sanders advocates is certainly in order, if the Senate's most progressive voice is not discussing the problem that the supply of oil is beginning to decline, then I don't see how carbon pricing is going to fare well. In the long run, people will get hysterical as their oil expenditures increase, as I argued in what I will now call Part 1 of what may become a series on oil hysteria. We need to push a mandate on turning the American car fleet into an all-electric fleet, and we need to construct a national high-speed rail and light rail network.

Government-financed construction plus carbon pricing is the key

With NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof's seeming endorsement of Roger Pielke Jr.'s ideas about mitigating global warming, it seems that we have two main arguments developing: the "breakthrough" argument, which says we must have technology breakthroughs in order to solve the problem, and, as articulated (for instance) by Joseph Romm, the "just do it" argument that we have the technologies now to minimize global warming. Most of my posts have been an attempt to show how current technologies can move us toward a "zero emissions" society.

The "breakthrough" people do raise an interesting question, but then they veer off into the wrong answer. They ask, effectively, Is there something the government can do to solve global warming, besides carbon pricing? Their answer: Spend $30 billion a year on energy R&D, hoping for a breakthrough.

I will argue in this post that the answer to their question is, Yes, the government can do something beyond carbon pricing -- governments at all levels can, first, provide some of the finance capital to the private sector to build renewable energy systems, and second, governments can build the necessary transportation systems and in some cases the energy systems. And by doing so, support for and the effectiveness of carbon pricing policies will be improved.

In order to make this argument, let's back up a little and ask, "What kind of society are the authors of the various plans for global warming mitigation envisioning?" I think that, at their core, most global warming initiatives embed a conception of what is practical, considering both political and cultural constraints.

Let’s rebuild our national rail network instead of repealing the gas tax

At the rate things are going, any money that would be available for global warming mitigation is going to go into subsidizing the oil used by airplanes, trucks, cars, and heating oil so that most Americans do not become hysterical -- or am I being hysterical? From Michael T. Klare's latest article: