Back to Work - Bill Clinton [67]
The founding fathers saw states as laboratories of democracy. Today our cities are, too. Both states and cities are able to innovate in many areas that can ultimately benefit the entire nation. Energy efficiency is the perfect laboratory. It creates jobs, lowers costs, saves energy, and improves the environment. We should be clearing roadblocks to innovation, not erecting them.
24. To speed up the process, we should pick one or two U.S. states or territories and work to make them completely energy independent. The Energy Department could take competitive proposals and select one or two, three at most, for extra help in maximizing their capacity to produce and consume energy. Nevada could do it, with its enormous solar and wind capacity. Making the effort would create jobs and lower its high unemployment and foreclosure rates. Puerto Rico could do it. Electric rates in the Caribbean are the highest in the world, because the base fuel is all imported. That hurts Puerto Rico’s manufacturing sector and undercuts the value of the tax incentives Congress has provided to develop jobs there.
The one area where I disagree with the administration on energy policy is in the provision of large loan guarantees to nuclear power. Eighteen and a half billion dollars’ worth of them have already been granted, and the administration has asked Congress for authority to issue $36 billion more.
I am not instinctively antinuclear. Arkansas has 2 of the 104 reactors that produce about 20 percent of America’s electricity at sixty-five sites. I believe they’re the two oldest continuously operating nuclear plants in the United States and they’ve worked well. I don’t favor a rapid shutdown of the safely operating plants, as Germany and Japan have decided to do. But before we build more, we need to consider the relative economic and energy benefits of other options. We still haven’t resolved the nuclear waste issues, and the Japanese tsunami and earthquake showed that power plants, like all other structures, are vulnerable to nature’s forces. The industry is already heavily subsidized, yet new nuclear plants are basically uninsurable and so expensive to build that the estimated cost of power from them is twenty-five to thirty cents a kilowatt hour, three times today’s rates and twice as high as solar power, which is dropping in price as new capacity comes on line and new technology improves productivity.
Finally, nuclear isn’t much of a job creator compared with other clean fuel sources. A recent study by the Berkeley Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory found that adopting a strategy that combines aggressive efficiency measures with generating 30 percent of our electricity from renewables would create eight times as many jobs as increasing our generating capacity the same amount by raising nuclear generation from 20 to 25 percent of our total, combined with capturing carbon from coal plants that provide 10 percent of our capacity. So I favor going for the options that offer the best combination of energy, environmental, and employment gains.
The economic benefits of clean-energy production and efficiency to ordinary Americans are enormous, both in new jobs and in lower costs. Of the thirty-seven wealthier nations obligated to reach specific reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol, four—Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Denmark—have made especially impressive efforts to reduce emissions. What happened? All of them have faster job growth, more rapidly rising incomes, lower unemployment, and less income inequality than the United States. The four countries adopted different economic and energy policies, implemented by both conservative and progressive governments. What they had in common was a serious commitment to change the way they produce and consume energy. Sweden got almost all of its reductions