Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [115]
The EU is also moving forward to create a regional supergrid and plans to spend 1 trillion euros in doing so.29 Germany and Portugal, in particular, are moving aggressively to expand their already quite large clean-tech sectors. Action in the core industrial economies is essential because only they have the infrastructure that can propel the clean-tech revolution and transform the world economy.
Pathways Forward
Despite US political sclerosis and fossil fuel fundamentalism, there are paths forward. First and foremost, there is the Environmental Protection Agency. Thanks to the pressure and lawsuits of green activists, the EPA is now obliged to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If the EPA were to act robustly, it could achieve significant and immediate emissions reductions using nothing more than existing laws and current technologies.
According to Kassie Siegel at the Center for Biological Diversity, “The Clean Air Act can achieve everything we need: a 40 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions over 1990 levels by 2020.”30 The two most important things the EPA could do are to halt any permitting of new coal-fired power plants—about fifty new plants are seeking approval as this book goes to press—and to force all existing coal-fired facilities to switch to natural gas. This “fuel switching” requires little to no retrofitting of most existing power plants. If that happened, total non-vehicle US emissions would be reduced by 13 percent or more in a matter of a year or two, say various experts. As a fuel, natural gas is generally half as polluting as coal. But in the case of old, inefficient coal-fired plants, switching to gas can reduce emissions by as much as two-thirds.
Though natural gas drilling is highly problematic, with regulation it could become less polluting. And there is plenty of natural gas: discoveries have glutted the market, and prices are down more than 60 percent from their peak. Gas is not a solution; it is not clean. Gas merely offers a cleaner, realistic “bridging fuel” as we move toward power generated from wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro sources.
Big Green Buy
Another tool of transformation readily at hand is direct government procurement of clean technology. Currently, leading clean technology remains slightly more expensive than the old dirty-tech alternatives. This so-called “price gap” is holding back clean technology’s mass application. The simple fact is that capitalist economies will not switch to clean energy until it is cheaper than fossil fuels.
The price gap results partly from dirty tech’s history of subsidies ($72.5 billion between 2002 and 2008) and partly from the massive economies of scale that the fossil fuel industry enjoys. The fastest way to close the price gap is to build large clean-tech markets that allow for similar economies of scale. And the fastest way to do that is to reorient government procurement away from fossil fuel energy toward clean energy and technology—to use the government’s vast spending power to create a market for clean energy.
After all, the government didn’t just fund the invention of the microprocessor, it was also the first major consumer of the device. It not only created the technology, it created its market. Throughout the 1950s, more than half of IBM’s revenue came from government contracts. Along with money, these contracts provided a guaranteed market, as well as stability for IBM and its suppliers, and thus helped coax in private investment—all of which helped make IBM the market leader.31
Now consider the scale of the problem: our asphalt transportation arteries are clogged with 250 million gasoline-powered vehicles sucking down an annual $200 to $300 billion worth of fuel from more than 121,000 filling stations. Add to that the cost of heating and cooling buildings, jet travel, shipping, powering industry, and the energy-gobbling servers