Solipsist Sarah Palin thinks everything is about her, her book, her life and her very broad view…

In a sign of the times a new industry is emerging – ‘Will Protest for Food’. Whether its health care reform or climate change legislation, bus us in and we will make noise against it.

President elect Obama delivers video speech to Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles today. Yeah, he talks about green jobs and that any business supporting clean energy has a friend in the White House.

Recognizing the importance of addressing the climate change crisis and reducing dependence upon foreign oil and gas, the US Department of Energy (USDOE) has launched an aggressive program aiming to meet 20% of America’s energy needs via wind by 2030. In conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the USDOE produced a study assessing the economic and environmental costs and benefits of achieving this goal.
The study can be read in its entirety at 20percentwind.org and concludes more than 500,000 jobs would be supported with an increase of 100,000 jobs in supporting industries and 200,000 more jobs through economic expansion at the local level. Other economic gains are expected annual property tax increases of $1.5B by 2030 and electric price stability.
Deploying wind energy and displacing fossil fuel powered plants will result in 825 million metric tons less carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2030. Power generation presently accounts for 40% of CO2 emissions in the US. Wind energy, unlike fossil fuel or nuclear generated power does not require water so water consumption will drop also.
The study focuses entirely on centralized wind energy or large wind farms despite growing and successful implementation of distributed renewable energy systems in Europe. Nevertheless, the study reveals that successful deployment of an additional 304GW of wind power to meet the 20% goal is dependent upon massive investment in the transmission grid infrastructure. Consequently, 19,000 miles of new 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines, for an estimated price tag of US $60 billion are being proposed to Congress by high powered energy players like T Boone Pickens.
Other challenges to the centralized model include the need to develop larger electric load balancing areas, in tandem with better regional planning to implement generation diversity. According to the study, the US must increase annual wind power installation by 16GW by 2018, within ten years. Obtaining permits from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other affected agencies in order to build out the transmission infrastructure to support this growth can take up to ten years. This is one reason the European Distributed Energy Partnership (EUDEEP) formed to implement wide scale distributed energy production to avoid many of these barriers and costs.
Significantly, the study acknowledges that a “business-as-usual” approach will not meet these goals. A major national commitment to clean energy, CO2 reductions and independence from foreign resources is required at a grass roots level. From a grass roots level it will also be possible to demonstrate that wide scale distributed energy systems can work in the US not just Europe and elsewhere. Happily, there are several people working on making the South Coast of Oregon a model of energy independence that the rest of the nation can build upon.
Please permit me a little divergence from topic here but I hope that in the inevitable debates to ensue during an election year we can focus on issues and not stoop to exposing verbal gaffes and sartorial faux pas. If you want to criticize Obama, criticize him, a constitutional lawyer, for eviscerating the 4th Amendment with his recent vote on the FISA bill. Or criticize him for his hawkish view on Iran or his votes for emergency defense spending more than five years after the ‘emergency’, not because he said fifty seven states instead of fifty on the campaign trail.
Criticize McCain for not defending the 4th Amendment and not voting on the FISA bill, for voting against an increase in GI benefits and for voting to continuing emergency defense spending five years after the ‘emergency’. Don’t criticize him because he thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a common border, (a really wide border called Iran). The future of this country is worthy of better debate and time is too short to waste on anything less than serious issues.

A federal judge ordered the Bush administration to release this report which was legally mandated to be released in 2004. Like Iraq, Bush intends to leave global warming as a problem for the next administration. Read the full report at ABC News Read your city’s carbon footprint here

Video from Rawstory

PPAs or power purchase agreements are essentially a long term contract for energy now being offered to residential homeowners and businesses. The contract provides the basis for financing the installation of solar or other renewable energy generators by allowing the manufacturer to dip into a financing pool to make installations.

“There were approximately 10,000 homeowners with solar power last year in California, and most say that there will be a 30-to-40 percent growth rate in the state this year,” says Nat Kreamer, CEO of Sun Run, a Silicon Valley start-up that offers power purchase agreements to finance most of the cost of installing a system.

Jon Guice, head of research at green energy consultancy AltaTerra, in Palo Alto, is bullish on PPAs in particular. “PPAs can drive the residential solar market because it makes the acquisition financially acceptable; it could change the whole solar value chain,” he reckons. “Last year half of all the commercial solar installs in the United States were PPAs, and this year that number is running between 60-to-80 percent,” he notes.

The proposal banks on the expected increase in energy prices to further encourage the signing of these PPAs by consumers hoping to reduce their energy bills. In Oregon, since 1997, electric rates have risen by 33% and PGE has an application into the PUC for an additional 9% increase.

Rural America grows the food, harvests the timber and produces the power essential to the survival of urban America. Factory farms work fields as far as the eye can see drawing water from the surrounding settlements and forests. Power plants are sited on once pristine environments while forested mountainsides are cut away to mine the coal to fuel them far from the view of urban centers.

Mighty river arteries are dammed, wildlife refuges flooded while coastal fishermen see their livelihood severely affected. Millions of acres of timber are cleared through rural farms, ranches, small towns and homesteads to erect transmission lines and lay pipelines to deliver power to dense population centers. Taking all this into account a single metropolitan apartment dweller may leave a larger environmental footprint than a rural counterpart living on a couple of acres.

Rural America supports their urban brethren in another way as well. While it was urban America that was attacked on September 11, 2001 military enlistment demographics show that it is predominantly white, rural farm kids risking life and limb on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is rural America fighting the war and suffering the losses.

We are all Americans contributing to the welfare of all so these facts mean nothing until it comes time to count ballots. As rural Americans we have less say in such issues as natural resources, land use, timber harvest practices and foreign, domestic and economic policy.

Not surprisingly rural and urban America vote differently on many divisive issues. In Oregon most statewide policies are decided by three counties, Multnomah, Lane and Washington. The remaining 33 sparsely populated and geographically diverse counties must accept the consequences.

To support an economy based upon a model dependent upon continued growth, massive energy corridors are planned for the eleven western states. Essentially fossil fuel corridors these energy routes, up to two thirds of a mile wide, are made up of oil, gas and hydrogen pipelines and high voltage transmission lines connecting to coal powered generation plants.

Proposed for Oregon are hundreds of miles of multi-modal lines most impacting the Harney Basin in southeastern Oregon. The population of most rural Oregon counties, including Coos has not grown significantly the last decade and the expected increase demand is for urban centers.

This would appear to be a huge step backwards in energy production and management. Notwithstanding the environmental impact making a massive capital investment toward infrastructure to support a finite fuel source is folly. Once again it will be rural Americans who bear the bulk of the burden if these fossil fuel corridors go through.

Strict adherence to the centralized energy paradigm won’t benefit urbanites either but being less directly impacted by the environmental damage and fearful of possible shortages may not support rural opposition to such an invasive energy plan. It is time for rural America known for its gritty individualism and rugged independence to dig in its heels and stop carrying water.

As rural communities what we lack in numbers we make up for in space for flexibility, innovation and new concepts. We are not bound by the confines of apartment walls, city regulations and boxed thinking. Rural America can implement and model new paradigms in energy independence and reduce the export of local dollars at the same time by decentralizing power locally.

A utility company CEO told me recently that he believes we will be fighting wars over electrons domestically within a couple of decades unless we make drastic changes. The Enron disaster was an economic war but future energy wars would be much more violent and are happening now in other countries.

Rural America will bear the cost of energy management in any event. My hope is that we put rural farm kids to work engineering energy independence which would preclude the need to fight in foreign lands. Either way, I believe it is up to rural America to save our environment and our country and it will be rural America not Congress that ultimately brings our troops home.