Jus­tice Depart­ment lawyer Thomas Tamm speaks with Rachel about why he called the NY Times from a sub­way pay­phone that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion was engag­ing in war­rent­less wiretapping.

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.

Rachel Mad­dow dis­cusses the Sen­ate action on FISA

“What if Con­gress had responded to Water­gate by immu­niz­ing the exec­u­tive branch’s law­break­ers and giv­ing Richard Nixon sweep­ing new pow­ers to snoop?

“Oh, wait! They just did! They just took thirty years or so to get around to it.”

Video from Raw­story

“They that can give up essen­tial lib­erty to obtain a lit­tle tem­po­rary safety deserve nei­ther lib­erty nor safety”. Ben­jamin Franklin

While being inter­viewed by a for­eign jour­nal­ist today it was hard not to notice the echo on the phone line. Sad that we are freely tapped with­out any regard for our pri­vacy and while I can’t say for sure that was the rea­son, I have had over­seas calls absent the elec­tronic feedback.

Tran­script at Raw­story