Why We Must Still Fight Caveman Energy

In renewable energy, as in everything else, we tend to focus on our own problems, and on today's news. We worry about profitability, about competition, and we feel guilty looking to government for any kind of hand-up.

This focus can lead us to ignore alternatives to alternative fuels, even have us sit passively while legislators try to weaken or dismantle policies which favor them, as is now happening in four state legislatures. 

At times like this we need to retrieve what went down the memory hole and remind the legislators, and their voters, what we're working toward.

Take the Macondo oil spill, aka Deepwater Horizon. It was in all the papers. It was less than a year ago.

• You do know that wells just 10 miles from that site have been leaking since 2004. You don't?
• See this week's University of Georgia study showing that 500,000 tons of gas was also released in the spill, resulting in "extensive and persistent depletion of oxygen" which is still continuing. Not ringing a bell?
• How about the fact that two commissioners appointed to study the spill told Congress Friday that an overhaul of federal oversight is still needed.

No, you probably didn't hear any of that.

What you may have noticed instead is that new deep water drilling permits are about to be issued Get the rigs warmed up, writes the Houston Chronicle.

Warmed up for what?

The explosion at Massey Energy's coal mine in West Virginia that killed 29 people last April  has gone so far down the memory hole that people are suing over the company's sale, claiming the price is too low.

Legislators in Montana, Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri want a future of Deepwater Horizon and Massey Energy for your children. They will actually have the nerve over the next few months to call digging coal a mile under the Earth “good jobs.” Here's an inconvenient truth for them. As fossil fuels become increasingly scarce, the risk from pulling them out of the Earth so we can burn them is going to increase, not decrease.

We need to beat the cavemen to reach our goal of an energy harvest.

Those of us in renewable energy need to pull the recent news out of the memory hole and bring it to those legislative chambers. Put those deaths and that destruction on some legislative desks, and get it into the districts of those legislators looking for a short-term fix of “lower prices” or “market solutions.” We still have public opinion at our back. Let's use it.

It's going to be a tough fight in legislatures over the next few years, as the reality of deficits runs into everyone's call for help. To win we need to use every weapon at our disposal. Don't let's throw hard facts away or let them be forgotten.