Archived material from historical editions of The Generator
Grist features a novel way to spread the word about climate change in their feature How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.
A complete listing of the articles in How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic, a series by Coby Beck, contains responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:
When applied to a wide variety of renewable energy technologies, this strategy is sometimes known as Community Supported Energy (CSE). CSE projects are somewhat similar to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The main difference, however, is that instead of investing in potatoes, carrots, or cucumbers, with CSE, local residents invest in energy projects that provide greater energy security and a wide variety of other benefits.
Another advantage of community energy projects is that they can be owned cooperatively or collectively through a variety of legal mechanisms. Ownership strategies can include limited liability corporations (LLCs), cooperatives, school districts, municipal utilities or other municipal entities, or combinations of these models. Sometimes a partnership with an existing utility can be mutually beneficial.
An excellent example of this approach is the prominent, commercial-scale wind turbine located on Toronto’s (Ontario) harbor front that is 50 percent owned by WindShare, a 427-member cooperative of local residents, while the other half is owned by Toronto Hydro Energy Services. While the appropriate model will differ from project to project and from state to state (or province), depending on a wide range of variables, what these strategies all have in common is some form of community ownership and group benefit.
The main point is to identify the project as belonging to the community, which may avoid (or at least minimize) the usual conflicts between local residents and developers, whose large-scale, commercial proposals are often viewed as primarily benefiting absentee owners. Local ownership is the key ingredient that transforms what would otherwise be just another corporate energy project into an engine for greater energy security that directly benefits its owners — the members of the community.
Community Supported Energy projects offer yet another advantage; they retain a greater amount of income in the local area and increase the economic benefits substantially over projects owned by out-of-area developers, according to a study conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for the Government Accountability Office. NREL compared the effect of large corporate wind farms owned out of area with similar projects owned locally.
The study found local ownership yielded an average of $4 million in local income annually, over three times more than the $1.3 million produced with out-of-area control, while job creation was more than twice as large in the local model.*
A European Model
With benefits like these, why aren’t there more CSE projects? For one thing it’s a relatively new concept in North America, although it’s a well-established strategy in many European nations. In Denmark and Germany — world leaders in wind energy development — many commercial-scale wind turbines are installed as single units or in small clusters distributed across the countryside, or sometimes in or near urban areas. And many of these turbines are either owned by the farmers on whose land the turbine stands, or by groups of local residents.
This idea has spread to many other EU nations as well and is beginning to catch on in Canada and the United States, especially in states like Minnesota and Iowa, where dozens of community owned wind farms are sprouting up.
One of the best examples is MinWind, located near Luverne, Minnesota. The original project, which began in 2000, consisted of four 950-kilowatt turbines owned by 66 local farmers. The project was so successful that seven additional turbines were added in 2004. The second group of turbines is owned by approximately 200 local investors.
One of the main reasons for this success has been Minnesota’s progressive promotion and support of locally owned wind projects and other renewable energy initiatives.
The main barrier to wide-scale implementation of Community Supported Energy in most other states, however, is a regulatory environment and process that does virtually nothing to encourage these types of projects. For the most part, CSE isn’t even on the radar screen of most regulators, and the typical high cost of the approval process (often $100,000 to $500,000 or more) halts most community based initiatives before they even get started.
What’s more, federal energy production tax credits (PTC) for wind farms, for example, favor large-scale corporate projects that are well beyond the means of local communities. This situation needs to change, and it needs to change soon, because all viable forms of renewable energy, regardless of their size, need to be supported and encouraged if we are going to meet the substantial energy challenges of the next few decades.
One of the best regulatory models in North America at the present time is the new Standard Offer Contracts in Ontario. Announced early in 2006, the new Standard Offer Contracts (Advanced Renewable Tariffs) are an historic step towards a sustainable energy future. Standard Offer Contracts allow homeowners, landowners, farmers, co-operatives, schools, municipalities and others to install renewable energy projects up to 10 megawatts in size and to sell the power to the grid for a fixed price for 20 years.
The Ontario Standard Offer Contracts provide a powerful model that other provinces and states should consider when developing their own renewable energy laws and regulations.
Security and Opportunity
Community-based energy strategies generally place the renewable energy facility as close as possible to where it is needed. In the case of electricity generation, this reduces the need for additional, ugly and expensive high-tension power lines, while simultaneously improving the stability of the electricity network. One or two good sized wind turbines, for example, could provide much of the power needed for a school, business or manufacturing facility.
A cluster of medium-to-large-sized turbines could power a whole neighborhood or small community. Add a significant number of rooftop solar panels, small-scale hydroelectric or geoelectric plants, ground-source heat pumps, and a local cooperative bio-fuels facility or two for biodiesel, ethanol, wood chips or pellets, and you begin to assemble a picture of greater energy security that provides for a significant proportion of your community’s energy needs while generating income, all from local resources.
The people employed to operate and maintain these facilities keeps them working (and spending) in their local communities, and eliminates the need for them to commute somewhere else to get to their jobs. The result is energy creation and conservation at the same time. And if the renewable energy facilities power other job-creating activities, such as local manufacture of essential products, you end up boosting the local economy while creating even more jobs. It’s a win-win-win proposition.
The energy challenges we face are enormous, consequently the response needs to be sized to match. Community Supported Energy offers the potential of making substantial progress on a large scale while directly engaging (and benefiting) a major segment of the population. CSE is an idea whose time has definitely arrived, and I am convinced that if this strategy were to be adopted across the nation that it could provide a huge boost to local economies everywhere while offering greater energy security and price stability.
The opportunities for locally based renewables are enormous. Almost every city and town in the country has the potential for one or more CSE project. Perhaps you can get one started in your community.
*Renewable Energy; Wind Power’s Contribution to Electric Power Generation and Impact on Farms and Rural Communities, General Accounting Office, September, 2004, 82, 83, www.gao.gov/new.items/d04756.pdf
Greg Pahl is a Weybridge, Vermont writer and co-founder of the Vermont Biofuels Association as well as the Addison County Relocalization Network. This article contains excerpts from his new book: The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis. The book’s primary focus is on Community Supported Energy.
Reference: House of Representatives, Votes and Proceedings, Hansard, Thursday, 1 March 2007. website: http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/reps/latesthansard/rhansard.pdf
Erisk Net, 08/3/2007, p.74-75
Those of my readers who know their way around the visionary politics of the last half century will likely find these habits of thought extremely familiar. Every decade or so, we’ve had some new book announce the imminent arrival of utopia via a grand transformation of consciousness that will solve the world’s problems, irrespective of the practical details. Charles Reich’s The Greening of America and Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy are two of the most famous of these works, and of course there have been plenty of others. They owe much of their market to the Baby Boom generation’s fondness for seeing its own arrival on the scene as the most important event in history – a habit of thought that crosses party lines, as shown by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 masterpiece of unintentional comedy, “An End to History?” – and of course The Great Turning draws heavily on this same vein of thought. It’s probably not an accident that the criteria Korten uses to define the natural leaders of Earth Community include an age barrier that rules out anyone significantly younger than the Baby Boomers.
Still, unlike the books just cited and nearly all their equivalents, Korten doesn’t argue that the enlightened can bring utopia about simply by being enlightened, and here his book breaks free of the pack to embrace an older and much more dynamic tradition, one that shares most of his assumptions and nearly all of his rhetorical flourishes. This tradition has been responsible for a great deal of radical social transformation over the last three hundred fifty years, though it must be admitted that very little of that succeeded in accomplishing the good its proponents intended. I’m talking, of course, about the revolutionary tradition of the modern Western world.
Historian James Billington, whose Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith remains one of the classic historical studies of the tradition, suggested wryly that if Marx was right to call religion the opiate of the masses, then revolutionary ideology is the amphetamine of the intellectuals. The moniker fits, and for more than the obvious reasons. The revolutionary tradition emerged at the same place and time as the modern intelligentsia, in 17th century England, and expanded around the world in lockstep with the spread of secular culture and modern education over the three centuries that followed. While the ideological banners brandished at the barricades have varied all over the conceptual map, the core narrative of the revolutionary tradition has remained fixed in place since the Diggers and Levellers first started proclaiming it in the aftermath of the English Civil War.
In its basic form, that narrative claims that all of humanity stands at a decisive turning point of history, facing the choice between the horrors of an uttery corrupt past and the shining possibilities of a future on the verge of being born. The existing order of society, the primary source of human misery, is beyond redemption and teeters on the edge of collapse, and a new social and political system that will bring out the best that humanity is capable of achieving stands ready to replace it. The existence of an ideal society in the distant past shows that a better world is possible, and that society’s destruction by the first forerunners of the present rulers of the world will soon be avenged. The old order is paving the way for its own demise by bringing about social changes that foster the emergence of its own replacement, while it makes its downfall necessary by pushing the world to the edge of ruin. All that is needed is the spread of the new system’s ideology, followed by one great effort on the part of people of good will, and the Great Turning will take place, ushering in a happy future for all of humanity.
You’ll find this same narrative laid out in detail in The Great Turning, of course, but you’ll also find it the writings of every revolutionary of the last three centuries or so. Gerrard Winstanley, the chief theoretician of the English Diggers, told the same story; so did the philosophes whose ideas laid the foundation for the French Revolution and the Jacobins who put those ideas into practice; so did Karl Marx and such 20th century Jacobins as Lenin and Mao, who played the same parts in a more recent remake of the same drama. For that matter, the same narrative crosses party lines just as effectively as the rhetoric of a transformation of consciousness mentioned earlier in this post; you can find exactly the same myth, for example, woven all through the repellent ideology of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
It may be worth noting that Korten’s disavowal of violence as a way to accomplish his Great Turning does not set him outside the revolutionary tradition. Some of the most influential figures in the tradition have also rejected violence and insisted, as Korten does, that peaceful political action is the right way to bring about the transformation of society. What defines a narrative as part of the revolutionary tradition are the claims that the old order of society is the mainspring of human suffering, that it cannot be fixed but can only be overthrown, and that the new order of society will by definition be free from the troubles of the old. Underlying these claims is the fundamental thesis of the tradition, the claim that human behavior is defined by social forms, and that replacing evil forms with good ones will thus cause wicked behavior to yield to virtue.
After more than three centuries of experience, though, we have some idea how these narratives work out in practice. The short version is “not very well.” As a way of reducing human misery, revolutions – peaceful or otherwise – just aren’t very effective. Time and again, once the new revolutionary leadership settles into the seats of power, all the problems faced by the old system still remain to bedevil the new one, and the moral renewal revolutionaries expect as the natural result of their triumph somehow never quite happens. The results are as varied as the richly human complexities of politics and culture can make them, but the one thing that has never happened yet as a result of political revolution – be it peaceful, violent, or any of the subtle shades in between – is the arrival of a utopian society like Korten’s Earth Community.
Doubtless Korten and his supporters will argue that it’s different this time. Never before in human history, they might claim, has the choice between utopia and oblivion been more stark, the need for a Great Turning more urgent, or the possibilities open to a worldwide progressive movement more real. Maybe so. Yet this same claim has been made by every other prophet of revolution. Furthermore, treating the contemporary crisis of industrial society as something that can be solved by replacing one set of politicians with another, or one ideology with another, completely misses the hard material realities that make that crisis an inescapable part of our future. To deal with our predicament as a political problem is to fail to deal with it at all. As I hope to show in the final section of this review, politics can play a constructive role in helping today’s societies cope with the coming of deindustrial society, but the way there leads in a direction almost precisely the opposite of the one Korten proposes, and requires a hard look at the ways that today’s mythic narratives influence Korten’s view of politics – and ours.
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Original article available here.
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by Matthew L. Wald
Published: March 14,2007
WASHINGTON, March 13 — A coalition of industrialists, environmentalists and energy specialists is banding together to try to eliminate the incandescent light bulb within the next 10 years.
In an agreement to be announced Wednesday, the coalition members, including Philips Lighting, the largest manufacturer; the Natural Resources Defense Council and two efficiency organizations, are pledging to press for efficiency standards at the local, state and federal levels. The standards would phase out the ordinary screw-in bulb, technology that arose around the time of the telegraph and the steam locomotive, and replace it with compact fluorescents, light-emitting diodes, halogen devices and other technologies that may emerge.
Compact fluorescents are three times as efficient as old-fashioned bulbs, and light-emitting diodes six times as efficient. These also last much longer. But while they cost much less to run, they are more expensive to purchase, and getting home users to change the bulbs in the estimated four billion sockets in the United States would probably require eliminating the choice.
James E. Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy and the co-chairman of one of the efficiency organizations in the coalition, the Alliance to Save Energy, said in a statement, “Encouraging our customers to use advanced compact fluorescent light bulbs and other energy-efficient lighting is fundamental to our plans to meet growing demand for electricity as economically as possible.”
The agreement is a compromise among the participants. Some favored an outright ban on incandescent bulbs, like the one Australia said last month it would seek by 2009 or 2010. Philips, a unit of Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, has pledged with others doing business in Europe to seek a shift to more efficient lighting there, too.
Read full article at The New York Times
Caption: Randall B. Moorhead of Philips Electronics North America with a 60-watt incandescent bulb, left, and his company’s energy-saving bulb. Doug Mills/The New York Times