When Green Means "Stop"

In case my humble little blog happens to be inaugurating your return to the Internet after a very long coma, I have a heads-up for you: There's a presidential election in less than six weeks. For everyone else, this is probably not news, considering the permanent news cycle the modern media operates on to feed Americans' insatiable appetite for political punditry. And if you've so much as glanced at a newspaper, a political talk show or any of the three billion Web sites where jerks like me profess to have something important to say, you already can sense that this election promises to be close, hard-fought and nasty. True believers on the left have turned the Obama campaign into a cult following while his detractors hate him enough to rally around former beauty pageant runner-up Sarah Palin, the anti-Obama if ever there was one, as our country takes another step down the dark path of complete political polarization.

But is all the divisiveness really justified? Are the two candidates so night-and-day, so black-and-white that battle lines must be drawn all across our fractured union? Because at least on one issue, Obama and McCain share a great deal of common ground: the trifling little flap over global warming.

While they differ on certain details, Obama and McCain both favor implementation of a cap-and-trade system to gradually reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases to levels consistent with what scientists claim are necessary to ward off the specter of global warming. (In a cap-and-trade regimen, the "right" to emit greenhouse gases is effectively rationed, and over time, the rations become smaller, requiring increasing cuts in emissions.) So whoever wins in November, it's a safe bet that there's going to be a radical overhaul of how our energy sector supplies the electricity that does so much to distinguish our society from the Stone Age.

Which ought to cause everyone a fair amount of concern, because it's already apparent how difficult this green remedy will be to implement, for the very simple reason that clean energy does not grow on trees, so the more of it we are required to produce, the greater the challenge will become. In an excellent piece of reporting today, The New York Times runs down the major reasons why coal, the dirtiest fuel for power plants and the biggest single cause of CO2 emissions in this country, is so central to our present economy, and why so few viable alternatives to coal are available. Nuclear plants? No emissions, but expensive and time-consuming to build. Oil? Too expensive to compete with coal, not especially green. Natural gas? Much cleaner, but in short supply.

So one might be forgiven for celebrating a little bit at the news that lots of utility companies and venture capitalists are rushing to build power plants that turn free, abundant sunshine into clean electricity. In the very next article on this page, The Times reports the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has received applications to build enough solar power plants to replace 70 (!) coal-burning plants across the country, particularly in southern California. If you're looking for a solution to the climate crisis that environmentalists have been scaring us with for years, this looks like a pretty good one: a renewable energy source with no emissions and builders lining up to get cracking. Huzzah!

But wait. I don't know if The Times deliberately places these stories side by side for the sake of irony, but there's a sickening amount of it. Because the real story of these solar saviors is the tremendous opposition to them being mounted by local environmentalist groups who fear that, among other ecological calamities, the Mojave ground squirrel and the desert tortoise might be displaced by all the mirrors and photo-voltaic cells.

Let that sink in for a moment. Amid the deafening clamor for solutions to what is being billed as a crisis that could do incalculable damage to the entire globe, a crisis that has sufficiently galvanized public opinion that both presidential candidates call for sweeping solutions, a tiny little cadre of the environmentalist movement is saying, "Not on my jojoba farm, and not if the Mojave ground squirrel and I have anything to say about it." In response to state regulators and utilities who are desperate to find energy sources to meet California's stringent renewable energy quotas, these squirrel activists want to keep "big solar" out, presumably so they can continue communing with the Earth Spirit in their unspoiled desert Eden.

Their solution? Build little solar panels somewhere else, on someone else's roof, through government subsidies paid for by someone else. (The Times notes, in excellent "just the facts, ma'am" style, that it will take a century for small, inefficient rooftop solar panels to provide enough electricity to meet the state's renewable quota coming up in 2010.) It's almost comical, except that this little farce in the desert serves as an excellent harbinger of just how acrimonious cap-and-trade might turn out, in no small part because certain elements of the green movement are completely intolerant of any human activity that sullies any small corner of the world's ecosystem. These high priests of the biosphere have effectively decreed that energy must be clean and have zero impact on all the species and habitats they hold dear. Any proposal that falls short of this lofty standard is rejected on the grounds of sacrilege.

And lest I start to sound like a villain in a "Captain Planet" episode, I ought to mention that I have no particular beef with the Mojave ground squirrels, and that I'd rather they go on about their squirrelish affairs in peace. But I see no reason why they can't, considering that companies that lease acres in the desert for erecting solar panels have to purchase three times as much acreage for conservation purposes. I ask only that certain environmentalists get serious about this looming climate crisis they dread so much, and recognize that the solution they've championed is going to be costly for everyone. Physics only offers us a limited array of solutions to combat global warming, and they all come with a price tag. Even the Mojave ground squirrel needs to pitch in.