02 May: Energy Policy
Here's an interesting idea that I saw in the Sunday Telegraph:

Scientists at BP are working with officials from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) on plans to bury millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) under the bed of the North Sea. The aim? To try to reduce the amount of harmful greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere which lead to global warming. The capture and storage of CO2, or carbon sequestration, is not new but the Miller (field in the North Sea) project would be Britain's first. Under the scheme, carbon dioxide would be liquefied, pumped back out to the North Sea via a disused oil pipeline and stored in the depleted Miller field. The discussions are still at an early stage but if an agreement is reached, the potential benefits could be huge. Scientists estimate that, on average, just one such project could remove 1m tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year -- the equivalent of the combined emissions pumped out by 100,000 4x4 cars every 12 months. For the Government, the stakes are high: not only is Britain legally bound to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5 percent by 2012 under the Kyoto protocol, but Labour has also pledged to reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2010

I don't know much about the science behind this, but at least it's an idea. Something that BushCo seemingly is without. Here's part of one of the editorials from today's International Herald Tribune (which was probably taken from the New York Times or Washington Post):

It was fascinating to watch President George W. Bush lay out intelligent approaches to pressing problems at his news conference on Thursday night, and then urge Congress to pass bills that would do almost nothing to solve them. Social Security was one case in point, but another egregious example was energy, an issue that has moved to center stage in the White House because of public concern over high prices for oil and gasoline at the pump. Bush had trouble with this issue all week, beginning with an embarrassing effort to persuade the Saudis to gun up productions. He then stumbled through an almost incoherent presentation of his larger energy strategy in a speech on Wednesday at a Small Business Administration conference. Bush was more honest than his Democratic critics when he conceded that nothing would reduce gasoline prices in the short term except an agreement by the Saudis and others to turn on the spigot, a step that is not all that easy when global demand is pressing up against supply. [...] Yet, as always, he completely ignored the surest way to reduce demand and thus oil dependency, which is to improve the fuel efficiency of America's cars and trucks. Indeed, everything Bush said seemed designed to divert attention from this simple and technologically feasible idea. In hi Wednesday speech, for instance, having asserted the pressing national need to reduce dependency, he veered off into the merits of nuclear power and liquefied natural gas -- potentially useful ideas that have nothing to do with oil imports. Cars and trucks don't run on nuclear power and rarely run on natural gas. [...] In addition to confusing things, Bush offered no guidance to Congress beyond an exhortation to the Senate to replicate what he described as a "good bill" approved last week by the House. In fact, the House bill is dreadful. Then, too, he could not resist the deceptions that make debating energy in Washington such a frustrating matter. These included the familiar assertion that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would be restricted to 2,000 acres, which is akin to counting just the greens on a golf course because it includes only the area to be occupied by drilling pads, not the spider web of roads and pipelines.

OK, true, one story is about CO2 and the other is about gas/oil dependency. Apples to oranges, right? My point is that because Britain is bound by certain promises, they're pursuing innovative ideas to tackle energy-related matters while the US remains grounded by BushCo into doing nothing save for debating where our next area of extraction of non-renewable resources will be or the merits of nuclear power (and how we can give nuclear power plant operators more tax breaks).

Here's a bit more from Salon's War Room commenting on what President Bush talked about during last week's press conference:

The other big topic tonight is gas prices. It's hard to believe Americans will be comforted by Bush's answers here. He essentially says that nothing can be done. While he exhorts the Senate to pass his energy bill, he also concedes, "the energy bill is no quick fix -- you can't wave a magic wand" to lower gas prices. What can we do? Bush says that the best way to lower prices is to ask producing nations to increase their capacity. This is what he tried to do earlier this week, in his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, but the Saudis are already thought to be pumping at close to the limit. Americans are probably smart enough to know that the president can't wave a magic wand to lower the price at the pump. But they probably also wanted to hear that the president was doing something about this problem, or at least that he considered the long-term energy self-sufficiency of this country an important matter. Nothing Bush says tonight supports that idea. There's nothing about fuel economy, or the wonders of new conservation technology, or the possibility of rethinking our reliance on foreign oil. Instead, Bush treats rising gas prices as a convenient political matter of the moment: I feel your pain, he says. Now please pass my unrelated corporate-giveaway legislation.

And here's also some facts and figures from Jeremy Rifkin's book, The European Dream (from a chapter discussing the merits of using GDP as a measure of the health of an economy; he suggests that GDP does not take into account for expenditures that do not have a positive effect on society--such as spending on medical treatment for more costly emergency room visits rather than preemptive health care--which also contributes to a nation's GDP measurement; he further argues that taking these negative effects into account puts the actual US output much lower than the EU):

The US's exorbitant and wasteful use of energy is another item that, if we adjusted for it, increases the gap even further between the European and US GDPs. In 2000, the then fifteen EU member countries consumed 63.3 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy. While this amounted to 16 percent of the world's total energy consumption for the year, it was 35.5 quadrillion BTUs less than the US consumed during 2000. In other words, the US consumed 98.8 quadrillion BTUs of energy, or nearly one-third more energy than the fifteen EU countries, even though the combined population of the EU at the time was 375 million people, or 102 million more people than lived at that time in the United States.

I'm getting sick and tired of hearing statistics like this and hearing BushCo continuing to ram extraction schemes down our throats. I think it's time the Democrats started inching away from their recent reactive stances (which have actually been successful at showing Republican hubris) and start offering platform suggestions that a broad swath of the population can agree to--like improving fuel efficiency, focusing more on renewable energy resources and technologies (here's a tactic: tell America we're falling behind the rest of the world and that'll get 'em behind this idea), etc., etc. Heck, you could even put it into a religious context (as the Archbishop of Canterbury recently did in the context of the current British parliamentary elections, as covered in a recent post). This isn't a short term fix, but America is coming to understand that the short term has been sold out from under us and we need to prepare for the future.

At least I hope it is.

****

After typing this post out, I was perusing some saved up pages from Daily Kos and noticed this bit of info via the NYTimes:

After decades of trying to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration, backers of drilling said Friday that they were closer than ever now that Congress had adopted a budget. The $2.56 trillion federal budget for 2006, adopted late Thursday night by the House and Senate, includes a provision that Congress can open the refuge by enacting a particular kind of legislation, called "a reconciliation," that is not vulnerable to Senate filibusters, which have been used to kill such drilling measures in the past.