Congress Gets a little Greener

On Friday, June 26th, the U.S. House of Representatives, in a narrow 219 to 212 vote, made environmental history by passing a landmark “cap and trade” bill: the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Like many Americans who have been waiting years for the United States to take a leadership role on climate change, this represents an important first step.

But as happy as I am that Congress is finally taking action, Americans still have a long way ago to lessen the output of carbon we all help to generate.

Not only does this “cap and trade” legislation now have to make it through the Senate, where there is considerable Republican opposition, and some anxiety among Democrats from coal or oil-producing states, but the energy debate in the United States is still too stacked towards a smorgasbord policy that gives carbon-generating options like bio-fuels and “clean” coal (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) too much weight in the mix.

In terms of what the United States could be doing to support the most environmentally friendly forms of energy production, like wind and solar, we are still paying mostly lip service to alternative energy sources, and even less attention is being paid to the most cost-effective but least glamorous solution: reducing our consumption.

Critics of alternative energy often overstate the inherent “instability” of solar and wind power – namely, that the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun only shines a portion out of every 24-hour period. But those objections have repeatedly been shown to exaggerate the effects of these periodic disruptions.

In fact, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests “that a land-based network of 2.5 megawatt turbines installed in non-urban, non-forested, non-ice covered areas could supply all of the world’s electricity needs.” In the study's findings about the United States alone, the potential for wind to supply American electricity needs is even greater, sixteen times current electrical needs.

Indeed, the main obstacle to harnessing the power of the wind, lies in the need to construct a better, smarter grid of transmission lines, and the political will to pay the upfront costs that can be compensated by clean energy production in just a few years.

In answer to the common critique that wind power either produces too little or too much, scientists now suggest that when excess electricity is generated it could be used to generate hydrogen, which is another clean energy source and one that can be stored.

I just returned from a trip to Germany, and I was struck by how advanced this country is in generating wind power. Driving anywhere in the countryside you see dozens of windmills. At the end of 2006, Germany had 18,685 wind turbines with a capacity of around 20,600 megawatts. Wind accounted for 5.7 per cent of Germany's energy consumption and was the largest source of clean energy. By contrast in 2007, the United States' total wind energy capacity reached a meager 16,818 megawatts (MW).

According to the Germany Wind Energy Institute (DEWI), by 2010 Germany's wind farms should have “a combined out put of A48,000 MW, including as much as 10,000 MW from offshore farms.” The U.S. Department of Energy, under the former Bush Administration, was not predicting a substantial increase in wind power until 2030.

There is much to celebrate in Congress's first steps towards reducing America's production of carbon, but looking at our neighbors across the Atlantic, it is clear that we need to move much more aggressively on the deployment of alternative energy production in our own backyard. Our technological capacity to harness the power of the wind and sun is improving every year; now we need to generate the political will to make the investment that will improve all our lives in a time of accelerating climate change.