I try not to watch the President on television. It’s too much like being in the boxing ring with my hands tied behind my back. And don’t all the meaningful details emerge in the more literary media anyway?
I made an exception this year, lured to the recent State of the Union by all those knock-your-socks-off promises about energy independence initiatives and alternatives to gasoline. Here, in my view, is how the President’s plans play out in the context of West Michigan’s future needs:
Where's the Innovation
Michigan has no coal industry of its own, so the President’s coal, be it clean or filthy, is nothing for us to get excited about.
Seventy-one percent of electric energy in the Midwest is generated from coal. Coal extraction benefits coal-producing states like West Virginia – where they sloppily behead the tops of mountains to get at it – or Wyoming – where they dig vast craters in the landscape.
So picture, for each 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant, a trainload a day of coal coming into Michigan and a trainload a day of Michigan money going out. In total, Michigan spends approximately $27 billion annually on energy. Most of that money — $18 billion — leaves the state, because nearly all of the fuel that utilities burn for energy in Michigan comes from out-state sources.
The President also talked about clean, safe nuclear power, which generates about 23 percent of Michigan’s electricity. We don’t manufacture nuclear reactors in the state. But we buy them on rare occasions and operate a few nuclear facilities to meet our own power needs. We also store quite a bit of nuclear waste along the Lake Michigan shore and other places. But nobody pays us to do it.
Nuclear power is not cheap, but it sure runs clean. Nuclear power contributes virtually nothing to our region’s air pollution problems and virtually nothing to our global climate change problem. The biggest criticism of nuclear power generation, from a sustainability standpoint, is that it produces the world’s most toxic waste, no one knows how to get rid of it, and so it collects on the property of whoever is dumb enough to take it.
Please don’t write in to tell me about the Yucca Mountain Repository – a volcanic Nevada mountain where federal officials propose to store spent nuclear reactor fuel and other radioactive waste. Your note will merely give me a few yuccas at your expense. If we go the route of increasing nuclear power’s share in our energy mix, we will need many Yucca Mountains, not just one.
We do have an oil and gas industry right here in Michigan, though it’s not a very substantial one. Michigan oil comprises .3 percent of our state’s total electric fuel use. The White House has big confidence in homeland oil and gas production, particularly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Some people call this the “drain America first” policy.
But at this point it is the oil industry, not the President, that decides how quickly we must pump oil out of the ground. When prices are low, the oil barons are in no rush.
Finally there is ethanol, which is really the President’s wild card. Ethanol cannot, even if you make ridiculous assumptions, provide more than a fraction of our future fuel needs. However, it has great vote-getting power in the corn-producing states.
Michigan doesn’t produce enough corn to be much of a competitor now. If we develop technologies for ginning switchgrass and other inedible plant matter into ethanol, as the President described, we might play more of a role.
That’s pretty much it. The President did say “wind and solar”, even more briefly than he said “global climate change." Michigan could establish a wind industry immediately, and be its own best customer. We could even run cars using wind power for overnight charges on plug-in hybrids.
Wanted: Meaningful Leadership
Two insights come stumbling through all the shiny language in the President’s State of the Union. The first is that the President has gone to much trouble to be sure that the game’s past winners – coal giants, oil companies, and reactor builders – continue to do well.
But how well can Michigan – a state targeting innovative, renewable energy companies as an economic growth sector – really do in the energy game if we feel compelled to guarantee the game’s past winners that they will be the winners of the future also? We’ll be like Oliver Twist, hopefully holding up our empty bowl to be filled.
The second insight is that conservation plays an extremely limited role in Bush’s thinking on energy independence. He managed to force out the word “environment” a couple of times. But the word “conservation” did not emerge at all. Once again, he seems afraid to challenge the American people to any higher calling than shopping.
What's needed in Michigan and across the nation is a more diversified energy portfolio. We need an aggressive strategy to lessen dependence on traditional energy sources like coal, nuclear, oil, and gas; ramp up investment in emerging technologies such as wind and solar power; and, perhaps most importantly, use the current energy we have more effectively.
The great irony in this debate is that our current use of energy is so profligate that we could probably conserve our way to a real energy savings of 10 percent or more almost immediately without reducing our quality of life one molecule.
Energy conservation is widely accepted as the low-hanging fruit in the push towards energy independence. It doesn’t even require major new technological breakthroughs. Implementing existing technologies would be enough to get us started. Leadership to do make the moves is what's missing. And if we don’t have that, we may not see energy independence in the next twenty years, or even the next fifty.
Photos:
President Bush onboard Air Force One - courtesy of the A.P.
Oil pump in Millennium Park - Grand Rapids
Steam plant in downtown Grand Rapids
Oil pump in Millennium Park - Grand Rapids
Photographs by Brian Kelly - All Rights Reserved