The three biggest opponents to renewable energy have been the oil, coal, and natural gas lobbies, who have paid billions to politicians to make sure energy policies go their way. These three quantify as the fifth largest lobbying group in the U.S., which is more than defense, agriculture, transportation, spending over $3 billion between 1998 and 2010. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff said to NPR in 2011 that:
Access is vital in lobbying. If you can’t get in your door, you can’t make your case. Here we had a hostile senator, whose staff was hostile. And we had to get in. So that’s the lobbyist safecracker method, is raise money and become a big donor.
Four percent of U.S. coal mined is exported and of 90 percent is used exclusively for power generation. Following Hurricane Katrina, a high-profile marketing campaign was launched by several companies announcing “clean coal” (despite the fact there is nothing remotely clean about coal as it’s simply transferring one waste stream to another).
Image Source: Treehugger.com
The year 2005 saw the W. Bush administration consulting with Exxon regarding its stance on the Kyoto protocol.
In briefing papers given before meetings to the US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky, between 2001 and 2004, the administration is found thanking Exxon executives for the company’s ‘active involvement’ in helping to determine climate change policy, and also seeking its advice on what climate change policies the company might find acceptable. [The Guardian]
In 2006, oil and gas companies spent over $19 millon on political campaigns, with the biggest spenders being also among the top-ranked polluters, including General Electric, Conoco, and Exxon. Some of these businesses have actively interfered with more than just American politics: According to the International Sustainable Energy Organization for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, the second World Climate Conference in 1990 “was sabotaged by the USA and oil lobbies.” This $19 million has borne bountiful fruit. U.S. government grants somewhere in the vastly wide region of $10 to 50 billion of tax subsidies go to these companies every year. And these figures don’t account for ecological costs of these industries to governments. At least another $120 billion in health-related costs is coughed up from the public purse.
During the fourteenth session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, the International Institute for Sustainable Development Bulletin reported, “One minister is said to have challenged the North’s renewable energy lobby with the words: why not ‘light up’ the dark zones of the world by ‘extinguishing some of the candles’ in yours?”
A major policy change that has happened in Europe — and needs to be the way out for America — is decentralization of energy production, as well as removal of lobbying groups from their positions of financial and political power regarding the future of renewable power. Lobbyists dictate government policies, they use their advertising to influence the public, and they operate with little or no oversight, with much of their lobbying money going to influence policies that would seek to reduce it even further.
It will be hard to envision a future with plentiful gadgets if the power to supply them comes from resources that simultaneously destroy it, whether that means pollutants from coal, polluted groundwater from shale gas fracking, oil-rig explosions, reactor leaks, or oil tanker spills. Leaders of industry — not just energy, but transport and countless others — can’t continue to deny, ignore, and lobby against the reality that surrounds us daily. Japanese car manufacturer Mazda doesn’t plan on “relying on vehicles that are strictly dedicated to meeting environmental needs.” That’s pretty much a “screw you” from the automotive sector who persist in building bigger, heavier, and less economical vehicles
As an aside, the first car I drove was a Ford Aspire. It would get 30+ mpg in 1995. Ford discontinued the Aspire in 2000, and their next small car, the Focus, gets a paltry 24 mpg. To add to this contrast, the 1995 Honda Civic got 39 mpg, but the 2005 Honda Civic gets 29 mpg. Contemporary hybrids get little more gas mileage than regular gas-powered cars from two decades before.
While wind and solar power is slowly advancing, the political desire is weakened by greed, the lure of fast profit, and reliance on outmoded forms of generation. By the ease that Greenwashing has taken place, and the public’s complacent acceptance that they are somehow to blame. Nuclear power is proven to be a fool’s game that has taken repeated disasters for nations to realize this while their leaders continue to insist on the plants’ safety. Shale gas — the new, exciting, high-profit exploitable resource of the 21st Century — is potentially an ecological minefield of disasters. Ethanol requires hectares of arable land and more energy used in its production than it can create.
Image Source: US Coast Guard Photography Archive
You can have the best of all possible futures, but only if the desire to profit from the worst parts is stricken from the equation.
I’m definitely enjoying this series, Tim: hope to see more from you! And thanks for calling out why the US is lagging on renewable energy so concisely: I always have gotten lost in a maze of twisty factoids all alike when I’ve tried to figure it out.
Profits! Why should there be huge solar power plants in the desert SW when there should be solar panels on people’s houses instead?