Green Energy
The Cost of Driving Electrically(new)
In our economy, each source of energy is subsidized explicitly with government-funded research and development conducted by academic, government, or industrial research centers, low-interest loans, and/or tax breaks and implicitly by allowing each to privatize more profit by socializing the risks to the public and environmental health, safety, and welfare associated with each stage of its life cycle from the mining of raw materials to final decommissioning and recovery of the land where the razed facility once stood for other uses. The implicit subsidies include allowing the consumption of renewable and nonrenewable matter and energy resources and the disposal of degradable and non-degradable air, water, and solids wastes and heat with various magnitudes, durations, and frequencies of reversible and irreversible environmental degradation at every stage in the life cycle of coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear, and solar, wind, or wave power. Once the initial fossil fuel debt to bring each facility on-line is paid off during its operation, the cumulative lifetime operational environmental footprint of a solar-, wind-, or wave-power facility is far smaller than that for a coal-, oil-, or gas-fired power plant or conventional nuclear power plants per megawatt.
And unlike nuclear plants, during its operation an alternative energy power plant doesn't require the reprocessing of reactor core nuclear fuel wastes to recover the 500 lbs of plutonium and the storage and disposal of 30 tons of high-level radioactive waste per 1,000 megawatts per year when a nuclear power plant is operated, and when it is decommissioned it doesn't require the safe transport and storage of thousands of tons of reprocessed high-level radioactive wastes for safe storage for tens of thousands of years and tens of thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste for a safe storage for a century. http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-energy/basics/introduction.htm
Regarding landscape alterations, once an alternative energy facility has paid off its fossil fuel debt, there is no mountaintop removal required to access sun, wind, or wave power. Regarding energy consumption, one does not have to operate drag lines to extract the raw mixture of coal and non-coal material from the coal seams, sorting and sieving equipment to separate the coal from the non-coal materials, and to transfer of the crudely processed material into bucket cars for transport by hundred-car trains to a raw coal processing facility. There are also no hundred-car trains every two or three days hauling processed coal from the processing facility to where it is burned, sometimes hundreds to thousands of miles away. Regarding water pollution, there is no rainfall leachate from unlined coal pile storage areas into the underlying and adjacent soils and surficial aquifers. There is no treatment of leachate from lined storage areas prior to discharge to impaired waterways. There is no contamination of underlying and adjacent soils and surficial aquifers with leachate from unlined wet fly ash drying lagoons or the need to treat leachate prior to discharge from lined lagoons. There is no contamination of adjacent streams or rivers when a berm fails and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of fly ash wash out, as occurred in the Tennessee River only a few years ago. The contaminated area downstream is now a Superfund site. There is no consumptive use of surface or ground waters for cooling towers or the need to deep-well inject the concentrated brine after many cycles of recirculation of that water. Once a mine ceases to be profitable, there is no acid drainage that contaminates tens or hundreds of miles of otherwise fishable streams. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/brief_coal.html
Regarding air pollution, there is no contamination of our air, surface and ground waters, soils, crops, livestock, milk, fish and shellfish with a variety of heavy metals and organic compounds that are the byproduct of incomplete coal combustion, as well as soot, ash, and oxides of nitrogen and sulfur. There is no acid rain that kills poorly buffered lakes in the midwest and northeast. There is no emission, transport, and deposition of inorganic mercury to watershed and waterbody surfaces that is subsequently transformed by sulfate-reducing bacteria in anoxic sediments into the extremely neurotoxic and bioaccumulative methylmercury, impairing the use of more than 90% of Florida's inland lakes and streams and most of its coastal waters as sport and commercial fisheries. Coal plants also emit more radionuclides than nukes per megawatt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry Note that to this point I have ignored the contribution of coal-fired power plants to the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the environmental impacts associated with the global warming caused by that increase, so coal-fired power plants cannot stand on their own without massive implicit subsidies, even if its contribution to climate change is ignored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
Only in our egregiously under-regulated world of economic illusion, where coal-fired power plants are allowed to externalize their waste heat and matter at no or reduced costs, can coal power be considered cost-competitive with solar, wind, or wave power. Coal is so heavily implicitly subsidized throughout its life cycle that it should be labeled a welfare slacker worthy of our scorn, not our continuing enabling behavior that allows it to socialize its risks and privatize its profits at the expense of the public and environmental health, safety, and welfare. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/EPAactivities/economics.html
That being the case, I welcome President Obama's nomination of Gina McCarthy, presently the Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation, to be the new Administrator of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_McCarthy. She will use the power granted to EPA by Congress in the Clean Air Act to go where no Administrator has gone before and level the playing field for alternative energy power sources by promulgating and enforcing environmental standards that finally force coal-fired power plants to internalize all of their externalities and, for the first time, force consumers to pay for the true, unsubsidized cost of coal-fired electricity, which will eventually kill it, because, on a level, unsubsidized playing field, it cannot compete with solar, wind, or wave power. If we need back-up plants for when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and the waves subside, switch to natural gas for the short-term and thorium nuclear power plants for the long term. You and the stable climate you depend upon will be glad you did.
And unlike nuclear plants, during its operation an alternative energy power plant doesn't require the reprocessing of reactor core nuclear fuel wastes to recover the 500 lbs of plutonium and the storage and disposal of 30 tons of high-level radioactive waste per 1,000 megawatts per year when a nuclear power plant is operated, and when it is decommissioned it doesn't require the safe transport and storage of thousands of tons of reprocessed high-level radioactive wastes for safe storage for tens of thousands of years and tens of thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste for a safe storage for a century. http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-energy/basics/introduction.htm
Regarding landscape alterations, once an alternative energy facility has paid off its fossil fuel debt, there is no mountaintop removal required to access sun, wind, or wave power. Regarding energy consumption, one does not have to operate drag lines to extract the raw mixture of coal and non-coal material from the coal seams, sorting and sieving equipment to separate the coal from the non-coal materials, and to transfer of the crudely processed material into bucket cars for transport by hundred-car trains to a raw coal processing facility. There are also no hundred-car trains every two or three days hauling processed coal from the processing facility to where it is burned, sometimes hundreds to thousands of miles away. Regarding water pollution, there is no rainfall leachate from unlined coal pile storage areas into the underlying and adjacent soils and surficial aquifers. There is no treatment of leachate from lined storage areas prior to discharge to impaired waterways. There is no contamination of underlying and adjacent soils and surficial aquifers with leachate from unlined wet fly ash drying lagoons or the need to treat leachate prior to discharge from lined lagoons. There is no contamination of adjacent streams or rivers when a berm fails and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of fly ash wash out, as occurred in the Tennessee River only a few years ago. The contaminated area downstream is now a Superfund site. There is no consumptive use of surface or ground waters for cooling towers or the need to deep-well inject the concentrated brine after many cycles of recirculation of that water. Once a mine ceases to be profitable, there is no acid drainage that contaminates tens or hundreds of miles of otherwise fishable streams. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/brief_coal.html
Regarding air pollution, there is no contamination of our air, surface and ground waters, soils, crops, livestock, milk, fish and shellfish with a variety of heavy metals and organic compounds that are the byproduct of incomplete coal combustion, as well as soot, ash, and oxides of nitrogen and sulfur. There is no acid rain that kills poorly buffered lakes in the midwest and northeast. There is no emission, transport, and deposition of inorganic mercury to watershed and waterbody surfaces that is subsequently transformed by sulfate-reducing bacteria in anoxic sediments into the extremely neurotoxic and bioaccumulative methylmercury, impairing the use of more than 90% of Florida's inland lakes and streams and most of its coastal waters as sport and commercial fisheries. Coal plants also emit more radionuclides than nukes per megawatt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry Note that to this point I have ignored the contribution of coal-fired power plants to the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the environmental impacts associated with the global warming caused by that increase, so coal-fired power plants cannot stand on their own without massive implicit subsidies, even if its contribution to climate change is ignored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
Only in our egregiously under-regulated world of economic illusion, where coal-fired power plants are allowed to externalize their waste heat and matter at no or reduced costs, can coal power be considered cost-competitive with solar, wind, or wave power. Coal is so heavily implicitly subsidized throughout its life cycle that it should be labeled a welfare slacker worthy of our scorn, not our continuing enabling behavior that allows it to socialize its risks and privatize its profits at the expense of the public and environmental health, safety, and welfare. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/EPAactivities/economics.html
That being the case, I welcome President Obama's nomination of Gina McCarthy, presently the Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation, to be the new Administrator of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_McCarthy. She will use the power granted to EPA by Congress in the Clean Air Act to go where no Administrator has gone before and level the playing field for alternative energy power sources by promulgating and enforcing environmental standards that finally force coal-fired power plants to internalize all of their externalities and, for the first time, force consumers to pay for the true, unsubsidized cost of coal-fired electricity, which will eventually kill it, because, on a level, unsubsidized playing field, it cannot compete with solar, wind, or wave power. If we need back-up plants for when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and the waves subside, switch to natural gas for the short-term and thorium nuclear power plants for the long term. You and the stable climate you depend upon will be glad you did.
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