Being an energy wonk, I try to stay current on the debate over national energy policy.  Lately, I find doing so to be hard on the soul. What passes for debate these days looks more like a messy shoot-out over half-truths and misinformation within a broader culture war that often resembles a cartoon. The Meanies versus the Greenies.

The Meanies being the entrenched myopic carbonites hell bent on destroying the planet in defense of God, profit, and nostalgia over a shinier bygone American brand. The Greenies being the godless insurgent stewards of Gaia marching us down a carbon free road to a doubtful sustainable future and the certainty of a wrecked economy. The reality is we’re all in uncharted waters and we’d do well to maintain a skeptical watch while keeping an open mind.

For the moment, it would appear the Greenies are indeed gaining ground as the conservative Meanies continue to self-marginalize. The signs are numerous. The topic of global climate change comes up with increasing frequency in the media, political speeches and corporate communications. The debate is no longer about climate change being “real”, but is about understanding the consequences, and above all, what we’re going to do ….or NOT do… about it.

The job that Gore lost in 2000 over hanging chads freed him up to become an Oscar and Nobel Prize winning warrior for climate change awareness proving once again that elections do indeed have consequences. Eight years later, humorous yet pointed ads mocking the oxymoron of “clean coal” flow into our living rooms almost every evening. A dry squinty-eyed good-ole-boy wearing jeans and work boots walks out of a mom and pop diner into a whirl of windmills giving us the “straight talk” about it being time to repower America with renewable energy. In Washington, cap-and-trade carbon regulations are getting traction up and down the halls of Congress while a national mandate for a targeted percentage of electricity from renewable sources is closer than ever to becoming a reality.

Meanwhile, those of us involved in the production and use of coal are definitely not feeling the love. Permitting of new surface coal mines, especially those involving mountain top removal in the Eastern US, has slowed to a crawl if not a complete stop. With few exceptions, the development of new coal fired power plants is being successfully blocked nationwide. Even Obama’s support for clean coal seems lukewarm compared to the administration’s clear enthusiastic support for renewable energy. Coal may indeed provide nearly 50% of our electricity today but the safe bet is coal is on a long term downward trajectory domestically even while countries like China and India are in a non-stop frenzy of building dozens of new coal plants each year.

The Meanies use this last point to highlight the futility of our moving away from fossil energy, at great economic cost and risk to ourselves, while the rest of the world ramps up cheap, carbon intensive energy, more than undoing any good we might have done, plus they’ll use it to beat us senseless in the competitive global marketplace.

You have to admit, the Meanies do have a point there. Should their argument prevail, a solo march by the U.S. into a green future, no matter how noble, could amount to nothing less than complete unilateral economic disarmament. Followed some time later this century by universal hardship brought on by abrupt nonlinear shifts in the global climate. Or we can skip the unilateral economic disarmament and just wait for the universal hardship.

Or, and here’s the long shot option, we can launch a global campaign led by the U.S. to bring the entire world into a greener, and far less meaner, future. In a quieter moment, in our guts, most of us probably believe this last option is the right thing to do. But in the next moment most of probably also believe……fat chance that’s gonna happen. We’ll see.

Tags: climate change, energy policy