Let’s not gush about our clean energy options

Estimates regarding the rate of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil blowout get spewier with each succeeding news cycle. The mess being made requires that we Americans consider what we are willing to pay—economically and environmentally— for energy.

I didn’t see President Obama’s live televised remarks to the nation on the BP oil spill but watched it online. He apparently chose not to use the speech I drafted, “Our Energy Future,” for his text. More’s the pity. He chose another path and the punditocracy are weighing in on how he said it and what he said or, more likely, didn’t say. It was a sober speech, part elegy and part jeremiad. I agreed with much of what he said: stanch the spill, help the Gulf Coast clean up and get back on its feet, investigate the blowout’s cause, tighten the regulatory oversight, and hold BP accountable.

Then our President went on set out his vision, “Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil… Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own (energy) destiny.”

It’s a nice vision, full of gumdrop trees and candy kisses where the air will be so pure from our clean energy that we would have to smoke six packs of cigarettes each day to remember what the air used to be like. In the oil-free America the air will be so clean that the sun will seem like it’s gotten a new lease on life, it will be so bright. That is, if we can see the sun for all of the photovoltaic panels that we will need to power our electric cars, electric SUVs, and electric pickup trucks; electric eighteen-wheeler trucks, electric trains, electric motorcycles and scooters, electric boats and ships, and electric planes and jets. You see, our transportation industry runs on oil and if we want to replace the high-density energy of petroleum with wind or solar we’re going to need a LOT of space.

So, instead of gumdrop trees where birds flit about, imagine 32,150 square miles of wind turbines that kill eagles and interrupt bird migrations. That is what is needed to meet California’s present electricity needs, which are in the neighborhood of 97,000 megawatts. Or, instead of candy-cane cactus, imagine 5,770 square miles of solar photovoltaic panels in the Mojave Desert (about 20% of the Mojave) disrupting habitats of endangered plants and animals. Imagine the new power transmission lines to deliver the electricity. Granted, to some extent, this is “inside-the-box thinking;” some PV panels can be put on rooftops so that not all the displacement would be on undeveloped land (One source I checked had put 27 PV panels on his average sized house in sun-rich Austin, TX. The panels produced about one-third of a typical family’s electricity use.).

Now imagine where those “guilt-free” “clean-energy” machines will be manufactured. If you said, “the United States of America,” thanks for playing; you may sit down. You’re wrong. Try China. So instead of getting our fossil fuel from countries such as Canada and Mexico (only 11% of our domestic oil supply comes from OPEC), we will get our batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines from China instead. Wind turbines, photovoltaics, and electric car batteries need rare-earth metals (such as lanthanum and neodymium) and China has a near monopoly on rare-earth mining. America’s one rare-earth mine closed in 2002. It’s not that rare-earth metals are terribly rare, it’s that mining for them leaves radioactive waste. China’s state-run economy won’t care about such concerns. It will ignore the short-term environmental consequences to lock up the market and get the (low-paying) jobs for growing its middle class.

So-called clean and green energy carries considerable downsides, just as fossil fuel does. Since all actions have consequences, costs and benefits have to be assayed. As that great Roman philosopher, Anonymous, once observed, “Res ea non est quae prandium gratuitum aquet.”

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.