Searching to reduce global warming

The News Journal (Wilmington, Delaware)
May 13, 2008
By Gov. Russell W. Peterson

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As we work to reduce the super serious threat of global warming to life on Earth, it is fundamentally important to assess early on the long range positive and negative impacts of each remedial measure we undertake.

I had the opportunity to work on such assessment when as chairman of the Presidents Council on Environmental Quality in the early 1970s, my prime responsibility was to convince and help a reluctant executive branch prepare environmental impact statements as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. And later, as director of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, I led the effort to advise the Congress on the long-term positive and negative impacts of technological developments they were considering on social, economic, environmental and political factors.

The forces that worked against such objective analysis were powerful and many. That will be especially true for a project dealing with such a threatening, far-reaching and all-encompassing problem as global warming.

The current runaway program to convert America's farmland, the widely acclaimed "breadbasket for the world," to a biofuel pump has already caused a run-up in food prices, and has the potential to contribute to a hunger tragedy in the developing world. Meanwhile, farmers growing corn, the intermediate for the biofuel ethanol, are enjoying markedly increased income, while their elected officials glow over the generous subsidies from borrowed dollars they provide these farmers.

Over 30 years ago, when I was the founding chairman of the Bioenergy Research Council, studying bioenergy developments around the globe, we concluded it took almost as much fossil fuel energy to produce ethanol as the energy obtained by burning the ethanol. The use of ethanol as a fuel for cars is cited as a way to reduce global warming. But ethanol is a carbon fuel and releases upon burning almost as much of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, as does gasoline.

The December 2007 Act of Congress calling for the production of 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022 is a frightening example of what can go wrong when the decision makers don't assess the negative impacts of their actions. The Act needs to be modified to assure that we retain enough farmland for food production and maintain America as a breadbasket for the world.

To reduce global warming it is essential we reduce use of the fuels that cause it, coal, oil and natural gas.

There are three key ways to do this: reduce demand for energy, use energy more efficiently and develop non-carbon sources of energy. Delaware is already part of an interstate agreement to reduce demand by imposing a tax on carbon dioxide emitted.

The number of programs to use energy more efficiently has skyrocketed around the world. The opportunities for doing more are numerous and huge. Remember, as Ben Franklin would say, "A kilowatt saved is a kilowatt earned."

The Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) that our state government has established to promote and subsidize energy-saving equipment and practices in our homes and businesses is an exciting and promising development.

Fortunately we also have the current opportunity to support Bluewater Wind's proposal to invest its own money in building a wind energy plant off our coast, and in the process provide a growing number of Delaware jobs. Unlike coal, oil and gas, wind energy is free, transports itself, and creates no greenhouse gas or any other pollution. What a change from the greenhouse gas spewing fossil fuel plants that threaten our Earth's future.

The global warming threat is huge and growing rapidly, and our country is the biggest culprit causing it. We need to run with both of our opportunities -- the Sustainable Energy Utility and the wind plant.

Unfortunately, leaders with conflicts of interest are fighting the wind plant, widely exaggerating its costs. The leader of both the sustainable energy utility and the state Senate committee on energy, Sen. Harris McDowell, is one. Another is Delmarva Power and its parent company, Pepco Holding. Their conglomerate is in the business of burning fossil fuels to produce electricity, and see Bluewater Wind as a competitor.

The people of Delaware are overwhelmingly behind the wind plant, willing to pay $1.60 more per week for electricity that doesn't threaten today's and tomorrow's kids with the horrors of global warming. I suggest that Gov. Minner and leaders of the Legislature get together and resolve the problems so we can show the world how the First State is out front in doing its share to fight global warming.

The time for action is now.

Russell Peterson is a former governor of Delaware and past president of the National Audubon Society.

NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for research and educational purposes.

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