LOOKING LOCALLY: A BOTTOM-UP ENERGY SOLUTION

 

Audio and Text Versions

David Morris is the author of A Better Way, and vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

AUDIO VERSION: Click here to listen to the commentary by David Morris. To download RealPlayer for free, click here.

TEXT VERSION:

As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer you see all the world's problems as nails. That's what happens when Washington gets involved. Washington has a national hammer, of course, and therefore sees all problems as national nails. That's why the energy bill recently passed by the House contains so many big solutions. More giant power plants. More giant oil refineries. More twenty-story tall transmission lines. More power to the federal government to override local and state authority.

If I had my druthers, Congress would stay out of the energy situation altogether. We don't need a single top-down remedy. We need a thousand bottom-up remedies. We don't need to figure out how to get more oil from Alaska to Minnesota, or more coal from Wyoming to Illinois or more electric power from Idaho to Los Angeles.

We need to figure out how to tap into our vast store house of human ingenuity to extract more energy from local resources. Consider what we've done in my home state of Minnesota. Ten percent of our transportation fuel comes from our own farmers. More than 90 percent comes from 11 farmer-owned biorefineries. That's what we call them in Minnesota.

When Minnesotans fill up at the pump, part of our fuel comes from just a few miles away. And part of our fuel dollar stays in the local community and nourishes a sector of the society that certainly needs nourishing.

Alaska now supplies about 9 percent of our oil. Rather than drilling in pristine wilderness to boost that to 11 percent, why not convert the hundreds of millions of tons of agricultural and municipal wastes that we throw away each year into transportation fuels?

When it comes to electricity, Washington is again missing the boat. Congress wants to accelerate the construction of thousands of new central power plants, each one serving half a million or more households. It wants to encourage thousands of miles of high voltage transmission lines to get their electricity to distant customers.

Vice President Cheney tells us we need a new giant power plant a week. What he fails to tell us is that at this very moment entrepreneurs are installing 20 new power plants each day. A new industry is being born before our very eyes, harkening back to the first days of electric power, when businessmen like Thomas Edison sold power plants, not electricity. Basement microturbines and fuel cells, rooftop solar cells, backyard wind turbines. These are the power plants for the twenty-first century.

We don't need to figure out new ways to even further separate the energy producer from the energy consumer. We need to develop policies that transform households, and farms and businesses into energy producers. Happily, dozens of cities and states are designing bottom up energy strategies to do just this. If Washington could nurture these efforts, I'd applaud. But I fear there is something inherent in being part of a national government that makes it impossible to foster local solutions.

The president's father established a program called a thousand points of light. Wouldn't it be lovely if his son would promote a program that would foster a million points of light?

This is David Morris for TomPaine.com.

This commentary was produced by Steve Rosenfeld.

Published: Aug 02 2001