Solar Energy and Capitalism: Somewhat of a mismatch

Why was widespread use of the sun as an alternate energy source not supported by the government beginning with Reagan and continuing for the next twenty-eight years?

Because the very ubiquitousness of the sun is a detriment to its widespread use in an unregulated supply based capitalistic system: it cannot easily be concentrated in the hands of a few for large profits.

What is a capitalistic system? To me it is one where the means to produce the things that people need and want in their daily lives is in the hands of the capitalists.

Who are the capitalists? In our free enterprise system they are the people who own the means (factories and the machines in them) to produce the things that we need and want.

What is money capital? In our capitalistic system it is a claim on the goods we all need and want in our daily lives.

Is that supply of goods, the things we all need and want, infinite? NO IT IS NOT! That the pie is unlimited is the lie that the rich would have us believe; often, I think, without knowing the truth themselves. They have learned how to amass money (the claim on the things we all need and want) without realizing and, in most cases I believe, without caring that the pie is not unlimited in size.

The pictures from the moon show the finiteness, the utter aloneness of our planet. It is only our ninety-three million mile juxtaposition with the life giving sun that our little blue world supports us all. For our world to continue we must somehow win out over that most vile of human traits—greed: left unchecked, it could destroy our world as we know it.

I do not advocate a noncapitalistic system; indeed, none of the so called utopian systems could possibly work in the presents of greed. On the other hand, I disagree with the premise that regulation in a capitalistic system would kill it. On the contrary, it is only with fair regulation that it can work for a larger group of a population: witness the large prosperous middle class present from after World War II well into the decade of the 70’s.

What was in place before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration? Unregulated, unbridled free market capitalism.

What did the country get from it? The Great Depression with its high unemployment and so much human misery.

What did F.D.R’s “New Deal” bring? It brought common sense regulation, some helpful social programs, hope, and government spending that ended The Great Depression. To those conservatives who gleefully say it was the second world war that ended the depression—was that not government spending, albeit, on tanks and guns.

What did the country get with Reagan and after with the return of the conservatives? Deregulation; and as wealth shifted to the rich, the shrinking of what was once a prosperous middle class; the abandonment of support for alternative energy systems in favor of big oil; two wars; and more deregulation in banking leading to the deepest and longest recession since The Great Depression.

But no, I do not think that a capitalistic system is unworkable; without some regulation, however, you get people in high positions amassing money capital (which is, remember, a claim on things that people need to survive) far beyond what they could need or have a use for. Can you tell me why any person, man or woman, should have a claim—remembering now that the pie is only so large—on another human beings share, many times on the order of a thousand to one?

Yes, capitalism can work as an economic system but to remain fair it should include President Lincoln’s dictum: that government should do for people what they cannot do for themselves—this in the form of common sense even handed regulations.

It would be very hard to convince me that a person would not strive to have a job that produced a very good living just because there was a regulated limit on the slice of the economic pie that he or she was entitled to.

It would be great if the business community could regulate itself but with the ever present flaw of greed in the mix, it seems impossible.

To my chagrin, It is probably not possible to wrest power from the wealthy to the point where government could impose meaningful regulations: this would require making lobbying illegal—not likely. But indeed, if we cannot somehow put a limit on greed’s claim, humankind’s legacy may well be as Shakespeare’s Macbeth described it: “… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Yet, I prefer the optimistic possibility  that there are many more nongreedy people than greedy ones. I am quite sure that even most conservatives are not basically greedy: just misinformed—believing the false notion that the economic pie is unlimited.

My definition of greed, as I use it here, is not the natural desire and striving for basic needs and security; that is, after all, the tenacity of life itself. No, what I am referring to here is a selfish desire beyond reason for more and more for its own sake.

Still, I do hold out hope that life is not as empty as Shakespeare’s Macbeth describes it. It is at the same time tenuous and tenacious. To save our home, this little blue world we survive on, we need to use wisely and in a balanced way our gift of the sun’s energy.

NPPD and Cap and Trade

In the spring of 2010, an electric power company in Nebraska, Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) mailed a brochure to its customers, in it, addressing some questions and answers on possible cap and trade legislation.

They ask the question, what is an emission? and then answer it by saying: It could be a chemical like a pesticide; a metal like mercury; or a gas like sulfur dioxide. Let me just add a very important emission they conveniently left out, one that will loom large later in this discussion: radioactive waste.

NPPD saying that the cap and trade program on acid rain was successful because there were various technologies already available to them to reduce pollutants but arguing that the technologies needed to capture and/or sequester carbon dioxide and store it are neither proven nor available for commercial use, is just a stall.

They give notice that the implementation of either the House or Senate proposals on cap and trade is expected to cost the nation billions of dollars. Of course it is, rhetorically I ask, what did you expect? the very latest we could have done something that possibly embodied less severe consequences was way back twenty-eight years ago when the conservatives came to power.

Back then, P. Richard Rittelmann said: “…controls have allowed the prices of energy to reflect only cost and not the value of diminishing resources.” “… [put in place then] alternate energy opportunities could quite conceivably have followed an evolutionary development process rather than the revolutionary process to which the nation must [now] commit itself.”

Indeed, it would have been, at the very least, revolutionary then (30 years ago), now, by the time the global warming deniers are finally forced to give in, it will truly be onerous: the problem is, we will all have to suffer the same fate as the conservatives who caused it.

Ronald Reagan was fond of saying: government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.

I’m sorry Mr. Reagan but that is not true. To your memory, your puppeteer handlers, and your conservative followers, you were the problem, and still are.

NPPD estimates it may cost their customers between $120 million and $ 350 million annually to reach the carbon levels set in the proposed cap and trade legislation. Here again, they claim that coal produces the lowest cost electricity but, of course, they are only counting the cost to them of the delivered coal. With this argument, they hope to win their customer’s support for their opposition to cap and trade legislation.

For the rest of us, however, the entire world family, it is the external costs of coal that must be paid: pollution, global warming, indirect health costs, lives lost in mining—these and others are not included in the price that utilities pay for a trainload of coal, see; (one of the Best-Kept secrets about Coal…) It’s Not the Cheapest Energy by Hendrik van den Berg in Nebraskans For Peace, Nebraska Report May/June 2010 Volume 38, Number 3; for a good explanation of the real cost of coal.

I commend NPPD for its support of renewable energy sources. They have set a goal to produce 10 percent of their energy by renewable resources by 2020.I wish they would, at least, triple this goal to 30 percent. I also support their programs that promote conservation of energy use.

NPPD, however, also advocates an increased use of nuclear power, which, they say, produces no emissions. I completely disagree with them on this, see above (the 2nd paragraph in this writing); radioactive waste is, most definitely, an emission problem—and one that, at the moment, there is no permanent solution for.

I say to NPPD, and all other utilities, abandon any new nuclear plans and, instead, put the money in other nonpolluting forms of renewables: solar and wind, for example.