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.
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