Joseph Romm provides a monthly column to Solstice. This month's column, however, is superseded by an outstanding article he published with Charles Curtis in the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly. We excerpt the first four paragraphs from this excellent article, and the entire article can be read by clicking the title of the article.
Joseph J. Romm is acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, and author of the book, Lean and Clean Management: How to Increase Profits and Productivity by Reducing Pollution (Kodansha, 1994). His e-mail address is Joseph.Romm@hq.doe.gov.Charles B. Curtis is Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy.
"Congressional budget-cutters threaten to end America's leadership in new energy technologies that could generate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, reduce damage to the environment, and limit our costly, dangerous dependency on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf Region."
Imagine a world in which the Persian Gulf controlled two thirds of the world's oil for export, with $200 billion a year in oil revenues streaming into that unstable and politically troubled region, and America was importing nearly 60 percent of its oil, resulting in a $100-billion-a-year outflow that undermined efforts to reduce our trade deficit. That's a scenario out of the 1970s which can never happen again, right? No, that's the "reference case" projection for ten years from now from the federal Energy Information Administration.Comments and Questions to:Imagine another world in which fossil-fuel use had begun a slow, steady decline; more than a third of the market for new electricity generation was supplied from renewable sources; the renewables industry had annual sales of $150 billion; and the fastest-growing new source of power was solar energy. An environmentalist's fantasy, right? No, that's one of two planning scenarios for three to four decades from now, developed by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the world's most profitable oil company, which is widely viewed as a bench mark for strategic planning.
A decade's worth of little-heralded technological advances funded by the Department of Energy have helped to bring such a renewables revolution within our grasp. Yet budget cuts already proposed by Congress would ensure that when renewable energy becomes a source of hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of new high-wage jobs in the next century,America will have lost its leadership in the relevant technologies and will once again be importing products originally developed by U.S. scientists. Moreover, Congress's present and planned cuts in advanced transportation and fossil-fuel research and development impede efforts to maximize the nation's conventional-energy resource base.
Although little can be done to change the first scenario, Congress's actions all but guarantee that if an oil crisis comes, our national response will be reactive, uninformed, and unduly burdensome. Having abandoned the technological means to minimize the crisis, the nation will be left in the next century with little more than its usual responses to energy crises: price controls or other rigid regulations, or unplanned, ineffective attempts to deal with the effects of sharp price or supply fluctuations.