TROUBL

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the agency that controls government-owned land that isn’t a forest, has put a two-year moratorium on new solar power plants to study the impact plants have on the local environment. Note, no such moratorium is being made to study the impact of Mountain Top removal mining, a form of strip mining where the tops of mountains are blown off, and the resulting fill is simply dumped into the local rivers. Given those two facts, that a dangerous form of mining goes along unchallenged, while the solar plants are shut down before they are even built, it’s easy to see that this is more than a battle over a few trees or fish, but an attack in a figurative war between the 19th century and the 21st century. We’re seeing it personified in the form of John McCain vs. Barack Obama, but really what we’re seeing is a battle of 19th and 20th century ideas, between drilling for more fossil fuels of the past and developing renewable energy for the future.

The moratorium comes at a time when oil prices are high, the ice caps are melting, and therefore it’s more obvious than it’s been in the past 30 years that our dependence on fossil fuels is crippling us. On the other side of the coin, studies predict that The U.S. could build a large solar plant in the middle of the desert providing up to 100% of our nation’s electric needs. Now, I’m no mathematician, but I know reducing our dependence on fossil fuels for electricity by 100% is at least a good start. The state of North Dakota, similarly, has been called the Saudi Arabia of Wind, with the potential to generate 1.2 billion kilowatt hours, or a quarter of the country’s electric grid!

Electricity, however, does have its drawbacks. Chiefly, you lose electricity when you try to store it for long periods of time or try to transport it through wires over long distances. The best solution, therefore, is to use local electricity, be it solar panels on individual buildings, or taking advantage of an area’s geography to maximize results. Once we’re producing a surplus of cheap, clean, renewable energy, it’ll be easy to take the next step of reducing our dependence on oil by using electricity to power our transportation needs: plug-in hybrid cars and buses will ease the transition to electric cars and scooters, hydrogen powered cars (using hydrogen as a storage medium for electricity), and hopefully a bullet train system; all part of a growing, green, 21st century economy.

Which brings us back to the Borough of Land Management, and that moratorium. Fortunately, the BLM did reverse itself, after public outrage. But, we need to keep moving forward, because the 19th century mindset is still hanging on, and it’s represented heavily by a bunch of white guys in suits. Just recently, Rush Limbaugh and the Right-Wing smear machine tried to make fun of Barack Obama for mentioning that we could save more oil by inflating our tires properly than we could produce by offshore drilling. It was, in turn, slapped right back in their face. But, they have already won the big victory. The issue of whether or not we should drill for oil upon the pretense of national security and the economy, instead of realizing that off-shore drilling will ensure another decade of record profits for the oil companies, that the rest of us won’t ever see.