William Urban: Cut red tape on solar projects, but don't abandon what already works
The opinion column by Mayor Peter Schwartzman in the Wednesday paper made the conversion from coal and natural gas to renewable energy sound very easy. There were only a few problems to overcome — building the infrastructure for solar and wind power, building a new transmission system for the electricity, and building a system for storing it. That rather takes one’s breath away.
One U.S. government website said that we only need 23,000 square miles of land for the solar and wind farms. That’s a lot of land and most of it is far from the people who need the electricity because nobody is recommending that we build wind farms in populated areas.
I won’t argue statistics with the mayor. Estimates about the future are mostly speculation, our best guesses on best and worst outcomes. How much is a gigawatt anyway? How good have cost estimates really been? How much pollution will we produce by mining the materials needed to build solar panels and wind mills, and why aren’t we producing them in the United States? When the windmills wear out, we cannot recycle them. We just bury them. How many years will solar panels last?
These are just some of the questions that the mayor passed over lightly. We should certainly move toward renewables, but experience suggests doing so cautiously — the Sri Lankan economy had not recovered from the civil war, when the government tried to go green all at once. Replacing chemical fertilizers with manure created a food shortage, then there was no gasoline, and cutting taxes did not stop the protests or the inflation that made the money almost worthless. Ghana has all the sunlight it needs to be a solar powerhouse, but turning that into electricity has not lived up to hopes, so that it still relies on hydroelectric power. Angela Merkel began shutting down Germany’s nuclear plants and coal mines, leaving her successor vulnerable to Putin using natural gas against him for supporting Ukraine. The economic outlook there is not good, with the Euro slipping from 1.13 to the dollar a few weeks ago when I was there to dead even and sinking. Boris Johnson resigned as UK prime minister, but less perhaps to his throwing parties during COVID than the disastrous economic results of his moving the country toward green energy. (And he led a “conservative” government.)
France still gets most of its electricity from nuclear energy. That is truly green energy, but the American public has been subjected to so much propaganda about radiation that it won’t even allow it on food products to kill bacteria. How much energy could we save if we didn’t have to cool or freeze our meat so much? How many people are ready for possible rolling electricity black-outs this summer? I won’t go into the Texas electricity crisis last year, because nobody had expected that a freeze would affect the equipment so seriously. But that’s the point — we don’t know what to expect all the time.
I won’t pretend to know all the answers. But it isn’t a matter of expertise. We should listen to experts, but not believe them unconditionally—our newest Supreme Court justice said that she could not define what a woman is because she wasn’t a biologist, which is rather strange, because most readers of this paper can. The question is how fast we should move on utopian projects that private investors are reluctant to put their money into without government subsidies.
So, yes, let’s cut the red-tape that is slowing down projects, let’s prepare for emergencies and how to help those most vulnerable, and let’s realize how inflation makes it difficult to move on projects such as the mayor supports, but let’s not abandon what works too fast. And while we are at it, let’s prepare our grids to withstand power surges created by high-altitude atomic bomb blasts. Our enemies don’t need to flatten our cities to make them uninhabitable.
William Urban is the Lee L. Morgan Professor of History and International Studies at Monmouth College.
This article originally appeared on Galesburg Register-Mail: William Urban: Cut red tape on solar projects, but don't abandon what already works
