Obama and Romney Have Different Views On Energy
This article from Smart Planet illustrates our presidential candidates ideas on Alternative Energy and how each plans to provide sustainable energy for our country's needs.
SMART PLANET
Obama vs. Romney: Who has the best energy plan?
Future implications
America still does not have an energy plan, and neither Obama nor Romney have cured that potentially fatal flaw. Both have offered general directional strategies and political fodder, not anything you could call an actual plan.
But the directions they would take us in could not be more different, and their implications will echo long into the future.
If my best guess is correct, all fossil fuels will have peaked and gone into terminal decline around 2025-2030. We will have to be well along in the transition from fossil fuels to renewables before that, because after it, building big infrastructure projects will become progressively more difficult and expensive and the rate of deployment will slow considerably. We really have less than 20 years to get most of the job done. Since non-hydro renewables currently produce only about five percent of U.S. electricity, we’ll have to be extremely aggressive about energy transition, starting right now, if we want to avoid the worst outcomes for our economy and our society as a whole.
President Obama’s strategy is clearly the better of the two choices for meeting that challenge. My reading of recent academic research suggests that generating 80 percent of our electricity from renewables by 2035 might be technically and economically possible, if not likely in our political climate. But by 2050, we’ll be grateful for every last kilowatt-hour we can produce from renewablefree fuels. And the “debate” about climate change will be long gone, replaced by a frantic quest for survival and adaptation.
Governor Romney’s energy strategy is painfully regressive and utterly blind to these clear and present dangers. It sounds like an energy policy from 1970, not 2012. Not only are his claims about our current energy situation wrong — for example, citing U.S. oil production at 15 million barrels per day, according to the Washington Post, when the reality is 6.2 million barrels per day — but his expectations for the future of oil are absurd, claiming “we” (meaning North America) will be producing over 23 million barrels per day eight years from now. That’s more than the world’s top two oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia, combined.
This is an unfortunate U-turn for Romney, who just two years ago wrote in his book: “But whether the peak is already past or will be reached within a few years, world oil supply will decline at some point, and no one predicts a corresponding decline in demand. If we want America to remain strong and wish to ensure that future generations have secure and prosperous lives, we must consider our current energy policies in the light of how these policies will affect our grandchildren.” I could have given an enthusiastic thumbs-up to that Mitt Romney, but the current Mitt Romney has apparently surrendered to the policy wishes of his fossil-fuel industry donors completely and lost his head.
At least as far as energy policy is concerned, there isn’t really a choice between the two candidates at all. One is leading us toward a semi-realistic future, while the other would leave us in the lurch as fossil fuels decline. And while it’s true that elections are about more than energy issues, if energy becomes the biggest challenge of this century as I expect it will, then maybe that’s all you really need to know.
Check out the comments at the end of this article to see some different views on carbon emissions, climate change, ethanol production and other important issues. Alternative Energy is in danger of losing some government support.
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