Why Climate Science Is Irrelevant

At her address to the LOHAS conference a few weeks ago, sustainability guru Hunter Lovins said that the science of climate change doesn’t matter. As a writer covering climate change, I couldn’t agree more.

Here’s why; even if all the well respected scientists in the world, including our own scientists at NASA, are dead wrong about climate change and its causes, there are a few things that are not scientific conjecture but basic fact. Whether you believe in climate science or not, if you get those facts, we will be on the same page when it comes to energy.

One, fossil fuels are a dwindling resource. They are becoming more expensive and difficult to find. The knowledge that fossil fuels are running out has led to great instability in the energy market which has led to instability of corporate profitability and household incomes alike. Having an energy source that is running out and does not have a fixed cost is bad for business. Solar, wind and geothermal have upfront costs, but the energy they generate is based on a resource that is renewable, free and relatively easy to tap. Sorry, but coal, oil and natural gas have no business case when you stack them up against that.

Two, fossil fuels are costing us. They are costing us, dearly. We are in hock up to our ears to China to buy oil from places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In May, we imported 366 million barrels of oil which means that 65% of the oil we used was imported from foreign countries to the tune of $21.6 billion sent overseas. Let me write that number again. $21.6 billion removed from our economy in just one month to pay for oil. Even Texas Oilman T. Boone Pickens says that foreign oil is ruining the economy. Why would we ruin the economy when we have domestic, renewable energy sources?

Three, renewable energy provides more jobs than fossil fuels. And with over 9% unemployment last month, we desperately need jobs. In February, I wrote about wind jobs versus coal jobs. At that time, there were 85,000 jobs in wind to coal mining’s 81,000 jobs although coal produces 50% of our energy and wind only 2%.  A recent Pew Study shows that green jobs are growing twice as fast as all other jobs. You could care less about climate change but want to kick start the US economy? Support renewable energy!

Four, much of the money we send out of the country to buy oil goes to countries that don’t like us much. Some of them actually hate us. When it comes to national security, that is just reckless. And it is particularly reckless when we have domestic options like wind, sun and thermal energy. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has a Prius that he converted to a plug in hybrid. He became an electric car advocate after running a war game for Representative Jane Harman in which he hypothesized what would happen if the Middle East cut off our oil supply. The outcome wasn’t pretty. He has a bumper sticker on the back of his plug-in. It says “Osama Bin Laden Hates My Car”. And guess who had an electric car in the 1990’s? A security hawk who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, Former Secretary of State George Schultz.

Five, domestic fossil fuel extraction is destroying the homeland. I like to tell this story, so I’m going to tell it here. It actually has a point. Right before the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the so-called great men that were putting the thing together came up with a brilliant idea for getting clean water to the fairgrounds. They found a pristine spring in Wisconsin and decided they would dig a pipeline and pipe it from there to Chicago. When they got to this little village in Wisconsin to start laying the pipe, the villagers met them with pitchforks and ran them out of town. If a foreign corporation came in and said they were going to blow the tops off our mountains, pollute our streams, put oil rigs off our shores and destroy our natural habitats, we would be like those villagers. Why would we let any corporation destroy the flora and fauna of this great country when we have wind and solar that do not require removal of a single mountaintop or destruction of a single wildlife preserve? Why would we uglify one single bit of our country when we don’t have to?

On a recent Q&A call with Representatives Waxman and Markey on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (with the awesome acronym of ACES, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill), Congressman Markey said that the Republican energy plan of maintaining the status quo accept for drastic increases in nuclear energy (which is expensive, dirty and dangerous) is like switching from one pack of cigarettes a day to two.

With all due respect to Congressman Markey, I think he’s wrong. When someone smokes, they are mostly hurting themselves. This is actually more like giving the sum of our entire treasury to Al Qaeda, along with a nuclear bomb and the delivery system. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or any science at all, to see that’s not a good idea.