Poll after poll show that citizens of the Western world want more
renewable power and are willing to pay for it. So what’s the hold-up?
A new poll conducted by Yale and Harvard researchers and published in the science journal
Nature
this week found that the average U.S. citizen is willing to pay between
$128 and $260 more per year in electricity bills ($162 on average, or
13 percent more) to achieve 80 percent clean energy by 2035. Support
varies by demographics, of course—it’s lower among Republicans, people
of color, and older individuals—and support drops further if the clean
energy standard includes nuclear power and natural gas. As a practical
matter, the researchers found in a voting simulation that the cost
increase would have to be under $48 a year to pass the House, and under
$59 a year to be filibuster-proof in the Senate. Even so, it’s clear
that the overwhelming majority of Americans and their elected
representatives would support the “80 percent by 2035″ standard if it
increased electricity prices by less than 5 percent.
Similarly, clean air enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support among U.S. voters. In October last year,
a poll of 1,400 voters
by Hart Research and GS Strategy Group found that, “by a wide margin,
voters of both political parties and in all regions of the U.S. disagree
with Congress’ anti-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agenda and
support the EPA’s new rules to limit air pollution from coal-fired power
plants.” A whopping 88 percent of Democrats, 85 percent of
Independents, and 58 percent of Republicans opposed Congressional
attempts to delay implementation of the rules, and 79 percent of voters
supported the rules due to health concerns about polluted air.
“Regardless of affiliation, voters want a healthy environment and an end
to foot-dragging to upgrade dirty power plants. Despite the rhetoric in
Washington,
clean air is not a partisan issue among Americans,
and Congress would do well to take notice,” said Mindy Lubber,
president of sustainability advocacy group Ceres, which sponsored the
poll.
One might well ask why Congress does not seem to have so noticed, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Another poll by ORC International
of 1,019 Americans, released in April this year and conducted by the
non-partisan Civil Society Institute, found that 77 percent of Americans
surveyed, including 65 percent of the Republicans, believe “the U.S.
needs to be a clean energy technology leader and it should invest in the
research and domestic manufacturing of wind, solar and energy
efficiency technologies.” When given a choice between subsidizing either
renewables or fossil fuels only, three times as many respondents chose
renewables.
More significantly, respondents were clearly looking beyond their
pocketbooks, even while struggling with high gasoline prices. More than
two-thirds of respondents said that progress toward clean energy should
not be ‘put on hold’ due to ongoing economic problems. Fully 76 percent
of Republicans, 87 percent of Independents, and 91 percent of Democrats
agreed with the statement “energy development should be balanced with
health and environmental concerns,” while only 13 percent said that
“health and environmental concerns should not block energy development.”
Two-thirds of respondents in the ORC International poll believe that
“political leaders should help to steer the U.S. to greater use of
cleaner energy sources - such as increased efficiency, wind and solar -
that result in fewer environmental and health damages.” But when framed
as a jobs issue, rather than a health and environment issue, support
zooms higher.
That conclusion came from a comprehensive analysis of international
and U.S. polls on “the world’s most pressing challenges,” released in
January by the Council on Foreign Relations’
International Institutions and Global Governance program and
worldpublicopinion.org.
It found that 91 percent of Americans believed that investing in
renewable energy was important for the U.S. to remain competitive on the
global stage, and that 80 percent favored strong tax incentives for
renewables as a way to cut dependence on foreign energy sources.
Further, it found that three-quarters of the American public believes
the U.S. government “should assume that oil is running out and will
need to be replaced as a primary source of energy,” and that large
majorities are worried about environmental damage, and the destabilizing
effects of impending energy shortages and higher prices.
The same analysis found that clear majorities in all 27 members of
the European Union approved of increasing the share of renewable energy
to 20 percent or more by 2020, and believed that they would be
personally affected by the consequences of energy dependence.
Two recent opinion polls
in the UK support those conclusions, finding that a majority of the
public see wind power subsidies as a good deal, and a large majority
favor renewable energy in general. The nation’s Renewables Obligation
strategy (similar to the state Renewable Portfolio Standards in the
U.S.) costs the average citizen about two pence per day, and most
thought it a good value.
Australians are overwhelmingly in favor of renewables, too. A face-to-face
poll of 14,000 Australians
last year found that 91 percent of the public think the government
should take more action to push for renewable power, and 86 percent are
in favor of a plan to get to 100 percent renewables.
A new
paper on the German Energy Transition
found that support for nuclear power is fading across the continent,
with only France, the Czech republic, and Poland still favoring it. Over
80 percent of Germans and 90 percent of Austrians are against nuclear
power, but, the paper argues, this is not simply “the reaction of a
spooked people to Fukushima.” Germans have favored a transition to
renewables since the early 1990s, “every political party says it’s on
board,” and Germans are willing to pay higher energy bills to make it
happen.
But they may not have to pay more, according to a
study by the Fraunhofer Energy Alliance
released in July 2011. As costs for solar PV continue to drop, the
researchers predict that electricity generation in Germany would fall to
11 to 14 cents per kilowatt hour as early as 2016, or about one-third
the current retail price of electricity. Another cited study, “Vision
for a 100 percent renewable energy system,” found that the cost of
expanding renewable energy would peak in 2015, then sink; from 2010 to
2050, it projected an overall savings of 730 billion Euro.
Solar is already reducing electricity costs in Germany on a daily basis. A widely-circulated pair of graphs
on the Renewables International site
show that as the sun fires up solar systems around 9 am, the cost of
“peak” power generation now crashes to around 35 Euro per megawatt hour,
and stays there until around 6 pm. Just four years ago, peak power
prices in Germany held firmly around 55 to 60 Euro over the same hours.
As Australian
journalist Giles Parkinson observed,
“solar PV is not just licking the cream off the profits of the fossil
fuel generators. . . it is in fact eating their entire cake.”
Further, the net impact of energy transition would result in more
jobs, and a greater benefit to the overall economy. “The negative impact
of a shift to alternative energy is far outweighed by the remaining
positive net effect of some 400,000 additional jobs in the EU as a
whole,” the Fraunhofer study says, and moreover, “Europe’s GDP is
expected to grow by 0.24 % (some 35 billion Euro).” Another cited study
showed that transition to renewables would result in a net new 120,000
to 140,000 jobs, after “all negative effects and influences on the
economic cycle are taken into account.” Across the EU, some 2.8 million
people are expected to find jobs in Europe’s renewable energy sector by
2020.
The rise of the precautionary principle
The public has clearly become sensitized to the risks of producing
fossil fuels from our remaining, increasingly marginal resources. The
last several years have offered a handful of hard object lessons: The
Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and its lingering effects on the ecosystem, replete with the ongoing spectacle of
eyeless shrimp, clawless crabs and fish with lesions.
A series of reports about water contaminated by shale fracking
activities, with tone-deaf industry responses. Small towns turned
upside-down by the sudden influx of trucks and roughnecks drilling for
shale oil and gas. Even nuclear power is now suspect after the specter
of the Fukushima plant meltdown, with low levels of its radiation
turning up in California a few days later.
Is it any surprise that the public is becoming risk-averse, and embracing renewables as never before?
An overwhelming majority of citizens now support the “precautionary
principle”: Rather than letting industry do whatever it wants and
putting the burden on the public to prove that those activities are
risky or damaging to the environment and the public health, voters would
rather put the onus on industry to show that its activities are safe
before being allowed to proceed.
As Steve Coll points out in his excellent new book,
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,
the company has prosecuted a long war against the precautionary
principle. He traces the popular rise of the concept back to the West
German environmental movement of the 1970s, where it was known as
Vorsorge
(precaution). In his chapter on the ExxonMobil chemical division’s
fight to preserve the use of phthalates (plastic softeners) in
children’s toys, he cites a company slide deck claiming that “Politics,
not science, is the reason” for a proposed ban on the chemicals, and
observes that “‘Politics,’ however, was in fact a synonym for the rise
of the precautionary principle as a popularly supported basis of
chemical regulation in Europe—and there was little reason to believe
that philosophy would remain sequestered there.”
Indeed, it has not. The ORC International survey found that more than
two-thirds of Americans, including 60 percent of Republicans, 76
percent of Independents, and 74 percent of Democrats, think the
precautionary principle should guide our energy future. But ExxonMobil
remains staunchly opposed. In an
article in Fortune
last month, CEO Rex Tillerson sneered that precautionary principle
“will absolutely undermine the economy,” adding, “If you want to live by
the precautionary principle, then crawl up in a ball and live in a
cave.”
A political boomerang
The fossil fuel industry seems to believe that ratcheting up their
rhetoric and blowing huge wads of cash on disinformation campaigns can
tilt the odds back into their favor, but with enormous majorities of
Western citizens now looking to renewables, I suspect those efforts will
backfire.
One week ago, the
Guardian broke a story
about a confidential memo showing that a network of right-wing
organizations in the U.S. were planning a national PR campaign to cause
“subversion in message of industry so that [wind power] effectively
because [sic] so bad that no one wants to admit in public they are for
it.” National advocacy groups funded by the fossil fuel industry,
including several organizations backed by the oil and coal industry
billionaire baron brothers Koch, were identified as the source. The
documents suggested setting up “dummy businesses” to hide the backers of
anti-wind billboards, and a “counter-intelligence branch” to dog the
wind industry. Further, it called for creating a tax-exempt organization
with paid staffers, backed by $750,000 in funding, to persuade the
public against policies favorable to wind energy.
The majority of the free world now believes that climate change is a serious problem;
a Yale study
released in March found that two thirds of Americans believe the planet
is warming. (However, as a testament to the effectiveness of the fossil
fuel industry’s disinformation campaigns thus far, just 46 percent
believe that it’s due to human activities, down four points from the
previous study in November 2011.) Europeans and Australians have long
been running far ahead of Americans on that issue.
Despite four ardent (and expensive) decades of campaigning by the
fossil fuel industry, the majority also want an electricity supply
powered by renewables, and believe that remaining on the fossil fuel
path poses serious risks to health, security, the economy, and the
environment. It’s a modest stretch to suppose that that same majority
increasingly understand that all of those issues are intrinsically
intertwined.
At the same time, the Yale study found that on the global warming
issue, the vast majority trust scientists; distrust the mainstream news
media; distrust the oil, gas, coal, and auto companies; and distrust
Mitt Romney.
It seems that money is no longer able to stop the energy transition
juggernaut, at least in terms of public opinion. If our so-called
representative governments actually represented us, we would have an
all-out push to leave fossil fuels in the dust and build every last
feasible kilowatt of renewable capacity ASAP. But they do not; they are
beholden to their corporate donors. In the U.S., the fossil fuel
industry still outspends the renewable industry in lobbying by about 12
to 1. “Legislative capture” is the reason why we continue to see
Congress slap-fighting about a mere $4 billion in subsidies for the oil
industry instead figuring out how to execute
transportation transition. It’s why we still don’t have a
feed-in tariff, like everyone else in the world who are serious about energy transition do. It’s why we haven’t yet taken the bit of
energy transition between our teeth and run with it.
But we will. We may have to wait until the dinosaurs of the fossil
fuel regime die or are voted out of office before policymakers catch up
with the public. In the meantime, we’ll have to
shift for ourselves,
build as much renewable capacity as we can manage, and be content to
throw popcorn at the TV when those glossy ads about jobs in the oil
patch come on. We know better than to believe the
claims of incipient energy independence.
The longer our legislators defy the will of the people, the more they
will lose our trust, and eventually, their lobbying support. The age of
renewables is here. There is no turning back.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/energy-futurist/the-energy-transition-juggernaut/493
