Well over half of the electricity generated by Nebraska’s public power system comes from coal. Although coal is far and away the dirtiest fossil fuel, the state’s public power generators have insisted on using coal transported by rail from Wyoming’s Powder Basin (rather than developing our own clean, native renewable resources) because the energy cost of coal was purportedly so cheap.
As the following article by UNL Economics Professor Hank van den Berg documents, however, those cheaper costs are illusory. Once the full costs associated with burning coal are calculated in, the price of this toxic fuel becomes economically prohibitive. Plus, coal produces exorbitant levels of greenhouse gases, which the Pentagon itself now openly states are contributing to global warming. The Pentagon’s 2010 “Quadrennial Defense Review” warns that climate change is already exacerbating international instability and conflict—and the more the climate warms, the more war there will be.
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NFP
The Legislature’s adoption of a major wind energy development bill April 9 was a sweet, sweet victory for Nebraskans for Peace. For an organization that’s been on record in support of renewable energy generation in the state since the 1970s (and has been criticized and belittled for our views for decades), to now have the Legislature unanimously approve a ‘Big Wind’ bill (LB 1048) and our conservative governor promptly sign it into law is yet another testament to the importance of tenacity in working for social change.
Over the past five years especially, NFP has been working closely with our environmental allies (the Nebraska Sierra Club in particular) to legislatively promote development of Nebraska’s wind energy resources. LB 1048 (the Natural Resources Committee bill which grew out of a previous legislative initiative sponsored by Sen. Ken Haar) will allow private developers to generate wind energy in the state for sale to out-of-state markets while fully protecting Nebraska’s 100-percent public power distribution system. Public power in Nebraska will be eligible to purchase up to ten percent of the renewable energy produced, and the private generators must shoulder the cost of developing any additional transmission infrastructure. As a result of this legislation, Nebraskans will see job growth, rural economic development, increased tax revenues—and less demand for carbon-producing fuel like coal.
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HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
In December, 50,000 people converged on Copenhagen to attend, protest, lobby, observe or report on the global climate conference. The original purpose of this long-awaited summit was to complete a new international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. However, instead of a new agreement, the 50,000 attendees, protestors, lobbyists, and observers were left with what Friends of the Earth described as a “sham agreement” that was agreed to by just five countries on the last evening of the two-week-long gathering. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso termed the accord a “commitment to the lowest common denominator.”
The so-called “Copenhagen Accord” is indeed a sham of an agreement because it’s nothing more than a statement issued by the leaders of just five countries after a brief closed-door meeting to which the remaining 188 countries were not invited. Especially infuriating was the complete exclusion of the European Union (the only region of the world to have offered ambitious and firm measures to curb greenhouse gases) and the bulk of the world’s developing countries that stand to lose the most from global warming. So Copenhagen produced an Accord arrived at completely outside the normal participatory United Nations process. Worst of all, the Accord established no goals, targets, strategies or even a process for future negotiations. Amazingly, President Obama—one of the five leaders who put the Accord together in a couple of hours (the leaders of Brazil, China, India, and South Africa were the others)—acted as if he’d engineered a breakthrough.
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HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
Both the Bush/Cheney and Obama Adminstrations and the Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress have openly supported the concept of ‘clean coal’—or what is more precisely called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Billions of government dollars have already been allocated to funding test projects that will serve to develop new technologies that (1) remove carbon from the emissions of coal-fired power plants, plants that convert coal to synthetic oil, and other industrial plants that use coal as an energy source; and (2) store the carbon permanently underground.
These technologies will, according to the coal lobby, make our most abundant carbon fuel ‘clean.’ CCS technologies thus simultaneously reduce global warming and our dependence on foreign oil. The coal lobby then continues to argue that, even though these new technologies are not yet available, spending taxpayer money on test projects and other types of CCS research justifies the construction of more familiar coal-fired power plants instead of more expensive alternative wind, solar or conservation projects because these coal-fired plants can be ‘cleaned up’ in a few years ‘when the technology becomes available.’
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James Hansen
Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Coal & Climate Disaster
Coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or global climate disasters will be a dead certainty… ‘Clean coal’ is an oxymoron. The clean-coal concept, at least so far, has been an illusion, a diversion that the coal industry and its government supporters employ to allow dirty coal uses to continue… Coal use must be prohibited unless and until the emissions can be captured and safely disposed of… For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we cannot allow our government to continue to connive with the coal industry in subterfuges that allow dirty-coal use to continue… If we want to solve the climate problem, we must phase out coal emissions. Period.
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