With all the talk of “cap and trade” and the new green industries, I thought it was time to really look at a vision of a truly “green” America, not one manufactured by political parties and big business.
First, just think about how we get electricity. It is produced by a coal power plant, transmitted hundreds of miles, and then to our homes. It has been this way for a century. Most of the power we generate is wasted though, because we have no efficient way to store the excess electricity. Is this a product of a lack of science? No. It is because of a lack of innovation because utilities are politically insulated companies, granted monopoly rights by our governments.
You would think, by now, every home would be fitted with solar panels that could generate more than enough electricity for the house. You would also believe that each house would be equipped with some sort of device, be it a flywheel or another invention, that could store power generated during the day to be used at night.
Then, we could all drive plug-in hybrid cars, cutting our gas consumption to a small fraction, and using the power generated by our homes to charge the cars.
Why haven’t we gotten to this point yet? Because as consumers, we have no choice. We have to buy our power from our local utility. If you even mention power deregulation, everyone always brings up the California fiasco. However, the reason it failed is because they deregulated everything except the end user. We were still stuck buying power from the monopolies, no matter how much they manipulated the price. And who can blame them? If you had a captive audience, wouldn’t you charge as much as you could?
Imagine if there was competition for supplying power. You could buy from a solar provider, hydroelectric, nuclear, or if you wanted to save a few bucks, coal. If we had the choice, I think a lot of people would sacrifice a few dollars a month to buy from a cleaner source. Rather than having the government subsidize the coal plants, we would put them out of business because we want a cleaner solution. This would cause for innovation from the coal companies to find a better way to burn the fuel.
Government restrictions and a horrible cap and trade policy cannot and will not help the environment one bit. It will just generate revenues for the government and their partner utility companies, while charging the consumer more, and allowing the utilities to keep polluting.
In India, companies claim that they can capture carbon in huge underground tunnels. They can then print out carbon certificates at will, and sell them on the cap and trade market. Utility companies can buy these certificates and not have to change their ways at all, while this bogus company makes millions.
We need to be able to hold companies accountable, and if it is proven that a utility’s pollution is harming people, they need to be held accountable. We can have the Supreme Court giving them a free pass to pollute all they want. That’s not helping anyone.
It’s not about global warming or climate change either. It is about creating the most efficient and cost effective source of power we can make, while polluting and wasting less. We need innovation in the way we produce power and the only way that will happen is ending government/utility partnerships, allowing consumer choice, and letting the markets work. Cap and Trade or any other government sponsored method will only hurt the environment and the consumers, while making the utility companies and the government itself handsome profits.
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