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Clean Energy for a Strong U.S.A. is a short film that explores clean energy economy in a new way. You’ll hear from laid-off workers given another chance by clean energy investments; veterans who know their role in the clean energy economy will make America safer; and business leaders and investors who see new ways to revitalize our economy and make the United States the global leader in clean energy.
Last night, in his 2011 State of the Union address, Pres. Barack Obama said he will commit the United States to securing 80% of its electricity from clean, renewable resources by 2035. He said the US government will support this goal with major new incentives for private-sector innovators, research and development, small business and improvements to infrastructure.
At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in the First Floor Lounge of Villanova’s Falvey Memorial Library, Joseph Robertson (Romance Languages & Literature), Sally Scholz (Philosophy), John Olson (Biology) and Chaone Mallory (Philosophy), will participate in an interdisciplinary discussion of the most complex scientific and public-policy challenge of our times: the destabilization of global climate patterns and the means by which an entire civilization can address the mounting crisis.
That’s what’s at stake in this debate. We can go back to the failed energy policies that profited the oil companies but weakened our country. We can go back to the days when promising industries got set up overseas. Or we can go after new jobs in growing industries. And we can spur innovation and help make our economy more competitive. We know the choice that’s right for America. We need to do what we’ve always done – put our ingenuity and can do spirit to work to fight for a brighter future.
Whenever legislation to price carbon starts to gain traction, the fossil fuel industry trots out this talking point: “It will kill jobs and ruin the economy.” In this paper, however, HotSpring Network founder and Citizens Climate Lobby volunteer Joseph Robertson ties together numerous reports and case studies to present a different picture, one in which the transition to clean energy will produce new jobs and provide a stimulus to the economy.
Solar power is one of the most promising and unpredictable forms of clean energy, because light and heat are so diverse in their effects and so fundamental to our interactions with energy. Innovations in harvesting solar power have come fast and furious over the last decade, with miniaturization to the nanoscale of light-sensitive particles able to capture solar energy. Now, a Norwegian company has developed a system with “metal nanoparticles embedded in a transparent composite matrix that can be easily sprayed on”.
Despite reports from BP and the Unified Command, which have been widely reported in the media, the 4.9 million barrels of oil that poured unabated into the Gulf of Mexico for 3 months have not vanished from the marine environment. That’s 205.8 million gallons of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, and will continue to contaminate the marine environment, unless it is extracted from the marine environment.
Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur behind Better Place, a global enterprise seeking to build a network of electric battery switch-out stations, says China is the new frontier for electric vehicles, and its adoption of the newest EV technology will push global adoption.
Carl Safina’s detailed TED talk on the fate of the Gulf of Mexico explores some of the unseen victims and impacts of the BP oil spill. He demonstrates how dispersants have made the spreading oil slick into an unrecoverable mess that is too pervasive and too blended to be cleaned. Fresh from a visit to the Gulf, Safina explains that the ongoing environmental disaster is building in severe biological trauma to the ecosystem of the entire hemisphere.
Professor Paul Ehrlich —of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences— says waste generated by human consumption of energy and industrial processes is the single greatest brake on human development; energy is abundant, but there is not enough absorption capacity in nature to safely continue generating waste from energy consumption.
Switzerland-based Solar Impulse has achieved the first-ever 24-hour solar-powered flight, flying both night and day on solar power alone. World Radio Switzerland reported “History is Made: Solar Plane Makes it through Night”, and the first manned nighttime solar flight is a major technological achievement. The plane was flying, as company partners and engineers have said, at the limits of the technology.
Bracken Hendricks, from the Center for American Progress, discusses the national project to build a clean-electricity “smart grid” for the United States. The first component is “a large-scale, multi-state, high-voltage transmission infrastructure” to deliver electricity from clean-electricity generation sources (like wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal steam wells), with the second key feature being a smart grid that connects consumers to the wider transmission infrastructure, so homes and businesses can also serve as clean energy generation sources, feeding power back to the grid efficiently and reducing electricity costs.
Solar Impulse, a revolutionary aerospace engineering project based in Switzerland, is closing in on the technological readiness to stage the world’s first ever night-time flight of a zero-fuel, solar-only airplane. On the aircraft’s third full flight, the design team was looking at “the expansion of the flying envelope of the airplane, which is to fly faster, to fly at low speed, to fly at greater bank angle”, in order to understand the behavioral mechanics of the airplane and to know where improvements can be made that will allow for anywhere-anytime, night-or-day solar-powered flight.
In a TED talk on the subject of how to do the hard work of really greening the economy, architect Ellen Dunham-Jones explains why “The big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia”. One of the unintended consequences of the suburban design paradigm is the need for roads and infrastructure whose sole purpose is to accommodate automobiles, without which the suburban habitat is not really functional.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) this week called for a move toward building consensus for a scaled back version of the climate legislation pending in the United States Senate. Two possible models, given the nature of the Kerry-Lieberman proposal, as written, would be to either establish at the federal level the kind of cooperative emissions reduction strategy already adopted by a coalition of states across the northeast or a limit on total carbon emissions from power plants only.
The Citizens Climate Lobby is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization, working to organize citizen volunteers, by state, county or Congressional district, to lobby elected officials for a strong emissions reduction plan that will prevent catastrophic climate change and speed the transition to clean energy. On June 22 and 23, the CCL team took its message to Capitol Hill, meeting with 45 different members of Congress, or their energy and climate staff, in both the House and the Senate.
There is nothing ideological about the issue of renewable energy resources. Proponents tend to care about the health of the natural environment, which motivates their wish to see renewables replace high-polluting resources like oil and coal, but the technologies, the fact of their economic viability and their usefulness for society at large, are not in any way a matter of ideology.
Pres. Obama addressed the nation last night from the Oval Office, on the tragedy unfolding across the Gulf of Mexico, and issued an impassioned call for the entire nation to rally to the cause of breaking its “addiction to fossil fuels”. The president’s vision goes beyond the question of “energy independence”, which tends to favor expanded offshore drilling, to a push for a comprehensive transition to clean, renewable sources of energy and the phasing out of carbon-based fuels.
There is mounting concern the ongoing flow of oil from the damaged BP Deepwater Horizon well in the Macondo field may be the result of one or more serious structural breaches in the cement well casing below the sea bed. Statements made on 7 June by Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, suggest the well casing has ruptured, there are multiple points of seepage across the surrounding sea bed, and the well can likely only be closed from below, if or when the two relief wells connect with the damaged well.
Even as Transocean, Halliburton and BP, each seek to lay blame at the feet of the other over what actions or inaction led to the explosion and the catastrophic ongoing spill, it is now amply apparent that there is no known way to seal a well pouring crude oil with such force. BP’s attempt to use dispersants to break up the slick has led to an EPA mandate that they find less toxic chemicals, to avoid threatening the environment and the health and wellbeing of the human population.
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