Climate and energy

I am sitting here frantically trying to post a news update while KS Clean Energy Day swirls all around me - 40 people from Reno County alone, how cool is that! - so pardon the fragmentation.

Let’s pull out the big guns first. Politics, schmolitics. Why not hear from a little religion for a change.

Catholics - don’t pollute! It’s now considered one of the new ecological sins that has emerged in modern times. So says a Vatican representative in a recent interview (Reuters). (I told Eileen this and she said - “Well, is it a mortal sin or a venal one?” I had to confess - ha, get it? - that I didn’t know.)

Southern Baptists - you’re apparently getting involved in this too. (Right up front, my favorite headline on this article came from Grist - “Holy Shift!”) As reported in the NYTimes:

44 Southern Baptist leaders have decided to back a declaration calling for more action on climate change, saying its previous position on the issue was “too timid.”

For the text of the Declaration made by the Church leaders, click here.  I haven’t had a quiet moment to sit down and read it and think, but I am looking forward to doing so after today.

Now the mundane. We hear so much about regulatory uncertainty… well, there’s all sorts of ways to find yourself staring down the barrel of that one. New England is, actually, because they don’t have adequate access to transmission lines, so they are running into trouble in developing new sources of renewable energy (AP, USAToday).

The KCKansan very thoughtfully considered the problems facing the KC Board of Public Utilities (BPU) (CEP live blogged their testimony the other day while waiting to hear testimony on KCPL’s energy efficiency bill). In the course of the discussion, the writer commented on the Sunflower Holcomb controversy:

The state-level exercise on Sunflower’s plans has served a purpose, however, in that a nuanced energy policy is being discussed as a result. Nevertheless, finalization of those policies, let alone developing consensus on what such policies should include, could be a number of years away….

Clearly, decisions have to be made, and they need to be made relatively soon. These decisions, however, will have multi-generational impacts, and should include experts’ best predictions about the energy landscape beyond 2050.

Projecting the future feasibility of coal or natural gas is likely an exercise in futility. Experts would largely be unable to predict the hundreds of variables associated with such a forward-looking report, rendering the results purely speculative at best.

But today’s energy crunch should spur a completely new line of debate and examination on the energy infrastructure of tomorrow.

Is our current system of a relatively few points of electrical generation and the transference of power through electrical lines the most financially and environmentally friendly method of powering our needs?

Gott go gotta go - my photography skills (ha - I happen to be the one of us who owns a functioning digital camera) are required.

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org