Electricity: Solutions to Climate Change Mary Wildfire page 5
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Distinguished Speaker Series Sunday, July 30 at 8PM ET Register for this online event here. Peter A. Shulman, Ph.D Coal & Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America page 2
Note from FACT Treasurer Ron Prosek page 9
July 2023 Newsletter
Fact Ohio Faith communities together for a sustainable future
“Activists” Work to Stop Ohio’s Parks From Being Fracked Dr. Randi Pokladnik page 3
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Note from FACT President Margaret Mills page 10
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Join us for our next speaker, Dr. Peter Shulman, on Sunday, July 30 at 8:00 ET. “The supposed security need for distant American coaling stations in the late nineteenth century did not play a significant role in catalyzing the emergence of an American island empire around 1898. Instead, the reverse happened: the establishment of that empire created entirely unprecedented demands for coal and coaling stations because Americans suddenly needed ways to protect their new, distant colonies from external threat and overcome internal resistance to American rule.” Peter Shulman, Coal and Empire, p. 9 Energy Reporters describes Dr. Shulman's book as follows: Europeans and North Americans, by and large, believe that markets are king in energy. According to this perspective, prices, supply-demand balances, and technological innovation are the primary drivers of the global energy system. Yet many outside the West believe that empires determine the energy sources that dominate globally and force others to adopt them through persuasion and coercion. Fledgling nineteenth century America, which faced few other threats besides internal strife, is a case in point. The imperial power then was Britain, which dominated global coal production and planted coaling stations around the world to fuel its coal-powered steam-propelled navy. This context constrained America in some ways, and certainly pushed it to adopt coal. At the same time, the British empire bestowed serious advantages. America could pursue its overseas commercial interests without its own requisite coal empire. All this and more is brought home in Peter Shulman’s excellent history, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Shulman…argues that since the United States did not have overseas colonies prior to 1898, policymakers and naval officials in Washington were unwilling to invest in overseas coaling stations simply to protect private commerce. This all changed after 1898. That year, the United States defeated Spain in Cuba, assumed control of Spanish territories Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and annexed Hawaii shortly thereafter. It then moved to build coaling stations abroad and showcase its naval power and burgeoning empire. Coal and Empire is, above all, a keen reminder that geopolitics drives changes in energy. “The problems Americans faced in managing an empire made the world after 1898 very different from what had come before, not least with regard to energy” (p. 218). Register for this online event here.
Distinguished Speaker Series Sunday, July 30 at 8PM ET Register for this online event here. Peter A. Shulman, Ph.D Coal & Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America
“Activists” Work to Stop Ohio’s Parks From Being Fracked Dr. Randi Pokladnik Recently Energy in Depth, a pro-fossil fuel website, posted a piece about the Ohio citizens who are trying to stop the leasing and fracking of Ohio’s public lands (Save Ohio Parks). The EID author specifically targeted a June meeting of the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Commission where Dr. Ted Auch, Youngstown Battalion Chief Silverio Caggiano, and I presented fact-based evidence as to why fracking on or near Ohio’s parks would be disastrous for the parks, park visitors, and local residents. Throughout EID article, experts and citizen members of Save Ohio Parks were referred to as “activists”. People who care about the environment are often labeled by the opposition. We’ve been called tree-huggers, hippies, snowflakes, and protestors. The fossil fuel industry is especially fond of the label “activists”. The definition of an activist is: a person who engages in social or political actions to make the world a better place. What makes a person an activist? Why are people willing to volunteer countless hours of their time, undergo stress, and even subject themselves to ridicule often by friends and family to act on behalf of the natural world and its inhabitants? It’s not a simple answer. Some people want a livable planet for their children or grandchildren. Some love nature and want to preserve it. Some people believe that we have a moral obligation to protect God’s creation. My first foray into the realm of activism started when I was 17. I wrote an essay for my literature class about a paper plant in the neighboring town that was using old tires as fuel. At night, the smokestack of that facility belched out some of the blackest, foulest smelling emissions one could imagine and these rained down on the poorer section of town. I wanted to send that essay to the local newspaper but my English teacher advised against it; he worried that the mill might cause trouble if their actions were exposed. It is not uncommon for environmental activists to be the target of legal actions and ridicule from corporations they are challenging. Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the most-read environmental book ever published was viciously attacked by the pesticide industry. My family had to deal with a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) suit in 1997 brought about in retaliation to our vocal opposition to the construction of Waste Technologies’ hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. After two years, the 33-million-dollar suit was dismissed as being frivolous, but many of the 33 people who were “slapped” were profoundly affected by this action. In addition to name-calling, the fossil fuel industry is notorious for leaving environmental messes behind for others to clean up. The incinerator that “slapped” us continues to pollute the Ohio River Valley today. The lasting impact strip-mining has had on the counties of SE Ohio is still there. A stream close to where I live that still runs orange from acid mine drainage, the acidic, iron-sulfide-containing water that results from coal mining. Currently, federal funding (STREAM ACT) is helping to pay for the cleanup of millions of miles of contaminated streams. Ohio’s citizens are still dealing with old oil and gas wells left from conventional drilling which occurred, in some cases, over a century ago. These wells, dubbed “orphan wells” because they have been left or abandoned by an unknown company, continue to leak methane into our atmosphere. Ohio has identified over 900 wells but some estimate the number of abandoned wells to be in the thousands. Federal infrastructure money is being used to help plug some wells. Throughout history, Appalachian residents have had to live with the destruction left behind from extractive industry. Now the externalities of fracking will be perpetrated on our beautiful state parks. We know from experience and countless peer-reviewed studies that fracking causes health problems, produces light and noise pollution, requires enormous amounts of freshwater, creates thousands of gallons of radioactive produced water and emits dangerous water and air pollutants. Yet 81 Ohio Republican politicians and our governor went ahead and pushed through the legislation (HB 507) that allows fracking of our lands. When asked about fracking on state lands, Governor DeWine tries to patronize citizens by saying the well pads will not be on the park land, but he fails to mention that Ohio has some of the most lenient set-back laws for fracked wells in the nation. Ohio Code 1509.021 says “a well shall not be within 50 feet of a stream, river, watercourse, water well, pond, lake, or other body of water and 150 feet of a property boundary.” The lights, noise, water and air emissions will certainly leave the well pad area. Long after a well is fracked, the fracking infrastructure, including gathering lines, compressor stations, and storage containers, leak volatile organic compounds into the rural communities. Earthworks has photographed and filmed this infrastructure with special thermal imaging cameras (FLIR GASFINDER 320 Infrared Camera). The cameras are also able to identify the compounds leaking from the structures which include benzene, methane, octane, toluene and MEK. One cannot claim to care about children and yet turn a blind eye to all the negative impacts of fracking on Ohio’s lands and citizens. One cannot claim to love Ohio’s parks and let them be fracked. One cannot claim to want a livable planet and turn the state into a fossil fuel mineral colony for an industry that is basically killing the earth. So, what makes an activist? How are they different from the fossil fuel industry? A conscience, an inner sense of what is right or wrong. The Ohio citizens that the fossil fuel industry calls “activists” are moms and dads, grandpas and grandmas, fishermen, boaters, hunters, bikers, doctors, teachers, and scientists. We know what is right and what is wrong. Allowing out-of-state companies to come into our parks, to forever damage them so they can extract our resources for a profit, is wrong. Preserving our state lands for generations to come and protecting our planet from climate change is right. In the words of Utah Phillips, “The Earth is not dying, she is being killed, and those that are doing it have names and addresses.”
“Activists” Work to Stop Ohio’s Parks From Being Fracked, cont.
Electricity: Solutions to Climate Change Mary Wildfire Mary Wildfire lives on the Hickory Ridge Land Trust in West Virginia with her husband Don. She endeavors to grow more and more of their own food, while continuing her quest to figure out how to save the world. Mary feels that clear, detailed depictions of a positive future are being dangerously neglected. She writes to help us all envision the sustainable, healthy communities that we work to create. Currently Mary’s reviews and commentaries can be found at resilience.org where this article was originally published. It’s become increasingly clear to almost everyone that climate change is not only real but beginning to bite. Now that much of the population is finally feeling the urgency - and as we recover from the time when Covid had much of our frenetic commerce on hold, giving us a space for thinking and discussion - what can we do to protect the only planet we’ve got? Unfortunately a good many of the solutions on offer seem designed to quiet the increasing concern, the impetus to do something, without challenging the status quo. Can we get real solutions and still maintain economic growth, population growth, and the growth of inequality? Are we entitled to an ever-rising standard of living? I believe the answer is no; we need some profound transformations if we are to leave our grandchildren a planet that resembles the one we grew up on, rather than a dystopian hell world. It’s time for humanity to grow up and accept limits, get over what I call human exceptionalism, or androtheism—the notion that man is god. A veritable cornucopia of false solutions is being pushed these days, not only by corporations and think tanks but by the UN’s IPCC, the international body responsible for research and action on climate. We could have made a gentle transition if we had begun when we first became aware of this problem decades ago, but for various reasons we did not. There is no time left for barking up one wrong tree after another; no time to waste in false solutions. Hence this series pointing out the fallacies behind such proposals as electrifying everything, carbon trading, geoengineering or switching to “gas—the clean energy fuel!” I’ve divided these concerns into six sectors: electricity generation, transportation, agriculture, buildings, and false solutions that aren’t part of an energy sector—geoengineering schemes and other policy options. Finally, we will look at real solutions. I am not an expert on anything except maybe gardening, so my hope is to spur discussion. Part 1: Electricity Many discussions about solutions to climate change focus on switching from coal, oil and gas to solar, wind, and hydropower…maybe geothermal. But the generation of electricity is only about 20% of energy use. So even if we made a complete switch to those renewable energy systems, we would still also need transformations in transportation, agriculture, buildings, and the materials sector. We’ll go into each of those in separate essays, but we do need to note that the solution usually proffered for transportation is to electrify cars and perhaps trucks; some claim we could even electrify small planes. But then we’d need to generate even more renewable electricity. Putting that aside, is it possible to switch all of our current generating facilities, now running on fossil fuels or nuclear power, to clean sources? We have to take into account that a sizable part of the human population still lacks any access to electricity, and most people feel that simple justice requires allowing them to increase their energy use to some decent minimum. Thus we need to replace maybe 125% of today’s generation capacity, to maintain current usage levels while adding this impoverished sector, even without electrifying transportation and other sectors. Right away we must deal with the notion that our country requires endless economic growth; that any time in which a nation’s GDP has not grown is a bad year and something must be done; that a generation which does not have a higher standard of living than its parents has been ripped off. I’d like to just dispense with the eternal growth notion as being obviously impossible—as Kenneth Boulding said, “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Yet to question it is considered radical; no politician dares to call for a steady state economy. But even if we put aside the demands of mad economists and fearful politicians and call for the simple replacement of all of today’s generating facilities with renewable energy stations, with no growth and without adding more for electrifying transportation—is that possible? There are a number of problems. First of all, the one most talked about: the intermittency of solar and wind energy. If we assume that we must, at all costs, have available to us at all times as much electricity as we want, then we must build a renewable system with several times its nameplate capacity, so that there is power stored somewhere to make up for a place and time with no wind and cloudy skies. Storage options have improved considerably in recent years, but not quite enough yet to overcome this problem. Before we look into the issues with the huge buildout of solar panels, windmills and batteries that a complete “Unplug/Replug” solution would entail, we must dispense, at long last, with the notion that we can solve the problem of carbon emissions from fossil fuels with…a fossil fuel. No, natural gas is not a “bridge to a renewable energy future”…it’s no longer cheaper to build new gas plants than the wind and solar plants that are supposed to be on the other side of the bridge, and there is plenty of evidence that when you consider all the methane leaks from gas, all along the supply chain from the well to the furnace, it is no better than coal in climate terms. Howarth and Ingraffea have done several studies on this question. And Oil Change International came out with a report suggesting that even if the leakage problem were solved, it makes no sense to build new gas plants . Nuclear power is another sticky ball of wax, with many people clinging to it as a solution. It is much better than fossil fuels in climate terms. But no one has ever come up with an acceptable solution to the problem of safe disposal of radioactive waste. And nuclear power plants are subject to horrific accidents; potentially they could also create attractive targets for terrorists. And the supply of uranium is limited, and mining it is harmful locally. Some talk about new generation nukes that might not have these problems but there are none of these magical plants yet operating, and we need solutions now. The time it takes to commission and construct a nuclear power plant, and the expense, are more reasons to discard this idea. Further, nuclear power is not “dispatchable,” meaning you can’t quickly gear it up and down to complement intermittent solar and wind. Another false solution is to go ahead and burn coal or gas but capture and sequester the carbon dioxide emissions. The problems here are that it’s more expensive, it’s unproven at scale, and this equipment makes the plant so much less efficient that you need to burn approximately 30% more coal to generate the same power—and you then have to deliver the captured CO2 to the site you hope will sequester it more or less forever. It would be a lot cheaper just to switch to renewables—and their fuel source is not going to run out. However, it seems doubtful that we can just build enough solar panels, windmills, batteries, and high voltage power lines to replace today’s fossil fuel plants, even ignoring the proposed replacement of internal combustion cars with electric ones, and the growth demanded by mad economists. To begin with, production of solar panels, and the steel and other components of windmills takes a great deal of energy; since only a small part of our grid is renewable now, the energy for this major construction binge must come from fossil fuels. Won’t this surge of emissions push us right over the line into climate catastrophe? Let me dispense with the claim that wind or solar energy take more energy to construct than they’ll ever deliver. This is not true. But the massive buildout that would be required if we attempted to replace all of our current fossil fuel infrastructure with renewables is dangerous when we are already teetering on the precipice of massive climate feedback that could spiral out of control. There are arguments that replacing the energy-dense fossil fuels with renewables would require an enormous amount of land. Then there is the problem of acquiring materials necessary to windmills (neodymium) and batteries (cobalt, lithium) and other parts (copper). Some of these materials are found primarily in a few places in the world; it’s speculated, for example, that the major lithium fields in Bolivia might have something to do with the recent coup. Cobalt comes just about entirely from the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo—where it’s mined under horrific conditions, often by children. Thus, environmental and human rights abuses in the underdeveloped world may be paying for the perpetuation of a high-tech, energy-intensive lifestyle in the overdeveloped world. Simon Michaux is an Australian hired by the Finnish government to research this question; he concluded that materials are in short supply and this transition is therefore not possible. Let us be very clear. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t build solar and wind power plants. In fact, we should be stepping up production. We have to be realistic about it, though. Attempting to keep up the current wasteful level of energy use and consumption (the current level in the “first world” that is) has unacceptable costs. We need to increase efficiency where we can, but we also need to face up to the end of a way of life which has never been very satisfying, and accept a lower impact. For example, we can choose not to wash clothes or use a lot of other power at times when there has been no sun or wind, living within ecological limits in harmony with the weather, rather than insisting that as humans we are entitled to defy any natural environmental limits. Consider this - until a mere century ago, every generation in human history somehow lived without any electricity. It’s time for us to grow up, accept limits, and make plans that take everyone’s well-being into account.
Electricity: Solutions to Climate Change, cont
Image credit: Yale Climate Connection
Image Credit Penn State University
From the Treasurer Ron Prosek I am happy to report that FaCT, working with the Ohio Council of Churches, helped to raise close to $4,000 for aid to the East Palestine community. Rev. Dr. Bob Miller of Emmanuel United Methodist Church reported to us that our donations are helping to purchase much-need air purifiers for families in that community. Rev. Bob asked me to convey their thanks to FaCT for our help. As we look toward the fourth quarter of FY 2023 (July, August, and September), we can see that FaCT will be running out of unrestricted funds as provided in our annual budget. Yes, we received a major grant this year, but those funds are restricted by the grantor to specific internal improvements in our organizational structure and practice. We are facing a shortfall for programming of about $12,000. With our volunteers, we can keep some things going, but not everything. To economize, the Board has decided that we will not produce any more print editions of the FaCT Newsletter through September. Of course, we will still have our online edition. Also, we will have to pause spending on our brine education program. We can still do some of this work online, but we will not be able to do in-person presentations for the rest of this fiscal year. Curtailment of additional programs and operations may have to be made in the next few months. Can we plug our budget gap? We realize that not everyone has the resources to make large donations to FaCT, but if only a dozen of our supporters could each donate $1,000 in the next month or so, we could overcome this budget gap and continue programming without any cuts. If you’ve been thinking about making a significant gift like this to FaCT, now would be a good time to act. And if you haven’t thought of it before, now would be a good time to consider it. Of course, we are grateful for any and all donations. FaCT is a 501c3 charitable organization under IRS rules. All donations to FaCT are tax-deductible.
From the President Margaret Mills
We all should be always thankful for the gift of the birds of the air. Last month, Distinguished Speaker Scott Weidensaul was powerful in his talk about these creatures. In reflection, I offer the sentiments of St. Francis of Assisi: ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. - A SERMON TO THE BIRDS My little sisters the birds, Ye owe much to God, your Creator, And ye ought to sing His praise at all times and in all places, Because He has given you liberty to fly about into all places; And though ye neither spin nor sew, He has given you a twofold and a threefold clothing For yourselves and for your offspring. Two of all your species He sent into the Ark with Noah That you might not be lost to the world; Besides which, He feeds you, though ye neither sow nor reap. He has given you fountains and rivers to quench your thirst, Mountains and valleys in which to take refuge, And trees in which to build your nests; So that your Creator loves you much, Having thus favored you with such bounties. Beware, my little sisters, of the sin of ingratitude, And study always to give praise to God. From, ‘The Little Flowers of St. Francis’ a classic collection of legends about the life of St. Francis of Assisi All of our speakers in this Distinguished Speaker Series have been outstanding. I encourage you to participate on Sunday, July 30th at 8pm for the next in our series when Peter Shulman talks about how the extraction of coal has been intertwined with international politics, power, and technology. I look forward to seeing you all on Sunday. July 30th for our next speaker. Pastor Margaret Mills, FaCTOhio President