No perfect solution to our energy needs By Don C. Brunell, President Association of Washington Business Imagine coming home from work, tossing your keys on the hall table and flipping on the light switch. Nothing happens. You sigh, remembering that this is the night your neighborhood is scheduled for a rolling brownout. Even with electricity at 25 cents a kilowatt hour, there’s not enough power on the grid to supply the homes, hospitals, factories and office buildings in your state. New laws limit the amount of electricity you can use, and homes are equipped with utility sensors that allow regulators to remotely turn off your energy-hungry appliances. This scenario may not be as far-fetched as it seems.
Over the years, legislators and regulators have steadily reduced the supply of affordable energy in the United States, while the population — and the demand for energy — has continued to grow. For example, while France gets 75 percent of its electricity from greenhousegas-free nuclear energy, opponents have virtually tabled plans to develop safe new nuclear technologies in the U.S. Crude oil has become a pariah, with the federal government and states banning oil exploration in many places. Even though technology has vastly improved, and we’re sitting on enough untapped oil to meet our needs for 300 years, U.S. oil exploration has slowed to a trickle. Coal, which provides half the electricity in the U.S. and the world, is a perennial
Can we create 10 million new jobs or tolerate an army of unemployed?
natural gas into snug steel-cased pipe and safely brought to surface. Extracting shale gas is already heavily regulated by federal, state and local governments, but opponents fear the process could contaminate drinking water. Every year, crude oil producers safely treat 18 billion barrels of water collected in extraction process, while shale gas producers safely treat an estimated 50,000 barrels. If there are legitimate problems with the process, government regulators and scientists should continue to work with experts to address them, but we all need to ask ourselves the question: What happens if regulators also reduce supplies of natural gas? What happens to the 70 million homes and businesses in the U.S. that depend on it? Alternative energy? Dr. Julio Friedmann, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says, “Solar and wind power are going to be important, but it is really hard to get them beyond 10 percent of total power supply.” So, we have some tough choices to make. There is no magic bullet, no entirely riskfree energy source. Politicians and ideologues should step aside and let the scientists and engineers develop innovative solutions that provide for the future of our nation — or it could be “lights out.”
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By Harry Kelber Let’s take an inventory of what we’ve done and where we stand in our top priority campaign for jobs for our unemployed. We’ve tackled the jobs issue with a record number of conferences, workshops, strategy sessions, rallies marches, picket lines, sit-ins and vigils, We’ve distributed tons of leaflets and pamphlets, used radio and TV programs, created videos and messages on Internet web sites, all designed to educate union members and involve them in the fight for jobs. And let’s not forget the endless speeches and statements by labor leaders about “Making Wall Street Pay,” for the jobs they destroyed; the many convention resolutions and the blizzard of e-mails we sent to our representatives in Congress and the White House urging them to initiate a massive works program that could provide millions of useful jobs, like what the New Deal did in the 1930’s. We called together some of the nation’s brightest and most experienced economists to devise a job-creating plan that could employ millions, while improving the quality of life for all Americans. Congress and the White House were not interested. The one bright spot on the job front came in February 2009, when Congress passed the $787 billion “stimulus package,” and President Obama could claim that 2 million jobs had been created or saved. “We’ve got to do better,” Obama said, but he hasn’t. He’s focusing on cutting the federal budget deficit, where every spending cut means an actual loss of jobs. We have hardly made a dent in the jobs crisis, as the following figures will show, in human terms, not in percentages: There are 25 million people who are looking for a full-time job, but can’t find one. Of these, 13.9 million are listed as officially unemployed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs will have to be found for the 100,000 to 125,000 people who enter the labor force each month. Mass layoffs are continuing. There were 19,564 mass layoffs by employers involving 1,854,596 workers in 2010. What has our economy, the richest in the world, done to provide those millions of jobs that are desperately needed by people, some 6.8 million of whom have been out of work for 27 weeks or more? Are we reconciled to having a permanent army of unemployed in our midst, while the bankers and investors of Wall Street cling to at least two trillion dollars in cash, and can give themselves compensation packages worth tens of millions? Isn’t this an immoral, but true, image of our society? And shouldn’t we be doing something about it? (Editor’s Note: Harry Kelber has been a front-line observer and active participant in struggles over the past seven decades. In 1939, at age 25, he was editor of two weekly labor papers that reported the historic CIO organizing campaigns. As a union printer, he was involved in the 196263 strike that shut down New York City's major newspapers for 114 days, serving as editor of the daily strike bulletin. Kelber has helped develop generations of new labor organizers and leaders. From 1985-90, he was education and cultural director of IBEW Local 3, the 36,000-member Electrical Workers Union in New Yourk City. In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was invited to direct a week-long seminar for 145 top labor leaders of Russia and the Commonwealth States on the theme, "Democratic Unions in a Market Economy." In 1995, at the age of 81 and as a rank-and-file member of the Communications Workers, he became the first and only independent candidate to run for AFL-CIO vice president in 30 years — forcing federation leaders to hold an actual election.)
target. Ironically, some anti-coal groups oppose developing clean coal technologies in the U.S. because they want to eliminate coal worldwide, an unrealistic goal. Here in Washington, the target is clean, renewable hydropower, which supplies about 75 percent of our electricity. Activists want to breach the four dams on the lower Snake River in the name of increasing salmon survival, but they ignore the fact that salmon are thriving, even in the far upper tributaries of the Columbia and Snake rivers — and they have no idea how to replace the electricity the dams provide to millions of people. The Bonneville Power Administration says replacing the hydropower with gasfired turbines — the cheapest alternative — will increase costs tenfold. But wait — now, natural gas has become a target. Coal opponents once touted natural gas as the cleanest fossil fuel, but they now attack gas pipelines and “fracking,” a technique to recover vast natural gas reserves embedded in shale rock deep in the earth. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, has been used in the U.S. for 60 years, but with new and safe horizontal drilling, fracking has made shale gas plentiful. High-pressure water, sand and small amounts of additives we use every day around our households are pumped into shale deposits forcing the