More policy, less energy

Congratulations to Sen. Susan Collins on her recent courageous stand on controlling the four major power plant pollutants that threaten our health and our World. EPA has proven that the costs of treating the medical effects of pollution far outweigh costs of controlling it. Polls show that Americans support this type of approach to saving our environment by a 2:1 margin. And three cheers for Christy Whitman, who got the president to tiptoe right up to the verge of confronting Global Warming, before Dick Cheney pulled him back. Let’s hope we don’t lose her reasoned voice in the coming energy debates.

I once had a fantasy, fading every day, that George W. would indeed lead us over the artificial Great Divide in politics that separates Americans from ourselves. I hoped that, as someone from my generation and a latent child of the ’60s, he would use the immense potential power of his growing popularity to override Washington’s puppet lobbyists on a wide variety of issues, to be a true “uniter” and a historically great president . I hoped he would override the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” and others from big industry who pretend that the overwhelming majority of Earth scientists and Earth nations are wrong on Global Warming.

Global warming is surely real and occurring faster and more egregiously than thought even ten years ago. It’s not just warmer and rainier winters, and West Nile Fever and Lyme Disease entering Maine. It’s more violent weather of all types worldwide, as we’re now seeing. It’s floods and droughts, and bigger storms of all kinds, including blizzards and “out of season” tornadoes. A conservatively predicted sea level rise of 1-2 feet in this century will obliterate the Everglades and the billions earmarked for them.

The Bush family compound in Kennebunkport could be washed into the sea. Hundreds of working Maine harbors with many thousands of fishing and boating jobs could be inundated. Valuable coastal wetlands with ecological niches for vulnerable species will not be able to migrate fast enough to follow rising coastlines.

We need an intelligent, reality based, long-term energy policy now. The mindless push to continue solving our problems by frantically drilling and digging for more fossil fuels must be abandoned, as it will only make our problems worse as we begin to exhaust all known reserves. We may need to burn all our coal and oil eventually, but over hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, so that carbon dioxide can be slowly and naturally absorbed by the oceans, after its’ known atmospheric half-life of 100 to 200 years.

We need to get deadly serious about alternative energy research, which was set back a decade by big industry during and following the Reagan years. There are many barriers to the development of clean energy alternatives by small entrepreneurs. They are easily fixed by rules to provide fair and competitive access to our electric power grid, which is now structured as a monopoly for the big operators. Well thought out tax incentives for new energy technology would be well worth the expense as ‘seed money’.

Most important is that energy conservation alone can save at least 50 percent of our energy consumption at a few pennies per kilowatt hour, less than we’re paying for it now – and far less than we will pay if artificially manipulated “blackouts” start rolling our way.

We will need energy technology transfer to emerging nations so they can do their part. We need to start building a whole new high-speed mass transit infrastructure to help clean up our air, and unclog our skies and our highways. These and other clean energy initiatives are the real way to get us out from under the present strangling influence of OPEC on our economy. And we need to keep our hands off the precious and fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Paul A. Liebow, MD, FACEP, lives in Bucksport.