Green Party of TN 518 Moore Avenue Nashville, TN 37203

from the Chattanoogan:

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tn.) made the following remarks on Tuesday on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

“Last week The New York Times ran a story entitled ‘Biomass Under Scrutiny’ about whether we’re accomplishing anything by displacing coal with biomass to produce clean electricity. Biomass is essentially burning wood and other organic products in a sort of controlled bonfire to produce electricity. Wood is natural, trees grow and re-grow—burn them up today and more trees also grow tomorrow...but we can’t rely upon biomass to replace significant amounts of the fossil-based electricity we get today from coal.

“Biomass can and should be an important, albeit a small part, of our electricity portfolio by using excess forest material and industrial wood waste. Unfortunately, The New York Times misses out on one of the most important concerns about biomass. Just like other renewable electricity sources, it cannot be the solution to clean energy because of the problem of scale. We would have to continually forest an area one-and-a-half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to replace the electricity created by two standard coal plants or one standard nuclear reactor."

you can read the rest of his remarks at
http://chattanoogan.com/articles/article_178425.asp

here is this Green Party member's response to him:

In his remarks about alternate energy sources, Senator Alexander seems to be saying that we need to keep relying on petroleum and coal, and increase our use of nuclear energy if we want to keep our current lifestyle, because "alternative energy" sources such as solar, wind, and biomass cannot possibly keep us living in the style to which we have become accustomed.

Senator Alexander's remarks contain numerous fallacies about our current energy supply and its future.  

First, he assumes we can keep on relying on petroleum, when the truth is that we on the brink of seeing our petroleum supply diminish rapidly.  One of the unmentioned truths about deep water oil drilling is that we are only doing it because all the easy oil is gone.  We are at the point of peak oil.  Supply is remaining constant while demand, especially from India and China, is increasing.  Senator Alexander refuses to face the fact that we are running out of oil.

Second, he assumes that we can go on mining coal at our current rate and current prices.  It is true that we have, at current rates, several hundred years worth of coal left in the ground, but the mountaintop removal technique that has become the norm for coal extraction is heavily dependent on oil use, and will become more expensive as the price of oil continues to increase.  Sen. Alexander further assumes that the sacrifice of much of West Virginia and Kentucky, and parts of Tennessee, is an acceptable price to pay for that coal.  Many of the area's residents would disagree with him.

Most climate scientists would disagree with him about the wisdom of these two ideas, as well.  The increasing carbonation of our atmosphere and oceans has spun the planet's climate out of equilibrium and in a much, much warmer direction.  By cutting back our carbon emissions, we can at least soften the blow that is falling on us, but Senator Alexander recklessly disregards these realities in his demand for comfort now.  Where is his respect for the rights of the unborn on this issue?

Nuclear power, too, faces looming limits on the availability of its primary fuel, uranium, and has the further disadvantage of creating a waste product that will be seriously poisonous for a quarter of a million years, at least, that nobody has figured out a way to safely contain or store.  And, while Senator Alexander rails against subsidies for wind power, he conveniently ignores the massive subsidies that have made nuclear power appear to be a viable option for producing electricity.  

The one thing that Senator Alexander got right is that renewable energy sources cannot give us the kind of energy access to which we have become accustomed.  The American lifestyle (and the European one too, as well as the lifestyle of any even moderately wealthy person anywhere on the planet) is possible only because we have burned the greater part of the planet's accessible supply of oil in the last two hundred years, leaving only scraps for our descendants.  There is no way we can keep living as we have been.  We are going to need to orchestrate a sensible and orderly return to a simpler lifestyle, or face the chaotic consequences of ignoring that reality.  It's not what most people in America want to hear, but that's the way it is.  The party's over.

Martin Holsinger