Green Patriot, David Steinman

It’s great to interview journalists who are intent on exploring green, the most fascinating journey we can take.

Andy Revkin came on the Green Patriot Radio Show. I knew it was going to be a great interview. I really like interviewing journalists who just like to explore, and that’s Andy. And explore he does, from the Arctic to the Amazon and elsewhere he took us on quite an adventure. We talked at first about environmental coherence and I think we both agreed one of the great appeals of Barack Obama is that he had a coherent environmental policy that oozed out in his jobs program, global relations, energy independence, and global warming. Andy pointed out that Teddy Roosevelt and Dick Nixon were both pretty darn good environmental presidents–but he also agreed that President-elect Barack Obama is holding steadfast and rock solid to his environmental convictions.

Roosevelt was a big environmentalist, no doubt, and loved the outdoors, but Nixon was, well, you have to understand, he triangulated, he got the message from the masses of 1969 when Earth Day was created, and he used environmentalism to bridge and triangulate, but he was not a strong environmentalist by any means, despite living along San Clemente on the California coast where he used to walk on the beach at low tide and pose as the solitary man for photo opportunities that would later show up in Life magazine.

But James Jones, Obama’s national security advisor, is a big proponent of energy independence via nuclear plants, clean coal, domestic oil and gas drilling, and less so relying on alternatives. Jones is a Marine General and he’s thinking about fuel supplies independent of the enemy, Revkin pointed out. He has to think that way.

Yes, I said, I understand, that’s true, but even the military is also thinking green and relying more and more on solar power for much of its energy needs and is looking into algae as a source of jet fuel, I have discussed on the radio show, and we can’t accomplish what we need insofar as global warming is concerned if we build more coal plants for our general energy needs, I said.

Well building them we are both here and Europe and don’t forget especially China where the technology is years behind and the plants’ smokestacks belch greenhouse gas emissions.

But do we need coal to meet our energy needs?

Not if we build enough wind turbines and solar cells, he said, but I wasn’t sure if he was being facetious, and then I realized of course he was. Because he pointed out that all over the country people are objecting to the wind turbines themselves or power lines as eyesores or as dangerous to birds (in the case of wind turbines), or they don’t want to see the power lines outside their window (and who can blame them?), but somebody is going to have to give if this is going to happen, he said. I’m sure that was all a hoot, the wise owl said. It can be done, I said.

It’s almost criminal how little we’ve spent in research into energy storage and photovoltatic technologies, he said.

And what about nuclear?

Well, John McCain talked about nuclear and a crash building commitment to some forty or forty five plants in the next two decades. And nuclear is going off line as the plants age, he said, but building more plants is not going to be a quick fix, he pointed out. It would take decades even at best, and it probably won’t happen in America as people are concerned about storage and security risks.

But if we’re not doing coal or nuclear, what are we going to do?

Conservation is a big winner, he pointed out.

I said that we should be investing in technology to capture greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants and that our US companies need to be in the vanguard of this market but that instead I see BP and the Chinese capturing this market globally and the Americans missing out. He agreed that we need to be offering this technology but added we are so far behind that the technology has never really been proven and plants are being built with best intentions to someday capture greenhouse gas emissions but not now and I said that we need geothermal, solar, perhaps natural gas. But meantime he said China keeps building coal plants. Not very promising, kind of scary, and he spoke about the broken sea off the Arctic and loss of summer ice.

Be sure to listen to David Steinman’s radio program here at Ecology Radio or at WebTalk Radio. To learn more about becoming a Green Patriot visit www.greenpatriot.us. You can also subscribe to this column via RSS.