The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  IT’S UP TO THE EPA

  For its part, the United States pledged under the Cancún agreement to reduce emissions by 17 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. The likelihood of near-term legislative action ended when cap-and-trade stalled in the Senate. With the legislative avenue blocked, the Obama administration shifted from the carrot to the stick—or as some said, the bayonet—and pushed ahead with regulatory action. That meant that the action was with EPA. In 2009 the agency, bolstered by the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, issued an “endangerment” finding that greenhouse gas emissions threatened the public health and welfare, and thus falls under the agency’s purview to regulate under the Clean Air Act.

  After making this endangerment finding, the EPA embarked on a yearslong process of issuing standards emissions. The standards would cover both mobile sources of emissions—autos and trucks—and stationary sources of emissions—power plants and refineries. For mobile emissions, these standards took the form of higher fuel-economy standards, and these standards were issued jointly in 2010 by the EPA and the Department of Transportation.

  In January 2011 the EPA took an initial step to regulate emissions from stationary sources of CO2 when it issued permitting requirements. Under these requirements, each time a power plant or refinery is built, or a major renovation to an existing one is made, the owners of the facility must use the best available technology to control emissions. In the next leg of regulation, the EPA was planning to roll out performance standards for power plants and refineries over a number of years. Such standards are potentially much further reaching than the permitting requirements. While not yet settled on, they are likely to require that such facilities limit the amount of carbon dioxide they emit as a measure of the amount of electricity they produce.

  But the EPA’s subsequent move to regulate emissions from stationary sources provoked a backlash. Resistance to the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas turned into resistance to the EPA itself in Congress and in the states. Opponents to regulation of CO2 emissions argued that the EPA was overstepping its bounds, that the rules would harm the economy, and that the agency was going against the will of the people. The Republican majority talked of denying the EPA money to run its CO2 programs. More than a dozen states went on to court to challenge the EPA greenhouse gas regulations. Texas governor Rick Perry went so far as to refuse to comply with EPA CO2 orders. “Our dispute with the EPA in particular,” said Perry, “illustrates how Washington’s command-and-control environmental bureaucracy is destroying federalism and individuals’ ability to make their own economic decisions.”

  On Capitol Hill, Representative Fred Upton, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said, “We will not allow the administration to regulate what they have been unable to legislate.” He recommended to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson that, since she would be called so often to testify, she should get her own parking place on Capitol Hill.

  The outcome of the battle over CO2 regulation will depend on the makeup of the U.S. Congress over the next half decade and the disposition of the counts. It will also be a critical factor in determining whether there is an international regime for climate change and what shape it takes.10

  THE LEGACY OF THE GLACIERS

  The issue of climate change has been transformed almost unrecognizably since it was first broached by a few scientists and naturalists in earlier centuries. They were curious about where the glaciers had come from and what happened to them. Had there once been a much colder world, an ice age? And could the glaciers return and crush human civilization? And they asked about the atmosphere. Why was it not boiling hot during the day and freezing cold at night? Did the atmosphere serve as a blanket to separate earth from outer space—and thus provide a lease for life to flourish on this planet?

  John Tyndall, as he trekked through the Alps in the mid-nineteenth century, was overcome by the “savage magnificence” of the glaciers he saw, and the vast, overwhelming masses of ice filled him with “wonder” that turned into “awe.” It was that awe that led him to learn how the atmosphere retained some of the heat from the sun and then stabilized temperatures.

  It was in 1958 that Charles Keeling first climbed up to the meteorological observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii to begin his lonely research. That year his readings indicated that the atmosphere was about 315 parts per million composed of CO2. Half a century later, the atmosphere’s level of carbon concentration is at about 387 parts per million. Climate change has become the research subject for thousands and thousands of scientists and the recipient of many tens of billions of research dollars. It has also become the focus of policy and politicians. The general objective is to keep concentrations from going over 450 parts per million in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change. As it is, some warn that rising carbon levels may already hold out the risk of an “iceless world” and that humanity is heading toward an iceless age.

  Others say that the bounds of uncertainty are wider, the knowledge of how climate works is less developed, and that fluctuations have always characterized the weather. Some also believe that the target of 450 parts per million is unrealistic, as is the possibility for a speedy transition from fossil fuels, which together currently provide about 80 percent of the world’s total energy.

  Yet whatever the debates over science and policy, the elevation of climate change and the effort to regulate CO2 are transforming energy policy and markets, stimulating investment, and starting a torrent of technological research. All this is giving a great new boost to the drive for greater energy efficiency, low-carbon or even carbon-free energy—and for the rebirth of renewables.

  PART FIVE

  New Energies

  27

  REBIRTH OF RENEWABLES

  It was the first and only press conference ever held on top of the White House. On June 20, 1979, President Carter, along with his wife, Rosalynn, tramped up onto the roof, entourage and press in tow, in order to dedicate a solar hot water–heater system. “No one can ever embargo the sun,” Carter declared. He put the system’s cost at $28,000 but quickly added that the investment would pay for itself in seven to ten years, given high energy prices. “A generation from now,” he said, this solar heater could be “a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people . . . harnessing the power of the sun.” Or, he said, it could be “a curiosity, a museum piece.”

  And there, standing on the White House roof, he set a grand goal: that the United States would get 20 percent of its energy from solar by the year 2000. He promised to spend $1 billion over the next year to get the initiative going.1

  By the time of Carter’s 1979 press conference, the idea that the world needed to transition to what was then called solar energy (and later renewables) had already become a clear trend in energy thinking. The Arab oil embargo earlier that decade, and the then unfolding Iranian Revolution, brought not only disruption in petroleum supplies but also grave fears about the future of world oil. All that combined with a sharpening environmental consciousness to make solar and renewable energy the natural solution. It was clean and it provided stability. And it would never run out. In Washington, incentives were wheeled into place to jump-start a renewable industry. Research dollars started to flow. Technologists, big companies, small companies, entrepreneurs, activists, and enthusiasts were all getting into the solar game.

  But nothing like 20 percent happened. Instead what followed this initial burst of enthusiasm were decades of disappointment, disillusionment, bankruptcies, and sheer stagnation. It was only in the late 1990s that the industry, by then established in Japan and Germany with strong government support, began to revive in the United States, and only around 2004–5 that it started to gain real scale. Even as late as 2010, renewables accounted for only 8 percent of the U.S. energy supply—about the same share it had in 1980. Remove two items—hydropower (which has been constant for many years) and biomass (primarily ethanol)—and renewables in 2009 con
stituted less than 1.5 percent of the total U.S. energy supply. Much the same holds true around the world.

  Yet today renewables are reenergized to become a growing part of energy supply, embraced as a key solution to the triple challenges of energy supply, security, and climate change. China’s President Hu Jintao said that China must “seize preemptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.” The European Union has gone further, with a 20 percent renewable goal for 2020. “I want us to be the greenest government ever,” declared British prime minister David Cameron, promising “the most dramatic change in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear energy.” In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel set a new target for Germany—to move renewables’ share of electricity from 17 percent in 2011 to 35 percent by 2020.

  More than any other president before him, Barack Obama has invested his administration in remaking the energy system and driving it toward a renewable foundation. Indeed, he has raised the stakes in renewable energy to the level of national destiny. “The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources,” he said, “will be the nation that leads the twenty-first-century global economy.” Both companies and investors now see renewables as a large and growing part of the huge global energy market.2

  Yet reaching the higher targets will be no easy achievement given the scale and complexity of the energy system that supplies the world’s economy. Today it is still at the level of policy and politics where the future of renewables is primarily determined. They are, mostly, not competitive with conventional energy, although costs have come down substantially over the years. A global price on carbon, whether in the form of a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, would further augment the competitive economics of renewables against conventional energy.

  Still, renewables are set, after a twenty-five-year hiatus, to become a significant and growing part of the energy mix. It is almost as though a time chasm has closed, compressing the decades and conjoining the late 1970s with the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  WHAT DOES “RENEWABLES” MEAN?

  The idea of “renewables”—an inexhaustible and environmentally friendly energy source—is deeply appealing. But what are renewables? Parse the word “renewables,” and one finds a series of disparate technologies:1. Wind—the fastest growing, which powers technologically sophisticated machines, clustered in “farms,” that generate electricity.

  2. Direct sunlight—captured either by photovoltaic cells (PVs) or by mirrors or other technologies that concentrate the light and transform its energy into electric current.

  3. Biofuels—ethanol, biodiesel, and advanced biofuels (made of algae, cellulose, or other feedstock), all of which substitute for gasoline, diesel, or potentially jet fuel.

  4. Biomass—wood or other plant material palletized or otherwise treated and burned in a power plant; also wood or dung that people in developing countries burn for heating and cooking.

  5. Geothermal—either hot water or hot steam that is pumped from beneath the ground to the surface to drive an electricity-producing turbine.

  6. Hydropower—falling or pressurized water that drives turbines; dams are increasingly criticized on environmental grounds and thus are hard to build in many countries.

  7. Passive solar—now also known as green buildings, which take advantage of the natural habitat to reduce energy consumption, and which often overlaps with energy efficiency.

  There are other technologies, including tidal power. Garbage-to-energy might count as well, if one thinks of garbage as a renewable resource. But those listed above are where most of the effort is focused. What unifies these varied technologies as renewables? They are not based upon finite resources; they are widely distributed; they do not add, at least in theory, to carbon, and thus have a much more restricted carbon footprint.

  One other technology needs to be added to the list: batteries for electric cars. These are not strictly renewable in the same way but fall within the same framework. They could count as renewable if the electricity by which they are recharged happens to be the product of wind or sunlight.

  EARTH DAY

  In 1951 the Paley Commission, appointed by President Harry Truman to investigate raw material shortages during the Korean War, warned against future oil shortfalls and dependence on Middle Eastern oil. “Direct utilization of solar energy,” it declared, “is perhaps the most important contribution technology can make to the solution of the materials shortage.” In 1955 President Eisenhower issued what has been described as “the first Presidential message on solar energy development,” praising what he called “movement toward a fuller use of virtually unlimited energy of the sun.” But not much at all happened for the next decade and a half.3

  But then a single day, April 22, 1970—Earth Day—crystallized a new environmental consciousness in America and established its political potency.

  Denis Hayes, a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, had taken a year off to create Earth Day. It turned into a coast-to-coast “happening” aimed at mobilizing the national consciousness. An estimated 20 million Americans joined in. They demonstrated and marched; they attended symposia and teach-ins; they protested outside polluting factories; they dragged tires and old appliances out of rivers; they buried autos to campaign against smog. The main targets of Earth Day were dirty air, polluted rivers and seas, toxic waste, chemical pesticides, strip mining, noise, oil spills, and overpopulation (a popular button, aimed at prospective parents, was “Stop at Two”). Congress shut down so that members could go back home. (“Everyone I’ve talked to,” commented one congressman, “is making a speech somewhere.”)

  After Earth Day the nation simply thought differently than it had before. A few months later, the first Clean Air Act was passed, and President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Time magazine crowned “The Environment” as the “Issue of the Year.”

  Yet what is striking in retrospect is what was omitted. While aspects of energy production and consumption (for example, smog) were among the targets, energy itself was not part of the agenda on that April day in 1970. “People spoke of oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro,” Denis Hayes recalled. “But there was no discussion of ‘energy.’”4

  Until the 1973 oil embargo, the energy business was just that—a business—or, actually, several different businesses. From 1973 on, energy became everybody’s business.

  “YOU WILL LEARN”

  In Washington, energy suddenly went from being a nonissue to being the number one issue. The reasons were the 1973 oil embargo, skyrocketing gasoline prices, and long lines at the gasoline pump. Jacob Javits, a senator from New York, was one of the most prominent of what were called “liberal Republicans.” In late 1973, shortly after the first oil embargo, Javits found himself sitting for 90 minutes in a gas line at a Washington, D.C., service station, fuming while he waited to fill his car. Once back on Capitol Hill, he stormed into his office, demanding to know who on his staff did energy. The answer was nobody. His frustration rising, the senator sent for a young staffer named Scott Sklar. Without even looking up, Javits informed Sklar that he would now be the senator’s “energy” aide. Sklar protested, though politely, that he was hardly prepared—he had done his graduate degree on Chinese-Russian relations and worked on military issues. To underline the point, he walked over to the hall and flipped the light switch on and off. “I have no idea where this stuff comes from, Senator,” said Sklar.

  Javits laughed. “Son, you will learn.”5

  In 1974 the first of several solar energy bills went into law, and federal research appropriation jumped substantially. Not coincidentally, that was more or less when the modern renewables energy industry was really born, although at the time, “solar” was the umbrella term for most renewables. In 1975, the second year of the Gerald Ford presidency, some five thousand people came to Washington, D.C., to participate in a solar energy industry conference. “Solar power has suddenly
become respectable,” the New York Times declared that year, adding, “Only a few years ago, it was treated in the United States as a subject for eco-freaks.”

  By the mid-1970s the environmental movement was focusing in on energy; it was organizing against nuclear power, and it embraced solar as the answer. One of the major intellectual protagonists was Amory Lovins, an American who had studied physics at Oxford and worked for Friends of the Earth. Lovins wrote an influential article for Foreign Affairs on what he called the “soft path.” He argued that energy efficiency and renewables would be more productive and much less costly than the “hard path” of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. In 1977, the founder of Earth Day, Denis Hayes, published his own book, Rays of Hope: The Transition to a Post-Petroleum World. By coincidence, its publication date was perfectly timed: New York City was hit just then by a massive power blackout.6

  But the most important single boost for renewable energy was the arrival in January 1977 of a new man in Washington.

  THE “MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR”