In “Deep Survival: Who lives, who dies, and why,” Laurence Gonzales describes a climb up Yosemite’s Cathedral Peak that brothers Rob and David Stone and their friend Steven Pinter planned on June 25, 2000. They’d timed things from their 4 a.m. start to get to the summit and back the same day. As Gonzales says, however, “The annoying thing about plans is how rare it is for everything to go just right.”
The 20-somethings were delayed immediately when they found someone had taken their food during the night, and it took them two hours to restock. They faced further delays when they found that the weather board still had the previous day’s forecast (clear weather) posted. Rather than use up more time searching for that day’s forecast, they pressed on. By then, the sun had dawned on a gorgeous day — surely the weather would be the same as the day before, they thought.
That afternoon, the three climbers saw clouds moving in, and then rain. But they could outrun the storm and be just fine, they decided. By the time they approached the summit, the threesome and two others found themselves in a hailstorm, chilled in their cotton clothing. Things got worse when lightning struck David and knocked him unconscious. His brother Rob began rescue breathing — but how were four men going to lower David down six rope-lengths of technical climbing and get him to a hospital, in a hailstorm?
In July, the Department of Public Service released the draft Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan. Like the climbers, the Department checked yesterday’s forecast. The plan describes the current priorities as affordability, environment and (for electricity), reliability. It contains 27 strategies with 68 specific recommendations. If yesterday’s weather continues and everything in the plan goes right, we may be just fine.
Yesterday’s weather, in the U.S. energy world, consists of increasing prices for energy but adequate supplies for those who can afford $4 gasoline and $5 heating oil.
The Department has spotted some distant rain, noting “a growing concern that the maximum rate of global production of oil and natural gas will reach a peak in the near future.” (Many well-informed observers believe the peak for oil production has already been reached, but it’s not possible to declare the peak definitively until some years after the fact.)
Apparently the department assumes we’ll outrun the storm. After oil and gas production peak, their availability declines, by definition. No public policy or private enterprise can change that. Yet the draft plan makes no provisions for declining oil and gas availability and no warnings about the impacts of ever-higher prices that crimped supply is likely to bring.
In fact, in an apparent contradiction, the department expects Vermonters to drive more total miles in the future. True, we are collectively driving about twice as far each year as in 1980, but the trend peaked in 2003. Total vehicle miles have been declining as gasoline prices have marched upwards, according to figures in the plan.
When the climbers in Yosemite planned their day, they had a map of the territory and a timeline. They expected to arrive at the summit at around 1 p.m. Though they chose not to heed the changing conditions, and they pressed on even as their timeline slipped, they had a way to evaluate whether the plan was going as expected.
Vermont’s Draft Comprehensive Energy Plan does not even give enough detail for us to discern whether we’re on track. It endorses reducing carbon emissions, but how quickly? The plan describes the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that Vermont has joined, together with other New England states and some Canadian provinces, but are its carbon reduction goals adequate?
Leading climate scientists like NASA’s James Hansen have said that the atmosphere already has more carbon dioxide than it can contain without triggering runaway climate change, and an international movement has taken off to reduce carbon dioxide, rather than merely stop its increase (www.350.org). The movement may pressure negotiators on the successor to the Kyoto Treaty to impose even more stringent limits on carbon emissions. Would the plan’s recommendations meet those limits? Would they even comply with Kyoto? The plan gives no indication.
The plan does prioritize a regional and/or national cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Under a cap-and-trade plan, policy-makers set caps on how much carbon will be emitted, and the market determines how the limited amount of carbon is distributed. Perhaps the department expects the market to handle whatever goals the regional or national policy-makers come up with.
Current high fuel prices, and the desperation they are causing, show how poorly such an approach works. We’re going through a dress rehearsal of what cap and trade would accomplish alone.
The effect of cap and trade is to make fossil fuels less available to the economy, so users bid up their prices. The high-value uses continue, and low-value uses and uses by low-income people decrease. At the same time, the theory goes, all use becomes more efficient.
Right now, the world production of oil has remained roughly constant for the last three years, as use has grown in other countries. Users have bid up the price by about $100 a barrel since 2003, and the United States has responded by decreasing its oil consumption. People are driving less, and huge numbers of Vermonters are shifting away from oil heating.
Absent good public policy, however, increased prices also mean a lot of pain. Without adequate public transportation or car sharing, it’s hard to reduce driving below a certain minimum and still hold down a job, run errands, and visit friends and family. Without long-term, low-interest loans, it’s hard for most people to do everything that is cost-effective to weatherize their homes, or to switch to pellet stoves or wood heating.
The plan does contain public policy recommendations in addition to carbon cap-and-trade, but without any overall goals for carbon emissions, how can Vermonters evaluate whether the recommendations are adequate?
The same is true for availability of oil and natural gas. The report acknowledges concern that oil and natural gas are near their peak, but no goals emerge from that. The city of Portland, Ore., has chosen to be more focused. John Kaufmann, senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Energy, testified in the Legislature this year that Portland plans to cut oil and natural gas consumption in half over the next 25 years just to stay ahead of the worldwide drop in availability. And since the United States is two-thirds dependent on imported oil, we may experience a drop much sharper than that!
Portland’s goal gives a basis for public conversation to begin about our plan around questions like, is the goal adequate? Do we have a plan that will meet that goal?
Setting goals is important especially if we expect we’ll have a hard time meeting them. The previous draft comprehensive energy plan, released in 1997, was also short on quantitative goals, but it did adopt the Kyoto Protocol’s goal of holding carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels. The 1997 draft plan admits that the combination of policies it recommends would not achieve that goal — but that’s enough information to prod people back to the drawing board to see what new policies it would take to meet the goal.
Riley Allen, who was planning director at the Department of Public Service at the time the draft plan was issued, defends the lack of timelines: “In those areas where we as a Department of Public Service have some control over timelines, we try to provide specificity about the pace. For those areas that are outside our direct sphere of influence, we are identifying the policy and direction, and the timing is really a matter for the General Assembly, for the administration, and other agencies, and the public at large to help direct.”
The 1997 draft plan also has a clear analysis on the environmental and economic impacts of each of the policies it examines. When the department in 1997 recommended a suite of policies, it could forecast not only how much less energy and carbon emissions would result from the recommendations, but also how the recommendations would save Vermont $12 billion. The report has placeholders for impacts, and Riley Allen said that the department would be working on them during the public comment period. How is the public to make informed comment on the recommendations when we aren’t told what their cost and impact would be?
Elizabeth Courtney, executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, was on the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change. The commission did the work that the department hasn’t done yet: It took a goal for carbon emissions reduction from the governor, and it evaluated the cost and carbon impacts of each of its recommendations.
Courtney is unimpressed with the department’s plan, which she says “lacks the urgency that we need to address the pressing issues of climate change and energy security. It’s acting as if we have business as usual at hand, and we certainly don’t.”
Noted peak oil author Richard Heinberg met with the leading people in the Department of Public Service who prepared this plan in April. Heinberg’s message during his Vermont visit was that oil availability is likely to drop off so quickly for us that preparing for it really is an issue of survival. (Many who are planning responses to a winter of $5 heating oil and $4 gasoline are saying that the energy squeeze is already an issue of survival for some Vermonters.)
In 1997, the Department of Public Service wrote in its draft energy plan, “If we don’t start gradually changing (our) energy use patterns now, while we still have choices, we will eventually reach a time when a radical change is our only option,” and they warned against the “social and economic upheavals” that a radical change could bring. We’ve lost 11 years since then and haven’t done nearly enough of the gradual change.
Burned by the lightning strike, but still alive, David Stone made it off of Cathedral Peak in the hail storm. His fellow climbers took desperate, sometimes panicked measures to haul him off the peak, including four men hanging on a rope with a single anchor. They radioed for help, and Yosemite’s search-and-rescue team aided them off the mountain.
The response to Hurricane Katrina shows that Vermont doesn’t have a search-and-rescue team to call on. If we drift onward, without goals for our energy future or ways of evaluating whether we’re achieving those goals, we’ll probably wish we’d checked today’s forecast.
Carl Etnier, director of Peak Oil Awareness, blogs at vtcommons.org/blog and hosts radio shows on WGDR, 91.1 FM Plainfield and WDEV 96.1 FM/550 AM, Waterbury. He can be reached at EnergyMattersVermont(at)yahoo.com.
