Albuquerque Tribune Evolution

November 2008

Decentralized Economy

V.B. Price


Voters have heard virtually nothing this election season about what are sure to be dominant themes in the years ahead – climate change, renewable energy and a green economy.

Such matters don’t lend themselves to savage 15 second attack ads approved by the candidates, nor perk up the beleaguered brain cells of media questioners in national debates.

For many of us, though, it seems a sure thing that we are on the verge of a gigantic rearrangement of both our economy and our way of life in this country, a rearrangement that will be carried along by the riptides of global weather chaos and economic upheavals and insecurity around the world.

Are there any key principles that will help us turn this kind of change into something more than crisis dressed up to look like opportunity?

The principles may not be simple enough for television, but they seem pretty clear. The first principle is the decentralization of energy. The second is the localization of economic interest and activity.

National and regional electricity grids are far too vulnerable to breaking down when they are overloaded. Electricity is sure to become the stopgap fuel of all uses as we move from gasoline to other forms of propulsion. Electric cars will take up the slack to a degree, I think, and overload the system.

Reducing carbon emission to slow down climate change will demand a massive changeover from carbon energy to alternative energies in the generation of electricity. Carbon fuels, like nuclear fuel, require national and regional grids.

Alternative fuels – such as solar and wind power – can be localized, and decentralized. Solar power can also be miniaturized to power individual homes and businesses. And wind power can be localized to supply power to towns and even cities.

Decentralized energy is infinitely safer than massive grid systems in times of potential overuse and potential terrorist threat.

None of this will happen overnight, of course. The changes will be gradual, but traumatic. Businesses will fail, new ones will take their places.

As we wean ourselves from gasoline, however, the price of transporting goods from one part of the world to another will grow astronomically. Transport costs have already tripled since 2000.

What that means is that jobs, ultimately, will be returning to this country. And just as global transport becomes prohibitively expensive, so will national transport. And that means a resurgence in local manufacturing, retailing, farming, repairing, recycling and reusing.

The last thing any town or region wants is to have the power go out, or become unreliable, just as it’s rebuilding its local retail and manufacturing trades, and getting local farming back to where it
produces more food than has to be trucked in.

As in all changes, transitions are where the troubles are.In moving from one fuel base to another, we will see many stopgap measures.

We just don’t want the stopgaps to cause more problems than they solve. Eventually cost will determine demand as it always does in the long run, despite false demand created by advertising. Decentralized solar and wind energy, with no dwindling resources or toxic waste to contend with, will become the low cost leaders.

In the meantime, natural gas will be a cleaner alternative, than scrubbed-up coal. Perhaps coal can be made clean, but no one has demonstrated a convincing argument as to how that could be done.

Bio fuels that burn food products to run cars will go the way of the dinosaurs in less than a decade. Hydro power remains relatively clean, except for the land destroyed by the dams that make it possible. And with global warming causing increasing periods of drought in the
American West, hydropower won’t be able to grow enough to replace coal.

Nuclear energy seems to me to be shortsighted stopgap, one that is potentially far more harmful and costly than any good it could do.

Nuclear power plants take a dozen or so years to come on line. They cost some $2 billion to construct. They’re vulnerable to terrorist attack. Uranium mining, including in situ leaching of uranium ore from ground water, is dangerous to public health, as has been proven over and over
again.

Alternative, renewable fuels lend themselves to decentralization, and, therefore, to the growth of local, decentralized economies. Why ship energy gained from sunshine across hundreds of miles, when everyone has enough sunshine to supply at least part of their energy needs? If cloudy
Germany is growing its solar power base, anyplace can.

Decentralizing power and strengthening local economies does not mean America will become balkanized into self-contained economic districts.  It does mean, however, that local people can begin again to take more control over their economic well being.

That’s an opportunity we can’t let pass us by.