Green Jersey

There is no big lever

by William Owen

We have to get to used to this idea. There is no one solution, no single master-stroke of human ingenuity that will help us mitigate the effects of global climate change.

While New Jersey has made a wise choice in participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — monetizing carbon in developed, industrialized countries is absolutely necessary so that we can see the true cost of fossil fuel usage — such a program will not make global warming go away by itself.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out, there is a very real likelihood utilities could opt to purchase cheaper electrons from out-of-state plants, causing those plants to run at higher capacity and increasing the rate of emissions.

Even a federal program that would standardize power plant emissions reductions nationwide, as suggested by Robert Keough of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, would take years to put into place once legislation was passed, and would still leaves a massive problem completely unaddressed:

We use, and waste, a lot of electricity.

In order to effect lasting, meaningful change, the introduction of these cap-and-trade systems must go hand-in-hand with increases in efficiency. If we are not addressing the issue of our consumption at the same time as we address emissions, we are only choosing to tackle the problem on one front, and still only trying to pull one lever and hope that reboots the whole system.

Chief among those increases in efficiency, and at the forefront of President-elect Barack Obama‘s economic renewal plan, must be stronger cohesion between utilities nationwide and a reinforced electrical infrastructure.

Reformulating the electricity grid into an intelligent, monitored electrical system capable of reading and load-balancing demand instantly — an energy internet, or electronet, as Al Gore calls it — is essential to meeting the efficiency goals we must achieve, will help to create millions of new and lasting jobs, and will provide much needed reinforcement of our nation’s infrastructure.

William Owen is a freelance writer in Jersey City.