Energy and Climate – Key Themes

• Cleaner, Sustainable, Local Energy
• Local Community Power
• Fairness & Equal Opportunity

Background

Dirty fossil fuel sources of energy release CO₂ emissions, which are the cause of the global climate crisis. Coal is worst of the fossil fuels. California imports over 20% of its electricity from out-of-state coal-fired plants. About another 20% of our total electricity is generated from nuclear power, and most of the rest is generated from natural gas, a finite fossil fuel. California is a big greenhouse gas emitter. The state contributes about 1.5% of the total global emission of greenhouse gases. For this reason, California has a significant role to play in addressing the global climate crisis.

What We Propose

Cleaner, Sustainable, Local Energy

The remedy to the climate crisis is to reduce emissions through conservation and efficiency, coupled with a rapid, phased transition to cleaner sustainable local energy sources. As appropriate technologies are accelerated through Federal and State incentives, an increasingly experienced “Green Workforce” will take its place in the new California economy and lay the foundations for future phases. Federal and State strategies, providing financial capacity and incentives through tax rebates and Green Home investment credits, will need to be coordinated to enable local solutions through accelerated weatherization, solarization and retrofitting of existing homes and businesses, using current technological solutions initially, and staging future deployments as technological advances enable new efficiencies and economies of local scale.

The most affordable and job-creating road toward energy savings is conservation through weatherization of our buildings and deployment of energy efficient technologies such as LED lighting and tank-less water heaters. Renewable energy technologies such as solar photovoltaic and wind power generation are here now and are rapidly expanding. Geothermal, marine-based renewable energy and other emerging renewable technologies are proven and hold great promise. We already have enough of the first-phase solutions to start immediately.

As Governor, Laura Wells would implement them. 

Nuclear fission power is not an answer.

One of the most alarming trends is the renewed and deceptive promotion of nuclear fission power as a “clean” non-carbon emitting energy source. Nuclear fission power poses unacceptable perils in every step of the process -- from the extraction of uranium that threatens Native American communities, to the transportation of radioactive materials that exposes communities to hazardous spills along transportation corridors, to the locating of monolithic reactors that are subject to catastrophic failure and/or sabotage, to the still-unresolved question of the final disposition of radioactive waste materials.

Nuclear fission plants do not serve well as a stopgap measure, due to the long lead-time required for commissioning. They are uninsurable in the commercial insurance industry, are not versatile in terms of scale (they come in one size - big), they are difficult to site (no one wants to live near one), and they are inextricably linked to nuclear weaponry and the potential for exploitation by terrorists. Gubernatorial candidates from the two status-quo parties have unwisely signaled their support for nuclear power.

Laura Wells stands out as the leader who has the practical and principled position for now and for the future.

Carbon sequestration is not an answer.

California needs true innovation, not business as usual with sequestration of CO₂ at the tail end of a wasteful and expensive trail of destruction. Even if carbon sequestration can be made to be technically and economically feasible (which has yet to be demonstrated), it does nothing to mitigate mountain top removal and other destructive consequences of coal extraction. 

Local Community Power

Publicly-owned utilities provide greater accountability, and offer the opportunity for lower energy costs (eliminating of the artificial need to generate quarterly profits or pay dividends to shareholders). Public utilities allow for decision-making based on long-term societal concerns like climate change, shifting the focus to cleaner, sustainable energy solutions rather than short-term profitability. Some of the best-performing utilities in the country are publicly owned, like the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

Community Choice Aggregation (CCA)

CCA is state law that allows municipalities to aggregate their collective ratepayer purchasing power in order to form their own utility or issue bids for third parties to operate their utility. CCA localizes power infrastructure and allows far greater flexibility to choose cleaner sources of power and to reduce costs.

Localized (distributed) electricity generation.

Renewable sources such as wind and solar can allow people and communities to control the means of producing their own energy in virtual perpetuity. This creates tremendous opportunities for the democratization of energy, and the elimination of risky public vulnerability to criminal energy profiteering, such as that which occurred with Enron (which cost California billions). It also reduces long-term dependency on foreign energy sources that turn oil-rich countries into potential war zones for decades to come. Powerful industries have already gained support from the two mainstream parties to create enormous solar facilities and wind farms that will keep these energy sources in the hands of relatively small groups of people so that they can continue to profit from something that could instead be available to many at much lower cost.  

Fairness & Equal Opportunity

Fair policies must be adopted to address climate change so that benefits and burdens are shared equitably.

As policies are adopted to respond to the crisis, benefits and burdens will accrue to various stakeholders. An example of this is a “cap & trade” system that allows a polluting facility to continue or expand its impact on the surrounding community by simply purchasing the right to pollute. CO₂ is not the only emission involved in most industrial operations, so allowing the processes that emit CO₂ include continuing emission of other pollutants that affect nearby communities. A community already burdened by these emissions should not be harmed further as the result of a dubious industry-concocted market-based cap & trade plan.

Green Employment for All

Responding to the energy and climate crisis requires massive public and private investments in retrofitting for energy efficiency and renewable energy. This will require thousands of newly trained workers in a wide variety of fields. This is a great opportunity for disadvantaged communities to be included in the training and employment in this rapidly emerging “green economy.”

The Green Party is the only political party in the U.S. to include Ecological Wisdom as a fundamental philosophical tenet of its political platform.