Energy and Our World

This article originally ran on Forbes.com on June 28, 2024. All rights reserved.

Daniel B. Markind is a Forbes.com energy column contributor. The views expressed in this article are not to be associated with the views of Flaster Greenberg PC.

During recent Senate hearings pertaining to energy and appointment made by the Biden administration to the United States Department of Energy, some of the most interesting questions have been asked by Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.

Kennedy often asks potential appointees: “If you were energy king for a day, what five specific things would you do in order to guard against climate change?” Senator Kennedy almost never gets a straight answer.  Many of the responses are in the form of a “word salad” from people who love to criticize but rarely have concrete suggestions on how to address man-made climate change and encourage decarbonization.

What would your list be?  Here is mine:

1. Build out America’s natural gas pipeline transportation system. At first, this sounds counterintuitive as for many people our ultimate goal is to eliminate fossil fuels, not expand their use. However, the transition to natural gas from coal has had the single largest impact on the carbon footprint of the country, so we should work to transform more of the petroleum and coal to natural gas until such time as we are prepared to make the full transition to renewable energy sources.  In addition, a change like this would dramatically increase our energy availability and overall energy security, which only portends well for our ability to affect this transition.
2. Streamline the permitting process for energy projects, especially for clean energy projects and for SMR nuclear reactors. SMR reactors are much smaller than conventional reactors have been in the past (so we don't have to radically change electrical infrastructure to site and build them), safer (so they cannot run away due to passive reactor design), and energy dense (from a kWh/acre standpoint), not to mention having high reliability and being essentially carbon free.  Using SMR reactors, we also can create more of a distributed network (like solar and wind have done), but much more reliable and controllable for load balancing.  With regard to the permitting process for renewables, it is a strange phenomenon that, while so many people insist that we transition immediately from carbon-based fuels to renewables, like solar and wind, the same people often will fight the attempt to locate a wind farm or a solar farm in their own vicinity.  To so many of these so-called environmental advocates, the NIMBY factor outweighs their desire to save the planet.  We must be careful, however, not to just try to replicate Germany during the 2010’s and seek to permit only renewable energy projects, to the exclusion of everything else. This too narrow of a focus, which ignored the economic realities of the marketplace, led to eventual disaster in that country and would do the same here.  Finally, as part of that streamlining, we need to amend section 401 of the Clean Water Act  to ensure that any state review of federal permits for projects like interstate pipelines, upgrades to the nation’s electrical grids, and the like, can only be reviewed by individual states for purely local environmental issues and concerns, should not be subject to any one state’s parochial interests or political considerations overriding those of other states.  Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York infamously used this relatively minor provision in the Clean Water Act, against its original purpose,  effectively to dictate energy policy for the entire Northeast, at the expense of the sometimes-contrary policies and energy needs of certain of New York’s neighboring states.
3. Divide college into two pathways (not dissimilar to Germany), tech/applied and academic/research. So much of what is taught in higher education in the STEM areas doesn't apply to the work many of us actually do, nor does it build our troubleshooting and application skill sets. Much of that learning "other stuff" would be better off taught to those who wish to develop the academic/research side of the universe, while the tech/application side gets trained on what is immediately useful and practical. Also, I would make all the other liberal arts classes optional. This would, in theory, reduce the costs for those who want them to obtain STEM degrees, while still producing economically and societally useful employees. More useful employees can, in turn, generate new businesses in high value areas. In addition, the academic persons can still focus on being academics, if they want. This would mean not much changes for them at all. But the whole point is to improve the overall STEM workforce while keeping the costs to create them low. We always must remember that one of the best ways to fight climate change is economic and technological strength to do whatever we need to do to deal with it.  For that to occur, we need many more STEM trained people.
4. Be prepared to spend tens of billions of dollars to expand, modernize and harden our electric grids. Without this level of commitment and expense, we have no realistic chance of effecting the transition to renewable energy that is our main goal. Along with expanding the grids, we must make them smarter so that they could efficiently shut off or power down areas that are not likely to use power at any particular time and transfer that unused power quickly to those areas where it will be most immediately needed, all at the cheapest cost.
5. Identify and locate the Rare Earth Elements that we will need to effect energy transition and secure our supply of needed power. This goes hand in hand with military preparedness and the capability to defend our nation against those who would do harm to us through attacks against our national energy system, or otherwise.  With all due respect to those who believe in transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy at the same time as we return to an isolationist foreign policy, those two are mutually exclusive, and self-defeating, concepts.

Obviously, everyone will have his/her own list.  I believe in the end that Senator Kennedy’s point is that, without specific proposals in mind, speaking in generalities and platitudes is of limited utility.  If we really are going to make an impact on man-made climate change, we need to put specific ideas on the table, debate them, hash out how they will be implemented, and move forward with concrete policies and actions, instead of either behaving like the problem does not exist or yelling, “Just Stop Oil!” while offering nothing practical in return.

If only I were Energy King.