Bringing affordable solar power to the masses is a critical piece of protecting the planet.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

When I take a walk through the woods from my house in the Hamptons, I pass several homes along the path with large solar arrays on their roofs or installed in their yards. I had to laugh, therefore, when I watched a video of Van Jones’ speech to some 10,000 youth climate activists at the recent Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C.

Jones was making the point that the high cost of solar power means “wealthy people have the solar panels while the poor people pay the big energy bills” when he added that the rich live under trees in the shade, while poor people live in neighborhoods where the sun beats down on their houses.

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There is no safe level of radiation.

Part Two of a two-part series from CSRwire.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

Yesterday, I wrote about the difference between exposure to external radiation - radiation that is in the air, water or soil - and internal radiation, the stuff that gets inside you. I explained why the natural phenomenon of bioaccumulation means, when radioactive particles (radionucleides) settle into the bones, organs and muscles of prey that are eaten, they become more concentrated the higher up the food chain they go.

So, even though the radioactivity in the water becomes more dilute the farther it flows from the source, it becomes more concentrated in bodies of the animals that ingest it. It’s why the “solution to pollution” is not dilution, at least in the case of substances that bioaccumulate (and damage cells, as we’ll see below).

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Business and government need to make sure alternatives to fossil fuels do not add to human and environmental health hazards.

Part Two of a three-part series from CSRwire.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

My last post in these pages, written a week ago, tackled seven top health hazards of climate change. I promised readers my next post would explore remedies governments, businesses and individuals can use to protect human health from the “the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century.”

What a difference a week makes. A devastating earthquake in Japan set off a tsunami that has likely claimed tens of thousands of lives and is also threatening a full-scale nuclear catastrophe.

With three reactors in “partial meltdown,” another with its spent fuel rods on fire and radiation levels spiking as I write these words, the unfolding nuclear emergency at Fukushima will end up — in the best case scenario — having caused acute injury or death to some plant workers and almost certainly an eventual rise in cancer in those living near the plant (especially children), or — worst case scenario — spewing radioactive clouds that will circle the globe for months, potentially causing many cancers and birth defects for a long time to come.

So, rather than continue on my promised path, I decided to take a short detour into a now more pressing question. After Fukushima, do we face a Hobbesian choice between illness, death and environmental disaster from fossil fuels — or illness, death and environmental disaster from the technologies we hope to replace them?

Nuclear energy was supposed to help get us off our fossil fuel addiction — it was supposed to be “clean” and provide a bridge to less mature technologies like wind and solar. Proponents of nuclear, including one of my heroes, climatologist Jim Hansen, have said that without a renaissance in nuclear energy, the world will not be able to get off coal in time to avert catastrophic climate change. As of March 11, however, the nuclear renaissance is in doubt, both in the US and abroad.

In fact there have been doubts all along. Critics have charged nuclear is anything but “clean:” nuclear waste is (practically) forever, transporting it to far-flung permanent waste storage facilities (that have yet to exist and probably never will) puts communities at risk of contaminating accidents, nuclear plants are terrorist magnets, and they are prodigious water hogs in a world that climate change is making water-poor. (The hotter and drier the earth gets, the more water nuclear power plants will commandeer to supply the increased demand by people running more air conditioners more often.) Moreover, nuclear plants carry a heavy carbon footprint from construction; mining, processing and transporting uranium; storing waste and decommissioning.

Claims of the safety of present nukes are Panglossian at best and disingenuous at worse: the Japanese have the highest nuclear plant safety standards in the world, yet they built their reactors to withstand earthquakes, not tsunamis — despite the fact the two go together, as any Japanese kindergartner can tell you. And don’t believe claims that low levels of radiation pose no danger. They do: there is no safe exposure level to ionizing radiation (although the risk does go up with more exposure).

If you think nuclear operators on American soil are any better than the Japanese on safety, I’ve got a nuclear plant in Vermont I can sell you. Vermont Yankee is the same design as the failed reactors at Fukushima and it has been leaking for years. Thanks to a courageous governor — probably encouraged by a long-battling group of activists — that plant will be shut down, in spite of the NRC’s approval extending the plant’s license for another 12 years. But he is the exception among politicians, not the rule. Perhaps nuclear plants can be made safer, but we’d have to have a different political climate — one not beholden to corporate interests — to insure that.

How about other energy alternatives to fossil fuels? As we’ve learned from the case of biofuels, the cure may be no better than the disease. Consider this:

• Corn ethanol uses more energy from fossil fuels than it supplies, leads to carbon-emitting deforestation and causes hunger to rise world-wide;
• Biomass also cuts down forests (that protect from climate change) and emits highly toxic particulates (especially when burning construction waste) — and it also may well use more energy from fossil fuels than it supplies;
• Geothermal causes earthquakes — something you might not want to happen near a nuclear power plant (or anywhere else);
• Hydrofracking for natural gas is contaminating aquifers with toxic chemicals;
• “Clean coal” is an oxymoron and enormously expensive to boot.

Even wind and solar — certainly our best bets for clean electric power — come with some environmental concerns, from rare earth mining to harm to migratory birds.

So, what’s a climate hawk to do? We need to consider a sobering truth: there is no “free” energy. We are going to have to put responsible innovation at the core of our search for clean, renewable energy; we are going to have to put efficiency first; and we are all — consumers, producers and investors alike — going to have to learn to live better with less.

How we can do that will be the subject of my third and final post in this series. Stay tuned.

About Francesca Rheannon

Francesca is CSRwire’s Talkback Managing Editor. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast, The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.

Talkback Readers: What is a climate hawk to do? Which alternative energies pose minimal health risks? Tell us on Talkback!

Japan’s tragedy points the way to a safer future – if we learn its lesson.

By Carl Safina

Japan’s tsunami is a horrific tragedy of staggering human and economic proportions. It is also as natural a disaster as humanity can still suffer. Its cause is shifting plates in Earth’s crust. It has nothing to do with greenhouse gases or global warming, which now casts suspicion on whether weather-related disasters are entirely natural or partially human-caused (Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, or the more recent droughts that have helped push up food prices, may reflect humanly influenced atmospheric change).

Natural or not, the tsunami will, however, force reevaluation of energy options that have implications for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Atomic energy is probably the most scaled-up, ready-to-go alternative to conventional combustion-based technologies requiring petroleum or coal.

That’s old news, of course. And that’s the problem.

Decades after we saw the need for alternative fuels – we have scant options. More than anywhere else, Japan’s engineers build with earthquakes in mind. In the case of the earthquake-induced problems at its nuclear reactors, no one is really at fault. Sometimes someone is at fault, as with last year’s Gulf of Mexico BP oil well blowout. In the latter case, fault lies with the bad judgment of the people involved. In Japan’s case, the fault is a geological one.

What these two very different circumstances – faultiness and faultlessness – have in common is: accidents happen.

So for me the way I’ve been thinking of it is that among the many reasons we need to transition to a clean-energy economy is the magnitude of inherent risks. Not the frequency of accidents, which are rather rare, but the severity of inevitable accidents.

The nuclear-energy risks are quite dangerous. As are the increasing risks from oil as we go to deeper waters where controlling blowouts is extremely difficult and takes months. Fracking for natural gas has been called safe, but its safety is increasingly being challenged by indications that it can pollute drinking water supplies, including New York City’s. Coal is putting mercury in fish, largely changing the heat balance of the planet and acidifying the ocean.

Clean energies like sunlight, tides, heat from the Earth, wind and algae actually power the whole planet. But also, they can’t explode, can’t be spilled and can’t be used by terrorists. They cannot be “unleashed” by earthquakes.

Those are some of the reasons we need to transition to a clean-energy economy. What are the other reasons? You don’t have to ask; you already know. Here are a few:

• Petro-dictators. Imagine how sweet it would be if we no longer threw cash to corporate giants and terrorists each time we filled our car or our home’s burner went on.

• Price, reliability and self-sustainability. Right now we’re subject to oil shocks caused by political events and foreign price-fixing. When we build the smart grid of the future, it can distribute electricity generated by any means, whether it’s coal or free, clean energy from wind and sunlight and geo-thermal sources.

• Price competition between biomass fuel and food made from the same crops. We can go back to eating food, rather than burning it. The hungry and poor will thankful.

• Peak oil. It won’t last forever. Can we finally start planning for the inevitable?

• Despoliation. Coal companies are still blowing up mountains in a country where children are taught to sing “America The Beautiful.”

• Other pollution. Fossil fuels, wood and other biomass create smog, lung and breathing problems. Nuclear energy creates dangerous waste.

• Jobs. American jobs. Sure other people benefit from getting jobs formerly held by Americans. But why are we doing everything we can to build the economy of the biggest, most anti-democratic, most oppressive government in the world? Why do we tolerate it?

• Leadership. Who builds the energy future will own the future and will sell it to the world. Will it be the United States or China? China knows its answer. We don’t. While China dreams big, America sleepwalks.

So as the horrors in Japan prompt a global reevaluation of the risks of nuclear energy, let’s really work toward a safer energy future.

About Carl Safina

Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow, Pew fellow, and Guggenheim fellow, he is adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and president of Blue Ocean Institute. His books include Song for the Blue Ocean, The View From Lazy Point and A Sea in Flames, his book abut the 2010 Gulf blowout, among others. He is host of Saving the Ocean on PBS television. www.blueocean.org | www.carlsafina.org 

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