And because the generation sources were scattered across the country, there was no need to run new high-tension power lines from central generating stations, making it more efficient and less expensive. Meanwhile, as dozens of German companies got into the business of manufacturing and installing solar power systems, the cost dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2007 and continues to plummet.12
The Germans expect that by 2050 more than 25 percent of their total electricity will come from solar (it’s now just over 1 percent), adding to the roughly 12.5 percent of all German energy currently being produced by renewable sources (mostly hydro but also including wind, biomass, and geothermal).13
The solar panel program has been so successful that the German government is now thinking that it’s time to back off and leave this to the marketplace. As the New York Times noted in May 2008:14
Thanks to its aggressive push into renewable energies, cloud-wreathed Germany has become an unlikely leader in the race to harness the sun’s energy. It has by far the largest market for photovoltaic systems, which convert sunlight into electricity, with roughly half of the world’s total installations….
Now, though, with so many solar panels on so many rooftops, critics say Germany has too much of a good thing—even in a time of record oil prices. Conservative lawmakers, in particular, want to pare back generous government incentives that support solar development. They say solar generation is growing so fast that it threatens to overburden consumers with high electricity bills.
Translation: the solar panel manufacturers want the subsidies to stop so they can catch up with demand and then bump up the price—and the profits. Because of the subsidies, prices have been dropping faster than manufacturing costs.
Other Lessons from Europe
Germany is now considering incentives for its world-famous domestic auto industry to manufacture flex-fuel plug-in-hybrid automobiles that can get more than 500 mpg of (strategic) gasoline (boosted by domestically produced rooftop solar) with existing technology.
Meanwhile, Denmark has invested billions into having more than half of its entire auto fleet using only electricity by 2030.
Even China is no slouch when it comes to renewable energy. Although the Chinese continue to bring a dirty coal-fired power plant online about once a week, they surpassed every other nation in the world in 2010 in direct investment in the production of solar and wind power. As the Los Angeles Times reported in March 2010:15
US clean energy investments hit $18.6 billion last year, a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts said, a little more than half the Chinese total of $34.6 billion. Five years ago, China’s investments in clean energy totaled just $2.5 billion.
The United States also slipped behind 10 other countries, including Canada and Mexico, in clean energy investments as a share of the national economy….
The Pew report pointed to another factor constraining US competitiveness: a lack of national mandates for renewable energy production or a surcharge on greenhouse gas emissions that would make fossil fuels more expensive.
Clearly, it is time for the United States to take action.
It’s the Taxes, Stupid
Taxes do two things. First and most obviously, they fund the operations of government. But far more importantly, taxes have been used since the founding of this country to encourage behaviors that we deem good for the nation and to discourage behaviors we consider bad.
For example, in 1793 Congress passed much of Alexander Hamilton’s plan to use taxes—tariffs—on imported goods to encourage Americans to start manufacturing companies to meet demand and needs here in this country. Those tariffs stood until the 1980s, and American jobs stayed here along with them.
Similarly, two presidents—Republican Herbert Hoover (1929 to 1933) and Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933 to 1945)—supported high taxes on the rich. They believed it’s not a good thing for too much wealth to be concentrated in too few hands because it would lead the wealthy to influence government policy for their own good rather than the public good.
So they taxed incomes above approximately $3 million per year (in today’s dollars) at around 90 percent, and the effect of that tax from the 1930s until it was repealed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s was that CEO pay in the United States was about the same as in the rest of the world—around 30 times that of the lowest-paid employee—and few families of dynastic wealth rose up to try to seize political power.
Other examples of using tax policies to promote public policy are the home mortgage interest deduction (which encourages home ownership) and providing accelerated deductibility to companies for research and development.
Taxing Carbon
Now we need a new tax to encourage change that will help us kick our addiction to oil and spur us toward a clean-energy future. We need a tax on carbon. Other countries are already doing it in a variety of direct and indirect ways. This simple solution will address both the environmental problem of carbon-based fuels’ fouling our atmosphere and the strategic problem of our transportation system’s being the weakness that keeps us addicted to imported oil.
There are two pretty straightforward ways to tax carbon. The first is to simply assign a tariff or tax value to it at any particular point in its use cycle. The tax could be levied when it’s used, for example, or when it’s extracted. A tax on carbon that’s imported would serve to really speed our change from gasoline-only cars to flex-fuel and plug-in-hybrid cars.
The second way to tax carbon is to tax the industrial emission of it but also “allow” a certain amount of carbon to be released into the atmosphere by “giving away” to polluters what are referred to as “carbon credits.” A threshold is set for the total amount of carbon a country will allow to be emitted (a “cap”), and anything above that point is heavily taxed. Companies that don’t want to pay the tax can instead pay to buy carbon-emitting credits from companies that have a surplus of them (presumably because they’ve reduced their levels of carbon pollution), thus “trading” the carbon credits.
This cap-and-trade program can work if the threshold is low enough, the number of credits “given away” is low enough, and the tax is high enough. On the other hand, if the thresholds are set high, the taxes are low, and the majority of the credits are given away, cap-and-trade policy becomes a windfall for Wall Street (the credits are traded via conventional commodity exchange mechanisms) but doesn’t do much for reducing carbon emissions.
The European Union, for example, has instituted a cap-and-trade program, although many European countries (Denmark is the leader) have gone one better by instituting domestic carbon or oil taxes to further encourage conservation, innovation, and the development of domestic renewables.
We should do the same.
One problem with this is that, in the absence of tariffs, many companies will simply export more manufacturing jobs to the few countries in the world that are not taxing carbon so that they can continue to use carbon-based fuels (or electricity generated from them) over there instead of here.
But there is a way around this. We can extend our carbon tax throughout the chain of manufacture. Just like our tariffs used to be based, in part, on the relative cost of foreign labor, a carbon tax tariff could be based on the amount of carbon generated in the manufacture of goods overseas. A carbon-based value-added-tax, where a small tax is imposed at every stage of manufacture reflecting the carbon used to bring about that manufacture, would do the job quite nicely if it had the power to extend itself to imported goods.
Of course, this is what the oilmen who fund the right-wing protest movements fear the most. But their interests are not those of the United States of America. And the faster Americans realize that, the better.
From Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country by Thom Hartmann, © 2010, published by Berrett-Koehler.
Something Will Save Us
From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight:
Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation
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But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? … Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1849–1900),
THE GAY SCIENCE (1882)
WENDY KAMINER WROTE A BRILLIANT BOOK TITLED I’M DYS-functional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help. In it she pointed to the pervasive assumptions of dysfunction inherent in the self-help movement and the increasing obsession with emotional and psychological pathology in our culture. She didn’t offer any specific solutions; she only defined the problem. (Although one could say that her solution was really the most elegant of all: see the problem for what it is and refuse to dance the dance. In this she argued forcibly for people to reclaim their own inherent power and emotional health.)
Kaminer received numerous letters from people demanding solutions to the problems she had identified. She pointed out this irony in a later edition of the book: it was as if the people writing wanted her to suggest the creation of a self-help group or book to help those addicted to them.
Some of the initial responses to the early editions of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight were similar. I received letters, e-mails, and calls from people telling me with great certainty that the only solution to the problems outlined in the first third of the book would be found in smaller families; cold fusion; coaxing the flying saucer people out of hiding; a worldwide conversion to Christianity (at least a half-dozen different people suggested that only their particular Christian sect could bring this about, and all other Christians must ultimately recognize the error of their ways), Islam, or some other religion; or the immediate institution of a benevolent one-world government. The letters ranged from amazement to outrage that I’d failed to see and support their perspective.
But these are all something-will-save-us solutions. This kind of thinking is a symptom of our younger culture—and fighting fire with fire is only rarely successful. Usually, it just produces more flames. As Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated, often the most powerful and effective way to “fight back” against the pathological kings and kingdoms is to walk away from the kings, see the situation for what it is, and stop playing the dominator’s game.
But that involves a shift of perspective that some people find very difficult. There are, for example, those who point to the foundational belief of our culture (and, particularly, to European-ancestry citizens of the United States) that we can solve any problem if we just put our minds to it. Some even argue that the exploding human population is a good thing because the more people there are, the greater the possibility we will find among them the next Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, or Thomas Edison, who will figure out how to get us out of this mess. It is, of course, a simplistic, and ultimately cruel, notion but one that has been used for years, usually to advance a dominator religious or economic agenda.
In fact, it’s somewhere between unlikely and impossible that children born into the contemporary slums of Islamabad or Haiti, or even Baltimore or East Los Angeles, will grow up to change the world or solve our problems. They may become very competent; any corrections officer can tell you there are geniuses among our cities’ gang members and in our prisons. But grinding poverty and pervasive violence—born of overcrowding and a lack of resources and security—rarely produce more than a surfeit of ingenious criminals and competent jailhouse lawyers.
On the other hand, Jefferson was a member of the land-owning elite, what we would today call the very wealthy. Translated into today’s dollars, nearly every signer of the Declaration of Independence was a millionaire or multimillionaire. Einstein was never truly poor, and he lived a life ranging from comfortable to wealthy. And even Edison, penniless when he ran away from home at age 15, entered a world with a total population that was a fifth of what it is today, rich with cheap natural resources, and almost limitless opportunity for ambitious white young men who spoke American English. If any of them were to be born into the modern-day sewers of Bogotá, they might end up being hunted for sport—but it’s unlikely that they’d ever have access to the resources necessary to create lasting and meaningful changes in the world.
True Change Is Not a Simple Process
There is no shortage of do-this-and-everything-will-be-okay solutions proffered in books and the press. The more commonly touted include worldwide birth control, strong controls on corporate exploiters and polluters, $5-per-gallon (or more) taxes on gasoline and oil products, doubling or tripling of the cost of water and electricity by increased taxation, worldwide destruction of weapons of war, more money for environmental remediation, and the creation and the empowerment of new political parties not beholden to corporate powers.
The idea of cultural change is often unpalatable because any sort of real, individual, personal change in beliefs and behaviors is so difficult as to be one of the rarest events we ever experience in our own lives or witness among those we know. It’s easy to send $10 off to the Sierra Club; it’s infinitely more difficult to reconsider beliefs and behaviors held since childhood and then change your way of life to one based on that new understanding, new viewpoint, or new story. But if such deep change is what we really need, I see no point in pretending that something simpler will do it.
The Something-Will-Save-Us Viewpoint
We are members of a culture that asserts that humans are at the top of a pyramid of creation and evolution. In our modern techno naiveté, we reveal our fatal belief that anything we have done—for better or worse—can also be undone. We tend to think that every problem, including manmade ones, has a solution.
In the deus ex machina ending in Greek plays, the hero inevitably finds himself in an impossible situation. To close the show, a platform is cranked down from the ceiling with a god on it, who waves his staff and makes everything well again. Similarly, we have faith that somehow things will turn out okay. “Don’t worry,” our sitcom culture tells us, “human ingenuity will save us.”
We envision that our salvation will come from new technologies, or perhaps the rise of a new leader or political party, or the return/ appearance of ancient founders of our largest religions. The more esoteric among us suggest that people from outer space will show up and either share their planet-saving technology or take us to a less polluted and more paradisiacal planet. The Christian “rapture” envisions the world’s “good people” being removed from this mess we’ve created and relocated to a paradise created just for them. Among the New Age movement, a popular notion is that just in the nick of time the Ancient Ones, now available only in channeled form through our mediums and psychics, will make themselves known and tell us how to solve our problems. And, of course, there is no shortage of “just follow me, worship me, do as I say, and you’ll be happy forever” gurus.
Whatever form it takes, our culture whispers in our ears daily, “Something or someone will save us. Just continue your life as it was, and keep on consuming, because you couldn’t possibly save the world, but somebody else will.”
This is what I refer to as something-will-save-us thinking.
It’s built into our culture, at the foundation of our certainty about how life should be lived, how the world works, and our role in it. It most likely originated as a way for dominators in emerging younger cultures to control their slaves: “Just keep picking that cotton and praying, and you’ll eventually be saved. It may be after you die, but it’ll happen; don’t worry about that. In the meantime, don’t stop picking that cotton!”
Far from being the solution, something-will-save-us thinking is at the root of our problems.
Younger Cultures and Something-Will-Save-Us Beliefs
Something-will-save-us beliefs are at the core of younger cultures but are startlingly rare among older ones. This is not to say that older cultures don’t have spirituality, bel
ief in deities or spirits, elaborate rituals, offerings or oblations to gods or spirits, personal mystical experience, and so on. But younger-culture beliefs require two essential elements that are lacking from most older cultures:
■ The belief that there is, to paraphrase Daniel Quinn, only One Right Way to Live (which, of course, is “our” way) and that when everybody on the planet figures this out and lives our way, things will be good. Conversely, this belief says that if we fail to convert everybody to our way of life, the deity (or, for secularists, the science/technology) who defined this One Right Way to Live will punish us. This punishment may be personal, or it may involve the destruction of the entire planet; but, in either case, those who fail to conform to the dominator culture’s way will suffer, and the only way to be saved from doom is to conform.
■ The belief that humans are essentially flawed, sinful, damned by a specific deity, or intrinsically destructive and, therefore, they (we) can and must be “saved.” According to this belief, this personal (and thus worldwide) salvation process can happen only by intense personal effort and devotion to a particular program (yoga, rosary, prostrations, good deeds, psychotherapy, jihad, Prozac, evangelism) or through the intervention of a divine being or beings who reside in a nonearthly realm (aliens from space) or nonphysical realm (gods, saviors, angels, prophets, gurus, channeled Wise Ones).
The most secular among us believe that we will find, among our own human race, people who will save us from ourselves. Historically, this was the basis of the rule of dominator kings: they had to have absolute power over their people, they said, to save the people from themselves. This is also a core belief among modern people who treat either politics or science as a something-will-save-us religion.
The Thom Hartmann Reader Page 21
