We're on the right track, now we have to speed up the train without knocking it off the rails

Chicago houses several great environmental advocacy groups, most of which extend their reach - through partnerships and satellites - throughout the Great Lakes and Midwest.  When I want some hope, I look to the successes that these organizations have had over the past decade.  Recently, I received an update from the Environmental Law & Policy Center regarding their activities in advocating for improved electricity generation.  Their data suggest we have found a good blueprint for success, but that we have a ways to go, especially if we do not want to trade one carbon-based future for another.

The ELPC report shows electricity usage dropping by a little over 10% from 2010 to 2020, based on progress in energy efficiency over the past couple of years.  The Center rightly looks at the period after 2010 because we can attribute a dip in usage from 2007-2009 to the worldwide recession.  Using data from the Energy Information Administration, we can verify that from a peak of almost 705 million megawatt-hours in 2010, the Midwest has dropped by almost 4% in just the past two years.  Other than the recession, we have seen no such consecutive drop in electricity use across the region since 1990 (the earliest record I pulled for verification).  If 2013 shows even a small drop, it will verify a trend that we can only hope continues throughout the coming decade.  If we continue with this trend, we can cut our electricity use in half by 2050.

In other good news, since peaking at about 500 million megawatt-hours in annual production in 2008, the amount of electricity generated from coal has declined significantly.  In 2012, we saw production at 380 million megawatt-hours, a nearly 25% reduction.  The efforts of ELPC, Sierra Club, and many regional advocates have combined with market pressures and federal regulation to cause the retirement of several of the oldest and worst polluting coal-fired generation plants in the Midwest.  This has significant local impact, especially in the communities that housed these plants.  In Chicago, the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods nearest the Crawford and Fisk plants, respectively, hope so see major reductions in pollution-related illness over the coming years with the closing of those plants.

Major challenges remain for us as a region, however.  The same data source that shows a potential trend toward reduced consumption of electricity shows a much slower drop for the use of natural gas in our residential, commercial, and industrial use.  At the same time, as coal and nuclear plants close due to market forces, most predictions - including that of the ELPC - show natural gas taking up picking up most of the slack.  This increase of usage, coupled with a slow decline in other uses for natural gas, mean that we will see flat usage over the next forty years in the region.  

The continued reliance on natural gas over the next forty years should give us pause.  For our region to find a truly sustainable future, we need to quickly and thoroughly integrate renewable energy systems into our lives as quickly as possible.  Even with recent gains, ELPC only sees renewable energy reaching 20% of our electricity generation in 10 years, and at best, we can hope that they gain another 20% by 2050.  The longer we remain dependent on finite and polluting sources of energy, the more likely we are to take a major economic hit when those resources are depleted.  Recent increases in access to natural gas through hydraulic fracturing have given us the notion that we have found unlimited natural gas reserves to power us through the next century.  We have yet to see that these reserves will keep up with the global population and development pressures that have caused a significant drop in per-capita fossil fuel reserves over the past 20 years.  It will take major investment and recovery in order to even keep up with national demand, much less worldwide desires.

Lastly, it bears stating that we do not have enough evidence yet that hydraulic fracturing, the source of the latest boon in natural gas and oil, has a smaller environmental footprint than coal production.  We have no doubt over the value of decreased sulfur oxides, nitrous oxides and soots that come from swapping natural gas for coal, but in terms of carbon production, the evidence currently leaves room for doubt.  The volume and size of mining operations has left little ability to regulate the business effectively.  The high-pressure, high-water-content operations have only been around for 15 years, so our understanding of the technology still need development.  (As Dave Mathos of SkyTruth points out in a recent article, industry asks us to accept the modern version of fracking because it supposedly comes from a well-tested "60-year-old technology".  In truth, the modern from of fracking bears only a faint resemblance too its 60-year-old ancestor.)  Anecdotal evidence varies widely, and the environmental community has yet to coalesce behind testing or regulation to sort out the issues.  Some have suggested that methane losses from modern fracking rise high enough to offset carbon reductions compared with coal.  Data on seismic activity suggests that fracking operations create more earthquakes.  Water sampling in areas that have a high number of wells points towards increases in benzene and other carcinogenic substances in the water (see the movie Gasland for more conjecture on the matter).  Recent flooding in Colorado caused wastewater fields from fracking operations to get washed into the freshwater supply stream.  Any one of these individually should cause us concern, but on the chance that all of them are coincidently true, we have simply traded one damaging future for another.

We have much work ahead of us.  Energy efficiency needs to remain our primary goal, and we should accelerate our work to reach 50% of our current per-capita usage by 2030, not 2050.  Also, we need to wrap all fuels into that goal, which includes natural gas for residential, commercial, and industrial operations.  We already know that most of our peer countries in the OECD have high quality of life at this level of energy use per-capita, so we should easily attain it.  We then need to focus immediately on policies that will favor the long-term stability of renewable energy over the long-term risks of natural gas.  The cost of wind-generated and solar-generated electricity continues to drop, and if we remove the subsidies for oil and natural gas, while promoting financing mechanisms that look outward 20 to 30 years (like we already do for home purchases and municipal energy efficiency projects), we can limit the development of infrastructure around natural gas, thereby making it truly a bridge fuel to a renewable future, and not the next sandy foundation on which we base our quality of life.