Green energy will be a revolutionary force: it will put power in the hands of the people, where it belongs. Heres what Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), has to say: POLLIN: [T]heres a lot of reason to think that a green energy economy will be more egalitarian than our present fossil fuel based economy. For one thing, the existing big oil energy companies are going to face a massive contraction in the value of their fossil fuel assets. I mean, this group called Carbon Tracker, in the U.K., estimates that they are going to have to lose about $3 trillion in the value of their assets in order for us to stop burning so much fossil fuel and to meet the emission reduction standard. In addition, in Europe there is a very large-scale movement, especially in the wind sector, for community-based, cooperative-based energy generation. Theres some of it also in the United States, especially in the Midwest. And these are not necessarily greens that are doing it. Theyre people that have come together because its good for their community to get their power that way. So there is evidence. And third, when we think about solar, everybody has a rooftop. And as solar costs come down, people are going to start increasingly to install solar on their rooftops. And the net effect is going to be to undercut gigantic utility companies, similar, I think, to what happened over the previous 20 years with traditional phone companies getting undercut by cell phone technology, and even still further by internet-based telephone technology. You know, in another 20 or 30 years, what we thought of as traditional land line phone companies are going to be dead. I think a similar thing is in the works with respect to solar over the next 20 years.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 15:16:18 +0000
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