So it's a question long overdue in the asking: Will President-elect Obama be able to enact his ambitious plans for energy independence in the midst of a financial meltdown?

We here at The Thin Green Line polled our extensive staff -- including field researchers, laboratory assistants and policy wonks -- and concluded the answer to that question will depend as much on the man as the circumstances.

But since the man is not even in office yet, and because we won't fully know what kind of president he is until he is president, over-stuffed with turkey as we are, we have decided to confine our effort today to examining the circumstances.

This in and of itself is no small task as, like the issues, they are complex.

It was going to be hard enough to wean Americans off the easy and familiar energy sources of oil and coal in the best of circumstances.

Add to that the tension, fear and volatility of a collapsing economy and "hard" just went to "harder."

How to you jumpstart a new energy matrix when the financial resources required just got flushed down the proverbial de-regulation toilet?

Oddly, it seems, this question makes stark the observation that the world is full of basically two kinds of people, optimists and pessimists or, in this case, entrepreneurs and bean counters.

The bean counter argument is not hard to imagine and has many good points to its credit, not the least of which is "is now the time to invest what little money is available for lending in an untested industry?"

This is being seen already as it relates to wind power, hence our symbolic windmill photo at the top of the page.

Initially, the fastest growing of the major green energy initiatives -- the others being solar, ethanol and, to a lesser extent, geo-thermal -- wind power is now suffering from the collapse of its financial backers, like Lehman Brothers.

As this article in The Christian Science Monitor indicates, projects already underway in wind-rich places like Wyoming and Michigan are now becalmed by a lull that has nothing to do with wind-speed.

"Financing for wind projects is likely to shift more to deep-pocketed utilities and other companies far from Wall Street – including big foreign companies searching for a foothold in the United States," the now solely on-line newspaper reported. "Until this fall, plowing billions into new wind farms from North Dakota to Texas to California had been the epitome of renewable-energy investing for hedge funds and big banks."

Once, the second-fastest growing source of electricity generation after natural gas, wind has hit the perfect storm: Falling fossil fuel prices, especially in natural gas, rising steel prices and a paucity of investors.

And there is another, more integral matter with which green energy must contend in the electrical arena -- the infrastructure itself.

It's not enough to just build graceful wind farms across the plains and stand back to admire our tardy-but-necessary initiative.

The power grid that must carry those busy electrons from the plains to the cities is already seriously over-taxed and not designed for the task at hand.

A recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation notes that switching over to more wind and solar power plants without upgrading the transmission capacity would result in more blackouts and less reliability -- not the kind of thing on which a thriving, high-tech economy is built.

And, as this report in The New York Times makes clear, the issue puts two green constituencies as odds.

"The report calls for construction of new power lines, which has become more difficult in some regions because of the diminished clout of utilities and the growing strength of preservationists trying to protect rural areas. "

Just such an effort is underway here in eastern Pennsylvania and is meeting with stiff resistance.

Even potential measures to ease this pressure, like voluntary shut-downs in exchange for price breaks, will not be enough to alleviate the shortage of transmission capacity however.

All of which brings us to the optimists or, as we fashioned them earlier, the entrepreneurs.

Some of the nation's most successful entrepreneurs succeed by seeing opportunity in difficulty, solving new problems in new ways.

Not being entrepreneurs here at The Thin Green Line (where wage slavery crushes our inner creative capitalist on a daily basis) we cannot propose those solutions, only have faith that they exist and that those so inclined will be able to find them.

One way to encourage them, argue some, is for a President Obama to enact a "Green New Deal" and use what financial fortitude the U.S. Government has left to support those efforts.

"Such a Green New Deal, woven into the economic stimulus package being crafted for early next year, could create millions of government-subsidized jobs and build a new energy infrastructure," The Boston Globe reported in this Nov. 24 article.
"It's a smart thing to do for the economy and a strategically wonderful thing to do for the environment," said David Foster, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership between the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers that works to develop green jobs. His group points to a University of Massachusetts report earlier this fall that said a $100 billion investment in clean technology could create 2 million new jobs in the next two years. "It leads us down the path for energy independence. It's a historic opportunity," he told the newspaper.

Supporters of Obama's $150 billion energy plans, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, say such a plan could include federal financial incentives to quickly build large-scale solar, wind, and other renewable projects. It could also include massive investment in new transmission lines to bring renewable power from rural areas into cities, creating a new electricity grid, according to the Globe.

But it won't be easy. Any reduction in carbon emissions from coal-fired plants are likely to raise electricity prices at a time when deregulation is already set to do that, at least in Pennsylvania, just when most consumers can't afford it. That will make it politically unpopular, requiring an effort to educate the country on why its necessary.

“In times of economic stress, the last thing you want to do is increase peoples’ energy costs with something like cap-and-trade,” Anne Korin, cofounder of the Set America Free Coalition (SAFC) of energy-security hawks and environ­mentalists, told The Christian Science Monitor in this Nov. 12 article which examines Obama's plans in some detail.

"SAFC calls for policies that would disconnect the US from imported oil. 'There’s a lot of talk about that, but a congressman who wants to be reelected would be very wary of that,' Ms. Korin says."

If you ask him if he can do it, Obama would likely say it is not him, but all of us that must accomplish this. "Yes WE can" was the mantra of his campaign.

But with the campaign over and his presidency looming, he must also recognize that while we may indeed be able to do it, we won't be able to do it without him.

Understand, generally speaking, I'm a big fan of democracy.


Citizens electing their leaders to decide what is best for the country (and the world) within a framework that protects the rights of the minority it a pretty awesome system.


But the key flaw in all this is, or course, the word "elections." Because at election time, the thing that most often concerns these alleged "leaders" is their own reelection.


So as we all drown in $4-per-gallon gas and heating oil bills that may mean our kids won't go to college, energy has become an election football.


As I blogged on June 26 and July 3, the tax break for alternative energy sources is set to expire soon unless Congress gets its act together.


(Did I just say the words "Congress" and "act together" in the same sentence? Somebody slap me.)


Well, as Reuters reported in this article, an attempt to move a Senate bill extending those tax breaks forward, which needed 60 votes but received only 51, was foiled by Republicans convinced the way to move away from our addiction to oil is to drill for more oil, particularly in environmentally sensitive places where it is currently banned.


Never mind that oil companies hold hundreds of leases to drill on public lands that they are not utilizing, the Republicans believe voters will believe that a crisis is the time to decide what to let oil companies do with our future, and have said as much -- publicly!

These same companies seem to be doing OK without the Senate's help.


As CNN reported here Exxon Mobil just posted the largest quarterly profit in U.S. history Thursday, posting net income of $11.68 billion on revenue of $138 billion in the second quarter.


That profit works out to $1,485.55 a second. That barely beat the previous corporate record of $11.66 billion, also set by Exxon in the fourth quarter of 2007."The fundamentals of our business remain strong," Henry Hubble, Exxon's vice president of investor relations, said on a conference call. "We continue to capture the benefit of strong industry conditions."


That's an understatement if ever I read one. I can see why Senate Republicans feel moved to rush to their aid.


The extension of the tax breaks isn't dead yet, but I think "on life support" is not an unfair way to characterize them.


But as the Senate Republicans try to convince voters we can drill our way out of an energy crisis, those tax breaks will expire (I wonder how John McCain will vote on this matter?) and our nation's nascent entrepreneurial attempt to get ahead of the curve on energy will suffer a setback, perhaps a fatal one.


And so elections will imperil all of us to live with the consequences of the need to curry favor with oil companies in order to increase campaign donations.


But fear not oh faithful reader, all hope is not lost. Some vision remains.


This story by McClatchy newspapers that says the U.S. will soon be the world's number one wind power producer, suggesting that we may be succeeding without tax breaks.


But be careful of jumping to too many conclusions. As Mark Twain is said to have said, "figures don't lie, but liars figure."


The American Wind Energy Association is expected to release a survey next month that calculates that the US wind industry now tops Germany in terms of how much energy is being produced from wind. But that has more to do with how windy America is than any visionary investment level by us. Maybe all those senate blow-hards are a natural resource we should begin taking advantage of.

Germany still has more installed capacity - 22,000 megawatts compared with 17,000 in the US at the end of 2007. But the average wind speed is stronger in America, which means more energy is being generated, the group said.

Not surprisingly, the newspaper group also reports that many of the world's leading wind companies are not US companies, and they will need to move manufacturing jobs to the US as the wind industry grows, Swisher said. His group says 4,000 wind-related manufacturing jobs have been added in the US since 2007.


Before you get too excited, you should know that currently, wind provides about 1% of US electricity.

The cost of wind power is almost comparable to fossil fuels such as coal, at between 4.5 and 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour, but building a wind farm costs more than a fossil-fuel plant - between $1.5m and $2m per megawatt of capacity compared with $800,000 for a natural-gas plant.
Once constructed, though, wind plants have no fuel costs compared with coal and natural gas plants.


Since Germany far surpasses the U.S. in solar power generation, despite our sunnier weather patterns, I'd call this one a draw.


But also in the promise for the future category, consider this idea. What if the weather didn't matter?


As O. Glenn Smith, a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, writes in this New York Times opinion piece, maybe the best idea is to harvest solar energy from space.


Smith, who seems to know what he's talking about, said it's not as James Bond as it sounds. As solar panels get lighter and thinner, this idea is more and more financially feasible.


Basically, you launch a bunch of solar collectors into space, which is a much more efficient way to collect solar energy, and then beam it back to earth. (Yes, I said "beam it.")


Smith writes: "Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid. Government scientists have projected that the cost of electric power generation from such a system could be as low as 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is within the range of what consumers pay now."


And if you want justification for what would surely be an expensive undertaking, Smith urges us to consider that: "Over the past 15 years, Americans have invested more than $100 billion, directly and indirectly, on the space station and supporting shuttle flights. With an energy crisis deepening, it’s time to begin to develop a huge return on that investment."


Now if only we could figure out some way turn that into a campaign contribution, then it might actually happen. (Sigh.)