Sunday, October 12, 2008
Great value in going green
From the RoundTable blog
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John S. Edwards
Edwards, of Roanoke, is the senator for the 21st Senatorial District of Virginia.
The world is consuming 1,000 barrels of oil per second.
The United States accounts for 25 percent of that frantic consumption, though we have only 3 percent of the world's oil supply. It should be no surprise therefore that we import 70 percent of our oil from other countries, exporting our dollars to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and others. In fact, we currently are sending $700 billion a year overseas, just to purchase oil.
This is three times what we imported some 30 years ago, when President Carter called the oil crisis the "moral equivalent of war."
Without change, it will only get worse.
America is now competing for foreign oil with China, which since 1993 has become a net importer of oil. The air pollution hanging over the recent Beijing Olympics is just one sign of China's transition from bicycles to gas-consuming vehicles and of Asia's insatiable market for oil.
Further, many believe the world has already reached peak oil production and the world will produce less and less oil over the coming decades.
All of this means higher oil prices, greater pollution and more carbon in the atmosphere with the resulting degradation of our climate.
Without change we will continue to rely heavily on a nonrenewable, polluting resource. Without change, we will send more of our money overseas to often hostile oil producing countries.
With change, we can create more jobs at home, improve our economy and clean up our environment, all at the same time. A starting place is investing more in low-carbon "green" construction opportunities.
According to a new report titled "Green Recovery -- A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low Carbon Economy," we can create some 56,000 new clean energy jobs in a variety of sectors of the economy in Virginia alone.
This would include using alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar, cellulosic biofuels and clean coal, investing in mass transit and rails, and building energy-efficient green buildings.
The move to build, retrofit and rehab green energy-efficient buildings has already begun in Roanoke. After recent preservation and rehabilitation work, the Claude Moore Education Complex of the Roanoke Higher Education Center has been highlighted as the greenest building in Virginia.
I've sponsored legislation to enable localities to provide tax incentives for green buildings.
Improving our rail system will also build a green, low-carbon economy. Trains are cleaner and cheaper to operate than trucks and cars that consume substantially more fuel on a per ton basis. Trains can go 436 miles per gallon of fuel per ton. Even a 1.5 ton hybrid car can only travel 50 miles per gallon.
Constructing rail lines is also less expensive than constructing interstate highways and takes less time. Rails consume less land than highways, better enabling us to conserve and preserve our outdoors.
Upgrading and modernizing our rail system will serve to shift more freight traffic from trucks to trains, bring back rail passenger transportation and build high-speed rail. All of this saves energy, protects the environment and relieves congested highways like Interstate 81.
With crisis comes opportunity -- and the imperative -- for change. We can invest our energy dollars here at home. We can use clean sources of energy to decrease our reliance on oil.
Building energy-efficient green buildings and improving our rail transportation system, among other things, would allow us to create more jobs, improve our economy and have a cleaner environment at the same time.
