Iowa Could Be Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free
by Paul Deaton
Frequent visitor to Iowa, Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research has determined a way to meet our energy needs without the use of carbon-based or nuclear fuels and technology. In his book, Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for US Energy Policy, he outlines the process of what we can do to reduce and eliminate our reliance on carbon and nuclear fuels to produce our energy.
When we talk about energy in Iowa, some knowledge of this text should be considered required reading, even if delving into the full analysis is a bit wonkish for most tastes.
Here is an excerpt from the Preface to Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free:
“A three-fold global energy crisis has emerged since the 1970s; it is now acute on all fronts.
2. The security of oil supplies, given the political and military turmoil in much of the oil exporting world, centered in the Persian Gulf region;
3. Nuclear weapons proliferation and its potential connections to the spread of nuclear energy to address climate change.
These issues are intimately connected. Oil is a leading source of global and U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as well as a principal source of local air pollution, and often the main one in cities. Concerns about the insecurity of oil supply are not new – they were expressed as long ago as 1952 by the Paley Commission, when the United States was just turning from an oil exporter to an oil importer. To complicate matters, many, including some environmentalists, now propose that nuclear power should be one of the sources of energy used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The U.S. energy legislation of 2005 provides significant subsidies, not only for renewable energy sources, but also for new nuclear power plants. But nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation are quite entangled with one another.”
Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County and weekend
editor of Blog for Iowa. E-mail Paul
Deaton
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