Dusty Johnson Goes Nuclear, Misses Conservation Boat

I gave Public Utilities Commissioner Dusty Johnson a little pre-emptive ribbing yesterday when I found out he would be giving a speech at DSU's spring convocation titled "Avoiding the Siren's Call: Being a Common Sense Environmentalist." That title suggested we might hear some justification of giving economic development the benefit of the doubt over those whacky hippie tree-huggers who so vex good decent Republicans.

The commissioner himself called after the speech to say he'd read the post and thought his speech was much more balanced than that. He certainly didn't think the speech did Big Oil's bidding or any of the plutocratic evil I hinted at. He said he actually thought that if he was going to catch heck from anyone, it would be from hardcore conservatives thinking he was going too green.
I did manage to catch the speech online before Commissioner Johnson called -- you can watch it yourself online and check my comments for accuracy. (Forward to 43:30 to get right to Johnson's speech; it lasts 16.5 minutes.)

First things first: the speech made no mention of TransCanada, Hyperion, or wind power. Given that oil and wind have figured prominently in South Dakota's discussion of energy and the environment over the past year, this omission was surprising.

Johnson spoke instead about his roadmap for solid energy policy. Among the highlights:

Johnson strongly supports nuclear power. He noted that the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979 brought the expansion of nuclear power in the US to a screeching halt. Meanwhile, our European friends have continued to use nuclear power. France leads the way, deriving 80% of its electricity from nuclear plants. They get all that power with no CO2 emissions, no mercury, no nitrous oxides. Megawatt by megawatt, nuclear power is darn clean.

Johnson noted that if a person had sat at the gates of the Three Mile Island facility through the duration of the accident, that person would have absorbed less radiation than a passenger on a single jet flight from New York to L.A. Johnson's numbers might be a little off: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission TMI fact sheet reports maximum dosage at the site boundary of under 100 millirem; a six-hour flight causes about 2 millirem of exposure to radiation from cosmic rays, alien warp drives, etc. (my back-of-the-envelope figures come from this site). Commerical flight crews absorb about 220 millirem annually; almost no other air travelers are going to log enough miles each year absorb the recommended annual limit of 100 millirem.

Still, we haven't shut down the airline industry to protect air crews from increased cancer from high-altitude radiation. And the two million folks living near TMI received an extra 1 millirem during the accident; compare that to 6 millirem for one chest x-ray, or 100-125 millirem annually from the natural background radiation in the area. Taking TMI as a cue to back away from nuclear power was a decision based on emotion and perception rather than rational cost-benefit analysis.

Johnson emphasized cost-benefit analysis as he urged us to embrace both economics and technology. On economics, Johnson said that environmentalists who say the land, the water, our furry friends are priceless are flat wrong. Nothing is priceless, said Johnson, not from a true economics point of view. Protecting the spotted owl, for instance, cost $9 million per bird in lost economic opportunity. Know anyone who's paid $9 million for a bird?

Here Johnson is a bit further off the mark. To assign $9 million dollars in opportunity cost from lost logging revenues to one bird misses the bigger picture. Let's look at what actually happened in the local economy in Stevenson, Washington, where a lumber mill shut down after a 1991 ruling ordering the U.S. Forest Service to protect the bird:

[said the owner of a local bakery] "We used to have the timber industry, but that's gone." her mouth smiled, but her eyes said, "City slickers." Uphill, in the national forest names for Gifford Pinchot -- America's first trained forester -- the timber industry has clear-cut all but a few valleys of the original forests. The Gifford Pinchot National Forest is what Northwesteners call a "working forest" -- it looks like a dog with mange. For decades, clearing the old growth employed Stevenson's people. They never got rich at it; in fact, their county stayed the poorest in the state. Still, logging was honest work. Then in 1991, a federal judge -- a city slicker -- shut them down.

...[Judge Bill] Dwyer was a scapegoat, of course. The job losses in Stevenson started a decade before his ruling and resulted from the mechanization of mill work and the liquidation fo the forest. If Dwyer had not stopped the logging all at once, it would soon have come to a halt on its own.

...In 1992, Stevenson's lumber mill shut down, putting 200 people out of work; a year later, the Skamania Lodge opened, employing 230. Attracted by the view and the windsurfing -- inexhaustible resources, if not as lucrative as old growth -- outsiders spent their money at the bakery, the convenience store, and the new espresso cart outside the True Value Hardware. Stevenson was no longer a place of extraction. It was a place of consumption [Alan Thein Durning, This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence, Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1996, pp. 57-58].

Durning goes on to say that protecting the environment is almost always a "smart economic strategy. Economic studies showed that environmental regulations have small positive effects on employment, because both employers and employees are people, all of whom want to live in a safe and healthy environment" [p. 63]. There's no "siren call" to extremism there, just a very rational cost-benefit analysis. Saving the spotted owl isn't a simple trade-off of $9 million per bird; it sends the economy in a different direction that may yield just as much economic benefit, if not more. Maybe nothing is priceless (although I can think of one in-house theologian who might see a deep philosophical flaw in that statement), but assigning a numerical economic value to everything requires some calculus more complicated than Commissioner Johnson could fit into a 16-minute speech.

Johnson's faith in technology also has its pluses and minuses. He touted the fluorescent light bulb (Governor Rounds must be requiring state officials to carry them around in their pockets), noting that if every South Dakotan switched to the newfangled bulbs, we'd save 560 tons of coal, or enough electricity to power the entire city if Pierre for 480 days. (Alternative energy-saving solution not proposed in Johnson's speech: switch Pierre off for 480 days.) Johnson said if we keep investing in research and development, we'll be able to come up with new technologies like the fluorescent light bulb that will help us use energy more efficiently.

My cheap shot: Technology didn't seem to do much good for the loggers who got mechanized out of their jobs before the spotted owl ruling.

The more important flaw in Commissioner Johnson's thesis: his faith in technology keeps him, at least in yesterday's speech, from calling for real conservation or real sacrifice. We don't have to pay high taxes, Johnson says. We don't need to ban cows, SUVs, or coal-fired power plants. It sounds like Johnson is saying we don't have to give up anything. We can keep driving and eating and building and in general consuming as much as we want. Someone somewhere will come up with a nice little fusion-widget, and everything will be fine.

Interestingly, Johnson indicts the promise of a number of technologies. Hydrogen, carbon sequestration, better batteries (I assume he meant for automobiles or maybe storage for wind and solar power), clean-coal technology -- none of them, says Johnson, are "ready for prime time." But if those technologies aren't ready to go (and I know some folks who would contend battery tech is totally ready for automotive uses), then what do we do? Do we keep increasing our energy consumption on the assumption that someone will invent fusion widgets before we run out?

That brings us back to the PUC, TransCanada, and Hyperion. Johnson himself says we should reject easy decisions, since easy decisions are usually wrong. I would suggest that saying yes to the TransCanada pipeline and the Hyperion refinery is the easy decision. Governor Rounds tells us the TransCanada and Hyperion operations would draw more pipeline business, and we should roll out the red carpet for the economic development opportunities Big Oil promises. With America demanding ever more oil, how can we say no? All that oil is good for America, good for South Dakota!

But the hard decision would be to take real responsibility for the problem, act as a leader, and say to Big Oil and to the country, "Hold on. All this dependence on oil is bad, no matter what country it comes from. We aren't going to facilitate the culture of consumption. We are going to make a stand for a new culture of conservation."

Oil prices going up? Use less. Use it more efficiently. Make the supply we have last longer. Leave some oil (and land, and clean water, and open spaces) for our kids. That's no siren call -- that's real common sense environmentalism, the same common sense we'd apply in any other situation.

Commissioner Johnson's speech wasn't bad. He wanted to chart a middle course for environmentalism that avoids the extremes. He appears to consider spotted owl protection as an example of the "siren's call" of extremism. He also cited Sheryl Crow's call for limiting toilet paper usage to one square per job. (Crow says she was joking.) Unfortunately, Johnson failed to cite any example of extremes on the other side, the extreme of doing nothing. He ignores the extreme of buying every glittery promise of economic development. He ignores the extreme irresponsibility of our ever-increasing consumption of finite resources.

Technology is great. Nuclear power (not to mention fusion widgets) is a potential solution worth discussion. But if we're hoping technology will give us everything we want, we may face more hard decisions in the future, when fusion widgets turn out to have their own set of problems. The more common sense route is to consider that we may have to give up some things. What will we have to sacrifice, and how much? I don't know. But if we don't take a hard look at our energy usage now, I'm sure our kids and grandkids will have to sacrifice even more.

---Update 20:01: And now for an opposing view and yummy comment fodder, check out Nansen G. Saleri, President and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston, Texas, "The World Has Plenty of Oil," Wall Street Journal, 2008.03.04, p. A17.