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Cross posted from the Great Energy Challenge blog

What wasn’t to dislike about the spectacle of this summer’s recently concluded budget battle? There was the impending economic disaster, the Full Monty on just how dysfunctional Congress has gotten, and the outsized role given by those operating on the political fringe.

But for clean energy advocates, there was another reason to throw the remote at the TV: Pro-clean energy elected officials missed the opportunity to cut government handouts to fossil energy companies.

I’m no budget expert, but when we need to cut a lot of spending, shouldn’t we cut the really big stuff that people dislike anyway? Nothing qualifies for that category like the combined welfare check we cut each year to the oil, coal and gas industries: $52 billion a year according to the most comprehensive count to date. For those in elected office trying to scale the clean economy, shouldn’t kicking these highly profitable, mature industries off the dole have been a policy and political no-brainer?

The answer given by Democratic pollster Mike Bocian is an unqualified “yes.” (See video above.) Bocian, now with GBA Strategies, spoke at our Communicating Energy lecture series before the budget standoff hit its climax. His message was the same I heard echoed roughly a week later by top Republican pollster Neil Newhouse: Cutting government handouts to big oil companies is a political winner with practically no electoral downside.

By similarly large majorities of over 70 percent, Americans want to cut the massive government welfare check fossil energy, and they want the relatively inexpensive federal policy support for clean energy left alone. Plenty of Republicans around the country want this waste ended, and we ought to have the two political parties racing to see who can cut the most from the handouts to fossil energy.

But the plans offered by Congressional Republicans – the “Ryan Plan,” named for author Rep. Paul Ryan (WI); or the “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan from Speaker Boehner –would have done exactly the opposite. For President Obama and other clean energy advocates, this gap created an opportunity to put small government advocates in the position of defending large, unpopular forms of government waste.

However, whether you’re marketing products or policies, busy Americans want things bottom-lined. You just can’t win their attention without message discipline, simplicity, repetition, and the plain language that connects to where their attitudes are.

To win the budget fight in the court of public opinion, each side –President Obama and his staff on one side, and Speaker Boehner and his caucus on the other – should have been trying to boil this messy situation down to a bottom line, anchored by key phrase.

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According to FuelFix, it appears that natural gas “frackers” could face a new obstacle to their expansion, in addition to opposition from communities across America to the threat that fracking poses to water supplies and public health.

A number of lawmakers have called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate aspects of the natural gas E&P business, namely whether companies are reporting the financial viability of shales accurately.

Now, Fuel Fix reports that “the SEC has pulled the trigger,” with “subpoenas seek[ing] documents and information regarding the actual performance of shale gas wells against forecasted or projected performance, the propriety of decline curves for the wells, and the calculation and public disclosure of full-cycle margins.”

This will definitely be a story to keep a close eye on.

An article on Forbes’ “Sustainable Capitalism” blog is well worth reading. The subject a familiar one: the debt is “ballooning out of control and threatening to spur…economic chaos.” Except that it’s not the debt you’re reading about in the newspapers every day, but a different debt that might even be more important in many ways (bolding added for emphasis):

The carbon debt. Those pesky greenhouse gas emissions that we spew to power our businesses, drive our cars and heat and cool our homes are accumulating in the atmosphere like an unpaid bill with compounding interest.

Economists now say that the bill for all that unchecked carbon pollution is a lot bigger than previously thought—and that the longer we wait to pay it, the more it’s going to cost us.

A new peer-reviewed report released this week by the Economics and Equity for the Environment (E3) network found that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere results in as much as $893 in economic damages, far greater than the government’s current estimate of $21 per ton.

This figure, known as the “social cost of carbon,” is used by federal agencies when weighing the costs and benefits of carbon-reducing regulations, such as appliance efficiency standards or fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.   It’s an estimate of the monetary damages caused by higher global temperatures, such as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, agricultural losses and wildfires.

That’s all true, and it’s a situation the needs to be dealt with ASAP. Currently, however,  not only are we not paying our “carbon debt,” we actually are continuing to subsidize the carbon-based fuels that are adding to that debt. How heavily are we subsidizing those fuels, and for how long we will continue to do so, are the main questions.  For the moment, though, the dirty energy industry appears to be winning its battle to keep itself from getting booted “off the dole.”

This LA Times article is an interesting take on Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, who seems to have foresaken his roots as a common-sense southwest Michigan representative and become yet another representative from Koch Industries.

Upton’s about-face illustrates how the tea party and its wealthy supporters, among them the Koch brothers, have stymied environmental agendas for improving air quality and public health both in his district and nationwide

[...]

Though Upton remains unfailingly polite, he has gone on the attack, shepherding through the House a bill to strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, he has removed the climate change language from his website, and plans to hold hearings reexamining the light bulb standard he had championed three years ago.

“From what I’ve seen, the old Upton who five, six, eight years ago would have been more moderate on votes and parted company with his party, that old Upton is gone,” said Bill Ballenger, editor of the newsletter Inside Michigan Politics, who served in the Ford administration. “He’s got to prove to these people that he can walk the walk and not just talk the talk.”

What’s noteworthy is that Upton is a career moderate, one who hails from a state with a growing, vibrant cleantech sector.  Despite this, Upton of late has taken a sharply more ideological approach to his new job as Energy and Commerce Committee Chair. That would be fine, if Upton was actually being conservative by saving us money through deep, aggressive cuts in government welfare for dirty energy. Instead, he’s mostly tried to block commonsense air quality standards and threatened pro-clean energy policies that costs a fraction of the government handouts to dirty energy.  And not a word breathed about cutting the incredibly wasteful spending on dirty energy.

A gifted consensus builder and smart policy maker, Fred Upton has so far been an unapplied talent in this extremely influential position. That’s deeply unfortunate, at a time when the nation needs something so very different than what Congressman Upton’s been offering.

Here are a few numbers to ponder:

72

That’s the number of U.S. soldiers that died protecting oil convoys on their way to forward-operating bases in Iraq in 2009.

400

That’s the estimated cost per gallon for getting fuel to a war zone in Afghanistan, including transportation and security (underwritten by U.S. taxpayer dollars, of course).

And 6.5

That’s the number of dollars, in billions, that the U.S. would save annually if every military unit serving in Iraq implemented the Marine field-tested Ground Renewable Expeditionary Energy System (GREENS) system.

These are just a few of the key statistics driving each of our armed services to partner with the cleantech sector in providing soldiers the tools and technology they need to do their jobs in a safer and more secure fashion. They are also the thrust behind U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’s keynote address at last week’s Clean Economy Summit, which I attended.

Mabus spoke to a packed room of several hundred cleantech investors, entrepreneurs and policy experts on the need to continue procuring clean technologies that will help the military significantly reduce its energy costs and enhance its energy security. Here are a few excerpts from his speech worth noting:

…15 months ago, I issued five pretty ambitious energy goals for the Navy and Marine Corps. Most overarching of those is that no later than 2020, at least half of all the energy that we use, both afloat and ashore, will come from non-fossil fuel sources. Also by 2020, at least half our bases will be net-zero in terms of consumption. And in a lot of cases, we think we’ll be returning power to the grid rather than pulling power from it.

As President Obama has so eloquently said, the reasons for changing the way we use, the way we produce and the way we acquire energy are very clear.

Now, there are obvious environmental benefits that come from reducing fossil-fuel emissions and the Department of the Navy’s carbon footprint. There are also some very clear economic benefits; a clean-energy economy supports American workers and it creates thousands of new jobs.

Mabus went on to discuss the military’s overreliance on fossil fuels:

Simply put, we as a military rely too much on fossil fuels. That dependence creates strategic, operational and tactical vulnerabilities for our forces and makes them susceptible to price and supply shocks caused by either man-made or natural disasters in the volatile areas of the world where most fossil fuels are produced.

He then cites the example of Marines in combat, whose only source of energy at times is solar-powered equipment:

And now, I want to talk just for a minute about the United States Marine Corps. Nobody has ever accused the United States Marine Corps of being soft on anything. The Marine Corps is ahead of everybody in terms of looking for energy solutions for its operating forces. They’ve got two test beds – one at Quantico and one at Camp Pendleton at Twenty-nine Palms in California – experimental Forward Operating Bases looking at different ways of producing energy.

And last fall, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines deployed to Sangin where the heaviest fighting for the Marines is taking place right now in Afghanistan.

And when they deployed, they took a bunch of new energy devices and energy-saving solutions with them. I went to Sangin right before Christmas. And I saw and heard firsthand about how the equipment worked and what didn’t work, and how the Marines were using it.

But what is important to note is that the Marines were beginning to use things like solar panels, like portable, roll-up solar power that they could put in their packs. And they were beginning to use it in the midst of the heaviest fighting that the Marines were doing. They have deployed a whole bunch of different fixed, flexible and portable solar-power systems. And sometimes, it’s the only power that those Marines have.

Mabus also discussed the Navy’s efforts on energy efficiency – what is sometimes referred to as the lowest-hanging fruit or the cheapest “negawatts” (because they are the ones that are never generated), thereby saving money and cutting pollution:

On the efficiency front, I went and visited one of our bases and the commanding officer. It’s amazing when the secretary starts talking about one thing because when I first went out and got briefed, when I first stepped to this job, the breakthroughs were great but they were all over the map. Now, first thing they talk about is let me tell you what we’re doing on industry. And this commanding officer said, he went and looked at his electric bill and it had one line: 85 percent of all the electricity coming into that base, one line said, line loss. It came in but it didn’t go back out. He didn’t know where it was being used. He didn’t know what buildings were energy efficient or weren’t. He didn’t know who was using well, who wasn’t, what the peak times were, anything.

And so we used some of the stimulus money that the Navy was given and we put smart meters on just about all our bases. So that commander and his cohorts, they’re going to know where that electricity is being used. They’re going to know who is using power and who’s not. They’re going to know who’s being careful and who’s not and where we need to work on things like energy efficiency in buildings and where we don’t.

The bottom line I take away is that the Department of Defense (DoD) seems far ahead of a number of civilian sectors when it comes to adopting a cost-effective, sustainable infrastructure for ever-growing energy needs. Beyond the Marines, the U.S. Air Force is home to one of the largest photovoltaic (PV) installations in the country at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, Nevada and other projects at other bases are in the pipeline. And, the U.S. military appears to be leading on a number of technological advances and demonstration projects necessary to scale a clean economy that is less dependent on coal, oil and other fossil fuels. These are the same fuels that have been the recipient of massive federal subsidies for 90 years while making our soldiers and our bases more vulnerable to attacks.

The DoD’s continued use of clean, renewable energy sources bears watching over the coming months and years.