It seems to me that we suffer from a failure of imagination. We dream of a low-carbon world, but can’t quite fathom how to get around the massive lobbying clout (and inertia) of the coal lobby. We dream of a world with no more utility obstacles to energy efficiency, but can’t imagine how to undo laws in fifty states (plus the feds) that would be required to undo utility disincentives. And we dream of a renewable future, but find it implausible that the tiny amount of solar currently on the grid can be scaled up to a level that matters in any reasonable time frame.

And so we scale back our ambitions.

Those of us who believe (as I do) that there are massive opportunities to reduce US energy costs while simultaneously lowering our greenhouse gas footprint spend a lot of time getting into arguments with bad economists. These folks remember just enough of freshman theory (supply, demand, price, blah blah blah) to assert confidently that if profitable opportunities existed of any consequence, they already would have been snatched up by our efficient markets. Therefore, any change from our perfectly-balanced status quo must be economically detrimental. If you believe this, there may be a job for you at the Cato Institute.

There is, however, another parallel set of objections that is no less pernicious, although it is a bit less public. These objections come from bad thermodynamicists.

RPS, EERS and Energy Politics

There is a belief that with the democratic shift in Congress, we finally have the votes to get a national RPS. I don’t buy it. As I pointed out here, the basic electoral math of the Senate makes a “pure” wind and solar only RPS a wealth transfer from the eastern to the western US, and no political party is inclined to vote against their state’s economic interests.

Many in the environmental community still don’t get this, but in my experience, the Congress does.

The recently approved stimulus package – aka, America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – offers several initiatives to advance combined-heat-and-power and waste-energy-recovery projects. Capturing and recycling energy certainly makes economic and environmental sense, but these new government incentives help reduce the initial capital costs, making now a great time to invest in clean energy. Here are just a few highlights of what ARRA will do:

Joe Romm has done a pretty thorough trashing of Matt Wald’s recent New York Times piece. Herein, I pile on. This is a shoddy enough piece of journalism to deserve it. Like Joe, I’ve talked to Matt Wald before, and generally I find him to be a good writer on energy. He’s capable of much better reporting than this.

That said, my larger beef is not with Wald nor the NYT per se, but rather with the analytical errors that are innate to his analysis, which are far too common in most journalism of this “what is the cost of competing power technology” type of piece.