“I have seen the future and it works,” Lincoln Steffens famously said, albeit prematurely, in 1921 about Soviet Communism. (After ten years time, however, he realized it didn’t. In any event, it’s a great line.) Well, the Germans are showing us the future now: It’s renewable energy. For how, see the segment on “The German Experiment” from the Nova program, “Saved by the Sun” from a few years back. A good deal of the segment focuses on Hermann Scheer, the man who engineered Germany’s renewable energy revolution.
I’m such a policy nerd that I watch C-Span when I sit down for my lunch in the afternoon. Well, I often find something good and yesterday was one of those days. I found Hermann Scheer giving a speech at a recent American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) conference. Scheer’s introduction and his compelling speech (20 minutes from 43:35 on the C-Span video) cover a lot of good ground. Scheer talks about the 85% support of the German people for increasing the pace of renewables deployment. At the pace they’ve been going, they should be 100% renewable by the early 2030’s, according to Scheer. Scheer (and the Nova segment) highlight the importance of the feed-in tariff that guarantees a high price for renewably generated power.
I noted the other day here that I thought that Copenhagen was very important but not the whole game, because “…we’re moving on a number of fronts to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming while at the same time creating both the motives and the means for a sustainable world economy, from renewables to ‘cool’ farming to green building and more.” Well, it was wonderful to hear a lion like Scheer echo that same sentiment. He said that “No one should wait for the outcome of international negotiations. They have some sense, but the driving element doesn’t come from them.” The driving element is the recognition that renewables work and their wholesale adoption by industry and the public.
There was one more really interesting and wonderful new perspective for me from Scheer: We are in a transition from a fuels-based economy to a technology-based economy. Oil, coal, gas and uranium are often called “extractive” industries. We go into the earth and rip these fuels out – at great cost of pollution, as I’ve noted here often. Well, the technology-based energy economy means we access the abundant energy all around us by simply harnessing it. That may seem self-evident to you, but it was a little bit of a turn-on for me.
Take 20 minutes and watch Scheer’s speech at the ACORE conference. He’s a force of nature, like the sun, wind, waves, tides, the earth’s heat and the other elements that will power our future.
