Seven Myths About Alternative Energy

by Michael Grunwald, September 25, 2009

The current debate about greenhouse emissions and global climate change is the ultimate déjà vu. It simply repeats most of what I learned almost 40 years ago in my high school environmental studies class. The need to recycle; create alternative fuel sources; purchase fuel efficient cars, water heaters, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; insulate homes, lower thermostats, don sweaters, and use solar technology—all of these topics and more were just as hot back then as they are today. The environmental awareness campaign of the early seventies inspired my purchase in 1975 of a Datsun B-210 Honeybee that got 41 miles per gallon on the highway.

Somewhere in between then and now a societal flip-off occurred that besides ridiculing Jimmy Carter, effaced the environmental movement and manifested such horrors as fuel-devouring SUV emission monsters and a host of products that exist in a constant state of on—whether they are being used or not. Agricultural lobbyists sold us on greenhouse gas-reducing farm-grown biofuels and shortly thereafter the production of these gasoline alternatives began driving global food prices up causing malnutrition, deforestation, and increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

In “Seven Myths About Alternative Energy,” Time magazine’s senior national correspondent, Michael Grunwald, unflinchingly addresses biofuels and other myths that have driven the environmental community in recent years. In a phone interview, Grunwald offered up a simple solution. “Reduce consumption. Americans in particular and people in general are extremely wasteful. In some ways that’s the good news. Because we’re so spectacularly wasteful that by just reducing just a little bit of that waste, we can reduce consumption a lot in gigantic ways that don’t require people to do anything, change their lifestyles, or suffer through the indignity of having to put on a sweater.”

“Mandates, incentives, and changing public and utility policies,” are the avenues to change, says Grunwald. For example, phasing out energy-wasting incandescent light bulbs and mandating their replacement by more efficient “twisty” light bulbs would not only reduce consumption, but also save people money. Instead of shutting down factories one day a week, motors that are twice as efficient and use half the energy to obtain the same product should be utilized.