Paying the Hidden Costs of Oil
The press had a field day in January when the Evergreen Solar Corporation announced that it was leaving for China, laying off 800 Massachusetts workers in the process. decampment to China. The company is reported to have received subsidies from the state of from $45 to $113 million in land, forgiven taxes, and other benefits. The amount varies with the source. Why, it was asked, should the government subsidize such an expensive energy source when cheap gas is ready at hand, oil still flows and coal still lies under our hills?
The answer is that oil, gas and coal are not really cheap. Reliance on fossil fuels, especially oil, has absorbed our national treasure. It continues to take the lives of our young and diminishes our health and the health of the planet.
If we were not compelled to protect the sources of our oil in the Middle East, we would not have spent more than a trillion on our wars there. We would not be building, equipping and supporting nearly as many far-flung bases and other military forms of our presence as we are now. We would not be supporting, by the free flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, middle eastern despots, dictators and other doubtful allies if we did not need their oil. We would not be sending so many of our young men and woman into hazardous service where they can be killed and maimed – each one an uncountable loss.
Oil, gas and coal are not cheap if you count the collateral costs of their extraction. The oil that gushed into the Caribbean was not cheap, and will cost us for years to come, BP’s reluctant contribution notwithstanding. Lost habitat, polluted wells and waterways, and unclean air are paid for through medical bills and absentee worker hours, in cleanup costs, in extra municipal water treatment plants.
As long as we are dependent on oil, we will encourage the production of biofuels for which land is taken out of food production and forests are cleared and burned. These actions incur the collateral costs of higher food prices, habitat loss and additional greenhouse gas production. The pollution costs of fossil fuels used to take those crops from the land and process them into ethanol adds to their intrinsic cost, unaccounted for.
The real meaning of the closure of Evergreen Solar is that all that we have done to shift America toward solar and wind empowerment and to encourage energy conservation has not been in vain. Rather, it has not been enough. Whatever way we go, we pay. As long as we remain more dependent on oil, gas and coal than on the sun and wind, we will pay in collateral damage. If we choose the alternative route, we will eventually get a nation-building return — on money invested, in health restored.