It was with remarkable foresight that Cervantes chose the windmill as his classic symbol of the misunderstood enemy. Don Quixote's windmills were always changing, always promising treasures, yet somehow were never fully real. Ironically, this is exactly how many people view their modern counterparts - wind turbines. Indeed, the promises of turbines and other forms of renewable energy are enticing: power sources that don't run out, have little environmental impact and don't create hostile political situations. The world of renewable energy is full of fantastical creatures, like solar-powered hot tubs and cars that run on corn. But somehow, these promises always seem just out of reach. No matter how hard we try, the technology is never quite developed, the supply is too small or it is just too expensive. No matter our intentions, we always seem to fall back to fossil fuels.
The time has come when renewable energy can no longer be a fantasy. It is the only way for Brown to address the very real impact that its energy policy has on the community and the world. From practical and moral points of view, renewable energy just makes sense.
It is true that the costs of oil and coal are currently lower than most renewable energies. However, fossil fuels are also much more volatile and unstable. Brown learned this the hard way last fall when it found itself facing a $3.6 million deficit in our energy budget. There is considerable disagreement among experts, but most predict the price of oil to increase at a rate somewhere between steady and skyrocketing. The price of renewable sources, however, is consistently declining due to increased demand and improved technology. If Brown wants to bring some much-needed stability to its budget, and to prepare for the long term, investing in renewable energy now is the wise choice.
There is far more at stake here, though, than our own economic benefit. In the big picture, the issue is really about the environmental, political and moral impacts of our energy policy. The environmental advantages of renewable energy are enormous. Humans contribute an excess 1.6 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, almost entirely from combustion of fossil fuels. This increases global temperatures, raises sea levels, intensifies natural disasters, causes imbalance of eco-systems and mass extinction, disrupts crop yield, breeds disease and much more. In addition, fossil fuel combustion releases chemicals into the atmosphere that create smog and air pollution, resulting in an unprecedented rise in respiratory disease and asthma. Finally, the very process of mining for oil rips apart the earth and has displaced millions of people from their land.
Beyond the obvious environmental effects, the irresponsibility of our energy policy is also proving to have disastrous effects on our foreign policy. Even President George W. Bush acknowledged that America is dangerously "addicted to oil," though he has done little to encourage breaking the addiction. Our utter inability to operate as a nation without large quantities of imported oil (even if we were to use all of our domestic reserves) forces us to chose between invading countries to take over their supplies or living at the mercy of the largest suppliers.
Furthermore, the nearly exclusive use of fossil fuels means that the effects of rising oil prices on our daily lives will be huge - and not just when we are filling up at the pump. Every sector of the economy depends in some way on a cheap supply of oil. The majority of our food and manufactured goods are shipped across continents or hemisphere with oil, all of our plastic products such as computers, iPods and water bottles are made of oil and so forth. If demand continues to increase while the supply reaches its inevitable peak (precisely when the peak occurs will depend on the rate of technological development, but as with any limited resource, it is unavoidable) we will see a spike in the price of oil that could cause an unprecedented national, even global, recession. The more we decrease our society's dependence on fossil fuels, the more we decrease the very real risk of an economic catastrophe.
Brown has an important part to play in this story. Dozens of other colleges around the country are already investing in renewable energy, and the commitment to just 25 percent renewable energy by 2010, called for by the Brown Environmental Action Network's emPOWER campaign, would put us at the forefront of this movement, setting an example for other schools, for Providence and for the nation. Now, with over 70 percent support in recent UCS poll, the student body is calling on Brown to do its part. It's time to stop fighting the windmills.
John Keller '08 is no Don Quixote.
