marksardella.com

Russell Simon for Santa Fe City Council

2010-02-16T05:53:47Z

Russell Simon carved out time from a busy campaign schedule to discuss his run for City Council with me, and I have to say I was impressed. He demonstrates a superb understanding of environmental and energy issues – certainly better than any candidate in the District 1 race, or in any City race for that matter. In his campaign he came out early for community-owned utilities, made it a central plank of his platform, and he has been an outspoken advocate on the issue. That’s exactly the kind of leadership we desperately need in City government right now. At the end of the meeting he told me his age, and I almost couldn’t believe it. The man is wise well beyond his years, and the opportunity to elect someone with his instincts and intellect is one that Santa Fe shouldn’t pass up.

Mark Sardella Lecturing at Renesan

2010-02-01T06:09:41Z

I'll be giving a 2-hour lecture entitled "Santa Fe Self Reliant in Energy? Local Ownership? Yes!" this Thursday at 2 p.m. at the Saint John's United Methodist Church (the "pumpkin church") in Santa Fe. The event is hosted by Renesan, and admission is $10 ($7 for Renesan members). The first hour will be a slide presentation covering the basic principles of Community-Based Energy and giving an update on where the energy industry and our community are headed, and then we'll take a short break and come back for a lively, interactive discussion. Hope to see you there!

For details visit Renesan's website or call 505-982-9274.

Mark Sardella at Garcia Street Books

2010-01-28T05:47:58Z

My work in energy is profiled in a new book entitled "Voices of the American West" by Corinne Platt and Meredith Ogilby, and I'll be at Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe this Saturday to sign copies. I am very proud to be included in this book alongside energy pioneers such as Amory Lovins and Randy Udall. The book is currently #4 on the Denver Local Bestsellers List!

Courtney White, Executive Director of the Quivira Coalition, is also profiled in the book and plans to be there on Saturday as well.

Corinne and Meredith are coming down from Colorado for the event, so come on out on Saturday at 2:00 for a discussion and refreshments and to get a signed copy of the book! See you there!

For details, call 505.986.0151

Because mandatory auto insurance is working so well?

2009-12-24T20:37:29Z

I have always fought against energy industry attempts at forced-purchase laws, because I think one of the most important aspects of fair markets is for the consumer to have the right to say "no thanks". It's hard to jack consumers too hard when they have the ability to walk away and not purchase at all.

So naturally I am anxious about the passage of mandatory health insurance laws, and this week I received a good reminder about how well mandatory auto-insurance is working out. Check this out:

Despite a perfect payment history and a 791 credit score, Chase Bank decided last month to lower the credit limit on one of my charge cards to a level just slightly above the balance I have on the card. Holding a balance close to your limit is seen as risky by the industry, so rating agencies responded by lowering my credit score. My automobile policy holder, Travelers, noticed this and decided to jack the premium on my auto policy by 17 percent, despite our seven-year history together with no claims or traffic violations. They sent me a very nice letter explaining that this is accepted industry practice but they can't tell me how or why they did it, because the methodology by which they determine auto risk based on consumer behavior is a secret.

It's bad enough that borrowers who don't pay and drivers who have accidents must suffer abuses from shifty creditors and insurers, but now even those with perfect records are apparently fair game for punishment too.

The market for products that are mandated by law or non-discretionary simply cannot be entrusted to profit-driven providers. Mandatory, for-profit health insurance will be a disaster for consumers -- largely for reasons that aren't discussed in debates or reported on the nightly news.

For a better understanding on how we can help one another learn to end the cycles of abuse that pervade our society, check out Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire.

Van Jones Promotes Smart Grid, but is it Really Smart?

2009-04-15T05:51:47Z

If ever you need to push a progressive agenda, you’d do well to have Van Jones on your side. The first time I saw him, at a conference in Oakland speaking about his work with incarcerated youth, he transfixed an audience of six-hundred for forty-five minutes of laughter and tears and applause. The Yale-educated civil rights attorney is a heavyweight orator: Who else gets a round of applause after their congressional testimony?

So naturally I was excited when Jones joined President Obama’s green-team, but he’s going to have his hands full with the big utilities and their so-called “Smart Grid” program. You see, anytime I’m told something is smart, I just have to check, and in this case, my worst fears were realized. So when Jones told Congress that building the “Smart Grid” would create benefits on the level that building our interstate highway-system did, I cringed. When he said that consumers would save money due to improved energy efficiency, I sighed. Here’s the problem:

(read the full article)

Smart Grids: How Smart?

2009-04-08T08:26:45Z

President Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, appropriates nearly $24 billion to modernize our country’s electric power grid, including an $11 billion outlay to make it “smart”. Those appropriations are stirring the hopes of renewable energy advocates, who foresee expanded opportunities for solar and wind technologies as well as a big, new role for plug-in electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.

And there are reasons to be hopeful. Decentralizing our electric system by adding a lot of small generators would help achieve the Smart Grid project’s primary objectives of improving the reliability, security and efficiency of our electric power system. Renewables also create a lot of jobs per unit of energy, and with unemployment above 8 percent for the first time in 26 years, that could provide welcome relief. And job creation is a bipartisan issue – you'd be hard pressed to find a politician in Washington willing to argue against entrepreneurship.

But what exactly is the vision for a smart grid? The characteristics were officially spelled out in Title 13 of former President Bush's Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which envisions using digital communications and control technology to enable the variety of devices connected to the grid to talk with one another. The idea is that by communicating, loads and sources on the grid could alter their behavior in beneficial ways. For example, if you plug in your car when you get home from work but don’t need it fully charged until morning, the start of the charging cycle might automatically be delayed until other loads turn off, perhaps after you go to bed. Smart appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators could limit the amount of cooling they do when the grid is approaching overload, and smart cars might offer up some of the energy in their batteries to help power those loads.

But will the project dubbed “Smart Grid” be smart for consumers, or just for utilities? The name certainly implies a “no-brainer”, suggesting a win-win so obvious that we needn’t concern ourselves with the details. That’s usually a good clue that a closer look is warranted. Remember the Patriot Act?

The first hint of a problem, beyond all the dubious language about data mining and cyber-threats, is a curious passage requiring states to consider allowing utilities to bill consumers for the value of any equipment rendered obsolete by the program. Compensate utilities for their obsolete technology? Imagine typewriter makers agreeing to build computers but insisting that we have to keep paying for typewriters too. And what if the new grid is so smart that it renders the old one useless? Must we keep making payments on the dumb grid even as we begin paying for the smart one?

Another disturbing provision – this one in the stimulus bill – requires states seeking stimulus funding to provide assurances that they will work to implement rules ensuring that utilities won’t make less money as energy use declines. These rules, termed “revenue decoupling” rules because they decouple utility revenues from the volume of energy sold, are being touted as a way to encourage utilities to help their customers conserve. The obvious problem (although not so obvious that anyone is talking about it) is that under revenue decoupling, a single customer can still save money by cutting electricity use, but an entire community cannot. Once the revenue of a utility is guaranteed regardless of usage, it doesn’t matter how much energy the community conserves – all together they are still obligated to pay the same amount to the utility. Revenue decoupling rules are, in reality, little more than thinly veiled attempts to guarantee the revenues of an industry that is hurtling headlong towards obsolescence.

With rules that force consumers to continue paying for obsolete assets and for energy they no longer consume, we ensure that the lions share of benefits from modernizing our power grid will go to utilities, rather than consumers. But there is another way to go about it, and other countries are already well down the path.

Denmark had wind but didn’t have the economic power to develop it, so instead they created a policy that enabled inventors and entrepreneurs to access renewable energy markets even before their inventions were market-ready. Within a few years, companies in Denmark were designing and building some of the most advanced turbines in the wind industry, and the tiny country of just over 5 million citizens today controls 38 percent of the world market for wind turbines.

What was Denmark’s secret? They simply opened up their power grid to every renewable electricity producer seeking a market, guaranteeing their right to interconnect and promising to buy every renewable kilowatt-hour produced at a premium price called a “feed-in tariff”. The flood of renewables that followed eventually necessitated upgrades to their grid, but those upgrades were driven by a mandate to accommodate new players, rather than to protect incumbent ones. Forty-six countries now have a feed-in tariff law, validating its reputation as the world’s most successful tool for advancing renewable energy.

The Smart Grid project might succeed in modernizing the power grid, but unless we change its focus it will fail to provide consumers with cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable power. You can’t simply throw billions of dollars at the builders of the dumb grid and expect them to build a smart one. We tried that with investment banking, pouring trillions into the very companies that created our financial crisis rather than taking a hard look at fresh policy approaches.

With the power grid, there’s no room for mistakes. Modernizing our electric power infrastructure using policies that create entrepreneurial opportunities for small businesses is where the smart money will go.

FDA Fails to Warn Consumers about Levaquin

2009-01-13T00:26:46Z

I have a sinus infection that has already survived two courses of antibiotics -- first Azithromycin, and then Augmentin. So my doctor prescribed 21 days of Levaquin and put me on Prednisone as well. It turns out that's a dangerous combination, but my doctor never said a thing about it. It turns out he's not required to, and except to a limited degree, neither is the pharmacist.

When tendon problems started to surface for people taking fluoroquinolone antibiotics -- including Levaquin -- Public Citizen compelled the FDA to require the drug maker to add a "black box" warning on the package. For all the hoopla this bold move generated in the press, you'd think the FDA had solved the problem. Think again.

I wrote to the FDA and asked how I was able to get my hands on a bottle of Levaquin that doesn't have a warning encircled by their highly touted “black box”. In fact, the pill bottle has no warning on it at all. The response, from a very nice fellow named BD, informed me that the FDA's ruling required the black-box warning be given to the pharmacist, but not to the consumer. My warning was buried withing the information sheet provided by the pharmacist -- a page of 6-point type without any highlight on the risk of tendon damage. Many lesser threats, such as dizziness and sunburn, are clearly highlighted. But the one about tendon rupture is buried under mountains of medical mumbo jumbo.

Why did the FDA, tasked with protecting consumers, mandate a highlighted warning about Levaquin's risks but fail to mandate that it be given to consumers? That failure gives merit to the pending class action lawsuit, which specifically alleges that if victims had been properly warned, they could have stopped taking the drug in time to avoid injury.

With dangerous drugs, the FDA needs to ensure that consumers are adequately warned, by their doctors as well as their pharmacists.

Local Energy Markets

2008-09-30T03:46:20Z

This commentary aired October 1, 2008 on KUNM.

I'll post the audio as soon as it's available.

One of the greatest myths of our time is that renewable energy isn’t quite ready to compete with so-called “conventional” sources of energy. More research is needed, we are told, because renewables are still too expensive. So onward we march, powering our homes with coal and filling our gas tanks with imported go-juice, all the while shipping bagfuls of cash out of our communities to pay for it.

There is a lot of evidence that this myth about renewable energy is false. Many countries smaller than ours are installing renewables faster than we are, creating jobs and increasing their self-reliance while lessening their environmental footprint. So, why does the myth still play so well in the United States?

One reason is that the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear companies here are actively engaged in energy policymaking, and they repeatedly tell the myth to lawmakers at all levels of government. Using carefully crafted messages backed by well-funded research, they tell the same story again and again: We wish we could...we look forward to the day when we can...but right now, we just can’t.

The key to telling a lie is delivering it alongside the truth. And it is, in fact, true that we haven’t figured out how to turn bloated, investor-owned monopolies and their overpaid executives into agents of community sustainability. If that were the plan, renewable energy would never be ready.

There is, on the other hand, a way to roll out renewables right now that would stabilize energy prices, create good jobs, retain energy-dollars in the local community, and provide secure and sustainable energy for the long term. It isn’t being proposed by either of the major party candidates for president, who instead keep insisting that renewables aren’t enough, and that we need to develop nuclear power as well as some strange substance they are calling “clean coal”.

No, it turns out that renewables can serve all of our needs, and the transition can happen quickly if we would just provide one thing that’s missing: a market. If we set up a market whereby independent energy suppliers could trade with independent energy consumers, we’d be all done.

Now, there have already been many attempts to create local markets for energy, but nearly all of them have been shut down by incumbent energy suppliers. I know this one guy who was trying to sell high-efficiency cogeneration systems, until one day he discovered that the utility was offering cut-rate electricity to his prospective customers in exchange for an agreement that they don’t buy one of his systems. He sued the utility, but as soon as the utility realized they were going to lose the case, they settled out of court. Did the utility retreat in shame, and amend their practices? Hardly! Instead, they drafted a law making what they were doing legal, and persuaded their state legislature to enact the law. Now, whenever a customer even thinks about putting in a clean, efficient, on-site system to generate their own power, utilities can offer something called a “load-retention rate” to entice them not to do it. That’s just one of their tricks – the list is long.

If lawmakers and regulators are unwilling to keep incumbent energy suppliers from obstructing the market for local, independent renewable energy, we’ll need to create this new market ourselves. All we need to do is organize all the energy consumers who already want to buy clean, locally generated power and heat, and form alliances with the local, independent energy producers. The only hard part will be fighting against an enormous, entrenched opposition of dirty energy suppliers, but in reality, we have all the power we need to pull this off.

Because next year, as we set out to spend another two-trillion dollars meeting our energy needs, we can simply decide to give it to independent energy companies right here in our community.

Bailout, Sellout...What's the Diff?

2008-09-29T17:36:52Z

Today feels like the day the last vestiges of democracy will die, as our government appears poised to demonstrate fully that they support Wall Street over and above their constituents. I am fed up. Here's what my Senator and Congressman received from me today...hope your letters were stern as well.

Dear Congressman Udall and Senator Bingaman:

Are you voting against this bailout bill today? I stayed up last night reading the bill, or the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” as congress is calling it, and I’m not happy about it.

First, the bill doesn’t place any limits on, or add any regulatory oversight over, the type of speculation that caused the crisis. That’s quite a departure from the days of FDR, who enacted the Truth in Securities Act and the Glass-Steagall Act to reign in speculation following the banking crisis of his day. Your first responsibility is to end the practices that have put Americans in harm’s way, but that’s not what’s going on in this bill. In fact, this bill would do more to perpetuate the bad behavior.

Second, the bill discusses, but doesn’t require, direct aid to the homeowners that were hurt by the speculative practices. We are not stupid – talking about helping someone is very different from actually doing it.

Finally, while the rhetoric in front of the cameras about limiting executive compensation has been firm, the language in the bill is not. The bill calls for the financial institutions to meet “appropriate standards” for compensation, but these are institutions that have already demonstrated that they don’t know what appropriate standards would be. The bill adds a few paragraphs on what the standards should include, but the language is so loose it appears to be idle posturing. Again, we are not stupid. Add some specifics, for heaven’s sake! Here’s an example: “No one at any financial institution shall be compensated at more than five times the rate of the firm’s lowest paid worker, and all employees shall receive the same terms for severance at the conclusion of their employment.” Fair enough?

My overall impression is that Wall Street is running the show here. You must stand with your constituents and oppose this bill. I’ve been talking with a lot of them, and I haven’t found any that want this bailout. Saying that you have to vote for it won’t cut it this time. You represent us, and we need you now. Please don’t sell us out by going along with this charade.

Sincerely, Mark Sardella

Drilling Offshore in the Age of Hurricanes

2008-09-05T04:48:49Z

This commentary aired September 2, 2008 on KUNM.

Listen to Commentary

There’s nothing quite like a hurricane bearing down on the world’s largest collection of oil and gas rigs to remind you just how bad an idea it is to drill offshore. Now, I know Hurricane Gustav was no Katrina or Rita, the pair that delivered the one-two punch to the Gulf in 2005, opening up 600 separate oil spills and dumping 750,000 gallons of crude oil into a fragile, coastal waterway. What’s that? You didn’t hear Katrina and Rita left behind one of the worst environmental disasters of all time? Well, a lot of news outlets reported that not a drop of oil was spilled, and Presidential candidate John McCain recently repeated this myth when he cited those two hurricanes as evidence that it’s now “safe” to drill offshore.

Even Barack Obama, in his acceptance speech last week, said that we need to do more drilling offshore. At least he called it a “stop-gap measure”, and boy, is it ever. We are already drilling fifty thousand new oil and gas wells a year in the United States, and the amount of oil and gas we produce STILL declines every year. We can’t possibly put holes in the ground fast enough to increase our domestic production of oil and gas. Every new well we drill simply offsets declining production from the other wells. Ten years ago we were offsetting those declines with about 15,000 new wells a year. Now it’s 50,000, and ten years from now, if you follow the trend, we’ll need 150,000 new wells a year. It’s like running on a treadmill...you can’t possibly win.

Perhaps the greatest reason of all for not expanding our drilling efforts in the United States is that scientists have discovered a clear link between the rate at which we un-earth carbon-based fuels and the rate at which our climate is destabilizing. Here again, there’s been a lot of confusion about this. From all the reports, you’d think climate change was caused by not having enough air in your tires, or using the wrong kind of light bulbs. But it’s not. Climate change doesn’t care how efficiently we use energy, or what we decide to do with it. The only thing that matters is how fast you dig up the buried carbon resources and release them into the atmosphere.

With this in mind, how can we say we are serious about addressing our climate problem while we push for more drilling? Instead of lamenting the fact that our domestic oil and gas reserves are depleting, shouldn’t we celebrate it? Are we finally getting a look at the end of oil, when we stop unearthing the carbon that is destabilizing our planet? I’m ecstatic!

Now, I’m fully aware of all the dire predictions about how our country would come apart if we stop buying energy from the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear companies. But seriously, if we took the two-trillion dollars we will give them this year and instead built a public infrastructure to harness and distribute renewable energy, would everyone have enough?

Isn’t it possible that the assertion that nothing else is feasible, that we have to keep handing two-trillion dollars a year to the companies that make dirty energy based on non-renewable, planet-killing fuels, is false?

To fix our climate, we need to start leaving carbon-based fuels in the ground. I say we set them aside, declaring them “protected wilderness areas”. The legislation for doing that is already in place – we do it all the time. You just say, “This area must be left untouched so that our children can have a decent future,” and your all done.

Now, if you still feel like you need more reasons to not drill offshore, check out the National Hurricane Center website. There are three reasons right on the home page, and their names are Hanna, Ike, and Josephine, and they’re headed for our shores.