The Persistence of Myth and Energy Infrastructure
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) If you’ve been around the renewable fuels movement, lately the renewable fuels industry, for any length of time, you’ve seen quite a few advocates and champions debunking what they contend are untrue urban legends. Indirect Land Use Change, ethanol’s return on energy invested, claims of engine damage from use of renewables, the list is long and myth-busting becomes something like the old Whack-a-Mole game, as soon as you debunk it once over here, it pops up over there. Whack! Then there. Whack! Then over somewhere else. Whack!
The persistence of myth is something that many ethanol professionals know a thing or two about. I have wondered, looking at the broader bioeconomy, if one of the reasons that myths appear to persist so easily and the truth seems to die so readily is that myths seem to be shared via the internet more broadly than the truth, and perhaps it is because the myths are so attractively framed.
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What can a truth teller learn from this? Use the conventions of drama even if you are telling a non-fiction story.
1. Establish your Air of Authority.
2. Achieve Suspension of Disbelief in the Mythy Middle.
3. Hurtle through your second act, with the Roaring Rush of Flying Facts.
4. A TAA-DAH with some ruffles and flourishes.
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The Persistence of Infrastructure
There are lessons to learn about infrastructure, too, from today’s myth. Let’s review.
1. Cartels.
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2. Roads are free, railways cost. The crowning achievement of the vehicle transport industry has been to establish the idea that roads are a public utility, maintained at public expense. Taxpayers pay for road repair and upgrades, private investors pay to keep the railroads in shape — more or less. Railroads may receive extravagant right of ways from government, but they can’t condemn land, compensate owners, and build at the public expense where they like. Rivers, likewise, are maintained at the public expense.
What becomes a free public utility will become a national energy platform. Electric utilities work by rate cases where they recover the costs by an adjustment of the rate paid for power. No free market there. Meanwhile, the nation is proposing to build a network of EV charging stations on the public dime. The Digest is not carping about it, we’re for it, but if the nation had built a network of E85 refueling stations on the public dime, we might not have seen $5 gasoline this past summer.
3. Energy infrastructure switched from renewables, not just energy production.
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4. Energy infrastructure powered the Industrial revolution
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5. Right of way matters. Back in the days of coal, right of way was not obtained under eminent domain. A railroad had to pay “wayfares” which sometimes were cripplingly expensive. That’s the underlying reality even today for a physical commodity like a renewable fuel such as ethanol, transported by a unit train. That’s not the case for natural gas pipelines or long-distance power transmission lines, As the state of Florida explains, “Transmission lines and pipelines require a linear, continuous right-of-way, preventing the utility from simply purchasing necessary land rights from another, more willing property owner. Utilities have this option under Florida law because power lines and pipelines benefit the community at large. “
Nothing wrong with Florida doing this, of course. But you can’t use eminent domain to build an ethanol pipeline or a CO2 pipeline (yet).
6. Infrastructure persists and shapes a society. Railroad right of ways have been used to support telegraphy, telephone, fiber optic broadband, and more. Our society is built on a decision to grant big right of way to railroads, But it’s more than just railroads.
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But we’ve also learned that there’s a layer between the infrastructure and the renewables, and that’s public policy. If the United States declared free E85 fueling infrastructure on the public dime and told EV enthusiasts, “you’re on your own” in everything from EV charging points to electric line right of ways — well, we’d have a different outlook for the 2020s.
In thinking about how public sentiment is shaped as a precursor to policy formation, let’s draw a lesson from the purveyors of urban myths.We can learn from how they are formed and disseminated.
Remember that Air of Authority, the Suspension of Disbelief, the Roaring Rush of Flying Facts, and the TAA-DAH of your Conclusion. Why shouldn’t we use the techniques of myth for things that are so, instead of what ain’t so? READ MORE
Opponents of U.S. carbon pipeline draw lessons from prior pipeline fights (Reuters)
Excerpt from Reuters: Environmental non-profit Sierra Club and progressive group Bold Alliance are working alongside local organizations to aid property owners across five Midwest states, and are applying lessons learned in their past campaigns, they told Reuters.
Their involvement suggests a big battle lies ahead for the Summit Carbon Solutions’ Midwest Carbon Express pipeline and two other proposed projects intended to carry carbon dioxide thousands of miles from ethanol plants to underground storage sites, as those companies attempt to convince landowners to voluntarily give them easements for their routes.
While the new projects will not carry oil, the anti-pipeline groups argue that they pose environmental risks because captured carbon can be used to extend the life of oil fields, and long-term underground storage of carbon is unproven. READ MORE
