A petition urging state lawmakers to introduce additional clean energy legislation at the next state legislature found its way onto campus last week, and the Daily Lobo spoke with founder and head of the UNM Sustainability Studies program, Bruce Milne, about the future possibilities of clean energy for NM.
DL: So, that’s 100 percent dependency on renewable energy by 2050?
BM: Yes, that’s the idea. People are starting to see that (it’s) feasible because we’ve got lowering cost of solar power; we’ve really made tremendous advances recently.
DL: What are some of those advances?
BM: So the report that came out today from Environment New Mexico says that wind energy costs have decreased by 58 percent and solar power costs have decreased by 78 percent, you know, LED lighting has decreased by 90 percent.
So you start looking at those things and you realize that they’re competitive with fossil fuel. There’s a lot of things happening in fossil fuel right now. For instance, last week, five major banks announced that they’re not going to be investing in coal because the risks are too big; you know, the financial risks are too big for coal because they’re tied to creating climate change, it compromises air quality and (people’s health). So, the big banks are moving away from investing in coal; it means we’re at the threshold of switching to clean energy.
DL: Could you tell us about the projected benchmark figures for clean energy transfer (e.g. 20 percent by 2020) used to inform clean energy policy?
BM: The information that we’re going on is based on studies by a group out of Stanford... I think it’s called the solutions project. In New Mexico they’re saying 5.5 percent would come from domestic solar on people’s houses; there’s a whole map with information, we’d be getting about 50 percent of our power from wind in New Mexico and all that adds up.
So you get wind, hydro and solar power, geothermal power; there’s zero coal, zero gas, zero oil and with all of this clean energy you satisfy the amount of energy you need in that space in the year 2050.
DL: Has acting on the climate crisis become an absolute necessity for mankind?
BM: The models that people have are saying that if we continue to burn coal, if we continue to burn oil and natural gas, all the fossil fuels, then the planet’s average temperature is going to increase above two degrees centigrade, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but in fact, that’s a big difference. It’s enough to turn forests into deserts, and it’s enough to evaporate your rainfall and ruin your crops.
There’s all these dire predictions that the system would collapse from all of that climate change, and (that’s) to say nothing of sea level rise. You’ve got something like 80 percent of all people living within a hundred miles of the sea coast around the world, and when you start increasing the sea level one meter or more you start flooding already-existing buildings.
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There’s like five nuclear power plants on the east coast of the U.S. that would go underwater...all of these things would be tremendous costs because society would have to rebuild schools and stores and houses, and they’d have to move people from the coast inland, so do you want to live through that? Do you want to have to pay to make all of those changes, trillions of dollars in costs, or do you want to be smart about it and get rid of the cause? The cause is fossil fuel.
DL: If the climate crisis truly is the problem of a generation, why isn’t it regarded as such?
BM: Well, it is the problem of this current generation, I can tell you. If you look at weather data from Corrales, NM going back into the '70s, what you’ll find is that temperatures have been increasing steadily since 1985. It’s a significant trend in five months of the year - May, June, July, August, September, and that means that the climate has been warming up since 1985.
It’s just that you don’t perceive it so much because there’s “ups and downs"...cold days, hot days, and we think, "oh, it’s nothing," but, on average, it’s increasing a lot. That amount of temperature change is enough to change the kind of crops you can grow; like in a colder climate in 1985, you could grow pinto beans, and now there’s enough heat you can grow oats in Corrales. Now what do you care if you’re not a farmer?
DL: How fair is it to say that at this point you’re either a part of the problem or part of the solution?
BM: That’s a complicated thing because we’re all a part of the problem. We’re driving cars, we’re eating food that was shipped from far away, we’re using electricity from power plants that are burning coal, but we can decide to be part of the solution.
Personally, that’s what I did; I woke up one morning and I said, "You know, we could have a Sustainability Studies program at UNM, and the reason is because of these problems."
You need to work on it and if you don’t work on it then you’re in denial and it will continue to get worse or you can do something really meaningful with your life, and I think this is what we offer our students: a meaningful way of living their life to move in the direction of improving their environment against climate change.
