Our failures in energy policy will fall to our children to resolve

A major wind power project my company, Independence Wind, is proposing in Western Maine was rejected by the town of Byron on March 10. In the course of the debate, one of the members of the audience – a thoughtful mom named Amber – asked me if the project would do anything for her children. I tried to answer, but didn’t respond as clearly as I would have liked. Here’s what I should have said:

Dear Amber,

In many ways, this project is all about the children.

Our country is facing a series of unprecedented challenges, all of which have a common thread: Our generation is not meeting its responsibilities to the next. Whether it’s budget deficits in Washington, our failure to fund the entitlement programs we are using or will soon use, our failure to maintain basic infrastructure like roads, bridges and water and sewer systems – all are debts we are running up which will someday have to be paid, almost entirely by our kids.

And nowhere are we failing them more than in the crucial area of energy. Our lives and livelihoods are built on energy – the food we eat, the products we use, the cars we drive, the lights we flip on at night, the machines we use at work – everything depends upon plentiful and relatively cheap energy. And the days of plentiful and cheap are at an end.

Two important facts about the energy situation in Maine: About 80 percent of our homes are heated with oil and more than half of our electricity comes from natural gas. This means that we are dangerously dependent upon someone else – usually someone in a different country – for this crucial building block of our economy and lifestyle. And it also means that although the whole country is going to suffer as the energy catastrophe hits, no state will suffer more than Maine, and this includes our kids.

Gas and home heating oil prices have more than tripled in the last six years; if (when) that happens again, a tank of gas will be $200 and it will cost $2,000 to fill up the oil tank in the basement. This will be a disaster for Maine – and our kids.

The reality is that two huge countries – China and India – are now buying oil in greater and greater quantities and that is only going to accelerate. And as supplies dwindle and demand explodes, all hell – quite literally – will break loose. The economic effects will be awful, but the even worse likelihood is that our oil dependency will drive us into conflicts around the world. And it won’t be us who are sent to fight wars for oil – it’ll be our kids.

The other piece of this of course is what we are doing to our environment when we burn all that oil. Has the huge increase in greenhouse gasses in the last hundred years caused the undeniable climate change we are experiencing?

I’ll let the scientists and politicians debate that, but no one can argue that what we are doing is helping, and the weight of the evidence seems to be that it’s hurting, a lot. And guess who’s going to have to live with those consequences?

Will our wind project save the world? Of course not, but it’s a start – which will produce as much power in a year as is used by all the homes in Oxford County – and we’ve got to start somewhere. And once the blades are turning in the inexhaustible wind sweeping across western Maine, we’re that much more independent and that much more safe.

I hope I’m wrong about what’s coming, but all the signs are telling me that we are in the early stages of one of the worst shocks ever to hit this country.

And so when our kids turn to us in a dozen years or so and ask, “What did you do to help prevent this energy disaster?” we’ll all need a better answer than “Well, I knew we had to do something somewhere, but in the end decided that ‘we’ didn’t include me and that ‘somewhere’ really meant somewhere else.”

Angus King is a principle in Independence Wind and former governor of Maine. He lives in Brunswick.

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