Della's Question of the Week #5: Can a ConCon address the energy crisis Hawaii is facing?

[Della Au Belatti]

Now, I know that this post will generate some buzz among you free market folks out there, but I'm going to put this question out anyway. And I hope all you folks out there who worry about climate change, peak oil, and global warming will jump into the fray!

This weekend, my husband and I watched 11th Hour, an amazing documentary/call to action when you consider the energy and natural resource challenges we are witnessing all over the world.

While you may disagree that global warming even exists and will have problems with this documentary from start to finish (BTW, I happen to believe the documentary is right about an awful lot), Tom Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, made a compelling case for why Constitutions need to be reviewed and amended from time to time.

“And so, the reason why we have these reams of documents in the libraries about solutions, about solar, about how to produce food in a sustainable way, about transportation, about changing production methods and putting in place a sustainable economy that respects the planet, is that we lack the authority to drive those things into law. Because in reality we have a constitution that empowers the corporate few to make decisions that trump the majority. And it has been our failure to drive real law into place because we don’t have the authority.”

What I found extremely insightful was Linzey's reliance on the Jeffersonian tradition and school of thought: “We need to understand that even folks like Jefferson said we need to rewrite the Constitution every generation to meet our needs. Do we think that the Founding Fathers understood anything about global warming or deforestation or the massive amounts of toxic chemicals that are pumped into our atmosphere and into our air and land and water and soil everyday? What we need to do is find a harmony between people and nature and the only the way to do that is to recognize that nature has rights too.”

So, with that as a little bit of context, here's my 5th Question of the Week:

Opinion Polls & Market Research

I sincerely hope that this post stirs up some conversation. For some, I know that the call to action will be to eliminate Section 8, Article XI in our State Constitution that relates to nuclear energy. Personally, I don't believe that enabling the proliferation of nuclear power plants in our island community, without the checks and balance we currently have, is a direction to move in.

I would much rather we look at the structure of our state and local governments to see if we can improve the functionality of these governments to address particularly pressing energy and environmental problems. For example, can we learn from other state governments like California that has an Energy Commission or Oregon that has a Department of Energy? Or maybe the conversation can be about strengthening home rule and empowering the counties more, as Linzey and the CELDF suggests, so that each island community can have more control over realizing energy self-sufficiency for themselves?

I don't know the definitive answers to any of these questions. But, I believe the ConCon can be one way we collectivley begin to tackle the most challenging problems of our time that simply don't get addressed or, get addressed too slowly, through the normal course of legislation.

Comments anyone?

[Kaunaloa]

"recognize that nature has rights too"

um, sorry della, but until the tree across the street starts paying taxes, i'm not about to consider letting it vote come autumn!

re: the question directly, if the "enlightened" french can rely on nuclear for 3/4 of their power supply, why can we not even consider it?! More broadly, and again this is an area where i suspect i stand nearly alone, the market should be the one to drive solutions re: energy supply and demand; placing constitutional provisions either way [mandates and/or proscriptions] is not the way to go w.r.t. this area ...
/j, of course, mo ...

[Peter Kay]

We should do our best to get a lot of folks into this discussion. Energy prices are big concern for most of us and I'd like to believe that we can combine some free market economics and some prudent incentivizing to get things moving in the right direction.

I'd also wonder what the public thinks about nuclear power plants overall. Do we still see the bogeyman of Chernobyl or do see France's lead in this area?

Right now Hawaii gets its power from Oil and Coal. Solar/Wind/Wave are wonderful and promising and personally I'd love to see us get all of our energy from those sources, but the reality is that today that's not going to happen and it may be many years before that's even feasible.

So until then, we have Oil and Coal to drive power.

If one believes that carbon emissions drive global warming (despite the fact that the planet has been cooling since 1998) then the nuclear power plant option, which has ZERO carbon emissions and would probably provide enough energy to power everything we need PLUS work on the next generation plug-in electric vehicles, is certainly something that begs further investigation.

[Della Au Belatti]

Kaunaloa – I share your same concerns about Lenzy’s comment about “recogniz[ing] that nature has rights too.” I’d like to learn more about whether he makes this statement as a general philosophical statement or if he means that these rights should be memorialized into our constitutions and, if yes, then exactly how he would do this….so more for us to uncover with further study.

There are three other directions, however, that I think we could explore by using Lenzy’s comments as a springboard that would really get to addressing the energy crisis through constitutional changes. First, okay so you don’t believe “nature has rights,” but what about future generations? Section 1, Article XI of the State Constitution states “All public natural resources are held in trust by the State for the benefit of the people.” Can this be amended to add the “benefit of the people and future generations.”

What about the Preamble of the State Constitution that says “We reserve the right to control our destiny, to nurture the integrity of our people and culture, and to preserve the quality of life that we desire”? Can we amend this to say “We reserve the right to control our destiny, to nurture the integrity of our people, our future generations, and culture, and to preserve the quality of life that we desire for our people and for future generations”?

These simple amendments get to the very crux of all the discussions about sustainability – ie. how do we ensure that there are enough quality resources that will sustain all our people in the future – and reflect bedrock principles or values that should be embedded in constitutions. IMHO, the policies that could flow from these fundamental value statements in our Constitution could change our world!

Second, the other point that Lenzy, and a number of experts in “11th Hour,” make is the inordinate amount of influence corporations and money have on the political process. Another HawaiiConCon member has just started a thread on “limiting campaign contributions” – this is certainly another fruitful area for ConCon discussions. I would add that maybe the way in which corporations have secured such a dominant voice in the political process is because they are identified as “persons” and this needs to be revisited through a ConCon. In this past 2008 legislative session, there was much concern about the influence of corporate contributions that drown out the individual’s ability to have an impact because the individual simply does not have the deep pockets of the corporate purse. Can a ConCon be a place where we still recognize the rights of corporations but also impose commonsense limits in areas like campaign finance – ie. clearly, Exxon Oil is not the same as Mrs. Watanabe down the street who must now choose between whether to pay for medicine, gas or food first?

Third, as I stated in my initial post, what about structures of governments – an Energy Resource Commission, a State Department of Energy, shouldn’t we be looking at these as part of the ConCon discussion?

Peter – you’re right that we need to have a discussion - I don’t want nor mean to shut down the conversation about nuclear energy. But I’m just skeptical and don’t want nuclear energy to be the only focus of our ConCon/energy discussions – there’s just too many possibilities and avenues in which to address the problem that we should look at all the possibilities before we picking just one.

[Kaunaloa]

Della,

I see little to gain by adding "future generations" to those sections of the text, but I'm not particularly opposed to it on its face. To mirror the federal constitution perhaps we could use their words "our posterity"

2nd, i'm not much of a fan of "campign finance reform" 'cause in the end you wind up with some monstrosity like mccain-feingold. one could argue that interest groups provide the individual a voice much like the corporations, your mrs. watanabe could be a member of n.o.w. or c.w.a., depending upon her views of course!

3rd, i remain opposed reflexively to enlarging the size of government; energy concerns now fall lunder the dept. of BEDT, which i think is the right place for them -- that goes back to my market driven philosophy.

[Kaunaloa]

Peter, as you are prolly well aware: chernobyl occured 1. ~20 years ago
2. under a system of government that has since gone away due to it being a complete failure
3. as the result of not only massive human and system error but also a poor design that is no longer being used anywhere on the planet.

to try to use any past nuclear accident [all THREE of 'em] as a justification for not utilizing the potential of nuclear is, imo, saying we should stop air travel because of the hindenberg ...

[Curtis Muraoka]

Add Environmental Stewardship to Article X, Section 4:
HAWAIIAN EDUCATION PROGRAM

The State shall promote the study of Hawaiian culture, history and language and environmental stewardship in local focus, and global reach.

The State shall provide for a Hawaiian education program consisting of language, culture and history in the public schools. The use of community expertise shall be encouraged as a suitable and essential means in furtherance of the Hawaiian education program. [Add Const Con 1978 and election Nov 7, 1978]

[Peter Kay]

I like the way "future generations" sounds but the question is, how far into the future do we need to plan for?

On a ridiculous level, the Sun is not operating in a sustainable way. Sooner or later, it will run out of fuel. Is it therefore unsustainable?

Of course not.

So while I really like the idea of "future generations", perhaps it could specifically be limited to "the next generation".

Something is "sustainable" if it doesn't leave the next generation in a pickle.

On that "sustainable" note, I've always wondered if its advocates have ever come to a definition they agree on.

Another issue I wonder about is how one balances sustainability vs. increased cost. I think most reasonable people would agree that today's gas prices are high because we've not done all we can to drill for oil.

On one hand, not drilling for oil might be called a win for sustainability. On the other hand, it's costing us a pretty penny.

How do we balance that?

[Peter Kay]

I just caught this article about how renewables have a much better economic curve than nuclear. Makes one think to closely examine how we could apply that here.

[cashpoor]

I am so glad we are discussing these issues. This has been a large part of my concern for Hawaii's future. I still hold on to a dream of Hawaii becoming the first sustainble state in terms of energy and the primary food staples.

While nuclear has many benefits, it also has many opinions against it. As I have studied, and live myself, almost completely energy sustainably, I believe the real solution is for the people to take the energy into their own hands. ("take the power back"). We constantly rely on government to make the decisions which in turn makes government bigger (which takes away from constitutional liberty and privacy).

If we as the people, decided to learn what it takes to actually generate energy, you would be very suprised how easy it actually is. Hawaii being so rich in natural, renewable resources, such as sun, wind, water, etc. We should have zero problem with it. It really comes from our own education, and lack of awarness and desire to vote with our dollar, and not following the heard. If you don't like paying for fossil fuel energy, figure out how to make yourself not as "grid dependent".

Did you know that inside of every automobile, there are several devices that you can modify to make "free" energy? enough to power a large percentage of the typical residents footprint.

We can discuss this all day long because at the end of the day 99.9% will be paying for gas and Heco this month. The real answer is look at yourself, do you need all those lights on? Can you change a few bulbs to flourescent or even better the newer LED lighting (made in USA)? Can you look into the tax insentives for solar, or even solar hotwater? Its starts with us, right here right now. If I can do it, so can you.

I actually have fun doing it, but most of the people I know have no clue as to what to do instead of gripe.

Please people, just like with big monopoly companies, big government, and big oil, multinational corporations, etc., VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLAR! That is what it all boils down to.

My statement is this: Hawaii needs to focus our efforts in an educational system for all ages that promotes entropenuers (that learn to develop their own opinions), energy self sustainability, small organic farming, and independent media. Otherwise we will fail at all we are trying to do for the sake of our future. This should be the backbone of any constitutional changes in the proposed ConCon.

[Peter Kay]

I'd love to get an economist's point of view on how you could setup a collection of incentives to naturally (but not punitively) move a society to greater energy independence.