Samuel Dotson

Sustainable Planning Seminar - Blog 4

by Samuel Dotson 2 min read

In this series of blog posts I will discuss some of the assigned readings for the Sustainable Planning Seminar (Urban Planning/Geography/Landscape Architecture 446) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The readings for this week are numerous:

Tuesday:

Thursday:

Most of the readings and videos in this collection are thematically connected by the environmental impacts of extracting (mountain top removal and hydraulic fracturing) and transporting fossil fuels (Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines). Design solutions and political actions are also considered in Bjarke Ingle’s TED talk, “Hedonistic Sustainability,” and President Joe Biden’s Executive Order, and battery storage.
It’s clear that extraction of fossil fuels has negative impacts on the surrounding environment and the health of nearby communities. This fact belies arguments, like the on in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein, that increasing access to energy increases GDP and life expectancy. Both claims may be true on average, but it willfully ignores the people that are hurt by fossil fuels. I reviewed this book last year.
These articles and videos were mostly about material extraction and did not discuss the environmental impacts of using coal to produce energy. Yes, coal is an enormous emitter of greenhouse gases, but it is also one of the greatest sources of excess radiation in the United States. A coal plant release 100 times more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant of a comparable size.
One thing in these readings surprised me– I hadn’t considered that Keystone and DA pipelines could be cancelled on their own due to poor economics. This makes the withdrawal of their permits feel somewhat performative on the part of the Biden Administration (not to say he was wrong to do it). Fortunately the Executive Order did a lot more than just stop a couple of pipelines. I was bothered by Dan Charles’ claim in the NPR podcast that solving the energy storage problem means you’re on your way to solving climate change. Energy storage is important, but it’s not a silver bullet and, as we observed in Texas last week, we will need a lot more batteries than previously imagined.
Finally, all sources of energy have trade offs. In the case of coal and natural gas, we are trading cheap and plentiful energy for environmental damage and climate change. With renewables we trade environmental damage (at the scale of coal and natural gas, they have their own supply chain issues) for intermittency and vast resource requirements. In the case of solar power, we may also be trading forced labor for a chance at a cleaner environment.