From the Bottom Up

President Bush and Vice President Cheney's national energy policy feels like a giant finger in the eye of the environmental community: drilling in wilderness areas, promoting coal and nuclear power over efficiency, withdrawing from the climate change treaty. It hurts and angers and, to some degree, it blinds-for the central strategy of the Republican Party does not differ dramatically from that of the Democratic Party.

Maybe it is an inherent problem of trying to design a national energy policy, but Washington appears united in demanding one-size-fits-all solutions-extra large. More giant power plants. More giant oil refineries. More 20-story-tall transmission towers.

We don't need a single top-down remedy. We need a thousand bottom-up remedies. We don't need to figure out how to get more oil from Alaska to Minnesota, or more coal from Wyoming to Illinois, or more electric power from Idaho to Los Angeles. We do need to figure out how to tap into our vast supply of human ingenuity to develop ways to extract more energy from local resources.

Consider what we've done in my home state of Minnesota. Almost 10 percent of our transportation fuel comes from our own farmers. And more than 90 percent of this comes from 10 farmer-owned biorefineries. When Minnesotans fill up at the pump, part of our fuel comes from crops planted just a few miles away. As a result, part of our fuel dollar stays in the local community and nourishes a sector of the society that badly needs nourishing.

Alaska now supplies about 9 percent of our oil. Rather than drilling in pristine wilderness to boost that proportion to, say, 11 percent, why not convert the hundreds of millions of tons of excess crops and agricultural and municipal wastes into transportation fuels?

When it comes to electricity, Congress (and unfortunately too many state governments) wants to accelerate the construction of thousands of new central power plants, each serving a half million households or more. To encourage their construction, the White House would override state and local governments that thwart the erection of thousands of miles of new high voltage transmission lines.

SUCH A STRATEGY is woefully out of step with the decentralizing technological dynamic of the 21st century. We don't need to figure out new ways to even further separate the energy producer from the energy consumer. We need to develop policies that transform households, farms, and businesses into energy producers.

Vice President Cheney tells us we need to build one new giant power plant a week. He fails to tell us that at this very moment entrepreneurs are installing 20-to-30 new power plants each day: basement and backyard microturbines and fuel cells, rooftop solar cells, wind turbines. A new industry is being born before our very eyes.

Each of these new power plants produces a tiny amount of power-which is why national governments ignore them. But collectively, they can challenge the very scale and structure of our electricity system. In scores of cities and states, policy makers and activists are seriously examining a decentralized, bottom-up energy strategy.

Many mistakes will undoubtedly be made. But if we make mistakes at the local level, the cost is modest and the lessons learned can be disseminated to hundreds of other communities grappling with similar issues.

David Morris is vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has gathered some of the best bottom-up energy policies on its Web site (www.newrules.org). His most recent book is Seeing the Light: Regaining Control of Our Electricity System (2001).