Rethinking U.S. Foreign Aid -- Make Iraq a True "Green Zone"

By Gregory Wright, Solar Today. Posted December 3, 2007.

There is no good solution to the pain of Iraq, and there might be no good or sufficient solution to the enormously greater problem of atmospheric carbon and climate change. Mitigating climate change, though, must be at the core of everything our society does for the foreseeable future -- including the way the United States does foreign policy and foreign assistance. And including America's plans for ending the war in Iraq and addressing the challenges of the Middle East.

One of the Iraqi people's greatest burdens is the lack of sufficient and reliable electricity, a worse problem now than before the U.S. invasion. In the violence-ridden heat island that is much of Iraq, insufficient electricity for cooling, refrigerating, lighting and running computers and TVs makes Iraqis' lives even more grueling. "Deploying additional forces [won't] solve Iraq's problems, but providing jobs, electricity and drinkable water [will]," U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, then commander of the Multinational Corps of Iraq, said in 2006.

According to a March 8 CBS News report, at the start of 2007 the United States had already spent more than $4 billion on restoring electrical power in Iraq -- with very limited progress. How much solar electricity generation capacity could $4 billion buy? At a conservative cost of $10 per watt installed, $4 billion could buy 400 megawatts of solar photovoltaics. At 3 kilowatts per home, that's enough to power 133,300 homes.

When President Bush announced the so-called troop surge earlier this year, he said the initiative must go "beyond military operations," and ordinary Iraqis "must see visible improvements."

"But they won't see lights at the flip of a switch until 2013, six years from now and 10 years after the war began," The New York Times reported in March. "That's how long U.S. officials say it will take to fix the electricity, a disturbing timeline given that the restoration of basic and essential services is seen as a key element in gaining the confidence and support of normal Iraqis."

Solar Electricity to the Rescue?

The United States should devote some of the estimated quarter-billion dollars a day it spends in Iraq to purchase solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, tiles and materials, and inverters, batteries and other components, in the largest quantities PV manufacturers can produce them. This distributed generation would restore some electricity and help relieve the daily hell of Iraqis' post-invasion lives. Solar water-heating components could be included too. The federal funds could be used to distribute the materials to Iraq's communities for Iraqis to install at their homes and businesses. This solar infrastructure might turn out to be the one unambiguously good thing that results from the gargantuan U.S. enterprise in Iraq.

This investment would also create many badly needed jobs. "If I could drive down unemployment in this country," Chiarelli said, "our casualty figures would not be so high, nor would Iraqi casualties ... nor the level of violence."

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About the author: Gregory Wright (greg@newciv.org) is a writer and solar energy advocate whose main interest is creating strategies to speed the large-scale adoption of renewable energy and radical energy conservation to ward off the worst versions of the globally warmed world that, if these efforts fail, could turn out to be humanity's unpleasant home for our entire future.

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