Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Sean Casten

Having outlined ideal utility policy in part 5, we move now to ideal environmental policy. As a reminder, this is not the policy that could be accomplished tomorrow given political realities, but rather the long-term goal we ought to shoot for. If the only thing that mattered was good environmental policy guided by responsible principles, this is what we’d do. It is the long-term goal, but not necessarily the politically-possible next step.

Ideal environmental policy reforms

Immediately
convert all emissions regulations to an output basis, per unit of electricity
(MWh) and/or thermal (MMBtu) energy produced. Under present regulation, the less fuel you
burn the less pollution you are allowed to produce, putting energy efficiency
paradoxically in conflict with environmental compliance. Shifting to an output-standard would allow
all regulated sources to use energy efficiency as a pollution control
device.

Set the
output-based standard to be technology-independent. Getting output-based standards right requires
more than just an algebraic tweak. Today, many jurisdictions set different emissions standards for different
combustion processes. The idea is to
drive all technologies to their maximum (economically-attainable) level of
performance, but the unintended consequence is that you can sometimes find it
easier to permit dirtier technologies. (For example, a gas turbine is allowed
to release less pollution than a reciprocating engine, even though a “clean”
reciprocating engine is, on most fronts, dirtier than a “dirty” gas turbine.) This problem is innate to our current
pass/fail permitting models, which are eliminated with the changes outlined
herein, and therefore we do not need to have technology differences in
permitting. If the standard is set to X
lbs/MWh, that should apply for all power generation technologies.

Provide
an initial allowance for output based-standards at 90 percent of the current average,
and consistently announce plans to ratchet down over 5 year forward intervals.
Then eliminate all grandfathering. Our pass/fail model depends upon grandfathering if we are ever to
tighten standards; the regulator, in exchange for being allowed to tighten
standards in the future, gives any permitted source the right to emit at their
permitted level in perpetuity. The
result is that new, clean sources must pay for modern pollution control
equipment but sell into a market dominated by dirty old sources, tipping the
economic playing field in favor of the dirtiest sources. This can be fixed by
setting an initial pollution allowance (in lbs/MWh, lbs/MMBtu as appropriate),
and then stipulating a 5 year decline in that allowed level. Start with a level just below the current
average to ensure a steady reduction in pollution, and add another year every 12 months to ensure there are always 5 years of forward visibility. This will give businesses time to plan for
evolving regulation and immediately eliminate the need for grandfathering.

Set up
tradeable markets for all regulated pollutants, and allow any regulated source
to meet their permitted obligation through any combination of actual reductions
or purchased emissions reductions. This would immediately eliminate the
pass/fail nature of current regulations. Suppose that a given pollutant has an allowed pollution level of 2
lbs/MWh, and suppose further that one source has the ability to cost-effectively
lower their pollution to 1 lb/MWh while the other cannot get below 3
lbs/MWh. In the current, pass/fail
architecture, the 3 lb source doesn’t get built and the 1 lb source has no
particular incentive to exceed the 2 lb/MWh threshold. However, with tradeable permits, both sources
can be built so long as the 3 lb/MWh source is willing to pay the 1 lb/MWh
source enough money to justify their marginal reduction. We still end up with 2 lbs/MWh, but have
created a economic pain for the dirty guy and economic gain for the clean
facility—and a clear incentive for both to continue to drive their emissions
down as fast as possible—not just as fast as policy makers can set lower targets, as is the case in the current paradigm.

Exempt
any costs associated with pollution compliance for regulated monopolies from
rate-recovery, except at the level stipulated by the regulated allowance. In the current paradigm, an environmental
permit is a prerequisite for power plant operation, and therefore the costs
associated with pollution abatement are added into the total amount of capital
to be recovered under utility rate setting. However, since the changes above allow one to emit above or below
allowance levels (with financial penalties and rewards accordingly), any
combustion source owned by a regulated monopoly will be improperly incentivized
if it is allowed (or required) to pass those costs (or savings) along to its
customers. To avoid, require utility
regulators to only allow recovery of that capital required to meet the allowed
level of pollution, such that any revenues or costs associated with the
purchase or sale of pollution allowances accrue directly to asset owners.

Appoint
an independent scientific panel to calculate the societal costs associated with
the release of regulated pollutants and use that value to set an “escape valve”
on tradeable permit markets. The
only possible case in which a tradeable market for pollution reduction would
lead to outcomes that are contrary to the public interest is if the calculated
cost of compliance in those markets (set by supply and demand of pollution
reduction) exceeds the societal cost of pollution; if a ton of pollutant X imposes a $100,000 cost to society, it is socially beneficial to spend $90,000 eliminating it’s release, but if it costs $110,000 to eliminate it’s release, we would be better off simply spending the $100,000 to abate the cost. In order to maximize economic efficiency, we can rely on the fact that the latter number is calculable. Indeed, the National
Academy of Sciences has already done just this analysis for most regulated air emissions. Create a commission like this one to annually calculate the cost imposed by all regulated
pollutants and use that as an escape valve, such that if a polluter cannot
reduce their pollution or procure pollution offsets at a price below that
value, they simply pay the calculated amount to the federal government. The government agency that receives
this money should be mandated to spend it solely on abating those costs caused
by the pollutant in question.

Eliminate
NSR. Recall from part 2 that
our current environmental policy is shaped by the formulation: pass/fail
regulation + input-based standards = grandfathering + NSR. Recall also that NSR (new source review)
ensures that pass/fail regulation is not gamed, but in so doing serves to
effectively criminalize investments in energy efficiency at any existing,
permitted plant. The problems with NSR
have to be eliminated, but can only be done if we eliminate the formulation within
which NSR exists—which we have done above. We’ve shifted pass/fail regulations to differential rewards and
penalties via the use of tradeable permits. We’ve converted input-based standards to output-based standards, so that
efficiency can be treated as a pollution control strategy rather than a major
modification. And we’ve eliminated
grandfathering, by projecting 5 year forward reductions in output-based
pollution allowances. The net result is
that NSR becomes redundant and can be eliminated.

Next: a final set of policy reforms to address the lengthy list of outmoded laws at federal, state, and municipal levels that act as unwitting barriers to clean energy.

Related Links:

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Policy fixes to unleash clean energy, part 3

Job losses push need for energy bill

by Todd Woody

On the heels of San
Francisco’s announcement
last week that it plans to spend $150 million greening up homes, comes a new report that studies a slew of other innovative ways to finance energy
efficiency improvements for all types of buildings.

It’s no big surprise that the key to ramping up the energy efficiency industry and
fostering technological advances is no-money-down financing so building
owners
can avoid the capital costs of retrofits.  And that’s exactly what the California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF) is working toward.

Energy efficiency “immediately saves money for end-users,
improves the bottom line for companies, reduces local exposure to electricity
grid outages and offsets the need for new power plants,” wrote the authors of
the report from the CalCEF, a non-profit venture capital outfit based in San Francisco.
“Yet, efficiency upgrades and their respective financing options are often out
of reach for most end-users, as the initial capital cost exceeds near-term
savings.”

Yes, you read that right—CalCEF is a non-profit VC, a product
of the California energy crisis of 2000-2001—remember Enron?—that resulted
in the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric, Northern California’s dominant
utility. As part of the bankruptcy settlement, CalCEF was created to accelerate
energy innovation and was seeded with $30 million from PG&E.

The best known such program is Property Assessed Clean
Energy, or PACE, in which cities float bonds to finance retrofits and
homeowners pay back the cost through a surcharge on their property tax bills
over 20 years.

While that can work well for middle and upper-middle class
homeowners in environmentally conscious communities, PACE is not as useful for
commercial buildings, office towers, and industrial sites, whose owners may be
solely motivated by the bottom line, according to the CalCEF report.

“High upfront costs are preventing large entities from
addressing energy inefficiencies,” says Paul Frankel, the managing director of
CalCEF Innovations, the organization’s initiative that focuses on developing
green energy financing and policy.

That led CalCEF to investigate possible solutions to the
dollar dilemma, some of which are currently being implemented.

One workaround is something called on-bill financing. For
instance, San Diego Gas & Electric will finance up to $100,000 in energy efficiency
retrofits for commercial customers (and up to $250,000 for school and
government buildings). Recipients then pay back the loans through a surcharge
on their monthly utility bill.

Best of all, the loans carry zero percent interest, though
business customers have to repay them in five years. In the first two years of
the program, San Diego Gas & Electric financed 180 retrofits and has another 100 in the queue. Over the next two
years, the utility will make $41.5 million available for on-bill retrofits.

“It has significant potential as it’s something customers
understand and like,” says Frankel. “The challenge right now is that because
utilities are not banks, most programs don’t go beyond five years for the loan
and cap the size of projects, which limits what you can do.”

Another cool—and I mean literally cool—utility-related
green financing scheme involves freezing water at night when electricity demand
and rates are low. During the heat of the day—when power demand spikes—the
melting ice cools the refrigerant of a commercial building’s air conditioner so
it doesn’t have to consume electricity to run a compressor.

The system, called the Ice Bear and made by a Windsor, Colo., company called Ice Energy, is not new. What is new is
that some utilities are financing the installation of Ice Bears in commercial
buildings as way to cut electricity use on hot days when everyone flips on
their air conditioning.

Last month, the Southern California Public Power Authority
announced a deal with Ice Energy to reduce peak demand by 53 megawatts by
installing Ice Bears throughout the Southland. Under such distributed
generation programs—in utility geek speak they’re called “Aggregated
Deployment of Thermal Energy Storage Systems”—the utility owns the Ice Bears
much like it would a conventional power plant.

Building owners benefit from lower electricity bills while
the utility lowers its costs and its greenhouse gas emissions. And in
California, such systems can maximize the use of wind farms, which tend to
generate most of their electricity at night when the Ice Bears need power to
freeze water.

But for really big retrofit projects—those involving large
industrial facilities and millions of dollars—other even more creative financing models are emerging.

One is being pioneered by one of the report’s authors, Bob
Hinkle, an entrepreneur-in-residence at CalCEF and chief executive of a startup
called Metrus Energy.

Metrus finances and manages the energy efficiency retrofit
for the corporation. The customer repays the cost over the life of the
contract. The payments are based on how much energy is saved.

“We lock in the price per unit of energy saved during the
contract term, which is typically 10 years or less,” says Hinkle. “A lot of
customers will not fund those projects themselves because if they have the
money they’ll want to put it in their core business operations, or they don’t
want to take out a loan.”

Metrus, which recently completed its first project for a
large industrial company Hinkle declined to identify, uses equity raised from
investors, as well as bank financing, to pay for the retrofits, which are
performed by a third party. Metrus
retains ownership of the retrofit assets—boilers, air conditioning systems,
and the like—and will sell them back to the customer when the contract ends.

The customer, of course, continues to benefit from the
efficiency savings, especially as energy costs continue to rise.

The company Transcend
Equity promotes a variation of the Metrus model called a “managed energy
services agreement.” Transcend finances retrofits for owners of office towers and
other large commercial properties and then takes over responsibility for paying
the owners’ now-lower utility bills for the term of the contract. The property
owner pays Transcend what it would have paid the utility without the retrofit,
and Transcend pockets the difference.

“Everyone talks about what a great opportunity energy
efficiency is,” says Frankel, “but until recently there hasn’t been investment
commensurate with the hype.” 

At last, the financial creativity appears to be catching up
to green technological innovation.

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Opportunity, fully funded

by treehugger.com

Photo: TreeHuggerIt’s one of Lima’s most unusual spaces: a set of structures that were
going to be the railways of an electric train. In 1986, the project was
dropped and the construction was left as-it-was.

For years, these concrete columns and pass ways ‘adorned’ Lima’s
landscape with no purpose, until this February.

Spanish group Basurama, known for projects like the ‘You
are what you drop’ installation, thought this was an amazing place
to make an urban intervention and came up with an amusement park.

The Ghost Train park features amazing bright colors and games made
with recycled materials such as car tires, a canopy line, swings and
climbing structures. All free of charge for kids, young people, and
adults.

More of the story, plus great video and pictures, from our friends at TreeHugger.

And if you love reclaimed urban blight as much as we do, you’ll get a kick out of what’s being done with emptied big box stores. Hint: a museum to a certain canned ham product. 

Sometimes an abandoned building is more like a big shopping mall for those who like to mine them for fixtures and lumber and the odd decorative element.  Amy Bauman greens the construction industry one re-claimed I-beam at a time.

 

 

 

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by Stephanie Ogburn

.series-head{background:url(http://www.grist.org/i/assets/special_series/n2_dilemma_series_header.gif) no-repeat; height:68px;} .series-head a{display:block; width:949px; height:68px; text-indent:-9999px;} .series-head a{margin-left:-70px; margin-top:-10px;} .series-head span{visible:none;}

California dairy farmer Joey Rocha. Photo: Stephanie OgburnTurlock, Calif.—Joey Rocha tends 2,800 cows at his Central
Valley dairy. That may sound like a large herd, but in
California, Rocha is a mid-sized dairy producer.

Taken together, California’s dairy cows
produce more than 100,000 tons of manure every day. Rocha and his fellow dairy
farmers put all those cow pies to good use—as fertilizer for the fields that
grow the corn that feeds their herds. It’s a perfect closed-loop system, except
for one big problem: nitrogen.

Manure is nitrogen rich, which makes it a
great fertilizer. But by applying every last bit of ma­nure to their fields,
California dairy farmers—and non-dairy farmers as well—are dosing their crops with
more nitrogen than the plants can absorb. The excess nitrogen is causing
serious air and water pollution problems and may even be threatening the health of
the soil.

There are ways around this problem: dairy
producers and farmers could dial back on the manure and synthetic fertilizers
they apply. But there’s not a lot of incentive to do this.

“[Fertilizers] are, in fact, relatively
cheap and very good insurance,” says Allen Dusault, program director at
Sustainable Conservation, a California group that works with farmers to develop
economically-feasible approaches to environmental practices. “If you’re a farmer
that is applying adequate amounts and then some, it’s good insurance to make
sure you get your yields.”

Perverse incentives

Yields are the driving force of modern agriculture. Whether
a farmer is growing corn to feed his dairy cows or someone else’s, he gets paid
by the ton. If he can apply a little extra of something that is cheap or free
(fertilizer or manure) in order to ensure a high yield, that’s a no-brainer.

 Although most agronomists will tell you that farmers
over apply nitrogen and can get the same yields without adding as much
fertilizer and manure as they do, few farmers are willing to take that risk for
an environmental benefit that doesn’t impact them.

Thus, nitrogen pollution from farms is really a kind of market failure: individual farmers have little or no
incentive to act in a way that protects the groundwater beneath them. But the
public does have an interest in clean water; and public action will likely be
required to change the incentive structure.

Reducing risk

Allen Dusault, program director at
Sustainable Conservation,
a California group that works with farmers to develop economically-feasible
approaches to improving environmental practices, has thought a lot about the N
problem. What’s needed, he says, “is a way to insure the financial viability of crop production methods
without creating such a surplus of nitrogen that you have runoff.” 

That’s where risk-reduction programs such as the Best
Management Practices (BMP) Challenge come in. The BMP Challenge, a unique
program available in 18 major farming states, allows farmers to try
environmentally-beneficial management techniques by offering to pay them for
any costs they might incur in the process.

The program, originally started by American Farmland Trust and now run by a company called AgFlex, is focused mostly in areas where nitrogen runoff is
causing big problems: the Chesapeake Bay, Mississippi River watershed, the
Great Lakes Region, and now California dairies.

Farmers who enroll in California’s BMP Challenge agree to
apply less manure to their corn, and to try and target that application at
times when the corn will actually absorb most of the nitrogen in the manure. If farmers’
yields dip, the program compensates them for their loss. If their yields increase or hold
steady, farmers pocket the savings from reduced fertilizer use and higher yields.

Rocha was one of the five dairy farmers that Dusault
and Sustainable Conservation first approached in 2009 about taking the BMP Challenge.
“We don’t look for these new programs,” says Rocha, whose environmental
consultant turned him on to the program. “But when stuff comes our way,
we do take a listen to it.”

Next year Sustainable Conservation hopes to enroll about 20
dairy producers in the San Joaquin Valley, according to senior project manager
Ladi Asgill. The program is appealing, says Asgill, because it “offers an
opportunity for dairies to experiment and work out the kinks in implementing a
new practice, where we offer risk coverage, basically.”

Speaking of risk, Rocha did have slightly lower yields this
year. But he also learned a lot about how to time his irrigations and apply
manure more efficiently. With a few years practice, Rocha believes he could get
to the point where he sees “the same [yields] with less [manure].”

Limiting risk is a key component in getting farmers to try
new practices that have favorable environmental results, says Ferd Hoefner,
policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition[4],
a D.C.-based policy group.

“There really is a barrier to adoption of
practices, even practices that on average are great net-return kinds of
practices for farmers,” Hoefner says. “They fear there will be some
kind of cost of production.”

The BMP Challenge gets farmers over the financial hurdle.
For Rocha, it was a “no-fear” option.

“There’s nothing unattractive about it,” he says.

Taking it national

Of course, paying farmers to try new practices can get
expensive. Farm conditions vary and the program has to pony up to pay for yield
reductions. Ideally, says policy analyst Hoefner, the program might work
well as a kind of national insurance policy for farmers willing to try something new.

In Hoefner’s view, modest programs like the BMP Challenge could have a
lot of short-term impact. But when it comes to creating truly sustainable agriculture
systems, Hoefner says his organization would like to see more support for
widespread systemic changes in how dairy farms, and other farming systems,
operate. Such changes would include returning to traditional pasture-based
grazing systems, and exchanging concentrated animal feeding operations such as
Rocha’s for smaller livestock production approaches that integrate animals into
farming systems with techniques such as rotational grazing.

The HDTV Challenge

Rocha didn’t get his usual yields last year, but he’s game to
try the BMP Challenge or some other similar program again.

“If it’s out there next year, if there’s another
program to be had, we’ll take a good hard look at it again,” he says. “If we
wind up with … [a] little less nitrogen, that’s better for us, better for the
ground.”

In the long run, what matters most is the effect that Rocha’s
experiment has on his dairy farming neighbors. If they see him getting more yield
with less manure, they may start doing what he’s doing—and if that happens, the practice of smart nitrogen use could snowball.

Sustainable Conservation’s Dusault calls programs like BMP
Challenge “showcasing,” and likens Rocha to the early adopters who
bought the first HDTVs. (25 percent of American
households had high definition televisions in 2007; 50 percent had them in 2009.)

Manure management isn’t as much fun as watching Peyton Manning
launch a Hail Mary in hi-def, though, and if California dairies follow the same
trend as California farmers who failed to adopt conservation tillage, Dusault’s HDTV penetration model may not apply.

The truth is it’s too early to tell how
effective the BMP Challenge for California’s dairies will be. What is clear is that unless
government steps in to share some risk or change financial incentives, farmers across the country will likely continue overdosing their fields with nitrogen—to the detriment of our ecosystems and our health.

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by Ashley Braun

Eat their heart out, Al Gore!

Even if your climate change-doubting colleague doesn’t snow the difference between weather and climate, you can patiently teach him the truth without being such a beef jerky. But if that doesn’t work, urine trouble!

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The Climate Post: Snow is unequivocal

by Agence France-Presse

HENDERSON, Nev.—President Barack Obama on Friday rebuked climate change skeptics who argue that piles of snow dumped on the United States during a frigid winter cast doubt on global warming science.

“We just got five feet of snow in Washington,” said Obama, when asked about alternative energy projects during a town hall meeting in Nevada.

“Opponents of climate change, they say—‘see look at that, there is all this snow on the ground—this doesn’t mean anything.’ … I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean every place is getting warmer—it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer.”

Obama cited the lack of snow in Vancouver during the current winter Olympics and unusual snowstorms in places like Dallas in the southern United States as examples of violent weather patterns brought on by climate change.

The president has committed the United States to the fight against climate change—unlike the previous Bush administration—and played a major role in the ill-fated U.N. climate conference in Denmark last year.

But there is growing doubt over the fate of legislation being pushed by Democrats in Congress aimed at establishing a cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon emissions. Republicans have branded such legislation “job killing” and some Democratic lawmakers also oppose it.

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by Tom Laskawy

Another day, another misguided announcement from the Bill Gates Foundation. This time, it’s hyping a new GMO press release project from DuPont’s biotechnology arm, Pioneer Hi-Bred (via the Des Moines Register):

Pioneer Hi-Bred is joining with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
to help scientists in Africa develop genetically engineered corn
varieties that would allow poor farmers increase their yields with less
fertilizer.

The aim of the project is to increase corn yields
by 50 percent over the average now reached by African varieties, said
Paul Schickler, president of Pioneer, a Johnston-based unit of DuPont.

… Pioneer’s
arch-rival Monsanto Co. is two years into a similar project with the
Gates foundation to develop drought-tolerant corn that is to be made
available to small-scale farmers in eastern and southern Africa.

Both Pioneer and Monsanto have agreed to make the seeds available royalty-free to small-scale farmers.

Wow, that sounds great! Those magic seeds should be getting into the hands of farmers any day now. Or not:

Monsanto hopes to have its drought-tolerant seeds to small-scale
farmers in Africa by 2016, four years after the projected release of a
commercial variety in the United States.

As for Pioneer, they will first use advanced conventional breeding techniques to improve yields, and then add their genetically engineered genes later. The conventional version should be ready by 2014. The transgenic version? Eventually.

From his years as CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates knows well the name for this kind of product: vaporware. It’s hard not to think that Monsanto, Dupont and their ilk are turning into the Bernie Madoff of agriculture. Convince gullible foundations along with the federal government to send billions in research dollars their way based on a promise of magically awesome results. Sometime down the road, of course.

Meanwhile, if African farmers want improved seeds, they should look in their own backyard. Because they already exist (from Science Daily):

Maize production in West and Central Africa is set to get a much-needed
boost with the release of improved varieties by the Nigeria National
Variety Release Committee. The improved varieties address many of the
major constraints to maize production such as drought, low soil
fertility, pests, diseases, and parasitic weeds.

Researchers developed the varieties through conventional plant breeding by tapping naturally-available traits.

This is not a coincidence. Even Pioneer and Monsanto admit that much of the yield improvement of their own seeds will come through traditional techniques. But sex sells and right now, sex in ag-speak is spelled G-M-O.

If only Bill Gates, not to mention USDA Chief Tom Vilsack or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would spend some of their money getting those Nigerian seeds into farmers’ hands today. Instead, they’d prefer to funnel billions of dollars to biotech giants because, well, 2016 isn’t really so long to wait. Dupont and Monsanto promise that the payoff will be worth the wait. And here in America, corporations never, ever lie.

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by Dave Hawkins

In his recent blog, David Sassoon calls President
Obama’s creation of a task force for a Carbon Capture and Storage Strategy a
big victory for the coal industry. Let me offer a few thoughts on why I
believe this task force actually is a step forward for all of us who want to
put an end to investments in new polluting coal plants, increase our reliance
on energy efficiency and renewable energy, and prevent disastrous climate
disruption.

Our
community uses several tactics to block new polluting coal plants. We
intervene in permit proceedings and bring lawsuits to challenge coal plant
permits. NRDC has actively used this tactic, joining the outstanding
efforts by the Sierra Club and others. Another tactic, that NRDC also has
pursued, is advocacy with Wall Street investors to convince them that
investments in new polluting coal plants are a bad bet. A third is
advocacy for performance standards that would make it legally impossible for
new polluting coal plants to be built. NRDC worked hard to get such a law
enacted in California
and is seeking such standards in federal legislation. A fourth is to
create a broad consensus that no new coal plant should be built unless it
captures its carbon.

This last
approach, which NRDC has pursued as well, is controversial in our community
because it does not call for an absolute bar on new coal plants regardless of
environmental performance and it lends legitimacy to carbon capture and storage
(CCS) technology. I certainly understand the controversy—after all, if
the coal industry seems to be supporting CCS, there is good reason to suspect
something nefarious. And Mike Brune is right that the coal industry has a
perfect record in speaking with a forked tongue on CCS—claiming that it is an
essential technology, arguing that it is not ready, and then working to block
any policy that would require it to be used. But the coal industry’s
duplicity should not keep us from assessing for ourselves whether CCS can help
us stave off climate destruction and increase our use of cleaner energy.

As a
community, we have achieved great success in blocking new coal plants one by
one but we need a comprehensive coal policy as well. Showing CCS is an
available tool helps us to convince policymakers that they should oppose
construction of coal plants that do not capture their carbon. Is such a
policy as attractive to many in our community as a law that says no more coal
plants, period? No. But we need to ask ourselves—what are the
realistic odds of getting Congress or any significant coal-using state to adopt
a “no new coal, period” policy in the next handful of
years? I have fought the coal industry for 40 years and in my
judgment the odds of a total ban on new coal plants are not large.

But we do
have in our grasp the adoption of policies that will bar the construction of
new coal plants unless the plant operates CCS. Securing the votes to get
these policies enacted will require convincing some members of Congress that
coal plants with CCS could in fact be built. I know that this is objectionable
to many in our community but which is a better outcome: leaving the door open
to building new coal plants with no CO2 controls at all or leaving it open only
to coal plants with CCS?

Right now,
the coal industry uses the claim that CCS is not ready as a weapon to fight
mandatory CO2 requirements. Those of us who talk to members of Congress
know that these claims are influential in far too many offices. The Obama
CCS task force is a way to take that argument away from the coal industry.

Some in our
community seem to fear that if we admit that CCS might become a tool in the
climate protection toolbox that we will lose the battles to deploy truly clean
resources like efficiency and renewables and to end atrocities like
mountain-top removal (MTR). With respect, I think that view is a
mistake. What CCS will do, in addition to cutting carbon pollution, is to
internalize one cost of coal use that is currently ignored. That is a
huge step forward in ending the distorted market that has allowed coal to
dominate electricity production until now. A policy requiring new coal
plants to use CCS dramatically improves the economic competitiveness of cleaner
alternatives overnight. It is true that CCS will not stop
MTR; neither will SO2 scrubbers, NOx controls, mercury controls, or
baghouses. But that has never caused us to oppose those vital
life-saving control measures in the past. To fight MTR we need to take it
on directly, as many are doing brilliantly. NRDC is proud of its work to
end this scourge and we won’t stop until MTR is history. As NRDC’s
President Frances Beinecke makes clear in her recent blog, supporting CCS does not
mean condoning the damages that coal, as it is mined and used today, inflicts
on us all.

CCS may
also be an additional tool to cut carbon emissions from existing plants. We all want to use efficiency and renewables (and, more controversially,
natural gas) to back out coal and carbon pollution from the more than 300GW of
existing coal plants. But that won’t happen without strong
policies. The reality is that we have not yet made the sale with critical
members of Congress that a coal-free energy system is feasible in the near term. However, we can make the sale that CCS can become a real option, with a serious
effort and supporting policies. Our community should not be afraid of
having an additional tool to go
after emissions from existing coal plants. If CCS is shown to be feasible
for existing coal plants it will become harder and harder for those plants to
justify operating without it. That helps level the playing field for
alternatives to coal.

Nor is CCS
just about coal. CCS may also turn out
to be something we need to get more rapid reductions in greenhouse gas
pollution. We all know we should have started a serious climate
protection program decades ago. Instead, our “leaders” have let
carbon pollution build up at an accelerating rate with a lot more in the
pipeline. Most of us fear that we are in for some disastrous impacts just
due to what is already in the atmosphere along with the added amounts we cannot
prevent in the next few decades. We may well need to pull CO2 out of the
air by applying CCS to sustainably produced biomass. Using the politics
of coal to prove out CCS so it is available for broader applications may be
seen in a decade or so as a smart move.

The energy
penalty projected for first-generation CCS systems is a legitimate
concern. But we need not worry about a
future of massive deployment of high energy penalty CCS systems. If CCS designs do not achieve substantially
better efficiencies than the first versions, other low-carbon options will win
in the marketplace.

What about
the risk that CCS subsidies will enable coal to crowd out superior energy
choices? Well, the key feature of the CCS subsidy provisions in the House
and Senate climate bills is that payment is tied to actual capture and disposal
of CO2. This is a huge change from past subsidies, including those in the
stimulus bill, where the payment is not tied to actual tons of pollution
avoided. While our community still may not like these CCS subsidies, keep
in mind that they are part of a package that will put in place a steadily tightening
cap on carbon pollution and a CO2 performance standard for new coal
plants. That is a radically different policy environment than the status
quo—one that will dramatically increase the prospects for efficiency and
renewables. So whether you think, as NRDC does, that pay-for-performance
CCS subsidies are an appropriate hedging strategy or that it’s just the price
to pay to get the US off the dime on cutting carbon pollution, the odds are
that CCS can play a positive role in helping us achieve our goals of moving the
U.S. and the world to a cleaner energy future.

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Earthquake wake-up call in Chicago

by Agence France-Presse

SAN DIEGO—U.S. researchers unveiled a vehicle Thursday that could earn money for its driver instead of guzzling it up in gasoline and maintenance costs.

The converted Toyota Scion xB, shown at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the first all-electric car to be linked to a power grid and serve as a cash cow.

“This is the first vehicle that’s ever been paid to participate in the grid—the first proof-of-concept vehicle,” Ken Huber, who oversees technological development at wholesale electricity coordinator PJM Interconnection, told AFP.

The presentation of the box-like, unassuming-looking Scion was the researchers’ way of introducing the “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) concept as it begins to gain momentum in the United States and around the world.

V2G projects with hybrid cars that use electricity and gas to store energy in their batteries and feed it back into the power grid are up and running in the United States, and the drive now is to produce all-electric vehicles to plug into the power grid.

“This makes the car useful not only when it’s being driven, but also when it’s parked, as long as you remember to plug it in,” said Willett Kempton, who is leading a V2G project at the University of Delaware.

A V2G car is linked via an Internet-over-powerline connection that sends a signal from inside the car’s computer to an aggregator’s server. The aggregator acts as the middleman between the car owner and power grid management companies, which are constantly trying to keep electricity output at a constant level.

When the grid needs more power due to a surge in demand, power companies usually draw from traditional power plants, which in the United States are often coal-fired and leave a large carbon footprint.

When V2G becomes more widespread, the power could be drawn from millions of vehicles plugged into sockets in home garages or from commercial fleets, such as the U.S. Postal Service’s vans, for a much smaller footprint than that of the power plants.

Grid management companies like PJM Interconnection currently pay around $30 an hour when taking power from a car.

V2G is still a new concept, but it is gaining ground in the United States and Europe.

“Ten years ago, this was just a plan. Today, it’s a real project, and in 10 years, we’ll be producing tens of megawatts of power this way,” said Kempton, adding that V2G will readily find applications in countries that are rapidly ramping up reliance on wind and solar energy, such as Denmark and Britain.

Huber said he will be meeting in the coming weeks in Paris with heads of European grid management companies about V2G.

“We’re going to try to determine how we can work together on this. It’s a technology that is very good at meeting a need we have, and there’s growing interest among auto companies to develop V2G vehicles,” he added.

AC Propulsion of California has designed an electric drive system for V2G, and car manufacturers including Renault/Nissan, Mitsubishi, and BMW are producing all-electric vehicles with an eye on the V2G market.

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by Umbra Fisk

Dearest readers,

Not all of your questions are as manageable to navigate as
selecting local versus organic apples or how to recycle your light bulbs/baby
food jars/yogurt containers/cell phones. Some are downright difficult,
controversial, and ambiguous, which is frankly all the more reason to dive into
these quandaries. One such pickle: nuclear energy. It’s recently found a
revival in the headlines via the Obama administration’s proposal to triple
nuclear power loan guarantees in 2011 and Bill
Gates touting high tech nuclear reactors at the TED Conference, which led
me to the Ask Umbra archives to dig up some pieces of wisdom I’d doled out on
the subject in the past along with some new takes.

Nuke you
lure.
If you acknowledge that climate change is
indeed the most important problem facing the planet, then you can’t just take
nuclear out of the running as a viable alternative energy source, as gross and
evil as that may feel. That said, I believe that once you do take a closer look
at nuclear, here’s what you see: In addition to nuclear waste remaining an
unsolved problem, plant meltdowns themselves being environmentally disastrous,
and the possibility of nuclear material being used to nefarious and horrifying
ends, nuclear power continues
to not be cost-effective. Get the full Ask Umbra answer.

The
lesser of two evils?
When it comes to the question, “Which is
better—nuclear or coal?”, the answer really just is “neither.” It’s a false dichotomy that lends legitimacy
to a false scenario in which we as a region, country, or world are forced to
chose coal or nukes and have no access to developing other energy sources. It
is a worst-case, stuck-in-the-corner, fake match-up. On a daily individual level, most people have
little choice as to which power source we support with our monthly electric
bill. If we do have choices, we should first buy renewable energy or even
hydroelectric power. (Find out if you have alternative choices by
searching EERE’s
Green Power map.) Nuclear and coal are not our only two options; let’s not
pretend that they are. Get the full Ask Umbra answer.

Thorium—yum!
Thorium—a naturally occurring radioactive
metal that is three to four times more abundant than uranium—is, to some, the
great white-hot hope for future nuclear-power production. The waste it produces
is harder to weaponize (possible, but tricky) and remains radioactive for 500
years instead of 10,000. In general, thorium’s good points seem to outweigh the
bad. But thorium is a long way from being widely implementable and should not
be used as an excuse for rushing to build new plants. What about abundant
resources like sun and wind? Why risk even 500 years of radioactivity when we
can invest in alternatives that are truly safe and clean? Get
the full Ask Umbra answer.

Radioactively,
Umbra

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by Eric Roston

First things first: Several high-profile exits from the climate conversation—Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) from the Senate; BP, Caterpillar, and ConocoPhillips, from USCAP; and chief climate negotiator Yvo de Boer from the U.N.—were widely reported this week. None of these stories
carry as much long-term significance as the under-reported-on
difficulty of many major English-language public information sources to
communicate both that potentially dangerous climate change is underway
and that professional researchers have enough confidence, despite
uncertainties, to attribute it to human activity.

This problem is giving leaders an opportunity to shut down climate policy discussions.

Climate science and the policies designed to address it will never
be understood and appreciated by the public quite as well as, say,
pairs figure skating is. It’s for the best, really. But, if
verifiability and accuracy are qualities that we would like to see in
leaders from every sector of civic life, then—as consumers and
producers of public information products—maybe we should set a
baseline, and point out when something smells funny. So, for today, I’d
like to loosen Climate Post‘s standard format, and share my own reaction to this WSJ piece.

It smells funny.

This next section, this second one, here, is fake; I made it all up: The spate of recent controversies about climate research has given
fresh voice to a group of scientists who question the mainstream view
on two points: that human activity is warming the planet at a slow,
imperceptible pace; and that human societies and institutions will be
able to adapt. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, said in his occasional emailed newsletter, “At the rate
world policymakers are chasing Titanic-like policies down to the bottom
of the rising Atlantic ocean, our grandchildren, perhaps even our
children will curse our generation as the most murderous and selfish of
any in the four billion year history of life on Earth.”

Hansen’s is one voice in a coordinated chorus who are taking
advantage of recent climatological observations—rising average ocean
temperatures, retreating mountain glaciers, earlier spring blossoms—to
promote to a wider audience the same criticisms of what they call
“mainstream, slow-warming suicide science” that they have advocated,
with great difficulty, in smaller circles for some time.

In the economics and policy sphere, Hansen’s concerns are echoed by
the Anti-Refrigerator Forum of the American Renewables Foundation
(ARF-ARF), a group of liberal economists from prestigious institutions
who want to outlaw residential and commercial refrigeration in the U.S.
because cooling chemicals, hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, are powerful
heat-trapping gases and refrigeration causes high carbon emissions.
“It’ll be the refrigerators that march us up nine degrees Celsius,”
said Akaky Akakievich, chairman of the ARF-ARF …

Okay, back to ‘reality,’ however defined, and non-fiction, here:
That’s what an article might look like that attempted to take ideas
from the (left) fringe of climate policy and pump them up into a
credible movement claiming to know something no one on Earth knows: How
and how quickly industrial emissions and land-use changes might change
the planet’s life-support systems. It would be a disservice to write an
article like that, at least without emphasizing where the critics’
extreme predictions for the future deviate from the consensus
expectation: something in the vicinity of three degrees C of warming,
from a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels, over several decades.

To be charitable, what the Journal has done is overlook the
likelihood that its readership doesn’t understand the first thing about
manmade global warming: that there is manmade global warming. This is
understood at a much higher confidence level than newspaper reporting
on external security threats to the US. Even if that’s still not nearly
as high as we’d like.

The article is a novelty story, but is not presented as such.

What seems to be the problem?: The problem seems to be that credibility-killing IPCC errors and the
University of East Anglia emails easily cause confusion among things
that should not be confused. Climate science, most visibly in the IPCC
reports, might be thought of as cascading tiers of knowledge, arranged
from scientists’ high to low confidence in it. It is a vast enterprise,
and not all observations have equal weight. The Journal gives
equal weight to all things climate science. This sounds like a benign
mistake, but given what these misunderstandings (disunderstandings?)
are doing to our ability to have a rational policy discussion, it’s
potentially dangerous.

The WSJ piece looks at four familiar voices—Bjorn Lomborg,
John Christy, Richard Lindzen, and Willie Soon—plus a retired Columbia
University climatology professor whose last name means “puppet” in
Russian. They each dispute either that global warming is mostly manmade
or that cutting emissions is a way to respond. (Lomborg, the only
person quoted who is not a research scientist, says, “It’s important to
say that the scandals we’ve had don’t change the fundamental point that
global warming is man-made and we need to tackle it.”) The story is
pegged to Texas’ decision to challenge the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency’s move to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The article’s logical fallacy is the hasty generalization, with a smattering of the slippery slope, and some straw men thrown in for good measure. Now don’t get me wrong. The IPCC’s error about the Himalayan glaciers is horrifying generally and to an extent
personally embarrassing. An elementary mistake about Dutch geography
undermines the IPCC’s credibility on other unfamiliar simple things.
The UEA emails have shown that there needs to be more openness in
scientific research. But check out the key line in the article:

It’s too soon to tell whether the critics’ views will
force the scientific community to revisit the prevailing view of
man-made climate change. Many of their colleagues remain resolute in
their stance that global warming is caused mainly by humankind.

It’s fallacious to construct an article on the premise that Lomborg,
Christy, Lindzen, Soon, and Kukla have data or ideas that could wipe
out the basic physics and environmental science that underpin manmade
climate change. The question is wrong. There are no dumb questions,
perhaps, but there are wrong questions and this is one of them. The
reason that “colleagues remain resolute” is because they have so much
data to support their arguments. Could they be wrong? Of course they
could be wrong (kind of … ). Is that a Mack truck accelerating toward us
on the highway? Of course it might not be. But let’s get out of the way
until whatever it is passes, shall we?

The media privileges virtually anything anyone says over what the
data say. But the data matta! This creates a stylistic conundrum for
writers. No sane publication would ever start an article on this topic
thusly: “This week in Washington, atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed
and emitted electromagnetic radiation at wavelengths between, roughly,
12 to 15 microns. That’s the reliably demonstrated fact from which
science’s robust understanding of manmade climate change flows, an
understanding challenged by the same four people whose views are
contradicted by the evidence in geophysics … “

Zzzzzzzz. The media’s bias isn’t against a political faction, but against boredom.

Punchline: The headline
of the story is correct: “Climate-research controversies create opening
for critics.” They are creating openings. It’s true-but only because
editors and reporters are showing at best a lack of rigor.

Winds of Change at Wall Street Journal?: The Wall Street Journal‘s
ownership has transferred to News Corp., which owns and operates Fox
News and other politically charged news outlets in the U.S. and other
parts of the Anglo-speaking world. The paper recently shut down its
“Environmental Capital” blog, for the stated reason, one WSJ staff member told me, that it wasn’t getting enough page hits.

There are still, thankfully, at least a handful of prominent
reporters who understand climate change from soup to nuts. Their work,
and quite frankly, their jobs, becomes more significant as widespread,
impoverished mass communication dramatically and rapidly undermines
climate policy of any kind at home and abroad.

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Still another critic of real food – this time in the NYT

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by Grist

How does your garden grow? Deeply urban denizens are ingenious at getting their greens. We’ve searched out some of the more outrageous efforts.

 

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Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

by treehugger.com

Photo: Energy AustraliaWant to live rent free for a year, and pay no costs for energy and water needs? Not enough incentive for you? How about the possibility of having a plug-in electric car in your garage, as well?

This is the deal that Energy Australia is offering, in concert with Sydney Water. They’ll be interviewing successful applicants, who will ideally be a family with kids to spend 12 months live-testing an energy and water smart home in the west of Sydney. The project that has been described by the NSW state government, one of the backers, as a ‘bit like “The Jetsons” meet “Big Brother.’

Newington was the Sydney Olympic Athletes Village in 2000. At the time it was one of the largest solar suburbs in the world. Now energy and water utilities are looking to ramp up the technologies considerably. And see it they work in the real world of family living.

More of the story from our friends at TreeHugger.

 

 

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by Jonathan Hiskes

The Operation Free tour brought U.S. veterans Matt Victoriano (left), Robin Eckstein, and Patrick Bellon to Seattle last week to call for clean-energy legislation.Grist photo/Jonathan HiskesAs a tanker driver in Iraq, U.S. Army veteran Robin Eckstein saw firsthand the risk that fossil-fuel dependence posed to American troops. She drove a water truck in convoys with fuel tankers, and every trip outside the secure zone at Baghdad International Airport meant a potential meeting with sniper fire or improvised explosive devices.

But field stations in the surrounding area depended on that fuel for their vehicles and equipment that ran off generators.

“It was a logistical nightmare that they have to wait for us, because, frankly, we were slow, we were poorly equipped, and we were trying to get through Baghdad to get to them,” said Eckstein, 33. “Otherwise they can’t operate.

“If they had solar panels to charge their laptops and other equipment, they wouldn’t need our slow-moving vehicles coming out to them. They would be more efficient. We would be putting less American lives at risk.”

Eckstein, who finished her service with the National Guard in 2007, has also come to see the larger threat that fossil fuels and climate change pose to the military. Climate change causes droughts and natural disasters around the world, which in turn drives instability, mass migrations, and conflict—and the U.S. military will increasingly be called on to respond.

The Pentagon agrees. The recently released Department of Defense Quadrennial Review, which assesses threats and priorities for the military, states: “Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration. While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

Says Eckstein, “As long as the U.S. military is the 911 for the world, every time there’s a natural disaster, we are going to be there. Unfortunately, climate disruption just speeds that up.”

Ultimately, promoting national security means doing something about climate change, Eckstein argues. That’s why she joined up with Operation Free, a coalition of veterans that’s traveling the country in support of a national clean-energy bill.

Eckstein is currently on her second multi-state trip with Operation Free, which is organized by the Truman National Security Project and other progressive veterans’ groups. The warm responses the first time around convinced her to do it again.

“Normally people see [climate] as a left issue, but it’s a bipartisan issue,” she said. “Everyone wants our nation to be secure. The fact that they’re willing to listen to us as veterans, and that they understand it, they get it, makes me very hopeful we’re going to be able to make this change and take back our energy future.”

Eckstein says the Pentagon already gets it and has plans to increase fuel efficiency and use more rechargeable energy devices in combat zones.  Now the rest of the country needs to get it too: Supporting the troops means consuming less oil. 

 “It’s hard to find an issue in the United States that has such an impact on national security,” said Matt Victoriano, a former Marine who served in Iraq and another member of Operation Free. “It’s evident to everyone that our dependence on foreign oil is fueling terrorist insurgencies, and we’re paying for it through our military. We’re funding both sides of a war, which is pretty ridiculous.”

The U.S. spent $66 billion on oil from Saudi Arabia alone in 2008, he said. Saudi Arabia was the top source of funding for Al Qaeda and other extremist networks that year, according to the government’s top financial counter-terrorism official.

“There’s no positive outcome to continuing on our path,” said Patrick Bellon, an Army veteran on the tour. “So we can listen to old men who make a ton of money who are calculating that maybe they won’t be around when [oil] runs out. Or we can look out for the next generation. That’s the only question in my mind.”

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by Tom Laskawy

Last year, thanks in large part to the White House kitchen garden, the country saw a resurgence in interest in backyard gardening. But this being America, where one-upsmanship sometimes seems like a national pastime, the vanguard has apparently moved on … to “aquaponics.” The New York Times illustrates what makes this “breeding edge” of backyard agriculture different with a visit to hobby farmer Rob Torcellini’s hand-built installation in Connecticut:

There are fish here, for one thing, shivering through the winter, and a
jerry-built system of tanks, heaters, pumps, pipes, and gravel beds. The
greenhouse vents run on a $20 pair of recycled windshield wiper motors,
and a thermostat system sends Mr. Torcellini email alerts when the
temperature drops below 36 degrees. Some 500 gallons of water fill a
pair of food-grade polyethylene drums that he scavenged from a
light-industry park.

… What feeds his winter crop of lettuce is recirculating water from the
150-gallon fish tank and the waste generated by his 20 jumbo goldfish.
Wastewater is what fertilizes the 27 strawberry plants from last
summer, too. They occupy little cubbies in a seven-foot-tall PVC pipe.
When the temperature begins to climb in the spring, he will plant the
rest of the gravel containers with beans, peppers, tomatoes, and
cucumbers—all the things many other gardeners grow outside.

In here, though, the yields are otherworldly. “We actually kept a tally
of how many cherry tomatoes we grew,” Mr. Torcellini said of last
summer’s crop. “And from one plant, it was 347.” A trio of cucumber
plants threw off 175 cukes.

“Barrel-ponic” gardening system in Kenya.Photo: Travis HugheyIf this sounds familiar, it should. Urban ag pioneer Will Allen has built a thriving commercial and philanthropic endeavor on exactly this kind of setup. But to see an individual put something like this together is a fish of another color. Granted, this is for the most passionate among us, but it’s not necessarily budget-busting. In fact, you can pick up a small aquaponics kit on Amazon starting at $300. Or you can go for it and get aquaponics expert Travis Hughey’s “Barrel-ponics” system for a bit more (the NYT claims he will soon start selling fully assembled systems for about $500).

Obviously, this isn’t for everyone, or even most of us. But judging from the potential productivity from these home farmers, whole neighborhoods could benefit from having just one committed aquaponics farmer around. So, who’s up for a bit of fish farming?

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by Agence France-Presse

PARIS—The head of the United Nations’ climate convention said Thursday that he was to resign, in a surprise announcement that comes barely two months after the fiercely contested Copenhagen summit on tackling global warming.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, will resign as of July 1, the UNFCCC secretariat in Bonn, Germany, said.  He will join the consultancy group KPMG as global advisor on climate and sustainability and work with a number of universities.

De Boer had come under fire for the outcome of the Dec. 7-19 UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen, which ended in near-chaos as world leaders scrabbled to find a face-saving deal.

But as recently as Jan. 20, the UNFCCC had said de Boer would stay in the job and expected his term to be renewed later this year.

In a statement, de Boer said it had been a “difficult decision” to step down. “I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia,” he said.

“Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming. This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen.”

De Boer, a quiet-spoken, British-educated, 55-year-old Dutch national, was appointed the UNFCCC’s executive secretary in September 2006, and carved out a highly visible role. He had championed hopes for a breakthrough at Copenhagen that would unlock a new treaty on climate change that would take effect after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s current pledges expire.

Instead, despite nearly two years of negotiations, the summit was only able to yield a general agreement, crafted by the world’s major carbon emitters in chaotic last-minute scenes. The so-called Copenhagen Accord would limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), but does not spell out the means for achieving this goal, and the pledges made under it are only voluntary.

The document did not gain approval at a plenary session of the UNFCCC, and it has so far failed to gain the official endorsement of major developing emitters which helped to craft it.

Supporters of the agreement admit it is a disappointment compared to the expected outcome. Its many critics describe it as a failure or betrayal.

Despite the controversy, De Boer had persistently said he would remain in the job. His “contract runs out in September, but he certainly has no intention of leaving and expects it to be renewed,” a member of the UNFCCC said in an email to AFP on Jan. 20.

“His resignation is partly a sign that it’s a very difficult job,” Wendel Trio, head of Greenpeace International’s political and business unit, told AFP. “Everything that happened in Copenhagen, with 128 heads of state coming to the meeting, created high expectations on the executive secretary of the UNFCCC to get an outcome. Expectations remain high, although negotiations have proven and continue to prove rather difficult.”

The UNFCCC, an offshoot of the 1992 Rio summit, gathers 194 nations in the search for combatting the causes of human-made climate change and easing its effects. Its key achievement is the Kyoto Protocol, the only international treaty that requires curbs in heat-stoking greenhouse gases blamed for disrupting the climate system.

The successor to de Boer will be named by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

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by Rep. Ed Markey

The Recovery Act, a key component of America’s tectonic shift away from foreign oil, should be celebrated for what it has saved—jobs, money and energy.

By making smart investments in clean energy technology and cutting taxes for 95 percent of Americans, the Recovery Act kept America on track to double our renewable energy output. It also funded critical efficiency and weatherization projects that save families and small businesses money on their electricity bills.

Manufacturing an End to Foreign Oil

Admiring the VoltPrior to the Recovery Act, countries like China and South Korea controlled the market for advanced battery technology that will power fuel efficient cars of tomorrow. In fact, 98 percent of the world’s advanced battery production is being done in Asian countries. The Recovery Act looked to America’s manufacturing muscle and our technology prowess to jumpstart battery production jobs here in America. Thus far, $2.4 billion in grants have been awarded to companies and educational institutions in over 20 states to fund 48 new advanced battery and electric auto projects—creating an entire new domestic industry and supercharging our market share from less than 2 percent to as much as 20 percent.

An additional $300 million in grants have been awarded to 25 cost-share projects to expand the nation’s fleet of alternative fuel vehicles. This will put 9,000 alternative fuel and energy efficient vehicles on the road further reducing our reliance on foreign oil.

Renewable Energy = Renewable Savings

Beating Wall Street’s recession-based projections, the wind industry grew its capacity nearly 40 percent in 2009, blowing past expectations that existed prior to the passage of the Recovery Act. Investing in solar projects at schools and government buildings helped lower energy costs on local community budgets and taxpayers. The $10 billion efficiency investment in federal buildings alone will save taxpayers $2 billion a year – creating renewable savings based on renewable energy.

Families Warm to Savings

The impact of the Recovery Act can truly be felt at home. Improving the energy efficiency of millions of U.S. homes will save working families an average of $350 on their energy bills per year, cutting their costs by nearly one third. Thus far, the Weatherization Assistance Program has created over 8,500 jobs for local contractors, plumbers and electricians.

Smart Grid + Smart Growth = Smart Future

Building a smart energy grid will empower consumers with information and tools to control their energy bills while providing a platform for wind, solar and geothermal energy to reach more families. $3.4 billion in grants have been awarded to small businesses, utilities, manufacturers and towns to fund smart energy grid projects that will support tens of thousands of jobs and benefit consumers in 49 states.

The Recovery Act not only invests in our communities, it reshapes how we travel between them. Investing $16 billion in high speed rail and mass transit projects will not only create jobs, it will reduce the amount of oil we import and minimize traffic congestion by taking cars off the highway.

A Change in Direction

For years, America has been governed by an energy policy that invested in foreign oil and fossil fuels without looking to new technology solutions and alternatives that reduce carbon pollution.

via the Environmental Law Institute

When the Recovery Act was passed our nation faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the nation was bleeding jobs at an alarming rate and foreign competitors were capitalizing on decades of inaction from the United States in the clean energy industry. History will remember the Recovery Act as an emergency response, but the future still has a lot riding on its success.

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Why Bill Gates is wrong

Smarter grids, appliances, and consumers

by David Roberts

Bill Gates is sad that David Roberts thinks he’s wrong.Photo: redmaxwell via FlickrBill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, made waves last week when, at the much-celebrated tech conference TED, he proclaimed that climate change is the most important problem facing the planet. Wo0t! Obviously having someone of Gates’ stature supporting the clean energy race is an unqualified good. (See Alex Steffen on Gates’ talk.)

That said, Gates has burst on to the energy scene with some rather ill-considered thinking. To get a flavor, see his blog post, “Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation.” The idea is that “conservation and behavior change” might get the world to its 2020 or 2030 targets, but to get to 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050 we’ll need fundamental technological innovation. Ergo: we should pay more attention to, and devote more money to, basic science and R&D.

Now: it’s incontestably true that the U.S. investment in R&D is lower than it should be. We should increase funding in the search for game-changing technology that can help us generate and use energy more sustainably. Indeed, we should increase funding in lots of things! Therein lies the rub.

There are two problems with Gates’ dichotomy between innovation and insulation. The first is the more obvious but the second is more meaningful. (Also, see Joe Romm and Sean Casten for further Gates critiques.)

1. Insofar as there’s a distinction between developing new technology that helps generate more/cleaner/cheaper energy and using energy more wisely, we obviously need to do both. Just as efficiency alone will never get us to our goals, neither will new generation. Richard Heinberg at the Post-Carbon Institute argues, in his report “Searching for a Miracle,” that …

… there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can reliably be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of the current century.

I don’t know if Heinberg’s right. I’m inclined to think there’s greater potential in renewable energy than he allows, but I’m too keenly aware of my cognitive shortcomings to get into the Math’n’Graph Olympics. Either way, it’s a safe bet that whatever breakthroughs in energy generation technology arrive in coming decades, they won’t be able, in and of themselves, to keep up with rising population and affluence. And it would be sheerest folly to depend on their arrival.

Getting maximum energy services out of each electron will be an overriding human imperative in the 21st century, and it will require every bit as much ingenuity and imagination as the pursuit of new generation technology. It’s not a zero sum game; there is no reasonable sense in which concern for efficiency is eclipsing concern for innovation. We absolutely have to do both, and no country on earth is doing either at the scale that will ultimately be required.

2. Innovation ≠ technology.

The deeper and more pernicious problem with Gates’ framing is the implication that technology is where we innovate; in all other areas of life, we just … manage. This taps into some deep archetypes that are worth digging up.

In modern industrial society we’ve come to see progress as effectively synonymous with technology. When it comes to energy, when someone says “invest in new technology or,” the or is usually followed some version of restricting, curtailing, or sacrificing. Technology is the opposite of constraint. Proponents of the technology-centric policy perspective cast themselves as forward-looking optimists—in contrast, implicitly or explicitly, to the dour doom-and-gloomers who want you to shiver in the dark. They find easy favor because in America optimism is technology, and vice versa.

I’ve come to think that this conflation of progress/innovation and technology—specifically energy-generation technology—is one of the principal barriers to a bright green future. To illustrate the point, consider a book I recently reviewed, Reinventing the Automobile, by two engineers from from GM’s advanced auto division and the head of MIT’s Smart Cities program. Among other things, it describes the sustainable city of the future in considerable detail. Here is an extremely condensed sketch of that city:

Everything is linked up in a smart, integrated communications, power, and transportation network. The city “knows” which roads are congested and which parking spots are free. It can communicate to individuals what combination of walking, transit, and individual vehicles will get them where they’re going fastest. Vehicles are small, electric, modular, and—via sensors, GPS, and broadband wireless—intelligent, so they can pilot and park themselves. They can be charged by parking-integrated stations or even
electromagnetic coils embedded in curbs, and since they’re
interchangeable and easily customizable, they can be public goods (like
today’s car-sharing services), easily swapped out and thus continuously
in use. The city uses the vehicles’ batteries as distributed energy storage, along with other storage options including pumped hydro integrated into the sewer system. Rooftops, parking lots, and other marginal lands are covered with solar panels; small-scale wind turbines are perched on bridges and towers; cogeneration systems are attached to every industrial facility. Through smart design and sensing, every building and neighborhood maximizes efficiency. The city senses power demand, knows where power is being produced and stored, and continuously balances supply and demand.

Cool, right?! At first blush it sounds like a Jetsons techno-fantasy. Here’s the thing, though: according to the authors, who should know, most of the necessary technology either exists or is in development. None of it relies on any major breakthroughs. By a wide margin, the biggest barriers to creating such bright green cities are social. To pick just a handful:

Building a city that behaves like an integrated organism means developing a holistic, long-term plan that will coordinate multiple agencies and levels of government. Big, long-term thinking is not exactly an American strong suit these days. Also—and this is a underappreciated problem—cities are cripplingly dependent on the financial largesse of state and federal authorities. They have very little autonomy to borrow money and invest in their own futures.
There are all kinds of collective action and first-mover problems: Who puts the charging stations in if there aren’t electric cars on the road yet, and vice versa? Who pays for a smart grid before distributed generation is in place, and vice versa? How can public infrastructure and private market development be coordinated?
Many of the investments involve high upfront costs that are paid back slowly over time. New financing models will be needed both for private individuals and companies and for cities themselves.
Changes in the way individuals live, work, communicate, and travel must be introduced in a way that maintains social cohesion and political support for further changes. That requires research in social psychology and other behavioral disciplines (sorely lacking in much policymaking). How these things are introduced matters just as much as what they are.

One could go on. The point is that the way we live together now, the way we govern ourselves, the way we arrange our physical spaces and our commerce, the way we do economics and measure prosperity—all these have to be changed in creative ways if we want to achieve the goal of sustainable prosperity. All these changes require … wait for it … innovation. Innovations in the way we think, interact, and structure our lives require just as much imagination, intelligence, persistence, and funding as innovations in technology.

Consider this analogy: The best brain research and social science show that reason, emotion, instinct, and social context are all part of a seamless whole, human being. There is no separate faculty called “reason” that operates outside or above. The division between “reason and emotion” is spurious—there is no one without the other; they are part of the same process.

Similarly, technology is not a separate thing unto itself. Tools, like customs, laws, built spaces, and ecological processes, are part of a seamless whole of human society. Technology happens in a social context, is of a social context; it shapes and is shaped by the context. Innovating new tools is not an alternative to innovating new social arrangements, much less a substitute; it is part and parcel of the same process.

Bill Gates is right that we need more funding, support, and attention applied to energy technology. But if we truly seek to fashion a sustainable future, we need just as much applied to laws, regulations, infrastructure, economics, behaviors, and values. We need to innovate a new way of being in the world, not just new tools.

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