Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Ashley Braun

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Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: How food service turns a green school into an enviro hog

by Glenn Hurowitz

With
Congress and the White House considering spending scarce dollars to jump-start
employment, they’ll need to get the biggest jobs bang for the buck to give
Americans confidence that they’re spending our money wisely. Probably the biggest
jobs generator of all, and one of the least recognized, is investing in forest
and land restoration and sustainable management, with conservation, watershed
projects, and park investment coming close behind.

Heidi
Garrett-Peltier and Robert Pollin at The Political Economy and Research
Institute of the University of Massachusetts report the following numbers for
jobs created per dollar of investment.

To
summarize, reforestation and restoration outperforms even the second-most
jobs-intense activity analyzed by 74 percent, and conservation exceeds other
major jobs alternatives, including especially new highway construction, Wall
Street, and conventional energy sources like oil and nuclear.

See full jobs table here [pdf].

This
means that if the government is serious about creating jobs, it’s got to pass
clean energy and climate legislation and a new jobs bill that includes powerful
incentives for reforestation, revegetation, sustainable forest management, and
conservation.

This
legislation can perform the equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the
extremely popular New Deal program that put millions of people to work in
forestry and conservation.

Why
are forest investments such good job generators? Restoring forests (as well as rivers,
wetlands, peat bogs, and prairies), requires people, which means jobs: soil
scientists, tree planters, equipment operators, water engineers, and people to
nurture the trees over time.

Conservation—investing in, for instance, the expansion of National Parks and other local,
state, and federal recreation areas through, for instance, the Land and Water
Conservation Fund—isn’t too far behind. Some of the direct jobs in this
sector include park rangers, park transportation workers, and other park
personnel.

Relative
to other spending options, investments in forests and parks tend to go towards
wages rather than capital investments—providing the greatest benefit to
communities, especially in economically difficult times (since Nature largely
provides the materials that go into making a tree or a prairie grow for free,
you don’t need the same kind of capital as you do for, say, building a
highway).

The
actual jobs impact of forest investment is actually significantly greater than
what’s represented in the above table. A variety of other studies have analyzed
job creation through conservation and found dramatic indirect effects. Expand a
national park, national forest, river or local recreation area, and spending on
and employment in outdoor recreation—everything from birdwatching and hiking
to fishing and hunting – is dramatically increased.

A 2006 report for the Outdoor
Industry Association found that the availability of active outdoor
recreation generated $289 billion in retail sales and services across the
United States, with a total of 6.5 million jobs supported by the recreation
economy overall. Other reports focusing on roadless
areas, national
forests, and privately-owned forests have found similar results: the National
Alliance of Forest Owners [pdf] reports that every hundred acres of
privately owned forests supports eight jobs and the FAO reported last
year that investing in sustainable forestry management could create ten million
new, good-paying jobs worldwide. 

Of
course, jobs aren’t the only reason restoration and conservation are a good
idea: forests and other wildlands suck pollution out of the air, provide
wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities—allowing America to put
people back to work, and giving them somewhere beautiful to go when they’re
done.  

Olivier Jarda, a
policy associate at the Center for International Policy, assisted with the
research for this post.

 

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[UPDATED] While the big cats cower, time to build robust food economies

Messaging that can save the clean energy bill

by Eliot Coleman

Biodiversity in action: lettuces grow at Four Season Farm. Photo: Four Season Farm

This post was adapted from an address Coleman gave at this year’s Eco-Farm conference in California.

——————————-

When a friend told me of two of the proposed discussion topics for a major agricultural conference—“What is so radical about radical agriculture?” and “Is small the only beautiful?”—I told him that that I thought both questions had the same answer.  Let me see if I can explain.

The radical idea behind by organic agriculture is a change in focus.  The new focus is on the quality of the crops grown and their suitability for human nutrition.  That is a change from the more common focus on growing as much quantity as possible and using whatever chemical techniques contribute to increasing that quantity.

None of the non-chemical techniques associated with organic farming are radical or new.  Compost, crop rotations, green manures and so forth are age-old agricultural practices.  What is radical is the belief that these time-proven “natural” techniques produce food that is more nourishing for people and livestock than food grown with chemicals.  What is radical is successfully pursuing that “unscientific” belief against the counter-propaganda and huge commercial power of the agrochemical industry.

The initiators of this new focus were a few perceptive old farmers from the 1930s and ‘40s who had not been taken in by commercial pressures and saw clearly the flaws of chemical agriculture.  The popularizers of the new focus were the young idealists of the 1960s and 70s who were attracted to the idea of food production based on non-industrial systems, even though most of them had no previous connection to agriculture.

The effect of those new young minds entering agriculture defined the early days of organic farming in the US and thus also provides a context for the second question—“Is small the only beautiful?”  Small became beautiful because of the passion of the new generation of idealistic young farmers.  I was like most of them.  I had no farming background, no farmland, and very little money.  None of us would have been able to buy 500 acres in the Imperial Valley even if we had wanted to. So we ended up on a few acres of inexpensive, abandoned land because of economic reality rather than by conscious choice, and we started farming with compost and rototillers.  The flavorful produce we sold, plus our passionate belief in quality, established the connection between the words “small” and “beautiful” in the public mind.

Once our combined efforts succeeded in making “organic” popular, the real farmers, the large-scale professional farmers, became interested.  (We always knew we weren’t considered “real” farmers.)  For most of them, growing organically was a market decision as opposed to the deep passion for soil quality and food quality that had inspired us hippies.  Since the age old farming techniques had not been abandoned because they couldn’t work but because chemicals were promising miracles that they couldn’t deliver, the transition to organic farming was not difficult for the large farmers and they began selling “organic” produce.  But the “small is more beautiful” idea remains in the public mind, because the organic-buying public intuits that the large-scale farmers may have changed their agronomy but not their thinking; that their minds are still logically focused on how much they can produce rather than on how well it will nourish their customers.  I don’t think the public objects to scale (America is the land of large farms) but rather objects to organics by the numbers.  They don’t see the old-time hippie passion for quality produce or any innovative new soil fertility improvement ideas coming from the large farms.  They just see coloring between the lines according to the minimum standards that USDA certification requires.

From the point of view of this old hippie who carved his farm out of spruce and fir forest on the rocky Maine coast and had to learn everything about farming as he went along, I envy people who are able to farm on large expanses of flat naturally fertile soil and who have generations of farming experience behind them.  Because of the poor quality of the land on which I started 40 years ago it took the first ten years of removing rocks, and stumps, and creating fertility to give us the marvelous soil and ability to grow exceptional food that we have achieved and continue to maintain.  I often think of how much further all that effort could have gone had I grown up on a “real” farm but then I realize that if I had, it would have required an equal effort to change from the “quantity first” focus that has so characterized American agriculture to the new “quality first” focus established by the organic pioneers.
   
So if we go back to the two questions about what is “radical” and what is “beautiful” they come down to the same thing—the passion for quality food and sustainable systems that the new young farmers brought to American agriculture.  There is no reason that large farms, whatever path they may have been on, cannot learn to meet those standards if they understand that it is not the scale of the farm but the attitude of the farmer that the public is interested in.  I think if the large farmers used all their experience and natural advantages to try to lead food production along ever more nutritious and sustainable lines, they would have the respect that so many of them obviously feel they deserve.

But there is one other connection between the word “radical” and small farms that I need to mention.  The small organic farm greatly discomforts the corporate/industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet.  Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.  Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.  It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces.

An observer today cannot help noticing the continuation of a trend that started at the beginning of the industrial revolution, a trend away from autonomy and independence for human beings and towards manipulation, consolidation, and control by large corporate entities.  The early destruction of small farms in the 18th century drove the dispossessed peasants into the cities and a bleak existence in the “dark, satanic mills” as William Blake so aptly termed them.  The propaganda in favor of becoming larger, more industrial and more centralized is so subtly pervasive and so effective that the majority of people have little idea of what has been regimented into their lives.  Massive industrial conglomerates that look upon people as anonymous passive serfs, obedient cogs in a mechanistic world, now control far too many aspects of human existence.  Circuses and bread, bread and circuses are presented as diversions for the masses today as they were for the masses of Rome.  But it is worth noting that according to the historians, it was the Roman consolidation of land into ever-larger farms that ended up destroying Roman agriculture, and resulted in the lack of bread that led to Rome’s eventual demise.

So I’d like to suggest a foe of Rome’s power as the perfect figurehead for the small family farmer holding out indomitably against the economic forces trying to subjugate the whole planet.  Our hero’s name is ASTERIX, and he is an immensely popular French comic book character.  In France there is a natural connection between the persona of Asterix and the fight against all things corporate.

Asterix and his buddy Obelix live with other members of their self-reliant community in a fictional Gallic village in northwest Brittany.  Asterix and Obelix hunt wild boar together and Obelix makes “menhirs”, those prehistoric stone monuments that are scattered all over Brittany.  The year is 50 BC.  Rome has conquered all of Gaul.  Well, not quite all because this one little village of indomitable individuals is still resisting – still holding out against all the soldiers that an ever more frustrated Caesar sends against them in a vain attempt to complete his conquest.  The village cannot be defeated because of the super-human strength the villagers get from a magic herbal potion produced by the resident village druid.
The Asterix characters are the ideal metaphorical mascots for the small family farm:

First, Rome, to whose power the villagers refuse to submit obviously represents the bigger-is-better, all conquering corporate/ industrial mentality.
Second, just like these villagers, made invincible by their druid’s magic potion, we small farmers cannot be defeated because we too have a homemade magic potion. It is called compost and is the secret to the soil fertility that sustains us. Who can possibly defeat people who know that the world’s best fertilizer can be produced in quantity for free on their own farm from what grows thereabouts?
Third, like the menhirs that Obelix makes, we too create ageless monuments. They are our small farms, because, in the words of British farmer George Henderson, we leave the land far better than we found it.
And, best of all, we have ASTERIX himself, small and tough, possessed of a confidence in his own ability. Asterix perfectly embodies the small family farmer, independent and unconquerable on the land.

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by Tom Philpott

Collin Peterson, right: plowing over attempts to reign in greenhouse gas emissions.

House ag committee chair Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) spent much of last summer gutting the Waxman-Markey climate change bill. Before the legislative process started, Peterson and his allies had made sure that the legislation would place no cap on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. By the end of the process, he had turned Waxman-Markey into yet another goodie bag for agribusiness.

After performing this feat, with much bluster and rallying of the Blue dog troops, Peterson reluctantly voted for Waxman-Markey. Since then, he has vowed repeatedly to cram yet more goodies for agribusiness into the bill if it ever got to reconciliation.

Well, I guess that was Peterson’s defense strategy. Now that climate legislation is gasping its death rattle, the great champion of agribusiness is on the offensive. If he gets his way, the federal government will be unable to regulate greenhouse gases at all—and the globe will lurch inexorably into a future of climate chaos.  Peterson’s office announced Tuesday that …:

Today, U.S. Representative Collin Peterson joined House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) and Representative Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) in introducing legislation to prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, and to stop the EPA from harming the renewable fuels industry.

“I have no confidence that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without doing serious damage to our economy,” Peterson said. “Americans know we’re way too dependent on foreign oil and fossil fuels in this country – and I’ve worked hard to develop practical solutions to that problem – but Congress should be making these types of decisions, not unelected bureaucrats at the EPA.”

Peterson watchers will remember that the ag chairman nurses a vendetta against the EPA. Why? Because the agency once dared question the ecological value of corn ethanol—in Peterson’s world, tantamount to debunking the virgin birth at Christmas service in front of the faithful.

And that gets to the heart of Peterson’s jihad against any significant attempt to reign in greenhouse gas emissions. The fundamental issue is this: Carpeting the vast middle of the country in monocrops of corn is fundamentally unsustainable. The practice consumes massive fossil resources, destroys soil, contributes mightily to greenhouse gas emissions, and foul waterways. Unhappily, the agribusiness interests that Peterson champions rely on this practice for their financial sustainability. Companies across the agribusiness spectrum depend on it for their survival: from meat behemoths like Tyson, which need cheap corn to profitably churn out cheap meat; to grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland, which thrive by turning cheap corn into dubious products like ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup; to Monsanto, which dominates the corn-seed industry.

Any truly meaningful regime to reduce greenhouse gases—whether it’s cap and trade, a carbon tax, or EPA enforcement of the Clean Air Act—would by necessity push farmers to diversify away from corn and soy and reduce their dependence on agrichemicals. And that’s why, if you’re Collin Peterson, any serious attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must be opposed savagely, tooth and nail.

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Why you should go see ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’

by Nadia Herman Colburn

Now that the first month of the new year in the new decade has come to an end, a first month that has brought much to mourn and not much to celebrate,  I’ve been thinking again about hope. What some were calling “Hopenhagen,” did not, as we all know, and perhaps should have known from the start, provide much reason for real hope. Daily there are more reasons to be worried—not just about climate change, but about genetically modified foods, ever-increasing rates of cancer, a great wave of extinction, the death of the oceans, and a hundred other subheadings of the apocalypse. The word is out: things aren’t so good.

How, then, do I talk to my children—five and nine—about the state of the planet, about hope? The question is worth asking, and revisiting, not only for the sake of the children and the future they will both inherit and create, but also because thinking about things in ways that children can understand can open up a new clarity for ourselves, as well.

I recently hosted an afternoon of readings and discussions on the themes of poetry and ecology. Poets, scientists, and activists spoke about their work and about how different forms of imagination can help us reorient ourselves in the world. The room was filled to capacity and there were many families with young children; I felt proud to have gotten an intergenerational audience, until the final speaker’s remarks.

An eighty-two year old poet, anthropologist, and environmentalist, he began by saying that he was going to tell us the truth.  He had been hopeful, he said, for nearly eighty years.  Now, however, when he looks at the state of the world, he no longer believes that hope is possible.

I could see the heads of many in the audience nodding: yes, he’s spoken the unspeakable truth, we need to continue, yes, but without hope, with a bitter, existential realism; and part of me was nodding too. But another part of me cringed. I didn’t want my children to hear this message, and I felt bad that so many other children were in the room.

Was it naïve to have invited families? Is bringing children to an event on poetry and ecology now like bringing them to an event on sex trafficking? Last year a friend’s eight-year-old had trouble falling asleep for several months because he was worried that global warming would flood his city and his house and that everyone would drown. Nothing could reassure him. Was I going to be getting angry calls at one a.m. from friends who had brought their children—who would no longer sleep—to my event?

I didn’t get any of those calls, but the poet’s remarks about hope continued to unsettle me. In the weeks since, as I have watched my children play and move through their days, as I have seen them struggle and learn, it has become increasingly clear to me that the reasons a message of hopelessness is not good for children remind us what is wrong with it for adults as well.

It is, of course, not when things are going well, but in the face of adversity that hope is most important. Recently a close family friend died of cancer. My son was very upset. What I said to him is what I have come to believe: Giving up on hope is always wrong, even in the face of what we can calculate to be certain destruction, because it cuts us off from ourselves and our own humanity, privileging the head over the heart, the mind over the body.  In one sense, this is exactly what we humans have done in our interactions with the natural world (and it is partly because we have done this—because we have poisoned our waters and our land—that there is a cancer epidemic).  We have cut ourselves off from the rest of nature.  But reconnecting with that world is the key to a more sustainable future, just as reconnecting with our hearts is the key to a sustainable existence.

Children, or at least children who still get outside sometimes, intrinsically place themselves in relation to the world around them (another reason it’s so important that children do spend time in the natural world). My friend’s global warming-obsessed son was finally able to sleep again only after he read that scientists had predicted sea levels would rise about a meter in his lifetime, and therefore would not cover his own nose. This makes much less sense than the many ways in which his parents tried to reassure him that things would be all right. But it makes a kind of poetic sense: the boy was imagining his own body in relation to the natural world around him.

“Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words./ And never stops at all,” Emily Dickinson wrote in 1861, the first year of the Civil War. More than 600,000 young men would die in the next four years. For those young men and their families, as Dickinson well knew, hope must have been nearly silenced—and yet she imagines a bird perpetually singing.

Sometimes watching my children squabbling or running around our small apartment in the middle of winter, I feel like I am watching—and hearing—cackling crows or mangy city pigeons. But mostly, I feel like I am living with birds who cannot stop singing, who remind me that hope is an essential part of ourselves, and who remind me of the fullness of being alive.

 

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by Lester Brown

One of the leading challenges facing the international community is how to rescue failing states, those countries most at risk of collapse due to a combination of weak governance, internal violence, and social upheaval. Continuing with business as usual in international assistance programs is not working, as evidenced by the continuing deterioration of places like Haiti, Somalia, and Yemen. The stakes could not be higher. (See earlier discussion of failing states.)

If the number of failing states continues to increase, at some point this trend will translate into a failing global civilization. Somehow we must turn the tide of state decline.

Thus far the process of state failure has largely been a one-way street with few countries reversing the process. Among the few who have turned the tide are Liberia and Colombia.

Foreign Policy’s annual ranking of failing states showed Liberia ranking ninth on its 2005 list (based on data for 2004), with number one being the worst case. But after 14 years of cruel civil war that took 200,000 lives, things began to turn around in 2005 with the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an official at the World Bank, as president. A fierce effort to root out corruption and a multinational U.N. Peacekeeping Force of 15,000 troops who maintain the peace, repair roads, schools, and hospitals, and train police, have brought progress to this war-torn country. In 2009, Liberia had dropped to thirty-fourth on the list of failing states.

In Colombia, an improving economy—partly because of strong coffee prices and partly because the government is steadily gaining in legitimacy—has helped turn things around. Ranked fourteenth in 2005, Colombia in 2009 was forty-first on the Foreign Policy list. Neither Liberia nor Colombia are out of the woods yet, but both are moving in the right direction.

Failing states are a relatively new phenomenon, and they require a new response. The traditional project-based assistance program is no longer adequate. State failure is a systemic failure that requires a systemic response.

The United Kingdom and Norway have recognized that failing states need special attention and have each set up interagency funds to provide a response mechanism. Whether they are adequately addressing systemic state failure is not yet clear, but they do at least recognize the need to devise a specific institutional response.

In contrast, U.S. efforts to deal with weak and failing states are fragmented. Several U.S. government departments are involved, including State, Treasury, and Agriculture, to name a few. And within the State Department, several different offices are concerned with this issue. This lack of focus was recognized by the Hart-Rudman U.S. Commission on National Security in the Twenty-first Century: “Responsibility today for crisis prevention and response is dispersed in multiple AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and State bureaus, and among State’s Under Secretaries and the AID Administrator. In practice, therefore, no one is in charge.”

What is needed now is a new cabinet-level agency—a Department of Global Security (DGS)—that would fashion a coherent policy toward each weak and failing state. This recommendation, initially set forth in a report of the Commission on Weak States and U.S. National Security, recognizes that the threats to security are now coming less from military power and more from the trends that undermine states, such as rapid population growth, poverty, deteriorating environmental support systems, and spreading water shortages. The new agency would incorporate AID (now part of the State Department) and all the various foreign assistance programs that are currently in other government departments, thereby assuming responsibility for U.S. development assistance across the board. The State Department would provide diplomatic support for this new agency, helping in the overall effort to reverse the process of state failure.

The new Department of Global Security would be funded by shifting fiscal resources from the Department of Defense. In effect, the DGS budget would be the new defense budget. It would focus on the central sources of state failure by helping to stabilize population, restore environmental support systems, eradicate poverty, provide universal primary school education, and strengthen the rule of law through bolstering police forces, court systems, and, where needed, the military.

The DGS would deal with the production of and international trafficking in drugs. It would make such issues as debt relief and market access an integral part of U.S. policy. It would also provide a forum to coordinate domestic and foreign policy, ensuring that domestic policies, such as cotton export subsidies or subsidies to convert grain into fuel for cars, do not contribute to the failure of other countries. The department would provide a focus for the United States to help lead a growing international effort to reduce the number of failing states. This agency would also encourage private investment in failing states by providing loan guarantees to spur development.

As part of this effort the United States could rejuvenate the Peace Corps to assist with grassroots programs, including teaching in schools and helping to organize family planning, tree planting, and micro-lending programs. This program would involve young people while developing their sense of civic pride and social responsibility.

At a more senior level, the United States has a fast-growing reservoir of retired people who are highly skilled in such fields as management, accounting, law, education, and medicine and who are eager to be of use. Their talents could be mobilized through a voluntary Senior Service Corps. The enormous reservoir of management skills in this age group could be tapped to augment the skills so lacking in failing-state governments.

There are already, of course, a number of volunteer organizations that rely on the talents, energy, and enthusiasm of both U.S. young people and seniors, including the Peace Corps, Teach for America, and the Senior Corps. But conditions now require a more ambitious, systematic effort to tap this talent pool.

The world has quietly entered a new era, one where there is no national security without global security. We need to recognize this and to restructure and refocus our efforts to respond to this new reality.

 

For more information on addressing the root causes of state failure, such as stabilizing population and restoring the earth’s natural support systems, see the following excerpts from Plan B 4.0: “Educating Everyone,” “Stabilizing Population,” “Toward a Healthy Future,” and “Protecting and Restoring Forests.”

Adapted from Chapter 7, “Eradicating Poverty and Stabilizing Population” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

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by Cathryn Clarke Murray

Step it up! Small is the new big.The environmental movement is
divided over the importance of small steps—are they a critical starting point
or a distraction from needed policy and institutional changes? A journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step, but will small changes add up to the
kind of massive shift needed to bring us toward sustainability?

We say sweat the small stuff—but
not because small decisions add independently to big change. Rather, because
societal change isn’t just additive like stair-climbing, it’s transformative like metamorphosis, and
small actions play a crucial role. Practiced consistently, small steps
facilitate both gradual evolution and rapid revolution for positive lasting
change.

Of course institutional and policy
change is crucial, but it doesn’t happen on its own; it happens when people
fight for it, motivated by their values. And if structural change happens without support from people’s values,
then people resent it and resist or revolt. So it’s not a choice between small
stuff or large, it’s a question of how we can integrate the two to get value
change that also motivates broad action.

The abolitionist movement in England in the
1800s was bolstered by personal actions, such as hosts refusing to serve sugar.
Not only did this small step give participants, primarily women, a feeling of
virtue or self worth, but it became a way to demonstrate their values and
instigate dialogue about slavery with those in their inner circles. These
“small” actions empowered women and transformed them into activists who played
a pivotal momentum-building role in the fight against slavery. 

We propose a theory of change
focused on small steps and rooted in the powers of virtue, rationalization, and
participation.

We all have a deep-seated need to
feel virtuous in our circle of
friends and family. Not virtue à la chastity and sobriety, but deep confidence that we are worthy of respect from
those who matter. What counts as virtuous varies hugely across groups, but all
groups—even gangs—have their own notions of appropriate behavior and character.

Rationalization is a powerful force that helps people justify their
past actions according to their values. People hate to feel that they’ve wasted
effort, time, and money. Because of this, consistent repeated actions can
reinforce values (as long as they’re voluntary and not coerced): people seek to
rationalize their sunk costs as necessary for an important value. Once the two
of us started recycling consistently, we both found ourselves unconsciously
searching for additional reasons to continue, subsequently identifying
ourselves as people who go to lengths to reduce waste and even compost—that is,
committed environmentalists.

The circle closes with participation: daily conscientious
actions can cement a gradual shift in our deepest values. Kai’s grandparents
scrimped and saved as young parents during World War II. Every little bit
helped, so their frugality was reinforced and became an entrenched value.
“Waste not, want not,” was their mantra of daily action. Over the years they
became outspoken against society’s excesses and imbued these values in their
children. That’s the kind of tenacity and longevity the environmental movement
needs!

Rooted in this theory, three
approaches might inspire others to take small steps toward transformative
change.

First, let’s address people in a
way that makes them feel recognized as virtuous, with new opportunities to
practice their sustainable values. Environmental activists have long been
criticized for characterizing people as villains, which often engenders recoil.
A subset of anti-smoking advocates, in contrast, employed virtue brilliantly in
the early ‘80s with campaigns that featured cartoon heroes stamping out
smoking. Not only did these characters entrench in kids the virtue of fighting
smoking, it also armed them to pressure their parents. And what parent doesn’t
want to be thought of as virtuous by their children?

Second, let’s focus not only on
engaging the “public,” but also our closest friends and family on these issues
of value. We both squirmed under scrutiny from friends about factory-farmed
meat before we eliminated it from our diets. Our brave friends wielded their
compelling arguments in a way that left us feeling not like bad people, but
rather very good ones—too thoughtful to hold steadfastly to flawed arguments. After
fidgeting for a while, we finally recognized that we had not been living by our
core values and changed our diets.

Third, let’s embrace the notion of “cool” so that a person’s very sense of style can reinforce a commitment to
sustainability. Gas-electric hybrid cars can appeal to technology fans and
trend followers, but they can also inspire value change, giving drivers an
opportunity to feel virtuous and think of themselves as conscious consumers.
Revolution-promoting design can extend to T-shirts and shopping bags and
furniture, with stylish items serving as Trojan Horses for sustainability. Of course, sustainability will also require
that we model desirable lifestyles that don’t include driving and that limit consumption of new goods. The key is to
make these items and lifestyle choices attractive, not to preach about them.

The challenge before us as
environmentalists is immense. To succeed, we must realize that while small
stuff can seem trivial, it’s actually critical. People need to feel invested in a movement on a personal level before
they can embrace and advocate change on a societal level. Strung together with purpose, small steps can carry us great distance. 

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by Andrée Zaleska

I may soon end up walking the streets of Boston with a sandwich board and a tinfoil hat. I know you’ll all remember me fondly when that day comes, and stop to say hello and maybe buy me a sandwich. But in the meantime, with my wits still somewhat collected, I’m going to tell you about my present struggles with self-expression and what I think they mean.

I was lucky to find an old friend on Facebook recently, and then to have breakfast with him in Washingon D.C., where we were both attending conferences.  Eric and I spent a summer together in NIcaragua in the 80s, and now he’s a professor of physics at a reputable university, and I am someone who is building a zero-carbon house, with thick padded walls, and making it known to all and sundry that I think we’re likely headed for social collapse.  It was Eric who suggested that I wear the tinfoil hat. I challenged him to a debate on the subject. Here’s my part of our email exchange, which summarizes my answer to his question “Do you really believe that we’re in a state of collapse?”

“The short answer is, yes I do, but I’d like to elaborate a bit, because I can see that you fall into a category of people in my life (friends and family), who are worried that I’ve become ungrounded and perhaps apocalyptic.

With people as educated as you, I generally just say “consider the evidence”, and leave it at that. With those I feel don’t have the interest in doing so, I change the subject. But it’s become clear that I need to be able to back myself up with facts and figures and reliable professional opinions, so I’m practicing doing that. Bear with me.

The economic crisis of last year—in which I lost 1/3 of my money which was invested in the stock market, and that was nothing compared to what I saw happen to friends and neighbors—was a major milestone in this process. The fact that the government has bailed out large banks and corporations with taxpayer money reveals the inherent corruption of the government, as does the Supreme Court decision of last week. Obama, however much we may like him, seems utterly stymied by the power of the corporate interests in government. Better heads than I have declared that we are living in a failed state. This isn’t so unusual—governments and empires collapse all the time.

I know much more about climate change than I do about the economy though, and I find the evidence that our way of life is unsustainable to be incontrovertible there. I keep up with the science pretty well, and follow the work of James Hansen, NASA climatologist, very closely. His conclusion, after years of research on glacial melting, ice-core samples, temperature data, etc., is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 must be kept to 350 parts per million or less in order to preserve the planet as we know it. Anything more is going to lead to runaway warming due to feedback loops (those are the natural mechanisms that accelerate warming once it’s already underway, such as melting permafrost, which releases methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas). Runaway warming will lead to sea-level rise, ocean acidification, massive extinction (already happening), drought and catastrophic weather events, etc. Right now the CO2 is at 387 ppm, and the promises made at Copenhagen by the major emitters, to cut their emissons, are so weak that they will lead us to 770 ppm within this century. It would be arrogant to assume that we can both survive that, and continue our way of life at the same time.

I think I can safely challenge you, because I remember that you enjoy a good debate! So here’s what I would say to you, or anyone with your smarts: What makes you think we AREN’T in an early stage of collapse?”

I didn’t get a good answer to that question “What makes you think we AREN’T in an early stage of collapse?” and it didn’t surprise me much.  Eric’s response was that he thought it unlikely that things would go bad all at once—he felt that positive change could happen over the course of a century or so, without great upheaval in the process.  But while I had given a good deal of the evidence that I find persuasive, Eric’s reply was only a few sentences. I felt as though I was being patted on the head reassuringly.

Many, many conversations with friends and family have ended with me changing the subject, and I did it because I found I was making people uncomfortable. The people I upset are always educated. They include my father, a decorated and highly respected professor or molecular biology, who doesn’t like to see me get upset. They include my writing class, a group of journalists with multiple publication credits, one of whom said to me, angrily “I don’t know why you think that climate change is any worse than anything else!  I feel like I hear about this all the time in the news. There’s a lot of stuff being done, you know—wasn’t there just a big conference in Copenhagen?”  They include a good friend, reeling from a divorce and a year of unemployment and an ex with breast-cancer, who says “I know about this stuff, but I just can’t deal with it right now.” Who can?

I prowl the internet for writing by psych professionals, or anyone really, on the emotional and spiritual effects of living with the threat of cataclysm.  What can we expect to see as typical reactions as the crisis progresses? What are the historical precedents?  How can people work, love and parent under these circumstances? Until about two years ago, I could find almost nothing written on this subject, and I felt isolated and fearful of my own mental health.

I”m a little embarassed to be talking about my communication problems with family and friends, but I’m doing it because I think it’s important to remember that the personal IS political. We are all involved in creating the story of our culture, and that story can be so powerful that it obscures the evident truth. The story of this culture, that we have all been steeped in for our whole lives, is that we are entitled to thrive, prosper and grow. Growth is in fact necessary for our well-being, for our powerful status in the world, and for our capacity to help the less fortunate. Many in this country believe that American prosperity and leadership is mandated by God. To suggest that all this success we have achieved and will achieve and seem destined to achieve, is actually failure, and will soon implode, is to contradict the story of our culture. But we can only change the story if we tell new ones.

This is an American story, and a conversation with almost any immigrant will turn it on its head. Most of the world’s poor already live in a state that we would call collapse. And even prosperous Europeans remember the Second World War in their homelands, and the countries formerly known as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and know that such disasters are possible.

I recently came across the work of Dmitriy Orlov, a Russian-American who saw the Soviet Union collapse up close, and has lived in the US for many years. His work compares the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the present US economic crisis, factoring in climate change and peak oil, as well as other resource depletion. It is particularly compelling to me because I witnessed the Soviet collapse from a closer vantage point than this—I was living in Czechoslovakia in the 1990s, in a post-communist society rebuilding itself to look more like ours.

Here’s an excerpt from Orlov’s essay “Thriving in an Age of Collapse”

“An economy collapses one person, one family, one community at a time.  First the dreams evaporate: the future starts looking worse than the present, and ever more uncertain. Then people are forced to withstand ever greater indignities and privations, which they tend to accept as their personal failings. The resulting stress causes them to experience a variety of physical and psychological symptoms. Our pride, our habits and expectations, and our unwillingness to adapt can kill us faster than any physical hardship. But eventually something has to give, and even if life does not get any easier, one morning we wake up, and not only has life all around us been transformed all out of recognition, but everyone we encounter recognizes that times have changed.  And we realize that none of this is about us personally, and feel better.”

“An economy collapses one person, one family, one community at a time.” Does this seem right? Can you picture unemployed friends? Whole communities losing homes to foreclosure? Families taken down by health-care costs? Detroit, maybe? Dmitriy Orlov’s writing struck me with the force of plain-spoken truth, based on what I know of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, what I know about the US economy at this time, what I know about the implications of climate change, and what I see around me. His story, which is about surviving, and even thriving, through collapse, is the one that compels me now.

 I am talking about the difficulty of expressing the truth—or what I think is the truth—about how imperilled our country and our world is right now.  The news is unwelcome, it makes for deadened conversations, it furrows brows and it irks people. Responses to the bad news on the environment and the economy range from denial to rage to hopelessness. Many good folks do not think about this stuff, or change their lives in accordance with the new reality, because they have no idea what to do in the face of cataclysm. 

I have found solace in the words of Dmitriy Orlov and many others, and there are two reasons for this. One is that the voices of truth relieve our anxiety that the liars are right and we are crazy.  The truth, however awful, is safe and real. The other reason we can embrace the truth is that it allows us to move past denial into action.  I know that this is almost a cliche now, but I have found it a huge relief in my life to contemplate the reality of a world without cars, of local gardens and revived community and useless television sets. We may have to spend much of our energy finding food and water, maintaining our homes and taking care of our families; we may have to school our own children, tend to the ill without hospitals, and bury our own dead. But it’s our spiritual work to take this on now, to prepare, and that begins with acknowledging the truth.

But, as Orlov says, wryly, “Your participation in this program is optional.”

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by Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

In a bald attempt to defend coal industry profits, Rep. Earl Pomeroy
(D-N.D.) has joined a predominantly Republican push to overrule the
Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse
gases are dangerous pollutants. Earlier this month, Pomeroy introduced
the Save Our Energy Jobs Act (H.R. 4396),
which would rewrite the Clean Air Act so that “[t]he term ‘air
pollutant’ shall not include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide,
hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride.”
Pomeroy’s justification for flouting the reality of the global warming
threat is the need to defend the coal, oil, and gas industries:

This action could result in significantly raising local energy prices and endanger the 28,000 direct and indirect jobs
that are connected to North Dakota’s coal industry, not to mention
thousands of jobs connected to our manufacturing and expanding oil and
gas industries.

Pomeroy’s claim that “regulations to address global climate change
must only be enacted at the direction of Congress” is specious,
considering that he voted against the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, which did exactly that.

This is nothing new. North Dakota’s coal industry successfully blocked the state legislature from taking action on global warming pollution in 1995, by noting that
it would make wind power more cost-effective than coal. Sen. Byron
Dorgan (D-N.D.), while extolling North Dakota’s wind power potential, has
decided to side with coal when it comes to actual climate policy decisions, though he has not
taken the extreme step of embracing Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska)
resolution to overturn the greenhouse gas endangerment finding, as
Democrats Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), and Blanche
Lincoln (D-Ark.) have.

North Dakota’s allegiance to coal has delivered low-price
electricity, but at great cost. North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power
plant, the Great River Energy Coal Creek Station, is one of the
nation’s most polluting plants, spewing over 800 pounds of mercury, 24,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, four million pounds of coal waste, and a staggering 10 million tons of carbon dioxide every year.

North Dakota’s climate is beginning to spiral out of control.
In the last twenty years, Red River floods expected to occur at Fargo
only once every 10 years have happened every two to three years.
2009’s unprecedented flooding made it the third year in a row with at least a “ten-year flood.” Pomeroy has two children—whose
future he is putting at grave risk, all for the sake of donors like
American Crystal Sugar ($99,025), whose facilities rely on coal plants, and the electric utilities who have given him $210,860.

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EPA capitulates on ethanol, hearts clean coal

by Jonathan Hiskes

Dirty energy lobbyists long ago mastered the art of lobbying on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by their copious government subsidies. Now clean energy companies are playing catch-up. Jim Snyder at The Hill reports on executives flying in to Washington to learn about the happy ways of our capital:

The executives mostly represent clean-energy companies and hail from states from Alaska to Florida. Some companies, like Dow Chemical and Florida Power & Light, are well-known and active in Washington. Mostly, though, the executives come from smaller companies like Biomass Gas & Electric in Florida, Midwest Sustainable Energy Contractors in Illinois, Carbon Green in Michigan, and Algae-Aquaculture Technologies in Montana, according to a draft list of participants

They’ll be briefed on lobbying and media strategy, meeting with Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and, of course, a former House member who is now a lobbyist, James Walsh.

I suppose this should be encouraging news—the sooner these growing industries build their clout in Washington, the better. Clean energy attracts more new private-sector funding than dirty energy does, but members of Congress don’t give the sector its due.  Instead, they spend their weekends frolicking in South Beach with oil industry reps.

Oh, and here’s what the clean energy companies are up against, from Greenwire ($ub req’d.):

Oil and gas companies spent at least $154 million on lobbying last year, potentially besting a field of rivals battling to shape climate and energy policies and setting a new record for the industry.

Influence efforts by the oil and gas sector grew at least 16 percent in 2009 from the $132 million spent in 2008, according to an early analysis of new lobbying disclosures by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The total reflects spending for the first nine months of 2009 plus 80 percent of reports filed for the past three months.

The electric utility industry, meanwhile, spent at least $134.7 million on lobbying last year. Combined, the two traditional energy sectors paid out nearly 10 times the $29 million that alternative energy companies allocated for lobbying efforts.

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Why senators don’t see the clean energy boom

by Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget would cut $2.28 billion in coal
subsidies over the next decade. These $228 million-a-year cuts are
dwarfed by the $545 million-a-year subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration technology, which Obama insists on calling “clean coal technology.”
How are Kentucky lawmakers responding to this effective doubling of
subsidies for the coal industry? By using Orwellian language—“coal”
becomes “domestic energy production”—to defend the existing subsidies and attack Obama for destroying jobs.

Rep. Ben Chandler (D-Ky.), who has received $91,042 from oil and coal interests.

We’ll have to examine the new budget proposal we received this morning, but we are very concerned about any possible impact this repeal could have on Kentucky jobs.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), who has received $691,565 from oil and coal interests:

The president can’t have it both ways. You can’t seek to
end our dependence on foreign oil and get America working, while at the
same time imposing policies that harm domestic energy production and
kill jobs. This is just another politically motivated assault that
takes dead aim at coal, severely limiting coal companies in their ability to create jobs and keep production lines open. Worst of all, it hurts Appalachia’s
hardworking coal mining families at a time when the commonwealth faces
over 10.7 percent unemployment.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), who has received $782,449 from oil and coal interests.

These new taxes will mean less domestic energy production,
a substantial increase in the price of power for American homes and
businesses, less revenue, as well as jeopardizing thousands of jobs. I
would encourage the administration to refocus their attention on
funding clean coal technologies, along with the commercial deployment
of advanced technologies that are necessary to ensure the United States
has clean, reliable, and affordable energy.

To be fair, Rep. Chandler is in a completely different category of
politician from Rogers and Bunning, who have received hundreds of
thousands of dollars more cash from the industry. For example, Chandler
is one of the leading coal-state politicians who publicly recognizes
the destructive nature of mountaintop removal:

Mountaintop removal can be a destructive process that damages our communities, our land, and our water. Today’s agreement between the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Army Corps of Engineers to further regulate the practice is a step in the right direction. Starting today, federal agencies will review each individual mountaintop removal permit request, further investigate the practice, and expand community involvement. These actions will help eliminate shortcuts, provide greater transparency, and ensure proper regulatory scrutiny.

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by Tom Laskawy

Admittedly, no one thinks clean coal is oxymoronic and misleading more than I do. That said, we do appear to be hell bent on funding carbon capture and sequestration systems for coal-fired power plants. The real problem with CCS, of course, isn’t so much the capture part as the sequestration part. What do you do with all that carbon that you’re pulling out during coal combustion. The main technologies under consideration involve pulling the carbon out of the exhaust gases, then liquifying it and injecting it underground. That last part is a technology originally developed by the oil industry for keeping dying oil wells productive (the carbon dioxide forces more oil out of the ground). Cost aside, the problems with applying that technique are pretty obvious—every coal-fired power plant would need to be sited somewhere near an appropriate storage location or we’d need to build a network of tubes to shift the liquified CO2 around. That, as Winnie-the-Pooh would say, is not a good plan.

So, if President Obama is going to insist on shoveling money into CCS research, I recommend he have Energy Secretary Chu get in touch with these folks. Via Science Magazine ($ub req):

If international agreements can’t slash carbon dioxide emissions fast enough to tame global warming, how about sucking it out of the air? Technology using chemicals that bind CO2 already exists, but it’s so expensive that using it on a large scale could increase energy demand—and the cost of energy—by at least one-third.

… However, researchers in the Netherlands report a new copper-based catalyst that can capture CO2, convert it to a different form, and then release it with a small fraction of the energy other techniques require. “This is an important fundamental advance,” says William Tolman, an inorganic chemist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “But there’s a long way to go before you could turn it into a catalytic process” for reducing atmospheric CO2, he adds.

Sure, sure, it’s not ready for industrial applications—but still very promising. The article seems to be talking in terms of a free-standing method for pulling carbon out of the air, but it strikes me as an ideal solution to the S part of CCS. The researchers converted that carbon to an oxalate, which is the building block of various chemicals, from wood alcohol to antifreeze. The important aspect here is that you want to fix that carbon in some permanent manner—not reuse it as fuel or something, which would release it right back into the atmosphere. By turning the carbon into a solid or room temperature liquid, you make storage that much easier. If I had to choose a path of research to throw a billion or two at, this would be it.

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Alabama dump taking TVA’s spilled coal ash declares bankruptcy

by Sue Sturgis

The landfill in Perry County, Ala. that has been taking coal ash
spilled from the failed waste pond at Tennessee Valley Authority’s
Kingston plant has declared bankruptcy—a move that leaves a planned
lawsuit to halt the dumping up in the air.

Arrowhead Landfill owner Perry-Uniontown Ventures I LLC, also known as
Perry County Associates, filed for bankruptcy last week in Mobile,
Ala., the Selma Times-Journal reports:

In court documents filed with the bankruptcy petition, Perry-Uniontown Ventures I LLC claimed two other operations, Phillips & Jordan Inc. and Phill-Con Services have withheld money paid by the TVA for accepting coal ash at the landfill located near Uniontown.

The complaint also asked for an accounting, indicating PUV did not know where the money paid by TVA for the disposal went.

Perry-Uniontown Ventures I LLC claims its three largest creditors are P&J for $3.9 million, the Perry County Commission for $779,837 and the Alabama Department of Revenue for $11,000 in sales tax.

TVA and its disposal contractor say the bankruptcy filing won’t stop ash shipments to the facility.
However, the filing automatically brings a halt to a planned lawsuit
aimed at stopping the dumping, since no new litigation can be brought
against entities in bankruptcy proceedings.

The coal ash is
currently being shipped by rail from the spill site in eastern
Tennessee’s Roane County, with more than 1 million tons received to
date. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is overseeing the
disposal, expects 3 million of the 5 million cubic yards of ash spilled
from the TVA plant to end up at the Perry County dump. The deal was
among the reasons cited by environmental justice advocates calling for an investigation into the EPA’s treatment of black communities in the South.

Some residents of Perry County—a majority African-American Black Belt community where more than 30 percent of residents live below the poverty line—were planning to file a federal lawsuit against the facility.

David
A. Ludder, an environmental attorney in Florida who has been working
with about 150 Perry County residents, submitted notices of intent to
sue to the landfill’s owners in December. The notices allege violations
of the federal Solid Waste Disposal Act and the Clean Air Act, the
Perry County Herald reports. Ludder said he’s now examining their options.

Among
those who have accused the landfill of not operating safely is
Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen, who says he’s discovered the
operators dumping liquid waste into ditches along the road in front of
people’s homes, the Locust Fork News-Journal reports. Nearby residents—some who live literally a stone’s throw from the dump—have also complained of foul odors.

Proponents
of the dumping plan have argued that it would bring jobs to the area as
well as a much-needed economic boost to the impoverished county’s
coffers. Under the dumping deal, Perry County is supposed to get $1.05
for each ton of ash delivered.

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by Tom Philpott

Food, Inc., Robert Kenner’s hard-hitting exposé of the food industry, has snagged a Academy Award nomination in the “best documentary” category. (Full list of nominess here; Food Inc. is up against another food politics-themed film, The Cove.) This is a significant development. I know people in the food world who have taken a blase approach to Food Inc.–there’s “nothing in it I didn’t already know,” they grumble.

That may be largely true of people immersed in food politics—but you have to give Kenner and crew credit for breaking the pink slime/ammonia burger story long before the mainstream media caught on.

And consider the film’s effect on folks outside of the tiny food-politics bubble. I was on an airplane last week, and the woman sitting next to me noted my reading material (Janet Poppendieck’s Free for All: Fixing School Food in America), and struck up a conversation. Before long, she was revealing how seeing Food Inc. inspired her to give up fast food and cut way down on what she called “mystery” (i.e, factory-farmed) meat.

The film seems to have a powerful effect on people—and winning an Oscar would boost its viewership. Of course, we shouldn’t out too much stock in the power of the “best documentary” nod to get a message out. I remember how much hope there was around An Inconvenient Truth’s Oscar bid a few years ago. The film ended up winning—and Al Gore scored a Nobel, too—but the U.S. public remains generally apathetic about climate change. Turns out that powerful industries with tons of marketing cash, and friends in Washington and at certain media outlets, trump Oscar in the court of public opinion.

Speaking of Foxes, as a huge fan of Fantastic Mr. Fox, I guess I should be celebrating its nomination in the “best animated film” category. (It also got one for “best original score.”) But I have to say, I’m bitter that it got stiffed on “best picture” (now featuring ten nominees) and best adapted screenplay, a collaboration between director Wes Anderson and the wonderful Noah Baumbach.

A grown man pushing for a cartoon to be recognized as cinema might seem strange; but I am not alone. No less an authority than The Nation’s excellent film critic Stuart Klawans declared it the “best American film of 2009.” Klawans goes on to describe Mr. Fox as the….

… most droll, inventive and visually delightful of the year’s movies, the one with the quickest wit and furriest puppets, the only one to make you proud of your place in the vast Darwinian diversity (and appropriately humble about it, too).

Take that, Hollywood pinheads who failed to promote this remarkably accessible film, opening it in too-few theaters and axing it from those theaters too quickly; and a pox on the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the academy, who shunted it mindlessly into the animation corner of the Oscars when it deserved better. Like Public Enemy said 15 years ago…

Below, trailers of Food Inc. and Mr. Fox:

 

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by Tyler Falk

During Monday’s YouTube Q&A session, President Obama was asked why he supports “clean coal” and nuclear power at the expense of cleaner forms of energy.

A group of young activists from the Energy Action Coalition posed this question: “President Obama, record numbers of young people elected you in support of a clean energy future. If money is tight, why do you propose wasting billions in expensive nuclear, dirty coal, and offshore drilling? We need to ramp up efficiency, wind, and solar that are all economically sustainable and create clean and safe jobs for our generation.”

Obama’s response, in short: Clean energy is great, but it won’t yet meet our energy demands, and coal isn’t going away anytime soon, so we need to make it cleaner.  Here’s the full text (and you can watch it in the video below at 31:40):

Well, you’re not going to get any argument from me about the need to
create clean energy jobs. I think this is going to be the driver of our
economy over the long term. And that’s why we put in record amounts of
money for solar and wind and biodiesel and all the other alternative
clean energy sources that are out there.

So I know that there’s some skepticism about whether there is such a
thing as clean coal technology. What is true is right now that we don’t
have all the technology to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from
coal-fired power plants, but the technology is close and it makes sense
for us to make that investment now, not only because it will be good
for America but it will also ultimately be good internationally. We can
license and export that technology in ways that help other countries
use a better form of energy that’s going to be helpful to the climate
change issue.

In the meantime, though, unfortunately, no matter how fast we ramp
up those energy sources, we’re still going to have enormous energy
needs that will be unmet by alternative energy.

And the question then is, where will that come from?

Nuclear energy has the advantage of not emitting greenhouse gases.
For those who are concerned about climate change, we have to recognize
that countries like Japan and France and others have been much more
aggressive in their nuclear industry and much more successful in having
that a larger part of their portfolio, without incident, without
accidents. We’re mindful of the concerns about storage, of spent fuel,
and concerns about security, but we still think it’s the right thing to
do if we’re serious about dealing with climate change.

With respect to clean coal technology, it is not possible at this
point to completely eliminate coal from the menu of our energy options.
And if we are ever going to deal with climate change in a serious way,
where we know China and India are going to be greatly reliant on coal,
we’ve got to start developing clean coal technologies that can
sequester the harmful emissions, because otherwise—countries like
China and India are not going to stop using coal—we’ll still have
those same problems but we won’t have the technology to make sure that
it doesn’t harm the environment over the long term.

Obama addressed energy again during a “good idea/bad idea” portion of the session, in which he gave short responses to proposed ideas. The question was: “Do you think it would be worth looking at placing solar panels in all federal, state, and school buildings as a way to cut energy costs and put that budget money to better use?”

Obama’s response [14:59]:

Good idea. And we want to do everything we can to encourage clean
energy. And I have instructed the Department of Energy to make sure
that our federal operations are employing the best possible clean
energy technology, alternative energy technology. And what we’re seeing
is more and more companies realize this is a win-win for them. Not only
is what they’re doing environmentally sound, but it also over the long
term saves money for them.

Watch the whole YouTube session:

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by Sean Casten

Bill Gates has written on his blog that we need “innovation, not just insulation” in order to reduce CO2 to manageable levels. His motivation is robust, but his thinking is … far from clear. Because he’s Bill Gates, this is sure to attract attention, but even if he weren’t, this is worth talking about. It illustrates the deep misunderstandings that most of us have about the energy sector, the possibilities for reform, and—at a much larger level—how our economy works.

What Gates gets right

Let’s start with his core thesis: Gates argues that while we might get to 30% CO2 reduction by 2020 with lots of efficiency and small-scale tweaks to the system, the long-term goal of 80% reduction by 2050 is going to be much harder—indeed, impossible without massive changes in the way we use energy, the types of energy we use, and the technologies we use for energy conversion. Ergo, we need to focus our efforts on large-scale innovation in zero-carbon technologies.

At an abstract level, this is an important point worth screaming from the rooftops. No one should define success solely by our ability to meet intermediate goals. Passing CO2 legislation is a critical first step. Hitting 2020 targets is a key second step. But neither of those steps matter if we fail on the long-term objective. This approach to long-term planning was ubiquitous amongst political leaders in an earlier era (George Marshall, anyone?) but sadly absent today. My God, do we need more of that.

What Gates gets wrong

Unfortunately, having spotted a problem, he gets the diagnosis wrong, in ways that are far too common among damned near every Serious Person who thinks about our energy system but doesn’t live in its trenches. It’s too flat for me to ski anywhere near my home in Chicago—but I’m not foolish enough to spend my weekends hauling dirt. Similarly, the lack of innovation in our energy sector doesn’t necessarily imply that the solution is simply to do more innovating. Rather, we have to start by asking a deeper question: why is this industry so devoid of entrepreneurial creativity? Solve that question and the innovation will follow. Avoid that question and we’re molding mountains in Milwaukee.

Gates is guilty of nothing more than a common habit of mind: We see the way that hard work, entrepreneurship, and innovation drive large-scale, socially beneficial change (especially in consumer electronics) and conclude that this recipe must apply to other industries. Ten years ago, I didn’t own a cell phone, but today I have a Blackberry. Meanwhile, that coal plant down the road is 60 years old and competitive. Can’t we just innovate to make it obsolete?

Yes and no.

Yes, the industry is devoid of real innovation. Write a list of the great technological and entrepreneurial leaders in the energy industry and you’re likely to end up with a list of cadavers. Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse … great men all, and all dead. Where are the Bill Gates, Michael Dells, and Fred Smiths of this industry? Where is the “killer app” of the last 30 years? How much greater would our lives be if this industry attracted the innovation we’ve come to take for granted in the rest of our economy?

But no, the solution to this is not to throw money at innovation. Rather, it is to understand why smart, ambitious, innovative entrepreneurs have consistently elected to pursue career paths in other industries. The Atlantic recently asked whether CEOs matter and noted that some industries (like Mr. Gates’) depend hugely on their CEOs while others (like electric utilities) don’t, because in the former case the CEO is “unconstrained” while in the latter case they are no more than “titular figureheads.” Now suppose that you are an ambitious entrepreneur, seeking to change the world. Would you rather be unconstrained or a titular figurehead? Is it any surprise that innovation is absent in such a industry?

This, at core, is why efficiency matters—and why it’s so troubling to hear Mr. Gates to write off energy efficiency with lines like “you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero.”

Of course you can’t. But there are two huge holes in that statement. First, it assumes that efficiency is simply about how people use energy rather than how we generate useful energy. When our electric sector is only 1/2 as fuel efficient today as it was in 1910, generation efficiency is key. You may not be able to insulate your way to zero, but you can make up at least half the ground between here and zero simply by deciding to stop throwing fuel away.

The second point is more critical: we have piles of efficient, profitable technologies that aren’t being deployed today, for a host of reasons ranging from utility regulation to environmental permitting rules—all of which may have been appropriate for an earlier era but are hopelessly obsolete today.

Given that reality, what would it mean if we innovated some great new technology? That’s easy—we’d simply throw another technology on a line of undeployed (but otherwise really cool) technologies.

That’s a hard pill to swallow. It flies in the face of our perceptions about the efficiency of our economy, and it flies in the experience of leaders like Gates who have spent their careers in rapidly changing, competitive, relatively low barrier-to-entry industries where the kind of stasis seen in the energy sector would drive you to obsolesence, then bankruptcy. But the discomfort of the reality has to be confronted. Like it or not, we are generating and distributing power with the equivalent of a 1980 Wang computer. And while an Intel 386 chip with Office 1995 isn’t the end goal, understanding and removing the barriers to deploying that particular technology is a prerequisite for all that follows.

In short, energy efficiency is the canary in the coal mine. Once we remove the barriers to innovation in the energy sector, we’ll see a flood of efficiency, a flood of sexy CEOs (pick me!), and a flood of those new technologies. But the cart can’t lead the horse.

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by David Roberts

This morning, Recurrent Energy will announce that it has signed a power purchase agreement with Southern California Edison (SCE) for 50MW of solar. This might not seem like a big deal—California utilities seem to sign solar agreements every week these days—but there’s something special about this one.

Recurrent’s power will not come from a single large-scale solar power plant out in the desert but from three small-scale solar PV projects, one 6MW and two 22MW installations in Kern and San Bernadino counties, which it will own and operate. In other words, Recurrent is selling distributed solar power, but in quantities that matter, at a price that’s competitive. That bodes well for the future of distributed energy (about which, regular readers know, I am very geeked).

Recurrent Energy

Because it is building small- to mid-size solar arrays, Recurrent has a number of advantages over power companies building large central plants:

It’s easier to find land, because solar panels are modular (they can be scaled to any size/shape of land parcel) and they are quiet and non-polluting (they can be located next to homes and offices).
For the same reasons, distributed solar doesn’t require environmentally sensitive land; it can be placed on already developed land or industrial rooftops. That makes for a much easier and faster permitting process.
Distributed solar doesn’t require new transmission, since it can be located next to existing lines. There’s no waiting for transmission permits or construction. Interconnection to the grid can happen almost immediately, and some of the value of avoided transmission can be built into the power price.
Because it avoids many permitting and interconnection hassles, Recurrent can build projects faster, in the range of two to three years. (The SCE projects will go online in 2013.)
Because it has many smaller investments rather than one big one, Recurrent is more able to adapt to delays or setbacks at individual projects.
Because it has a steady stream of new projects rather than one every 5-10 years, it is better positioned to take advantage of iterations in technology. (And solar panel prices are descending quickly.)

This is not to unduly valorize Recurrent but simply to point out that the benefits it enjoys by focusing on distributed energy are the very benefits society accrues from distributed energy: more flexibility, resilience, and iterative speed. Most importantly, Recurrent is proof of concept that distributed projects can be aggregated into large-scale power purchase agreements. Distributed energy is now a viable market option.

I talked with Recurrent CEO Arno Harris—an energy geek himself, with his own blog—and he says the company has around 1 GW of projects in the pipeline. Let’s see how fast they come online relative to, say, their nuclear and “clean coal” competitors, or even their large-scale solar thermal competitors.

In fact, I’ll make a bet: the U.S. will see its next GW of distributed power before it sees its next GW of central-plant power. Any takers?

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by Agence France-Presse

PARIS—Fifty-five nations including the world’s top carbon polluters have registered their commitments to combat global warming, the U.N. climate chief said late Monday. The pledges from both industrialized and developing countries for cutting greenhouse gases up to 2020 cover nearly 80 percent of total emissions, and provide a much-needed boost to December’s Copenhagen Accord.

“This represents an important invigoration of the U.N. climate change talks,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “The commitment to confront climate change at the highest level is beyond doubt,” he said in a statement Monday night.

But more than a month after the nearly scuttled climate deal, rich nations have yet to say when and how they will deliver emergency funds to help poor countries begin to green their economies and cope with climate impacts. $30 billion in so-called “fast start” financing is meant to cover the period 2010 to 2012.

Also missing for now is the list of countries that have chosen to “associate” themselves with the controversial Copenhagen Accord, which fell well short of the binding and comprehensive climate treaty once hoped for.

The U.N. climate forum shepherding the talks simply “took note” of its provisions after a handful of countries refused to back it in December.

The UNFCCC’s 194 member nations were later invited to endorse the deal by Jan. 31, and to list the actions they plan for reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. It is still not known how many countries have opted to formally back the accord.

On the action plans, there were no surprises. The United States, the European Union, Japan, and other rich nations all renewed pledges made in the run-up to the climate summit. Rapidly developing countries led by China, India, Brazil, and South Africa also reiterated voluntary national plans for curbing the carbon intensity of their economies.

But registering the commitments was widely seen as a critical step in jump-starting the troubled negotiations.

“The machine has been forcefully set in motion, it’s going to put some new wind in our sails,” said French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo.

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy on climate change, said that the United States was “pleased” to be among 55 nations representing nearly 80 percent of emissions that met Sunday’s deadline to submit plans to the United Nations. “In supporting the accord, we are taking an important step in the global effort to combat climate change,” he said. Stern urged holdouts—largely smaller nations—to come forward and submit plans to the UNFCCC.

The Copenhagen Accord calls for limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), the threshold for dangerous impacts such as increased floods, drought, and extreme weather, according to scientists.

“This is the first time that countries have ever committed to this goal. That’s the good news,” said Alden Meyer, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “The bad news, of course, is that the pledges that have been put on the table to date don’t put us on track to meet that goal, and would make it very difficult—both economically and politically—after 2020 to catch up.”

The accord also commits developed countries to paying out $10 billion per year to developing nations over the next three years, to be ramped up to $100 billion annually by 2020.

“But it remains far from clear where the funding will come from, if it is genuinely new and additional, and how it will be allocated,” said Saleemul Huq, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

Many of the poor nations most vulnerable to climate change complained of being sidelined in Copenhagen, and delays in providing the financing could increase tensions as talks proceed.

Japan has taken the lead in promising some $15 billion over the next three years, while the European Union has said it will stump up $10 billion. The United States has yet to announce what share of the $30 billion it will shoulder, but analysts say it is likely to be substantially less, in the $3.5 to $4.5 billion range.

But so far none of this money has materialized.

“Looking at past experience of overseas development aid and climate funding, it may take several years to disburse even the ‘fast-start’ finance promised for 2010 to 2012,” Huq said.

Borloo agreed that it would take some time to get the wheels turning. “All the mechanisms have yet to be invented,” he said of the $30 billion fund. “Simple bilateral aid is out of the question. We have to invent a new partnership and establish the fast-start modalities.”

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by David Roberts

The Obama administration released its 2011 budget proposal today and the internets are choked with stories about it. The four biggest green stories are EPA funding,  fossil-fuel defunding, nuke and clean energy spending, and the cap-and-trade placeholder.

EPA regs are funded

The EPA’s budget (PDF), which jumped up by 34 percent least year, will decline slightly from $10.3 to $10.2 billion. More notably, it contains $21 million to implement the Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule and $43 million to implement regulations on greenhouse gas emissions:

Requested funds include $25 million to aid States in permitting activities for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the New Source Review, and Title V operating permits programs. The Budget also requests $7 million to develop New Source Performance Standards to control GHG emissions from a few categories of major stationary sources. The Budget requests an increase of $6 million to support regulatory programs to reduce GHG emissions from mobile sources. These initiatives will help the United States meet its target for emissions reductions.

The message to Congress—particularly Dirty Air Act sponsors Murkowski et al.—is that the administration still intends to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress doesn’t legislate.

Fossil fuels lose out

The proposed budget “plans to do away with $36.5 billion in tax breaks to the oil and natural gas industry and $2.3 billion for the coal sector between 2011-2020.” Note that fossil fuels get $70.2 billion a year in subsidies—and that excludes implicit subsidies like unpriced carbon and military spending—so this is the tip of the iceberg. Of course, modest efforts to remove fossil-fuel subsidies are inevitably portrayed by fossil shills as “raising taxes,” and such efforts have failed in Congress many times before, so this one gets filed under, uh, aspirational.

Nuke and clean energy funding

To the naked eye it looks like nuclear energy wins out here:

The Budget substantially expands support for construction of new nuclear power plants by increasing the Department of Energy loan guarantees authority for such projects by $36 billion, to a total of $54.5 billion, and provides credit subsidy funding of $500 million to support $3 to $5 billion of loan guarantees for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

But it’s worth unpacking this. As OMB chief Peter Orszag emphasized in a briefing call this morning, the nuclear loan guarantees are meant to be fully repaid, while the renewable energy and energy efficiency money contains $500 million in credit subsidy. So there’s more direct spending on clean energy.

That’s with one big caveat, of course: that the nuclear industry doesn’t default on loans, sticking taxpayers with the liability. That could never happen, right? Ha ha. See Sue Sturgis and Dan Weiss on that subject. Or see the Congressional Research Service (PDF), which says the “federal government would bear most of the risk, facing potentially large losses if borrowers defaulted on reactor projects that could not be salvaged.” Or the Congressional Budget Office, which “considers the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high—well above 50 percent.”

Cap-and-trade placeholder

The FY2010 budget contained projected revenue from a cap-and-trade system—$79 billion a year by 2012, $83 billion by 2019. Obviously that revenue, um, never showed up. (Thanks, Senate!)

This year, as Kate Sheppard noted, the administration included no specific revenue projections. Instead it merely includes a placeholder, noting it will “work to enact and implement a comprehensive market-based policy that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the range of 17 percent in 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050.” Since nobody, including the administration, knows what a final bill might look like or how much revenue might be generated or how much of that revenue might go into the Treasury, they decided to just punt.

Whether this means they have less confidence in a bill being passed is a matter of (mostly pointless, but fun) speculation.

Other stuff

The budget increases the (already turbocharged) budget for scientific research (PDF) by 5.6 percent to $61.6 billion, so that’s cool. Also:

It boosts the Department of Energy budget to $28.4 billion, up $2 billion from 2010. Its renewable energy and efficiency budget is up $113 million to $2.4 billion.
The Labor Department sets aside “$85 million for green job training, providing support for about 14,000 participants.”
The Department of Transportation sets aside “$530 million as part of the President’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities to help State and local governments invest in sustainable transportation infrastructure that integrates with housing development and other critical investments.”
The Department of Interior sets aside “$73 million—a $14 million increase—to build agency capacity to review and permit renewable energy projects on federal lands.  DOI has set a goal to permit at least 9,000 megawatts of new solar, wind, and geothermal electricity generation capacity on DOI-managed lands by the end of 2011.”

What it all means

Generically, the budget reflects an administration that cares about science and wants to solve the energy crisis. But we already knew that. On the specifics there’s a degree of la-la land here, since spending is ultimately up to Congress and Congress is broken. So we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

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