China Cleans Up

Vacuum Solar Tubes ChinaChina exceeded U.S. investment in clean energy for the first time last year with deployments totaling $34.6 billion. The country still has a long way to go to clean up it’s emissions—China surpassed the US as the global leader in C02 emissions several years ago—but they’re moving quickly to clean up their act.

Technology Review posted a slide show today profiling some of the new technology they’re committing to including offshore wind, utility-scale solar power, DC transmission lines, massive nuclear deployments, and coal with carbon capture and sequestration.

I was happy to see vacuum tube solar hot water included in Tech Review’s lineup. Not the most cutting edge technology, but one in ten Chinese people now use these highly efficient heaters for domestic hot water.

Unwelcome Earth Day gift

Chia Head by Already have a Flickr account? After good news last week that the Senate would be unveiling its version of a climate bill at the end of the month—even though “Senate compromises frighten, infuriate some enviro groups“—there are indications that Congress may punt on the legislation this year to tackle immigration. Happy 40th Earth Day!

Weekend Updates:
Republican Senator Graham withdrew support from the bill, and Senator Kerry subsequently delayed the bill which was scheduled for release on Monday. However, the senior Massachusetts Senator says the bill is not dead, Senator Lieberman reports that Graham may yet again get behind the legislation he helped craft if Reid paves the way for the more advanced climate bill rather than open yet another can of worms. Tuesday evening Reid he is willing to tackle climate first, but not to the satisfaction of Graham. Given these issues, some have suggested that it might be time to instead focus on the Bingham bill, however it’s likely to experience hiccups of its own.

The Economics of Climate Change

Paul Krugman Talk by TaekwonweirdoLooking past the exciting technical, legislative and community advancements made to address climate change over the last few years, lies the reality of whether we as a society will make the necessary changes in energy use, lifestyle choices and investment decisions in time to avoid the most catastrophic global warming scenarios.

In last weekend’s New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman examined the question that could fatally delay the steps necessary to reduce the impact of climate change. It’s the question that many of the people running our government and global corporations are now pondering, “Is it good for business?” Photograph by Yoshikazu Nema; Artwork by Yuken Teruya

Even when people accept the reality of climate change, there is some legitimate debate on how fast and how hard the truly negative effects of global warming will visit us. So Krugman quickly takes the argument past the philosophical diatribe conducted by climate deniers and examines first how business plans for any other crisis. He identifies the best and worse case economic effects on GDP if we make drastic cuts in CO2 emissions. As it turns out, the very worst that could happen is a 3% drop in GDP that would likely soon be made up through the manufacture and marketing of the technical solutions and products necessary to live in a low-carbon emissions world.

Krugman then makes an attempt to predict the impact on the world economy if the effects of global warming produce the disastrous changes in climate and weather patterns that scientists predict will come true by the middle of the century. Suffice to say, a 3% decline in GDP would be the least of our troubles.

Like me, it might take you a couple of days to get through the article and ponder the consequences of Krugman’s predictions. It’s well worth your time-both for how well it shines a light on the decision-making processes of our legislative and business leaders, and because the facts may come in handy for debating colleagues who believe ‘the business of America is business’.

Green GDP

Son of Jim Norris, homesteader, tying corn into bundles, Pie Town, New Mexico (LOC) by The Library of Congress In a recent Earth Magazine article, and just in time for the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, an interesting argument was made regarding so-called “Green GDP.” Garrett Groves and Michael Webber point out that in the United States, as well as in many developed nations, current economic measurements of GDP are intended to assess national income and wealth exchange using a pre-World War II model created by Simon Kuznets, a Nobel prize winning economist. Within this model, there is little room for the quantifiable benefits of preservation or conservation of natural resources, or for decreasing carbon emissions. This model also fails to account for waste and pollution. Instead, our economic system measures “success” purely through monetary growth, development and exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources.

Clearly, given climate change and our ever-increasing global demand for energy and natural resources, there is a serious and urgent need to re-evaluate economic definitions of prosperity and gain. To do this, a new indicator would need to be developed, one that reflected both economic prosperity and ecological health. Many international conferences have addressed this exact question, starting with the Rio 1992 Earth Summit. This discussion continues through talks in Kyoto, Johannesburg, Montreal, Copenhagen and soon, Cancun.

Unfortunately, there has been much political debate and little focused action with regard to a unified economic environmental measurement.  Some economics argue that to do so would require privatizing the “commons”—or shared public goods such as atmosphere, ocean, and fresh water. A similar argument was famously discussed by Garrett Hardin in 1968.  Others argue that the developing carbon “market” will be pivotal in defining further environmental economic measurements of its kind. One thing is certain: environmental economics must play a key role in public policy if we want to sustain a healthy planet for generations to come.

Tribal Power

The NWF, which has been collaborating on tribal energy issues for several years co-sponsored a report on the renewable energy potential of tribal lands. Although tribes cannot currently take advantage of most incentives due to their complicated legal status, their sovereignty also gives them greater latitude in permitting.

Download the full report.


In other news: Seemingly lost amid the continuing drama surrounding Cape Wind, one tribe
spoke out in support of the project.

Getting Agreement on Energy Policies and Plans

Energy planning ought to be about avoiding problems and seizing collective opportunities. Cities (and nations) have problems when there is not enough energy available at a reasonable price. And, if they could get their act together, cities, regions, states and countries could reduce wasteful patterns of energy use and take advantage of “greener” energy production technologies that reduce costs of all kinds—especially environmental cost—and increase energy independence (i.e. reducing our dependence on “foreign” oil). Energy planning is about figuring out the best way to match energy supply and energy demand in sustainable ways. It gets complicated, though, because different groups have their own ideas about (1) the desirability of relying on various sources of energy; (2) the desirability of relying primarily on markets to set prices, encourage technology innovation and meet long-term needs, and (3) the appropriateness of allowing some groups and countries to tightly control certain energy supplies. In the final analysis, negotiations at the international, national, state, regional and local levels determine which energy supplies are available and what price we pay to meet our growing demand for electricity, transportation, home heating, and economic production.

Imagine a pie chart that shows the composition of our current energy supplies. We can do this at any scale. Let’s think about the country as a whole. Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, renewables (like solar and wind power), and a few other sources each constitute a wedge. A similar-sized pie chart shows how we use energy: industrial uses, residential uses, transportation, commercial uses, and the like. Supply and demand must be in balance in the sense that we can only use what we are able to find and pay for.

If you ask what the supply and demand pie charts will look like at a certain point in the future, say 10 years from now, there is no correct answer. Different groups will prefer a different mix of energy supplies and want to reshape energy demand, either because a shift will benefit them directly or because they are committed to improving the net overall impact on society in some way. One thing is for sure, though, experts can’t tell us what the pie charts ought to look like. We have to make those decisions for ourselves.

If it were up to you, how would you want to alter the pie charts for the United States? The current supply is made up of about 29% coal, 16% oil, 31% natural gas, 12% nuclear, and 11% renewables (including hydro). Current demand includes 30% industrial, 22% residential, 28% transportation, and 19% commercial. The overall price of energy is just over 9 cents per kilowatt, although not everyone pays the same price. The environmental costs of current energy use and production are hard to calculate. Sometimes these are framed in terms of impacts on public health: x people die or get sick each year from diseases associated with pollution of various kinds caused by energy production and utilization. Increasingly environmental costs will be framed in terms of what we would have to spend to artificially do the work that ecosystem do naturally like filter air and water or convert CO2 to oxygen. These are called ecosystem services and we can price them.

Any change in the overall size of the “pie” will effect certain groups—either changing the price they have to pay for a unit of energy, redistributing job opportunities, reshaping environmental costs, or altering the balance of power in the world. Someone’s got to pay for investments in new technology if we want to grow the pie or change the size of a supply or demand wedge.

Efforts at present, at the city level for instance, to change the pattern of energy supply and demand include (1) reducing the amount of energy used by municipal governments; (2) encouraging individual homeowners and businesses to conserve energy and reduce their carbon footprints; (3) encouraging more energy efficient patterns of land use and development, and (4) looking for ways to encourage more sustainable electricity production (through re-use of brownfields for renewable energy, building trash-to-energy plants and the like). In a big city, these can have a noticeable effect. Overall, though, states and national governments will have to get involved or the larger pie charts won’t look very different in the future than they do now. In recent years, states have begun to require that at least 20% of the electricity produced within their borders come from renewable energy sources by 2020 or 2030. We’ll see whether these provisions are enforces. If they are, the size of the renewable energy wedge could double in the national supply chart.

Unfortunately, we don’t have proper forums in which we can work out agreements on how existing supply and demand pie charts should look in the future. Congress has never faced this issue directly; preferring instead to make incremental decisions about whether to subsidize one form of energy development or not (often, at one location at a time). As a nation, we have not set supply or demand goals; instead, we have just bumped along. As I mentioned, states have been trying to encourage investment in cleaner forms of energy production, but they are limited by the grid—the system of power lines that allows energy produced and stored in one location to be “wheeled” to other locations as demand ebbs and flows. We need a national plan to expand and modernize the grid. We also need to figure out how to store and distribute highly distributed forms of (renewable) energy. We need to decide whether we are going to maintain or increase our reliance on nuclear energy even if we don’t have a plan for storing high level nuclear waste.

If states try to change energy efficiency standards or subsidize new forms of energy production, they end up competing with each other. Localities are even more highly constrained. They can improve energy efficiency in public buildings, increase the efficiency of the municipal bus fleet and work with building owners to encourage retrofits that reduce the demand for energy. They can also urge residents to use less energy. But, most are not about to get involved directly in producing energy on their own. If we allow more drilling, maybe we can increase our reliance on oil and gas. But, how do we do that and decrease greenhouse gas emissions at the same time? Can we assume that technology innovation (i.e. clean coal technology or carbon sequestration) will resolve that apparent conflict?

What would it mean to create national, state and local forums in which we could negotiate agreements regarding the changes we want to achieve in the current supply and demand pie charts? At each level, we would have to bring together representatives of all the relevant interests groups, engage in joint fact finding (with the help of appropriately qualified experts), formulate comprehensive agreements regarding five, ten and twenty year objectives and commit to appropriate implementation strategies. These conversations would not be easy. It is hard to formulate overall “packages” that will leave everyone better off. Discussions of this sort need to be mediated by qualified consensus building professionals. At the national level, the Department of Energy could take the lead (in cooperation with the appropriate Congressional committees) but a great many other groups would have to be involved. At the state level, governors and legislative leaders could convene appropriate consensus building efforts, but first we would need to figure out how to define the scope of state energy policies and how they fit within certain national decisions. In every city, broadly-representative working groups would need to consider possible changes in their supply and demand objectives within the framework of state and national plans. Final decisions would be made, of course, by those with the legal authority to make them, but to ensure implementation, the trade-offs and shifting distribution of gains and losses would need to have broad political support.

In the end, energy policies and plans are political choices that ought to reflect the best possible scientific, economic and engineering inputs. Our traditional approach to making public policy—careening from one crisis to the next—won’t produce the interlocking decisions required. We need to commit to a consensus building approach to energy planning.

City Council to receive recommendations from Climate Congress

After three community meetings, the Cambridge Climate Congress finalized its recommendations for an all-city awareness and response campaign, and for city responses to the Climate Emergency.  The City Council will receive the Climate Congress communication at the upcoming March 22nd City Council meeting.  This would be an opportunity for the public to provide additional comments on the Climate Congress report and activities.
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Administration’s overlooked successes

Bamboo Bokeh by Steve Webel A few weeks ago Paul Rogers of the Mercury News wrote that despite the general perception that the current administration having accomplished relatively little Obama has in fact made major strides in national environmental policy. Some examples not included in the article are: the significant tightening of the previously weak regulations surrounding non-conventionally raised livestock, and the FTC’s stepping up efforts to address greenwashing amidst increasing complaints
and problems such as the bogus “bamboo” textiles.

Cleaning up New York’s Gowanus Canal

gowanus canal by joe holmes According to the NYTimes, the EPA announced that it will designate the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, one of the most contaminated waterways in the nation, a Superfund site. This designation paves the way for a federally-funded clean up process of decades of pollution; the 1.8 mile canal was shown to have pesticide pollution as well as PCB cancer-causing pollution.  The EPA estimated that the cleanup would last 10 to 12 years and cost $300 million to $500 million. Interestingly, the Bloomberg Administration was not pleased with this news. The Administration argued that the designation could spark legal battles with polluters, defer completion of cleanup and dissuade construction by developers deterred by the stigma of a Superfund label.

Gowanus Canal at Lowtide by JGNY The city instead envisioned a residential and commercial development project along the canal and supported voluntary cleanup measures by polluters. To establish these new residential areas, the city planned to hire the Army Corps of Engineers in a separate federal funding bid, but by doing so would not secure funding as well as with a Superfund designation. Critics also claimed the plan would complicate cleanup given the involvement of both the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA. For those of you in the NYC area who are interested to learn more, the EPA plans to discuss next steps regarding the canal at a public meeting with neighborhood residents and other stakeholders on Thursday night at Public School 58 on Smith Street in Brooklyn.