Climate Change

Here’s an eye-catching quote:  “I believe the age of fossil fuels is coming to end - and that the age of clean energy will follow.”  That’s what Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last week.  See this from the AP.

Massachusetts is home, as you probably know, to the Cape Wind project, what NRDC has characterized as the largest single GHG reduction project in the U.S.  This is a project that Patrick has championed, in contrast to his predecessor, Mitt Romney.  At a conference I attended last year, I heard Cape Wind’s developer, Jim Gordon, say that on a good day his offshore wind farm could not only supply all the stationary power needs of Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, but the surface transportation needs as well - if plug-in hybrids were being deployed.  (I recently wrote about a great Nova program on automotive advances starring those two quintessential Boston townies, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack.)

For a comprehensive look at what’s being proposed, including advancing renewables and green jobs, go to the state’s website here for a transcript of the speech and video as well. 

Patrick’s speech coincided with an announcement by the state’s Department of Public Utilities that they’d given approval to a program that would allow a million Boston-area electricity customers the option of buying 100 percent of their power from wind.  See this from the venerable Boston-based Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the designers of this innovative program.

In my post from March 29 on the “State of the Planet ‘08” conference, sponsored by The Earth Institute and “The Economist,” I talked about a close encounter I had with the gentle Chairlady of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.  We talked about nuclear power and I said, among other things, that societies needed to choose and any emphasis on nuclear power would necessarily take a tremendous amount of wind out of the sails, or turbines, as ‘twere, of the renewables industry.

Here’s an excellent ten-minute video from Greenpeace UK that makes my point rather well.

The outspoken “NY Times” columnist, Tom Friedman, takes some serious shots here, Dumb as We Wanna Be, at two of the three Presidential candidates for their recommendation on suspending the 18.4¢ a gallon federal excise tax on gasoline during the heavy summer driving season coming up.  “The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: ‘Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.’” Ouch.   

Mr. Friedman has hit it fairly close to right on the button, but he also takes a shot at Congress for not renewing tax credits for renewable energy.  It should be noted that the question of the tax credits for renewables has, for all intents and purposes, been settled now by both houses of Congress  I wrote about this here on April 15 - a good day to be writing about these things.  

Also, to say, as Mr. Friedman does, “We have no energy strategy,” is incorrect. The present Congress has significantly altered course from the recent past by passing the somewhat extraordinary “Energy Security and Independence Act” in December of this past year. It’s not everything - a renewable portfolio standard is missing, for instance - but it’s a dang sight better than we’ve had.  See It’s A Wrap… from December. 

I believe that the next Congress, presumably more heavily loaded with Democrats than the present one, will continue moving on the track toward a low and zero-carbon energy policy.  (I am not being partisan in this, merely noting facts.  The present Congress has been fiercely divided by party on energy, particularly in the Senate.)

It is good, as far as I’m concerned, to note further that any of the three remaining Presidential candidates will, as President, be on board for much of this agenda of increasing efficiency, decreasing reliance on fossil fuels, increasing growth in renewables, and generally fostering progress toward a world vastly better suited to sustainable development and saving our climate system.

I just finished watching a truly terrific Nova special, Car of the Future, with the thoroughly irrepressible Tom and Ray Magliozzi, known to their adoring public as Click and Clack from Car Talk, the NPR supershow.   Along with the laughs, you get a look at lightweight materials to revolutionize car manufacturing – the same materials being used in the new Boeing Dreamliner, hybrids, plug-in electric cars, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles with the hydrogen produced by geothermal and hydropower, and discussion of the policies we need to get us to a post-gasoline society.  See a preview here.  The website for Car of the Future may be better than the show itself.  It’s got the footage, in-depth interviews, and open content so you can take clips for your own movie or other production. 

Then, run out and get ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, by two veteran writers for “The Economist,” Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran.  I heard Vaitheeswaran speak recently at the “State of the Planet ‘08” conference and he was quite enthusiastic about the possibilities for clean car technology for the future. 

Happy Earth Day!

Energy Boost is the title of the article from yesterday in the “Washington Post.”  The Senate has agreed to “… extend solar and wind energy tax breaks as part of a housing bill that is likely to win approval in the House.”  This article keys in on some businesses that are happy about the tax benefits being extended here.  Senator Maria Cantwell, one of the authors of the extension, had this to say in her press release:  “The Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act of 2008 … provides the continuation of clean energy production incentives and incentives to improve energy efficiency that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, save people and businesses money, and over time reduce energy costs over time.”  NRDC said:  “Extending these tax incentives is essential to moving our country in the direction of a clean energy economy that will help reduce energy bills and reduce global warming pollution.” 

I’ve written about this numerous times, most recently at If At First You Don’t Succeed ……  The Senate has not passed the same bill that the House did that would have rescinded $18 billion in tax breaks for the oil and gas industries.  As I like to say, though, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  (Voltaire said it first.)

A truly classic quote, as reported in the Year in Review, came from Fred Krupp, influential president of the Environmental Defense Fund, in referring to the White House talks on climate change in September:  “It was a lost opportunity.  America needs to lead, and we can lead, but now the spotlight shifts to the Congress because the president has refused to accept the only path that’s ever solved an air pollution problem — and that’s mandatory legal limits.” 

Krupp and EDF have been a powerful force in getting the mainstream environmental movement more in tune with the realities of the private sector.  Instead of always confronting big business on issues of energy and the environment, they have very often worked with business to effect positive change.  That does not mean, in any sense, that organizations as powerful as EDF, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which bears many of the same attributes as EDF, don’t take their shots at irresponsible and dangerous actions by industry in the courts and in the offices and lobbies of government when industry’s actions merit it.  It does mean that EDF recognizes the value of getting business to act responsibly in whatever ways are effective.  Hell, even Greenpeace works with Coca-Cola and Unilever these days.  (See that story toward the end of this from July.)

Krupp and EDF made an enormous breakthrough in February of 2007 when they negotiated the shelving of eight coal-fired power plants in Texas.  Former EPA administrator William Reilly and Krupp were the architects of a deal that permanently altered the map of power production in this country.  You can see this segment from Frontline’s “Hot Politics” to get a bigger picture.

Now Krupp and the journalist Miriam Horn have come out with a book, Earth: The Sequel – The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming.  It looks at some amazing initiatives that are being aggressively pursued:   the use of “concentrators” to intensify the sunlight directed at solar thermal arrays or photovoltaics, colocating solar and wind farms to get the maximum generating potential of those two, bottling heat in giant thermos-type containers as a storage mechanism, using biotechnology to produce biofuels and nanotechnology to radically improve the properties of silicon for use in PV cells, power-generating buoys, geothermal units that can be deployed all over the world to take advantage of the crust of the earth’s tremendous heat and also the hot water that comes up with oil at wellheads, and underground coal gasification, among many others.

My favorite is the pilot in Arizona that is using carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plant stacks to feed algae which, in turn, can then be converted to a potent biofuel.  The process is water-intensive but it can tolerate wastewater so that is another waste stream that is incorporated.  This scheme would also use nitrogen from the emissions as fertilizer.  Eventually, the coal in the plant could be replaced by the algae, leading to a carbon-negative situation.  (See also this recent piece from Matt Wald at the “NY Times.”)  I’ve been writing about Renewable Energy since the beginning of this blog and I continue to find these ideas and initiatives, as Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.”

One of the leitmotifs of the book is the entrepreneurial, even frontier spirit of the innovators bringing some of these solutions into being.  Venture capitalists get their due here.  But what drives capital?  The promise of a return on its investment.  What then is the single-most important driver in the quest to realize a good “return on capital”?  Krupp and Horn iterate (and reiterate) it’s setting a price on carbon.  Why?  To “level the playing field” with the fossil fuel and nuclear suppliers of energy.  What’s the best mechanism for doing this?  A cap-and-trade system.  This brings us back to Krupp’s quote above regarding the necessity to institute “mandatory legal limits.”  That’s the cap.  The trade part is what you do when you’ve gone below your capped emission limit and can then sell the difference between what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been mandated to achieve.  (I’ve written about this mechanism a number of times at Carbon Markets.)

EDF, led by economist Dan Dudek, was one of the pioneers of cap-and-trade back in the 1980’s in order to effect dramatic reductions in acid rain precursors.  (I had the privilege of working with one of their senior scientists, Michael Oppenheimer, back then on the acid rain problem when I was an activist with the Sierra Club.  Michael has been a critical figure in bringing the science of global warming to the fore.  He was right there with James Hansen at that epic hearing in Washington in the summer of 1988 that brought global warming fully into view for the American public.  See from about 2:45 in this segment from “Hot Politics.”)

Energy:  The Sequel also discusses other critical approaches to confronting global warming such as halting tropical rainforest destruction.  A post-Kyoto international regime that set a reasonable price on carbon ($30 a ton) would allow Brazil alone to realize $168 billion profit from protecting its rainforests while preventing emissions of six billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to the Woods Hole Research Center.  (Pop quiz:  After the US and China, which two countries are the biggest contributors to global warming?  Brazil and Indonesia - because of rainforest destruction.)

The book also notes the critical importance of energy efficiency.  (See my post Energy Efficiency for Fun and Profit.)

The book is engaging, informative, and hopeful.  It gives us the perspective of those scientists, policy innovators, entrepreneurs and, in some cases, visionaries, who are going to make the earth a safer, more prosperous, smarter, and more equitable place for us all to live.  It’s a stimulating read, to say the least.

For more, go to the book’s website and also see the trailer.

I headed up to Columbia University this past week to check out the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet 08 conference.  As usual, I couldn’t devote as much time as I would’ve liked to the conference sessions, but I came away with a few good insights nonetheless.  Thursday, I attended a press briefing with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the institute and a real force for fostering sustainable development; plus the very worthy Jan Egeland, former UN chief of humanitarian affairs; Carl-Henrik Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson, the cell phone makers; and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, a senior correspondent for “The Economist” and an expert on energy and automotives.

One of Ericsson’s emphases is on bringing mobile telephony to the developing world.  This was characterized as the “singlemost transformative technology in the developing world.”  See Ericsson’s CSR pages for a ton of information on how engaged they are.

The discussion came to climate change, not surprisingly, and Sachs emphasized the importance of an integrated approach that would create an “incentive” system (cap-and-trade) along with technology policy.  Egeland said that mitigation is important, but that adaptation is critical at this point.  There are extremely vulnerable populations that need to be buffered from the increasingly intense effects of storms and other climate-induced disasters.  Drought, of course, is another looming specter.  Vaitheeswaran, a compellingly intelligent speaker, has written a new book, ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, and he said we’re looking at a billion cars on the planet soon, with two billion not so far in the future.  That’s the bad news for global warming.  The good news is that the renewable energy revolution could well be driven (pun intended) by a new generation of cars.  (Sadly, I missed Vaitheeswaran moderating a formal debate – “Proposition:  “The United States will solve the climate change problem.”  It was, by all reports, lively and smart.  You and I can see it here though.) 

Well, at the press briefing, I was going to ask about biofuels but before I was called on, Sachs read my mind.  (As you may recall, I’ve been writing about this a fair bit, including this post from last month:  Are Biofuels A Bummer?)  Responding to a question about energy, Sachs quickly segued into a blistering critique of present biofuels policy.  He called US and EU policy in this area “misguided.”  He said that biofuel production is driving up food prices worldwide.  In his talk to the conference on Friday, he outlined a ten-point plan for the next President on sustainability and eliminating biofuel subsidies was one of the points.  Sachs also has a new book:  Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. 

I am forced to say that a talk given on Friday left me a little breathless.  Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, an American it turns out, is the Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.  She gave a talk on the virtues of Nukes.  She trotted out a number of the same canards I’ve been hearing, on and off, for over thirty years:  Three Mile Island and Chernobyl weren’t so bad.  People want nuclear power plants in their communities.  You can’t rely on renewables because the power is intermittent and we haven’t learned how to store it.  A new take on the theme of the acceptable risk of nuclear power was the somewhat blithe statement:  “Life is about risk.” 

Another assertion was that 90% of nuclear waste comes from weapons production, not power production.  Sorry, Lady Judge, but that dog don’t hunt.  Here’s just one quote from the US DOE website:  “As of December 2005, the United States accumulated about 53,440 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. In addition, there will be about 22,000 canisters of solid defense-related radioactive waste for future disposal in a repository.” 

You can see Lady Judge’s talk here.  I had the opportunity to talk with her a little later.  I ventured that her pooh-poohing of the role of renewables was not correct.  I mentioned the recent analysis from Daniel Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Associates that there was $7 trillion in business looming just over the horizon.  (See my post here.)  She said that she very much supported renewables but that you needed nuclear power as well.  I said that societies needed to choose and any emphasis on nuclear power would necessarily take a tremendous amount of wind out of the sails, or turbines, as ‘twere, of the renewables industry.  I pointed out that not a watt of electricity would be generated from nuclear power in this country were it not for the Price-Anderson Act that, for all intents and purposes, insulates the industry from liability.  The private insurance industry wouldn’t touch nuclear power with a ten-foot control rod.  Lady Judge was poised and gracious and I thanked her for entertaining my point of view.

The idea that nuclear power is something of a silver bullet for climate change certainly seems to be gaining traction, at least in the UK and in France.  I think that the Earth Institute’s embrace is more-than-a-little off from their prevailing theme of sustainability.  Part of the problem lies in the continuing overemphasis, in my opinion, on the central power generating paradigm.  I think that the world will profit, in every way, from a shift not only to renewables but to the distributed generation model that renewables can empower.

I had time to catch a bit of the panel on “Identifying Energy Solutions for Sustainable Development.”  Paula DiPerna of the Chicago Climate Exchange gave a lucid and illuminating talk on carbon finance.  (I’ve written about that a number of times under Carbon Markets.  This, of course, is a critical part of solving the climate change problem.)

The Earth Institute and many of the participants at this conference are doing groundbreaking work in sustainable development.  It’s exciting to hear so many of these initiatives discussed.  Check out the conference videos to catch some of the excitement.

Man, I am a sucker for innovation, for using your head to come up with designs and systems that mimic nature and produce real energy and real energy savings.  I’ve been reading a new book on renewable energy and alternative fuels and there’s some wild stuff in there:  algae grown using carbon dioxide from power plants and then fueling the same plant; solar power concentrating systems that can, potentially, provide gigawatts of electricity, store heat for power generation in giant thermoses, and be collocated with windfarms; and power-producing buoy systems, among others.  I’ve written about low-tech approaches such as solar box cookers and high-tech methods, for making hydrogen from plants for instance.  (See Green Tech, Low Tech, Clean Tech, New Tech and many other entries under Science and Technology and Renewable Energy.) 

Here’s one that grabbed my attention this morning:  Cargo Ship Completes Maiden Voyage Using Towing Kite.  The US DOE’s excellent weekly newsletter on renewables and energy efficiency talks about how the kite can cut fuel use for ocean-going vessels by up to 20%.  Not bad.

Credit: WINTECC

Low power and small hydro projects are, according to another terrific newsletter at RenewableEnergyWorld.com, on the rise.  See U.S. on the Verge of a Small Hydro Boom?  There’s a realistic potential for 30,000 MW of power from these low-impact, zero-carbon facilities.  “The kind of projects we’re talking about would not involve large dams or any inundation of property.  These would all be run-of-river projects,” says a federal program manager working in this area. 

Geothermal is another source that seems a bit of a no-brainer to me.  See Free Power from the Earth 24/7, also from RenewableEnergyWorld.com, in which we learn that Atlantic Geothermal has a proposal that would equal Hoover Dam’s output.  I wrote about geothermal in April last year and said:  “… a major new report found enormous ‘… potential for geothermal energy within the United States’ and ‘… that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.’ See this from the M.I.T. news service and the report itself. (Big file – 14.5 mb!)”

Speaking of Hoover Dam, and remembering what is driving so much of our efforts – global warming – here’s another piece from DOE:  Report Places Even Odds on Hoover Dam Running Dry by 2017.  A little shocking?  I’d say.  (See also my recent look at water stress in the American West.)

According to CoalSpeak, The Official CoalRegion Dictionary, the above term refers to “tuberculosis, or some virulent strain of TB. Consumption was a common word for tuberculosis many years ago (‘consuming’ the lung tissue). ‘Galloping’ refers to the speed at which the disease progresses.”  Ironic, perhaps, that I’m using this term to illustrate one of the thornier problems associated with global warming – ironic because of its association with coal, and coal’s association with runaway global warming. 

Jared Diamond, professor of Geography and author of the hugely popular Guns, Germs and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, wrote a terrific op-ed for the “NY Times” early in January:  “What’s Your Consumption Factor?”  In it he noted that the developed world has consumption rates roughly 32 times that of the developing world.  “If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates),” Diamond wrote.  It would be difficult to suppose that world resources, strained as we are today with a world population of 6.5 billion, could support those levels of consumption.  Consider, while we’re at it, the output of GHG and the further destruction of ecosystems from industrial agriculture and fishing, overdevelopment, and conventional water and air pollution from such galloping consumption.  Are we thus doomed?  Diamond’s answer:  “No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels.”  But then we would have to reduce our access to labor-saving devices (driven by electricity, for the most part), and infant mortality would go up, gains in nutrition worldwide would evaporate, and literacy rates would plummet.  Right?  Wrong.  Diamond reminds us, if we had forgotten, that “…living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates.” 

The seminal Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in October of 2006 by the UK government, warns, in its Executive Summary, (and available in 22 languages other than English), of catastrophic economic consequences if climate change is not confronted fully, vigorously, and now.  It also says:  “Tackling climate change is the pro-growth [my emphasis] strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries.”

Are you still with me?  Now today an op-ed from the “Wall St. Journal” came in over the transom to me from the esteemed editor of this and my sister Foreign Policy Association blogs, Robert Nolan.  (See the right margin for links to these many, diverse and interesting blogs.)  Sins of Emission, by Oxford professor of energy policy Dieter Helm, notes that “… the U.S. and the EU together account for nearly half of world GDP. And it is consumption, not production, that matters. This means that if global warming is to be limited, the U.S. and Europe will have to take much more drastic action to reduce those emissions embedded in their own consumption. Their appropriate emissions-reduction targets will have to be based on the consumption of goods that cause those emissions in the first place.”  I’ll buy that, as it were.  But Helm makes what Diamond, the Stern Review, and many, many others conclude is a false assumption:  “It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable.”

Economic growth, according to a growing number of analysts, will be stimulated by how we confront climate change.  I wrote, for instance, in February about a new analysis that said that our response to global warming can “… spur $7 Trillion in Clean Energy Investment by 2030.”  (See Trillions for Renewables! here.) 

Getting back to consumption:  How do you get at it?  One way was detailed by Yale professor Judith Chevalier in an another op-ed from the “NY Times” in December:  a tax on carbon consumption.  I wrote about this here and described it thus:  “So, if you can’t get China or some other recalcitrant to restrain GHG emissions through some international protocol (to which the Bali meetings were supposed to point the way), then take it out of their exchequer by creating barriers to products created in high-GHG economies.”  Professor Chevalier explains it more lucidly than that, but you get the idea.

Can we reduce our dangerous rates of consumption and maintain and improve our standards of living worldwide?  You bet.  Making Peace with the Planet will also make us happier.  You can take that to the bank.

Solar Thermal – One of the pleasures of teaching a class on climate change is that students come up with some interesting, stimulating things.  In papers recently submitted on renewables, and in following up with a little web surfing, I’ve come across some further information worth sharing here.  I’ve also been reading a new book, Earth:  The Sequel, from Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, and Miriam Horn.  The book talks a lot about new renewable technologies and jibes nicely with what I’ve been hearing from my students and seeing elsewhere.  (Much more about the book in a forthcoming post.)

One paper discussed solar thermal.  A few days later, the venerable Matt Wald had this, Turning Glare Into Watts, at the “NY Times.”  Solar thermal captures the heat from sunlight and uses that heat to drive turbines that turn generators, as conventional power plants do.  This is in contrast to solar photovoltaic which captures sunlight and turns it directly to electricity.  One seeming advantage which the thermal developers are touting is the inherent capability to be generating juice during the day, peak consumption time, plus the ability to store the heat for generating power during evenings and cloudy days.   One of the companies mentioned in the article, and discussed at some length in the book, is Ausra,.  Ausra’s website has some terrific graphics, well worth seeing, and some fun speculation:  “Solar Thermal Power Could Supply Over 90 percent of U.S. Grid Plus Auto Fleet.” 

Meanwhile, I want to mention another exciting prospect:  the idea of supplying virtually limitless amounts of power from solar arrays in the Sahara Desert.  The Europeans and some of the North African and Middle Eastern states are working on precisely this.  See the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) project.  See also this informative UK website on this concept.  Solar power for massive desalinization projects?  Why in the world not?!

New Hydropower – Another student did a nice job on ocean power.  There’s also huge potential here, and it’s being rapidly researched, developed, and brought on line.  There’s going to be a Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference in NYC in April and I expect to be there.

One of the companies that caught my eye recently was Bourne Energy.  See this useful little article, One Dam Thing After Another For The Hydropower Industry, courtesy of CarbonFree.  Bourne’s website has some excellent graphics as well, describing their technology and how they want to “change energy’s DNA.”  Catchy!