Comments Gar Lipow has made

Put in infrastructure to make solar and wind technologies more practical. Long distance transmission to move power from where it can be generated to where it is needed, short distance transmission to move power from stranded wind into the grid, smart grid technologies that help the grid adapt to variable power sources, storage to smooth out variations.

Up to a point this is interesting. But one of the things it requires is development of a new type of glass for surfacing. I always get suspicious of claims that somthing that does not exist will be easy to develop. There is also the quetion of storage. The claim is that these roadway solar cells will include supercapacitators. But supercapactors are extremely expensive per kWh of capacity (around $10,000+).  I know of no reason to believe building them into roaday solar panels will lower the cost more than a thousand fold.  And these objections are much stronger because the issues mentioned are being handwaved rather than faced.

I would love to see this work.  By using existing roadways you end up with a very low ecological footprint. (Not zero, because of the toxics used to crate solar cells, but low.)   But it seems to me that too many steps are like punchline in an old joke. "Assume a can opener".

OK, you give the the number of wind turbines needed to supply all electricity as 675,000. If anything that is probably low. But close enough - so say 70,000 wind generators built and installed annually over th course of ten year. In contrast we produce between 7,000,000 and 11,000,000 automobiles in the U.S. each year What about your "supercomplicated" grid? Include HVDC connectiors along with general quality upgrades and we ship power thousands of miles.   Realistically of course we would mix in solar because it tends to be complementary to wind power, geothermal and hydro power to produce a small amount of non-variable renewable energy for shaping, storage in the form of flow batteries to help match wind supply to demand. (If the solar was CSP, we could use thermal storage which is much cheaper for the solar portion.) Finally for backup we could natural gas, which with all these other things in place would represent between 1% and 4% of total generated kWh, though a much higher percent of capacity. 

To refine further - add efficiency to reduce demand. Also on the supply end there is recycled energy which might supply 5% to 20% of electricity from waste industrial heat.

I would worry about both. However I don't think the case that industrial wind is harmful has been made. Opponents of industrial wind often make the comparsion to tobacco companies. However if you look at in, even in the fifties there was peer reviewed research showing that tobacco was harmful.  And a lot of the "testimony" in favor of tobacco was non-peer reviewed. It is wind opponents whose research style is comparable to that of the tobacco companies. 

I'm going to make a guess as to what is at the heart of wind opposition. All energy sources (and for that matter energy savings methods) have social costs.  But while fossil fuels hurt everyone in invisible ways, the visible effects (towns destroyed, miners killed, waters contaminated) mainly effect poor and working people. Whereas when you put up wind generators rich and middle class people have to look at them.  So there is this emotional rage agains having to suffer any inconvenience in order to facilitate energy production, whereas coal and so forth feels *emotionally* cost free, even though the actual social costs are much higher. The visible costs of fossil fuels fall on other people and the invisible costs are, well, invisible. So Robert Kennedy Jr. opposed wind generators miles offshore where they would be visible as something about the size of a pinky fingernail from the Kennedy family Martha's vineyard.  At that distance there could have been no  sound or transmitted vibration.  There were claimed environmental effects, but every environmental study proved otherwise, including studies intially supported by wind opponents (but rejected when they came to conclusions they did not like).    And meantime you have an asthma epidemic among poor children in Boston because of continued coal burning.

That is what is really behind this. Rich and middle class people don't want to look and wind turbines. They don't put it this way, but fundamentally they prefer poor people continue being killed by coal. And they will use any bullshit excuse to oppose them. And (as happened with the oppostion to offshore wind in Mass.)  the fossil fuel industry will be happy to put money into supporting their opposition.

Eric R: "Those responses, however, call them what you will, from several respected experts in relevant fields attest to the solid science of the work."

I'm sorry, but an extended blurb, however respected the source does not vouch that a work is solid science. Especially since all these respected sources went along with the pretense that what they were engaging is peer review.  It may be solid science or not, but this type of shennaigan is NOT evidence of solid science, and might be taken as the opposite. I'm not dismissing her work on this basis (though it makes me more skeptical). I'm refusing to accept it as evidence of the solidity of her work.

EricR: "There will probably be reviews in medical journals when the book is actually in print."

I'm sure there will be. They still won't be "peer reviews". 

EricR: "It is a case series and the most thorough examination of these symptoms claims yet. But it is still an early effort that most importantly provides the basis for further work (as is being planned in Michigan and Ontario).

Except she is not just presenting it as a basis for further work. Follow the links to various articles and  you will find repeated claims that this study "definitely" establishes the existence of Wind Turbine Syndrome. Again, even as a preliminary study, it looks weak. Mabye she could not have done a complete control group, but for not much more than the money she already spent she could have gotten some grad students from the social psychology department and bought some blocks of phone time to get some preliminary results comparing the prevalence of such symptoms inside and outside the "danger zone". But of course if you think that the existence of a syndrome has "definitely" been established, you are not interested trying to find out whehter it exists or no.

If peer review is so unimportant, then why the falsely claim to be peer reviewed when you are not?

I'm going to do something I intended not to - to deal with the substance of her argument a little bit. I have not spent enough time to really be confident, but her methodlogy really looks shaky. Apparently the supporting data are derived from a total of 38 people. 38 people in ten families who were self-selected in response to a public call asking for people who were having health problems adjacent to wind farms. That self-selection is itself somewhat problematic in a study trying to establish the existence of a syndrome (as opposed to testing a treatment).  Worse she had no control group. The right way to do such a study would be as follows.

The hypothesis is that closer than 2 kilometers is definitely a problem zone. Outside 3.2 Kilometers is definitely a safe zone. (In between is uncertain.) So there is set of symptoms hypothesized to constitute wind turbine syndrome. Survey extensively people living in the danger zone for those symptoms. Survey extensively people living outside it. (Ignore for the moment people in the uncertain zone. That can be tested later if a problem is found.)  Gather  tons of demographic information for each person surveyed. Compare both total population, and every demographic you can think of: age, ethicity, gender, lifestyle, type of work - anything that can affect health. Match each demograhic inside the danger zone with the same demographic outside.  See if the results vary. 

EricR - references on peer reviewed rebuttals:

“Infrasound from Wind Turbines – Fact, Fiction or Deception?” by Geoff Leventhall in Vol.
34 No.2 (2006) of the peer-reviewed journal Canadian Acoustics

“Electricity generation and health” in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet. The paper
concludes that “Forms of renewable energy generation are still in the early phases of their
technological development, but most seem to be associated with few adverse effects on health”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17876910

Also - non-peer reviewed but still worth considering

“Wind Turbine Facilities Noise Issues” by Dr. Ramani Ramakrishnan for the Ontario
Ministry of the Environme

“Wind Turbine Acoustic Noise”, A White Paper by Dr. Anthony Rodgers at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst.

“Research into Aerodynamic Modulation of Wind Turbine Noise”, University of Salford,
UK, July 2007

“Health impact of wind turbines” , prepared by the Municipality of Chatham-Kent Health &
Family Services Public Health Unit. comprehensive review of available literature

Energy, sustainable development and health, World Health Organisation, June 2004.

Partly you are divierting the discussion. The (very short) original post was about what was physically possible and feasible in the sense that it could be done, for example, less expensive than nuclear energy. That is not the end of the discussion, because it does not settle the question of what is optimum,  or what is politically possible, but it is a precondition for serious discussion about those questions. So the point is that we could replace all our electricity with wind plus transmission plus storage combined with existing hydro, feasible geothermal and a few percent natural gas.  Now to get optimum results we put more efficiency in  mix (including recycled energy) maybe some biomass (but probably not much), solar thermal electricity(probably a lot), PV and so on. And we can argue about what the mix is. But it is absurd to argue that a constraint on how to phase out emissions is  that it has to be compatible with using existing coal plants in as efficient a manner as possible. Hansen and most climate scientists who look at the solutions end agree that phasing out emissions equal to existing coal over the next decade is the minimum that has any chance of averting complete catastrophe. Now maybe that cut won't be done completely in the form of eliminating coal, but it seems foolish to assume that we should not consider this. Any solution will require doing stuff we are not doing now.

As to your leprechaun analogy is I'm afraid stupid rather than silly.  You can't become a leprechaun, but we can build long distance transmission and storage.  More and more climate scientists are agreeing we need an 80% reduction or more in emissions over the next 20 years. I'm happy to debate what the best means of doing this, but I'm pretty sure that will include shutting down coal plants. You don't think that is feasible? Then, just within the U.S. , we  need to start thinking about how we deal with a drastic reduction in our ability to grow food, how we deal in ten or fifteen years with internal refugee crisis many times the size of the Katrina displacement, how our healthcare system will cope with a major increase in diseases. And worldwide the problem will be much worse.

I did not say hydro is *only* peaking, but a lot is used for peaking and load following. That is why hydro is around 25% of name plate capacity but around 4% of actual supplied kWh.  If we start using a lot of wind, the key will be to NOT use coal as spinning reserves. Put on line a lot geothermal, and distribute that and existing hydro more widely.  Use storage, and use single cycle natural gas turbines, which are not particularly efficient, but can be brought on line in a matter of minutes. Or use some of the new generation of combined cycle turbines, in which the gas turbine is brought on line in under ten minutes, and the steam generators then gradually come up, bringing it up to full combine cycle load in under 45 minutes.

Note that the advanced model is only worth it if natural gas is providing more than a percent or so of total power. This is an example of what Amory Lovins calls "tunneling through the cost barrier".  If variable renewables provide 20% or 30% of total power then whatever "shapes" that wind/solar power will run a great deal of the time and needs to be efficient. But if you have a mostly renewable grid, wind and sun shaped by hydro and geothermal and a small amount of storage, then you can get by with a really small amount of natural gas as a percent of total power. Mostly wind and sun, with a bit of natural gas will probably be cheaper than a substantial amount of wind and sun combined with a substantial amound of natural gas. The low ends of the cost curve are at the extremes - a tiny bit of renewable energy or a great honkin huge percent of renewable energy. A *moderate* amount of renewable energy is more expensive than either.

Sean, typically new (as opposed to older less efficient) wind turbines average 35% to 40% of capacity. Even older ones averaged 29% unless you go really far back.  In terms of "curtailment" of hydro, hydro represents 25% of nationwide nameplate capacity but around 3-5% of kWh generated.  Hydro, other than exceptional cases like Seattle where it represents 100% of power, is used for peaking and load following more than baseload.   So using hydro to shape wind shifts when it is consumed rather the decreasing total amount consumed. If we put really large scale wind into place, communties that run on a 100% hydro now would use some of that hydro to shape some of their own wind power and solar (or to shape imported wind & solar if they lacked that capacity locally) and export any they did not need for that purposes to other communties that lacked sufficient resource for this shaping. In a  95% wind/solar scenario, we would combine the use of long distance transmission, hydro and geothermal for shaping, storage for additional shaping and for peaking and load following, and small amounts of fossil fuel for backup. In terms of "hot burn". I will note some of that was going on before wind came along, and that an hour or two of storage can help elimanate the need for "hot burn" by providing lead time ramp up from a cold start. (If a plant can't be brough on-line in two hours from a cold start, that is a good argument for replacing it with something else.)

Hi Veritone. It is better news than you might think. While wind in any one place is intermittent, it becomes less intermittent when you attach a lot of wind farms together in distant places with high voltage direct current transmission lines.  This does not turn wind into baseload. (Actually not strictly true . It turns a minority of power generated into baseload.)  But it generally reduces the length of time wind power is "short" compared to a baseload target to hours rather than days. And what this accomplishes is that you can add a comparatively small amount of storage and end with wind being able to supply 70% to 80% of reliable grid. If you overbuild to compensate for seasonal variations it can do better than that - 90% to 95%. I'm on the way out so will post links to support this later. I will add that in practice we would use more varied power sources than this for the sake of reliablity and to minimize costs.

I've been pointing this out from the beginning. No Democrat and few environmental groups have been willing to say "This bill is so bad I can't support it." Nor have many said, "this is so bad I can barely support it as is, but not if it gets any worse".  No amount of criticism or "pointing out that it is already a compromise" will keep the bill from getting worse in the Senate, as long as the environmental community makes it clear they will swallow anything. There is no countervailing pressure from the left to push back against pressure from the right. Congratulations to mainstream environmentalists who have show their usual sound strategtic and tactical sense.

You know money for organic agriculture is a good thing, but if that money comes from offsets sold by organic farms started in 2001 that is not actually helping the climate. That comes pretty close to meeting the classic definition of non-additionality.

This is nuts! Pass a bill regardless of content? As long as it is called a climate bill, the actual effect on the climate does not matter? And you are literally supporting it blindly. The page count has changed drastically since the last public release. You are going to get hundreds of new pages Thursday in a bill to be voted on Friday And further mods can take place between Thursday and Friday.  So any congresscritter who votes for this literally does not care what is in it.   For those of you who say "trust Waxman"  liberals always claimed to be the "reality based community". "Faith based politics" was to be left to consevatives.

If you trade every reduction in ag+forest reduction for permission to burn lumps of coal, and you are counting those reductions wrong, then you are NOT REDUCING EMISSIONS! It is more important to make a solution that will work politically viable then to win a politically viable solution that won't work! I though liberals claimed the reality based mantle. Why is effectiveness completely unimportant?

I will also point out that the history of forest offsets has not exactly been great. Historical satellite picturs show that most carbon plantations planted as part of such experiments were monocultures replacing native rainforests! One of the reasons why CDM ended up with no or almost no forestry projects.

To amplify what Ricardo Coelho said, yeah you lower prices by printing counterfeit carbon credits. But that is just a backdoor way of raising the cap. It is not a tradeoff for a genuinely lower cap - just a way to hide that you have raised the cap, and reduced the need for emissions cuts.

As to the argument that offsets are a good thing because they are the only way to include forestry and agriculture: if we could measure emissions changes in forestry and agriculture precisely and accurately enough to generate nice package carbon offests that are real, additional and permanent, we could include them in cap-and-trade, or charge a carbon tax against them. Why don't we? Because you can't measure carbon changes in biological systems that precisely or exactly. Given that they are dynamic systems that absorb and release carbon constantlty, both the establishing of baselines and the assurance of permanence are close to impossible. In addition there is just the precision and accuracy of day to day measurment. A lot of carbon is in the soil and in roots.  In very small scale tests, where esssentially cost is no object we can get day to day measure plus or minus five percent by combining sattelite pictures with on-the-ground metering. On the scale needed to measure carbon in real world scale forestry and agriculture we have to depend mostly on sattelites, with scatter ground probles used to refine and tweak estimates. That means plus or minus 25%. Given that actual carbon gain or loss can be a lot less than that, and that what is in an ecosystem varies a lot depending on when the measurement is taken, this means any particular year to year number can be off by close to 100%.  In short, offsets, or carbon charges or permits are not the right way to deal with agriculture and forestry. You need  qualitative meansurements, the kind of thing that mostly can't be included in an emission based cap-and-trade system. What you can measure is the long term trend in terms of whether carbon is being stored or released and by a little or a lot. There are ways to regulate and/or subsdize changes in the right direction, but not by the type of division into neat little precise emission packet

How about a poor law that makes things worse? Huge spectrum between "perfect" and "less than zero".On Mainstream environmentalists' enthusiasm for Waxman-Markey ensures it will get worse posted 5 months, 4 weeks ago 13 Responses

Not always smart to play your opponent's game. But if  you want to stick to their rules, levy the permits upstream, but still give them away downstream. The downstream holders can sell them to the upstream exactractors and importers. Of course that violates another rule of the game. Keep plausible deniability when  you give away the store. Alway pretend you are doing this to benefit conusmers.

Without commenting on your particular policy, I agree that in a cap-and-trade system the place to require permits is as far upstream as possible. Fossil fuels are still the biggest sources of emissions. Permits for them can be required at extraction or import. However  for many other GHG (and even for CO2  emitted when heating limestone during Portland Cement making) upstream and downstream are the same or very close . HFC23 and other non-fossil fuel emissions from industrial production, methane from landfills and mines and so on.  Also Agriculture and forestry, for reasons mentioned in the post simply are not suitable for an emissions trading scheme. You need some other way to solve that part of the problem.

To the "something is better than nothing crowd": Remember:

Between offsets, downstream permits and giveways the cap-and-trade portion doe NOT lower emissions significantly.  For details http://www.grist.org/article/waxman-markey-bill-would-do-more-for-climate-without-cap-and-trade-provisio

Also because the entire architecture is wrong, improving it in the future is harder than passing a new bill because you will have large constituencies benefitting from counterfeit carbon permits (otherwise known as offsets), from the games that can be played with downsteamd permitting and sectorial caps.

And most of that is fed to animals, and most of the rest is fed to cars!  The U.S. grows enough soy to provide soy milk to replace every drop of milk  U.S. adults drink with plenty left over! If you drink cows milk the odds are that that ratio of soybeans eaten to milk produced is greater than the number of soybeans needed to produce the same amount of soy milk!

Here are some old 1997 figures on percent of U.S. soy harvest fed to dairy cows.

http://www.livestocktrail.uiuc.edu/dairynet/paperDisplay.cfm?ContentID=327

I am not taking time tonight to dig up later figures, but the big difference you will find today is that more of the soy harvest is used to make biodiesel.  So if the effect the soy harvest on the rainforest makes you sick, then the effect of drinking cow milk should make you sicker, because it leads to consuming more soybeans.

Here is the bottom line. There are ways of raising cattle that are easier on the environment that don't involve feeding them other animals or soybeans or things they really are not designed to eat. But there are ways of growing soybeans that don't involve burning down rainforests either. And in the latter cases, the answer lies in consuming the soybeans directly rather than feeding their high quality protein to animals.

I don't know if we need a special "Screw the Earth" day. In the U.S. at least, every day is "Screw the Earth" day.

One point to consider about wood burning.  Some of the particulates produces by wood burning stoves are black carbon, which has a much greater forcing effect than CO2. So the effect of  some of the lower quality wood stoves may be as great or greater than burning natural gas even after you consider the effects new tree replacing the old ones burned.

We need it all, but Griffith overstates difficulty

Griffith may be smartest guy in the world, but he made an arithmetic mistake somewhere. He estimates it takes 141X141 meters to sustain U.S. energy consumption with renewables, but:

If all energy use was converted to kWh the U.S. uses about 100,000 kWh per person per year

Nevada solar produces about 7.69 kWh per square foot per years.This includes all land use, not just solar collectors, but generators, access roads, buildings, services and even land left undisturbed within property boundaries
So square footage to generate energy from solar equivalent to U.S. use is about 12,750 square feet per person per year.

That is 34.4 meters by 34.4 meters, not 141 x 141 meters.With current populaiton that is about 3.2 million square miles.If population stabilizes at 10 billion that is about 4.7 million square miles

But lots of very nice places to live use about half the energy per person the U.S. does, and
they have not maximized efficiency. We can reduce emissions by 80% from per capita U.S. usage without doing stuff like reducing use of pens to one pen per lifetime.

So about 820,000 square miles to provide energy to sustain a world population of 10 billion with current U.S. GDP.So about 1.5% of land area of word's deserts could generate energy needed for a U.S. per capita GDP with a world population of 10 billions. That is less than one third of an Australia, and includes population growth!

Of course Nevada One, because it is small, has a high ratio of service area to collectors. Large scale solar farms would probably reduce that, and require only 1% of world desert land.

And that does not consider wind energy, solar on or shading rooftops or paved area, small amounts of geothermal and hydro, small amounts of biofuel, small amounts of fossil fuel.   On Saul Griffith calculates what we need to do to keep the world we evolved in posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago 7 Responses

Details

Bob, I wonder if you feel like posting more details on your system? I know a lot of offgrid people who do stuff along the lines you outline, but this kind of story is good to accumulate.On A smart grid, yes. A new national grid, no. posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 27 Responses

Geothermal wind

Hmm, an interesting thought. The bulk of commercially developable geothermal are comparatively low temp. That means that boost from adding compressed air is real. With natural gas CAES, electricity in compared to electricity out is distorted by comparing to single cycle turbine when advance combined cycle are available. With geothermal you might get a real boost. Of course what you are boosting is a tiny percent. Still if you could take the .5% or 1% potential geothermal electricity currently has and double it, that is a signficant amount of dispatchable electricity. A nice contribution to shaping much larger amounts of variable power. The engineering is not the same as natural gas, because you are not burning anything inside the turbine. I know there have been proposals to do this with nuclear, so there ought to be a way to do it with geothermal.  Not a silver bullet, but maybe a really really useful silver BB.On A smart grid, yes. A new national grid, no. posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 27 Responses

Capacity utilization

Don't know where DRX got capacity utilization. 45% is absolute best utilitzation of wind at very best sites. 35% is average in new wind farms. 19% to 21% is the usual capacity factor for solar usage. Also, 2 dollars pe watt installed is low for solar. Don't know any solar electric source that manages that cost.     2 bucks a watt for wind is high. Wind farms can be as low as $1.20 a watt, and usually top out a $1.80 per watt.

So your total per watt cost is high unless most renewable electricity is provided by wind and very little from solar. (Or unless the price of solar drops a lot, which I admit seems likely: but then your scenario depends on a technical breathrough, and is not based on today's costs.)

Also yeah we can cut total energy use by half. But we will probably want to use electricity to drive ground transport. A lot of existing building can't heat and cool with solar, so we will probably want to heat and cool them with ground source heat pumps. Given that most heating of buildings is not done with electricity, this is probably a large electricity increase in buildings even after we increase climate control efficiency in existing buildings. And after we cut industrial energy use in half, we will probably want to provide half of that industrial energy consumption with electricity, leaving half of reduced industrial consumption to be driven by sustainable biofuel or fossil fuel.  That means electricity use in a high efficiency scenario will vary from about the same as today, to twice as much as today. In short we can save a lot of electricity, but we will also need to use electricity for a lot of things we don't use it for today. So your numbers are off by many times. And still worth it at the real price.On A smart grid, yes. A new national grid, no. posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 27 Responses

What advantage in passing what won't work?

From the beginning of the ETS to present, emissions have risen. The one year they dropped does not make up for the three the rose. It is not obstructionism to insist that even the first draft should not have include problems we know will prevent the system from working.

And cap=and=trade is actually rather like deregulation. Relying on markets to do stuff they won't do well. At best any price on emissions is supplementary. Old fashioned standards based regulations and public investment is the main means that can reduce emissions. "Pass something that won't work,and then modify it" is seldom a good procuedure. I agree with you that the clean air act worked fine, and just was not updated when needed. And I agree that deregulation could never have worked.

But the thing is we have empirical evidence with cap-and-trade. It worked with acid rain on a small scale, though other nations got better results faster with rules along the line of the old clean air act. But the Reclaim system which tried to implement a larger scale trading system in a much smaller area failed miserably. It collapsded. The ETS over the course of 4 years has raised emissions. Isn't that an indication that any U.S. approach should be different? If the ETS was learning experience shouldn't we fucking learn from it?On Low permit prices undermine infrastructure transformation posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 7 Responses

Slowing down

Isn't there a limit to how much you can slow down without changing altitudes? That is doesn't reaching certain heights require a minimum speed?

Also, I'm pretty sure that lifespan of emissions is already taken into account when calculating effects of water vapor emissions. Also isn't the problem that some of the vapor when released at sufficient heights does remain for months? If it just stayed around for  hours, like it does near the ground, it would be a feedback, not a forcing. On High energy requirements make the manufacture of algal biofuel prohibitive posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 35 Responses

Grid fix

even so i wonder if blocking a national grid (whether or not it comes with local and regional resilient distributed smarts) is a good idea until the grid fix is part of a complete clean energy package as it is in the full "repower america" proposal.

I think that is a good point. National transmission can be used for good or evil. It probably should be supported only if it comes with some guarantee against the latter. On A smart grid, yes. A new national grid, no. posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 27 Responses

But there is good reason to do both

There is good reason to do both. We need to be able to move electricity between renewable production zones. As I've argued in past posts, even if we get all rooftop power, you still need to move electricity between places with different daily and different seasonal production patters. (Also, even if we get rooftop solar, most wind potential is concentrated in a few areas. And if you do solar, you want complementary wind.)

But we need fine grained grid control and demand side management too. And a smart grid and national transmission complement one another.  If you are doing demand side management being able to combine demand from differnt time zones and climates smoothes it out. If you are putting variable power into the grid the from distance places being able to delay some demand to match supply is a huge benefit. We need full smart grid, and full national transmission. Not one or the other, but both. On There are two ways of improving the electrical grid, each with its own politics and challenges posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 4 Responses

intelligence

>Recently I have pondered whether there may be a ninth, or existential intelligence

So you are taking a speculation, not a settled theory and staking that out as the basis for your new political movement

>Formerly, your #1 problem with 'talking this kind of crap', has been blowback from the Nature vs. Nurture conflict.  Meaning, the nurture-people are incensed, and the nature-people are (infuriatingly) amused.

Anyone who takes either side in the Nature vs. Nurture conflict is ignoring the science which says we have phenotypes, genetic capabilities expressed via environmental influence. Everything is both, though there are degrees. And multiple intelligence is a well known theory widely used in the classroom. And teachers, quite rightly, are indifferent to whether those intelligences are more nature or nurture. They know that even if a particular student is more focused on one type of learning that student will learn optimally if information is conveyed in mulitple ways that nurture multiple levels of intelligence. And trying build a long term political movement focused on just one type of intelligence is going to be doomed to failure, especially since our definitions of what constitutes different types of intelligence are still in a process of discovery. For example, Stephen Pinker who has done some of the best work trying make evolutionary psychology scientific rather than a bunch of just-so stories thinks there is a single mathematical/musical intelligence, that math and music are differing expressions of the same type of intelligence.

Again, anyone who argues for all nature or all nurture doesn't even understand the question. And in terms of judging degree, the key there is humility, cause we don't yet know the answer very well. On Q&A with a board candidate I wish I could vote for posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 10 Responses

Output based standards

Actually I've always agreed that output based standards are feasible with electricity. It is the manufacturing end that makes zero sense. Emissions per kWh are a great standard for electricity. Because a kWh is a good surrogate for the economic value of electrical generation. (That is a kWh from one source is pretty the same value as a kWh from another. It is not a perfect standard. Dispatchability, and how far it is from point of demand do factor into value, and are not not taken into account in a an emissions per kWh standard. But kWh is a good enough surrogate for practical purposes. )

Of course in terms of effectiveness I'm pretty sure straight regulation beats output based standards.   A simple ever tightening regulatory standard for total emissions per kWh within each utility district will have the same results. And most electricity is produced within utility districts large enough to provide plenty of flexibility in terms of path take to achieve reductions. If compliance within a single district did not allow enough flexibility you would allow utility disticts to voluntarilty combine into compliance superdisticts to let them achieve compliance across multiple districts.

Also straight emissions standards per kWh rather than an output based system in this case achieves the same advantage David attributes to cap-and-trade over carbon taxes: certainty in amount of reduction rather certainty of emissions price. On Some perspective on tax-and-dividend and a better alternative posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 26 Responses

Large trucks and cranes

Something has to run large trucks, cranes, and airplanes -- even if its less efficient than batteries.

I dont care if its hydrogen or Algal biodiesel.  But it should be more free of carbon, than natural gas.

1) Large trucks - replace 85% of heavy truck miles by electric trains. Cut the remaining 15% in half by using more efficient trucks and by reducing packaging, and by making stuff last longer, and by making stuff closer to where it is used. Another words ship mostly by electricity, run trucks more efficiently and ship less.

2)Cranes, Given that mining is electricified there is no reason we cannot electrify other heavy equipment.

3) flying.  Regardless of how you fuel planes, water vapor persistance when released in the atmosphere means we will have to fly less. To some extent we can fly lower and more slowly, but there are limits to how much this reduces water vapor emissions. So there is no technical solution currently in queue to running airlines. We will have to substitute high speed rail for some flights, teleconcfrencing for others, and simply do  without some of the rest.

With enough efficiency, enough conservation, and enough substitution of renewable electricity for fuel use we can use small amounts of fossil fuel and small amounts of biofuel from waste. In the U.S. we we could reduce combined use of fossil fuels and biofuels to about 8 quads.    
On High energy requirements make the manufacture of algal biofuel prohibitive posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 35 Responses

Again how do feebates scale

I'm trying to envision widespread use of feebates covering whole sector on a product by product basis. Past a certain point, I think you'd have to go for sectorial implementation. I can't see feebates implemented for thousands or tens of thousand of individual products. On Some perspective on tax-and-dividend and a better alternative posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 26 Responses

Scalability

Don't know how well this would scale. Past a certain point I think you would simply want to combine standard based regulation with a straight carbon price.  

Also when you talk about recycling the money back into emissions reductions:

1. Fine for things like automobiles. Not so good if done generally, because even then you end up with things you want to do depending on things you don't want to as a source of revenue. Even with automobiles, you might end up with a lot autos that are just efficient enough not to get taxed, followed by an abrupt drop in the subsidy for electric cars, followed by a lot of electric car companies going out of business. A reason not to overdo subsidies. You want subsidies to help break chicken/egg deadlock. You don't want to create industries so dependent on subsidies, they collapse when the subsidies are reduced or eliminated.

2. Also, why is always more efficient to direct revenue from a carbon tax or feebate into the same sector? Suppose you tax the electric industry on emissions per kWh. OK, well maybe a good place to spend that is  electric industry:  solar or wind or generating electricity from waste heat. But maybe it makes more sense to use that money to weather seal homes. That saves some electricity directly, and it also saves natural gas that can then be used as a replacement for coal in electricity generation.  

3. If you moved from specific products to sectors maybe you could generalize it. Fees for homes and offices that emit above a certain level per person or per square feet, subsidies for weather sealing and duct sealing, and insulation, and window treatments, and efficient lighting, appliances and office equipment, and subsidies for solar space and water heating and for ground source heat pumps. Feebates in transport based on emissions per passenger mile and per ton mile. Feebates in electricity based on emissions per kWh. Ironically, the one sector we do NOT have a good proxy , that is a good what in the emissions per what equation is manufacturing. I know Sean thinks emissions per delivered BTU work process is such a proxy, but he overlooks that there are a lot of ways to reduce emissions per dollar of output that this does not capture. In manufacture of high quality steel for example, beyond heat per ton of steel, there is near net shape manufacture of steel, which reduces scrap during manufacture, and thus ends up with more USABLE steel per unit of emissions. Also there is not just a question of scrappage of raw materials incorporated in products, but scrappage (as opposed to use) of materials used in manufacturing process not incorporated in product. Spills, emergency flaring and so on. Plus of course scrapping finished products due to various avoidable problems (for example not adequately inspecting raw materials, and not adequately controlling processes.) 8% to 16% of industrial emissions could be reduced just by feasible reductions in avoidable scrapping, about a 1/4th to 1/2 of savings from Tom Casten's estimate of maximum feasible savings from recycled energy.  And that does not even consider other forms of changes in material intensty: reduced use of materials, reduced use of high carbon footprint marterials, increased product lifespan. Nor does it consider changes in process once material choice and lifespan are optimized that can reduce BTUs needed to drive a particular result as opposed to just delivering BTUS to that process more efficienctly.

Should have followed the link

Duke can already get returns on efficiency incentives. This lets them get returns on Avoided costs, meaning what they say investing would have cost them. This is an invitation to do the same kind of kind of game playing that have been well documented for ripoffsets. And you yourself say that Duke has been caught engaging in that very kind of game playing. On South Carolina misses an opportunity for energy efficiency with Duke's Save-A-Watt program posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 18 Responses

Most blogs run a tighter ship than Grist

Climate Progress is a great example of running a tighter comment ship than Grist. I'd bet CP has a lot less readers than Grist. But their threads have about the same number of comments. Higher comment to reader count - because they exercise troll control. Don't know if Grist has high enough advertising rates that fewer clicks mean significantly less money. I know funding is a mixture of donations and ads. But if advertising is a significant revenue source for Grist, then troll tolerance is costing them money. On Coen brothers shoot an ad busting the 'clean coal' myth posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 36 Responses

Problem with trolls

With Grist we have the worst of both worlds in terms of trolls and incivility. There are anti-trolling and anti-incivility rules, but they are not enforced. So if a troll has had bad day because the other boys in the locker room have been snapping towels at him, and the cute nerdgirls in algebra won't talk to him, he can come here and take out his bad temper. Because the rules exist he won't be flame until he runs crying to his attic bedroom.  But because the rules are not enforced the troll can continue to be disruptive and insulting. I think this one of the reasons Grist gets so few comments. To post here you have to either be troll, or willing to take verbal abuse without fighting back. I think that is one reason the male to female ratio is even worse than your normal internet site in comments. Women have to put up with a lot more verbal abuse in circumstances where it is impractical to return to favor than men anyway. For that reason, they are less likely than men to volutarily subject themselves to that sort of nonsense volutarily. Grist either needs to start enforcing its rules, or let commentors enforce informal community standards via flaming. I don't much care for the second, but it beats what we have now - rules that apply to normal participants, but not to trolls.

And its not like you can't disagree here within the rules. Some of the pronuke people are examples of how to maintain a high level of civilty while disagreeing strongly with other posters.  On Coen brothers shoot an ad busting the 'clean coal' myth posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago 36 Responses

Drx on Kunstler

If we can't afford high-speed, medium-speed, freight and regular rail, we better relocalize and kiss industrial civilization goodbye right now."

I think that's what Jim is hoping for, his Y2K fantasy did not work out so well.  It's nothing against civilization, he just wants to be right for a change.  

If we start with climate disaster nobody listens

At this point I'm afraid "We can get rich, and solve the climate crisis as a side effect" will get a larger hearing than "We can solve the climate crisis and get rich as a side effect".

What we are suffering today are effects of emissions from ten years ago or more. If we stopped all emissions today and starting drawing down, it would be ten years before we saw any reduction in the rate of climate disaster. Public opinion considers the long term only when costs are extraordinarily low. An immediate gain in productivity is a better argument for winning public support than long term prevention apocalypse. Your approach is better in strict logic, but strict logic does not accomplish much in public discourse.  On Higher productivity and lower health costs outweigh additional spending posted 9 months ago 7 Responses

Eliminating coal is the goal

At least our goal, don't know about Jackson. As, of course, part of the broader goal of eliminating emissions. But the EPA has only certain powers until new legislation is passed.

The speculation here is not about the best answers (I think when it comes to coal agreement is pretty broad.) The speculation is about what loopholes will be available to the coal industry  under various plausible sets of regulations that could be passed without new legislation.On What is the 'best available control technology' for CO2 from coal plants? posted 9 months, 1 week ago 11 Responses

Personally I'd like more put into freight rail

Electrification and improvement of our freight rail system could displace 85% of long haul trucking. And provide moderately high speed passenger rail as a side effect (100 mph vs 200 mph, but for every route in the U.S. that made sense for long distance rail).  I'm not saying we should not do others too, but freight+better Amtrak would be huge bang for the buck in money, in emissions reductions, and in oil savings.
On The stimulus bill provides serious money for high-speed rail posted 9 months, 1 week ago 13 Responses

impressionism

Umm markets don't have morals. Individuals may or may not have them, markets can't. And again "learning experience" is a post hoc excuse. But maybe one of things we should learn from the ETS failure is that emissions trading is not the right way to lower emissions. Or maybe we should learn that we need to do it better. Certainly we should learn that we need to do something drastically different. And the thing is, it is not as though we don't have a long list of other things we can do that have worked in the past. Standards based regulation lower SOx emissions faster and further in German than the U.S. acid rain trading system did at the same time. Public investment in Germany and Denmark produced a large wind industry long before there was an emission trading system. And if you want a carbon price to be part of the solution, a carbon tax is worth considering. So "ETS or nothing" is a false choice.

As to "too late", it is too late to reverse certain damage that has already been done, and further damage that has been locked. But what we are not yet locked into is a cycle of irreversible feedback. We are going to lose a lot of coastline; a lot of people living in coastal cities and towns and villages and rural areas will have to move inland. We are gong to see some major freshwater rivers become salt rivers. But what is locked can at least be compensated for. Loss of agricultural potential is still small enough that it can be compensated for by a reduction in meat consumption and a switch from industrial to organic farming. (Of course for those things to any good will require a reduction of economic inequality.) Keep going and we can see our absolute capacity to produce food cut by half or more. We don't have time for trading schemes that don't  actually reduce reductions. If an emissions market won't actually reduce emissions, we have a lot of other choices, and we had better start adapting them. On Since the Kyoto ETS went into effect, traded emissions have risen posted 9 months, 1 week ago 4 Responses

Caps

>Under a cap, any person, organization, or policy that tries to save carbon will fail.
Why? Because we will hit the cap anyway. Buy a hybrid and the "trading" of permits encourages someone else to buy and SUV and laugh at you for making it cheaper for them.

OK this is nonsense. There are lots of arguments against trading, but there is no reasonable argument against a cap if you want to solve the climate crisis.  If you have and enforce a cap, then any means of complying with the cap is useless under your argument because it could have been complied with in another way. However, if we choose to reduce emissions, obviously we will choose some means over others. Thus if we meet 100% of our electricity needs with a particular mixture of PV, Wind, CSP solar and a small amount of hydro and biofuel, this is not useless just because a different mixture could have accomplished the same thing.  Your argument is not an argument against carbon trading but against any mandatory reduction in emissions, and incidentally based on a fundamental logical fallacy.On Expanding on Barbara Boxer's principles for climate legislation posted 9 months, 1 week ago 10 Responses

Excuses

You know this was pretty expensive for a learning experience. I wonder if anyone can point me to anyone favoring this system saying in 2004, before it went into affect, that this was learning experience and would not actually lower emissions.

As to price floors and so on interfering with "what is otherwise a free market", I find that a very revealing statement. That would imply the emissions market is more important than an actual emissions reduction. Again, I hope cap-and-trade supporters who genuinely want cap-and-trade to be an instrument to reduce emissions will bear in mind that this is the mindset of many of your more conservative allies. On Since the Kyoto ETS went into effect, traded emissions have risen posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 4 Responses

And algae is expensive

So better to go with wind and sun, and stick to research on algae. And the small amount of biofuel we can get from waste without competing with soil building uses. (This includes certain forest wastes and brush clearing.) ("Small being a relative term. We could actually generate more biofuel sustainably than we generate unstainably now. But for the most part that includes generating methane from it, with fertilizer as a side effect or burning directly as coal substitute, not making ethanol.)On Is the U.S. ready for sane ethanol policy? posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 6 Responses

First solar again

OK they do give a manufacturing cost $1.08 per watt. You can't sell for manufacturing cost, but that really is good new. But if they sell panels for $2.50 a watt, then installation is going to add a minimum of $1 per watt to that more likely 2.00 for most uses.  So $3,500 per peak KW still remains absolute bottom. On Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 34 Responses

V2G

V2g - great but exaggerated. (Not exaggerated by people who seriously advocate v2G but by people who hear about it and get an inflated idea of what it is.)

Basically batteries are expensive. Battery cycles are expensive. If that changes utilities will buy their own batteries for intensive use. In the meantime, utilities won't buy battery cycles from drivers at high prices routinely, for example on a daily basis.  V2G will be good for a lot of uses, spinning reserve,  seasonal peaks that happen a few days a year - a substitute for capital capacity that would be very lightly used.  But not for time shift solar or wind production.  (Also another issue. People will want to sell only a percent of their capacity.)

Perhaps the greatest potential for V2G is standard demand shifting. When I said a maximum (and a very overoptimistic maximum) of demand shifting can be one third demand, that includes V2G. If you have a vehicle that will  charge in six hours, and you plug it in at work for eight, you may well be willing to delay the charge, or to having pauses in charging of up to two hours. Better yet if you only drive five miles to work, and you can recharge that in 20 minutes, you will be willing for that 20 minutes to occur anywhere within that eight hours the utility wants, all at once, or a bit at a time as the utility chooses. Even if you use your car to eat out or run errands at lunch that does not change the equation much. (And I know there are plenty of exceptions. But this certainly will apply to many people.)

If I were a utility, increasing capacity to meet demand from electric cars, I'd want a smart grid, and I'd want every electric car to be a smart appliance that supplied the following info when plugged in for charging: How many total kWh do you want? When do you want them by? How much less than that will you accept? (If the answer to that is not zero the utility will assume that you will plug in again later to make up the difference with no willingness to accept less, so may or may not take advantage of that current willingness.)

Is there a solution to combine radical decentralism with really phasing out fossil fuels? Yeah.

One is not to be too purist.  Is a mostly decentralized grid that includes a percent of long distance power that terrible a thing? Especially since other components of energy like efficiency, and low temp heat storage, and a smart grid really do lend themselves to decentralization.

The other, if you really insist on decentralist purity, is to make the hydrogen path work (not for cars, but for electricity storage). When Amory Lovins writes about the advantages of decentralized power, one thing he never explicitly says, but is implicit in his arguments is that A) either that many of them apply only to peak, not base or load following unless B) base and load following is provided by hydrogen.

True local production, even with extensive demand management requires either extensive fossil fuel use (not minor, a lot) or requires really extensive storage. Where hydrogen shines thermodynamically is if you need a high ratio of stored hours to peak demand.  Hydrogen stores energy less efficiently that batteries, but not intolerably so (at least not with the really expensive types of hydrogen fuel cell and electrolyzers). But efficient hydrogen has a really high capital cost, both efficient electrolysis, and efficient fuel cells to burn it in.  But if you get the capital costs of efficient hydrogen (say 40% round trip loss electrolysis, storage, and energy recovery combined) to something reasonable, and you get cheap (say 2 cents per kWh) solar then it won't cost much more to store 16 kWh of electricity than to store one. The incremental capital costs are just hydrogen storage, which is not trivial, but ultra-high either.

The bad news is that this is at least two technical improvements. You need cheap efficient PEM hydrogen fuels. (But the good news is that if you get that, you have cheap efficient electrolysis - basically the same PEM fuel cell designed tweaked to run in  reverse, and optimized slightly differently.) And given you are talking 40% round trip cycle losses maybe you need really cheap solar electricity. (But of course you can use the waste heat for water heating and refrigeration. So maybe solar PV competitive with wind would be sufficient. Still a heck of a jump from where we are.)

(Note on waste heat for refrigeration - moderate temperature heat running refrigerators is existing technology.)
Any way, I finally realized why Amory is so hipped on hydrogen. It is not necessary to replace fossil fuels with renewables, but it is needed if we don't want large wind farms and large CSP solar to be responsible for a lot of that production.   On Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 34 Responses

Ground source heat pumps and water

Yes heat pumps can heat water. Just not much advantage. You don't get much COP. On Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 34 Responses

Solar Water heaters

I'm all for solar water heaters. Our spreadsheet assumes them. But note that you still need some electrical or natural gas backup. (For obvious reason my preference is electrical. )  Again I'm disputing that solar and more important efficiency can save 50% of current electricity use. Perhaps more. But unlike water heating, we have a lot homes without ability to add solar space heating (though like hot water a lot of homes that won't support PV will support solar space heating.)

Also solar space heating requires a smaller temp difference than hot water. Still retrofitting an existing home with a solar space heater is close to the cost per  kw equivalent of a hot water heater. So 4 to 1 cost difference between PV and solar space heater. Maybe 5 to 1, because spacing heating is cheaper. But PV can drive a ground source heat pump. So you can end up with a PV system one 4th the power of a solar space heater.  Also that ground source heat pump can cool as well as heat, whereas a solar space heater can't do cooling without doubling your capital cost. (And non-electrical solar space cooling is not available for single family homes anyway, as of six months ago - at least not in humid climates. Maybe that has changed.)

What would really change this is is if Sunflowers scheme would work. Take a concentrating mirror. Focus on a 40% efficient space solar cell. With losses from the mirror and from inability to use indirect sun, say the result is 30% efficient PV. Put that into a heat pump and you end up 90% to 150% efficient use of sunlight. (Yeah, more than 100% - if you are lurking and this is new to you google heat pump and COP.) That of course is at least as good an efficiency as solar panels. And if Sunflower is right about costs, at a comparable price. Of course you still have the cost of your ground source heat pump. Note that this does not apply to water heating. The  higher temperature difference means you don't gain much from a heat pump. And you need hot water all year round. So direct solar water heating is a perfect application for direct thermal solar.

The whole game changes with new homes. You can build a new home to need zero fossil fuel or electric climate control energy, or close to it at a tiny incremental cost.  But in existing homes you have to consider these things. On Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 34 Responses

Solar hot water and heat

I mentioned solar hot water and heat. One thing to remember is that solar electricity potential is a percentage. Without storage a drop in demand means a drop in the amount of solar electricity that can be provided without storage without disrupting reliability.  Also remember that a lot of existing buildings are shaded or badly oriented in regards to the sun which lowers solar thermal potential.  Also remember we want to start driving transport by electricity. Because fossil fuels drive transport so inefficiently, that won't raise electric demand much, but it will increase it somewhat. More seriously, there are parts of industrial demand where we can only lower emissions by substituting low carbon electricity for direct use of fossil fuels. Fortunately there are lots of cases (like Electric Arc Furnaces) where this can increase rather than decrease life cycle energy efficiency, but that may make up for decreases in the use of commercial and residential electricity. Also, to the extent that we can't use low temperature solar in existing buildings, we may have to use ground source heat pumps. Ground source heat pumps are more efficient than resistance heating. (They are even a bit more efficient than natural gas if the electricity is produced by reasonably efficient gas turbines. But of course we want the greater saving that wold come from driving them with renewable electricity.)

Look, I think if we had seriously started moving along the path of efficiency and renewables back in 1976 when both Barry Commoner and Amory Lovins were shouting for attention, we could have move along a more gradual path where for many years we got most of our power from fossil fuels, just used it more efficiently. But we wait too long. We did not deploy what we already knew how to do cheaply. We can't wait any longer for the stuff "just around the corner". We have start deploying everything we know how to do at  a reasonable cost, which includes stuff that is more expensive (not including social costs) than fossil fuel. Improvements almost certainly will occur as we deploy, and when they do we can shift course. But we can't wait for tech to get better anymore. Not even near term stuff. We threw away our safety margin. Actually we are way past our safety margin. Now we are trying to slow down enough that the crash only causes cuts and bruises. If we wait much longer we will be hoping to get away with broken limbs. On Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 34 Responses

For Duggie

I meant that proper battery choice could save a total of 80% to 120% of the cost of the batteries chosen. At the time I thought it was a use efficiency issue, kWh per mile. It turns out though that the Volt is very efficient in that respect, even beating the Triac (.2 kWh per mile instead of .23). Where the waste comes in is that to maintain a battery life of 10 years they are using 50% of battery capacity instead of the usual 85%. But if the $10,000 figure is correct they could have bought advanced batteries at a lower cost that would have lasted ten years with lower capacity. Maybe the speculation is wrong and their costs are under control and they are just raising the prices because they think they can. In the current recession I kind of doubt that though.On Chevy Volt could cut costs by using batteries more efficiently and paying less for them posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 17 Responses

I'll be curious to see all your numbers

But if you exclude real social costs (and you are - you are just talking market costs after excluding subsidies)   then I don't see how wood ends up cheaper than coal. Lower capital costs? On Proposed renewable-energy bill is better than nothing posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 26 Responses

OK thanks for clarification

Thanks for explaining your internal jargon. Also reading more carefully, you are not really claiming to capture all social costs, in spite of using that term, but to chart all internal and private costs, less subsidies (and maybe regulatory costs). So you are not judging whether wind or biomass electricity are cleaner. You are saying that biomass is cheaper. I do wonder about some of your rankings, but look forward to your spreadsheet. I would really be curious as to the potential for what you call "recycled energy with CHP". Because at point you are not only producing electricity, you are reducing industrial energy consumption even not counting the electricity produced.On Proposed renewable-energy bill is better than nothing posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 26 Responses

Various

What is difference between "recycled energy" and "recycled energy CHP"? I mean I thought Combined heat and power was a form of recycled energy? By non-CHP recycled energy are you talking about resuing process heat for other processes, (counter-current washing and such)?   Also I'm curious what kinds of biomass electricity and combined heat and power are cleaner than wind. Are you talking about waste wood only? Or are you claiming the full social of cost of energy plantations to run generators are cleaner than wind? On Proposed renewable-energy bill is better than nothing posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 26 Responses

Volt

Yeah that is certainly part of it. But the Volt is about 1/3rd bigger than the Triac. So why is it nearly double the weight? And it is worth remember that the Selectria Sunrise was as big as the Volt, and got better miles per kWh with freaking nickel chromium as opposed to Lithium batteries! On Chevy Volt could cut costs by using batteries more efficiently and paying less for them posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 17 Responses

700 billion?

I'm pretty sure we spend more like a trillion plus on energy.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/states/sep_prices/total/pr_to ...

Yeah, slightly undre 1.2 trillion in 2006On The economy needs to be green to be 'fixed' posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 9 Responses

Downside

"..as long as the price is tethered to a firm cap, there's no environmental downside."

Sorry, but there is if the cap is going to get lower. Usually the point of a phased in cap-and-trade is not only to meet the current cap, to get the investments made needed to comply when the cap tightens. If the carbon price drops too much during bad times, when they improve the infrastructure won't be there. One way to avoid this is to take action to reduce volatility, such as a minimum price. Or you could have large enough scale public investment and efficiency standards to ensure that such investment does not depend upon price, so that either cap-and-trade or a carbon tax is reinforcement not the main driver of reductions. But that would be setting priorities and apparently setting priorities is now the equivalent of declaring holy war. On Magic exists: It's called 'cap-and-trade' posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 12 Responses

Foot stomping

David, read the tone of your comments compared to the tone of my post, and think about who is really engaging in foot stomping. You have now commented twice, engaged in name calling twice and not addressed the substance once. Take a deep breath...
On How awful does a bill have to get to lose your support? posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 32 Responses

Note that you did address substantive point

1. Do you disagree that grandfathering, not every possible gimmick, but grandfathering (i.e. permit giveways) are easier to spot with a carbon tax than under cap-and-trade?

2. Can you name one gimmick that is easier to get away with under a carbon tax (not any possible tax in the world but a carbon tax)than in a cap-and-trade?

David some of your own comments are evidence

1. Pelosi has said she wants to wait until 2010.

2. When I suggested 100% auction, no offramp (among other conditions) you suggested as narrow an offramp as possible and as high a percent of permits auctioned as possible.

3. So let me put it another way:

"have to choose"

>But, really, I'm not the one insisting we have to choose.

First, every post on the subject I've put up insists we need both. So you are attacking a red herring when you say that. And the whole idea that talking about setting priorities between C&C and price is new or unimportant seems kind of odd.

Examples of swipes at "command-and-control" include: Matt Yglesias bashing swipes CAFE in defense of gasoline taxes, the EPA describing "advantages of market-oriented policies over command-and-control approaches to controlling pollution", Pew's statement that "an emissions trading program, if designed and implemented effectively, can achieve environmental goals faster and at lower costs than traditional command-and-control alternatives". There is also the Environmental Defense Fund's claim that "Markets provide greater environmental effectiveness than command-and-control regulation because they turn pollution reductions into marketable assets". On the Gristmill blog, at almost the same time Stein was claiming comparing "command & control" to carbon pricing is something new done only by awful people,
Hannah McCrea and Doug Kendall were writing "The better approach to mitigating this risk is to attach a price to carbon emissions".

Obviously the perception of a conflict is not limited to C&C advocates.On Why the rush to defend this not-so-embattled style of legislation? posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 13 Responses

CSP

Relevant factor: water per mWh:

CSP full water cooled 800 (including mirrors)
CSP 80% savings with hybrid water air 180 gallons per mWh (160 for cooling +20 for cleaning) =.18 gallons per kWh or 216 gallons to produce one months power for your average household. That is a little over 2 days use for your average household.

Another way to look at it.  Megawatt hours 2007 net generation = 4,156,745,000
If 100% of U.S. power was produced by CSP that would be 748,214,100,000 gallons of water used for that purpose.

Estimate water use for power cooling 2000
71,175,000,000,000 gallons http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/ (195 billion gallons per day * 365)

So using hybrid water/air cooled CSP plants would reduce water consumption for electric power cooling by nearly 99% compared to today. Using plain old water cooled solar plants with no conservation would still save well over 93% compared to today's consumption.

And of course nobody is suggesting that 100% of power come from CSP. And of course some of the cooling water could be contaminated water which you distill into clean water at the same time as you cool the plant.

Stopgreenpath, you do know that some of the early opposition to big green was paid for by coal companies? You may want to look into whoever keeps feeding you out of context figures.
On World heads for 'water bankruptcy', says Davos report posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 31 Responses

Infrastructure and carbon pricing

I do disagree, though, on whether green infrastructure is an adequate substitute for carbon pricing. Green infrastructure creates clean alternatives to traditional dirty sources of energy, transport, etc. But I think you need carbon pricing in order for people to actually make the effort to switch to those green alternatives. In my mind, green investment and carbon pricing are complementary - green investment creates the means to lead a cleaner lifestyle, and carbon pricing creates the will to do so.

The argument seems to be that what we need to do first is get through a pricing mechanism. Infrastructure spending and regulations are reinforcement. Whereas the reverse is true. What is most urgent is green infrastructure, and regulations. Carbon pricing is reinforcement.If we can do everything at once, great. But if in the real world of politics some things have to take priority over othes, then Infrastructure and regulation should be the priority.On Carbon tax is better on merits, cap-and-traders trade away political advantages posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago 18 Responses

SO2

>Except cap and trade, which was created by economists as an alternative to technology mandates for emissions reductions (and ended up reducing SO2 faster than had been the case).

1. Not faster than Germany or a bunch of nations in Europe who used mandates to reduce emissions from higher than the U.S. to lower

2. Not faster than the mandates were scheduled to lower them. C&T was instituted in the U.S. as an alternative to mandates that would have been put in place otherwise. There was one year where emissions were lowered more than scheduled. But the credits were banked and came back to bite us in the ass later when a bunch of people were exposed to pollution thanks to banked credits.

3 year permit

To avoid excessive trading, or excessive resale. In a 100% auctioned system the "carrot" is not buying permits in any case. On There's a reason Republicans stump for a carbon tax, and it ain't to reduce emissions posted 10 months ago 37 Responses

Shorter version

1. A an acceptable bill must have a real cap, with no takebacks, and allow only real emissions cuts, no imaginary paper cuts like so-called offsets.

2. An acceptable bill must sell all permits, not give them away to big polluters. And it must structure that sale so that polluters mostly buy them directly. It is not acceptable to end up with our greenhouse policy run by the same financial institutions who did such a bangup job with mortgages. We don't need carbon hedge managers collecting billion dollar bonuses, or carbon derivative swaps!

Romm seems to think we are not going to get ANY bill in 2009. If that is the case, then the best strategy is to get a maximal bill introduced, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and make that the starting point for 2010 negotiations.On There's a reason Republicans stump for a carbon tax, and it ain't to reduce emissions posted 10 months ago 37 Responses

Cap & Trade

OK, one thing the right has always known is that unity comes from giving something to the base. You don't have to do a carbon tax. But I think the minimum you need for a cap & trade to be acceptable to progressives is:

1. NO giveaways 100% auctioning

2. NO offsets.

3. NO escape clauses.

4. Permits auctioned frequently and conveniently enough that buying them directly rather through traders is real option

5. Permits have a life of no more than three years, and a start date no more than three years from time of auction. (So you could buy a permit that takes effect three years from now and expires three years from that).

If you want well designed (as opposed to acceptably designed) I add the following. I think it will work well enough without the following, but for best policy add:

1. Minimum prices close to the best guess as to actual cost (greatly reduces volatility).

2. A quarter percent tax on resale of permits. (Discourages trading and encourages direct purchasing.)

In essence this is a call for a unified position. Fine, but if you want unity between different parts of the spectrum, you can't expect one faction to  do all the moving on the grounds that "you are just being big sillybillies. Grow up and to things my way".

If progressives are important enough that you are afraid their lack of support will kill something, then they are important enough to be reached out to rather than scolded. On There's a reason Republicans stump for a carbon tax, and it ain't to reduce emissions posted 10 months ago 37 Responses

Gas taxes not that big compared to gas prices

Not only is Sean spot on that gas cost is not that big compared to other car costs. Gas taxes are not that big compared to the cost of gasoline. On What gas taxes don't do posted 10 months ago 5 Responses

Karen Street

You are right - did my arithmetic too hastily. But
"You're right it's carbon, not carbon dioxide." Actually CO2 equivalent.  Greenhouse gases other than carbon containing ones are not trivial - SF6 and other F5 gases. (SF6 is 22,000 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2). Also black carbon is much more powerful the CO2 as is Methane (natural gas/landfill gas/sewage gas) all CH4 is also many times more powerful. CO2 equivalent is a nice measure that converts them all to a common factor. Though actually these conversions are not as simple as we treat them as being. That is there are certain judgements made in saying that SF6 is 22,000 times more powerful than CO2. How we value strength of forcing vs. lifetime in atmosphere.   On We need to cut emissions faster than 80 percent by 2050, but how fast? posted 10 months ago 39 Responses

Karen is right about percent drop

Very simple arithmetic:

Census International Data Base:

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.html

Midyear pop 2010:6,869,643,038

Midyear pop 2030:8,378,629,430

That is about a tiny bit under a 22% population growth. So take absolute reduction of 80% in 20 years, and increase that by population increase and you end up needing a bit under a 96% emission decrease per person. If the decrease in 20 years is to be 90% in absolute terms, it comes so close to 100% per capita as for the tiny remaining emission not to be worth considering.  And that is before we consider per capita economic growth above zero. So essentially we need to cut emissions over 20 years by between 95% per person and essentially zero.
On We need to cut emissions faster than 80 percent by 2050, but how fast? posted 10 months ago 39 Responses

Political mistakes to overemphasize relationship

Part of what is politically possible is defined by what is asked. Also, since nobody can anticipate every political turn you need to be ready for unexpected opportuntities.

Example: I have been saying for years that green groups think too small, that people like the Apollo Alliance who call for a 30 billion annual green investment or even Van Jones who calls for a 50 billion green investment need to think bigger.

And now Obama is supporting a 440 billion dollar stimulus for two years. And what is the green portion? 15-30 billion per year - just what green groups have been asking for. It turns out his people considered much higher numbers. But there were not detailed proposals in place for spending more than 15-30 billion. So 15-30 billion is what is being proposed. Now there will be some pushback, maybe a bit more for buses and rail. But fundamentally if nobody is asking for more we wont' get more.

Lets take another example. The Republicans were very successfuly in pushing through what they wanted until recently. Now the Republicans are lousy at relationship building. Bush and Cheney are both personally obnoxious in different ways. So is Newt, and so are at least half of the Republican big time players.  Bt they had the muscle so they got what they wanted. And ultimately they failed not because they were obnoxious, but because their policy so damn bad.

Lets take another example. Maxine Waters is one of sharpest legislators out there. She is one of the three or four leftmost members of Congress out there, yet she is a player. She is a good enough player to able to get the occasional bit through - even though she is a minority of a minority. She is the progressive part of the Black Caucus, which is itself not exactly in the mainstream of Congressional thought. She is at the left end of the Progressive caucus, which again is not itself in the mainstream. And she is no purist, knows how to make a strategic compromise. By raising a stink at the appropriate time she may well have save Aristide's life after the second Haitian coup.  And yet she would be the first to tell you that if she could get anyhing she wanted it would not be for some the other legislators to become as smart as she is. I would not be slicker lobbying groups on her side. It would be a grassroots group that could put some muscle behind all her brilliance. Because there is a limit to how much you can accomplish with clever maneuvering if you don't have the muscle to back it up. On Legislative proposals must be judged not only as policy, but also as politics posted 10 months ago 6 Responses

Brown

I think I see a bit more of Brown's reasoning. Hansen says we need to peak at 400-420 ppm. Brown takes the bottom number and says 400. I'm still not certain exactly where he gets 80% in ten years from this. He is generally a careful reasoner, with good technical knowledge though. Since he posts occasionally on Grist, I'd like to see him post on this subject.On We need to cut emissions faster than 80 percent by 2050, but how fast? posted 10 months ago 39 Responses

ETS Banking

>Example: The price collapse in the EU ETS phase 1 could have been avoided with either a price floor or banking, but banking would have effectively extended the overallocation into phase 2.

Actually banking was allowed through all of phase I, and after the price collapse, it was extended through Phase II. All the overallocated permits will actually be valid in Phase II. And we still had a second price collapse after the general economic crash. That at least brings the effectiveness of banking into question. On Carbon price volatility is a real issue posted 10 months ago 15 Responses

Volatility

Carbon price volatility is one of the bad features of a poorly designed cap-and-trade system. Even if the specific price of carbon isn't really the point, lots of bouncing around doesn't do the environment or the economy a ton of good.

With or without volatility, excessively low carbon prices are bad anywhere but the end game, at least if price is your main driver for lowering emissions. That is because if you are depending on price signals, a low price fails to encourage the investment needed to comply with the cap when it tightens. That is why increasing numbers of cap & auction advocates suggest a minimum price accompany any cap. That lowers volatility and also avoids too low a price. It gives a cap & auction many of the advantages of a carbon tax. On Carbon price volatility is a real issue posted 10 months ago 15 Responses

Groups should stop calling selves environmentalist

No one who supports coal should call themselves environmentalist, nor friends of the human race. This particular group should also rename themselves "Enemies of the Columbia Gorge". On Oregon enviro group calls not for shutdown of coal plant, but for infusion of millions of dollars posted 10 months ago 19 Responses

Bob

I assumed in your case that groceries were close and work was far. You have to travel 100 miles for Groceries? Until the tech improves, yeah you are screwed. I've lived in some pretty rural suburbs. But there was always shopping within fifteen miles; it was work that was distant. If the nearest store is 100 miles that does not sound like a suburb. That sounds like a farm. On A detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use greenhouse-gas emissions posted 10 months ago 38 Responses

Surveys

Except when asked about things like "favorite food", most surveys are misleading.

On most issues a large percentage (ranging from a substantial minority to a small majority) have no opinion, and certainly no strong opinion. But pollsters don't like 'undecided' and try to minimize that response. But a lot of people are making up their mind for the first time in response to the survey. one way to try to compensate for this is having choices like "strongly believe" or "somewhat believe". or "strongly support" "somewhat support" "strongly oppose" "somewhat oppose". There are problems here too, because on the one hand you will get people saying "strongly" because they don't want to seem wimpy and on the other hand people saying somewhat because they don't want to appear fanatical.  Don't know what phrasing would be better, but polling would really improve if more effort was put into distinguishing between strongly help opinions, weakly held opinions, and people who are just choosing an answer rather than saying "undecided"  because they want to please the pollster by choosing something, or because they think "undecided" is for wimps.

Even strongly biased questions won't affect the answers of people with strong opinions. I suspect that biased questions may sometimes capture the political dynamic better than attempts as scrupulous fairness. Here is an example that is not green but illuminating. 45% of Americans support government health insurance even when it is called "socialized medicine".39% opposed it when called that, and 17% are undecided. Responses are much more favorable when it is explained means that the government provides help insurance rather than all the doctors become government employees. But I suspect the response to the biased phasing reflects actual public opinion - including the large undecided component.  On FOX News continues quest to endumben viewers posted 10 months ago 7 Responses

Read further - OK last three months

Still question that level of deflation. Have not seen it at the supermarket.On Bills for highways, no change for transit posted 10 months ago 10 Responses

Triac

If the triac turns out not to be vaporware I'll seriously consider getting one. 25K 100 mile range on a 28.8 kWh battery, 75 mph top speed. 6 hours charging time with a dryer outlet, which I already have in my garage. Not sure I'd bother getting a 70 amp "double dryer" version, six hours charging time will mostly do for me. If I want to drive to Seattle or Portland (and mostly for trips to those cities I take the train) or longer there are car rental places nearby. On Photos from Plug In America's inaugural parade posted 10 months, 1 week ago 18 Responses

Emisison target not in line with current science

I'm almost done with a post on what scientists seem to think is really needed to cut emissions. However let's just link to a recent University of Victoria study: Here's a pdf of some of the key results. http://www.pims.math.ca/files/zickfeld.pdf

Here is a popular article with some quotes from the authors: http://www.physorg.com/news147001400.html

Basically net zero emissions by 2050. 90% actual cut, plus ten per cent sequestration. And that still leaves a 1/3rd chance of exceeding 2 degrees Celsius. And there is a lot of doubt of the safety of 2 degrees Celsius. So aside from the question of means you are choosing an inadequate end. On How the cap-and-trade blueprint fits into domestic and international climate action posted 10 months, 1 week ago 3 Responses

Greening suburbs

>But I don't agree with the more radical city-ites that we have to abandon suburban/rural lifestyles.  I live deep in the coastal mountains in Northern California and realize that all of us here could lead very green lives with the addition of electric vehicles.

Yes. Mind you I don't think current technology can support green SUVS. But if suburban drivers are willing to live with much smaller cars  for long distances, and much slower cars with short driving ranges where size is essential, then absolutely. And with today's technology.

We can make fast electric cars with 100 mile ranges at a reasonable price to day, but they are small, a driver and a passenger - commuter vehicles. We can make large electric cars today at a reasonable price, but they have 35 mile ranges and are limited to below 45 mph. (Commercial ones often have lower top speeds, but this is due to regulatory requirements, not technical limits.)  On A detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use greenhouse-gas emissions posted 10 months, 1 week ago 38 Responses

Transport

I also have yet to see solid evidence that all the necessary storage and transmission systems needed for the various forms of renewable electricity to power the current mobile consumers of fossil fuels (automobiles, aircraft, etc.) will enable us to maintain the types of transportation systems to which we -- and much of the rest of the world -- have become addicted.

Do you mean two million people traveling the same fifty mile stretch to work each in their own eight passenger SUV? Cause no, probably today's technology can't support that. Or do you mean those same two million people getting to work in the same amount of time, some in two passenger electric cars, some on trains, some on buses? Cause that we can do even without breakthroughs, just by implementing the technology we already have.On What Obama's green team has to say about coal posted 10 months, 1 week ago 26 Responses

Underground

ABB says their underground tech is for short runs, not long ones. However if Stopgreenpath is concerned about transmission operating emissions, underground does nothing about that. The demand for SF6 for insulation, transformers and switches is the same. If the concern is construction, underground is probably worse - though maybe "ploughing" could be slightly better than above ground. ABB claims their cables are well enough protect to need conduit. So you dig a trench, drop the cable in, cover it up again. Maybe that actually could save construction energy. Though you still can't do that with support infrastructure like switches.

In terms of area, the question is area for what. If you remember I figured we have enough roof area to provide 35% of demand with a combination of low temp solar thermal and very efficiency solar cells. Parking lots and roads cover much more area than roofs. So 100% of pave area would come close. I don't think there is all that much brownfield. But taking advantage of that is mainly solar PV. Not much of that is suitable for wind. Not much is suitable for baseload concentrating thermals solar.

So even without concerns about when the power is generated, that would be  many times as expensive as power that includes wind in the equation. Then there is the concern that around 70% of that energy would be generated in a five hour period on a daily basis. So either you end up throwing most of it away (and that drastically lowers the amount of energy it could provide) or you store it. And even just considering daily issues thatis again much more expensive than with a long distance grid.  And then there are seasonal variations. And again    power averaged over a long distance including power from sunny climates and power from windy climates has much less seasonal variation than power from within the same few hundred miles.  So you have to build much more capacity if you are not sharing power than if it is atomized.

Again, I'm not saying we leave this to the utilities.  A national grid should be nationally owned, built at the same time as freight rail is upgraded. And it should be done in a way to minimized emissions from the transmission line. Infrastructure other than the lines themselves can be built with SF6. There are solid state technologies, and oil insulation that work fine without the SF6. (The disadvantage is more bulk, but if you are building along rail rights of way, we can live with that.)  Older HVDC was insulated with oiled paper rather than SF6. But you get more line losses, and oil leaks with that, so probably we do need to use GIL (Gas insulated lines). But we can put in infrared cameras all long the lines that spot leaks much faster than conventional leak detection. So it is possible to keep those emissions low over the lifetime of the lines. (And of course there are leak reduction techniques we can use as well.)On A detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use greenhouse-gas emissions posted 10 months, 1 week ago 38 Responses

Mag cement

Monbiot wrote about thinks it a scam. Geopolymeric cement is real though, they make bricks and roof tiles of it in Australia, and it produces 75% fewer emissions than Portland cement.

Also electrical industries, makers of refrigerants also produce emissions not from fossil fuels. SF6, HFC23, N2O2, also byproducts from making teflon I think. Cement is the largest, but the F5 gases are important too. On A detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use greenhouse-gas emissions posted 10 months, 1 week ago 38 Responses

OK looked at link

The emissions are real but are not mostly caused by construction. They are caused by SF6 (Suflur hexaflouride) an electrical insulator that is a potent greenhouse gas 22,000 times more powerful than CO2. Adding reasonable renewable energy (not 100% use of line capacity) with projected rate of leakage of SF6 would indeed take 12 years to pay back leakage from the line.

The solution to that particular problem may not be to stop the line, but to reduce SF6 leakage. For example NY has instituted a program to reduce SF6 leakage by 80%.
http://mydocs.epri.com/docs/public/000000000001000063.pdf ...

Reduce SF6 leakage by 80% in the Sunrise line you pay back SF6 costs in 2.4 years, not 12. Add an additional 1.5 years to payback all other emissions for building the line, and you still end up with less than a 4 year emissions payback. I'm not saying the sunrise line is necessarily a good idea. It is a comparatively short transmission line, and you may indeed be able to build local wind for the same cost.  At any rate, if Sunrise does not want to withdraw their proposal, they need to resubmit with a plan for reducing SF6 leakage by 80% or better. On A detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use greenhouse-gas emissions posted 10 months, 1 week ago 38 Responses

2% of GDP

I think calculations that 2% of GDP have to be sacrificed overlook an extremely important point: positive externalties besides stopping climate chaos. (Social benefits to use a different jargon.)

Perhaps from a human standpoint, lowered death and injury from air and water pollution is the greatest benefit.

But im terms of pure dollars, we need to consider improved productivity. A majority of economic activity in the rich nations takes place in climate conditioned buildings, and at least a substantial minority in poorer ones. And greening buildings boost productivity within them significantly.  (Better air, sunlight, more control over artificial light levels, and more control over temperature.) . Similarly shifting freight from trucks to trains is again a productivity booster. Even industrial productivity improvements often involve stuff like improving processes to reduce scrappage, preventing overflows that waste water, but also cause halts to production and so on. So more net production per person hour. Similarly a lot of industrial energy saving techniques don't pay for themselves in energy saved, but do pay for themselves in reduced maintenance. On Robert Stavins can't walk and chew gum at the same time posted 10 months, 1 week ago 40 Responses

Population and per capita economic growth

First percentages are multiplicative not additive. So 50% efficiency and 25% renewable still equal 37.5 percent emissions per unit of GDP.  However population is going to increase in the U.S. so pop growth alone would put that at more like  50% in the U.S. in a few decades. And that assumes zero economic growth per person, which admittedly might happen net, after our GDP shrinks a while before it resumes growing again. On Even renewable energy should be used and produced efficiently posted 10 months, 1 week ago 15 Responses

Replying to DRX

Because DRX is having trouble posting for some reason:

Drx replies to me:

Gar I think solar cogeneration and ground source heating/cooling and across the board efficiency improvements in manufacturing (cogeneration) can get 29% at least.   From solar cogeneration on roofs producing domestic hot water all the way up to solar furnace cogeneration on factory roofs.

I think wind/wave and ocean current power could be around 20% instead of 10%.

And using natural gas in solid oxide fuel cell turbines for backup is not as bad as regular copal and gas plants.  These fuel cells can run on biogas from waste most of the time.

A recent estimate I saw for cow biogas alone claimed that 4.5 million homes could be powered in total.  That is without landfill, garbage, food and crop waste, wood waste, and sewage added in.

We are nearly there, ready to phase out nuclear plants over the next 20 years as technologies like superconducting electromagnetic energy storage.  And much better cheaper batteries are developed.

I know you are skeptical of smart grid storage potential, but this is developing right now.  Studies may just turn up soon on the first smart grid installations.
 

I'm not skeptical of smart grids doing what most smart grid advocates suggest they can actually do - shift a few hours of demand to reduce the difference between base and peak loads, or take modest advantage of variable supply. To improve power conditioning, and reduce capital for peaking plants.  But I don't know anyone involved in smart grid design who thinks they can provide really extensive storage. In terms of cheap batteries, sure if batteries become low priced enough than a smart grid could manage electric cars to shift more power Vehicle-to-Grid advocates currently expect. But if batteries become cheap enough then individuals may buy large home battery storage systems, and utilties may buy their own batteries. Cheap enough batteries and they will be used for utility storage with or without a smart grid. The sweet spot for a smart grid would be $50-$100 per kWh batteries with a 1,200 to 2,000 cycle lifespan. Still expensive enough that utilities would not want to invest extensively, but cheap enough that electric car drivers would probably be willing to lease a fair percent of their capacity. I will point out: does not seem to be anywhere close, and does not solve seasonal problem.   Most likely what we will end up with $250 batteries that will last 2,000 cycles. (Actually we have cells close to that now, but the cost of putting them in a battery pack and adding battery management systems drives the price up.) At that price drivers will be willing to sell a small percent of capacity but not much, and you end up with a conventional V2G scenario - where V2G is used for spinning reserve and other occasional uses, but not for anything routine. On Even renewable energy should be used and produced efficiently posted 10 months, 1 week ago 15 Responses

We still need renewalbe electricity

Co-generation is great, but we still need renewable electricity.

Low temp solar heat is great but we still need renewable electricity.

They are not either or, they are both and.

Burning coal for industrial use, and the using the waste heat to produce electricity still produces unacceptable emissions.

Burning oil or natural gas for industrial use and then using the waste heat to generate electricity still produces unacceptable emissions.

Burning unsustainably harvest biomass for industrial use and then suing the waste heat to generate electricity still produces emissions.

Burning sustainable biomass for industrial use and then using waste heat to produce electricity is low emisison. But right now there is not that much  potential for truly sustainable biomass that does not complete with food. "Not much" is a comparison to demand, so if you want to cite tons, list what percent of industrial energy that represents.

Use concentrating solar to provide heat for industrial processes reduces emissions, and even more so if waste heat is used for generating electricity or provide heat for lower temperature needs. But then you really do get into questions of area. Commerical and residential buildings spread their demands out over fairly large areas. Industry uses concentrated power, and I think it unlikely that the roof and parking lot of most existing industrial buildings or campuses will supply most of their demand. You may provide a portion, and that is great, but  a  majority of industrial energy demand will still need to be supplied by fuel or electricity.

You need to take a whole systems view, to see how things scale. On Even renewable energy should be used and produced efficiently posted 10 months, 1 week ago 15 Responses

Mojave

No time to link, but

A) there are real studies suggesting that deserts may be carbon sinks - a combinations of Soil PH and microrganism

B) The studies are controversial. Not settled science

C) I will note that even if true, an acre of desert "carbon sink" does not absorb as  much CO2 as an acre of renewable generation displaces. On A detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use greenhouse-gas emissions posted 10 months, 1 week ago 38 Responses

Phasing out coal and this plan complementary

Phasing out coal will phase out a lot of the slowing moving heavy high volume freight that makes managing the system more complicated. In the absence of a major freight rail upgrade it also phases out a lot of their revenue. And without an upgrade they won't be able replace it with other higher value freight that requires faster more reliable delivery.  So ironically losing a lot of their business is  a reason rail will need to upgrade capability.

In terms of utilities paying for HVDC lines on their own

1) I see no evidence they will do this

2)The cost of HVDC lines to create a national grid is given as 300 billion to 400 billion dollars. (Though Al Gore thinks we can include full smart grid capability in that higher figure.) The rail upgrade Drake proposes would cost 400 billion without including a national grid. The cost of a national grid and rail upgrade combined is 450 billion to 500 billion dollars. So you have huge synergy and huge cost savings by doing them together.

3) And believe me, getting long distance transmission available will be of tremendous benefit to renewable industries. That does not we should not do additional things. I do support carbon intensity regulations for utilities that would be benefit renewables (and also efficiecy means such as recycled power - truly technology neutral). But this is a move toward a low carbon economy with huge potential, and it ties in to so many other things we need to do. On Upgrade freight rail: Save 12 percent of oil, 4 percent of emissions, and jumpstart renewable grid posted 10 months, 1 week ago 16 Responses

Subsidies

I think you are right for things like per kWh subsidies. (Though these things are not always symetical.) But for tax and divenend, or auction & dividend I think there s critical difference - distribution within the group initiallly receiving the subsidy.

Think of it this way. If the subsidy goes to people downstream they will keep some of it (as a group) and some if it will go to distributors and suppliers to make up for the price increase. What part of the pie goes to pay increased energy prices and what part is kept is probably fixed. But how that subsidy is distributed among the people who receive it is different between upstream downstream subsidy. Because with upstream it is distributed according to energy consumption, whereas with downstream Cap & Dividend you don't get a refund in ratio to how much you consume. So in theory t hat is a difference. That would not apply to, say, the RTC. Currently the RTC goes to people who produce renewable electricity. In theory in could go to consumers reflecting what percent of the kWh they consumer are renewable (based on their particular utility company). Or it could go to utility company purchasers. And in theory these would all be identical. Not for taxes this theoretical construct seems to hold up empirically.

But I have not noticed a great deal of work finding good proxies for the same comparison on subsidies. So while I would expect them to act the same, I would like to see some comparison. There are various food and fuel subsidies worldwide, and I suspect some of them are upstream to suppliers, and some downstream to consumers. So somebody who wants make the comparison for subsidies comparable to the RTC or PTC can probably find good proxies.

Don't know what you would do to test the equivalent of a cap & divedend.  The Alaska pipeline does not work, because the point of that dividend is to buy support for keeping Alaska oil industry, rather than change consumer behavior.  Again I would say that giving out cash on a per capita basis should not change behavior, because cash you receive is not related to energy consumption and thus your incentives to reduce consumption remain the same as if cash was not given out. (With one very important caveat demand elasticity as related to income as opposed to price. Hmm - an argument that at least some of the rebate should be "green stamps" usable only for purchasing of efficiency or renewable energy rather than all of it being cash.)On More evidence that burden sharing is the same up and down stream posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 2 Responses

Oversimplification on my part

I'm omitting a lot of details, which is why I urge people to read the whole thing, not just my few paragraphs. However part of the infrastructure upgrades Drake proposes is to make intermodal connections better. He also proposes a "mind upgrade" where rail becomes customer service oriented. Even today rail is cheaper per ton-mile than trucking, which is why it still dominates heavy low value cargo. But it is slow, unreliable, and has (as you say) intermodal complexity besides. The bottom line is that intermodal connections should be handled by the railways and shipping companies and be transparent to industry doing shipping. For many years UPS did ship packages by rail. But as rail infrastructure deteriorated, they found that the rail companies failed to meet even the minimal comittments they made increasingly often. And unfortunately losing UPS made sense for the railways as currently constituted. They can't compete with trucking in anything but low cost. Focusing on a customer service orient niche when they are competing on price and really cannot compete in service makes sense. But there was a time when not only UPS but most long distance U.S. mail traveled by rail. The intermodal problems can be handled if the core service is decent.   Note: while this post was in queue I learned of a Washington Monthly article on the same subject. I've updated the post to point to it.On Upgrade freight rail: Save 12 percent of oil, 4 percent of emissions, and jumpstart renewable grid posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 16 Responses

industry

>Unfortunately -- admittedly, from IPCC data -- power plants for electricity (about 22%) plus transportation would "only" be a little over one third of emissions.

This is why I'm so insistent that we have to decarbonize the grid, increase electricity production and substitute electricity for fuel in most cases.  Combined heat and power is a bridging technolgy, but ultimately we have to phase out most industrial emissions and most electrical emissions. Continuing industrial pollution at anything close to current levels won't get us where we need to go, even if we co-generate electricity from that same fuel. I'm not opposed to co-generation as part of the transistion, but over a pretty short period of time we will have to phase out most of the fuel burned in industry that we can get that waste heat from. This is not a matter of "picking winners" or "hating decentralization". It is a matter of what the science requires. On Slicing and dicing global greenhouse gas data posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 17 Responses

Table 3 completely confuses me

Shouldn't there be a transportation CO2? And what exactly do table 3 numbers represent? Table 1 and 2 are clear if you read the text. But I'm not sure what table 3 is.On Slicing and dicing global greenhouse gas data posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 17 Responses

Smart Grid

At some point I may argue with what you said, but right now my reaction is WTF does this have to do with smart grids? Smart grids consist of demand management, finding ways to delay power demand until supply is available more cheaply, and dispatch managing, managing how generated power travels. It also includes certain types of power condition. In certain cases it can include electricity storage, though I think the last piles too much into one term and should be considered separately. None of these relate to generators being told what to do. In fact they are ways for the grid to adapt to generators determining when and how much power they dispatch.

I will say that past a certain point we may need have some broad say about what type power is generated. I will also note that the quality of power in the U.S. has deteriorated since deregulation,  with more blackouts and more brownouts, and with more vulnerability to scams such as Enron. So I would not be too quick to boast how successful deregulation has been.On Small solar needs long-distance transmission as much as big wind posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 30 Responses

Local generation

The problem with local generation is:

1. most cities cannot generate all their own power needs. There are exceptions like San Diego and Phoenix.

2. Even if you can generate everything locally in some seasons you will need a hell of a lot of overcapacity to generate for four seasons.  Wind friendly areas will probably have low winds in either the spring or summer (maybe both).  Sun friendly areas will less sun in the fall and certainly in the winter. So even if you generate locally, you still will need long distance transmission so that cities can back each other up for seasonal differences. Let me add that even with the same sources there are good effects in having long distance connections. For example distributed wind sites  within a small area may generate seasonal power with differnces as much as three to one. But take all wind power in the U.S. and connect and that ratio drops to about 1.5 to 1. (To derive the latter figure, simply look at the DOE figures and average them for all wind currently generated.) Add sun into that mix and of course the ratio drops a lot more. So even with locally generated power you can cut generation capital costs in half by having long distance transmission. And since it is pretty undisputed that the per KW cost of renewable generation is lower with bigger plants than with smaller, that effect is bigger for small sun and wind than for big sun and wind. The way around that with todays technolgy is lots and lots of backup - which means burning fossil fuels and creating GHG emissions. The demand for backup in an all mostly local renewable scenario is too high to meet with biofuels.

Since most solar energy fall over the course of about 5 hours in any spot, you need many more hours of storage for sun than for wind. So with today's technology a PV only scenario basically limits sun to providing peak generation in hot climates.

3) Incidentally your distribution figures are just considering wire capacity. But are grid is not just inadequate in carrying capacity. We need smart grids for a number of reasona. People normally think about smart grids in terms of demand management, because that is an area with obvious benefits. But we also need a smart grid to provide dispatch management to know how much to shoot down which wire. We use very crude means right now to estimate that when much smarter means are available. Smarter dispatch can reduce losses down both transmission and distribution wires. On Small solar needs long-distance transmission as much as big wind posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 30 Responses

And in terms of nodes

Big vs. centralized node arguments. Even "big wind" is decentralized compared to big coal and big nuclear. On Small solar needs long-distance transmission as much as big wind posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 30 Responses

Middle East

I don't can't quite come up with a blog post on this,though I have strong opinions on what is happening in Gaza. Especially I can't bring myself to do a "green" tie-in, because the problem with mass murder is not that it is not "green". So a poem:

The Rebirth of Anne Frank

Fleeing her bulldozed home in Rafah,
Hiding in an attic in the U.N. school,
Dreaming of love and sex and poetry,
Dreaming of work and politics and soccer,
Dreaming of video and song and clothes,
Dreaming of becoming,
Dreaming of being.
This time no soldiers in jackboots drag her off to a death camp.
This time a missile incinerates her alongside her diary.
Perhaps next time she is born the world will have changed,
And she will live long enough fulfill her twice-thwarted sacred mission.On Green mideast peace posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 2 Responses

Pompey Road

We need to phase out coal within a decade for the sake both of Appalachia and for the sake of the world.  But contrary to Mr. Wallace, we don't have to sacrifice the people who live there. There is every reason to believe we can provide a lot more jobs than are lost. What we need to make sure is that the pay as well as those they replace and that people in industries that are displaced by clean energy get first call for the new green jobs.

Appalachia has a huge potential for renewable generation. There is no reason some of the new wind turbine manufacturing that will be needed should not be located there, as well as solar cell manufacturing and concentrating mirror manufacturing. For that matter we need to increase rail manufacturing, make new heat pumps, new solar heating panels (very different from electricity generating). That is far from a comprehensive list.

The key is that if we want to phase out coal quickly we need to ramp up the replacement industries just as quickly. We need to make sure to get the politics right so that this actually happens, and so that enough of the benefits from this ramp up are steered to Appalachia and in general to where workers in dirty industries would otherwise be displaced. On Robert Stavins can't walk and chew gum at the same time posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 40 Responses

Green Growth

n order to really deal with climate change, we need to get people to stop using so much energy, stop eating so much meat and processed food, etcetera. These are things which will be onerous to a lot of people, including the working class, and which cannot necessarily be accomplished in ways that benefit our economy in the short term. While green spending might produce jobs in the short run, as public spending is generally thought to help with recessions, it will not by itself lower the unemployment rate in the long run, and it is debatable what costs real climate change action will impose on the economy. Most people here and elsewhere, me included, care deeply about both jobs and the environment - but unfortunately, there are tradeoffs, and miracles can't be produced.

I suppose the use of the word "necessarily" gives you some weasel room, but I have spent a great of effort documenting that we can phase out emissions in ways that benefit the economy in the short run. There are three causes:

1. Savings from more efficient energy use can pay most or all of the cost of more expensive sources: solar or wind electricity and other renewables. (Or nuclear electricity as some, but not me, insist.)

2. Any remaining difference would be made up by short term positive externalities, some of which could be capture via taxes to return to the people who otherwise would be hurt.

small taxes

We just had an experiment with a large increase in both gasoline and home heating price which yielded very small drops. If you put reveue from  a small carbon tax into subsidizing renewable you get an increase until the amount of renewables grows large enough to reduce the subsidy to a tiny amount per power generated. Include efficiency and you end up with that from day one. Sorry, but for a large effect from a carbon tax you need a large carbon tax.  Unless you want to shock the system with a large tax all at once you start with a $50 per ton carbon tax and escalate to $250 per ton. Or maybe higher than that. I'm fine with an escalating cap and minimum(escalating price). But again the cap has to eventually end low. Probably the emissions price has to end up high, though I can imagine scenarios where it doesn't and we still lower emissions.  (Basically an "electricity too cheap to meter" scenario.) At any rate a low carbon price, even recycled into green tech seems unlikely to lower emissions much, and certainly is one hell of a risk. So probably the do-little advocates who want a small carbon tax are right in thinking it won't do much. That is why serious Carbon Tax advocates like Charles want the tax to start either low or moderate, and then escalate to a high rate. Or really what they want is escalation high enough to lower emissions, but they judge that will in fact be not be anywhere near as low as the equivalent of ten cents per gallon.   On Question of the day posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 15 Responses

Why delayiers favor carbon taxes

You will note that over the past year I've shifted from strongly favoring carbon taxes to supporting either carbon taxes or 100% auctioned permits designed to minimize the role of carbon traders. My reasoning is I think what David Roberts is hinting at.

I think some in the delayer and denier community have adapted a "do little" strategy. Now that is  not new. I think the giving away of permits under Kyoto, along with offsets was a "do little" path. But I think the new "do little" tactic is to support a carbon tax, but a low one - $25 per ton maybe less if they can get away with it.

Now that does not mean we should give up on carbon taxes. Peter Barne's Sky Trust was a way to take the permit system and turn it into a 100% auction system where we set very tight caps - the opposite of what delayers and deniers want to do. And I think we can do the same with a carbon tax if conservatives switch the debate to taxes rather than permits. Fine conservatives, you now favor carbon taxes? Let's levy $250 per ton, and refund it all to taxpayers on an equal basis - essentially the Barne's proposal but built around taxes rather than permits.

But at the same time given what is being tried I'm just as open to a Cap & Auction so long as we have 100% auctioning, and as long the we set up the auctioning system in such a way as to ensure that most permits are bought directly for reuse, that we avoid the creation of massive numbers of carbon traders. Basically I want to avoid permit resale and the creation of a large financial community with a strong interest in keeping the volume of permits high.

Now I also think that either way of putting a price on permits can take a back seat to regulation and public investment - for a while, but not forever. Public investment can and regulation can take us most of the way we need to go. But in the end we will need a carbon price.On Question of the day posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 15 Responses

CO2 and power plants

When it comes to upstread vs. downstream and simplicity I'm  mainly thinking of manufacturing.  A lot players in manufacturing, vs. a very few players providing fuel. But still even with power companies it is simpler to levy on fuel than at the generating plant. And the big thing about levying upstream is you have one system instead of many.

However the bottom line is that the only reason for levying downstream instead of up is supposed incidence of taxes or permit fees. That is your sole argument is that upstream payers of carbon or permit fees ability to pass fees or permits down, or that downstream payers ability to pass fees up differ significantly. Economic theory suggests you are wrong. Empirical studies suggest no significant difference. At this point I think if you want to continue to argue that there is a significant difference you need to provide evidence rather than just-so stories. On They affect consumers the same either way, and upstream is simpler and more transparent posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 27 Responses

Hapa, you got it.

You are not confused. You are refusing to let bad arguments confuse you. On They affect consumers the same either way, and upstream is simpler and more transparent posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 27 Responses

Parking fees?

A lot of the cost of cars entering a congested area occurs when they park and thus block traffic. Could simply raising prices on parking  and enforcing parking fees stringently be included as part of the plan? Should it be?On The Kheel-Komanoff Plan: A congestion toll to liberate New York posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 6 Responses

Net effect may be a bit smaller but only a bit

Cool roofs add to heating bills unless they home is very well insulated. On the other hand they reduce cooling bills in homes with air conditioning, and we should insulate poor insulated homes in any case. Still probably should be accounted for.On White roofs are the trillion-dollar solution posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 7 Responses

cheap over fast

Charles Komanoff

"How can you say that Jim Hansen's global-warming solution favors cheap over fast when one of its three pillars is a hefty carbon tax?"

You will note my use of the phrase "I'm sure completely contrary to your intention" However, I'm afraid looking for "cheap" is the only conclusion I can come to from his including this 4th plank. Safety valve? If you really want an R&D safety valve, you won't concentrate on just two technologies.  Nobody can guarantee that a particular R&D project will succeed, especially when there is a time limit and success includes cost constraints. If you are seeking protection against technical failure in R&D you will advocate a diversity in approaches.  What concentrating R&D on these particular technologies offers is a chance (I think a really slim one) of finding cheap replacements for fossil fuel that are non-disruptive of existing infrastructure.  But elevating this to a key plank in a plan to fighting global warming on grounds that known means are uncertain is offers a devastating weapon do delayers, deniers, and do-littlers. They can argue that even Hansen says that results from taking action on global warming are uncertain and that we should do little or nothing now, make large investments in R&D, and eventually come up with a more certain and cheaper solution. That is the opposite of Hansen's intention, but it is an obvious conclusion to draw from his elevating R&D to a fundamental plank of comparable importance to implementating things we already know how to do.

Incidentally, I chose the term "refundable" quite carefully. Doesn't mean I'm right, but here is the logic: I don't like "revenue neutral carbon tax" because even if you know what a carbon tax is, if you haven't already heard a description of the proposal it won't tell you what it is. It also has no framing power, does  nothing to sell the concept.  Tax & Dividend, like Cap & Dividend meets the latter but still does not describe the system to someone who does not already understand it. In fact is is a bit misleading, because dividend usually implies a reward for ownership. Tax & Rebate would convey what is going on pretty well, because rebates tend to be fixed amounts, but manufacturers rebates are pains in the ass, and often scams, so the framing is awful. And given that we already have the word "tax", you need decent framing for the rest of the description. "Tax & Refund" coveys most of what people need to know. And you can then point out that is an equal distribution, not related to individual carbon consumption. Maybe we could say "Tax and Equal Refund", getting another positive term in there. At any rate that is the reasoning behind my use of the term "refund".  On An open reply to James Hansen's open letter posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 32 Responses

$10,000

I probably should have made clear. That 10,000 was in an apartment complex - with multiple units per building. I doubt that heat pumps, even shared for single family homes will get that cheap. But along both sides of a street for a block we might get to $15,000 per residence. The tradeoff in sharing comes when the cost of additional piping to move  heat long distances exceeds the savings from various economises of scale.  Sunflower at one point was claiming that even at neighborhood level, square miles, district pay offs compared to smaller units. Don't know if he still thinks that. It looks to me like for single family homes the optimum occurs at a much lower scale, though for apartments and densely populated urban areas where residents mostly live in multi-unit buildings he could be right. At any rate I think that for single family homes we will end up at $15,000 per unit or close to that, and that for apartments and multi-unit buildings that are a couple of stories or so we probably can come closer to $10,000 per unit. Where you have hundreds of units per building the cost may be even lower. On the other hand in skyscraper and mid-scrapers (anything much above five stories) you run into other problems - the need to dig boreholes, cause there is not way to serve than kind of building with broad shallow loops (unless they have really big parking lots). And I believe modifying ducting in tall buildings is a major pain. I wonder if a green builder reading this can describe the problems and potential for tall buildings, how they differ from short buildings, and how they are similar.On With heat pumps, smart cooperation is as important as technology posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 6 Responses

Airplanes

Yeah, we can use biofuels for airplanes. Unfortunately that does not solve the airplane emission problem.

On or near the ground water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. How much vapor the air can hold is determined by how hot the air already is. Add more water vapor and it condenses back out within hours. Remove extra vapor and nearby oceasns or seas or lakes or rivers or streams or puddles or swimming pools or whatever will evaporate a trifle faster.

But at airplane heights the air is extremely high. Depending on the weather water vapor from planes may remain for days, even weeks or months. So water vapor from planes is reponsible for at least twice the forcing of fossil fuels.  To take a hypothetical case: suppose commercial planes ran on wind generated hydrogen rather than either fossil for biofuels. (I know the technical barriers to this are huge, but accept it as a hypothetical.)  Additional water vapor would makes these hydrogen powered planes worse emitters of greenhouse gases than running them on fossil fuel based kerosene. Heck it be worse from a greenhouse gas standpoint than running them on palm oil you cut down rainforest to grow.

Now that doesn't mean we should actually cut down rain forests to run airplanes, or continue to run them on fossil fuel. Small amounts of sustainable biofuels for the purpose of running airplanes are possible. But, because of the water vapor, we still have to reduce total air miles, even if they run on sustainable biofuel.

There are mitigations at the edge. For example if the airplanes fly lower their water emissions are in a zone where more of them are a feedback, and fewer are a forcing. The thicker air at lower altitudes lowers their fuel efficiency, but the lower water vapor forcing more than makes up for it. Still, if we have to reduce rather than increase airplane fuel efficiency, obviously we will need to lower air miles to make up for that.  On Robert Rapier on ever-delayed cellulosic ethanol posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 50 Responses

scientism

I don't think mathematical modeling or scientific study is wrong per se in the social sciences. But there are a lot of false claims of rigor in stuff that is not done rigorously. And the extreme claim that scientific study in those areas is impossible is an extreme position that  sets out a warning flag pointing to a real problem. I think that this is one of the things Hayek is good for. His extreme positions often contain a grain of truth worth paying attention to.  I think in fact that Friedman, Hayek's disciple was often guilty of the kind of false science Hayek criticized. Another area where this happens a great deal is in evolutionary pyschology. Not that studing how our brains evolved and how our  hard wiring affects us is not worthwhile, but that like its predecassor sociobiology, evolutionary pyschology is often dominated by just-so stories, and gender, class and racial prejudice. So even though the extreme claim that real science is not possible in those areas is false, the claim is a good warning flag, because they are magnets for bogus studies where political agendas overwhelm the science.On Faster, climate change! Kill! Kill! posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 22 Responses

Pasivhaus

I wrote about the Passivhaus concept before Monbiot did. And, for that matter, Amory Lovins wrote about it back in the 90s. So it is not just Europeans who the powers that be in our nation ignore. And it is not as if Europe has actually been successful environmentally. They do better than the U.S. does, but these days that is not a very high standard.  Europe fails by a smaller margin than the U.S., but they still fail.On While we obsess about 'clean' coal and bail out the mortgage industry, Germans build passively posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 12 Responses

Elasticity

>And as for elasticity, Gar Lipow is too breezy by half in stating that the long-term elasticity of lowering emissions" at -0.5.

The reason I did not cite lit on elasticity was because I've done extensive work on the subject, which I posted a recent link to:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/17/225851/62 . And in the absence of extensive infrastructure I don't why price sensitivity should change. Now price is not the only thing demand is sensitive to. There is also income. If you don't have the money, you can't buy energy even if it is cheap. But that does not make price  elasticity numbers obsolete. On Will carbon cap-and-trade be the next Ponzi scheme? posted 10 months, 4 weeks ago 21 Responses

Storage

About 9 to ten hours worth of storage compared to average production, so 3 hours or less compared to peak capacity of current wind generators.

But some of the current big flow battery makers say that on a hundred megawatt or more scale they can deliver for $250 to $350 per kWh of capacity. The thing is Sodium Sulphur is new, and may have similar economies of scale. And with Sodium Sulpher you have the added bonus that you might be able to make them light enough to use in cars. Downside (for cars) they have to be run hot, don't work at room temperature. I gather there are ways around that though, especially in PHEV systems. On Old Man Winter declares war on renewable energy posted 11 months ago 33 Responses

Short term elasticity is not the point

Long term elasticity is what drives change, though if short term elasticity can be brought up to a significant portion that is not a bad thing.

The problem overall is that long term elasticity for lowering emissions is about -.5. There are a few narrow exceptions where it is lower (fuel for electricity production) but also exceptions where it is worse (residential efficiency, and to a lesser extent transportation fuel).

But that is an equal problem for carbon taxes and cap & auction. Actually for reasons you point out it is a worse problem for cap & auction, because volatility under trading results in underestimates by businesses of future prices. That can, as in the case of RECLAIM lead to drastic capital underinvestment to meet future cap tightening. But even under a carbon tax scenario (or auction with a minimum price), where the volaility is eliminated or reduced, you still have the fundamental elasticity problem.

That is why the key is that carbon pricing in either the form of auctions or taxes is not the fundamental driver. Put in place extensive rule based regulation. Do large scale public investment. Still put in place a carbon price, but do it as a supplement, not as the main policy tool. Really large scale green investment, investment in the hundreds of billions of dollars, investment in today's efficiency technology is really the first policy step, the one the that both makes the changes that makes regulation and pricing more effective, and the politically makes them  more palatable. Yeah, it is a cat-belling problem. Large scale public investment would have huge results but is in itself a huge thing to win. But that applies to anything effective against climate chaos. A univesal high carbon price with no loopholes is a huge and difficult political goal.  A large scale set of regulations that sets standards for building, transport and electricity generation emissions is a huge policy goal Any of these are tough to win. All of them are needed. But public investment makes the other easier to obtain. Politically, people are less resistant to a high carbon price when they have alternatives in place that let them drop carbon use easily and cheaply. Economically elasticity will be higher when there are readily and easily available alternatives to make it cheap and simple to shift long term demand.  And with the need for a "stimulus" we have a huge green public investment opportunity, even though green investment would be much more than a stimulus. On Will carbon cap-and-trade be the next Ponzi scheme? posted 11 months ago 21 Responses

Hydrogen still more expensive than batteries

Even next to the wind turbines. On Old Man Winter declares war on renewable energy posted 11 months ago 33 Responses

Editorial bloopers

Oh there have been editing blunders. I remember an editor inserting a major factual error in one of Romm's posts. And Robert's turned down my Kevin Smith of CarbonTradeWatch's offer to blog for Grist. I won't call that an error, but it is an editorial judgment I strongly disagree with.

But all that says is that having an editor is not pure upside. An editor will exercise editorial judgment. That is one of the things she is there for. And that will probably include choices authors disagree with.  But I still think on balance having an editor is far superior to not having one.  On Editing is really a good thing for the blogosphere posted 11 months ago 14 Responses

Rates

What do you think of the proposal to finance efficiency improvements along the line of British rates. Rates are the British version of property taxes with one key difference. The liability for them belongs to occupants  not owners.

Set up a what amounts to an efficiency utility, possibly owned by existing utilities, or perhaps independent cooperatives owned by customers, or public utilities owned by municipal or state governments.  

Let this efficiency utility offer audits, and then (with owner and tenant consent) perform efficiency upgrades. The utility would borrow the money for the upgrade, possibly financed by the Federal governments ability to borrow money at extremely low interest rates. In turn liability to pay the efficiency utility would belonged to whoever occupied the building. The required payment would have to be slightly higher than the nominal interest rate would suggest to compensate for expected vacancy rates.

So it does not appear as a loan on the books of either an owner or tenant. Yes it is the same payment, but a utility bill rather than a loan payment which affects credit rating, credit limits and credit availability much differently. It makes it easier to sell buildings, because even in owner occupied buildings, buyers and lenders treat utility bills differently from second or third mortgages. And from a tenants point of view, they still have the advantage they would have the other systems. They are liable only while they occupy the building or space. They have no liability when they move. On Mysteries of on-bill financing revealed! posted 11 months, 1 week ago 4 Responses

Electric buses

Hmm - I had the impression that unless you put up trolley lines, buses that can carry large number of passengers are not practical to run on batteries. Batteries are heavier than gasoline, but in a car that does not matter because you make up for that eliminating the gas tank, the engine, and so on. (In theory you can eliminate the transmission, but it seems that a lot of electric cars still have transmissions.)  On a bus though the parts you eliminate are not as large a percent of the mass. As a result electric buses are more like elecric vans, or built for very short routes, three miles, five miles that sort of thing. But I could be missing something. A typical school bus route is five to ten miles. Do you know of 30 to 90 passenger electric buses with that range?On Kunstler's tips to prepare for a post-oil society posted 11 months, 1 week ago 83 Responses

Electric batteries

>We know that electric batteries aren't there yet,

No we don't. We know that electric batteries won't push SUVs with 500 mile ranges at a reasonable cost. But they can drive $23,000 to $26,000 2 seaters with a hundred mile range. A suburban family can use that for commuting and errand running, and use the damn SUV a few times a week for major shopping and recreation. Which doesn't save the suburbs in their present from, but lets us transition away from them or transform them more slowly. Do you know what you call shifting a large part of the population suddenly to a new location? A refugee crisis.  On Kunstler's tips to prepare for a post-oil society posted 11 months, 1 week ago 83 Responses

Can't resist brief reply

OK David and Sean, but we are not talking about carrots in general. We are talking about carrots specifically as price signals. (That is what the whole "market based democracy" thing means.) And there really is no way to give positive price signals, price signals as a reward for not emitting, as efficiently as charging. You either run it like renewable tax credits, which give a break for the tech you choose to reward. Or pick something Sean Casten's proposal for a regulatory based trading system which is actually similar to the earliest cap & trade proposals before they were implemented in the real world. You set a "command & control" based standard for something, for example emissions  generated per BTU of delivered energy.

Their are two problems with regulatory based standards. One is that if set the regulation at the wrong level, you send a lot of "carrots" to people doing stuff they would do anyway. The other is that the regulation is of a means rather than an end. For example, under the example of Sean's proposal a lot of co-gen would be developed in the paper industry. However we have a lot of potential to reduce paper use, which reduces emissions in ways Sean's regulatory thing won't capture. (I'll leave it to Sean or someone to post the links to Sean's proposals.) That doesn't mean there is not room for regulations along the line Sean proposes. But instead of trying force stuff into price signals that does not really fit, the better way is to have a price on carbon, and then have a command & control regulations in area where you know what needs to be done. Again public investment + regulation +price combined is the way to solve. Trying to fit "carrots"  into the price part of the equation won't work. Why did Komanoff get so mad? Its something that has been examined in detail. The theory is well known. The empirical data is well known.   On Why carrots and sticks are not interchangeable posted 11 months, 1 week ago 9 Responses

tinurl - no problem with trusted source

Basically tinyurl is only a problem if used to hide where a malware or bogus link points to. So if Whiskerfish or someone I trust is the poster, no worries.On After Poland talks, a new reality starts to set in, says McKibben; 350 ppm must be the goal posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 22 Responses

Hirshman is as half-assed as she always is

It is not inherent in green jobs that women won't get their fair share. As both these comments and letters to the editor at the times point out, plenty of women do roofing and carpentry and are electricians and plumbers and so on. Also green jobs are not limited to manual labor, not even skilled manual labor. They require trainers and administrators. In large commercial buildings, an important part of energy savings is the use of sophisticated monitoring and control systems that require skilled operators.

Jezebel also points out that Hirshman is also wrong about some of her key facts.

To put Hirshman in context, her schitct is to find feminist reasons for being anti-feminist and liberal reasons for supporting far right positions. She is one of those conservatives who always pretends that she is a liberal at heart,but she just has so much more common sense and intellectual rigor than liberals that she just ends up taking extreme right positions (for solid liberal reasons). It is not her fault that she isn't dumber than dirt the way most liberals are.

She is absolutely shameless in this pose: for example she often claims to speak as a housewife against heartless working women who just don't understand the the viewpoint of a homemaker, in spite of the fact that she has a full time maid and nanny, and by her own admission never does housework. And she earns more from her writing than your 90% of people out there. And the point is not that she is wrong to earn money or avoid housework, but to do that and then criticize other people for working, or to claim special insight into the circumstances of full-time unpaid homemakers is a bit much.

In this case I'd say she has half a point, and one that really is important. While there is nothing inherent in green infrastructure that would require discrimination against women, it is true that a lot of the investment will be jobs that are traditionally male-dominated. So if a large green investment is made without paying attention to feminist issues, it probably will result in discrimination against women. The proper solution is not to fail make that green investment, but to make sure that very strong efforts are made to preclude gender discrimination in recruiting, training hiring and promotion. I would add something Hirshman does not notice. Many of these same professions and trades are traditionally white dominated, often with a strong history of deliberate discrimination and racial exclusion.  So we need to make sure than any public investment has strong racial anti-discrimination policies in place as well. In short if we public fund green investment, we want to make sure appropriate diversity programs are built into that investment from the start.

So while I have zero respect for the messenger, I would take Hirshman's warning as a heads-up. It is not true that green investment is inherently discriminatory. It is very true that if fund green investment, we have to put real effort into making sure it is not discriminatory.
On NYT op-ed says mostly men will benefit from green jobs posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 8 Responses

too damn narrow a debae

>This study over here says good sticks are better than good carrots:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2008/08/taxes-versus-subs ...

The above study is looking at per kWh subsidy vs. a carbon tax. That it is still relying on price signals, on in Robert's words "a market based democracy". But we don't have to stick to those narrow constraints.  Again look at a different kind of subsidy, public infrastructure investment in smart grids, long distance transmission, trains, energy storage. Look at  the possibility of publicly providing even certain types of private infrastructure when it is key - weather sealing, insulation,. And look at old fashioned rule based regulation (slandered as "command & control").  When elasticity is low, and the technology is clear, for example in residential and commercial office buildings, straightforward regulations about energy use per square foot, and per person can produce reductions at a lower price than either per kWh/BTU fees or subsidies. On A carbon tax has efficient sticks, but what about carrots? posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 19 Responses

Eco-action

Wes, I think you are biasing your cost by including new windows. If your  house is not already well sealed you seal your shell and ducts for a very low cost and get back your money in a couple of years, or maybe a couple of months if you live in a very bad climate. Attic and floor insulation can also be examples of improvements with  a very fast payback - unless you already have decent insulation in those places.

However these are very good examples of where neither carrots and sticks work very well if it is done through pure price signaling. Neither a kWh/BTU tax nor kWh/BTU reduction negative tax (a la RTC) is going to motivate most people weather seal homes when they are already ignoring two year paybacks. The single best way to get you to weather seal and insulate your home would be for your utility to offer to do it for free. Now that is a carrot that might get you hopping!
On A carbon tax has efficient sticks, but what about carrots? posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 19 Responses

Accounting Truth

Note that this did not reply on an "an honest market, one that tells the ... truth". The quick transformation relied on what today is slandered as "command & control". As you say, there was a ban on new car, new home, and new highway construction.  There was a massive funneling of public money into war manufacturing. Now there was also the equivalent of  what you call "ecological truth" - rationing of food, rubber and so on. But in terms of preserving resources for the war, that was secondary to outright banning of automobile manufacturing and public investment.

If speed is essential, then I'd say the right way to do it is massive public investment, rule based regulation (slandered as command & control) , and lastly a price on emissions.

I've posted on this recently:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/25/17212/723On We need climate action on the scope of the WWII mobilization posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 7 Responses

No, not part of normal cycle.

It is just in one part of the country, but many different species of oak trees are not producing acorns. And if you follow the links, biologists are genuinely puzzled.  You don't expect an entire region to be acorn free. And no, it is not neccesairly climate change related. It could be pesticides or pests or a disease or whatever. But it really is not good news when the ecosystem starts showing weird symptoms, even harmless ones.On Not as threatening as missing bees, but another odd symptom posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 6 Responses

Quick Charge

Quick charge not really  needed. Most cars spend more time parked than on the road. And we all have to sleep sometime. More than half of car owners have garages, car-ports or fixed parking spaces with electric outlets. That infrastructure is place. Put in renewable energy with storage so that if we start using it those cars don't end up charged by baseline coal. As the number of electric cars grows, require charging at work.

In terms of barges: yes they are more efficient than rail. But it will take a lot of dredging just to keep from losing capacity, especially as drought and flooding increases. I did put barges in my book. But I decided that shifting freight to barges does not have that great a potential. There is one exception, but it is positive unintended side effect of doing the rest. A lot of both freight train, and barge capacity is used to transport coal. As we phase out coal, that makes room for more freight of other kinds. Since barge is a very slow form of transport, getting rid of coal probably is all the increase in capacity we will need. On Public investment and regulation can be main means to green posted 11 months, 4 weeks ago 43 Responses

Bob Wallace & CE1907

Bob, I think your four level vision is right on.

CE1907:

>re-jigger your priorities to target votes

I'll give you some data, and you can produce the spreadsheet. About half the cost is deployment of technology. Efficiency technology has to be deployed where the energy is consumed. Freight rail has to be put where freight moves. Renewable energy has to be deployed where the sun shines and the wind blows.    But about half is manufacturing - wind turbines and towers, solar panels and cells, steam engines, insulation and efficiency equipment for the home, electric cars, rail cars, locomotives, steel and aluminum, and glass and plastic.  So you have 850 billion a year (mostly private, but steered by public investment) that you can deploy pretty much where you want it. Yeah there are still physical constraints, but you are also dealing with a variety of technologies, and money is fungible. With appropriate juggling you can spend that 850 billion annually where you want.

So you do the spreadsheet. We have 850 billion a year. So long as you don't get ridiculous like putting half of it in one state or something, you can deploy it where you want. Why don't you do the political calculations.

One other thing. In most areas we are increasing not only net but gross employment. That is we are for the most part not displacing workers. We are mostly converting job categories with no need to eliminate them. (Workers who made cars can make electric cars, PHEVS and trains, and so on.) But there is one important exception. Trucking. We are going to drastically decrease trucking and do so quickly. While we will increase freight rail, freight rail has much greater labor productivity per ton mile than trucking. Truck manufacturing can be converted to other other manufacturing, but long Haul Truck Drivers won't all be able to do new, similar jobs. Here the the choices I can think of:

1. There are new jobs that have some transfer of skills. We are going to need a lot more drivers for passenger rail and buses. Not exactly the same skill set, but a truck driver should be able to become a train or bus driver more easily than your average bear.

2. Jobs that have no relation to trucking - manufacturing,  installation of efficiency technologies, work in wind and solar farms.

Transit

Here is the thing. Without a massive increase in density, 1.6 trillion in passenger rail spending might not buy us more than 500 billion. We can do freight much more quickly than passenger.

>Great job Gar!  Only one quibble, I think it would be wise to specify plugin hybrid hypercars, the Lovins carbon fiber body/frame streamlined SUV.  Pure electric cars won't be ready until battery technology undergoes serious advances in research and mass production.

>Even a 1 hour charge time every 150 miles, abot the best that can be acheived with 20k dolars worth of nano-tech lithium is dies not a practical vehicle make.  And it's far too expensive.

There is huge potential market for pure electrics  with a 100+ range and a six (not one) hour charging time.   And a large percentage of cars in government fleets are used in ways that such would be suitable.  So why concentrate on pure electrics? Cause PHEVs are also expensive. A massive increase in the number of electric cars would put enough components into mass production that are now craft items to drive down the price of making PHEVs by private companies. A massive increase in the number of PHEVs would in turn drive bringing down the price of components for electric cars.    It is a virtuous cycle that could best be jump stared by ordering HyperCar electrics, not PHEVs. One exception: retrofitting existing cars into PHEVS.

I suspect we could easily place  50,000 pure electric cars per year just in government fleets with a decent 20 year payback.  That is a tiny, tiny fraction of the  total auto fleet, but boy would that jump start the cycle, bring down costs, and advance the technology.  And we need to have the smart grid in place before too much of the fleet is electrified in any case if all those car batteries are to stabilize rather than destabilize the grid. (Mind you given that most cars are charged at night, not that fast. But "charged at night" often equals "charged with coal", so the sooner we get a smart grid, and substantial renewable renewable electricity, the better.)On Public investment and regulation can be main means to green posted 11 months, 4 weeks ago 43 Responses

Inflatation

Price of Trac is now up 23,000. Does not affect my basic argument.On Public investment and regulation can be main means to green posted 11 months, 4 weeks ago 43 Responses

Spreadsheet

> Could you put some of the figures into "the" spreadsheet?  What I mean are the figures for each of the major areas, for expenditure -- is that what adds up to 1.7 trillion per yeara? -- and then show the payback, and how that brings the figure down into the 200 to 400 billion dollar range

The costs tab shows the costs. The payback tab shows the paybacks. The Scenarios tab  combines costs and payback to show payback with various assumptions on  efficiency investment, sucesss of that investment, and degree of technical improvement. On Public investment and regulation can be main means to green posted 11 months, 4 weeks ago 43 Responses

Regulatory

I think these problems apply to non-profit and publicly owned utilities as well. When you buy power you pay a small fixed monthly fee even if you use nothing, and a per kWh charge. And the problem in that case is that in many cases that fixed monthly charge does not cover fixed costs. Not only variable, but a large portion of fixed costs are included in the per kWh charge. So if kWh sales drop below a certain point utilities stop being able to recover capital cost. This is not as simple a problem to fix as it seems. If everyone paid a larger fixed fee, and a lower per kWh fee, that would provide a different kind of perverse incentive, and incentive for customers to use more energy. It is solvable, but not in a soundbyte, and on the answer to this, I suspect Sean Casten and I would agree.  In fact I invite Sean to write on this topic. On You know your regulatory incentives are perverse when ... posted 12 months ago 4 Responses

Anti-corruption

This kind of Goo-Goo (Good Government) reform helps at the edges. The problem is that there is always a way around it. Also there are constitutional constraints on this type of limit. There are some more fundamental reforms.

1) Given everybody in the U.S. a one hundred dollar voucher during even (Federal) election years, they could divide up among any candidates they wish. During off year elections, people would get ten dollar vouchers if their were any state or local elections.  You could raise the 30 billion dollars through a tax on advertising.

2)Elect Congress, state legislatures, councils and other legislative bodies and multi-member boards via proportional representation.  Run executive elections (such as President, Governor and [usually] Mayor via choice voting, such as instant run-off or instant round-robin.

I think however that winning in the economic dimension (for example single payer health or massive Green investment) is more likely to build a coalition that can then go on to win this type of Goo-Goo stuff than that we can build a Goo-Goo coalition in the absence of a movement fighting around bread and butter issues. On Deregulation and inequality are bad for both the economy and the environment posted 1 year, 1 month ago 15 Responses

Checks and Balances

More equality means ordinary citizens and smaller interest groups can act as a counterweight to the elite. If you have lot of players instead of a small narrow group they can play each other out.

Burke was an advocate of this in politics in general in the 18th century. During his lifetime it was common to condemn "faction" - political parties, much as it is common to condemn "partisanship" in ours. And Burke argued that, yes it would be great if you just had pure disinterested politics, thinking only of the greater good,free of passion or self-interest.  But given the unlikeliness of this, the next best thing was to have a lot of factions canceling one another out, so that the only way to build coalitions was appeal to the greater good, or at least to interests of factions adding up to an majority - which was imperfect, but still useful approximation of that greater good.

In today's environment when the public face of conservatism is the rabid attack dog, proud its own viciousness and ignorance, it is worth remembering that there is a conservative tradition of caution, deliberation and balance, of settling for an achievable second best rather than an impossible perfection. Conservatism does not have to be just a mask worn by murders and thieves. As conservatives have rejected so much of what was once good in conservative traditions, liberal and lefties can perhaps learn and adapt some of them: skepticism about over-reliance on virtue that does not take in account human weakness and irrationality, a suspicion of abstract principle that is immune to empirical correction.  There was even a time when conservatives were not eager for the disruption of war.

Modern conservatives need to rediscover Jonathan Swift,Burke, Disraeli, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis (hopefully rejecting the antisemitism Chesterton repented of near the end of his life). The modern conservative movement has made the term "compassionate conservative" a bitter joke, a contradiction in terms. But there really was once a tradition of humane conservatism, of "Red Tories".On Deregulation and inequality are bad for both the economy and the environment posted 1 year, 1 month ago 15 Responses

Pop culture that handles environmental issues well

I can think of a lot - most legal fiction or science fiction:

Old stuff: Erin Brockovich, Karen Silkwood - both good films with a fair amount of humor.

Novelists Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling. Comic books: The Swamp Thing. (Their was a movie some time ago based on it that was pure schlock, but did have some very funny lines in it.

Swamp Thing: Me? Your Boyfriend?

Abby Arcane: Why not?

Swamp Thing: You said it yourself: I'm a plant.

Abby Arcane: That's okay, I'm a vegetarian.

I think pop culture handles environmental issues best when it is simply part of the story rather than propaganda. On King of the Hill takes on green posted 1 year, 1 month ago 16 Responses

Deployment speed

I don't think you are taking the urgency of deployment into account.

Your big thing is industrial combined heat and power or "recycled energy". OK, if you take a plant that is already producing heat for industrial purposes and use it to produce electricity besides, you are getting that electricity for no additional emissions, no additional fuel and a very small capital cost.  But the problem is: given constraints, are we going to be able to continue to tolerate continued emissions from industry at the current level, even if we get "free" electricity as a side effect? Because if not, then from a social standpoint, beyond a certain point you are spending money in a way that will be obsolete fairly quickly.

Now this is not an argument against recycled energy, because we are nowhere near that point. Certainly there is a level of emissions we will have to tolerate from industry. Also some industrial processes will not change fundamentally, but will be powered by biofuel, to some extent by solar heat, and to some extent by a very tiny amount of fossil fuel. Whatever that level is, we may as well get electricity as a side effect.

Also, a lot of combined heat and power pays for itself very quickly. If some systems will be obsolete in twelve years - well I'm pretty sure there is a hell of a lot of recycled energy potential that can pay for itself easily in that length of time.

However there is a lot of argument for doing some of the expensive things at the same time you do the cheap things.  Because we need to reduce emissions from electricity production by 80% to 95% within 20 years, and to reduce emissions from industrial production by a similar amount within the same time. Keeping industrial emissions at the current level and getting part or all of our electricity for "free" by doing so does not make sense. Neither does waiting ten years to ramp up production of wind, solar and other renewables.

We need to reduce emissions by 80% to 90% in 20 years, by 95% or better within 30 years, to zero not much later, to human activity actually being a net remover of carbon within 40-50 years.

the middle game is a drastic reduction of emissions from ALL sectors within 20 years. As industrial emissions drop so will recycled energy potential.  If we do things right, within 20 years, the potential for electricity from industrial waste heat will be drastically less than electricity demand. At that point we want the remaining electricity to come from renewable sources. So if you really want to exhaust combined heat and power before significantly increase deployment of renewable electricity, then you better find a way to deploy that fast, like within five year. If you can't do that, if you think it has to be done gradually over the course of ten or twenty years, then we had better start deploying renewable electricity now at a much faster rate than we have been. Because we can't take twenty years to deploy all the recycled energy potential and then take another twenty to reduce industrial emissions and deploy renewables.

Also, even though a lot of recycled energy will pay for itself before it become obsolete, it is still better to minimize deploying capital twice. If you invest in a recycled energy system which then has to be discarded and replaced with a wind generator, it seems like it may be better to build the wind generator in the first place. The "deploy the cheapest first" is efficient statically, but not always dynamically. On How current GHG policy distorts capital allocation posted 1 year, 1 month ago 27 Responses

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Depending on severity, she warns, disemvowels, or bans.
On More Couric and Palin, on drilling and climate change posted 1 year, 1 month ago 29 Responses

Another thought

We might also want to do very light all-electric right now. There are a number of under 20K two person cars right now with 100 mile ranges and that is with annual production ranges in the low 100's. On Is a 40-mile all-electric range too much? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 20 Responses

bailout

Hmm Mad Mac, if you were talking to me I was very clear on what I favor doing which did include saving the credit system, just not failed institutions. I'm going to make a point from now on of identifying who I'm talking to in these conversations.On The financial sector and the 'real economy' aren't that far removed posted 1 year, 2 months ago 21 Responses

How is any of this socialism?

Or even social democracy? Sounds like crony capitalism to me.On Bad policy ideas in Michigan posted 1 year, 2 months ago 10 Responses

Weakness of the state

Fannie Mae is an example of weakness of the state? Fannie Mae that was privatized decades ago (at a time when it was working just fine) and had to be nationalized by the government lately to clean up the mess that it made.

As to the sex for deregulation scandal - I would say that in this matter the public department has a lot more accountability than the private. It seems like the DMM girls are facing a lot more consequences than the banking and investment CEOs who are walking away with generous compensation packages.  It is not that the public sector can't screw up big time. It is just that in this area the public sector  is more accountable, and more self-correcting that the private sector. As weak a check as democracy is, because of certain self-reinforcing bad tendencies in finance, it is a better check than the relation between finance CEOs and the stock market. On One trillion for billionares and pennies for solar? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 26 Responses

Green Deal instead of Green Shift?

Massive green public investment - paid for by cuts in military spending (I know, not as much fat in Canadian military as in U.S.), by taxes on the rich, or by borrowing if you can't get taxes through. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but every bar owner knows that offering one is a good way to get people in the door to buy drinks.On Hope dimming for Canadian carbon tax posted 1 year, 2 months ago 5 Responses

Republicans

One point should be made. The number of Republicans are going down. Those who recognize reality on this issue tend to leave the Republican party and become independents. In short one answer it to forget convincing the far right. Appeal to the left and maybe to the center. Create a big enough bandwagon that the right will have the choice of getting on or getting run over.On Gallup polls indicate that Republicans are less likely to recognize global warming posted 1 year, 2 months ago 52 Responses

Shorter

The shorter thing I did was an old internet tradition invented by Daniel Davies.  I was more bemused by the combination of the title and the last line than making fun of the content - which I actually found quite interesting.  I would like to see what happens with the election. It is a good test case this kind of Green Tax shift.  But it is still kind of funny for a post titled "Could Canadian Politics Matter" to answer "I don't think that's likely."  On Canada has its own elections, which may shape future of a carbon tax posted 1 year, 2 months ago 10 Responses

where to run the grid

The answer is that the most urgent needed for new wire is as part of railroading.

Alan Drake's proposal

Basically spend 450 billion dollars to upgrade our freight rail system to the point where most trucking traffic can be switched to it. Electrify the most heavily used 20% of this system. Problem for this to happen you need to electrify long swatches of rail which are nowhere near any grid. Solution - use the railway rights to way to add transmission lines. You can make this into a true national grid for not much more than it will cost to just bring electricity to the railroads. On A purely local approach would double or triple costs posted 1 year, 2 months ago 23 Responses

Renewables

Sean, as far as I know whether we have renewables or not is a choice. No I'm not in favor of building wire without the renewables: otherwise they might be used for transmitting coal or nuclear generation.  But if you take seriously the need to reduce emissions by 80% in a 20 year time, then we need to do everything - huge efficiency increases and renewable both.  Efficiency by itself is not going to reduce emissions 90% or more. Neither will a renewable dominated grid by itself. So yes, I think we CAN and SHOULD decide we need a renewable dominated grid. The goal is not to get any old reduction, but to get big enough reductions fast enough. And nobody has pointed a way to do that without decarbonizing the grid - at least not without giving up the industrial infrastructure needed for things like antibiotics, lightbulbs and computers.On A purely local approach would double or triple costs posted 1 year, 2 months ago 23 Responses

Inconvenience

When we sponsored a speaking tour on climate change, with our speakers traveling mostly via Amtrak, we had a pair respectively from the UK and Spain held up for half a day by homeland security. And I understand HS has already upgraded their examination of rail travelers. The other thing to understand is that most of what Homeland Security does on airlines is Security Kabuki - not actually making us safer, but just causing hassle to so people feel like something is being done. Also is sets conditions where they political opponents can be harrassed or even arrested if it every takes a turn that way. And it gets people used to submitting to being pushed around just in case they want to extend it to the rest of life. "Sorry mein herr. Come vit me. Dere is a minor irregularity in your papers. I'm sure it is nutting". Of course if you are not a U.S. citizen life in the U.S. can already be like that. On Will train travel get annoying too? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

Smart Grid

>With smart grid technology many businesses or homes could have their own backup emergency power.

This is a misunderstanding of what "Smart Grid" technology is. Smart Grid is a lot of things, but it does not automatically mean individual businesses and homes having their own power supplies. For that matter, a lot of businesses and homes have backup generators now, even in the absence of a smart grid. A smart Grid is a way of managing power. It can increase grid reliability, decrease capital costs by lowering the need for spinning reserves and lowering peak demand. In a renewable grid with a large variable supply, it could shift a portion of demand to follow supply rather that require 100% of supply to follow demand.  But a bad enough hurricane or earthquake or severe natural disaster is going to knock out power no matter what kind of grid you have. If you live on an island that essentially ends up under water during a storm, you can expect some time to pass before surviving buildings end up with power again. I'm not saying that given that most of humanity lives in zones where some sort of disaster occurs on occasion you can't build with recovery in mind, but being without electricity for a time in the face of something like this is not unreasonable, or something you can guarantee won't happen.

I love smart grid technology. I think it is great. But it is not magic; we need to understand what it can and can't do, and not have unreasonable expectations.On The oil market can't save us from climate change posted 1 year, 2 months ago 33 Responses

Wolverine

Wolverine you once said you considered not calling yourself an environmentalist because you considered yourself a defender of wildlife. But then you decided that would be "divisive ", so stuck with the term.

I absolutely support your right to consider yourself an environmentalist if you want. But if you wanted call yourself something else, and leave to term to those of us who don't consider humans a cancer, I would have no strong objections. On Energy efficiency alone is not sufficient posted 1 year, 2 months ago 10 Responses

Legislation

Even without backing you can sometimes interest a legislator in a bill, and get introduced - where (if you don't have a grassroots movement or else some powers behind you) it will die in committee. I think putting the work into putting together a bill might be worthwhile, if you could get enough people interested that you could commit to whoever you approached that a year from now, you would have 50 people in each state working on gathering signatures in support of that bill. For example, as CE mentioned Sanders was famous as a member of congress for introducing great bills on all sorts of topics that had zero chance of getting passed.  But as open as he is, I'll bet he would be a lot more interested in something where we have some muscle behind it - because I'll bet he'd prefer leading a fight to making a nice gesture. On In either an Obama or McCain adminstration, climate legislation will be back-burnered posted 1 year, 3 months ago 33 Responses

Where to you get the money?

From the military. From taxes on the rich. If that is too politically infeasible then finance it the way the Republicans finance everything. Borrow it. On In either an Obama or McCain adminstration, climate legislation will be back-burnered posted 1 year, 3 months ago 33 Responses

Hi Hilzoy

OK, don't know if you notice that the headline mentions "cold war". I'm not accusing you (or for that matter Kleiman) of supporting a shooting war. The old cold war killed a lot of people by means other than shooting wars (not that there were not plenty of those). Sanctions against Iraq killed a whole of Iraqis long before we invaded. Either Iran or Russia as an enemy can serve as an excuse for maintaining are out of control war budget long after the shooting war against Iraq ends.

With both Russia and Iran what we need is engagement. On Time to choose between a new cold war with Russia and a new cold war with Iran posted 1 year, 3 months ago 17 Responses

Quibble: Price signals don't do technology forcing

You will note that Romm makes that argument too. Old fashioned rule based regulation does technology forcing. Price signals are reinforcement and leak plugging for regulations and public investment.On The argument for action on climate change posted 1 year, 3 months ago 1 Response

Kleiman is playing

Mark Kleiman: http://www.samefacts.com/archives/campaign_2008_/2008/08/ ...On Will Gore be veep? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 2 Responses

EESTOR

I tend (to put it mildly) to disagree with CB. But this:

To me the most damming failing of the EEStory is the failure to produce evidence that a single tested prototype exists, despite the claim that EEStor will begin to deliver mass produced EESUs next year.  Those guys at EEStor are so good, they can go from research to production without any need to do product development.

makes sense to me. I've said similar things. As to investors, all the investments are risk capital - which means accepting a high probability of failure, with returns from the few successes outweighing it.  Hey, I hope EESTOR proves me wrong, and I'll bet Barton would love to be wrong on this too. Really good cheap electricity storage would benefit both renewables and nuclear in very different ways.

If I were going to guess, EESTOR is suffering from a syndrome I've seen before when I worked briefly for a venture capitalist. In between genuine commercial breakthroughs and conman, are good solid tech guys who fool themselves. They make a genuine technical breakthrough in a product or product that requires a dozen such breakthroughs to be commercial. And they say to themselves "I've done the hard part, the rest is easy". And because they really have made a genuine breakthrough and are honestly convinced that the rest will follow easily they can be extremely convincing even to technically savvy investors. Sometimes they slip over the line into deception by claiming to have actually achieved additional breakthroughs - convinced that they really will make them before anyone catches them out. Often they stay honest, deceiving others only to the extent that they deceive themselves, claiming success is just around the corner.

Pure speculation of course. I'm not a mind reader, and have access to nothing that is not public. But  the overoptimistic claims of being able to jump directly from lab to production with no product development, the constant moving of goalposts (albeit with really good excuses) and even the ability to attract really smart venture capitalists fit the pattern I described. If the pattern is what I think, the the firm can bypass all sorts of really first rate bullshit detectors, because they have fooled themselves and don't know they are bullshitting. On EEStor founder says things are on track for commercial production in 2009 posted 1 year, 3 months ago 13 Responses

Grid management

I will note that all these costs are affected by placement of renewables, and as they rise they can cause backlash. For example in Denmark their has been increasing grid stability problems. This is caused by a combination of getting a lot of power from wind with getting a lot of power from combined heat and power, neither of which the grid operator controls the timing of. One of the problems is that they provided incentives to the cogen operators to supply power during peak periods. Since much of Danish cogen in the areas with highest wind is waste heat from natural gas used to run greenhouses, operators were able to comply by storing heat. But there have been occasions when highs wind also occured during peak,  and the grid operators had to scramble to find a way to place the excess power. What they really need is the rework the incentives for flexibility rather than just production at a scheduled time. Since the co-gen producers have some flexibility ideally, there should be a system where they produce power as needed rather than on  a fixed schedule (subject to guaranteeing the system buying a fixed amount in a 24 hour period but scheduling that production according to need.) Don't know how hard it would be, but given that the generators already run just a few hours a day, with low temp waste heat stored for gradual release into greenhouses, it ought to possible.

Note that we already see problems with wind supplying around 24% of total consumption in one of the major Danish grids. I don't think any grid in the world currently runs with a majority of its power coming from variable sources. If you just allow any renewable variable source to attach without any balancing you get real problems. Sure enough operating and spinning reserves can compensate. But many of these will be coal or natural gas, which ends up losing a lot of the carbon reduction benefits. Also if your generation is not balanced right, if you have the "free market" providing a mix that is too far from optimal you will need a lot more spinning and operating reserves than you would otherwise. On Government-guaranteed, for-profit businesses are inherently risky posted 1 year, 3 months ago 11 Responses

As you say a strong argument for public ownership

In fact historically publicly owned utilities have provided better service at lower prices than private and semi-private utilities - not in every case (I can think of exceptions) but on average. Note that this applies specifically to public goods, not to all goods. There is no reason to think that publicly owned supermarkets would do well, and a lot reasons they think to do badly.  But power generation, and utility lines are by standard economics 101 public goods. We ought to at least seriously consider  whether we would be better off providing them publicly.On Government-guaranteed, for-profit businesses are inherently risky posted 1 year, 3 months ago 11 Responses

Really bad politics

Look at the sequence:

1. McCain, former drilling opponent flip flops to support drilling. McCain's base The Media, naturally, portrayed this as mavericky maverickdom from a mavericky maverick.

2. Obama points out that inflating underinflated tires could provide more oil than new drilling in close off areas.  He is roundly mocked by McCain and McCain's base, giggling emptyheaded journalists.

3. A gang of ten centrists, all of whom coincidentally are personal friends of John McCain, strike a compromise deal that includes drilling and renewable energy. In offering the compromise the gang of ten speak only for themselves. No one else (including John McCain) is bound by this deal. It is standard used car tactics where dealership underling makes a non-binding proposal which magically gets turned into YOUR offer.

4. Obama accepts the "compromise" while explaining that he still thinks additional drilling is worthless. To a low information voter (i.e. anyone who thinks additional drilling rights in the U.S. are  going to significantly affect oil prices) this looks like a pander, a flip-flop, and like Obama just admitted that the Republicans are right in blaming high oil prices on drilling restrictions. There may be circumstances in which supporting drilling would be good politics for Obama. These are NOT such circumstances. It won't win him votes. It does not advance policy negotiations. Romm is right in calling this "something for nothing". But unfortunately Obama gave up the something and got nothing.

And how do you get that legislation etc.

That is given that the rich seem to like stuff the way it is, how do get it changed without people creating the pressures to put forth those changes? Don't you need a popular movement, which in turn means you need a change in mindset? Or do you think legislatures will do this out of sheer noble-mindedness, and corporations make changes out of sheer ability to think about long term profits? On Things smart people assume posted 1 year, 3 months ago 15 Responses

Helicopters not kites

Among other things the tethered helicopters have actually been demonstrated - not for a long period, but they have been put into the air and generated energy. Do they strike me as more ready than anything else for a demonstration.

And you can guffaw at them all you want. The numbers add up, and there have been short term demonstrations. That does not mean they will work, but sure as hell is justification for doing a demonstration project.

But of course if you don't think about it, is sounds silly, so just don't spend any time on it. You know like that silly idea someone had a while back about selling tiny individual computers to people instead of constantly making bigger ones people could share. I knew some of the old IBM guys. They had a real horselaugh over that idea - referred contemptuously to people who wanted to substitute "toys" for real computers. When they finally decided to get into the "toy" business I remember how they laughed at a sucker named Bill Gates who gave them a low price on the O.S. as long as he had continued rights to market a version of it to makers of competing "toys".  As though the market for "toys" would ever be big enough for that to make a difference. (Yep, I'm old enough to tells this story first hand - though part of it was pure luck - I was taught my first computer class by a guy who was just teach for the pleasure of reaching the next generation. His main job was at IBM. But everyone in the class got treated first hand to the classic IBM attitude towards the "toys". )On Neat posted 1 year, 3 months ago 31 Responses

Displacements

OK - but the problem is not just displacing food. When palm oil displaces rainforest you have a net increase in carbon even though the palm oil has fairly high net energy, because the rainforest took up so much carbon. OK what about sugar cane or palm oil that does not replace rain forest? Well good up to a point, but often the non-rainforest palm oil or sugar cane will displace food which then displaces rain forest.

I'm not against biofuel in principle. But there is a heck of a lot intersection with all sorts of social mechanism. Doing it right is tough, and on a lot levels besides technical ones. To do biofuels right is really hard in a globalized market that maximizes the advantages of very small differences in marginal cost. And it seems that with biofuels unexpected consequences keep hitting us in the ass. And, if you will pardon me, a lot of those promoting biofuels show a lack of caution, and in fact a real contempt for the idea that there are real dangers of even well-managed biofuel systems going wrong.On Short, medium, and long-term solutions to phase out oil posted 1 year, 3 months ago 46 Responses

Price

Price is not the only factor and it may not even be the biggest factor, but it does appear to matter.

Don't know who you are arguing with on this, but most people who think public investment and regulation should be emphasized agree with this. As you say a lot of the high rated cities are cooling climates. Because almost all air conditioners are heat pumps, you get Coefficient of Power (COP), whereas most electric heating is resistance heating with no COP. So heating climates tend to use more electricity than cooling climates. Also, California has extremely tough efficiency regulations, much tougher than Washington State or Seattle.  I agree we need refundable energy taxes, refunded to the public not utilities. But that is reinforcement. The primary tools for lowering emissions fast are public investment and rule based regulation. On The cheaper the power, the more we use posted 1 year, 3 months ago 15 Responses

Arjuna

Thanks for pointing this out. If it works extremely promising. Note that it did not in fact become available in June or in July - seems like it is not quite commercial yet. Also looks like the only place to put the batteries is in the trunk, which loses trunk space and will discourage sales. Still very promising - the first I've seen that can convert existing cars to electricity for a reasonable price. I look forward to seeing the kit become commercially available.On Short, medium, and long-term solutions to phase out oil posted 1 year, 3 months ago 46 Responses

TVA

In my personal view, the government needs something on the order of the TVA for large scale concentrated solar power development, including a smart and efficient grid to distribute it.

Yes. I agree 100%. But with one major proviso. The TVA has been as bad as private companies when it comes to ignoring local communities. Remember Johnny Prine song, Paradise? Some Tennessee residents have lyrics about the TVA, cause it has stripped a whole of lot of land has been stripped to supply coal for its power plants. Anything TVA-like set up, I'd like to see some way for local communities (including obviously tribes) whose resources were used for big solar and big wind to have substantial voice  these resource were used, including the ability to set standards for building, insist on bonds to n handle end-of-life, and substantial say in day to day operation.
On Renewables and efficiency would provide more GDP than fossil fuels posted 1 year, 3 months ago 48 Responses

Efficiency & Renewables

I agree that we need massive efficiency improvements. But  If we are to meet the target that is generally agreed to be scientifically needed - that is more like a 5% annual emissions reduction than a 2% reduction, we will need both efficiency and grid decarbonization. Especially since a lot of efficiency improvements require electrification. For example, there are number of limits on adding solar to heat and cooling to existing buildings. So if you want to get massive decreases in consumption in existing buildings, you will start with insulation, weather sealing, lightbulbs, window insulation (but not window replacement) - along with low-flow shower-heads, and sink aerators.  Then energy using appliances. At that point what is left is remaining electricity and remaining climate control (mostly not electric). Remaining carbon base electricity can only be replaced by non carbon based electricity. Similarly, at that point remaining fossil fuel heating main be best replaced by electrical heat pumps powered by a decarbonized grid. (Yeah, where the home has the "solar resources" solar heating may be better - but even then, usually solar can only provide part of heating in a retrofit, and then you need a back up anyway - heat pump is often a better use of resources. )

Also it is not just cars where a major source of efficiency gain is the substitution of electricity for fossil fuels. One of the big efficiency gains possible is the switch from  trucking to train for most freight. Now in terms of energy use, diesel trains are already so efficient that electrifying them gives you a very small gain for a very big expense.  But the key is our current train system could not handle a massive switching from truck to rail.  And electrification of around 20% of our routes is a necessary part of the upgrade that would let freight rail handle much of what is currently handled by long haul trucking.

In addition, there is a lot of potential for reduction of industrial consumption that involves substituting of electricity for direct fueling. (Think of Electric Arc Furnaces via Basic Oxygen Furnaces for handling scrap metal. And even in processing raw iron ore, it turns out that EAF (with coal or charcoal used to add carbon) can produce steel with slightly fewer emissions even if the electricity is coal powered. If the electricity is solar or wind you get a huge emissions reductions. And yes this comes in addition to reducing material intensity to cut steel use drastically, and after we use various ways of producing steel in shapes closer to what final uses will be to greatly reduce scrap in manufacturing. The fastest way to reduce all emissions (not just electricity emissions) is massive efficiency increases, combined with electrification, combined with renewable generation of that electricity.

Incidentally electric cars are currently more expensive than coventional autos. I don't think that would be true once we start real mass production, but I would delay putting a tax on electric cars to finance a grid until that mass production happens. Why not put a $500 tax on any car or light truck that gets under 35 mpg instead?  That would finance a whole lot of wind and grid upgrades, and discourage something we want less of besides.

In terms of not needing grid upgrade - yeah if the wind and solar industry continue to grow at their current rates we won't need major grid upgrades to handle them for 20 years (though we need significant grid upgrades now that have nothing to do with renewables - we have simply neglected our transmission, distribution and power management infrastructure).

What we need scientifically is:

1. A small absolute drop in emisisons in the next five years

2. A larger one in the next  ten

3. a 90% drop in the next 20

4. a 95% drop in the next  30

5. followed by phasing the remain 5% out and beginning negative emissions (removing more than we emit) by 2050.

Solar wind

I agree in general. But Altamont is an exception. It was an early deployment, was done very badly, and defending renewables should not including defending Altamont.  With what we know today about how to deploy wind turbines you could tear down the existing turbines at that spot, and put up new ones and not kill any golden eagles. You could come close just by moving turbines; there was a suit a few years ago to force Altamont to do just that.  Unlike some of our purity trolls, I have no objection to big wind or big solar done right. And in the U.S. I think mostly it is done right. But I do think it can be done wrong, and we need to hold industries feet to the fire when it is done wrong.  Altamont was a case where it was and continues to be done wrong. And it turned a lot of people against legitamate wind powers. I know some people concerned with raptor health who are absolutely unhinged about wind power, who are level headed on other issues. And when I talk to them it comes down to Altamont. They are so angry about that particular wind farm that it spill over onto the   wind industry as a whole, and they hate all windmills. Not rational, not right, but an understandable human response that is not helped by continuing defenses of Altamont. If you understand that big wind is essential (as I think you and I both do)  and want to convince others, then I think it essential to condemn Altamont, support shutting it down, and then point out we know how to deploy modern wind farms without threatening raptors - even in raptor-rich ecosystems, and insist that the wind industry continue to use proper spacing tower construction to avoid the problems of Altamont. (Altamont is not comparable to cats, tall buildings or cars because it hurts raptors and golden eagles in general, not just "birds". Again an exception not the rule. )On The media's central arguments for and against Gore's challenge to the nation posted 1 year, 3 months ago 18 Responses

Diesel

When comparing diesel to gasoline cars you have to adjust for the fact that diesels have more BTUs in a gallon. So in terms of oil use and greenhouse emmisison a diesel ford fiesta is the equivalent of a 55.4 mpg gasoline car, (assuming Jailbos figures are right - which is not something to count. He has publicly admitted on occasion that he will make stuff up to sound good) which is still pretty good. In existing diesel's you also have the problem that diesels emit black carbon which is a much more intense greenhouse forcing than CO2. (New diesels are required to have filters; I'm not 100% certain that this eliminates the problem, but I've heard that it does.)  On Surprise first-quarter profit for Honda, unsurprising giant loss for Ford posted 1 year, 4 months ago 13 Responses

Ron I promise

Ron, I will cheerfully promise to turn down any post as Secretary of Agriculture I'm offered. I also promise to turn down any offers of a billion dollars Bill Gates makes to me over the next three or four days. If there are any other hypothetical offers that have no chance of being made to me you want me to turn down, please feel free to ask. It is always a pleasure to make someone happy with something so cheap and easy.

More seriously, my bet is that Obama's Secretary of Agriculture will have strong ties to Archer Daniels Midland .On Public investment can stop emissions faster than relying on private sector posted 1 year, 4 months ago 14 Responses

Altamont

Altamont is an example of what happens when big wind is done wrong.  A disgrace. But this does not happen with most big wind farms.  Wind towers are now built not to attract raptors. Better spacing, even in raptor territory also avoids harming raptors. And of course there are lots of places where turbines can be placed that are not raptor territory. On The media's central arguments for and against Gore's challenge to the nation posted 1 year, 4 months ago 18 Responses

That is the person I asked - definitely not in bed

But note that this person did NOT support tree farms. My acquaintance supports brush clearing and thinning - real thinning, not taking mature trees. And thinning was never in question. I just wondered (because I did not know) if brush should be left on the ground when cleared. And the answer is no. But this expert definitely does not support tree farms. Monocultures are deadly fire traps.  From the perspective we discussed, if we had not screwed thing up so badly the ideal thing to do would be nothing, leaving clearing brush to the natural fire cycle. But because we suppressed small fires over the years, and because we cleared and planted monocultures there are a lot of areas we need to do fire suppression in by substituting for small fires by clearing brush. And I don't know any enviromental group that does not support clearing of brush, young trees, green branches.  But what I was not sure of, and what was answered was that if brush has to be cleared then most of it has to be removed. On Are biofuels a core solution? posted 1 year, 4 months ago 201 Responses

The study

I have no criticisms of the study. I will note that a lot the problems with solar came from not being able to use economies of scale or requiring too much risk to use economies of scale.

Your suggestion to bring in other tribes might solve that problem. I think there is an alternative outside the scope you were allowed that might be worth studying. What about a project that produces many times the electricity all the local tribes will need, that produces for export. The local tribes could be minority partners in a project that takes on outside investors, but as protection be guaranteed first call as customers, be operating partners (which gives them control), make the deal conditional on buyers willing to sign long term contracts (minimizing risks from improved technology). On Renewables and efficiency would provide more GDP than fossil fuels posted 1 year, 4 months ago 48 Responses

The paragraph I quoted followed that one

No electric cars are not that kind of technology. Electricity and battery cycles are still significant costs. And we have actual experience with electric cars and more efficient cars. Also use your freakin common sense. If you have a car that is five times as efficient are you really going to drive five times as much? You love driving so much, you don't want to spend any time at any desinations. Someone who drives an hour a day is really going to start driving five hours a day?On Energy efficiency is the core climate solution, part 1 posted 1 year, 4 months ago 21 Responses

Interesting

Knowing the usual delay between submitting and having stuff post, it looks like we had essentially the same thought independently. (Not saying you agree or disagree with the details in my post, but it seems like we had the same general idea.) http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/22/142141/955

Since we are at somewhat different spots along the political spectrum (in spite of many commonalities) the convergence is encouraging. On Two-pronged strategy to sway energy policy debate posted 1 year, 4 months ago 5 Responses

food

don't disagree that sugar does not need subsidy or protection, or in fact keep most existing subsidies. But we have really unsustainable agriculture that has been shaped by nearly a century of subsidies. Suddenly withdrawing them and replacing them with nothing makes no sense. (Well some of them, like sugar protectionism and biofuel subsidies would be a net plus for consumers even if replaced with nothing. Where I think we could put the money with net benefit is giving a subsidy to any farmer who any farmer to switched to low input agriculture - low pesticide, low energy, low water. That would include organic farming, but not be limited to it, though non-organic methods would have to really close to organic to qualify. Secondly we would want to subsidize farmers who built top soil rather than eroding it. So we should offer a subsidy on stables (grains, pulses and fresh fruits and vegatables) that could be qualified for only by growing them via low input soil building menas. Lastly I would offer people who grew fresh fruits and veggies more than their share, since these have risen in price even more than grains and pulses. Lastly I would shape these so that subsidize food directly for humans, not food for animals or machines, and also eliminate any subsidies that go directly to raising animals. (In the long run we might want to look at subsidies for green grazing, but these policies along with not selling grazng rights at below cost, and putting more stringent conditions on grazing rights might themselves encourage a switch to green grazing.)  Once this was in place then we could some time and refine the policies to come up withe better agricultural polcies.

In terms of Japan's rice protectionism:

1. they are paying less right now than if they  had eliminated most domestic production and were buying suddenly double price rice from the U.S.

2. To the extent they grow their own rice, they are not competing with poor in nations in the global south buying rice on the global market. In fact since they have bought rice on the global market only under international pressure and not actually consumed it, they are now releasing part of their stockpile to ease the food crisis - and would have released much more if the U.S. had not denied permission. (Japan needs permission because a lot of is U.S. rice and the U.S. would consider releasing it without our permission a free trade violation - which tells you something about the meaning of the term "free trade")

Limestone in ocean

The problem is on the scale we are talking about you are not just reversing ocean acidification, you are making it basic. (This is from GreyFalcon's link.) At the same time, on a global scale you are not affecting acidity.

Another point from GreyFalcon's first link: none of the articles link compare putting up high voltage line and feeding the energy to do this into the grid with this. Also in terms of costs, you not only have to compare costs of doing this with the costs of putting putting the power into the grid, but the cost of the fossil fuel that would be displaced by putting the power into the grid. We need the hard figures, but I'd bet:

1. You get more sequestration via limestone than via putting the power into the grid

2. you get higher costs via limestone than putting power into the grid

3. the cost per unit of reductions is about the same, but you are better off putting in place renewable infrastructure faster. You can do limestone if that turns out to be a good idea, after we stop putting garbage into the atmosphere. The first rule of holes is: if you are in one, stop digging. The second rule of holes (which I just made up) is don't start filling the hole you are in until you are out of it.

Also on one of my earlier points: they think this makes sense only using "stranded power". That implies that "unstranding" it might be more productive that producing limestone.On Could lime absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide? posted 1 year, 4 months ago 15 Responses

Follow the comments further

Follow the comments further and you find an argument against Olivine, still unrefuted.

Real Climate comment

In terms of limestone, the argument seems to be that dumping huge amounts of limestone into the ocean is not in fact a good idea.On Could lime absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide? posted 1 year, 4 months ago 15 Responses

Gas prices

I agree there is no poor taste or bad timing about it. But I am curious. We use oil for a tiny percent of electricity generation. A tiny percent of peaking, plus some remote generation where oil is the only available fuel. So a commitment to renewable electricity will do all sorts of wonderful things. But I don't think bringing down oil prices is one of them. Mind you a commitment to renewable energy along with a commitment to electrifying transportation would lower oil prices. I'm still waiting to hear anything from Gore on this, but maybe I missed something.

I would add that even without tackling oil and ten year phase out of fossil fuel for electricity is a good idea. If subsidized properly it would lower electric bills, which would put money in peoples pockets to make up for higher oil prices. And if you eliminated electricity emissions in the first ten years, you could phase out most of the rest in second by a combination of increased efficiency and by expanding that generation and substituting electricity for fossil fuels. Still tackling some of the low hanging fruit in transport, buildings and industry at the same time we decarbonized electricity would be better.

1) On Blogosphere responds reservedly to Gore's call for 100 percent renewable electricity posted 1 year, 4 months ago 14 Responses

direct circulation

Japanese air source heat pumps have 4 to 1 cops in cooling. Can ground source heat pumps beat that? (In heating as temp approaches zero no contest - ground source all the way). Water source is another question. But ground source usually is NOT 55 degrees, especially not in cooling climates. I thin if you used the same tricks the most efficient Japanese air source use, the ground source would beat them again. But Japanese efficiency regulations have greatly improved air source, and a lot of the technology has not migrated to ground source.On Time to stop using the phrase 'renewable energy' posted 1 year, 4 months ago 65 Responses

Backcut

You will notice that backcut is very uspecific about what he advocates. He also tends to blame environmentalists for forest fires  falsely painting them as opponents of thinning. In fact there has been almost no opposition in the environmental community to thinning. The disagreement between environmentalist and the timber industry is that many in the timber indusry want to log old growth and mature trees that are widely agreed not be needed for fire control in order to pay for thinning. For Backcuts positions be reasonable he would need to document where environmentalists have stopped thinning, as opposed to timber companies and the forest service stopping thinning as a form of extortion to get permission for unneeded logging. In the past when I've asked for such documentation, Backcut has simply linked to his photo blog. In short his "reasonable" position is: "here are the fires. It is your fault. I'm not going to provide any evidience it is your fault. If you don't believe me you are a denialist". Let's see if that pattern changes of if Backcut actually decides to provide evidence.On Are biofuels a core solution? posted 1 year, 4 months ago 201 Responses

Oil drilling

Start with a fact you already know: oil companies already own a lot of leases they are not drilling. So why push to open more leases? Not to have the ability to produce more oil, but to get more control. The higher a percentage of reserves they own, the more they have the ability to turn the spigot on and off at will. Control baby, control. On Oil execs, the neutral arbiters energy policy has needed for so long posted 1 year, 4 months ago 4 Responses

Green for All

Actually, I'd say Green For All is taking a pretty good approach on this.

http://www.greenforall.org/

But the reason the greens lunch has been eaten is that main stream environmental groups and thinkers have mostly focused on putting a price on carbon. (Sean, I'm including you on this, because indirectly your proposal does create a carbon price.) It is not that putting a price on carbon is wrong but it should never have been the main focus. The single biggest potential source of cuts would come through public investment. And poltically if all the green groups had been shouting all along about public investments to reduce emissions and replace oil, the right would not have been eating our lunch on this.On Progressives discover there is no coherent energy movement to take advantage of this moment posted 1 year, 4 months ago 16 Responses

Biomass

My doubt, for both Jonas and DRX is that we can get all this biomass sustainably. It is also why I think charcoal "put the carbon back" scenarios will play a small role. Yes they all do have a role. We can harvest some energy biomass sustainbly. Conversion to charcoal if done carefully does not have to contribute to global warming. But it has to be within reason. In terms of African biomass. Unless you are talking about tranforming our economic system, it will involve displacing food crops and driving people off land, and probably end up with destroying rainforest. Yes I know there are technically possible ways to grow fuel without displacing food (net energy is another question). But to do this in the global south, you are going to need to repeal a lot of free trade agreements, support land reform that gives land back to the people to who live there and much more local control, and some public spending to end poverty and much economic insecurity. You ready to support these things Jonas? Because without them, biomass  is going to complete with food, worsen inequality and increase emissions. Even with them, a lot of discoveries are narrowing the scope for growing biomass for fuel with net reductions in emissions. Every new discovery seems to be that biomass for fuel is worse on carbon emissions than we thought.  The nitrogen cycle of biofuels worsens global warming more than we thought. Charag produces less net sequestration of emissions than we thought, because soil charcoal displaces some of the existing ability of soil in cool or temperate climates to absorb soil. (Also you have make charcoal very carefully so as not to produce black carbon which is a much stronger greenhouse forcing that CO2.)  Also in turns out that in cool climates the soil has limited ability to absorb charcoal. Once you get to about 4% it more charcoal actually lowers fertility. (In tropical rainforests the story is different. Because plants in tropical rainforests store carbon in themselves rather than soil, the soil can absorb carbon generation after generation. But high tech means (like harvesting waste, converting it to charcoal then ploughing it back into the soil are energy intensive, and unlikely to prove sequesering. Traditional slash and burn agriculture might fix carbon, but it will provide huge amounts of black carbon and particulates - which are net emitters. I guess you could clear cut the jungle convert it to carbon, then let it grow back. You might or might get net carbon sequestration out of this, but the ecological consequences in other directions are pretty horrible.  And my instinct is that destroying rainforest is not going give you net carbon sequestration in other case.

DRX, you have been arguing for gasification.  OK, if you have the sustainable biomass - this is one good way of using it. But please sit down and add up the numbers. How much waste gas can you get from existing sewage treatment plants, existing coal mines once we shut them down, existing landfills. (And yeah mines and land fills will yield methane for decades after we shut them down, so capturing it is a good idea. But instead of just handwaving and saying lots why don't you take the friggin trouble to research the potential and add up the numbers. Give us a documented total. If you think there are other sources of biomass, by all means include them, and explain why they are sustainable.

Also, to save you some wasted effort, if you aerobically compost methane producing waste, the areobic process converts to methane to CO2. So aneorobic composting is NOT the only way to get rid of the methane in manures and such. Aerobic composting has the advantage that it preserves soil structure rather than just nutrients. So manure is NOT a zero environmental cost alternative.  That does not mean it is automatically a bad idea; it means you  need to weigh all the consequences rather than just handwaving them if you are going to keep advocating. I really ask you instead of just going "hey, hey, hey" please run the numbers. On Can the coal industry and an environmental blog find common ground? posted 1 year, 4 months ago 24 Responses

nearly 100%, not half

At this point I would require that any new electrical source be essentially carbon free. However, pace Gore, I would have a requirements on utiltities that they be 100% carbon free at the end of ten years - meaning that they know they will have to shut down existing plants that are not low carbon within ten years. I would count electrical generation that ran off waste heat from existing processes, even existing carbon intensive processes as "carbon" free, provided that revenue streams from this generation did not result in those processes being run for longer times. So much of the "recycled energy potential" would count as carbon free for this purpose.On A simple regulatory fix to the coming power crisis posted 1 year, 4 months ago 12 Responses

Takings

A takings issue is a Constitutional issue and so constrains even action by legislatures including Congress.  

The court never used the term "takings", but I (and some legal scholars) think the logic is backdoor takings argument. On Clean Air Interstate rule struck down because it devalues sulfur trading permits posted 1 year, 4 months ago 15 Responses

Rail fatalities

OK, I see where my mistake was. Fatalities per vehicle mile are slightly higher for transit than for  autos and light trucks. But you get significantly more passenger miles per transit vehicle than per auto. So the figures you linked make sense. Buses have about one third the fatality rate of autos and light trucks.  Rail has about about 2/rd the fatality rate.    (But bus injury rate is much closer to autos than rail.) Since the next thirty years are going to contain both buses and rail a 50% reduction is reasonable. (I'm going to back calculate savings from capital invested, since I have a capital cost per passenger mile for light rail and buses.) Now to look up figures for freight, since our truck reduction is 85%.

http://www.aar.org/pubcommon/documents/govt/brown.pdf
.61 fatalities per ton mile vs. 1.45On Renewables and efficiency would provide more GDP than fossil fuels posted 1 year, 4 months ago 48 Responses

L-W bill expressly said no property right

Good we can count our judicial system to not ignore this if it passes. Cause decades of Republican appointments would never result a judiciary that will stretch a point in the interests of corporations. In fact this ruling never explicitly uses the word "property" (Pdf of decision). Instead it relies on "fairness issues" that indirectly rely on such rights. There is no reason to think that even this particular ruling would have been different if the acid rain trading program had such a provision. On Clean Air Interstate rule struck down because it devalues sulfur trading permits posted 1 year, 4 months ago 15 Responses