Comments Laurence Aurbach has made

Offshore wind for the East Coast

If they included offshore wind, the self-sufficiency figures for the Eastern seaboard would look a whole lot better. Some studies say the East Coast has enough offshore wind resources to supply the region's entire energy demand.

The New Rules projections for cellulosic ethanol are probably overstated by an order of magnitude.

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Paying for It

Other Gristmillers are writing about the current financial crisis and how it will limit the amount of credit available for new investments. I'm also reading stories like "Federal billions for Wall Street will handcuff next president" that describe how the Treasury Department's bailout plans are going to cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and will severely limit the ability of the next president to pay for any new initiatives.

In the sustainability arena, this means a meager outlook for initiatives like a revamped electric grid, new transit and rail infrastructure, energy efficiency tax credits and so on.

In this context, and given the continuing necessity to lower CO2 emissions, I wonder if carbon taxes may become more politically palatable. The big advantage of carbon taxes is that the costs to consumers and industry can be certain and predictable. After watching the massive failure of the credit industry this fall, I wonder if Americans will prefer revenue certainty to Wall Street betting.

Also, if proposals like that of the Carbon Tax Center are implemented, everybody would receive a rebate from the carbon tax revenues, an idea that could gain popularity in a recession economy. This is the same sort of individual payment that Alaskans get ($2069 in 2008 via the Alaska Permanent Fund) and that Palin supplemented with an additional $1200 "resource rebate." So now that we have a VP candidate from Alaska, let's hear more about dedicated tax revenues that are rebated directly to individuals.

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Prince Charles background

The Prince owns a lot of land (141,000 acres in the Duchy of Cornwall) but there are others who own a similar amount, like the Duke of Buccleuch, Estate of Atholl dukedom, Duke of Northumberland, and Duke of Westminster. Land ownership is very poorly distributed in the UK. All told, 158,000 families own 69 percent of Britain's land.

Prince Charles has no more or less ability to treat his land "like a huge laboratory" than any other large landowner, farmer or developer. The difference is he has made a concerted effort to innovate with research and investment into

Healthy living,
Sustainable building and urban design,
Organic food, and
A variety of responsible business and charitable trusts

Everyone who lives or works on Duchy of Cornwall land does so by choice, and many of the Prince's initiatives are successful profit-making enterprises.

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Signs of the times

Check out this little photoessay: Hummer 2 Smart.

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Preparations

Here's a blog about net oil exports. The trend has been downward since peaking in late 2005: http://netoilexports.blogspot.com

Re: Preparations in the Middle East.

Big plans are underway for a Saudi Arabian rail network connecting all population centers. This includes the high speed Makkah Madinah Rail Link from Jeddah to Mecca and Medina which will serve 15 million travelers annually.

Abu Dhabi (its oil reserves are the fifth largest in the world) announced it will spend $350 million on a 100 MW solar plant. It is "part of Abu Dhabi's drive to cut dependence on hydrocarbon power generation." The investment is part of the Masdar Initiative which is authorized to spend up to $2 billion to become an exporter of solar technology.

Other Middle Eastern countries are increasing their renewable energy portfolios at a fast rate.

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On the topic of market demand

From the article The Market for Mixed Use & Walkability:

The bottom line is this: The great preponderance of surveys finds approximately one-third of the current U.S. market wants neighborhoods that are multiform, mixed use and walkable. Nearly all (90+ percent) of new residential development is conventional suburban sprawl or otherwise hostile to pedestrians. Ergo, a market failure is taking place, and a pretty massive one at that.

That was written a year and a half ago, and I believe the market demand for walkable urban neighborhoods and towns has increased somewhat since then, as mentioned in some of the articles above.

Furthermore, the demand is projected to increase, even in the absence of high gasoline prices. Demographic and cultural shifts are changing the market landscape. Twenty years from now the market for new, large-lot, exurban McMansions will likely have vanished.

Some of this relates to Bart's question. Suburbs may not be so great for older folks, especially when they have difficulty operating cars. Increasingly, seniors are looking for safe, walkable communities.

And so are younger folks, even young families, reversing decades of standard operating procedure. Really a confluence of trends signaling shifts in the real estate market.

In deference to Mad Mac, however, I will say the last thing cities need is for people to be forced to live in them. Cities need people who love the urban lifestyle -- from small town Main Streets, to leafy streetcar suburbs, to dense downtowns. Cities need people who are willing to protect the best qualities of urbanism and work to make it better, and even come up with creative new ideas for future visions.

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Mandates

I would never want to mandate where and how people should live. Fortunately, some forecasts are showing the market for new, large-lot exurban development is going to disappear over the next couple of decades, and all future demand in the new housing market will be for small-lot houses and multifamily dwellings in walkable and transit oriented neighborhoods.

There are proposals for goals and timetables for VMT reduction within communities, like the 2030 Community Challenge. I've seen proposals for rewarding localities or regions that meet standards along those lines. The ramifications of that idea should be explored.

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Pesky planet

Why stop with mountains? We need to get rid of everything that stands in the way of progress. Get rid of foothills, get rid of valleys, get rid of canyons, get rid of rivers, streams, lakes, oceans.

Heck, let's just get rid of the Environment and be done with it.

Face up to it America -- we'd all be better off if the planet was a featureless slag heap with every square inch working to maximize corporate profits.

Besides, a coal-mining leachate pad is the perfect spot for a hospital. It's so, you know, healthy and restorative.

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Promise us the moon and stars

The EIA numbers are suspect right off the bat. Look at their chart, Figure 20. Lower 48 offshore production hits bottom in 2005, then immediately begins a rapid climb. By 2008, we are producing 37 percent more than we did in 2005, according to the EIA.

The reality? Lower 48 production has decreased more than 10 percent since 2005.

Remember, that is including the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which cut Louisiana's offshore production in half from Sept-Nov 2005. Also, the decline has occurred as the Bush administration has opened large areas to drilling in the central and eastern Gulf of Mexico.

The EIA has a record of excessively optimistic forecasts, and it's likely this chart is the same.

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Up, up and away!

All indications are that we reached the production peak in conventional, cheap oil back in 2005.

Even the head economist of the IEA is coming around to the view of near-term peaks:

What I can tell you is that one day global conventional oil will peak. This will depend on many factors, including the role of technology, investment, and production policies. When we look at oil outside of the OPEC countries, when you put all of them together, I think it is going to peak very soon. But we have unconventional oil, and we have oil in the Middle East as well. How much will come to the market from unconventional oil?

With regards to Middle Eastern oil, he answers himself:

Therefore, the bulk of the growth in the future needs to come from the national oil companies, and perhaps price will no longer be the main determinant when they make their [production] decisions, because for many countries, oil is their only natural endowment. And those countries legitimately value and want to leave their one and only natural endowment for future generations.

(This naturally raises the question: Why are the national oil companies starting to conserve now? Why didn't they start that 10 or 20 years ago?)

Others concur with this view, like the U.S. energy secretary:

The U.S. energy secretary said Saturday that insufficient oil production, not financial speculation, was driving soaring crude prices. ... "Market fundamentals show us that production has not kept pace with growing demand for oil, resulting in increasing prices and increasingly volatile prices," Bodman told reporters. "There is no evidence that we can find that speculators are driving futures prices" for oil.

And the CEO of Total:

Christophe de Margerie, the boss of Total, thinks that the world's oil production may be nearing its peak... Last year he declared that the world would never be able to increase its output of oil from the current level of 85m barrels per day (b/d) to 100m b/d, let alone the 120m b/d that energy analysts predict will be needed by 2030.

The bottom line is that global oil production has been on a "bumpy plateau" since 2005. Net oil exports have declined since 2005. The majority of the big oil fields are in decline, and new production is not ramping up fast enough to replace them over the long term (after 2-5 years from today).

There is a debate over the causes -- some say geological and technical, some say political. At any rate it's a solid bet that oil prices will continue on an upward trend for the foreseeable future.

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Meanwhile

A big brokerage reduced its rating of General Motors stock to "sell" and the stock price dropped to its lowest level since 1955. General Motors' market value is now about the same as that of toy maker Mattel.

News article link:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/25392542

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Re: Solar dish mirrors - MIT

Great stuff, Doug!

One of the keys to making an inexpensive design was something Wood discovered by accident as he built a variety of solar dishes over the years: Smaller really is better. Unlike many technologies where economies of scale dictate large sizes, a smaller dish requires so much less support structure that it ends up costing only a third as much, for a given collecting area.

MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class this project first took shape last fall, says that "I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen. And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."

Just how cheap is this dish, compared to other solar tech?

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Big Wind as Micropower

Here are Lovins' 207 Benefits of Distributed Generation.

I think I understand his point, which is that when large power arrays are composed of small modules, then the large array has many of the benefits of the individual modules.

Maybe an easy way of defining such facilities is by marginal costs: Is the cost of adding 1% or 5% to the capacity of a large array approximately the same as building that same amount of capacity as a standalone micropower unit?

That's probably true for a lot of wind farms, solar PV, trough solar thermal and wave power. It's probably not true for larger, more centralized renewable plants like solar power towers, geothermal power or tidal power.

In all fairness, though, a good 10-20% of Lovins' 207 benefits are related to transmission and scale. Maybe his methodology would be more consistent if he were to separately break out large and/or remote renewable power facilities that are composed of small modules.

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Yes there are two paths you can go by

Even with billions in dollars in loan guarantees backed by U.S. taxpayers, the private sector is not stepping up to invest in U.S. nuclear.

Coal plants that simply meet 1971 Clean Air Act standards are very expensive. Coal plants that sequester carbon dioxide are not yet commercialized and are projected to be prohibitively expensive.

U.S. natural gas production peaked in 1973 and is on the decline; LNG imports are expensive; global natural gas production is projected to peak soon and then decline -- after which prices will shoot up even higher than they are now.

It looks like our basic choice is 1) Cheap, dirty, climate-wrecking coal, or 2) the green energy program of efficiency, demand reduction, and renewables.

Houston, we have a problem... and an opportunity.

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Drake's proposal

See also the proposal by Alan Drake, What is Required to Displace Heavy Trucks (and Some Air Freight) in the USA? Drake proposes an incremental upgrade strategy that maximizes cost effectiveness, speed, reliability and practicality. He describes the proposal:

... this is for both passengers and freight at 100 to 110 mph as a part of a roughly $400 billion electrified railroad upgrade (electrify 65,000 of 178,000 miles, 25,000 miles of double track or much enhanced single track and the below "CSX" type track). I see speeds above 125 mph for passenger & package only service as a luxury that the USA should build "later".

There are some similarities with the DOT map, but Drake's map is optimized for both passenger and freight traffic.

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Nagging questions

"These countries don't need the incremental revenue. They're getting the revenue through price; they don't need it through volume."

Well, sure, it's a lot easier to raise the price of oil than to extract and transport it.

This rather begs the question, however. Why are producers able to raise prices so dramatically now, when a decade ago they could not? What's changed? Why didn't price go up ten years ago to the level where it meaningfully reduced demand?

Speaking of oil price forecasts, this chart of Energy Information Administration forecasts made over the past four years is a classic study in wishful thinking.

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Building for the future

Big plans are underway for a Saudi Arabian rail network connecting all population centers. Especially interesting is the Makkah Madinah Rail Link from Jeddah to Mecca and Medina.

Currently this travel corridor used by 20 million travelers per year, expected to grow to 30 million by 2020. Fifty percent of travelers -- 15 million annually -- are anticipated to use the high speed rail service.

Railset: Electric high speed
Gradient: up to 3.5%
Five minutes headway during peak hours between Jeddah & Mecca
Consulting with SNCF International (French railway)

Routes and times:
Jeddah - Mecca 80 km in 30 minutes
Jeddah - Medina 420 km in 2.5 hours

With respect to the future of Saudi oil production, this says more than any  number of OPEC or IEA press releases.

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good article, especially the conclusion

Lovins' paper walks through a comprehensive and persuasive explanation of the economics behind nuclear power, micropower and renewables. In most respects, nuclear power is the most uneconomic of the three.

But it's not until page 44 that Lovins gets to the heart of the matter: the monstrously large and deeply corrupt billions in loan guarantees that the U.S. government has been giving away to the relatively moribund and trough-sucking nuclear industry. The ante keeps getting upped, year after year; lending standards keep getting loosened; we taxpayers become liable for bigger and bigger potential losses with each new giveaway.

And yet the numbers still don't work. The private sector refuses to step up. And in response, the industry is asking for tens of billions more in guarantees.

As Lovins notes, this story is unknown among the American public. One reason is that many media outlets are owned by conglomerates that also own nuclear companies. Clearly this conflict of interest serves the U.S. public poorly. Lovins says,

To be sure, some leading newspapers have described nuclear regulatory and construction complications, and a few have mentioned that financing may present challenges. Yet the broader story -- an industry that is failing and unfinanceable despite wildly escalating subsidies, has been massively outpaced by competitors it doesn't even recognize, and is unable even in principle to deliver its claimed climate and security benefits -- remains virtually untold.

Questions:

1) Lovins says a primary reason nuclear plant construction costs more than wind and micropower is because of a shrinking talent pool. The same dynamic is at work in the oil industry, where the pool of qualified geologists and engineers is aging, retiring and shrinking. Is it possible the youth generation has read the writing on the wall, years ahead of regulators and big fossil/nuclear interests, and has jumped into the efficiency/micro/renewable sector instead?

2)Lovin's says micropower still has many barriers to fair competition. Here at Gristmill Sean Casten has made similar arguments. What the the priority policy changes that need to occur to make the competitive field for micropower a fair one?

3) The nuclear industry may try to use shock doctrine tactics to leverage peak oil and global warming fears among the populace into a stampede towards additional nuclear subsidies and supports. What are the chances it will be successful? Will the fossil fuel lobby ally with nuclear in that struggle or will it be an enemy? How can a distributed industry have the same political clout as a centralized industry?

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science fiction and climate change

The original PBS TV dramatization of Lathe of Heaven was very good too. It's been a long time since I read the book and I don't remember if LeGuin specifically mentioned the CO2 mechanism. The 1969 James Blish story "We All Die Naked" is said to be the first to put the greenhouse effect in a fictional setting.

Ecological catastrophe has been a theme in science fiction for more than a century, and traces its roots back to ancient works like Gilgamesh and the Bible. Victorian writers imagined the destruction of London from poisonous coal smoke, as in Robert Barr's The Doom of London.

Through the first half of the twentieth century the most common fictional manmade global disasters were caused by war and weapons, and the movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) continues that tradition. With an intelligent script, decent acting and impressive effects considering the shoestring budget, it remains the best movie about global heating (in this case caused by a nuke test).

JG Ballard focused on global climate change in The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought, a.k.a. The Burning World (1964). In the latter, human pollution creates an impermeable layer on the oceans that prevents evaporation and causes a global drought. I seem to recall a Gristmill commenter who frequently promoted that theory.

The Global Warming Timeline has an interesting collection of newspaper articles going back to the 19th century. It wasn't until the publication of Silent Spring (1962), I think, that these articles changed from passing entertainment about zany scientists to reports about a possible threat that should be taken seriously.

Brian Stableford's essay Science Fiction and Ecology has some very interesting thoughts about the field, its history and its relation to current climate developments.

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Re: Wimpy Owls

Sounds familiar... isn't that what the Cro-Magnons said about the saber toothed tiger?

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There's no escaping power and values

Cost benefit analysis appeals to the technocratic dream of a completely fair and impartial decision-making methodology. The dream goes like this: Money measures value, so if we can just get the assumptions underlying CBA right, we'll have an authoritative process that will be valid in most situations.

That dream is a fallacy. Power struggles and values are at the heart of CBA. CBA spits out answers; the answers depend on assumptions; the assumptions are determined by political power and cultural values. We should and must have the most impartial facts on which to base our decisions, but there is no escaping the political process when it comes to making decisions based on those facts. Calling CBA an impartial metric is just a way to conceal that reality.

What are the alternatives to CBA when making political decisions? A review of Heinzerling's book lists these methods:

• using holistic, not atomistic, methods;
  
• favoring moral imperatives over cost comparisons;
  
• adopting the precautionary approach when dealing with uncertainty;
  
• promoting fairness towards the poor and future generations
  
• heeding the extreme forecasts when contemplating potentially catastrophic events, such as climate change.

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Jesse Jackson Replay

In 1988, I saw Jesse Jackson give a stump speech in Roseburg, OR (pop. 17,000). For context, here's the Google map of Roseburg.

There was a pretty good crowd to see Jackson, as he was running for president then and already had a certain degree of fame. There were 200-300 people in the room. The crowd was attentive.

At one point, Jackson stated that small towns like Roseburg needed to be "reconnected" with a revitalized nationwide system of passenger rail routes. That excited me, so I stood up and applauded. I was the only one to make any response to that line. Jackson glanced at me, and continued on with his other topics as if nothing had happened.

I'd guess if Obama said the same thing in Roseburg today, he'd be lucky if one person applauded.

I think it has to be about more than gas prices and gasoline dependency. It also has to be about development. Rail can be a powerful catalyst for development, like highways can, but in a more concentrated pattern around stations. Also, rail for business and tourist travel is becoming more popular throughout the world, and tapping those markets can spur economic development. Creative class businesses/workers are relocating in the walkable cities and towns that are supported by rail service.

And not least, rail can reduce air pollution and can be part of a climate change strategy, as well as a Green Collar jobs strategy.

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Imagine

Imagine how much human development and prosperity would result from a massive implementation of solar thermal generating plants coupled with new HVDC or high efficiency AC transmission to power the entire southwestern U.S. Imagine an industry that uses sunshine for fuel and thus can continue indefinitely, with no boom and bust cycle in commodities to worry about, no built-in obsolescence because of the coming peak and decline of natural gas and coal production. Imagine an industry sector that will mint money from carbon credits instead of paying out; an industry that will help clear the air and reduce particulates, smog, asthma and other pollution impacts. Imagine an industry that could turn Las Vegas and neighboring desert areas into an international hub of solar industry research, financing, development and export.

After all, Las Vegas and its desert neighbors are the the biggest solar resources in the world that are also close to big metropolises. The opportunity is clear; the only question is whether the citizens of Las Vegas will permit coal industry shills to derail the bonanza that's within reach.

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Words of nuance, words of skill

"Delayer" is a term that many of them would wear with honor. It's not necessarily a negative, from their perspective.

How about "Hesitators"? "Do-nothings"? "Non-responders"? "Procrastinators"? "Too-little too-lates"? "Stallers"? "Impeders" "Shufflers"? "Jack-arounds"?

A thesaurus is a great thing.

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Wrong again

France gets 80 percent of its power from nuclear

Wrong. France is mostly dependent on fossil fuels:

Fuel            %
Oil            38
Natural Gas    14
Coal            5
Nuclear        31
Hydro          14
Biofuels/wood   5
Total         100

France gets 79 percent of its electricity from nuclear -- not the same thing. Furthermore, the U.S produces far more electricity from nuclear than France.

Nuclear electricity generation (net TWh) 2006

France: 429 TWh
United States: 787 TWh

Most important of all, France has a massive state-run regulatory apparatus to monitor and ensure the safety of its nuclear sector. Even that isn't enough to prevent mistakes and dumping of nuke waste, but it's a thousand times better than the irresponsible free-for-all in the U.S. commercial nuke power sector and in most other nations.

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Porous pavement

More about those innovative streets here:

Pringle Creek's Porous Pavement

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Already happened

Eyal Press wrote in The New Suburban Poverty (April 13, 2007):

For the first time ever, more poor Americans live in the suburbs than in all our cities combined.

Chris Dovi and Scott Bass' article Rethinking Suburbia (February 7-14, 2007) looks at the details of that pattern in Richmond, VA:

Neighborhoods that once held the suburban dreams of many have become havens for crime and the all-too-familiar problems of the inner city.

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re: Masdar

The principles all sound very good, but principles are the easy part. The project will succeed or fail on the strength of its details and implementation. Frankly, the renderings look like something Gene Roddenberry would dream up. Starfleet Academy indeed...

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More from NRDC

At NRDC's Switchboard Blog, there's a funny post about CARB's study:

Facts Are Stupid Things

CARB found that in California, the state's standards reduce global warming pollution more than twice as much as the federal standards in 2016. Looking at cumulative reductions from 2009 through 2016, California's standards cut heat-trapping gases three times as much as the federal standards. ...

Well, let's go back to EPA administrator Johnson's fuzzy math.

Slips of the tongue happen (even in a written letter). But even after being called on his mistakes, Johnson didn't take the opportunity to correct himself. Instead, Johnson had his spokesman repeat his bogus 2020-vs.-2016, 35-vs.-33.8 comparison when the state and environmental coalition took him to court on January 2nd.

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Another Wack-A-Mole

First the global warming denialists tried to attack the scientific consensus demonstrated in the peer-reviewed literature. That effort collapsed in a farce of errors and backpedaling.

Now they're trying a new tack: Try to undercut the consensus demonstrated in the IPCC. Their strategy is to lie about and misrepresent the IPCC review process. It was pretty muddled on TV, but I think that's what Horner was trying to put across.

This latest round seems to be based on a denialist piece titled The UN Climate Change Numbers Hoax which claims the IPCC consensus on AGW was reviewed by only seven qualified scientists. This has already drawn some debunking such as Blatant Hypocrisy Among Global Warming Skeptics: IPCC Chapter 9 and John McLean and the NRSP. I'd venture to say there will be more debunking to come, as the skirmishing of disinformation and smackdown plays itself out yet again.

As far as "mine is bigger than yours" goes, this short description of the IPCC process offers some numbers:

From more than 4,000 nominated scientists, about 600 were chosen as authors in the Fourth Assessment; and all those not chosen are automatically included amongst reviewers of the drafts.

... Several thousand scientists are asked to review the authors' drafts, at two different stages; and there are also two stages of review by governments.

And in regards to the IPCC's data:

However, a new development in the Fourth Assessment is that it concludes, from an examination of 29,000 data sets, that the impacts of climate change occurring now can be observed everywhere on our planet. It is evident in its impacts on animals, plants, water and ice. This is traditional science-based observation and measurement, not "arm-waving" with computer models.

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In smaller cities

Maybe we can say that buses are the most cost effective option in most of the individual transit routes in the United States. I'd like to see a paper that makes that case using full cost-benefit analysis.

On the other hand, there is a streetcar renaissance happening in France, and many new routes are in smaller cities like Nice (pop. 347,000),  Nantes (pop. 280,000), Strasbourg (pop. 273,000), Montpellier (pop. 244,000),  Bourdeaux (pop. 230,000), Saint-Étienne (pop. 175,000), Grenoble (pop. 158,000), Le Mans (pop. 146,000), Mulhouse (pop. 110,000), and Valenciennes (pop. 41,000).

The usual argument is that European cities are denser and therefore more suitable for transit, which is true generally. But one of the great advantages of rail is its feedback effect, where the rail line initiates new transit-oriented development, which increases ridership, which boosts demand for new rail lines.

One of the main reasons rail draws more riders is because the service is better than buses. Bus comfort, convenience, service and design quality can and should be improved a lot. A good example in a smaller U.S. city is the Eugene EmX. Eugene went with buses because it was determined that a rail system would have been too costly. The long-term question, however, is which option would ultimately have been best for ridership, transit oriented development, the environment, and the total cost-benefit balance.

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Better balance, better policy

The pros and cons aren't as simplistic as the Baltimore Sun editorial makes them out to be. The developer's profile of the site shows that parts of it are already logged over and have coal mining currently underway. A Sun reporter blogged about the story, showing a string of proposed turbines along an Interstate freeway. So from the limited information that's available right now, it appears some sites are suitable for development and some are not.

More fundamentally, why don't we see this sort of hue and cry from the media and preservationists when thousands of acres of forests are destroyed for coal? As Mike Tidwell observes,

Unbelievably, thanks to regulatory help from the Bush Administration, another 326,000 acres of prime Appalachian land are scheduled for mountaintop removal in the next eight years. That makes a total area of land from 1992-2012 equivalent to blowing up and leveling virtually the entire panhandle of western Maryland!

Where is the outrage about this ruination of Appalachia's "pristine" "wilderness" "sanctuaries"?

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Meanwhile, back at the henhouse...

Interior Concedes MacDonald Meddled with Science

... [T]he Department of the Interior today conceded that seven out of eight decisions made during the tenure of Julie MacDonald, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, warrant revision.

"Julie MacDonald, who was a civil engineer by training, should never have been allowed near the endangered species program. This announcement is the latest illustration of the depth of incompetence at the highest levels of management within the Interior Department and breadth of this Administration's penchant for torpedoing science. Today we hear that seven out of eight decisions she made need to be scrapped, causing us once again to question the integrity of the entire program under her watch," [House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick] Rahall said.

... The latest announcement outlines seven specific Endangered Species Act decisions that Interior has determined were "inappropriately influenced" by MacDonald. The Fish and Wildlife Service had announced on July 20 that it intended to review eight ESA decisions where it appeared that MacDonald had played a significant role in asserting her own political interests to overrule scientific decisions on endangered species recovery.

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Reducing intermittency at competitive cost

apsmith wrote:

"renewables have generally lower capacity factors (30-40%, or 60% perhaps for hydro, rather than 80-90%) relative to typical fossil or nuclear stations. In addition to whatever backup power storage or generation that might require, that means all capital costs must be multiplied by the inverse of the capacity factor (a factor of 2-3 in many cases) to get an equivalent per-kWh number."

The 177 megawatt Ausra solar thermal plant I mentioned above will include a water-based thermal storage system (most likely with 16-hour capacity) to enable electricity generation any time of the day or night. The Ausra report Solar Thermal Power as the Plausible Basis of Grid Supply says:

Both PV and wind are currently limited by lack of low cost storage systems, so that variations in sun and wind are transmitted into the grid and need to be balanced by other technologies ... because of the ability of solar thermal electricity to use low cost thermal energy storage between the solar array and the turbine, very high grid supply fractions are possible without auxiliary peaking systems.

Even more intriguing, the report asserts solar thermal costs are lower than IGCC costs even before sequestration is accounted for.

Some experts insist that low cost 'clean' coal and nuclear are the solutions and that renewable energy cannot do the job. Coal fired generation with carbon sequestration needs Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), a type of power plant that gasifies coal into synthetic gas to power a gas turbine. In April 2007, Minnesota's Office of Administrative Hearings rejected the proposed Mesaba IGCC plant, saying that NOx and mercury emissions are not improved over a conventional coal plant with modern pollution controls, that the basic plant would cost 9-11 cents per kWh, and that capturing and transporting the carbon would add at least 5 cents per kWh. This is a significantly higher cost than solar thermal electricity plants now being contracted. Sequestered coal is also more polluting, and the sequestration technology is unproven.

The report Lower Temperature Approach for Very Large Solar Power Plants presents more detailed information about several thermal storage technologies for solar generating plants.

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Think of the whole system

A few comments:

1) In your hypothetical example gas rises to $8/gallon and the consumer switches to a hybrid car in response. So far so good. What happens next? Does the price of gas stay flat at $8/gallon? No, it continues to skyrocket because worldwide oil production continues to decline. What vehicle will the hypothetical consumer switch to? You see, it's relatively easy to double fuel economy from 25 mpg to 50 mpg, but the next doubling from 50 mpg to 100 mpg is very difficult and expensive with standard passenger vehicles.

After a certain point, the marginal cost of efficiency improvements becomes greater than the marginal value of fuel saved, even at extremely high oil prices. What is that point? Is a rough estimate possible?

2) Your example only addresses the cost of vehicle fuel, but suburbia is a vast, interconnected system overwhelmingly dependent on cheap oil products at all levels. Many localities already are finding they cannot afford to maintain the extensive networks of roads and infrastructure that are necessary for suburbs to function.

Gasoline use for cars and light trucks is about 43% of total oil consumption (about 9 million barrels/day, out of roughly 21 million barrels/day). Most of the rest is consumed by heavy trucks and industrial processes. Many big box suburban retailing operations are organized upon long distance shipping and just-in-time, warehouse-on-wheels logistics that depend on cheap fuel.

3) Suburban houses are bigger and use more construction materials per person, and those materials require major energy inputs, particularly bricks, windows, drywalls and structural concrete.

4) I don't think all suburbs will be abandoned. Many people like the lifestyle and will do what's needed to make households and transportation efficient enough to survive peak oil. To get there will take a lot of work and retrofitting, but it is well within our means technologically. However, getting there is not about technology. It is about policy, leadership, initiative, foresight, and vision. Kunstler argues that the suburbs will crash because he sees no evidence that we are getting on with the job on the scale and with the speed that is necessary. I hope he turns out to be wrong, but he could just as well be right.

5) The name is spelled "Kunstler."

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The evidence for roadway reallocation

the vehicles will just take a different road, often longer and/more more congested. That's pretty factual.

That's not necessarily the case. What's more, a reduction in traffic capacity will often cause a reduction in traffic. The effect has been studied and documented in hundreds of places around the world. For instance, Evidence on the Effects of Road Capacity Reduction on Traffic Levels states,

Such measures raise public relations, political and practical considerations, in which a key issue is the technical feasibility of measures to reduce capacity. Feasibility is sometimes calculated on the assumption that all traffic displaced from one street will simply divert to another. Since those other streets may also be suffering from congestion, calculations which use this assumption, whether carried out manually or via a computerised traffic model, have sometimes produced forecasts of such unacceptable congestion that they have been caricatured as `traffic chaos'. On occasion, concern that this `traffic chaos' will happen has been so strong that it has led to measures being rejected, or implemented in a reduced form.

... The balance of evidence is that measures which reduce or reallocate road capacity, when well-designed and favoured by strong reasons of policy, need not automatically be rejected for fear that they will inevitably cause unacceptable congestion. The effects of particular schemes will be reinforced or undermined by network conditions, and by the sticks and carrots of other policies, in a time-scale which is continually determined by wider choices about home, work and social activities.

A lot depends on the specific conditions, and the general rule of thumb is that people will chose the travel mode that is most convenient and attractive. In many cases that means walking, biking, and transit.

There are other factors to consider in addition to emissions and congestion. These might include safety, accessibility, other environmental impacts, and social and economic impacts. When all the costs and benefits are added up, non-automobile modes often have superior performance.

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Physically separated bike lanes

For high-volume streets, one of the best solutions is physically separated bike lanes. This StreetFilms short explains the idea. When it's safe for small children and elderly folks to ride in a bike lane, you know it's properly designed. If not, it's a failure. The New York DOT is proposing a physically separated bike lane on a section of Ninth Avenue in Lower Manhattan, the first ever in NYC.

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steps to walkability

When I heard Leinberger speak earlier this year, he used the term "walkable urbanity." I thought that was a good way of combining new urbanism with the creative class focus popularized by Richard Florida. Here's a video of Leinberger talking about walkable urbanity to the Downtown Sacramento Partnership on Jan 11, 2007.

the rebuild in NYC to make lower Manhattan look like the rest of the city is therefore probably a manifestation of longer-term trends in the urban planning

It would be nice if that were true, but I don't think it's time for urban advocates to be declaring victory and resting on their laurels. The rebuilt WTC won't be any better than the Avenue of the Americas in terms of walkability; the blank glassy facades, superblocks and windswept plazas of the original WTC will live on in the new plan. The base of the Freedom Tower in particular will be as deadening to street life as any suburban self-storage warehouse.

And over in Brooklyn, local activists are battling the megastructures and car-oriented plans for Atlantic Yards.

Some of the credit for restoring vitality and street life to Lower Manhattan should go to NYC Department of City Planning Chairman Amanda Burden, who has steadfastly maintained the importance of streets as places where civic life flourishes:

I firmly believe in the principles articulated by Holly Whyte that the street is the barometer of the health of city life, and that every new development must connect with the street to ensure its vitality.

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Can Do or Hair Do?

Well, shoot, everybody wants to fix the problem at lowest cost. The question is, are you actually going to fix the problem, or are you going to make a lot of overhyped, ineffectual gestures designed mainly for corporate PR and political spin?

After all, it's relatively easy to measure whether or not we are fixing the problem. We already have a pretty solid idea of how much GHG we emit. If and when sequestration technologies get commercialized, those CO2 flows should be verifiable.

Going to a decarbonized economy won't fix the problem. It will only stop making the problem worse. Fixing the problem means reducing atmospheric CO2 -- down to levels where natural processes can restore balance.

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London's experience

It makes sense only if you are contrasting the circumstances of suburban driving to those of urban, stop-and-go driving.  Naturally the suburban drivers have greater distances to travel.  That is the way the suburbs are designed.

You explain the effect well. Here's another take on the issue by Kenworthy and Newman. And these maps illustrate what CO2 emissions look like on the city-wide scale: low in the center, high in the suburbs.

The case of congestion charging in London provides some interesting air quality results. Between 2002 and 2003, reductions in traffic volume caused an 8% reduction in CO2 emitted. Reduced traffic jams and idling, and therefore increased speeds, reduced NOx by 8%, PM10 by 7%, and CO2 by 7%.

(BTW, London is proposing additional charges for CO2 emissions. The cleanest vehicles would get free entry into the charging zone, and high-CO2 vehicles would pay a £25 fee.)

It's important to realize that while speeds have increased in London, the increases have been very small. The main effect has been to reduce gridlock and idling, not to allow freeway speeds. The average speed was 8.6 mph in 2002; that increased to 9.3 mph in 2006. Without congestion charging, the estimated average speed would be 7.1 mph.

London already had a low level of traffic crashes, but the congestion charge has resulted in 40 to 70 fewer personal injuries per year from traffic crashes.

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Lights, Highlander, Action

Let's see... a Highlander Hybrid gets about 30 mpg, the equivalent of 1.2 KWh per mile. So, driving a Highlander one mile uses the same energy as burning twenty 60-watt light bulbs for an hour. Or eighty-seven 14-watt compact fluorescents for an hour.

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year of records

Meanwhile, January and April 2007 were the warmest since records began in 1880. The North Pole is disappearing before our eyes in real time. India had double the normal number of monsoon storms, causing the worst flood in decades that has killed hundreds and displaced millions. Record-breaking temperatures in southern Europe killed hundreds, and record heat and rainfall in the UK wreaked havoc.

This article summed it up: Across Globe, Extremes of Heat and Rain

The year still has almost five months to go, but it has already experienced a range of weather extremes that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization said yesterday is well outside the historical norm and is a precursor of much greater weather variability as global warming transforms the planet. ...

"What I saw just brought home exactly what the IPCC and this report are saying -- that we will be having more extreme weather," Clapp said. "What's frightening to me is that it's all happening more quickly than the earlier models predicted, which tells us that the effects of the buildup of greenhouse gases is probably more damaging than we've thought."

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Post by Sam

See also this post by Samuel Fromartz that links to a description of the book release party. They had a taste test of organic twinkies. Bet you didn't know Twinkies (the authentic ones) have crude oil as an ingredient.

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promises

The General Compression homepage has a nifty animation that explains how their system works. This page explains the benefits of compressed air energy storage, and this white paper explains how the system is competitive with other sources of energy. They claim:

Dispatchable Wind is competitive with all generation sources in most wind sites of Class 4 and above. Our technology will allow us to penetrate electric grids at rates approaching 50%.

and that

the same footprint that generates a 100 MW wind farm with conventional technology is a 400 MW wind farm with General Compression technology.

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Let's review

So, let's review how the Department of Energy proposes to allocate its requested $9 billion in loan guarantees:

Within DOE's FY'08 budget request to guarantee up to $9 billion in loans, DOE has proposed to guarantee $4 billion in loans for central power generation facilities such as nuclear facilities or carbon sequestration optimized coal power plants; $4 billion in loans for projects that promote biofuels and clean transportation fuels; and $1 billion in loans for projects using new technologies for electric transmission facilities or renewable power generation systems.

As I figure it, that's 44% for nuclear and coal; 44% for ethanol, NGL and CTL; and some portion (probably an exceedingly small portion) of 12% for renewables.

Sounds about par for the course. Billions for nukes and fossil fuels, crumbs for renewables.

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sustainable neighborhoods are profitable

A new study from the Prince's Foundation finds that sustainable neighborhoods are profitable for homeowners and developers alike:

Hank Dittmar, Chief Executive of The Prince's Foundation comments: "These findings are good news for house-buyers who can be confident that buying a home in a sustainable neighbourhood will not only give them a better quality of life but their home will be a better investment. It's also good news for the developer who can be confident that sustainable design won't comprise his ability to build and sell his houses and he is likely to make  ore from a development in the long term." ...

One of the aims of the report was to find out why so few sustainable communities are being built when they are popular with homebuyers and favoured by government It concludes that developers and landowners suspect that sustainable communities are more costly to plan and develop, and secondly, planning authorities are not well enough informed about the benefits to incorporate them more robustly in their guidelines.

Full report: Valuing Sustainable Urbanism and the Prince's Foundation press release.

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by a furlong

I agree with Bart about the air of nostalgia. When Solar Hydrogen: Moving Beyond Fossil Fuels came out in 1989, it was pretty exciting stuff. We were going to run the U.S. vehicle fleet off of a square of solar collectors the size of a few counties in New Mexico. What's not to like?

Even as late as the turn of the century, you could still argue there was a horse race between battery powered vehicles and fuel cell powered vehicles. The technology was advancing, new discoveries and processes developed, new government R&D programs were announced.

Today batteries are far ahead in the race. So far, hydrogen and fuel cells have proved to be too expensive, too fragile, and too flammable for widespread commercialization. Storage and distribution remain thorny problems.

Maybe one day hydrogen will catch up and exceed batteries. Research should continue. Subsidies and price supports, however, are a poor idea. The hydrogen vs. battery horse race illustrates the why government shouldn't try to pick market winners speculatively.

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History question

Here's a question that gets at the history angle. How has government interest and action on environmental/energy issues changed over the past 25 years? Meaning all levels of government -- local, state, federal, and other nations.

Presently in the U.S. we have federal government leadership that's mostly dedicated to servicing the whims of entrenched, polluting corporations. How does renewable, sustainable, techno-optimism thrive -- or even just operate -- under such conditions?

If [Lovins] could pick any issue OTHER THAN global warming as the most urgent/significant environmental issue, what would he choose?

That's an interesting question in itself. I'm inclined to say deforestation and loss of natural habitat. Or perhaps toxic industrial emissions and waste. But then again, there's a little-mentioned threat to human life and health that is rapidly becoming a global epidemic: traffic crashes.

By 2020, the number of human years lost from road-crash death and disability will be greater than years lost from any of the communicable or infectious diseases. Losses from road crashes will be greater than all war-related injuries and casualties.

Even if all cars were Hypercars, crashes would still be a growing threat. Along with all the other non-energy related costs and environmental impacts of sprawl.

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green jobs

Put those out-of-work miners back to work installing and maintaining large-scale wind turbines and solar thermal collectors. May require some relocation, but the work's a whole lot safer and cleaner, and there's more opportunity for upward advancement too.

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tepid

The dollars are in fact inflation adjusted. Here's another chart, and another, and another. They all show the same thing: The current spike is much higher than the 1973 spike, and it's been underway for five years now.

During the 1973 spike, the government tried to keep prices down with mandated rationing and windfall profits taxes. If people switched to more efficient cars because of government-caused lines, that seems to be another argument against the idea that demand for increased car efficiency was purely a free market societal response.

Today we have high prices instead of the government-mandated even/odd rationing we had in 1973. Here's an article that agrees with my position that the response has been "tepid" compared to the 1970s.

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Re: CAFE and the 80's

Evidence that CAFE was a primary driver of fuel efficiency increases: Real gas prices are much higher today than during the 1973 oil shock, and slightly higher than the 1979-81 oil shock. Yet fuel efficiency has been flat since the late 1980s, when CAFE standards stopped increasing.

Our government -- the GAO, the military, the Department of Energy -- is telling us that the supply of cheap oil is more precarious than ever before, facing hard long-term limits that generally weren't recognized in the 1970s. Yet there is no huge societal shift underway. Just some relatively minor and marginal changes in buying trends.

Also, the rapid shift to Japanese cars was the result of superior price and reliability as much as efficiency. American cars of the late 1970s and early 80s had a reputation as crap, often well deserved. David Halberstam's The Reckoning tells the whole sorry tale.

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expect pushback

What's with all this whining about CAFE's supposed lack of effectiveness? CAFE standards were successful in bringing about a huge boost in the fuel economy of the U.S. auto fleet between 1975 and 1985.

As this bill moves through conference committee and then to the president's desk, we can expect to see auto industry pushback redoubled. There'll be plenty of disinformation about how high fuel efficiency causes more traffic deaths. That one's easy to refute. Just look at the fleet efficiency of Europe or the Asian tigers -- much higher than the U.S. Then look at the per mile traffic fatality rates in those countries -- far lower than the U.S.

Turns out that driver education, enforcement, and advanced roadway engineering standards are much more effective at saving lives than relying on the armor of big, hulking trucks.

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This Land

Anthony Flint wrote a chapter in his book This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America that summarized this debate. In an exchange with David Goldberg (of the Smart Growth Alliance), Flint had this to say:

Q. I recently heard you spar with writer Robert Brueggman, who argues that urban sprawl has always been with us and that only "elites" are concerned about it. What do you make of his contention?

A. I was sorry to see that he fell into the pattern of being the sort of drive-by intellectual that Joel Kotkin often is. He knows, for example, that there was no such thing as automobile-dependent sprawl before the automobile. I was disappointed because this role of devil's advocate just seems to put us in a debating society mode that is a little bit of a waste of time. It doesn't seem like these celebrators of sprawl are really interested in an honest debate. His technique primarily is to throw out a lot of red herrings. I think arguments like his are the last gasp defense of an out-moded system. It's easier and sexier to be an Ann Coulter type commentator on this topic.

Here is David Roberts' Grist interview with Flint. Here is Flint's home page, and his blog, "Developing Stories".

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WRI Flow Charts

As far as graphic design goes, I'm a lot more impressed with the GHG flow charts made by the World Resources Institute. They just have a whole lot more useful information, and they look better too.

World GHG Emissions Flow Chart

US GHG Emissions Flow Chart

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missed the mark

The Council on Foreign Relations paper is about the   U.S. situation. Its conclusions are about U.S. potential. If NEI's editorial refers to worldwide construction, then they are comparing apples to oranges and not responding in a substantive manner.

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good work

The Council on Foreign Relations examined the potential for nuclear power to mitigate global warming and energy insecurity. Even if we built two reactors per month for the next forty years, it would only contribute a modest amount to CO2 reduction. That level of construction is practically impossible -- we don't have the necessary raw materials, labor or safety apparatus.

The Center for American Progress report is excellent. Unlike many similar think tank products, it gets deep into financing issues, which are critical.

As the report points out, underground carbon sequestration is already happening. According to expert engineering studies, a massive expansion probably workable. Natural gas has been stored underground for millions of years.

The big stumbling blocks are 1) Ensuring the reliability and market acceptance of gasifying technologies and 2) Financial incentives for sequestration (caps, taxes, performance standards, etc.). The report has some interesting thoughts on why a carbon tax alone might not be the best solution.

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money where the mouth is

In regards to financial investments, Mr. Crichton apparently has zero understanding of the global insurance industry. It's only the second-biggest industry in the world.

It's also the industry that's in the business of understanding future trends, and it's starting to take strong action on climate change.

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check the fine print

Prof. Kibert wrote:

Note that a school can be LEED certified even with zero energy savings depending on the project team's strategy for getting points.

This is an important point for all jurisdictions to consider. If the goal is energy efficiency first and foremost, then LEED certification may or may not deliver what you are seeking.

This highlights an important difference between LEED and other green building initiatives such as Architecture 2030. Architecture 2030 calls for a 50% reduction of fossil fuel use in buildings right now, and a carbon-neutral building standard by 2030.

Similarly, the Passivhaus standard gives specific performance targets: the total energy demand for space heating and cooling is less than 15 kWh/m2/yr treated floor area; the total primary energy use for all appliances, domestic hot water and space heating and cooling is less than 120 kWh/m2/yr.

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Hawken's video

The video on the Blessed Unrest website is good. That scrolling list is a powerful, memorable image.

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coughin'

Shouldn't be hard to find real coal miners for an ad like that. Real coal miners know better than anyone else what coal does to the air, to the rivers and streams, to the land, and to their own bodies and lungs.

Of course, they'd have to be coal miners who'd just quit their jobs. No one else would be free to speak.

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details

Yes, the most interesting aspect of the Dongtan plan is its synergistic infrastructural systems. Real technical and design details are curiously lacking from online sources, however. Its unusual for a project to receive this much publicity with so little supporting information, and I look forward to seeing more details as they can be made available.

The best quality renderings I've been able to find are in this New City Skyline article. The renderings focus on expansive water views and recreational walkways. There's little evidence of the pedestrian oriented frontages or human scale storefronts that experience shows are necessary to create truly walkable urban spaces.

In terms of design, the renderings are remarkably similar to Reston, VA and other "New Towns" of the 1960s, with the addition of windmills. But windmills packed that closely together will interfere with each other, so that's not going to happen the way Arup is picturing it.

It's also interesting how their study of density led them to conclude that compact, 4-8 story development, equivalent to downtown Stockholm, was the best environmental solution. I've read similar studies and made some of my own that find historic urban patterns outperform the "tower in the park" model or the "edge city" model in most cases.

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hisss

Wow, I have one of those little greenhouse bombs on my shelf. Even though I use it so infrequently that it's lasted 6 years so far, now I want to get rid of it. But I guess I gotta hang onto it until someone figures out how to neutralize HFC-134a (doesn't seem too likely, does it?).

Here's another Cool Tools recommendation: Vacuum Micro Attachment Kit.

I can't believe kids are huffing this stuff and dropping dead and it hasn't been banned yet. According to Wikipedia, at high concentrations it also causes testicular tumors.

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questions that should be asked

Two essential questions are:

1. Are any of these buildings carbon-neutral on an annual basis? In other words, do they produce as much energy as they consume each year (not counting purchased offsets).

2. Are any of these buildings carbon-neutral when embodied energy is included in the calculation? In other words, will the building produce enough energy over its lifetime to offset the greenhouse gases resulting from the manufacture and assembly of its materials and components?

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two scoops

Corruption sundae -- is that a Ben and Jerry's flavor? It's a rocky road to raisin' spew-monies.

http://pedshed.net

more info

Eric Raymond's Solar Flight site has photos and background information. The best source is this article from Aerospace Testing International: Page One, Page Two.

http://pedshed.net

metro areas

Keep in mind how metro areas are defined in the US. They are not urbanized areas -- urbanized areas are something else entirely.

Metropolitan areas are made of counties. They are the counties that contain cities and large towns, and the adjacent counties that are within commuting distance. So metro areas can include a great deal of rural land. See for instance how much of North Carolina is classified as metro areas.

In my estimation, the majority of France would qualify as a metro area, if the US definition was applied. Here's a map from 1972 that illustrates the population distribution.

Relating this to the thread topic, eighty percent of Americans live in metro areas that are comparable to nations like France and Spain in terms of density and geographic feasibility for train service.

http://pedshed.net

park slope

Can't believe I didn't mention Park Slope, one of my favorite neighborhoods anywhere. Hey, lookit that, the Wikipedia article says Park Slope of one of America's top ten "eco-neighborhoods."

There's been lots of action lately about proposed street improvements in Park Slope. Streetsblog has been covering the story.

http://pedshed.net

correction

Let me try again with that table...

Total energy consumption in France, 2000:

Fuel            Percent
Oil               38
Natural Gas       14
Coal               5
Nuclear           31
Hydro              6
Others             5
Total            100

Figures do not add up 100 because of rounding.
Source: Bilan énergétique provisoire de la France en 2000, p. 20

http://pedshed.net

news sources

Environmental Health News has customizable feeds.

The Smart Growth Network provides news in several formats.

The Energy Blog keeps track of alt energy press releases and developments.

Big Gav at Peak Energy is indefatigable. An Australian viewpoint.On Where to find green news posted 2 years, 8 months ago 9 Responses

zillions of vaporware

Yes, it's true that zillions are floated and few stand up to scrutiny. That creates real problems for the few that make technical, financial and political sense. The few that make sense get lumped in with the zillions that are pie in the sky.

Most people are skeptical than any renewable energy source can  provide more than a tiny fraction of the nation's power reliably and at a reasonable price. It would help a lot to have a neutral broker of energy information that was comprehensive and authoritative. Too bad the US government has wasted so much of its credibility.On Seems like a dead end posted 2 years, 8 months ago 6 Responses

costs of solar thermal

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory publication Assessment of Parabolic Trough and Power Tower Solar Technology Cost and Performance Forecasts found the cost of solar thermal could drop over the next few decades to well within the range of coal or nuclear.

The figure and table below highlight these results, with initial electricity costs in the range of 10 to 12.6 ¢/kWh and eventually achieving costs in the range of 3.5 to 6.2 ¢/kWh.

The cost reductions will come from volume production, plant scale-up, and technology advances (such as the Schott receiver, which is already in mass production).

Natural gas assist may or may not be employed with solar thermal. It is not required and solar thermal plants can function well with 100% solar input. On Still posted 2 years, 8 months ago 8 Responses

defcon 1

Global warming will fry and evaporate all of our precious bodily fluids.On 'Supporting global warming initiatives is tantamount to endorsing communism and the one world order' posted 2 years, 8 months ago 27 Responses

feeling the Urge2

I feel the Urge2 post this again. It's yet another twist on the Gore residence story:

Zoning rules in Al Gore's upscale Tennessee neighborhood have prevented the former vice president and environmental activist from installing solar panels on his roof.

Gore bought his multimillion dollar home in 2002 in Belle Meade, an exclusive city encircled by metropolitan Nashville, and he has embarked on an ambitious renovation. But his contractors ran into a legal barrier last summer when they sought to apply for a permit to install solar panels on the roof.

... Terry Franklin, Belle Meade's building officer, said the town only allows power generating equipment to be placed on the ground level. "Solar panels are generators," Franklin said.

"We told them they couldn't do it," he said. "They wanted to try anyway, but we convinced them it was something the board wouldn't allow."

New rules on April 1 will allow homeowners to install solar panels on their roofs. ... The builders at Gore's home plan to make the application for solar panels once the new ordinance goes into effect.

lighting

Here's a more detailed source that says lighting uses 22% of US electricity:

National Lighting Inventory and Energy Consumption Estimate

There's no question that it's significant. In terms of total US energy consumption (not just electricity), lighting uses about 8 percent of the total.On All ten of 'em posted 2 years, 8 months ago 13 Responses

gasping

Klaus also said other government leaders would speak out, but "political correctness strangles their voice."

In other words, politicians who fail to protect the environment don't get re-elected.On Liveblogging is the new black posted 2 years, 8 months ago 27 Responses

Re: The Waxman hearing ...

And lo, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth and quibbling about legalisms.

I hope the committee gets to Hansen's basic point, which is that government scientists should be able to report scientific facts to the American people in government publications, regardless of administration policy positions. Reform is needed, or else we'll have more and more national policy based on pseudoscience.

Thanks for the liveblogging.On Live-blogged! posted 2 years, 8 months ago 4 Responses

smile

I kept expecting the host (Shepard Smith) to say, "Smile! You're on Candid Camera!" "April Fools!" or something along those lines.

Here's a brief blog post about the segment.On Yeah, you heard me posted 2 years, 8 months ago 12 Responses

dishonest

Real Climate has also put together a post that debunks the NYT article on several additional points: Broad Irony. One, the article's discussion of hurricanes is downright false and dishonest. Two, the critics who are given such prominent space in the article have numerous proven and admitted errors and inaccuracies in their own work, none of which are mentioned.

The worst effect of articles like this is that they degrade the legitimacy and credibility of other NYT reporters who work hard to cover the issues accurately and with honesty.On The gray lady gets it woefully, laughably wrong posted 2 years, 8 months ago 53 Responses

design matters

Urban design has a significant impact on urban crime. To put it bluntly, burglars go where the best opportunities are, and those are isolated, partly- or totally-hidden homes on long, curving cul de sacs with low or zero pedestrian activity.

Conversely, very short cul de sacs and well-connected streets, with many dwellings and good visibility of doors and windows, are the safest. In terms of the number of dwellings on a street, there is safety in greater numbers. For a detailed review of this topic, see Connectivity Part 5: Neighborhood Crime.On From a former homeowner posted 2 years, 8 months ago 8 Responses

evidence

Sure looks that way from the available evidence.

No, not at all. The available evidence from the US energy Information Administration indicates that conventional oil production reached a maximum in May 2005 at 74.15 mbpd. Production of total fossil fuel liquids (including natural gas liquids, ethanol, shale, etc.) reached a maximum in July 2006 at 85.47 mbpd. All of the "supergiant" oil fields are in decline.

The million dollar question is, can drillers produce enough from smaller fields to make up for that? Can they squeeze enough out of aging oil fields to make up for that? And can they do that at the same time that global demand for oil is shooting up?

No one knows for sure, but there are compelling arguments that the answer to those question is "no." Ignore at your own peril.

If we look two or three or four decades into the future, we know that hydrocarbons alone will not meet the needs of a growing world economy. Even with all the technical expertise the world could offer and all the political will it could muster, eventually, we will run out of oil. And, even before then, the price of a dwindling supply will be prohibitive. At present, our world is overly focused on, and overly dependent upon, one source of energy. And that path is unsustainable.

... We cannot meet future demand with hydrocarbons alone. Period.

Remarks by U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, Nov. 13, 2006

raking it in

Of course he's proud; he's taken more than a million dollars in contributions from the oil, gas and utilities industries. The more outrageous he behaves, the more they pay him.On I'm sure this will get old someday posted 2 years, 9 months ago 1 Response

venture swap

I don't think Carver is planning a hybrid version. Their FAQ says, "While we definitely recognise the ecological benefits of using alternative power, for the time being there are no concrete plans to develop an electric or hybrid version."

You're probably thinking of the Venture One which will be available in hybrid and full-electric versions and which will use the A123Systems battery packs. Check out this video -- even more fun than the Carver videos.

And the Venture One has sweeter, more streamlined styling too.

Hoo boy, the doomers and the Puritans are going to slam me now.On Electric motocycles may be bridge to electric cars posted 2 years, 9 months ago 18 Responses

green star

David, that's a good point about tit-for-tat controversy. By all means, avoid that. And for heaven's sake, don't give any legitimacy to the Tennessee Center, the Drudges, or any of the rest of the spin machine.

But Gore's spokesperson has already responded by mentioning green electricity, carbon footprints, compact fluorescents, solar panels and other measures the Gore household is undertaking. And An Inconvenient Truth ends with a number of similar recommendations.

All I'm suggesting is to use the momentum in a positive way. One idea might be to find a green Bob Vila-type and do a walkthrough video of the Gore residence, talking about What is green electricity? What is a carbon footprint? How are solar panels retrofitted into a Southern mansion?

Sure that's all been done before, but not by Gore. The celebrity interest factor is at work now.On Same as it ever was posted 2 years, 9 months ago 37 Responses

shuffle up

Here's Hoofnagle's essay in HTML format: The Denialists' Deck of Cards.

Pretty handy list, and dead-on accurate, I'd say. I wonder if there isn't some kind of cheat sheet used by lobbyists and think tank shills, because they seem to be reading off the same page no matter what industry they're in.

I'm surprised Hoofnagle says most of these cards are played behind closed doors. I see them in newspaper editorials and think tank position papers all the time. New ones appear weekly, repeating the same old arguments against anything they perceive as cutting into their bottom line.

The deniers aren't necessarily against regulation, however. They're all for regulation when it serves their interests. They'll deploy the full deck of denialist cards to preserve regulations that are in their favor.On An illustrated taxonomy posted 2 years, 9 months ago 2 Responses

Viagra?

I said: A coordinated strategy of climate change mitigation and adaptation, including the health care sector, to me seems a better general goal for environmentalists than a strict tactic of immediate triage.

What do baldness cures and Viagra have to do with that?

You said: It will do next to nothing to improve drinking water for the poorest of the poor

An improved well is useless if it runs dry during a "1,000 year drought" caused by land mismanagement and regional/global climate change.

My point is that in many cases it's counterproductive to address developing-nation diseases in isolation, without factoring in the related environmental, political and economic aspects. I guess we disagree about how much land use, pollution and climate change affect human well-being, and how important it is to begin action right now.On How do you choose yours? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 54 Responses

flowing with the go

We are social animals and we're all part of a herd sometimes. So I don't think there is any need to "short circuit" any wiring, even if that were possible. There are all sorts of ways social institutions motivate people to use longer discount rates than a few months or years. Institutions like school, church, foundations, pension funds, and even some aspects of government like long range and strategic planning are some examples.

While a longer discount rate thinking is critical to insuring a healthy environment, strategies to address short discount rate thinking are also required. In other words, what can solving global warming do for me right now? There are a lot of responses to that too. It can clean up your air and water and reduce toxins in your personal environment; it can reduce the need for petro-war that perhaps your friends and relatives are involved in; it can provide enormous business opportunities. If you're anxious about the future of the environment and potential impacts for your family and community, working on fixing the problem can give you some serenity today.  

Thought, debate, and technological advances are definitely needed to develop policies to adopt and actions to take. But for swarm-type behavior at least, it comes down to how many people are pulling the cart in a particular direction (according to sociobiologists). Most people will not be strongly involved, so about 5 percent set the direction just by making the personal choice to do so. I wonder how much the swarm behavior models apply to large scale, long term social/political movements like climate change policy.On Fun with evolutionary psychology posted 2 years, 9 months ago 11 Responses

mutterings from the crypt

Actually, that Flash feature was a supplement for an article in the July, 2001 issue of National Geographic. It's still a pretty good one, in spite of the cars that significantly outnumber pedestrians.

An interesting thing is that it intuitively presents the urban-to-rural transect, which has become the basis for some new urban planning and development. The most extensive example of transect-based planning is the Miami 21 initiative to completely overhaul that city's zoning codes.On Cool feature in Nat'l Geo posted 2 years, 9 months ago 2 Responses

Inherit the Wind

This is extremely cool too:

Inherit the Wind

The Gulf Coast is littered with the carcasses of unused oil equipment. Now those structures are being repurposed to build the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

... Schellstede called Schoeffler, and they drew up a plan to bring offshore wind power to the oil patch. The key was to take advantage of existing oil-industry infrastructure. To save the expense of designing and building specialized offshore wind equipment, they would mount conventional windmills on decommissioned oil platforms. Hurricanes could be a problem, so they decided to outfit their windmills with hydraulic lifts scavenged from oil-industry machinery; the system would lower the turbines in the event of a squall.

WEST is convinced there is potential for 1,000 turbines to be installed on abandoned oil rigs in the Gulf, which would generate about 3,000 megawatts of energy. By comparison, the eleven TXU coal plants combined are projected to generate 9,000 megawatts of electricity.On It's seductive -- and wrong posted 2 years, 9 months ago 54 Responses

in mississippi

Visit the Mississippi Renewal website for a behind the scenes look at a Katrina Cottage being assembled in the factory. And here's another article with photos of a Katrina Cottage undergoing final finishing construction touches.On Tiny houses growing in popularity posted 2 years, 9 months ago 30 Responses

once again

The citation for that first study got messed up. Here it is again:

Public Transportation and Petroleum Savings in the U.S.: Reducing Dependence on OilOn More fun with analogies! posted 2 years, 9 months ago 32 Responses

TrafficSTATS

The TrafficSTATS application provides some interesting information. Between 1999-2004 there were 254,000 traffic fatalities. I notice that 135,000, or 53 percent, occurred during the day between 8 am and 8 pm. Driving to work or shopping accounts for about one-third of all trips in private vehicles. (Most other trips are for family personal, social recreational, and entertainment reasons.) Therefore, the assertion that "People are rarely injured or killed when driving to work or to shopping centers" is most likely incorrect.On Is it greener after all? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 76 Responses

go badgers

Good for Wisconsin. Wisconsin appears to have the second-highest gas tax in the U.S.; in 2002 its tax of 28.1 cents was second only to Rhode Island. Now it's 30.9 cents. Wisconsin is also one of the states with the highest percentage of highway costs funded by gas taxes -- eighth in the nation as of 2001.

TOTAL... 76% covered by direct users of the transportation system via gas tax. Not 35%.

I have a slightly different reading of the budget numbers... I see 1033 million in state gas tax revenues and 756 million in federal gas tax revenues. The total state transportation budget is 2719 million, so gas taxes contribute 66% to the total.*

That is very good -- almost twice the national rate. The U.S. would be much better off if it was run as well as Wisconsin.

State lawmakers made the decision to rely on gas taxes and registration fees intentionally to ensure that users of the transportation system pay for it.

-- How does Wisconsin fund transportation?

* Note that vehicle registration fees aren't counted in that calculation, because I pay the same vehicle registration fee whether I drive 1 mile per year or 100,000 miles per year.On Is it greener after all? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 76 Responses

the answer is "yes"

By your logic, if we removed all personal vehicles from the roads, we would need only 1% of the current funding to maintain them. For that to be the case, the roads could be only 1% current width and 1% current length!

That's exactly the point. If roads only had to accommodate transit, emergency and service vehicles, all roads could have a 20 foot wide travel way. The rest could be sidewalks and planted landscaping. It could be quite pleasant. Many historic European and Mediterranean towns are built that way. Somehow they manage to accommodate fire trucks (hint: the trucks are smaller and more maneuverable than American-style big rigs). J.H. Crawford's proposal for a car-free city is designed that way.

I'm not saying cars should be banned everywhere, but why not allow some experimentation here and there?

there is a minimum structure required and everyone has to share the burden

Again, you've hit the nail on the head. Just what is that minimum structure? If I want to build a subdivision 30 miles outside of the city in the middle of some farms, is it everyone else's responsibility to pay for the roads, sewer & water service, schools, etc. that my customers are going to need? And then is it everyone else's responsibility to cope with the additional traffic, pollution, accidents, etc. that come from developing in such an far-flung location?

Under our current system, the answer is "yes."

Just how much does everyone have to share? Are some people "sharing" more than others? Under our current system, the answer is "yes."On Is it greener after all? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 76 Responses

another example

Here's another example. Suppose I live in a house and I pay property taxes. I shop and pay sales taxes. I get a salary and pay income taxes. All of those taxes contribute to paying for roads.

Suppose also that I have a neighbor. My neighbor has an identical house, identical job and identical non-gasoline purchases. So my neighbor has identical property, sales and income tax payments as I do.

Now suppose I drive 2,000 miles per year and my neighbor drives 20,000 miles per year. We are paying the same property, sales and income taxes, but my neighbor is getting more of the benefit of road use, and incurring more of the cost of maintenance, congestion, pollution, etc. Why is that fair? Why shouldn't my neighbor pay the full cost of what he uses?

What if I don't even drink milk? Why should I support milk producers with a subsidy for their shipping costs? Why shouldn't milk consumers pay those costs?

Also, please note that the 35% figure that gas taxes cover is only for state, local and federal highways. Local streets are almost completely paid for by local taxes. So if I drive mainly on local streets, I pay for that through my local taxes. At the same time, I still have to pay gas taxes that go to support highways, even if I don't use highways directly. On Is it greener after all? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 76 Responses

no rats

"I'd have to look up the exact reference, but there have been studies with rats that show high population densities make them more agressive and likely to attack each other."

Except that humans aren't rats, and the living conditions in the rat experiments in no way resemble U.S. cities.

Since suburban dwellers drive more, their risk of death or injury in traffic accidents is higher than in cities. Even when you throw in the risk of homicide committed by strangers, the suburbs are generally still more dangerous than central cities.On Is it greener after all? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 76 Responses

questions

Good rebuttal, Charles. I appreciate your advocacy for carbon taxes and the Carbon Tax Center website has made a good beginning on presenting the arguments.

I'd like to find an in-depth report on the U.S. experience with cap-and-trade for NOx and SO2 emissions. What were the political factors that led to its adoption, and are there any parallels with CO2 today? How effective has it really been, and would different approaches have worked better?

What is the potential for various nations' carbon tax programs to be harmonized across national borders? Would international carbon tax cooperation be easier or harder than trading permits?

Part of the intention of a carbon tax is direct reduction of demand through price signals. The argument against that is that fossil fuel demand is relatively inelastic, and effective CO2 reduction will require per-ton pricing so high that many industries would be crippled. Yet, a more important effect of a carbon tax may be the incentivizing of alternative technologies, practices and research. Such alternatives may be incentivized at price-per-ton levels that are much lower than what's required for direct demand destruction. Are there any reports that summarize alternative energy investment balancing points and tradeoffs with respect to carbon taxes?

Your point about trajectory of rising energy prices and investment is well taken, but it seems that pricing is in the hands of futures traders. How much can a carbon tax really smooth out volatility and ensure a predictable rise?On Why carbon taxes trump cap-and-trade posted 2 years, 9 months ago 18 Responses

evidence w/spin

And just to put a spin on the density argument, some studies are finding that density may be a proxy for the real factors that support efficiency:

Compact geographical pattern of infrastructure and services
Proximity to mixed use
Safe, pleasant & plentiful walking routes
Development patterns that can grow up, not outOn Is it greener after all? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 76 Responses

chips, cola, CO2

Speaking of TV and brain function, this research by the UCLA Brain Mapping Center has some interesting results about which Super Bowl ads light up people's brains. I'm not sure what relevance this might have to environmental issues, especially long term, complex ones like climate change. Still, the results seem important to how public opinion is formed in the U.S.

Here's more info from a private research firm that assisted with the study. They say,

We track the ads on a host of dimensions by looking for activity in key parts of the brain areas that are known to be involved in wanting, choosing, sexual arousal, fear, indecision and reward. ...

Broadly, we have learned that 30% to 50% of the brand images, advertising and marketing material that is shown to respondents does not even fundamentally engage the human mind. In short, consumers filter out much of what they only see and hear.  This filtering is either passive - they just don't engage; or active - they smell a rat and forcefully don't engage. Our research has shown the importance in understanding the emotions that create this filtering and how to address it.

phase change

I know this was previewed in the media, but I still think it's kind of a bombshell:

Current models suggest [Greenland] ice mass losses increase with temperature more rapidly than gains due to precipitation and that the surface mass balance becomes negative at a global average warming (relative to pre-industrial values) in excess of 1.9 to 4.6°C. If a negative surface mass balance were sustained for millennia, that would lead to virtually complete elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 m.

-- IPCC Summary p. 13

In other words, if the status quo continues for some (unspecified) number of centuries, the models are telling us we'll see the huge rises in sea level that Al Gore warned about. Say goodbye to Miami, Venice, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, etc. And this is supposed to be a conservative consensus document.

The Real Climate folks say this:

How good have previous IPCC reports been at projecting the future? Actually, over the last 16 years (since the first report in 1990), they've been remarkably good for CO2 changes, temperature changes but actually undepredicted sea level changes.

I never knew melting ice could be so chilling.On The definitive word posted 2 years, 10 months ago 5 Responses

blame godzilla!

So there was a leftist movement to deliberately exaggerate scientific findings, and The Day After Tomorrow was the culmination of this movement.

Kerry Emanuel should also be alerted that the producer/director of The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich, has been responsible for numerous hysterical screeds that deliberately flaunt scientific responsibility.

For example, Godzilla (1998) deliberately exaggerated the science on giant mutant reptiles and attempted to whip the populace into a frenzy of anti-reptile hatred with its irresponsible portrayal of widespread urban devastation.

And Independence Day (1996) deliberately exaggerated the science on large-scale alien invasion. Numerous commentators have pointed out that the Mac OS is incompatible with the alien mothership OS, and that system hacking would in reality be far more difficult than it appears on screen. This exaggerated depiction encourages a dangerously overconfident attitude toward the threat of moon-sized mothership invasion.

Thus, not only must Mr. Emmerich accept a large measure of responsibility for today's most critical environmental problem, he must also accept responsibility for the current wave of anti-reptile hate crimes, as well as our dangerously underprepared military stance with respect to giant mothership alien invasion.On The myth of 'both sides do it' emerges yet again posted 2 years, 10 months ago 5 Responses

older comments

I would request not just recent comments, but a way to get a listing of older comments too. That way if I miss a day or two, I can check to see what discussions have been happening.

In terms of presenting new contributions, there are some limitations to the blog format. Each new story takes up a lot of space (relatively) and goes below the fold quickly.

By contrast, a presentation like Energy Bulletin can easily accommodate 12 new posts and keeps them visible for at least 3-4 days.On Too much blog to handle? posted 2 years, 10 months ago 39 Responses

cooties

Even more disturbing than McGaffigan's revelations are the responses from the DOE:

Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said the criticism from McGaffigan was "highly predictable."

Naturally, that explains why his statements are making the news and environmentalists are stunned.

McGaffigan "is tainted in our view," Stevens said.

Yes, he was irradiated by a green-o commie treehugger energy beam that transformed his years of experience into nothing more than a thought infection. He is officially Off The Reservation. The memo has been circulated; he is to be Shunned.

Apparently the DOE has no intention of learning from its mistakes.On You know any? posted 2 years, 10 months ago 11 Responses

happy dance

• 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 ... will include sources such as corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel, methanol, butanol, hydrogen, and alternative fuels -- Result: Massive increase in coal consumption, environmental degradation from mining, and CO2 emissions!

• Scientists, farmers, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders will continue to lead the world in developing and investing in cutting-edge technology, infrastructure, and farming methods -- Result: Negligible support for government R&D!

• Size-based CAFE standards -- Result: SUVs get off easy!

• Congress Should Not Legislate A Particular Numeric Fuel Economy Standard -- Result: Forget what we said about increasing CAFE standards 4 percent per year! Bait and switch rules!

• $2 Billion In Loans For Cellulosic Ethanol Plants -- Result: Vinod Khosla does the happy dance!

• Gulf Of Mexico Energy Security Act To Increase Domestic Oil And Gas Production By Allowing Access To Key Portions Of America's Outer Continental Shelf -- Result: More gasoline used. Increase, reduce, whatever. It's All Good!

• The President has set a target of cutting our greenhouse gas intensity by 18 percent through the year 2012 -- Result: Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase! Greenwashing rules!

• Lower Carbon, Clean Coal Technologies, Clean Air Interstate And Clean Air Mercury Rules, Clear Skies, New Source Review -- Result: More lip service, more pollution, worse environment!

RE: Killer B's

Erik:

An advanced, efficient woodstove used in a low-density, rural wooded area is probably not a problem. Extra fine particulates emitted by thousands of vehicles on heavily-traveled expressways running through residential areas is a big problem.

Particulates near heavily traveled routes are responsible for hundreds of deaths per year in every large city; particulates lead to greater chances of cardiac or pulmonary disease; excess particulates from vehicles make childhood asthma two and a half times more likely.

Here are some sources you can check out:

Clearing the Air: How epidemiology, engineering, and experiment finger fine particles as airborne killers

Ultrafine Particles: The Science, Technology, and Policy Issues SCAQMD Conference

And, for Massachussetts residents: Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership

I also have an annotated bibliography of 28 scholarly studies I can send to you if you'd like to research this topic in more detail.

On a related note, ten years ago Sen. John Dingell was one of the leading opponents of higher EPA standards on particulates. Dingell characterized the research by saying, "In point of fact, the scientific record is unambiguously ambiguous." The language is almost identical to the current stonewalling on efficiency standards and CO2 regulation.

Another note: Your woodburning stove is only carbon-neutral if you are growing wood just as fast as you are burning it. I'm sure you knew that already.On You may be surprised posted 2 years, 10 months ago 56 Responses

natural progression

"Most scientists believe" leads naturally to "brave dissidents fighting to uncover the truth!"

Security is a good reason for limits on greenhouse gases. Cost/benefit is another way to represent the goals and can be persuasive on its own instead of as a subset of security. Impacts on non-human species and ecosystems are yet another reason, maybe less persuasive but still relevant.

Beyond regaining some moral authority, any solution to global climate change requires the participation of the United States. Individual nations and allied blocks of nations are voluntarily taking action, but effective GHG reduction is going to require UN-level engagement, innovation, research sharing, technology distribution, and perhaps most importantly, enforcement. On Pelosi snubs Dingell posted 2 years, 10 months ago 4 Responses

oh by the way

Now is the time for progressives to establish themselves as the reasonable voices on climate change, before the Right does so in our stead.

Please explain to me why it would be a problem if the Right became a reasonable voice on climate change.On Listen and learn how the game is played posted 2 years, 10 months ago 9 Responses

real grunt

If I recall correctly, a building (eg the solar arrays and associated equipment ) has a cost BUT the maintenance of such facilities over the years more than multiplies that cost many times over.

No. Twenty years of documented experience with the 350 MW SEGS plant in California shows operating costs equivalent to 3 ¢/kWh when capital expeditures are paid off.

You must think WORLD WIDE and with real grunt

Check out these proposals:
Clean Fuels Institute (USA)
Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (Europe)On One research org says so posted 2 years, 10 months ago 16 Responses

Re: References please!

Not peer-reviewed, but this is fairly credible:

The Ethanol Illusion, Harvard Magazine Nov/Dec 2006, by Professor Michael B. McElroy. A more technical discussion is available at Ethanol from biomass: can it substitute for gasoline?On Let's wonk it out posted 2 years, 10 months ago 28 Responses

Re: Idle capacity?

Buying bigger lithium ion batteries for a pure EV can be expensive.

Sure, but nowhere near as expensive as fuel cells. Hydrogen cars: Cost millions of dollars, are in prototype only, available in 15-20 years, no existing refueling infrastructure.

Battery electric cars: Cost tens of thousands of dollars, are in production and available now, refuel with existing transmission infrastructure.

Not to mention all the operational difficulties with fuel cells outlined very ably by other commenters on this thread.On We will wonk you posted 2 years, 10 months ago 18 Responses

The Charcoal Economy

Many in the industry won't say whether or when cellulosic ethanol will be commercialized.

So as long as we're considering proposals currently in the prototype stage, take a look at Engineer-Poet's proposal Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy. It's a long post, dense with information and links. I had to read it several times to understand it.

But to summarize, cellulosic ethanol is simply too inefficient to be a major replacement for fossil fuels. On the other hand, converting biomass to charcoal can be orders of magnitude more efficient. It sounds weird (charcoal??) but the keys are fuel cells that convert fuel gas and carbon directly into electricity at very high efficiencies. Throw in algal photosynthesis processes, and ethanol from its byproducts, and you've got what I call the charcoal economy.

Purported advantages:

• Sustainable
  
• Carbon neutral
  
• Can replace all fossil fuel with 1/4 of U.S. farmland
  
• Energy in safe, storable, transportable form
  
• Works with many types of biomass, including easy-to-grow grasses
  
• Supports agriculture and crop diversity
  
• Can build soil quality through terra preta formation (the only sequestration scheme that promises to turn a profit)

It would be good to see a proof-of-concept trial of the complete synergistic system as Engineer-Poet proposes. It's an idea that may be a good complement to other cost effective renewables like wind and solar thermal electric.
On Let's wonk it out posted 2 years, 10 months ago 28 Responses

the rest that got cut off

If a lot of those renewables are peeled off to make electricity for electric cars, you're going to push demand for more nukes or more coal to continue to power the grid.

Hydrogen is also going to create demand for more electricity generation, because we aren't going to be running our transportation fleet off of sewage. The difference is, hydrogen is a lot less efficient. We are better off converting biogas directly into electricy via fuel cells, and skipping the hydrogen conversion step.

First of all, we don't have the infrastructure, if everyone switched to an electric car tomorrow. We don't have enough transmission and generation stations.

Idle capacity in the existing electric power system can recharge 180 million vehicles, or 84% of the existing U.S. fleet.

Hydrogen vehicles were hyped by the federal government for years. Now the market, even GM, is realizing that battery hybrids and full electrics make a lot more sense, definitely in the short and medium term, and probably in the long term as well.On We will wonk you posted 2 years, 10 months ago 18 Responses

hotspots of biodiversity

Here's an article that upsets some conventional wisdom. From Newsweek, July 3-10, 2006, The New Jungles:

As they take a closer look, however, biologists in the nascent science of "urban ecology" are finding that cities are not just important habitats, but veritable hot spots of animal and plant life. "You can take any big city and find more species, more diverse habitats than in just about any national park or nature reserve," says Josef Reichholf, professor of ornithology at Munich's Technical University. Both in animal numbers as well as species diversity, he says, cities beat the countryside hands down.

Berlin, one of the best-studied cases, is home to two thirds of the 280 bird species existing in Germany, including peregrine falcons and ospreys--raptors that have disappeared from much of the country. What's more, biologists say, urban biodiversity seems to be on the rise--as our cities become cleaner, suburbs grow greener, and more and more species learn to adapt. These findings are challenging an old piece of orthodoxy--that urbanization is the planet's biggest environmental threat. On the contrary, it's in the open country that plants and animals have seen the most rapid decline. The main culprit, biologists say: a highly efficient but species-killing agriculture, now spreading from the developed world to southern countries like Brazil.

Extremism becomes the commonplace

Warnings of the North Pole breaking up, or the world's coral reefs dying off from heat and acidification, or once-in-a-thousand-year droughts, were once dismissed as hysterical alarmism from the nutty greenie contingent. Now those phenomena are observed and recorded in the daily news. They've gone from nutty alarmism to mere facts. Seems like a lot of people forget the headlines, or ignore the implications, as soon as they throw out the newspaper.

Alarms have a purpose. They keep us from getting burned. We need alarms. (And we also need to dampen false alarms, which are the spam of the forecasting biz.)

So here's a bracingly "extreme" alarm from one of my favorite enviropundits:

... There isn't any "prophecy" or "prevention" involved any more. A climate crisis is here now. Realism says that it's here now and it's getting worse fast. There isn't any way to get along with that prospect and think it's groovy. It's a 50 year old issue; today it's a big issue; 20 years from now, it's THE issue.

It's not about prevention, mitigation or adjustment. The first already failed and the second two are not possible. So it's about remediation. Repairing the damage. An atmosphere upgrade. Obviously we have to stop intensifying the damage, but if we further expect to avoid collapse, we have to undo the damage already done.

This isn't a modish thing to think and say in 2007, it sounds kinda grim, farfetched and scary. The modish things to think and say in 2007 are the kinda grim, farfetched and scary things that I was saying in 1998.

If you go sample popular opinion in 2016, of course it's going to be about cleaning up the sky. The only variable there is whether people will be also be cleaning up heaps of bodies in the wrecks of major cities as they're doing that. The variable depends entirely on how quickly we knock it off with the delusionary crap and just get after the job at hand.

-- Bruce Sterling, 5 January 2007

really?

"This scenario turns your 100-mile fallout plume into one 10,000 times as long--wrapping around the earth dozens of times, widening and crossing oceans and continents, killing everything."

Is that really true? Can you please point me towards a credible engineering analysis that validates that scenario?On Opportunity costs redux posted 2 years, 10 months ago 7 Responses

the question mark kidz

Most scientific findings have some degree of uncertainty. The larger the scope of research, the more uncertainty is inherent in the findings. Conclusions about global scale phenomena are necessarily going to be some of the most uncertain. And yet is it vital that we make some estimate of the dangers and harms presented by global climate change. That is the predicament for policymakers.

Science has excellent statistical methods for quantifying the degree of uncertainty of any finding. Scientists can tell us exactly how much uncertainty is inherent in any scenario or projection. And policymakers will set policy based on their judgment of the potential harms and the level of uncertainty in that potential.

It is in no way unprofessional to set policy according to that procedure. In fact, nearly all long-term policy is based on projections and scenarios that are uncertain. It's part of the job -- politicians are used to it -- and using uncertainty as an excuse for inaction is either cowardice or pandering to corporate interests.

If policymakers decide that economic interests of the present outweigh environmental interests of the future, let them argue their position forthrightly. Falling back on the uncertainty excuse is just whining.
On Some thoughts posted 2 years, 10 months ago 72 Responses

per capita

I thought the justification for green roofs was longer-lasting roofs, better insulating qualities and reduction of heat island effect. They do need maintenance, though. It's a poor idea to mandate a system that requires ongoing maintenance to function. Without enthusiastic committment on the part of the property owner, maintenance is the first thing to be cut.

Sometimes large companies support onerous preconditions and standards to keep the smaller competitors out of the picture. I don't know if green roofs are in that category.

Green roofs may not solve flooding and runoff, but LID techniques sure can, as this press release boasts:

December 11, 2006

Pringle Creek's Full-Scale Porous Pavement System Flies Through Wettest Month in Oregon History

Eco-consious developers celebrate success of nation's largest "green street" system

SALEM, Ore. - According to the National Weather Service, Oregon experienced record-breaking rainfall throughout the month of November. The Portland metro area received 11.61 inches while Salem alone received more than 15 inches. Yet while many regional streets and sidewalks flooded as a result of clogged storm drains, Pringle Creek Community -- a 32-acre sustainable living community located in the Willamette Valley -- cruised through the month without flooding due to the success of its state-of-the-art porous pavement or "green street" system.

"It seems a very odd idea to suggest that increased urban density is favourable to sustainability."

The key is per capita impact. The EPA publication Protecting Water Resources with Higher-Density Development has a very easy to understand explantion.

Low density suburbs and rural farms have significant water pollution impacts. In some cases worse than an equal area of urban development. On Is required green development smart public policy? posted 2 years, 11 months ago 15 Responses

dust to dust

GMB, you said: "I'm waiting for an authentic counter-attack so I can counter-attack back."

I'm not looking for a fight, I'm looking for more truth and common sense. If we could have three or four times as much CO2 with only beneficial effects for the planet, that would be tremendous good news. Please don't keep the trail hidden. Reveal your evidence, research, and sources.On Time for greens to get over their fear of big government posted 2 years, 11 months ago 29 Responses

losing Nemo

For responses to climate crises, the most effective federal actions will be a) carbon taxes and limits; b) efficiency standards; c) large infrastructure investments, as Gar Lipow has been describing; and c) R&D, especially the commercialization of carbon sequestration processes for coal, and all renewable energy technologies. Policymakers need to take a comprehensive look at the obstacles, market failures and externalities that are preventing a swifter move to a decarbonized economy.

In response to GMB -- I suppose "catastrophic" is in the eye of the beholder. After all, the human race has survived massive climate change in the past. If all the coral reefs of the world died off, I would consider that a catastrophe. And that is virtually certain to happen with the status quo.

The experts on catastrophe, the global insurance industry, are finding plenty of evidence for action: in their balance sheets.On Time for greens to get over their fear of big government posted 2 years, 11 months ago 29 Responses

recycled farts?

I have a hypothetical question that I've been trying to find an answer to.

Let's say there is a cattle ranch. It's been established for a while and the herd is rotatated so that the ranch creates no major deforestation, desertification or depletion impacts. All the biomass on the ranch is grown without any outside inputs like fossil-based fertilizers.

This year, the cattle eat a certain amount X of CO2 equivalent (in the carbohydrates of the biomass). Some of X is released to the air, some of X is excreted on the ground, and some of X goes into the bodies of the cattle so they live and grow.

Next year, some of the range/pasture biomass that was grazed in the past will regrow. Here's my question:

What percent of X will be taken up by the growing biomass? In other words, to what degree is this ranch carbon-neutral?On Livestock's long shadow posted 2 years, 11 months ago 42 Responses

cow pie charts

Following up on caniscandida's questions, here is the percent breakdown of livestock GHG contributions:

34   - deforestation
30.5 - manure management
25   - farts
7.4  - tilling, fertilizing and overgrazing
2.2  - fossil fuel for transport, processing & fertilizer

The amount of enteric fermentation (farting) depends on the quality of feed. Grain diets are higher quality in this respect, and generate slightly less farting:

• Crop by-products and rangelands (typical of developing countries) - 6 percent methane conversion factor
  
• High quality feedlot grain diets (typical of North America) - 7 percent methane conversion factor

Wilson's Rebuttal

John R. Wilson wrote The Truth about Hydrogen, a reponse to Lovins' "Twenty Myths" paper. Wilson is a consultant on coal-based synthetic fuels and unfortunately appears to be a global warming denialist. Otherwise, he makes many persuasive points. In his "Hydrogen Report - Executive Summary," Wilson writes:

In our white paper we show that the technology required to support an economically and technically viable electrolysis-based hydrogen economy is not available today. In fact, it may never be available, since it requires large amounts of low-cost clean power. What is needed is fairly clear, but some of the barriers that must be overcome are set by the fundamental laws of chemistry, physics and thermodynamics. These WILL NOT be overcome. There are also huge economic barriers to be overcome, especially those involving capital costs. These are so high that the costs in both energy and dollar terms are likely to be so enormous that electrolytic hydrogen, for all its virtues, will never be a commercially viable option on a large scale. We believe, however, that there may be a number of niche opportunities that make sense.

More at TMG/The Management Group website.On Warning: techno-engineering speak ahead posted 2 years, 11 months ago 43 Responses

favorites

If Paolo Bacigalupi had an anthology published, I would put his short stories near the top of the environmental literature list. Until then, I have to be satisfied with various magazines and best-of-the-year anthologies. Didactic and memorable.

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science in the Capital" trilogy comprise the finest novels to date about global warming. They are "Forty Signs of Rain" (2004), "Fifty Degrees Below" (2005) and the upcoming "Sixty Days and Counting."

Robert Charles Wilson's "Spin" just won the Hugo award for best novel. Not about anthropogenic climate change, this elegaic and bittersweet book directly confronts the personal toll and political ramifications of "hidden" ecological catastrophe.

Nausicaa is a good suggestion. I thought Princess Mononoke was a more accomplished, more subtle film, but maybe Nausicaa has more kid appeal.

Nonfiction: Mark Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" hit me like a cinder block when I read it. Amazon says it's "a very illuminating lesson in the political economy of limited resources anywhere."

"Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World" by Alan Weisman is tremendous and overflowing with solutions, but it probably belongs on the old-school list.On Newer and cheekier! posted 2 years, 11 months ago 15 Responses

the tornado

It's awfully hard to have a reasoned scientific debate when the scientists are being attacked, censored and fired in deliberate campaigns of character assasination and career destruction.

"I see this self-critique based on apocalyptica as nothing more than a way to enable the denier mindset and attack the credibility of enviros."

I don't agree entirely. There is a thread of doomerism that says society will crash no matter what we do, so any action to correct matters is futile. There is another thread that says running for the hills and riding out the crash in a secure bolthole is the only solution. Both of those threads only serve to frighten people, increase apathy, and if taken to extremes, disrupt lives.

Whether one is optimistic or pessimistic, hopeful or hopeless, good long-term decisions are not made in a mindset of fear. Good decisions need a mindset of creativity, innovation and thoughtfulness.  Doomerism is part of the tornado storm of FUD, noise and obfuscation that seeks to overwhelm reasonable action and effective solutions.On The enduring attraction of apocalyptic predictions posted 2 years, 11 months ago 29 Responses

bollard roulette

Here's a more complete version of the video that better explains what's going on.

They've installed those things around the U.S. Capitol and White House.

Some people have asked, Why not use retractable tire spikes instead? But apparently those can cause vehicles to lose control and possibly careen into pedestrians.

Interesting comments at the Manchester Evening News. Most seem in favor of the bollards.On Funny video alert! posted 2 years, 12 months ago 2 Responses

no cachet

The problem is the greenie-weenie things aren't visible. They're not out there on your roof for the world to see, so no one knows about them unless you  bring it up yourself and make yourself a real bore at parties. There's no cachet in insulation.

Maybe contractors should give out house plaques like LEED plaques or historic register plaques. "This is a high-performance insulation house!" Display it proudly! Hm. Maybe this concept needs some more thought.On The boring green-building stuff is the best posted 2 years, 12 months ago 4 Responses

R&D is crucial

Ronald Bailey falls far short of making the case against government R&D. He relies on just two examples, the Synthetic Fuels Corporation and NASA's Apollo program.

The Synthetic Fuels Corporation (SFC) was a technology commercialization program that subsidized the capital costs of constructing synfuel plants. It was not a technology R&D program. None other than the Heritage Foundation argued that, "Perhaps the best solution to the SFC dilemma would be to reorient the Corporation toward demonstrating the technical rather than the commercial, feasibility of various synthetic fuels processes."

NASA's R&D program accomplished more than putting 12 men on the moon. The research report NASA: Measuring the R&D Payoff by NASA policy director Sylvia K. Kraemer found that between 1976 and 1999, NASA was issued 2,620 patents. For most of the 80s and 90s, the number of NASA patents (as a percent of all gov't patents) exceeded the agency's R&D budget (as a percent of all gov't R&D expenditures). Kraemer wrote, "And the payoff is not in the consumer marketplace of popularly recognizable products and services, but in the capital goods marketplace, where one acquires instrumentation for research, development and manufacturing, biochemical and other chemical processes, new ways of harnessing energy, and in medicine, where we seek sophisticated new substances, mechanisms and instruments."

A level playing field in the energy industry and the elimination of all subsidies is an ideal that is chimerical. That's not to say we shouldn't eliminate the largest and most obvious fossil fuel supports; we should accomplish that immediately. But it will take a significant research effort merely to identify all the pervasive and entrenched energy market distortions at the local, state and federal levels. Then there's the task of figuring out politically feasible ways of eliminating the subsidies. The Oil Drum had a post about this today and some of the comments are right on target.On No new subsidies needed posted 3 years ago 17 Responses

full screen

There's a nicer, full-screen version on the Victorian government's website. The complete production background is here.On A cool new ad campaign from Victoria, Australia posted 3 years ago 5 Responses

no trap

Bart, you said "In some cases, [efficiency] might result in zero or negative energy savings." But the Congressional Research Service report that you referenced says this has only happened in very special cases. It gives the examples of the invention of the steam engine that led to greater coal use, the invention of the electricity market around 1900, and the introduction of new technologies to developing countries. These are all situations where new paradigms of technology systems led to radical, complete reorganizations of energy usage patterns of entire societies.

The report goes on to list examples of actual efficiency rebound effects -- 0 to 40% for electricity, 10-30 percent for automobiles. In other words, for the types of policies and practices Gar is discussing, efficiency always reduces consumption.

The people who argue that mandated efficiency measures are useless as part of the greenhouse gas solution are the same academics, think tanks and industry front groups who deny that climate change is even a problem that should be dealt with.

The issue of combining policies for greater synergistic effects is important and should be discussed in more detail.On So we can transition to renewables without cost posted 3 years ago 22 Responses

like a Swede

I think it is a safe bet that many Westerners will decide for the sake of the climate to live like middle class Swedes. The question is, how bad do climate change and ecosystem damage have to get before they make that decision? And will it be too late for our economic, political and social systems to adapt? Tipping points are not only ecological.On Poor countries can't afford to tackle climate change posted 3 years ago 57 Responses

experimental automated transit

Gar: You say automated systems are no longer experimental -- which is true if you are considering airport-type systems only. They go in a straight line or a simple loop, and they have headways of 1-5 minutes.

I repeat, computer controlled vehicles and routing, with large numbers of vehicles and extremely short headways, are unproven on the neighborhood or municipal scale. CyberTran and similar systems propose to operate on complex, interconnected networks of tracks, not simple straight lines or isolated loops. CyberTran and similar systems propose to operate vehicles just a few feet or yards apart, with headways of a few seconds or fractions of seconds. Systems like that are unproven. That's why it's hard to find first adopters.

As for BART, DC Metro and similar metropolitan-scale computer-assisted systems -- the computers have been known to fail on numerous occasions. That's why human backup is always required.

To ac5p: I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but we are facing shortages of fuel for our cars. Some people say we are facing shortfalls now, some people say it will be later. But even optimists say it'll happen within our lifetime, 30-40 years. The U.S. Energy Secretary summed it up quite well:

If we look two or three or four decades into the future, we know that hydrocarbons alone will not meet the needs of a growing world economy.  Even with all the technical expertise the world could offer and all the political will it could muster, eventually, we will run out of oil.  And, even before then, the price of a dwindling supply will be prohibitive.  At present, our world is overly focused on, and overly dependent upon, one source of energy.  And that path is unsustainable.

concrete

Then there's the energy embodied in all those square yards of concrete used to build the dam. I don't know exactly how much energy that is, only that it's got to be a huge amount.On Dams squeeze methane out of river water posted 3 years ago 11 Responses

Re: why pessimisn is win-win

Except that no one listens to the boy who cried wolf.On By quite a bit posted 3 years ago 7 Responses

Re: False Hope

Well, sharisec, turn it around. Suppose there was a 100% conventional coal-fired generating plant in your region. Suppose you could sign up to get all your electricity from that plant, and pay 15 percent less on your utility bills. Would you do it?On Are the wind credit cards deceptive? posted 3 years ago 20 Responses

Coffee pools

The analogy is more like this: Everyone gets their coffee from pools. My local utility comes to me and says, "Hey, we have some organic coffee made by a collective in Costa Rica. If you pay a little extra, we'll dump some of this great coffee into your regional pool -- exactly as much as you consume at home."

RCE comes to me and says, "Hey, if you pay a little extra we'll dump some great coffee into a pool somewhere. Maybe it'll go to you. Maybe it'll go to a factory. Maybe it'll go to Canada. Who knows."

If I make the arrangement through my local utility, they get a market signal that one of their customers will pay more for better coffee. If I make the arrangement through RCE, my local utility remains clueless about its customer's preference.

If I make the arrangement through my local utility, I am billed for what I use. So I have an incentive to conserve. If I make the arrangement through RCE, my credits are pre-paid and I have no immediate incentive to conserve (although I can always buy more credits later on).

Of course, the ideal thing is to get my coffee direct, instead of diluted in a giant pool of inferior coffee. Then if the national coffee spigots get clogged, I'll still have my own supply. But to get undiluted coffee, I have to grow my own, or get my neighborhood, city or region to grow it. That's where co-ops and municipal ownership have a real advantage.On Are the wind credit cards deceptive? posted 3 years ago 20 Responses

Vote for windfalls!

Yeah, a lot of people pointed this out after the Contract With America's takings compensation provision passed the U.S. House in 1995. For instance, this CS Monitor editorial, or this more detailed scholarly report.

The usual rebuttal is the increase in property value caused by regulatory action is collected in the form of property taxes. But some landowners benefit from "givings" more than others, especially owners of undeveloped land. Often, property taxes don't fully account for increased valuation afforded by government policies.

Consider, for example, a 500-acre Midwest crop farm. The farm may be simultaneously involved in government programs paying subsidies based on historical plantings of different grains, while also receiving conservation payments for idling land under the Conservation Reserve Program, while also facing restrictions for "conservation compliance" and subject to "swampbusting" regulations on designated wetlands. When the value of the entire farm is appraised, all of these government actions are relevant, together with current and projected estimates of agricultural input and output prices, affected by national and international supply and demand. Given all these factors, how can it be reasonable to consider, in isolation, the effect of, for example, an endangered species restriction on the farm's value?

--Runge report

Assessment policies and procedures vary wildly by locality. All sorts of policies complicate the picture: exemptions, circuit breakers, freezes, incentives, breaks, and other special provisions.

The tax on a particular property may depend on who owns it, what it is used for, and when it last sold. To compute the tax the administrator may have to know the income, age, medical condition, and previous military service of the owner. Anomalies abound as taxpayers figure out ways to make the complicated system work in their favor. A few bales of hay harvested from a development site may qualify it as agricultural land and enterprise zones, which are intended to provide incentive for development in poverty-stricken areas, may contain industrial plants, but no people -- poverty stricken or otherwise.

--History of Property Taxes in the United States

No surprise here that the name of the game is manipulating the system for one's own benefit. The regulatory takings movement is an attempt to gain personal advantage via the ballot box, often at the expense of the greater community.On Why only takings? posted 3 years ago 6 Responses

Electricity sector

Even just in 2006 we've seen retail gasoline prices go up and down about 75 cents, and the economy didn't screech to a halt. So 25 cents per gallon is feasible from a systemic point of view. Whether it's feasible politically is another thing entirely.

Over in the electricity sector, carbon taxes can influence long term decisions about generating plants, fuels and CO2 control technologies. This article in EPRI Journal looks at a variety of technologies and how they're affected by carbon taxes. For the current level of technology, the carbon tax will have to be $25-$45 per ton before renewables become competitive with conventional generating technologies.

However, EPRI identifies specific technological advances to be implemented by 2020 to create an energy portfolio that "would be largely insensitive to the cost of CO2 yet still be affordable for the developed world and some parts of the developing world" (p. 39). EPRI's roadmap could be a stepping stone to a fully renewable electricity sector, but it'll take a crash R&D program to pursue it.
On A small price to pay posted 3 years ago 2 Responses

Migration Dreams

The whole idea of migrating biomes is a grand fantasy. We are not going to shoehorn the entire Brazilian rain forest into Guatemala. The Canadian agricultural sector is not going to move north into the taiga forests where the soil is thin, rocky and acidic. Ecological communities do not function when only a few of their member species are present.

Mark Twain poked fun at this level of hubris in his novel The American Claimant (via Bruce Sterling):

I would like you to provide a proper outfit and start north as soon as I telegraph you, be it night or be it day. I wish you to take up all the country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature of opposition resorts.

But I have said enough to give you an idea of the prodigious nature of my scheme and the feasible and enormously profitable character of it.

I shall join all you happy people in England as soon as I shall have sold out some of my principal climates and arranged with the Czar about Siberia.

Eating the Land

I've mentioned this before, but it's such a stark and impressive infographic that it's worth another look: Land Area Required to Offset 50% of Miles in the U.S.

As this Chicago Tribune article points out, replacing the all the oil consumed by the U.S. with ethanol is a pipe dream. And many in the industry won't say when or if cellulosic ethanol will ever be successfully commercialized.

All of which goes to say, when it comes to greening our transportation system, job #1 is to burn less fuel annually. A lot less -- if we're going to navigate the challenges that the 21st century will bring.
On Whatever its other costs and bennies, ethanol is no biggie on global warming posted 3 years, 1 month ago 3 Responses

For Wonks

The study by the National Housing Council, the background reseach and the press release are available here.

The most interesting graph is on page 5 of the report (the page numbers are sideways). It shows combined housing and transportation costs rising as commute distances increase to about 16 miles. The combined costs stay at that high plateau even as commutes get longer.On Suburban commutes are money-losers posted 3 years, 1 month ago 3 Responses

clouds in my coffee

I like the cloudy-day photos... because that's how it looks most of the year. The architecture is well adapted to it. The simple, blocky forms, bright yet earthy colors, and high-contrast trim give a cheerful appearance to what might otherwise be a dreary streetscape.

I think the urban design, environmental techniques, social diversity and financial performance of High Point are four equally important factors that work synergistically to create a better quality of life for all the residents. High Point's gotten lots of kudos for the environmental aspects, so I guess the planner wanted to balance the record a little bit.

The video about High Point's green features was pretty good. Here's a profile of the project manager. Here are a few more pages about the development: from the housing authority, the City of Seattle, and an independent writer. On Seattle's -- possibly the country's -- coolest new neighborhood posted 3 years, 2 months ago 1 Response

Liquid Coal

"I'm waiting for a rigorous comparative analysis and projection of all real costs - including the energy consumed growing corn or sugar cane."

If you haven't seen Robert Rapier's blog yet, it's well worth some study. He is skeptical of many of the claims currently being made by ethanol boosters, but he also supports certain ethanol technologies and initiatives when he thinks they make economic and technological sense. This index of essays is a good place to start.

"Long-term, however, ethanol's cost advantage relative to petroleum-based gasoline will only get better, especially after cellulosic hits."

I think that's right, but it's because producers will switch to coal instead of oil, as they have already started doing.On If Friedman had a blog, he'd be learning right now posted 3 years, 2 months ago 5 Responses

Promise Breaker

The current administration already reneged once on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Is anyone going to be suckered into a bait-and-switch a second time?

In addition, this may well be a delaying tactic designed to convince states to hold off on substantive action until the feds come riding to the rescue. After enough years have passed, a convenient pretext will be worked up to renege yet again.On Rumblings have started. posted 3 years, 2 months ago 8 Responses

prototypes

Here's a gallery of Viridian magazine covers (vaporware, no big money behind them). See also this page.On Verdant posted 3 years, 3 months ago 2 Responses

Calling Hari Seldon

a) The idea that economists are neutral and dispassionate is bunk. Economists have political biases and axes to grind just like everyone else, and the assumptions of their profession color their conclusions, just like a malaria expert or climate expert.

b) The notion that human cultural phenomena can be modeled out to 300 years is pure speculative fiction. Implicit in their analysis is an infinite number of assumptions about future technology, culture, economic systems, etc. If the IPCC's 100-year horizon yields results that are too fuzzy to act upon, why is 300 years better? (Cline cites one 15-year-old study to support that.)

Over the past 300 years we've gone from leeches to gene therapy, from yodeling to satellite phones. No one knows what we'll be in 300 years. Calling Hari Seldon -- please report to your local science fiction convention.

c) What about the synergistic effects of climate change? Impacts like increased social disruption, mass refugee movements and increased communicable diseases will surely have an effect on the other items on Lomborg's laundry list. Yet his study says "other potential losses" like human morbidity "were recognized but omitted from quantification."

d) On the benefits side, the study only considers the potential benefits from climate damage avoided. But what if some of the CO2 reduction measures are considered as investments? That is certainly how GE, Swiss Re and many other businesses are talking about it. In those cases CO2 reduction is not a cost, but a net profit. Greenhouse gas control and R&D policies will hurt some industries, but they can also spark new sectors of the economy, resulting in net economic gains.

A page-by-page catalogue of errors and distortions in The Skeptical Inquirer and previous Copenhagen Consensus meetings can be found at The Lomborg-Errors Website

This may have been posted by Grist previously, but here's an updated link: Sceptical Questions and Sustainable Answers is a 227-page response to Lomborg's book The Skeptical Inquirer, written by the Danish Ecological Council (an environmental think tank).On Bjorn Lomborg and climate change mitigation posted 3 years, 3 months ago 5 Responses

More gobbledygook

Interesting post, Tyson, thanks for continuing the calculations. I have a few points in response.

a) Remember that cars are a system of cars AND drivers. The caloric cost of the driver should be accounted for. If we want to figure the energy use of the car alone, we need to subtract the driver's caloric expenditure from both sides of the equation. That means the walker uses 3.3 - 2.0 = 1.3 kcal/kg/hr more than a single driver. (The average car also has 0.5 passengers and you could incorporate that if you wish -- I am going to leave it out of this example.)

b) In the "Doing the Math" post above, I cited 6,000 Btu/mile as the wheels to well energy cost of driving. The link is to the Argonne National Laboratories' GREET model. As far as I can tell, GREET accounts for waste like spills and flaring, so it makes sense to account for waste in the food production system (29% as cited above).

c) How about the energy used to manufacture the car? Here's a study that finds that 120 GJ are used in manufacture. But it is based on 1990 prices and uses a 1990 Ford Taurus as the example. How about more recent numbers? This model can calculate the energy use of the automobile and light truck manufacturing sector. If I plug in $25,000 as the average price (when new) of cars on the road today, the model says the energy used in manufacture is 216 GJ. Assuming the average car goes 135,000 miles in its lifetime, that works out to about 1500 Btu/mile.

d) Putting it all together. Using 1.3 kcal/kg/hr, a 150 pound person burns 29.5 calories to walk a mile. Add wastage and that's 42 calories. Add fossil fuel inputs and that 305 calories, or 94 mpg.

A car uses 6000 Btu/mile in its fuel cycle plus 1500 Btu/mile to be manufactured = 7500 Btu/mile or 15 mpg. The walker is 6.3 times (or 626 percent) more efficient than a car with a solo driver.

All figures and assumptions are estimates, your mileage may vary.On Walking tall tale posted 3 years, 3 months ago 22 Responses

Doing the Math

My previous post indicated that slow strolling has the same caloric cost as driving a car, so in that example driving has no efficiency advantage whatsoever. But let's set that aside and go through the math in your original example.

• Walking a mile burns 43 calories.
  
• About 29% of the food supply is wasted, so walking a mile actually consumes 61 calories.
  
• It takes seven calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food, so it actually takes 427 calories of fossil fuel to walk a mile.
  
• 427 nutritional calories of fossil fuel is equivalent to 1694 Btu. It takes 1694 Btu to walk a mile.

Trust But Verify

Few environmentalists are reluctant to embrace the latest signs of progress. Many are reluctant to embrace the latest talk of progress. If there's anything politicians and multinational corporations excel at, it's self-promotion.

The Chafee endorsement seems to be an inside-pool determination of strategy and tactics. The Sierra Club cries, "Save the last line of defense!" while critics like Krugman and Kos cry, "Build the new line of offense!" There are valid arguments in both camps, although it's hard to see how the Sierra Club's strategy can lead to more powerful environmental representation in Congress over the long term. From one perspective, the Club's tactic looks like a way to strengthen relationships and influence; from another perspective it looks like self-defeating appeasement.On Why won't America's environmentalists accept positive developments? posted 3 years, 3 months ago 22 Responses

Charged

This is very exciting & I hope you do brag about the batteries! Please keep us updated on whether the cells are living up to published specs and how performance differs from NiCads and other lithium batteries. Does lithium phosphate represent as much of an advance over conventional Li-Ion as Li-Ion was over Ni-Cad?

A123 Systems features a pretty amazing story about an electric motorcycle. Zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds -- how many gees is that? Also, about the nanoscale particles -- they are bonded to the electrode, are they not? Is there any possibility of a health hazard in that configuration?On Batteries gone wild posted 3 years, 3 months ago 23 Responses

Greenpeace UK Video

The Greenpeace UK video What are we waiting for? is a terrific introduction to decentralized energy, and makes a usually dull subject entertaining. Greenpeace's information page has links to their report, a slideshow and case studies.

Tom Twigg is right to warn about increased local emissions; that has to be carefully monitored. Sometimes it's more difficult to control emissions from smaller power plants due to economies of scale, lack of enforcement and other factors.On A huge source of clean power that's been neglected posted 3 years, 4 months ago 6 Responses

False Economy, Real Climate

Yes, let's look at the costs and benefits of global climate change and possible solutions. But let's do it with wisdom rather than smarts. Let's do it with morality, not expediency. After all, conventional economics is the mindset that says (due to the discount rate) if there's a choice between burning increasing amounts of fossil fuel in the near future, or preventing human extinction 1,000 years from now, we should burn the fossil fuel. I'm not saying that's the actual choice that faces us, but how can we trust the mindset that begins from such a premise?

Yes, it is not 100% clear that doing what we need to do to reduce global warming makes sense. Here's a news flash: it is never going to be 100% clear. We're talking about forecasting the world's climate, economy and geopolitical systems 50 or 100 years from now and beyond. Of course the predictions are fuzzy.

But the uncertainty is less than you imply, and many scientists believe we now have enough information to act. Many businesses are already acting, especially those in the field of long range forecasting: the insurance sector. We see that Florida and Louisiana are becoming uninsurable. One thing the insurance industry learned from Hurricane Katrina was that their existing models were woefully inadequate for predicting both the nature and magnitude of losses from large storms.  It's no accident insurers like Swiss Re are some of the biggest advocates of greenhouse gas control.  

As the the Pew Center on Global Climate Change says, "the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be."On Some inconvenient truths posted 3 years, 4 months ago 24 Responses

Simple Message

The biggest sources of greenhouse gases generated by the residential, commercial and transportation sectors are 1) driving cars and trucks; and 2) heating and cooling in buildings. That's almost one-half of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. So a simple message about solutions might be:

• Burn fewer gallons of gasoline annually
  
• Insulate your building, use efficient HVAC and lighting technologies
  
• Use efficient cooking, water heating and refrigerating appliances
  
• Switch to renewable energy wherever possible; conserve whenever possible
  
• Support policies that make solutions like these easier, more abundant and less expensive

Laurence Aurbach

It's a good article, especially the point about having a home with all the green bells and whistles but being long drive away from shops, work and civic buildings.

The article says, "Anyone purchasing a home or business in these [LEED-ND] developments will have already achieved the previous criteria," but that's not true for #2 (infill). LEED-ND will certify greenfield developments as well as infill.

LEED-ND is an order of magnitude more complex than previous LEED standards and there will be a shakeout period of testing, feedback and calibration before some of the details are ironed out in a satisfactory way. On Green Building 101 posted 3 years, 5 months ago 1 Response

Trust Us

The waste generated by the National Enrichment Facility will be depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUH6). In order to dispose of the waste, it must be deconverted to a more stable form. There are no commercial deconversion facilities in the U.S. at this time. Louisiana Energy services says it is "open to discussions with such companies" to sign long-term deconversion and/or disposal contracts. Or maybe it will just ship the waste to Kazakhstan. Link

DUH6 is identified by an growing body of reseach as highly toxic when ingested. Shallow-burial disposal sites are not sufficient to keep the waste out of the local air and drinking water wells, and no deep-burial waste sites have been permitted yet. In addition, the deconversion process itself generates toxic waste that is difficult to handle.

The governor of New Mexico has asked that the wastes be removed from the state ASAP. Given the record of the DOE and the industry, however, it will likely be a very long time before any commercial disposal sites are approved and built. Congress has already introduced legislation that would mandate on-site storage of nuclear power plant waste, making every generating station a permanent waste dump.

For a lengthy and technical report covering the health hazards of DUH6, the requirements for safe disposal of waste from the National Enrichment Facility, and the estimated liability costs to the public, see:

Costs and Risks of Management and Disposal of Depleted Uranium from the National Enrichment Facility Proposed to be Built in Lea County New Mexico by LESOn Nuclear plant licensed posted 3 years, 5 months ago 10 Responses