You know how sometimes Jon Stewart gets all smarmy and sycophantic when he has on a guest he actually admires? And you know how Al Gore has a reputation for being a bit stiff on occasion? Let’s just say they seemed to bring out those qualities in each other last night—or, as Stephen Colbert “jokingly” put it later, there was “no Al-Gore-rhythm.”

Still, Gore spoke clearly about the energy and technology solutions that exist, what it will take to actually implement them, and why it ain’t happenin’. The Daily Show published a two-part extended interview on its site—here’s part one:

... and here’s part two:

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The two Steves knew exactly what they were doing when they sat down to pen the final chapter of their sequel to their 2005 bestseller Freakonomics. In the now infamous chapter in the newly released SuperFreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner manage to downplay the global warming threat, compare climate change believers to religious fanatics, and accept at face value the assertion by some pointy-headed geeks that they can save the world on the cheap.

No surprise, SuperFreakonomics set off a firestorm of criticism and angry rebuke. To quote Joe Romm, "the Superfreaks frame this chapter mostly as their (misguided) view of the science versus the views of that famous non-scientist Al Gore (as opposed to the views of all of the scientists who disagree with the crap they are peddling). That straw man approach gives them the 'high' ground."

The Steves feigned surprise Monday night before a crowd of 300 gathered at Seattle's Town Hall. Why would anyone get upset about that chapter? We're not denying the climate change problem, they averred, nor are we saying nothing should be done about it.

To the contrary, the Steves told the audience, when they suggested that the costs of capping carbon emissions are greater than the costs of potential geoengineering solutions, they're just being good, objective scientists. No, make that economists -- the only truth tellers among the social scientists, who get treated like pariahs because they make morally agnostic observations about humanity, they said. Dismal science, indeed.

The truth is, there's plenty to object to in SuperFreakonomics. The whole tone of the climate chapter understates the threat and overstates the potential for technology to save the day. Some examples:

That's a pretty simplistic review of the first part of the global warming chapter. But it's no more simplistic than the authors' breezy survey of climate science and unquestioning regurgitation of the wild geoengineering ideas being offered up Nathan Myrhvold and his Hall of Justice pals at Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures. (Motto: If you thought of it, we already patented it.)

This point bears a bit more scrutiny. Freakonomics and its sequel contain lots of counterintuitive observations based on measurable data. The global warming chapter stands out because, well, it doesn't rest on data. Myrhvold says he and his pals can float a "garden hose to the sky" to pump sulfur 18 miles high into the stratosphere, all for $20 million in upfront costs and $10 million annually to keep it running. Uh huh.

And the IV brainiacs have super boats in mind that would spray ocean water into the air to feed the formation of clouds, blocking more sunlight from hitting the surface and being absorbed as heat. Sounds great, but how many boats? What do they cost?

Dubner event hinted salaciously that IV has solutions to ocean acidification in the works. Details, please!

These are fascinating ideas. But they're just that -- ideas based on some pretty big leaps of faith, i.e. that these things can be engineered, that someone will fund them, and, moreover, that the solutions will actually do enough to cool the planet.

As Grist's very own David Roberts wrote a few weeks back, "Lesson: the problems humanity faces are systemic and interrelated. The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers."

OK, enough. The real point here is get beyond the bad in SuperFreakonomics and focus on two messages that deserve greater discussion in the world of climate wonkery.

First, Levitt and Dubner do what economists do best, and that's note that emissions from burning fossil fuels are a negative externality -- fancy economist speak for the fact that we don't really pay the full cost of relying on coal, oil, and gas. Power plants and their customers around the world generally don't pay anything now to deal with the environmental impact of CO2 emissions and other bad stuff -- heavy metals in the emissions and ash, health effects of particulate pollution, etc.

And it's an open question whether an international carbon-cap system based on trading credits and buying offsets can genuinely cut carbon emissions enough to reduce global warming that's already predicted to happen. At the end of the day, no matter what is decided at Copenhagen, it's still in too many people's economic interests to keep burning fossil fuels. It's also right for Levitt and Dubner to note that cutting carbon emissions won't address methane from livestock or nitrous oxide from fertilizer.

Second, and just as significant, Levitt and Dubner are doing a real service by talking about geoengineering and stressing that technology and innovation are going to be a part of saving our asses -- it won't be done through complex cap-and-trade schemes alone. As fancical and unproven as the ideas proffered by Myrhvold and company are, eggheads everywhere should be encouraged to think about them and figure out ways to execute them. We might just need some wacky tech solutions to fend off the worst effects of global warming while we transition the global economy toward clean, renewable energy.

So, read the book. Take the Steves' dismissive tone with a grain of salt, but think hard about how we insert geoengineering into the climate discussion, and heed their warning about the limits of public policy to steer people away from the old ways of doing things.

More on the super-freaking-hullabaloo ...

Video: Stephen Dubner on SuperFreakonomics:

Video: Intellectual Ventures video on "garden hose to the sky":

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Al Gore’s last book, in case you hadn’t heard, was about the climate problem. The new followup to An Inconvenient Truth lays out solutions. The Vice President, Nobel laureate, and veteran climate advocate describes the most promising responses to the climate conundrum in Our Choice, released November 3. We’re tracking reviews, analysis, screeds, and tirades on the book right here.

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My publisher and I still haven’t come up with a title that works. The problem is that there are a great many books on climate and/or clean energy solutions coming out right now many with similar sounding titles.

I do think this collection of blog posts accomplishes what I try to do on my blog -- save readers time, cut through the crap, and focus on what’s important in climate science, solution, and politics (with a hefty dose of old-media critiques). The trick is it making that all clear in a few, catchy words.

I prefer figures of speech -- The Hype About Hydrogen is my best-selling book. And don’t worry too much about the subtitle -- it will explain what the book covers, and I have a pretty good idea for that, but don’t want to thwart any of your creativity by putting out any ideas right now.

If we end up choosing your suggestion (or something very similar), you’ll get free copy of the book (woo-hoo) and you can write a guest blog post!  For similar sounding suggestions, the earliest entry wins. You can build on someone else’s idea -- in fact, that’s usually how the best title is ultimately found.

Enter as many suggestions as you want. Do use Google to check whether the title is sufficiently original.

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The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday, Nov. 3.  If you want a preview, Al Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference.  Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions. Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now.” Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

I was at one of the Solutions Summits, as long-time readers know (see “My Al Gore story").   I was interviewed by Newsweek about that Summit for their cover story:

Gore assigned each speaker at the summits a half dozen or so questions: Is nuclear power a viable solution? How can new photovoltaic technologies enter the market? He moderated every discussion, and no one remembers him ever glancing at his iPhone during even the most eye-glazing PowerPoint slides (”differentiation of value chain strategies”). Every panel at the New York meetings ran late, recalls Joseph Romm, who oversaw the Department of Energy’s renewables program from 1995 to 1998, as Gore asked question after question. “It was a fire hydrant of information,” says Romm, and it taught even experts things they didn’t know “about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy.” Gore also hosted a reception afterward, where he betrayed no doubt that everyone would find everything as fascinating as he did. “Have Tim tell you all about soil carbon!” he said to one scientist. “Gore bothers to come talk to us,” says climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Most other politicians are too busy: ‘Just give us the talking points.’ He’s the only politician who’s interested in the nuts and bolts of the science—and the only one who knows what a hydroxyl radical is.”

Like Gore, I learned a lot from the summits.  Here is what I wrote in January 2008:

For the last three days I attended a small climate solutions summit hosted by the former Vice President and current Nobel Laureate. It was off-the-record, so I can’t report on presentations directly, but they have made me a lot smarter about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy, which will inform my blogging this year on climate solutions. I will say now as an aside that I have become much more bullish on the potential for large-scale solar photovoltaics as a result of attending these meetings. The VP asked me to speak for seven minutes on hydrogen at dinner Wednesday. Before dinner, I gave him a copy of the brand-new paperback edition of -- warning, shameless product placement -- Hell and High Water. He looked it over for a few minutes and said, deadpan,

I have only one problem with this book—this blurb on the back here that says, “If you buy only one book about global warming, make it Hell and High Water.” I just can’t agree with that.

When he introduced me that night, he repeated the line to great laughter.

BTW, in case it wasn’t obvious from his movie, the VP has a terrific sense of humor — and not just in his delivery timing of canned jokes, but in quick, impromptu one liners, like the one above, many of them self-deprecating (one of the speakers from a web-based company thanked him for his work accelerating the Internet, and he said something like, “You heard I had something to do with the internet?”).

And in case this wasn’t obvious from his movie, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things related to climate, energy, science, and technology.

I didn’t realize until I read the Newsweek piece that the VP had a similar reaction to the PV panel:

By all accounts, Gore was open to changing positions he brought to the summits. He originally thought that concentrated solar thermal power, in which the sun heats liquids that then power an electric generator, is superior to photovoltaics, in which sunlight produces electricity directly (PVs are the solar panels sprouting on rooftops these days). But “the PV industry surprised people over the last three years with the speed at which costs dropped,” says Cornelius, who is now at Hudson Clean Energy, a private-equity firm. Gore came around. “We are at or near a threshold beyond which photovoltaics will actually have a cost advantage” over concentrated solar as well as fossil fuels, Gore writes. He likes the fact that they can be deployed in small installations—those rooftops—whereas solar thermal projects are immense; he’s impressed that the price of photovoltaics is dropping while their efficiency is rising, thanks to new materials and manufacturing techniques. “Photovoltaics are a prime example of where the developmental pathway had a big impact on my conclusions,” Gore said at his home last month. “The rate of cost reductions and increases in efficiency for PVs is very impressive. PVs probably overtakes concentrated solar thermal within the next half year.”

I’m not certain one can directly compare PV and solar thermal.  And I still think solar thermal will deliver more kilowatt-hours this century than any other form of low carbon electricity (see Solar Baseload—a core climate solution) particularly because it is so much cheaper and efficient to store thermal energy than electricity, and there are no obvious production bottlenecks for CSP.  But this summit did convince me to include a full wedge of PV in “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution,” along with 3 wedges of CSP.

The Newsweek article is by Sharon Begley, a journalist who definitely gets global warming—see Newsweek’s Science Editor explains why climate change is “even worse than we feared” and how “a consensus has developed during IPY that the Greenland ice sheet will disappear.”

And for those who want to learn about soils and biochar, the book has a good chapter:

Gore loves plants and soils as only a former farm boy can (well, a summertime farm boy: as a kid he spent the school year in Washington, where his father was a senator). He regales you with numbers: more CO2 is emitted from burning and destroying forests—20 to 23 percent of the annual total—than from all the world’s cars and trucks; only by the 1980s did CO2 from fossil fuels overtake that from deforestation, which accounts for 40 percent of the CO2 increase since the 1800s.

The potential for soils to absorb more of the CO2 that our utilities, factories, and vehicles spew poses a dilemma for Gore, one of two where his scientific and political instincts collide. With better management, soils could sequester much more carbon than they do now. The question is how much more. Soils scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University was surprised to get a call last summer (”Vice President Gore would like to talk to you”) that began, “I have 15 or 20 questions about soils and climate for you.” Lal calculates that if more farmers adopted mulching, no-till farming, and the use of cover crops and manure, 3,700 million acres worldwide could sequester 1 gigaton per year of CO2, roughly 12 percent of annual global emissions. Other experts are even more sanguine. “If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit,” says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. The political clash is this: if you tell people soils can be managed to suck up lots of our carbon emissions, it sounds like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and could decrease what little enthusiasm there is for reducing those emissions—as one of Gore’s assistants told LaSalle in asking him to dial down his estimate. (He didn’t.)

To his credit, Gore sides with the science, letting the political chips fall where they may. He writes that soils could sequester an additional 15 percent of annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. That could cut 50 parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere over the next 50 years. (We are now at 387, up from 280 before the industrial era, with 450 ppm or even less a dangerous level.) To encourage changes in agriculture that would foster carbon sequestration, Gore advocates moving away from price supports and toward paying farmers for “how much carbon they can put into and keep in their soil,” he says. Paying farmers to sequester carbon might jump-start the use of biochar, which Gore calls “one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils, and sequestering significant amounts of CO2.” Biochar, which he learned about during a 1989 trip to the Amazon, is basically porous charcoal. Made by burning switch grass, corn husks, and other waste, it can absorb CO2 like a charcoal filter in a cigarette absorbs gases. Gore estimates that biochar could sequester 40 percent of annual CO2 emissions.

Begley notes one especially unexpected chapter in the book:

But because of one sentence, and one chapter, it does surprise. The chapter is an astute analysis of the psychological barriers that keep most Americans from taking the threat of climate change seriously, his acknowledgment that emotion, not just reason, drives the decisions people make. The sentence is this: “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”

… Gore is a canny-enough politician to know that change of this magnitude takes time, and that politics tends to trump science. A new poll by the Pew Research Center found sharp declines in the numbers of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world is warming (57 percent, compared with 71 percent in April 2008), and in how many believe it is because of human activity (36 percent vs. 47 percent). Gore blames this on the boatloads of money the coal and oil industries have spent to muddy the science and confuse the public…. His favorite quote in Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”

The piece concludes with Gore’s native optimism:

“You know, the political system is [like climate] also nonlinear,” Gore says. “I’ve been waiting a long time for that tipping point,” when politicians and the public recognize the threat of climate change and act to avert it. “But I think we’re closer than ever. Reality does have a way of knocking on the door.”

Walking back through the house, I ask Gore again whether he believes the sanguine vision of Our Choice will come to be. He points to solar panels on his roof, and to his driveway, 300 feet beneath which seven geothermal wells gather the planet’s warmth to heat and cool his house. “I have to,” he says.

Our Choice is really the anti-SuperFreakonomics.  I’m sure it will be widely attacked by the deniers and delayers, so no doubt I’ll be blogging about it more this month.  The bottom line is that besides being informative, Our Choice is a truly beautiful book page after page, and I highly recommend it, particularly for those who want a broad overview of the key strategies for preserving a livable climate.

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Tim Flannery says the U.S. Senate absolutely must pass some form of carbon cap before the Copenhagen talks in December.Mark Coulson, 5th World Conference of Science JournalistsDon't let the perfect be the enemy of the absolutely essential.

That's the message author and climate campaigner Tim Flannery brought to Grist's Seattle office today. By that, he means: The U.S. Congress absolutely must pass climate legislation that puts a cap on the country's total carbon emissions. Failure to do so will take pressure off other nations to follow suit, effectively undermining the spirit and intent of the international climate talks set to happen in Denmark in December.

Flannery is an Australian scientist-activist in the model of Carl Sagan, James Hansen or Stephen Jay Gould. The author of the influential book The Weather Makers and chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, he's traveling the United States promoting his latest book, Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future.

The inspirations for the book, he said, are the political tracts and pamphlets of 17th and 18th century Britain -- lengthy, often underground, publications circulated by the various political factions.

"It's a tract for our times," he said -- 20,000 words making the case for why the world must get serious about global warming.

If the U.S. Senate fails to pass a companion to the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, America will show up in Copenhagen without anything to put on the table, Flannery said. "The United States needs to be able to demonstrate a commitment to reducing total emissions," he said.

Atlantic Monthly PressFor climate activists who say no bill is better than a watered down climate law, Flannery says cool it. As long as a firm cap is put in place, he said, it will spur the international talks and, more importantly, boost alternative energy.

Flannery praised the Waxman-Markey bill in particular, noting that its provisions calling for a huge U.S. investment in international carbon credits amounts to "the perfect mechanism for exporting cap-and-trade to the rest of the world."

The agricultural offsets included in Waxman-Markey, he said, will drive additional research into how much carbon farmland can store and how it should be managed to maximize storage. That, he said, will do much to spur a vibrant market in carbon credits.

For readers who will be making the trip to Copenhagen, Flannery advises that you study up on your Shakespeare. The Copenhagen Climate Council has rented out the historic Kronborg Castle, famous as the setting for Hamlet, and will use it on Dec. 12 as a stage for scores of business leaders to talk about the importance of finalizing a global climate deal.

And a word of consolation for American climate campaigners: If you think the coal lobby is bad here, move to Australia, where 90 percent of the country's electricity comes from coal-fired plants. The industry's influence over the political system is expansive, with the conservative Liberal Party beholden to the mining and power generating companies while Labor must balance its support for change with the need to curry favor with an important political constituency -- the labor unions that represent coal industry workers.

Flannery will speak tonight at Town Hall in Seattle. The point he will stress to the audience: Our planet is at a critical moment in time, and voters in United States in particular are at a critical juncture. Carbon emissions need to be capped and curtailed, otherwise we're on track for 1,000 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Best-case scenario, Flannery said, is that we max out at 450 (we're at about 390 now). Those may sound like dry numbers, but a 1,000 world would look drastically different than a 450 world. Just ask the folks at 350.

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James Hoggan and his DeSmogBlog.com posse might be our nation's most important sleuths -- and they ain't even from the United States.

Not that climate destabilization knows any boundaries. Not that climate change deniers and public relation firms hired by dirty energy corporations pledge allegiance to any country's well-being.

Drawing on their brilliant muckraking and breakthrough research, Canadian DeSmoggers (and public relations insiders) Hoggan and Richard Littlemore have just released a blockbuster new book, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.

As the U.S. Congress grapples with various incarnations of climate change bills and world leaders and climate experts ready to gather in Copenhagen in December, Climate Cover-Up is an indispensable guidebook to anyone concerned about our planet's climate future; in fact, it should be required reading for all American citizens, journalists, public policy makers -- and President Obama.

A page-turning expose of industrial fossil-fueled machinations to muck up the scientific debate over climate change, Climate Cover-Up takes readers through a blow-by-blow account of how bankrolled public relations firms and their bogus fronts and campaigns have deliberately sought to manipulate the media, mangle the language of real science, and effectively derail any public policy or action to halt the spiraling climate crisis.

In the end, unfolding like a chilling and disturbing thriller, Climate Cover-Up is about one of the greatest campaigns of misinformation in our time: The dark corporate roots of astroturfing, whitewashing dirty coal and denying climate change.

Hoggan and his team hold no punches in their investigation. They ask: Where were these purported skeptics getting their money?

Examining the role of the Hawthorn Group, one of the top public relations firms in the U.S., and its bankrolled mandate to launch a "clean coal" whitewashing campaign for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) last year, Climate Cover-Up found:

The end result?

Canadians are no strangers to U.S. energy policy. On his first trip abroad, Obama stood with his Canadian counterpart in Ottawa, Canada last February and declared: "The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but we have our own homegrown problems in terms of dealing with a cheap energy source that creates a big carbon footprint."

Let's hope Climate Cover-Up makes it to the White House before the next round of Big Coal lobbyists.

Here's an interview with author James Hoggan on Democracy Now this week.

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Cross-posted from The Huffington Post.

The forthcoming SuperFreakonomics, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, plays fast and loose with the scientific consensus on climate change. The book's fifth chapter, "Global Cooling," revisits a number of discredited arguments that misinform readers about the danger unchecked global warming poses to the United States and the world.

The authors also gloss over solutions available now that could help reduce global warming and instead promote a futuristic technology that makes for an interesting read, but, unfortunately, would do nothing to cut pollution now.

Muddling Climate Science

Excess carbon dioxide from burning gas in cars and coal in power plants and destroying tropical forests has increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to levels unseen in millions of years and is largely to blame for the increase in global average temperature scientists have measured over the past century.

As the authors ably explain, damage from carbon dioxide production is an economic externality, something one person or one business does that affects everyone else in the world. But strangely, the authors spend a great deal of the chapter seemingly defending the idea of increasing levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

At one point they say more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase growth rates for plants. What they fail to mention is that weeds, allergens and invasive species are among the plants that may grow faster with elevated levels of carbon dioxide. Overall, the minor benefit for some plants pales in comparison to the major disruptions climate change could bring to agricultural crops, forests, and natural ecosystems, as well as human society.

Whether intended or not, this is the same tactic that the oil and coal-friendly group, CO2 is Green, has adopted. It's also reminiscent of the tobacco industry's claims that "smoking is good for you." In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency has labeled carbon dioxide a pollutant because too much of the gas is changing our climate and setting in motion a series of changes that will have serious consequences around the world.

The authors also brush off the critical role carbon dioxide will play in determining our future climate when they criticize climate models for projecting what they say is too large a range for future temperatures -- between two and 10 degrees F above today's levels. But what they fail to mention is such projections depend almost entirely on how much more heat-trapping emissions go into the atmosphere. Models project that a decrease in production of heat-trapping emissions would lead to less warming -- around two degrees F by the end of the century -- while continued high emissions would lead to greater warming -- closer to 10 degrees F.

A two degree shift is dangerous but tolerable. Ten degrees would be catastrophic. Nevertheless, Levitt and Dubner say, we should abandon efforts to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

These are just a couple of the many contrarian claims repeated in SuperFreakonomics.

Technical Fixes

Levitt and Dubner advocate the advantages of unproven technological solutions such as putting reflective particles into the atmosphere to bounce away sunlight and cool the Earth. When you ask scientists about so-called "geoengineering" solutions they will tell you that we have no idea if it will work, that it might backfire and that even if we could do it, that it would be no excuse for failing to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming now. It's worth noting that scientist Ken Caldeira says the authors misrepresent his views on geoengineering in their book. He does not support geoengineering to the exclusion of reducing emissions as the authors imply. Instead, he says we need to reduce excess carbon dioxide emissions to zero.

The authors appear to have taken a purposefully contrarian position on climate change science and economics. The scientific myths that Levitt and Dubner highlight will likely continue to persist in circles of people opposed to reducing emissions. It is far easier to believe there's no need to do anything about a problem if one believes the problem does not exist.

But science doesn't work that way. According to the United States' leading federal and academic scientists -- as well as the peer-reviewed scientific literature -- global warming is happening, it's hurting us now and the degree to which it will affect our children and grandchildren depends on the choices we make about how we use energy today.

While it's tempting to believe geoengineering may solve our problems, we need to work now to address climate change.

Luckily, the House of Representatives did pass legislation that would dramatically reduce heat-trapping emissions and momentum is building for the Senate to do the same. If all goes well, world leaders who meet in December's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen will produce an effective international treaty to address climate change.

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Cast your vote for the best climate journalism

Blogging won''t save the world, nor will rowing across the ocean. But join Roz Savage and thousands of others on Oct. 24 for 350.org's climate action day!Courtesy Roz SavageA million keyboards were singing on Wednesday as bloggers across the Internet drummed up support for action on climate change.

The cynical move here would be to take a great big potshot at Blog Action Day, e.g.: "Thanks, bloggers, for dedicating a whole day to this topic. [Insert eye rolling] Your bits and bytes will help change minds and save the world."

And after attending an event the other night in Seattle, I am feeling very cynical about online campaigns.

Roz Savage was in town to tout her first book, Rowing the Atlantic. You've heard stories like Savage's before: Earnest, hard-working striver finds wealth and success in the dog-eat-dog corporate world. One day, our hero wakes up, questioning what the hell he/she is doing, and whether killing himself/herself to build up a bigger bank account to fuel more consumption of ridiculous things (little red sports car, in Savage's case) is really making him/her happy. The hero takes the drastic step, walking away from the grinding career to find meaning and personal discovery in a simpler, more meaningful life.

Cue the heartfelt music and the Hollywood screen treatment.

But try as I might, I can't get too cynical about Roz Savage. Yes, it's easy to fall for her charm, beauty and storytelling ability. What's compelling about her, I find, is her fearlessness and her conscience. She gave up the rat race to become ... wait for it ... an ocean rower.

She rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in 2005 -- a three-month ordeal that's the topic of her book. And she's two-thirds of the way through her row across the Pacific. She's using her momentary celebrity to call attention to need for climate action, serving as a UN "climate hero" and planning to walk from London to Copenhagen (presumably, with a ferry trip across the Channel) so she can be among the activists in that city this December urging the world's leaders to agree to a new climate treaty.

Crossing the Atlantic in 100 days at 10,000 strokes a day.Courtesy Simon and SchusterAt the book event the other night, Savage said something that really caught my attention and put the climate challenge into focus. On her Atlantic Ocean voyage, she calculated how many oar strokes she made on a typical day -- 10,000. The trip took about 100 days, translating into 1 million strokes to cross an ocean.

One million ... a few feet for every stroke, amounting to imperceptible progress in her voyage. But add those strokes up, day after day. And day after day. Before you know it, she crossed the water. It was hard. There were errors and backsliding from time to time. Still, the distance was overcome.

Sorta like this climate problem we're facing.

Next Saturday, Savage will be in London for 350.org's Global Day of Climate Action. She'd like everyone -- Blog Action Day supporters especially -- to join her there, or join the 350 movement in your hometown wherever you are.

We can't save the world through keystrokes or oar strokes alone. We gotta get outside and stand together to save the planet. Stand together, not just on October 24, but every day, in little and big ways. That's how movements become reality.

OK, back to your regularly scheduled cynicism...

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Don't ask what kind of mileage it gets.In the summer of 2006, Marine Corps Major General Richard Zilmer sent the Pentagon an unusual "Priority 1" request for emergency battlefield supplies. Stationed at a temporary base in Fallujah, Zilmer was commanding a force of 30,000 troops responsible for protecting Al Anbar, the vast territory in western Iraq bordering Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. Heavily armed insurgents were hammering the region, and Al Qaeda was quickly gathering recruits. Zilmer's beleaguered soldiers were running low on fuel for the diesel generators powering their barracks -- fuel that cooled their tents in the 135-degree weather, refrigerated and cooked their food, and kept the communication lines open. The general, however, was wary of trucking in backup supplies during a time of so much turmoil. The U.S. fuel convoys that chugged along the back roads of Iraq every day -- long lines of 18-wheelers hauling armored vats of gas -- were among the insurgents' prime targets.

Zilmer's memo presented the Pentagon with an unprecedented request: "a self-sustainable energy solution," including "solar panels and wind turbines." This was the first time a frontline commander had formally requested renewable energy backup in battle. Without alternative power sources, the memo continued, U.S. forces "will remain unnecessarily exposed" and will "continue to accrue preventable ... serious and grave casualties." Put in civilian-speak: Too many of Zilmer's troops were dying in fuel convoys, and the relentless gasoline demands of the diesel generators were partly to blame.

Renewable energy was not an environmental consideration for Zilmer, it was a tactical necessity -- a matter of life and death, of victory or defeat. The Pentagon is the largest consumer of petroleum in the United States. In recent years it has used between 130 million and 145 million barrels of oil annually -- 2 percent of America's total petroleum demand. That translates to nearly 400,000 barrels per day, roughly the total daily energy consumption of the United Arab Emirates. Over the last century, no institution has done more to propel America's rise to power than our military -- or consumed more oil in the process. We have petroleum to thank for building the Department of Defense into an as-yet-unmatched fighting machine -- but our troops are only as powerful as the flow of fuel that sustains them.

I was both baffled and hopeful when I read about Zilmer's memo. Here was a no-nonsense Marine Corps general who has served more than 30 years in the U.S. military (not your typical tree-hugger) stationed in a country that's virtually floating on an ocean of oil (Iraq has the world's third-largest oil reserves, after Iran and Saudi Arabia) demanding clean energy solutions that only a few years earlier had been regarded as rinky-dink hippie technology suitable only for yurts and Earthships. Zilmer's plea struck me as a clear harbinger of change in America's attitudes about energy. If there was ever an opportunity to "man up" the effete image and role of solar panels, wind power, and other fossil-fuel alternatives, this was it. Just think of what the Pentagon could do to fast-track alternative-energy innovations going forward -- after all, it was military R&D that led to the invention of jet airplanes, helicopters, radar, remote-control mechanisms, cell phones, global positioning systems (GPS), microchips, and the internet.

But for all the promise it augured, Zilmer's memo also carried overtones of despair that spoke to the massive challenges that come with fueling the military -- one more oil-dependent today than ever before in history.

How did the American military get so hooked on petroleum? How much does it really cost -- in both blood and treasure -- to fuel war? What would it take to transform the world's biggest and strongest military into a petroleum-free enterprise? And how did this become the primary concern of a man leading 30,000 troops? To get answers, I went straight to the heart of the U.S. military establishment.      

*

Despite the imposing neoclassical façade I'd seen in so many photographs, the Pentagon as I approached in autumn 2007 looked surprisingly humble, unadorned, and low-slung. No sign of the tragic events of Sept. 11 remained on the building's exterior. But inside, a string of police line tape marked "Do Not Cross" still demarcated a section of the structure's impacted west side.

I had come to discuss the military's fuel consumption with Dan Nolan, who oversaw energy projects for the Defense Department's Rapid Equipping Force. (He recently retired.) Nolan, who graduated from West Point and has an engineering degree from the University of Southern California, procured in-field equipment ranging from tents to tanks for the Pentagon.

I met with Nolan in a windowless, soundproof room with cinderblock walls and a two-way mirror in the basement of the Pentagon, where interviews with the media are often scheduled. Though the setting was austere, the conversation rolled amicably. Nolan was eager and passionate about the military's green prospects: "I can see a future," he said, "where we have base-camp generators powered by garbage, surveillance aircraft powered by the sun, hybrid-engine tanks many times more fuel efficient, soldiers' clothing that harvests solar energy to charge their electronic field gear ... footwear that converts the kinetic energy from movement into stored energy, buildings and facilities operating entirely on renewable energy ... it's all in the works."

Thus far, Nolan's most successful energy-efficiency programs had been comparatively low-tech. He devised a superinsulating spray foam that could be applied to the outside of soldiers' tents in Iraq to save on air-conditioning demands; after the DOD spent $95 million on insulating foam for base camps in Iraq, the agency earned that back in energy savings in just 60 days. The security benefits are perhaps more impressive: DOD data show that if all U.S. military base-camp tents in Iraq were spray-foamed, the number of fuel convoy trucks needed would be reduced by 13 per day.

Nolan was additionally collaborating with a start-up called SkyBuilt Power to meet the demand for renewable in-the-field power stations. SkyBuilt had developed a mobile power station that fits into a standard shipping container and uses a mix of solar, wind, and hydro power to augment diesel generators. The hitch was cost: this contraption is priced at roughly $100,000, compared with just $7,500 to $10,000 for a basic diesel generator. For that reason, Nolan had been able to deploy only two of the renewable power systems in combat zones.

The range of green innovations the Pentagon is working on is impressive, extending beyond specialized military applications to products with potentially vast commercial potential: a combined-cycle jet engine with 40 percent greater efficiency, jet fuels derived from algae, low-cost lightweight titanium applications to replace heavy steel, ultra-efficient batteries. The Pentagon has partnered with companies including Boeing, General Motors, and General Electric to try to bring some of these products to market, but the time frame is vague at best. "Hard to say," Nolan replied when I asked him how soon some of these products will be commercially viable. Another reality check is the Pentagon's annual budget for developing efficient and alternative technologies: just over $1 billion in 2009. That's a tiny fraction of its total R&D budget, indicating that fossil-fuel reduction is not exactly an urgent priority.

What would it take to get the funding and political capital necessary to significantly ratchet down the military's energy footprint? I posed this question to Al Shaffer, the executive director of the Pentagon's Energy Security Task Force. Shaffer, who trained as a meteorologist to supply weather information to frontline combat units, has a big-picture handle on all the moving parts of the Pentagon -- not just the Army, Navy, and Air Force, but also the dozens of other divisions that handle logistics, long-term strategy, and, most important, budget.

He formed the Energy Security Task Force in 2006 in response to the spike in fuel prices after Hurricane Katrina. "All of a sudden we realized we had a problem at the Defense Department," Shaffer told me, "because a $10 increase in the price of [a barrel of] crude resulted in a $1.4 billion upsurge in our operating costs for the next year."

Shaffer noted the growth in the military's green R&D efforts to push the development of efficient and renewable technologies, and emphasized the progress the military has made installing renewable energy on its bases. "Did you know that the world's largest photovoltaic farm is on an Air Force base?" he asked, adding that the DOD currently derives 12 percent of the electricity for its facilities from renewable sources, making it one of the world's largest consumers of green energy. The agency has vowed to increase that to 25 percent by 2025, and reduce the energy usage of its facilities 30 percent by 2015.

All of this sounded promising, but I asked Shaffer how the U.S. military can talk about a secure energy future when its own B-52 bomber uses up to 45,000 gallons of fuel in a single mission. And as the Defense Science Board's 2001 report "More Capable Warfighting Through Reduced Fuel Burden" stated clearly, fuel usage is not something the military can actually restrict: "Because DOD's consumption of oil represents the highest priority of all uses, there will be no fundamental limits to DOD's fuel supply for many, many decades."

Shaffer nodded slowly, indicating he understood this problem all too well. "Energy security is critically important -- and it has become dramatically more so in recent years because of the increase in cost of oil. This is scary." He paused. "Our cost for energy went up just shy of $3 billion from fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2006, even though we reduced our overall usage of energy by about 5 percent during that same time period."

The shift to a greener and more efficient military, said Shaffer, will accelerate as the Pentagon adjusts to volatile oil prices and rethinks the way its fuel costs are calculated. The Defense Science Board report pointed out that the Pentagon calculates the cost of the fuel it uses according to wholesale refinery price -- roughly the price we pay at the pump -- and does not factor in the cost of delivery in the field of combat. DSB analysis showed that the total cost of fuel when delivered to army bases over short distances is roughly $10 per gallon. That number quadruples over long distances to "at least $40-$50 per gallon" and rockets up to "more than $400 per gallon" when fuel is delivered by aerial tankers to aircraft in flight. "This produces a sub-optimal allocation of resources," the report concluded.

These kinds of added costs are particularly pronounced in the Iraq operation given that a pipeline infrastructure can't be used, and given how dispersed the combat activity is. "The war on terrorism is a lot like guerrilla warfare," explained Shaffer. "When we send out a convoy, there are vehicles in front of the fuel trucks, there are vehicles behind the fuel trucks, and there are aircraft flying overhead. It's very, very complex. Takes a lot of kids, a lot of our young troops. Every time they go out and do this type of run, it puts their lives in danger."

Once the Pentagon starts factoring in the true cost of fuel, it makes the new renewable energy alternatives look cheaper by comparison.

"We don't do things to be green," Shaffer told me. "We do things for operational efficiency, for improving our capability to perform our mission, whatever that mission may be. And it just so happens that being sustainable is now a smart thing to do." Not since World War II -- when the Germans were bombing American oil tankers and interrupting the Allies' fuel supply routes -- has the Pentagon had to worry about having affordable and abundant energy to buoy its military operations.

"Suddenly efficiency presents us with multiple benefits," Shaffer told me. "We save money; we simplify our logistics supply line, which makes us a more effective fighting force; we free ourselves from dependence on oil controlled by our adversaries; and above all we save lives. With better energy conservation, we simply would not have as many combat casualties."

In March 2008, the Defense Science Board publicly released a report titled "More Fight -- Less Fuel." This report reiterated many of the requests it had made in its 2001 document and berated the Pentagon for failing to implement these recommendations in a meaningful way. Though it praised initiatives like those of Nolan and Shaffer, it exposed the underfunding that plagued such programs. This sequel report included an emphatic plea to "unleash us from the tether of oil."

How much time -- and how many more lost lives -- before the top brass at the Pentagon respond seriously to pleas for efficiency and energy self-sufficiency?

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

That staggeringly anti-scientific statement (page 170) is just one of many, many pieces of outright nonsense from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. In fact, human-caused global warming is well-established science, far better established than any aspect of economics.

Hard to believe such a staggeringly illogical statement (page 203) comes from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the same folks who wrote the runaway bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

For the record, it’s perfectly logical to believe that -- indeed, I daresay most of the world’s leading climate scientists believe that -- if you could curtail all new carbon emissions (including from deforestation) starting now (or even starting soon), you would indeed avoid apocaplyse. None, however, would use the loaded word “simply” I’m sure and most, like Hansen, would like to go from curtailing emissions to being carbon negative as soon as possible. The Superfreaks, however, are simultaneously skeptical of global warming science, critical of all mitigation measures, but certain that geo-engineering using sulfate aerosols is the answer.

“Rogue” is a good word for Levitt, but I think “contrarian” is more apt. Sadly, for Levitt’s readers and reputation, he decided to adopt the contrarian view of global warming, which takes him far outside of his expertise. As is common among smart people who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions and get it so very wrong, he relies on other smart contrarians who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions. In particular, he leans heavily on Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, who has a reputation for brilliance, which he and the Superfreaks utterly shred in this book:

Impressive -- three and a half major howlers in one tiny paragraph (page 187). California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld called this “patent nonsense,” when I read it to him. And Myhrvold is the guy, according to the Superfreaks, of which Bill Gates once said, “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan.” This should be the definitive proof that smarts in one area do not necessarily translate at all.

In olden days, we called such folks Artistes of Bullshit, but now I’m gonna call them FAKERs -- Famous “Authorities” whose Knowledge (of climate) is Extremely Rudimentary [Error-riddled? I'm still working on this acronym].

The most famous FAKER was Michael Crichton. I thought Freeman Dyson was the leading FAKER today, but Myhrvold makes Dyson sound like James Hansen. I will devote an entire blog post to the BS peddled here by Myhrvold (who now runs Intellectual Ventures) because I’m sure he’s got the ear of alot of well-meaning, influential, but easily duped, people like Levitt and Dubner.

Here are the howlers in that paragraph for the record:

1. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black.” Try googling “solar cells” -- (Nathan, you can Bing "solar cells") -- and most of the panels you’ll see are in fact blue. I’ll call this half a howler. Lots of the cells are black. As we’ll see, however, it is NOT a problem. This is a bogus issue.

2. These days, lots of solar cells get much higher efficiency than 12 percent. Scientific American writes about “Suntech’s Pluto line of multicrystalline cells, which boasts 17.2 percent efficiency converting one sun’s light into electricity, or Suniva’s ARTisun single silicon crystal cells that can convert 18.5 percent of the sunshine into electricity.” This book is supposedly about solutions available in the near future and billions of dollars are being poured into technologies that could more than double those efficiencies. Indeed, “New solar energy material captures every color of the rainbow.” But, of course, only IV’s unproven and dubious aerosol geo-engineering solution gets the benefit of assumed scientific advances, not real, actual hardware that could start solving the problem now.

3. The biggest howler from the perspective of a would-be FAKER (and those who are duped by them) is the logical error of failing to ask one simple question: What was the absorbtivity or emissivity of the material that the panel covered up? If you look on Google images, you’ll see that PV panels are often -- if not usually -- put on roofs or over ground that is quite dark, often black. In a large fraction of cases, the panels contribute less heat reradiation than what they are covering would. This is a complete red herring, a “trivial issue” in the jargon Levitt would normally use.

4. The way Leavitt and Dubner write the paragraph -- “A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren’t,” Myrhvold says. As an example he points to solar power. -- they have Myrhvold saying all forms of solar power “probably aren’t” a good thing. That is a laughable notion, and I seriously doubt he believes that. But, as we’ll see, this is the Superfreaks style, to overstate or misstate what the people they talk to actually believe.

John O’Donnell, VP Business Development, GlassPoint Solar and a former lead engineer at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (old bio here, Business Week profile here) just emailed me to be sure I don’t miss the forest for the trees here in debunking this nonsense:

Yes Nathan is howlingly off base. Not because solar panels are (whatever cover with whatever relative emissivity), but because solar panels, like wind turbines and solar thermal power plants, eliminate the emission of CO2 which would otherwise occur from electricity production.

As Ken Caldeira so grippingly points out (and I tried to make graphically clear in my Stanford talk last year) , each molecule of CO2 released thermal energy when it was formed -- that’s why we formed it. In the case of electricity generation, about 1/3 of its thermal energy went out a wire as electric power, the rest was released promptly as waste heat. But each molecule of CO2, during its subsequent lifetime in the atmosphere, traps 100,000 times more heat than was released during its formation.

A hundred thousand is a big number. It means that running a handheld electric hairdryer on U.S. grid electricity delivers a planet-warming punch comparable to [the heat directly emitted by] two Boeing 747s operating at full takeoff power for the same time period. The warming is delivered over time, not promptly, but that don’t matter; the planetary heating is accrued, the accountants would say, the moment you hit the switch.

The thermal energy balance for a solar panel runs vastly in the other direction. If our solar panel is pure black, and 14 percent efficient, then for each kWh of electric power that comes out, there are 7 kWh of heat that were absorbed and radiated. But each kWh it generates it eliminates the release of 1.4 pounds of CO2, which during its lifetime in the atmosphere will absorb 210,000 kWh of heat. So the energy balance for the solar panel (when it’s connected to the US grid) is about NEGATIVE 209,993 kWh(heat) per kWh(electric) -- since some fossil power plant somewhere is being turned down based on its generation. And hey, if it’s blue instead of black, that might increase to negative 209,995 kWh.

So, yes, Myhrvold is an uber-FAKER, raising issues that are uber-trivial.

As an aside, O’Donnell is a CSP guy, like me, the solar energy that I believe is most promising for large-scale, low-cost, low-carbon power delivery (see “Solar Baseload -- a core climate solution“). Naturally, the Superfreaks never mention this in their amateurish take-down of solar.

The reason I’m calling Leavitt and Dubner Superfreaks for short is that Chapter Five, the “Global Cooling” chapter -- aka “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” -- has precious little economics, and what it does have is simply wrong. So the book could easily have been titled Superfreaks. [Note: Most of the book is searchable online.]

The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo’s eruption both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.

Yes, the Superfreaks frame this chapter mostly as their (misguided) view of the science versus the views of that famous non-scientist Al Gore (as opposed to the views of all of the scientists who disagree with the crap they are peddling). That straw man approach gives them the “high” ground.

But by embracing aeresols and rejecting mitigation, they have adopted the identical view of that rogue, thoroughly debunked, non-economist Bjorn Lomborg. Unlike the Superfreaks, CP readers know that Ken Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.”

And yet Caldeira is the primary practicing climate scientist the Superfreaks rely on in the chapter! He has responded to many email queries of mine over the weekend so I could characterize his views accurately. He simply doesn’t believe what the Superfreaks make it seem like he believes. He writes me:

If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.

One sentence about Caldeira in particular is the exact opposite of what he believes (page 184):

Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.

Levitt and Dubner didn’t run this quote by Caldeira, and when he saw a version from Myrhvold, he objected to it. But Levitt and Dubner apparently wanted to keep it very badly -- it even makes their Table of Contents in the Chapter Five summary “Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain?” It fits their contrarian sensibility, but it makes no actual sense.

Here is what Caldeira really believes:

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products. I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible …

Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastrophic consequences. There is no safe level of emission.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

I am in favor of fire insurance but I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I am in favor of research into geoengineering options but I am also against carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems, and I fear we may have already dawdled too long. That is why I want to see research into geoengineering -- because the threat posed by CO2 is real and large, not because the threat is imaginary and small.

Ouch!

Needless to say, you’d never get that impression from reading Superfreakonomics. Again the authors had a contrarian argument they wanted to push, and they shoe-horned the one true expert they talked to into it.Dystopia.

I’ll address the other myriad errors and analytical flaws in the chapter in future posts. Their core argument is the same as Lomborg’s, that aerosol-based geo-engineering can substitute for aggressive mitigation, which they repeatedly diss as uneconomic, contrary to virtually all actual independent economic analysis (see “Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost -- one tenth of a penny on the dollar“). They leave the impression Caldeira shares that view. This is what he really believes:

If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2/low sunlight conditions -- similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse -- maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.

We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.

And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth’s climate system that we depend on?

On top of all of these environmental considerations, there are socio-political considerations: Will we have a cooperative world government deciding exactly how much geoengineering to deploy where? What if China were to go into decades of drought? Would they sit idly by as the Climate Intervention Bureau apparently ignores their plight? And what if political instability where to mean that for a few years, the intervention system were not maintained … all of that accumulated pent-up climate change would be unleashed upon the Earth … and perhaps make “The Day After” movie look less silly than it does.

Long-term risk reduction depends on greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Nevertheless, there is a chance that some of these options might be able to diminish short-term risk in the event of a climate crisis.

I would add the grave risk that that after injecting massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere for a decade or more, we might discover some unexpected bad side effect that just gets worse and worse. After all, the top climate scientists underestimated the speed and scale of greenhouse gas impacts (and the magnitude of synergistic ones, like bark beetle infestations and forest fires).

We would be in incompletely unexplored territory -- what I call an experimental chemotherapy and radiation therapy combined. There is no possible way of predicting the long-term effect of the thick stratospheric haze (which, unlike GHGs, has no recent or paleoclimate analog). If it turned out to have unexpected catastrophic impacts of its own (other than drought), we’d be totally screwed.

No surprise, then, that science advisor John Holdren told me in April that he stands by his critique:

The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.

Even geoengineering advocate Tom Wigley is only defending “a complementary combined mitigation/geoengineering scenario, an overshoot concentration pathway where atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches 530 ppm before falling back to 450 ppm, coupled with low-intensity geoengineering,” with the goal of stabilizing global temperature rise at 2°C, in case we can’t stabilize at 450 ppm. You can see a good discussion of that at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists‘ expert roundtable response to Alan Robocks’ excellent piece, “20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.”

Well, stabilizing at 530 ppm requires doing a massive amount of mitigation starting now -- only 2 or 3 fewer wedges than what is needed for 450 (see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution“).

Levitt and Dubner and Myhrvold are FAKERs. They simply don’t know what they are talking about.

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A Penny Saved Is…

The bowels of New York City's electricity system.Often referred to as "the world's biggest machine," the North American electricity grid as a whole is an integrated network of generators and millions of miles of wires that crisscross the United States and Canada. It snakes across fields, over mountains, through tunnels, along highways, beneath sidewalks, under rivers and seas. If you live anywhere in Canada or the continental United States, this mega-machine "reaches into your home, your bedroom," as one writer put it, "and climbs right up into the lamp next to your pillow."

The grid is designed as a hub-and-spoke system, in which large centralized generators supply electricity to thousands of end users. All told, the U.S. grid has about 300,000 miles of  high-voltage transmission lines and 5.2 million miles of local distribution lines. When one cable in a network short-circuits, others nearby will automatically pick up the burden. But if the surrounding cables are also overstressed, they too can fail, causing a cascading effect that can knock out major portions of a network.

In recent years, the U.S. power grid has become increasingly prone to such interruptions. Average temperatures have risen, homes have gotten bigger, and so have air-conditioning demands. Thanks to our technology-rich lifestyles and the inefficiency of our buildings and power plants, Americans consume, per capita, at least 50 percent more electricity annually than the citizens of Europe and Japan.

But we don't have the infrastructure to support our lavish habits. We've seen almost no expansion or evolution of the grid that struggles to sustain our skyrocketing demands. Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has explained the problem this way: "We're a major superpower with a third-world electricity grid." The average age of the equipment that makes up our grid infrastructure is more than forty years, and many components were designed and installed before World War II. If we're to see a major shift toward greener, more reliable power sources, we need a simultaneous upgrade in grid transmission technology.

*

I got a firsthand look at the challenges our power system is facing when I climbed inside the New York City grid. Con Edison's chief of underground grid maintenance, Dennis Romano, had agreed to accompany me down below with his crew of electrical engineers to explain what I was seeing. A jovial man with a permanent five o'clock shadow, Romano seemed amused if a bit baffled at my excitement over this brief trip.

Amanda Little, ready to go down the manhole.In spite of what I'd learned about the grid's fragility, I had a fanciful notion of what I'd encounter: a vast, orderly chamber 50 feet underground containing thousands of gleaming wires all labeled and mapped according to the neighborhoods and buildings they fed, gauges glowing to indicate the volumes of current coursing on each line -- as clean and intricate as the innards of the world's biggest iMac.

Instead, my descent into a manhole on lower Broadway lasted all of 17 feet-and the shallow tunnel I crouched through opened onto a chamber roughly the size of an average walk-in closet. The floor was covered with a murky pond of street runoff, crumbled asphalt, and garbage fragments, and the air was clammy and foul. The walls revealed a gory cross section of the grid: emerging from dozens of cement ducts was a spaghettilike tangle of grimy wires pulsing with so much electric current I could see them vibrate, like hoses with liquid gushing through them.

The New York City grid encompasses more than 80,000 miles of cable-enough to circle the globe four times. Peel back the sidewalks of Manhattan and you'll find a larger concentration of copper than anywhere else on the planet-more, in fact, than in the world's largest copper mine. All that metal can be found within 15 feet below street level, sandwiched in with water mains, sewage pipes, and telephone lines. (These pipes and tubes are constantly in need of repair, so they have to be placed close to street level for speedy access.) There is no large central chamber where all the wires are organized, labeled, and monitored; instead, there are some 260,000 manholes throughout the city, each one providing access to the wires feeding just a handful of buildings.

Many of these cables are over fifty years old. As the wires age, they degrade under a battery of stresses. The combination of sweltering heat in the summer and freezing cold in the winter causes them to expand, contract, and weaken. The constant vibrations of the city and its underworld-rumbling subways, feet pounding on pavement, incessant traffic-can wreak havoc over time. When water mains break and sewage lines overflow, they can soak and erode grid equipment. When salt is scattered on snowy streets, it often eventually drips into street cracks and manholes, eating away at the cables' insulation. Equally common is a nick in a cable from a construction worker's jackhammer or backhoe.

Any one of these burdens can overstress and shut down a wire. But the biggest challenge facing New York City is its outsized electricity demand, which is growing at a rate of nearly 2 percent a year. That doesn't sound like much, but it translates to an additional annual load of 200 megawatts-enough to power nearly a quarter million homes or a midsized city. "It's like moving Albany onto the New York City grid every year," Con Edison's president later told me. That's a big challenge when you have a system as congested as Con Ed's.

"See what I mean? The grid is running out of room," Dennis Romano said as we huddled in the dank manhole, gesturing at a mass of wires so dense it was like a Friday afternoon traffic jam at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel. "There's just no space down here to put more copper." The lines, he added, can only carry a finite amount of electricity: "You can't put ten pounds of baloney in a five-pound bag." Romano was describing gridlock in the most literal sense-the grid in its current form is reaching a physical threshold, meaning it can't be built out any further.  

"At the rate our demands are growing," Romano said, "we could outgrow the grid in under ten years." When we ventured back up to street level, I could see why: New York was voraciously guzzling power. Bank machines were whirring, flat-screen monitors were flickering, and an Old Navy store had flung its doors wide open, sending a misty plume of air-conditioning out into the stifling 90-degree heat. Across the way, Banana Republic and Bloomingdale's were doing the same. "That right there," said Romano, nodding toward the open doors, "is why the grid gets hammered in summer months. People assume we can air-condition the streets. They just don't think about it."  

Lou Rana, Con Ed's president, did offer some encouraging news about the direction of the energy industry today when we discussed his plans to renovate New York City's complex, aging grid. For nearly two hours, Rana excitedly discussed the "smart grid," which he described as a "high-tech, superefficient, ultrareliable, self-healing, ... clean, green electricity machine."

Con Ed has already been experimenting piecemeal with some components of a smart grid, which Rana mapped out for me, drawing squiggly lines on a whiteboard. He's been testing superconductor wires that carry far bigger loads than do the current copper cables and reduce the energy lost in transmission from 10 percent to less than 2 percent.

Rana's engineers are installing nanosensors that can monitor electrical current flows remotely, allowing grid operators to track and contain power surges before they begin to cascade. Rana is also developing a plan to obtain 20 percent of New York's City power supply from small-scale distributed power sources -- solar panels and clean-burning microplants fueled by natural gas, for instance -- installed on apartment and office buildings. This would help address the problem of building big new power plants and transmission lines on extremely limited real estate.

None of these ideas can be implemented on a large-scale basis without a major investment. A full smart-grid conversion would cost tens of billions of dollars for New York City alone. It remains to be seen who, if anyone, will be willing to pay for such a change. New York consumers famously resist rate hikes, and the state's coffers are running low. Even with sufficient funds, it's not clear whether the system could be installed in time before the grid's demands finally outgrow supply, as ever more of its aging components collapse under pressure. The easier path would be to continue replacing the grid piecemeal., copper wire by copper wire. But this won't do in the long run. Without the smart grid, more and bigger blackouts could lie ahead as demand grows in a system with limited capacity for expanded supply.

The United States is expected to see a 29 percent growth in electricity demands between now and 2030. But that number doesn't take into account a vast new market that could open up: electric vehicles. As hybrid cars are growing in popularity and new plug-in models are soon to be introduced, the futurists of today are envisioning a century in which all transportation is powered by electricity. The  whole energy system, they believe, will be unified under the flow of electrons.

This seems almost laughable given the current fragility of the U.S. electricity supply system. How, I wondered, can we confidently move toward an all-electric future if we're operating on a Third World electricity grid? One way or another, by necessity if not by choice, the archaic system of plants and cables has to be rebuilt. Will it be replaced with the same old twentieth-century fossil fuels, mechanical switches, and copper wires? Or will we opt for a smart grid and usher in a generation of clean, sustainable technologies?

"The mind can not conceive," said Thomas Edison in 1916, "what man will do in the twentieth century with his chained lightning." And a lot we did, to be sure.

But now it's time to start conceiving what we'll do in the 21st century -- and there's no time to waste.

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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Amanda Little on the farm.

If you pinned a map of the United States to a dartboard, Kansas would be the bull's-eye. Smack dab in the center of the country, the Sunflower State is one of America's most productive agricultural hotbeds -- the fifth-biggest producer of crops and livestock in the country. More than 90 percent of the state consists of farmland endowed thousands of years ago with rich glacial loam. This fertile topsoil is no longer as robust as it once was, having offered up its nutrients season after season, decade after decade, century after century, to produce great bounties of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, hay, and sunflowers. I could almost sense the exhaustion of the land as I drove through the back roads of northeastern Kansas one chilly November morning -- past sagging wooden farmhouses silvered by age and weather, barbed-wire fences with listing wooden posts, general stores and swinging-door saloons, a Native American heritage museum commemorating the Kansa tribes that once roamed and tilled these prairies, and mile after desolate mile of denuded farmland.

It wasn't that this dormant soil was incapable of producing -- on the contrary, during the previous summer and fall it had yielded one of the most plentiful harvests in Kansas history, many times greater than the bounty of a century earlier, when the land was more inherently fertile. But now, like an aging bull receiving shots of testosterone, this well-worn ground reaps the benefits of modern chemistry -- and good old-fashioned fossil fuels.

That late fall morning, thousands of tractors combed the Kansas countryside, priming the soil for next spring's planting with a "booster shot" of nutrients that would turn the weary earth into some of the world's highest-producing farmland. That chemical nourishment, also known as fertilizer, has transformed America's economy over the last century, and expanded the global population, too, by vastly increasing the food supply.

Nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous are the three most common nutrients in the fertilizers applied to American farmlands, nitrogen being by far the most prevalent. The main form of nitrogen fertilizer is known as anhydrous ammonia, and natural gas is its primary feedstock. Nitrogen fertilizers take many forms, ranging from the Miracle-Gro sold at your local Home Depot to the industrial-strength anhydrous ammonia that's used on tens of millions of acres of U.S. corn and wheat crops.  Each year, American farmers apply 6.2 billion pounds of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers to their croplands.

Ken McCauley's corn fields getting their booster shots.

To see fossil fuels in action on the farm, I paid a visit to Kansas corn grower Ken McCauley.  His vast tracts of land—rolling stretches of bone-colored soil—reminded me of nothing so much as the ocean with their sheer expanse.

To distribute his fertilizer, Ken hitched a 2.2-ton canister of nitrogen to the back of his apple-green John Deere tractor. A series of tubes and wires connected the tractor and fertilizer tank to a mechanism that looked like a giant rake spanning eight rows of corn. The dozens of prongs at the end of the rake were tipped with knifelike cutters that would pierce into the soil, opening it up so that hoses embedded within the blades could blast the chemical nutrients six inches into the ground. The liquid fertilizer freezes into golf ball–sized lumps in the wintertime that then thaw and release into the soil in the spring. It's best to inject the fertilizer in the late fall or early winter, Ken explained, so that the soil doesn't have to be opened up in the spring, which would release precious moisture.

I climbed up into a plush passenger seat in the tractor cab next to Ken's foreman, Nick James. Though the seats were mounted on shock absorbers, they still bounced and pitched as we trundled over the rough, hilly ground. I grabbed the dash to steady myself as we began to move slowly down the field.

Maneuvering a tractor throughout a cornfield is a little like steering a ship through waves -- it's hard to keep the vessel in a straight line on the sloping, bumpy earth and then to repeat that straight line exactly as you traverse the rest of the field, without overlapping any areas on which you've already sprayed nitrogen. Conventional tractors routinely overlap on fertilizer application, wasting precious resources. Ken is able to overcome this costly human error because his tractor drives itself. "See the GPS system?" Nick asked, pointing to a small round blinking device on the dashboard. That device was feeding signals to a satellite monitoring the position of the tractor on the field. The satellite was then automatically feeding those location coordinates into an autopilot system that steers the tractor on a precise course, never double-applying fertilizer to the same patch of soil.

This tractor is high-tech.

Ken's tractor is also outfitted with new computer software that enables him to vary the distribution of nutrients according to soil quality. Ken estimates that about 10 to 15 percent of the fertilizers applied on U.S. farms actually go to waste because they're blindly doused on areas of soil that in fact have sufficient levels of nitrogen. Other agriculture experts I interviewed put that number even higher, saying that up to 35 percent of the nitrogen typically sprayed on farmland goes to waste, draining out of the soil and polluting nearby bodies of water.

As natural gas and oil prices surged in recent years, the costs of fertilizers nearly quadrupled. In 2005, when natural gas prices were low, a 2.2-ton tank of anhydrous ammonia cost under $400. When gas prices shot up in 2008, that same tank of fertilizer cost nearly $2,000. To fertilize Ken's 4,000 acres, that added up to an expense of roughly $500,000 a year -- about 40 percent of his total operating costs of $1.2 million a year. Even with soaring costs, he explained, "fertilizer is the most economical thing we do because it gives you your production on the top end." In other words, while Ken spent nearly half a million dollars on fertilizers in 2008, these additives still created significantly more value in enhanced crop production.

What would happen if Ken cut out chemical fertilizers altogether? "If you don't put your fertilizer on," he told me, "you'll cut your yields by half or more. No farmer is going to stop using nitrogen altogether. Look at the poor countries -- when you travel to places that don't use the fertilizer you'll see they're raising a third of the yield." He boiled the issue down to six words: "Nitrogen is yield. Yield is nitrogen." And yield, he added, is everything. "Worst thing that can happen to a farmer is getting a reputation for having a low yield. It's like being a race car with a lawnmower engine or a newspaper that's always a week behind." 

Sustainable farming advocates such as author Michael Pollan put forth a different vision for agriculture in America: total reform of the food system, beginning with the dismantling of large single-crop farms and the end of fossil fuel–based inputs. They argue that farmland can be naturally replenished through farming practices including the application of animal manure, which is high in nitrogen. Pollan describes a virtuous cycle of nutrient recycling between crops and animals:

But, he maintains, simply removing fertilizers and other petrochemical additives from industrial farming is not the whole answer: "Only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving  it around," Pollan wrote in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. For that reason, he added, the large-scale organic farms that produce most of the organic products in your grocery store are, just like conventional megafarms, "floating on a sinking sea of petroleum."

Reformers want to see a network of small and midsized organic farms that is organized into regional cooperatives. These aggregates would enable small farms to serve local markets but think like big farms, working together to make bulk purchases of equipment and aggregate distribution systems. They want to see crops and animals reintegrated into the same farms, naturally feeding and fertilizing one another, correcting the current system in which cattle, chickens, and pigs are concentrated on huge feedlots, producing an oversupply of nitrogen-rich manure far removed from croplands.  

On the other hand, most agronomists will tell you that we can't rapidly shift to growing food on a global level without chemical fertilizer and fossil fuel–powered machinery. The United Nations has predicted an increase in fertilizer use worldwide of roughly 35 percent by 2030. Jeffrey Sachs, the United Nations special advisor who wrote The End of Poverty, told me plainly that fertilizers will be necessary to human survival for the foreseeable future: "We will not feed 6.7 billion people on the planet without chemical fertilizers." On weathered tropical soils like those of farmlands in large portions of Africa, says Sachs, fertilizers will play a key role. "In all the world but Africa, farmers are using around 100 kilograms per hectare on average of fertilizer. In Africa it's essentially zero, which is one of the real reasons for the massive hunger there."

Perhaps the challenge, then, is not so much to go cold turkey on modern farming methods as it is to significantly improve methods for getting the greatest amount of food production using the least amount of fuel and fertilizer. With the world's population poised to hit 7 billion by 2012, we can't get started soon enough.

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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MaassPhoto courtesy Erinn Hartman/KnopfNew York Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Maass spent eight years following the flow of oil around the world, from fields in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Azerbaijan to corporate boardrooms. His new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, uses stories from these locales to show why the lucrative resource tends to be very bad for the people who live above it.

We spoke recently about his reporting on this resource curse, and about a strategy he proposes for environmental activists—sourcing gasoline to show buyers the violence their gas money supports.

Q. You call oil “black oxygen.” Unpack that phrase a little.

A.Oil makes our cars move. It makes the planes fly. It’s in our clothes. It’s in our food because it’s in fertilizers. It’s in chemicals. It is just absolutely everywhere in modern existence. It also is everywhere in terms of politics. It’s a major preoccupation of the governments that need it, and it’s the major preoccupation of the governments that have it.

Beyond that, it is a major factor in terms of pollution that occurs in the world today. Even when oil and natural gas are operating the way they are supposed to be, they still cause a lot of damage to the earth. Burning them puts a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. We all know where that’s leading us.

In my book I describe oil not only as black oxygen but also as like gravity, because it’s invisible in a way. From the moment it comes out of the ground until the moment it goes into our gas tank, we do not see it. Yet, like gravity, it influences everything we do.

Q. What makes the oil industry so much more harmful than others?

A.It’s an extractive industry. As with all extractive industries, the word itself tells you quite a lot: you’re gouging into the earth to get something, and that’s never a gentle process.

Second, unlike many other natural resources, oil is really concentrated and really valuable. Whoever owns a certain oilfield--and it usually ends up being a government or a royal family--has an extraordinary amount of concentrated money at their disposal. It’s not a resource like fertile land that is spread over many, many thousands of acres owned by many, many people. It’s not like manufacturing industries where there a lot of workers and a lot of owners and there are products that come out. This is really, really concentrated power. The cliché is that absolute power corrupts and corrupts absolutely. Oil can have a very similar effect because the possessor of oil possesses a country’s destiny.

Q. Does it matter where I buy my gas, or are all oil companies equally harmful? And what about state-owned oil companies like Brazil’s Petrobas?

A.I’ve looked at that question a lot. The more you look at it, there’s something objectionable about pretty much all the oil we consume. If the oil comes from Nigeria, there’s a war being fought over oil in Nigeria. If the oil comes from Ecuador, there’s a tremendous amount of environmental damage that’s coming from that oil. Ironically, most of Ecuador’s oil that goes to the United States goes to California, one of the most environmentally conscious states in the country. If the oil comes from Saudi Arabia, the income from it has gone to feed a lot of Islamic extremism.

Even if the oil is from Canada--which is actually the largest supplier of oil to the United States--a fair amount of Canadian oil comes from tar sands. There you have to cook the earth by using other forms of energy--natural gas, for example--and a lot of water. Canada is a great country politically, and there’s no corruption really associated with the Canadian oil. But there is an environmental toll.

Q. Your book focuses social and human-rights costs of oil extraction. How did climate change play into your reporting with political leaders, executives, and workers?

A.The climate argument has been made really well and continues to be made really well. But I was most interested in writing about the social costs of oil, meaning human rights, violence, and poverty.
So when I went to Nigeria, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, etc., I focused on how people’s lives been affected by the oil that they export.

And honestly, the environmental issues for them are not the same ones they are for us. When I went to the Niger Delta I had to get permission and an aide from the warlord, because if I didn’t have his protection I’d be kidnapped in an instant. We took a canoe up the creeks and it was a terrible situation with wells dripping oil into the water, with flares all over the place, with fighting going on. I spent the night in one totally destitute village. It has no running water or electricity, it has no healthcare, nothing.

Right across from the creek is a multi-billion dollar Shell natural gas processing facility, with massive flares. In the west, flaring is very tightly regulated. In Nigeria, it’s supposed to be but it’s not. At this particular Soku facility, which is actually shut down at the moment due to fighting, there are massive flares going off 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Huge, huge flares. This is consistent throughout the Niger Delta.

One of the reasons flaring is restricted in the United States and elsewhere is not simply because it emits a lot of greenhouse gases, but because it’s incredibly harmful to human health. The toxins and the chemicals that are emitted in flaring are tremendous. So for these villagers in the Niger Delta, the climate issue for them wasn’t that in 20 or 30 years the world temperatures will have increased by another degree and weather patterns will have changed slightly. The climate issue for them is that they were breathing toxic chemicals as a result of this flare that was 40 yards across the creek.

Q. A few years ago the Chicago Tribune published an impressive piece of reporting (Paul Salopek’s “A tank of gas, a world of trouble”) in which a reporter traced gasoline from a suburban gas station back into all the places it came from. What did you make of that?

A. What he did was fantastic. There’s myth that’s perpetrated by the oil industry, and accepted by pretty much everyone, that it’s impossible to trace the oil that you put into your tank. Shell or Exxon say their oil comes from a lot of different sources, it’s mixed together, and it’s just not tracked down to the local level. They say it’s impossible to do. Paul Salopek said, “Let me check into that.” He found out that it is possible to source gasoline that you put into your tank and find out where it actually comes from. He really blew the lid off this myth.

This knowledge needs to get out. When you don’t know the origin of the product you’re buying, you can’t possibly care about the human-rights abuses or the pollution at the point of origin. That goes for tennis shoes as well as oil. By sourcing it, there is a lever that environmental activist groups can use to make people aware on a very local level of what is in their gas tank and what the price is beyond the $2.50 or $3.00 that they are forking over per gallon. It’s a lever that I don’t think environmental activist groups are fully aware of. Who knows where it will get them, but it could be useful.

Q. Is sourcing gasoline still really difficult to do?

A. Salopek had to get some proprietary data in order to get the information. But he’s just one reporter. If he can do it then an environmental group could too, I would think.

Q. What about solutions to the oil problem—do you have any?

A. I do, but none that are original. There are lots of plans and a lot technology that make a lot of sense. The real problem for us isn’t solutions--the problem is embracing the solutions. The political leadership of this country, perhaps spurred on by the citizenry, needs to actually take the steps of investing in conservation, in efficiency, in renewable energy … the list goes on.

The main problem is motivating people, and motivating political leadership. Not just the White House, which seems quite motivated, but all of the interest groups that it has to deal with. All of the regional interest groups it has to deal with. That’s the problem area.

I don’t have an answer for getting from here to there. In writing the book I hoped to make people understand oil more, and therefore support the kinds of changes necessary to get us to a post-oil future.

The size of each country on this map reflects the relative size of its oil reserves. The colors reflect different level of oil consumption (per country, not per capita).

Click to enlarge.

Courtesy Aaron Pava of CivicActions

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The action at the Talladega Superspeedway.At dawn on a hazy autumn morning, the rising sun spilled over the steel grandstands of the Talladega Superspeedway like foam from a cracked can of Bud. This image likely came to mind because I was lying beneath a tarp in a scrubby Alabama meadow carpeted with empty beer cans -- an area known as Talladega's Family Parking Field C. The 2.66-mile Talladega racetrack, located about 50 miles east of Birmingham, is the world's second-largest car-racing venue, with a mile-long grandstand built to accommodate more than 140,000 fans. Around my L.L. Bean tent were some 40,000 parked vehicles, most of them flatbeds, SUVs, Winnebagos, and camper vans filled with groggy pilgrims rising to greet a day that would bring them the nation's biggest semiannual NASCAR racing event.

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing claims to hold "17 of the top 20 most-attended U.S. sporting events." I had come to see what may rank among the world's most lavish displays of fuel consumption: 40 hot rods, each getting about 5 miles per gallon, hurtling around a strip of asphalt in an infinite loop. This was my first visit to a NASCAR event, and I admit I came with a certain lack of regard for its premise: burning huge amounts of fuel and rubber for the sole purpose of driving around in circles. The ritual seemed careless to me at a time of war in the Middle East, unchecked global warming, and soaring energy prices. But hours later I would leave Talladega with a less skeptical take on the NASCAR phenomenon and a better understanding not just of carburetors and checkered flags but of who we are as a nation -- a thrill-seeking, speed-loving, self-propelled, forward-charging culture.

Talladega is NASCAR's XXL, Big Gulp–sized speedway -- the most treacherous and most exciting. Its long straightaways and unusually wide track allow for cars to build up to and sustain speeds of more than 200 mph and to run three or four abreast. Racers don't brake for turns at Talladega the way they do at smaller tracks; instead they mash their gas pedals to the floor. These conditions raise fans' expectations for the "big one" -- a massive, harrowing multicar wreck.

NASCAR grew out of the 1930s Prohibition era in America's Deep South, when rural bootleggers rigged standard-looking cars with high-powered engines to outrun the law. The forefathers of NASCAR, wrote historian Neal Thompson, were "a bunch of motherless, dirt-poor southern teens driving with the devil in jacked-up Fords full of corn whiskey -- the best means of escape a southern boy could wish for."

*

Field C, which a week earlier had housed only wildflowers and Alabama Longleaf pines, was now a sprawling tribal village with makeshift neighborhoods and orderly avenues.

Families had been dwelling there for days before the race, many erecting well-appointed encampments with awnings trimmed in Christmas lights, lawn chairs, picnic tables, movie projectors, grills, and coolers stocked with cold American beer. Hoisted above the camps were Confederate flags and tributes to the denizens' favorite racers.

I had awoken to the ambient stench of beer-soaked crabgrass, cigarette butts, fire pits, and the charbroiled remains of last night's cookouts. I groped for soap and toothpaste and made my way to a public trailer marked "$5 Showers." En route, I caught sight of my neighbor shuffling out of his tent wearing nothing but his briefs. He nodded hello, and as he leaned over a propane stove to flip his pancakes, I saw the numeral 8 shaven expertly into his thicket of back hair -- a brash, intimate, and wholehearted display of fan loyalty. This tribute to Dale Earnhardt Jr. (whose number has since changed to 88) was a single-digit poem about America's devotion to speed.

Little and her NASCAR-savvy guide in front of the grandstands.At 1:00 p.m. -- just after the national anthem blared over the loudspeakers and a squadron of B-1 bombers buzzed overhead -- the green flag dropped. In seconds the chorus of twelve-cylinder combustion engines was echoing through the grandstands with a collective shriek as though the universe was being torn in two. Speed rumbled through the ground and into my bones, and my heart knocked against my rib cage. The air filled with the acrid odor of burnt rubber, hot asphalt, and spilled fuel.

For an up-close, under-the-hood look at the action, I made my way into the pit -- the restricted area in the center of the track where the cars are fueled and tuned between laps.

Each of the drivers has a pit crew of more than a dozen mechanics responsible for gassing the cars, changing the tires, cooling the engines, and assessing track and vehicle conditions throughout the race. The mechanics were outfitted in helmets and matching Crayola-colored jumpsuits -- cherry red, royal blue, canary yellow. Their polished metal tools--wrenches, jacks, pressurized gas pumps shaped like giant baby bottles--glinted in the sunlight.

Between pit stops, as mechanics lounged on spare tires and casually dragged on cigarettes, I pressed them for some answers about NASCAR's fuel consumption. The cars get anywhere from 4 to 7 miles per gallon, which means that in a 500-mile race such as this one, averaging 5 mpg, each car would consume roughly 100 gallons of fuel. Multiply that by 43 cars per race, and each event as a whole consumes approximately 4,375 gallons of gasoline (assuming all cars finish). With about 96 U.S. NASCAR races per year spread out across several divisions, that totals over 1 million gallons (factoring practice rounds and adjusting for some shorter races).

You also have to factor in the tires for every race. Several gallons of oil go into the production of a synthetic rubber tire. One car competing in a NASCAR event burns through 40 to 80 tires per race. Additionally, each team has a convoy of 18-wheelers that hauls its race cars across the country from track to track, cumulatively traveling hundreds of thousands of miles per year. Fully loaded, these trucks get around 4.5 miles per gallon, which means that millions of gallons are consumed in just getting the cars to the races.

These numbers are small when compared to the volume of fuel that goes into America's military endeavors or our daily commutes, let alone our total oil demand. What's fascinating about this particular form of fuel consumption is that its purpose is sheer entertainment. This is gas consumption as an art form.

Drivers and crews pause before the race to say the Pledge of Allegiance.Looking up at the grandstands, I was struck by the appearance of the crowd. For all the wealth of competing logos and gear available to them, by far the stand-out choice among the Talladega fans was patriotic garb: the grandstands looked like a pointillist painting in red, white, and blue. I approached one bystander, a 63-year-old account manager at a North Carolina carpet company who had been coming to NASCAR races since they were held on dirt tracks in the 1950s, and asked him about this apparent connection between stock car racing and patriotism. "Those fellas are fast, proud, fearless go-getters with rebel hearts," he said, nodding toward the track. "That about sums up the American spirit, don't it?"

I'd take it a bit further to say that no consumer product more wholly embodies the American ethos than the automobile -- "the heartbeat of America," as Chevrolet famously dubbed it. The word derives from the Greek root auto, "self," and the Latin mobile, "moving"--words that could be said to define the American dream: we each propel ourselves toward the life and destiny of our own choosing. In these individual pursuits, we also directly consume on average 1.5 gallons of gasoline per person per day. This fuel consumption -- roughly quadruple that of the average European -- is due in part to the great distances traveled in our sprawled-out, auto-dependent lifestyles, but also to the fact that we have some of the lowest fuel economy standards of any industrial nation -- lower even than those of our up-and-coming rival China. All of which contributes to a habit of domestic consumption that far exceeds our ability to produce domestic oil.  

Our penchant for long-distance driving is not surprising in a geographically expansive country that now has nearly 4 million miles of heavily subsidized, well-maintained roadways, low gas taxes, and a hobbled rail system -- a country in which driving has become, on the whole, significantly more convenient than public transit. Even in the summer of 2008, when gas prices hit record highs, some three-quarters of Americans vacationed in cars. According to the Department of Transportation, the average American driver travels between 30 and 40 miles per day or nearly 14,000 miles a year -- the distance around the equator every 1.8 years.

Packing up my sagging tent in Field C at Talladega, I struck up a conversation with an amiable family from Missouri camped out nearby. The four boys, aged 12 to 19, and their parents had driven 600 miles from home in an RV they'd named "Bigfoot." It's a voyage they make every year because, as one of the kids told me, "Getting here is half the fun."  

I asked how much their fuel bills -- in a Winnebago that gets 8 mpg -- had been affected by rising gas prices. The father, a tall, bearded man in his fifties cooking a hot dog on a fork over his smoldering fire pit, answered, "It'll cost you. But we adapt -- cutting back on the restaurant stops, maybe going direct instead of taking the scenic route." But, he conceded, if oil prices keep going up, eventually Bigfoot may not be able to make the journey.

As I surveyed the sea of campers and Winnebagos in Field C, I wondered what would happen to this scene if oil stopped flowing tomorrow. The answer, simply, is that NASCAR would go with it, along with a piece of the American identity and a slice of the American dream.

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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The "Cajun Express" oil rig, tapping the black gold deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico.The oil field known as "Jack" is located 175 miles off the coast of Louisiana, below 7,200 feet of water and another 30,000 feet of seabed, occupying a geological layer formed in the Cenozoic Era more than 60 million years ago. This layer -- the "lower tertiary" -- lies deeper under water than any other Gulf of Mexico oil discovery, which is one reason why many in the industry initially dismissed it as too remote to exploit. But in 2006, Chevron defied the odds when its engineers drilled a test well at Jack and discovered that oil could flow from this ancient sediment at profitable rates. Their success opened up a new drilling frontier -- a monster oil patch holding between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. It was hailed as the largest discovery in the United States since 1968 -- a discovery potentially big enough to boost national oil reserves up to 50 percent.

Since then, global oil companies have been pouring billions of dollars into these so-called ultradeep waters of the Gulf in pursuit of the region's buried treasure. Jack is among a cluster of nearly a dozen new fields there -- including "Blind Faith," "Great White," and "Cascade" -- that companies are now tapping in waters from 4,000 to 8,000 feet deep and in sedimentary rock extending between 1 and 6 miles below the seabed.

Coaxing oil from such great depths poses unprecedented risks for oil drilling -- and that's why I decided to visit the area. I wanted to witness firsthand the world's most extreme drilling territory, the Mount Everest of oil frontiers, where the industry has to tackle the tallest odds and gravest circumstances to eke out new discoveries.

Little, psyching up for the two-hour trip to the rig.

I set out at dawn on an April morning in a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. The sky above the New Orleans heliport was a pea-soup green, thick with rain and pitchfork lightning. I was traveling with a Chevron executive and three of his staffers, all of us wearing regulation jumpsuits, hard hats, and steel-toed boots. The chopper lurched and shuddered in the squalls, but my travel companions nodded to the pilot to press on -- this was typical weather for the Louisiana coast, and routine flying conditions.

The Gulf yields 25 percent of all U.S. oil production, and is home to more than 3,700 production platforms, most of them located in relatively shallow waters of under 2,000 feet. Many geologists believe that the ultradeep regions of the Gulf -- those covered by waters greater than about 4,000 feet -- hold more untapped oil reserves than any other parts of the Western world. Today, offshore rigs are capable of operating in 10,000 feet of water and boring through 30,000 feet of seabed (twice the depth they could manage a decade ago). One rig sits atop each field, thrusting its tentacles into up to a dozen wells throughout the bed. The rig pulls up oil and then pumps it back to onshore refineries via underwater pipelines.

From my helicopter window, the offshore rig known as the "Cajun Express" looked like a child's toy -- a multicolored Erector Set floating on a buoy. But once we landed and I stepped out into the salty, sunny Gulf air, the rig gave an entirely different impression, awesomely vast and imposing.

It doesn't look so small now, does it?

We entered the boxy three-story cement building that houses the dorm rooms and offices. So austere were the surroundings -- and so far removed from civilization -- that I found myself heartened by the familiar details of a Snickers wrapper crumpled on the floor, a dust bunny underneath a desk, and a family snapshot tacked to an office wall -- evidence that people actually do live and work on this floating city.

Rising from the concrete floor and up through the bottoms of my boots was a strange vibration. "The thrusters," explained Paul Siegele, then director of Chevron's offshore drilling divisions. Thrusters, he told me, are gigantic engines at each corner of the platform relentlessly pushing and pulling against the ocean currents. Picture yourself standing in shallow waters at a beach and incessantly shifting your weight to stay balanced as the waves surge and the tides ebb and flow. Thrusters do an extreme version of this in order to keep the rig "on station," meaning within six inches in any direction of the drill's charted entry point into the seabed below. Anchors can't be used to moor drilling vessels at these depths -- the motion of the ocean would strain even the strongest of moorings, and rigs need to be able to motor to safety in the event of a hurricane.

The thruster solution is ingenious, but it carries an astonishing energy burden: these 9,500-horsepower engines use a combined total of 27 megawatts of power when running at full capacity -- enough to power about 21,000 homes. The generators that power the thrusters and keep the lights on, the electric drill turning, and the computers humming in this village at sea require about 40,000 gallons of diesel per day. It's roughly the amount of fuel that 13,300 Hummers consume in a typical day of driving.

You have to burn fossil fuels to harvest them -- that's a reality in any drilling scenario -- but the ratio of energy invested to energy gained gets slimmer as the drilling conditions get more extreme. (By "energy invested" I'm referring to all fossil fuels used to discover, drill, pump, and refine the oil and transport it to market.) During the glory days of U.S. oil production in the 1930s, an investment of 1 barrel of oil would yield a return of about 100 barrels. By 1970, when oil deposits had become scarcer and more difficult to extract and refine, the ratio had shrunk by more than half: 40 barrels of oil gained for every 1 barrel invested. By 2005, as the industry faced ever-greater limits, the ratio had diminished still further: about 14 to 1. Returns will continue to diminish, some experts argue, until we reach a 1:1 ratio -- and that would spell the end of the petroleum era.

During a tour of the rig, Little gets a look at sections of the drill shaft.

Three out of four exploration wells in the ultra-deep region of the Gulf come up dry -- nerve-wracking odds when the wells cost $100 million apiece, or as much as 20 times what they cost on land.  And even if you hit pay dirt, there's no guarantee of profit: In the past decade, Chevron has abandoned nearly a quarter of the successful wells it has drilled because they wouldn't flow at profitable rates. Add to that the risks of hurricanes, powerful undersea currents that can cripple well shafts, and even routine equipment failures that can stymie operations on rigs that cost more than $500,000 a day to operate.

Given the vertiginous risks that plague ultra-deep drilling, it's sobering to think that this frontier holds the oil industry's best hope for finding new petroleum reserves. "The odds are incredibly low that we're going to hit some fabulous new discovery on land," Matthew Simmons, a leading investor and industry analyst, told me. "Everybody's looking to the deep sea for big new finds." To an outsider, it's at once impressive and baffling to watch engineers burrow five miles into the earth for oil. "It has all the audacity and technological complexity of launching a space shuttle," as Simmons put it.

If Chevron is going to throw a billion dollars into wells in this high-risk, deep-sea region -- many of them doomed to failure -- wouldn't it make more sense to invest in the inexhaustible, greener technologies that will likely replace fossil fuels? Not anytime soon, according to Siegele: "Do you fly on planes? Do you drive a car? Do you use FedEx and eat imported food?" he challenged me. "What do you think delivers those products and moves those jets?" Siegele had a point: Even as innovators have been producing breakthroughs in clean cars, green buildings and renewable energy and efficiency, American oil demand on the whole has been holding steady in recent years, not declining. And even if America were to slash its oil consumption, industrial growth in China and India is pushing global petroleum demand ever higher. "So long as people need oil," Siegele told me, "we'll find a way to supply it."

Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry: petroleum reserves often seemed too remote or too expensive to exploit over the last century, yet engineers invariably managed to come up with better, cheaper drilling methods. "Predicting peak oil," Siegele told me, "is almost like predicting peak technology" -- an exercise that to him seems inherently small-minded, even absurd. As for global warming, he believes technology will triumph here, too: we'll find a way to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, rendering fossil fuels harmless to the climate.

I found the whole enterprise of deep-sea drilling doggedly ambitious, but also seemingly desperate -- like an addict forcing a syringe into the earth's innermost veins. How did it come to this -- to scenarios as remote and arduous as the five-mile undersea wells drilled by the Cajun Express? How did a resource that is now so hard to come by in America become the basis of our economic survival?

This piece was excerpted and adapted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells-Our Ride to the Renewable Future, as well as from a feature published in Wired.

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The power grid: more feeble than you think.The trouble started on an August afternoon in a remote field in northern Ohio, miles from any town large enough to be marked on a standard road atlas. The only trace of humanity hung above the trees—an electrical cable known as the Harding-Chamberlin Line, carrying 345,000 volts of power.

By 3:00 the air temperature had risen to 90 degrees, and the cable itself had reached nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit—roughly twice its average temperature. The aluminum core of the 3-inch-thick wire was expanding with the heat and beginning to sag.

Five hundred miles due east of that meadow I was sitting at my desk in New York City when, at 4:09 p.m., my computer suddenly shut down. The lights, music, and air-conditioning died. I heard a strange lurching sound as the elevator in my building froze with passengers trapped on board. I rushed to the window along with my officemates and was amazed to see traffic snarling to a halt up the entire length of Broadway as street signals went black. The Verizon landlines were dead and our cell phones had no signals. We hurried down eleven flights of stairs, into streets already thickening with crowds of evacuees. Storefronts, groceries, and cafés were darkened. Subway stations were emptying of travelers as word spread that the trains had no power and hundreds of people were stuck underground. It was 2003, and like most New Yorkers, we initially jumped to the same conclusion—another terrorist attack.

What had in fact happened to us, and to a majority of the residents of the metropolitan areas of New York, Newark, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, was a blackout—larger than any other blackout in recorded history. One of the greatest achievements in industrial engineering, the 93,600 miles of electrical cable known as the Eastern Interconnection, had been brought to its knees. All because of unseen events in that distant Ohio meadow where an overloaded wire had drooped into high tree branches and short-circuited, triggering a massive cascade effect throughout the aging power grid.

As night fell, I walked up to Times Square to see its flashing billboards snuffed out, leaving the commercial El Dorado quaint and sheepish. I passed the main post office building and Bryant Park, where thousands of stranded commuters were sprawled in a mass slumber party, using their suit jackets and briefcases as pillows. Candlelight flickered in apartment windows, and I looked up past the walls of darkened buildings at a sky so brilliant with stars I could make out the soft haze of the Milky Way and the faint pulses of orbiting satellites.

Before-and-after satellite images of the event tell the story. In the before picture there is a thick streak of foamy white across the northeastern portion of the United States and southeastern Canada. In the after is just a scattering of faint droplets, the rest absorbed into the blackness of space. Fifty million Americans were without power.

*

Little finds it's tough to break that addiction.Up to that point, I had spent most of my brief career as a journalist trying to gain a better understanding of the causes of just such events—an understanding of the strengths and vulnerabilities of America’s energy landscape.

Fancying myself an amateur gumshoe, I had traveled throughout the country, from Ashland, Ore., to Tampa Bay, Fla., to write about the architects and early adopters of emerging energy technologies that could provide alternatives to fossil fuels: solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, and hybrid-electric cars such as the Toyota Prius. I began studying and writing about the legislation that was being drafted (and blocked) to push these innovations into the mainstream. I began criticizing the federal government’s failure to take action on climate change and its unwillingness to encourage the development of clean, efficient, next-generation energy technologies.

But when the August 2003 blackout hit, I recognized one major blind spot in my understanding of energy. Nothing I’d learned in my reporting had quite prepared me for the feeling of utter helplessness and paralysis that a blackout of that scale would cause. It was the first time, for me and for millions of Americans, that the story of energy was conveyed in human terms. Here I was crisscrossing the country, chasing after innovators and wagging fingers at the government, but I’d completely neglected to examine the role of energy in my own life.

So one morning I took a small, quiet, but personally momentous tour around my office. My aim was to count the things in my midst that were, in one way or another, tied to fossil fuels.

Since nearly all plastics, polymers, inks, paints, fertilizers, and pesticides are made from petrochemicals, and all products are delivered to market by trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes, there was virtually nothing in my office—my body included—that wasn’t there because of fossil fuels.

There I sat at a desk made of Formica (a plastic), wearing a sweatshirt made of fleece (a polymer) over yoga pants made from Lycra (ditto), sipping coffee shipped from Zimbabwe, eating an apple trucked from Washington, surrounded by walls covered with oil-derived paints, jotting notes in petroleum-derived ink, typing words on a petrochemical keyboard into a computer powered by coal plants. Even the supposedly guilt-free whole-grain cereal I had for breakfast and the veggie burger I ate for lunch came from crops treated with oil-derived fertilizers. My purse yielded another trove of specimens: capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol made from acetaminophen (a substance, like many commercial pain relievers, that is refined from petroleum); glossy magazines and a packet of photographs printed with petrochemicals; mascara, lip balm, eyeliner, and perfume that, like most cosmetics, have key components derived from oil.

I had understood this intellectually before—that the energy landscape encompasses not just oil fields, coal mines, gas stations, and the vast network of copper wires that feeds electricity to our homes and offices. It’s also the cornfields in America’s heartland, the battlefields of Iraq, and the medical labs that produce penicillin, Novocain, chemotherapy drugs, and many other treatments and cures. It’s the cosmetics shelves and magazine racks in our drugstores. It’s the constantly humming, behind-the-scenes network of ships, planes, trains, and trucks that transport products to our store shelves. It’s even our own bodies, which we routinely drape in synthetic fabrics like spandex and nylon, and feed with crops that were fertilized by fossil fuels, and stitch up with plastic sutures.

Once I connected the dots between so many seemingly disparate elements of my life—my car, my clothes, my email, my makeup, my burger, even my health—I saw an energy landscape far more vast and complex than I’d ever imagined. I realized also that this thing I’d thought was a bad word—oil—was actually the source of many creature comforts I use and love, and many survival tools I need.

But if fossil fuels are a part of everything we do, how do we go about removing them from the picture? How can we kick America’s addiction to fossil fuels, given its sheer magnitude?

The father of a friend of mine who is now a successful businessman defined his approach to problem-solving in terms he learned through painful experience as a boy growing up on a farm in Ohio: When a cow gets stuck in a ditch, first, you have to get the cow out of the ditch.  Second, you have to figure out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, you have to figure out how to stop the cow from getting into the ditch in the future.  I want, like a majority of Americans today, to get myself out of the ditch of fossil-fuel dependence. But to do it right, I—and we—need to understand the roots of the problem, to understand how, during the 20th century, fossil fuels became so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our lives.

The story of America is, in sum, the story of a power trip; to understand it, I had to go on my own. In January 2007, I set out to explore the most extreme frontiers of our energy landscape—from its deepest wells to its tallest towers. I wanted to pull at the threads of connection between fossil fuels and everyday American life and see what places they led me to, however odd or unexpected. They led me, as it turned out, to some very strange spots, from deep-sea oil rigs to Kansas cornfields, NASCAR tracks to dank city manholes, Pentagon offices to my local produce aisle.

My goal as I describe this journey is not to cast judgment on what has gone wrong in America’s energy landscape—as I have said, I’m guilty myself of buying into and even relishing it. Instead, I want simply to understand this landscape, and to celebrate its successes for all their unintended consequences. It was, after all, American ingenuity that led us down the path of fossil fuel dependence. 

And it's that same ingenuity that can change our future course and lead us to an actual, factual “green” future free from fossil fuels.

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web's leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

Traffic is essentially "an engineering issue," says author Tom Vanderbilt. "But there's also a layer of culture."

That layer of culture determines, to a large extent, how traffic can become a problem. This idea is explored in Vanderbilt's 2008 book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), a Planetizen Top Book of the year. He recently expanded on that idea for a discussion about traffic put on by Zocalo Public Square in (where better?) Los Angeles. A write-up of the event and video of the discussion with UCLA researcher Eric Morris is also available.

Tom Vanderbilt discusses his book Traffic as UCLA researcher and New York Times Freakonomics blogger Eric Morris listens.Courtesy Planetizen.comPeople in L.A. love these sorts of discussions. We've got a mess of a traffic problem in this city -- from intense congestion to freeway domination to a late-blooming public transit system. Something about events focused on transportation and traffic just seems to pull people together here, almost like a support group. "Hi, I'm Nate, and I have a problem with traffic congestion."

The human impact of traffic is easy to see, but less apparent is the human cause -- a point made crystal clear by Vanderbilt's work. Obviously it's humans causing traffic, but what about humans is actually the source? What about how we act, interact, and live makes a bunch of drivers into a traffic jam? Vanderbilt's book cites a lot of data that offers some indication. The data shows how men cause more of a certain kind of accident than women, and how teenagers cause more crashes when there are other teens in the car with them, and a variety of other demographic- and behavior-based conclusions. These may be fairly straightforward, but Vanderbilt's discussion brings up what may be a more important if underappreciated cause of most traffic: the lack of an interactive social structure in driving.

"Traffic has a lack of a feedback system," says Venderbilt. "There's no repeat interaction."

So if I never have to see you again on the road, am I really going to be as courteous as I would be if I saw you every day? Most people probably want to think yes, but their actions say no.

Sittin' in Silicon Valley.richardmasoner via flickrVanderbilt cites the work of psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who researches why regular people can be convinced to do terrible or evil things. One of his explanations is a concept he calls de-individuation -- the act of disregarding other people as individuals. Vanderbilt draws the connection to traffic, where it's not a person driving a car next to you in traffic, but just a car. It's just a box on wheels -- and it's in your way.

Interaction between drivers is seen by many as a way to improve safety, but also a way to improve efficiency. If people have an idea about what others are going to do before they do it, they can react accordingly, or at least not be surprised. It's also the principle behind the move to remove signs from roadways. By removing that reliance on clearly defined rules, people are forced to fall back on their highly evolved but incredibly elemental communication skills. In the end, it's all about being cognizant of each other and working together to get where we all need to go. After all, that's not a finite resource. I can get to my job on time just as well as anyone else on the road, and my success does not limit theirs.

Maybe what we really need is a support group. Or at least the realization that, as fellow Planetizen Interchange blogger Josh Stephens once wrote, we're not in traffic, we are traffic.

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In November 2006, Michelle Conlin began a year-long experiment in extreme sustainability, resolving to burn no fossil fuels, produce no trash, and eat only food grown within 250 miles of her Greenwich Village home. She gave up nearly all shopping and learned to use cloth diapers for her 2-year-old daughter. She took up bicycling and rode a scooter to work. Describing her earlier self as “espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping” and a “take-out junkie,” she gave up coffee (with some lapses) and to-go food. Eventually she gave up electricity at home, relying on candles in her 9th-floor apartment and lots of stair climbing.

Michelle, Isabella, and Colin, still smiling.Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

Conlin, a 42-year-old reporter at Business Week, had no blog, book deal, or film project to send her on this journey of sacrifice and self-denial. What she had was a husband.

By fortune or misfortune, Conlin is married to Colin Beavan, the self-described No Impact Man. He cooked up the No Impact Man stunt as fodder for a book of the same name, out Sept. 1. He keeps a No Impact Man blog. And a film crew recorded his year for No Impact Man the movie, also released next month.

Beavan, 45, says he undertook the project to learn if his own lifestyle could become part of a solution to the world’s environmental crises. In writing about his motivation, he says he was afraid of becoming “that brand of liberal who whines about the world but doesn’t actually do anything about it.”

“If I were still a student, I’d probably march against my adult self,” he quips.

Hence, the bathtub full of laundry and the winter dinners of local cabbage. Also, because of the deforestation crisis, no toilet paper.

While Beavan gets all the attention and the superhero nickname, his wife and their 2-year-old daughter, Isabella, are dragged along for the un-motorized ride. That’s a good thing for the film, because Conlin emerges as the most vivid character for the simple reason that she struggles to make such drastic changes in her life.

Beavan, despite his claims that he was a do-nothing liberal, seems like he was just waiting for a reason to build a kitchen compost bin, mix up natural cleaning supplies, start buying groceries at the Union Square farmers market, etc, etc. The movie shows him reflecting on and defending the project, it shows him visibly losing weight over the year, but you don’t really see him struggle.

Conlin is more sympathetic because she misses coffee and tires of eating local root vegetables. She thinks, understandably, that a year is a long time to go without buying new clothes. While No Impact Husband devotes much of his day to cooking, cleaning, and making the experiment work, she keeps her day job. The filmmakers play up Conlin’s “espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping” characterization, but it’s still clear this is difficult for her.

The movie opens with Beavan backstage at The Colbert Report, practicing different ways of explaining his shtick. This is telling, as a lot of the movie is about the couple explaining the project. A New York Times profile about them serves as a plot development, because they’re shocked at how strongly and negatively readers react to their project.

“I didn’t quite get why people hated us,” says Conlin. She visits Eating Liberally blogger Kerry Trueman, who wrote a scathing post about No Impact Man before softening her view of the enterprise.

“This really touches a nerve for people,” Trueman says. “Aside from making people feel guilty and defensive about their consumer habits, people are very traumatized if you suggest that they should make do without something.”

Others weren’t angry but dismissive, leading Beavan to complain about the Times profile headline, “The Year Without Toilet Paper.”

Beavan holds Isabella at the Union Square Greenmarket. Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

“What if we called it the year I lost 20 pounds without going to the gym once?” he says. “Or the year we didn’t watch TV and became much better parents as a result? Or if we called it the year we ate locally and seasonally and it ended up reversing my wife’s pre-diabetic condition?”

But if the project is meant to get people talking—and Beavan says it is—it succeeded. Colbert, Good Morning America, and a slew of other media called to get his story. Sony/Columbia bought the right to rework the story as a drama that could, reportedly, include Will Smith. (Weird, I know.)

At some point toward the end of his project Beavan makes the discovery that he isn’t alone in working toward sustainability. He visits a project to reintroduce oysters in the Hudson River and an industrial cleanup project in the Bronx and says, “There is this network of people who have been working on this stuff forever.”

It shouldn’t have taken a year-long experiment to figure that out, but Beavan understands that the publicity gods reward stunts like No Impact Year. To my knowledge, the Bronx cleanup people haven’t been invited on Good Morning America.

Beavan undertook the project expecting that it would launch a more politically engaged stage in his career. (He has a Ph.D. in electronic engineering and wrote previous books about the history of forensics and D-Day.) After learning that 12,000 diesel trucks a day pass through the Bronx neighborhood he visited, he reports, “The diesel particulates in the air are causing asthma in kids, causing brain damage in kids … I’m not talking about the polar bears, I’m not talking about people in faraway island communities who are going to be hurt when the ocean levels rise. I’m talking about people who are already feeling the effects of our over-consumptive society.”

I hope his work keeps moving in this direction. In explaining why he flipped off his apartment’s circuit breakers earlier in the film, he says, “I can’t change the way that electricity is delivered to my house.” I wanted to tell him that a lot of engineers, activists, and citizens are working hard because of their conviction that—together--they can change where electricity comes from.

He seems to sense this when he installs a rooftop solar panel and says, “For the first time I’ve realized that it’s not about using as little as I can possibly use, but finding a way to get what I need in a sustainable way.”

It might be an artificial revelation at the end of a patently artificial “experiment.” Then again, even Thoreau’s shack at Walden Pond was a stunt, with a book deal always in mind. Walden proved both deeply irritating and useful to those who were unsettled by it. No Impact Man (the movie) inhabits that tradition well.

One more note: It’s a thoroughly fun movie to watch, with great music. Watching Beavan reading Gawker comments about himself gives a sense of how hard it can be to dramatize a story about not doing things. But filmmakers Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein make the most of the Manhattan setting, using traffic jams, overflowing trash cans, and belching exhaust pipes as foils to Beavan and Conlin’s clean living. They got into the no-impact spirit, shooting from a bicycle rickshaw while filming the couple on their bikes.

Find out when the movie is coming to your city, and watch the trailer:

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