Masses to the Massif

The long lines forming (and long wait times) at the cable ride of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is more proof that China's middle class is growing, getting flush with extra cash, and using it to see the world.

But with economic prosperity comes increased concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Worldwide average atmospheric temperature rise and diminished monsoonal rains are causing Asian glacial ice to melt and retreat.

According to China expert Orville Schell, Baishui Glacier No. 1 on the flanks of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain has receded more than 800 feet in two decades. It is also visibly dirty from aerosols spewed by wood and coal burning in surrounding Lijiang County.

The Chinese tourists are mostly educated and aware of what's happening, but few seem overly concerned about the future of their mountain glaciers which have existed for thousands of years. One woman told me, "we have more." After all, there are an estimated 18,000 more glaciers in the Tibetan-Himalayan region, all feeding rivers as diverse as the Irrawaddy, Mekong, Yellow, and Yangtze.

But facts and projections are scary. One Chinese glaciologist says at the current rates of above average temperatures, warming and melting, two-thirds of the region's glaciers could be gone by 2050.

This is no minor development for what's called "The Third Pole," the perennial Asian land ice that ranks in size behind the Arctic and Antarctica. As many as two billion users rely on water that originates from The Third Pole and they could be fighting scarcity wars in the coming decades.

What struck me as a cavalier attitude by the woman from Shanghai actually reflects a realistic calibration of personal and national culpability in the crisis of climate change. That's because while Chinese factories and coal plants are churning out huge volumes of carbon dioxide emissions (driven by U.S. and European demand for Chinese products), the present crisis is the cumulative legacy of the industrializing West.

It's not too far off to suggest that the current crisis might bear the label "Made in the U.S.A."

Check out Orville Schell's piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/opinion/26Schell.html?scp=1&sq=Schell%20on%20Lijiang&st=cse

See a glacier while you can

Maybe because I live in Florida, a giant sand bar, I am especially fascinated by the vertical.

But I have always loved mountains, beginning in my youth with Mount Hood, the 11-thousand foot "colossus" in Portland's backyard.

I climbed it at age 16, a rite of teen passage I've never forgotten.

So imagine my thrill at taking an aerial cable ride to a "glacier park" at the 14-thousand foot level of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China, a massif at the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

There is a long wooden walkway that allows you to view a glacier up close as it breaks up into pinnacles cascading over the mountain side.

If you were to climb to the summit from the viewing platform at the end of the cable, you'd have another 4,000 feet to go.

I suffered no acute mountain sickness, mainly because I gave myself time to acclimatize to high altitude in Lijiang, the ancient Naxi people's town near the base, which sits at about 8,000 feet.

This area of northwestern Yunnan province is truly "wild China," and it is clearly one of the best travel adventures for the money.

What kind of adventure did I come to see? Let's call it the unfolding drama of climate change.

Totally Tubular

You see them everywhere in China, ungainly water tanks jutting above the roof lines of homes and apartment buildings, the mark of a developing country where indoor plumbing has been slow to arrive. Or at least this is what I initially thought.

But solar hot water collectors, or evacuated-tube collectors in particular, are a fabulous solution to rising electricity costs, where hot water is responsible for as much as 30% of a domestic utility bill.

You see this thermosiphon version (above) of ET solar all over China, but particularly around Shanghai and south to Shenzhen along coastal China. There must be hundreds of ET solar hot water factories making these units, serving the large demand within China and now for the export market.

I took a factory tour once of a joint venture company, Sino-British, that made a basic unit for approximately the equivalent of $900. It couldn’t possibly supply enough hot water for an American family of four in a temperate climate like that in Shanghai. But in a clime as hot and with as much insolation as south Florida it probably could.

((For scientific verification of average solar resource by location go to: http://www.nrel.gov/rrdc/pvwatts/))

Flat-plate collectors are more familiar in south Florida for their simplicity and lower cost as a pool heating source. But evacuated-tube collectors, thought to be best for mild climates, are going to eat into market share as they get out into the marketplace, even though they cost more.

How ET technology works is simple: those long tubes are double-glazed glass (tube within a tube), at the very center of which is a black absorber plate and tube which carries a heat-transfer fluid into a manifold at the top. The insulation provided by a vacuum between the two tubes gives ET a greater efficiency curve, meaning that the difference between inlet temperature and ambient temperature causes less heat loss and thus greater efficiency in the ET over the flat-plate.

The ET may be easier to install than a flat-plate, all things being equal, because the tubes can be inserted last. And especially good for south Florida, they can be removed before an advancing hurricane.

The biggest problem I foresee with ET is the residential aesthetics: ET systems are ugly, no less in the U.S. than in China. All the better if the water tank can be burrowed within the envelope of the house, but shiny tubes are still not as pleasing to the eye as the dark sheen of a plate.

Countering Green Conventional Wisdom

A great piece in Foreign Policy, a favorite journal of mine, confronts head-on several common assumptions about renewable energy that hold greater sway over policy debate than they should.

While a couple of the 7 myths are straw men intended to frame the discussion, several others are so spot on it's hard to believe anybody promoting these orthodoxies about renewables is still getting a pass.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112327040

For example, the myth that we should be doing everything possible to promote alternative energy is ridiculous on its face, because panicky and ill-thought-out responses aggravate the disease they purport to cure.

Case in point is the biofuels movement, which Congress rammed through under pressure from the farm lobby. As if the pervasiveness of subsidized corn in our food diets isn't enough, we are pressing corn into action to power our fleets. Not to say that cleaner fuels aren't desirable, but there are probably cheaper and more efficient feedstocks (switchgrass from Montana, sugar cane from Brazil) than corn.

Add to this the fact that a lot of petroleum (fertilizers, tractors) is consumed harvesting corn, to say nothing of the carbon emissions resulting from such effort.

Another related myth is that biofuel mandates will evolve and we'll get better resolving these contradictions in the future. The author quite correctly points out that so long as agriculture-for-fuel's footprint grows, displacing valuable forest cover, we are hardly out of the woods, and may in fact be increasing emissions over the long term and doing greater harm.

The logic of all this may be too compelling for even the most powerful vested interests in biomass and biofuels to stop: that it may be wiser to mandate lower fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions through aggressive auto fuel economy standards, carbon sequestration, and other energy efficiency measures than ravage the world's forests.

"Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of global emissions, so unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources--cars, coal, factories, cows--it needs to back off forests."

Bottom line, says the author, and most non-PC, is that we'll still need gas and oil and coal for some time to come, we just need to use a lot less of it. It seems unorthodox, even today, to suggest that Jimmy Carter was right, we need to change our behavior, and that while energy efficiency can do great things, conservation may be even better.

So, turn down the thermostat, put on a sweater, car pool to work, or better yet, ride a bicycle.

Breaking News: BEETLE INVADES NEW JERSEY!

It is not the most high-profile of environmental causes, but eradication of non-native plants gets some play in New Jersey ecology circles these days as a noxious weed is threatening to take over the Garden State's lower third.

With help of an imported Chinese beetle called Rhinoncomimus latipes, state agriculture officials are taking on Mile-a-minute, an appropriately named herbaceous nuisance that is literally strangling Christmas tree seedlings and other plants with economic value to the state.

This plant is a threat because it grows an astonishing six inches a day and spreads unchecked, first through railroad and power line easements, then along highways and into farm lands.

It's not quite as epic a struggle as locusts and Pharoahs, but the non-native weevils are loosed upon the non-native weed, pitting a Chinese bug against a Japanese import. Mile-a-minute was brought to nurseries from Japan sometime last century and, like Godzilla, it busted out to terrorize the local populace. Alright, so I exaggerate just a little.

The research station housing the weevils is the Phillip Alampi Beneficial Insect Rearing Laboratory, built in 1985 for biological pest control. It seems herbicides after Rachel Carson are as popular as kool aid after Jim Jones.

I met one of the young researchers at a gathering of environmentalists and was fascinated to learn that Chinese entomologists had collaborated insofar as identifying the species and where it might be gotten in the country of origin. I still don't know from which provinces the beetle hails from in China.

But it was a match made in heaven (or hell in the case of the plant): that is, the Chinese weevil thrives on Mile-a-minute and not a single other plant species in New Jersey. Once it devours all the noxious MAM in its habitat it effectively dies off.

small is BEAUTIFUL

Amory Lovins is a guy the world has finally caught up to. A proponent of the "soft" energy path, his ideas got their initial boost during the 70's oil pinch.

Like E.F. Schumacher and the whole small is beautiful movement, Lovins and his micro renewables are coming back and getting some serious consideration.

The mere mention of Lovins evokes the Eugene, Oregon of my youth, when bicycles were mass transit, showers were shared to save water, and UV lights supported the local indoor cash crop.

Check out this brief Q and A with Mother Jones:

Mother Jones: What will it take for renewables to go mainstream?

Amory Lovins: We have obsolete rules that favor big over small, supply over efficiency, and incumbents over new market entrants. It's the very opposite of a competitive market. So a good dose of conservative economic principles would get us even further than trying to give technologies we like subsidies as big as the ones we don't like are already getting. Desubsidizing the whole energy sector would be a wonderful advance--level the playing field, but also let [renewables] in. The barriers that renewables and efficiency face come less from our living in a capitalist market economy and more from not taking market economics seriously, not following our own principles.

MJ: What energy policies should the next president try to enact right away?

AL: I think the important policies need to happen at a state rather than a federal level. With modest exceptions, our federal energy policy is really a large trough arranged by the hogs for their convenience.

MJ: So how could Washington best cut fuel consumption?

AL: For cars, the most effective thing would be a "feebate": In the showroom, less-efficient models would have a corresponding fee, while the more-efficient ones would get a rebate paid for by the fees. That way when choosing what model you want you would pay attention to fuel savings over its whole life, not just the first yea r or two. It turns out that the automakers can actually make more money this way because they will want to get their cars from the fee zone into the rebate zone by putting in more technology. The technology has a higher profit margin than the rest of the vehicle.

MJ: What's the most promising new energy source in terms of supply?

AL: Micropower---cogeneration, wind, sun, small hydro, geothermal, biomass, and waste fuel--is now providing about one-third of the world's new electric capacity.

MJ: If you had $1 million to invest in the energy sector, where would you put it?

AL: Efficient use. I want to do the cheapest things first to get the most climate protection and other benefits per dollar. Buying micropower and "negawatts" [Lovins' term for efficiency measures] instead of nuclear gives you about 2 to 11 times more carbon reduction per dollar, and you get it much faster.

MJ: Would you rather live next to a nuclear plant or a coal-burning plant?

AL: This is like a stupid multiple-choice-test question: Would you prefer to die of climate change or oil wars or nuclear holocaust? The right answer is none of the above.

MJ: Do you have any energy-use guilty pleasures?

AL: I take long showers, but they are 99 percent solar, so I guess it's not really guilty.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Foundation for National Progress
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

The House Whisperer

You don't have to be an Einstein to know how to prosper in the energy efficiency business. But it helps to be an Eisenstein.

In addition to his real estate-related home inspections, Ira Eisenstein is finally seeing a pickup in energy-related business, the kind where panicky homeowners call him to ask what they can do to cut their skyrocketing home energy bills.

The Princeton, New Jersey energy auditor is the owner of Strictly Business, a home inspection service that flushes out problems ranging from termites and radon to lead pipes and drafty windows.

Eisenstein and others of his trade may benefit big from the federal stimulus package, which provides money for the retrofitting of energy inefficient government buildings and even qualified existing homes and commercial buildings.

It takes a skilled, certified home inspector like Eisenstein to thoroughly diagnose a home's energy efficiency needs, which may require such solutions as blowing insulation into the attic, installing storm windows or caulking seams around a door jamb.

"I can definitely save people as much as 30 percent of their total electricity bill," Eisenstein says. "I had one guy who had a 450 dollars per month gas bill. He didn't realize he could save a third by simply tilting his radiators a certain way so as to more efficiently use the steam that fills them."

Eisenstein doesn't do a "blow door test," a fairly common procedure that identifies air leaks in a space. Instead, he “packs heat,” carrying an optical tool called an infrared thermal imaging gun.

The operator of the camera can point it at a wall or ceiling and clearly show areas where heat is escaping in winter (and conditioned air in summer). It is money down the drain.

I trailed him on one house call where the homeowner complained of high home heating bills. Eisenstein found several areas where original insulation had either been moved by electricians doing their work in crawl spaces, or had been improperly installed in the first place.

As he aimed his thermal gun on one particular area of the wall, you could see what looked like lesions of red and blue in the viewfinder.

"The camera takes numbers, temperatures, and translates them into colors," he says. "White is the hottest, black the coldest. In between, red is the next hottest, followed by orange and yellow. In winter, you can see heat escaping, as here, between the poorly insulated intersection of walls and ceiling."

Eisenstein comes off initially as a brainiac on nerd patrol. Certified mold inspection makes poor cocktail party patter. But he can be engaging and is capable of laughing at himself in the profession he calls "house whispering."

His fee typically runs $395 for a house call that can last 2-3 hours. His inspections come with a professional report, including extensive photo-documentation. He's the go-to guy for the home buyer.

http://www.strictlybusinesshomeinspections.com/

Ten Thousand Miles

"A journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step."
--Chinese proverb

True though the proverb may be, China's authoritarian government is getting out of the block quicker than the U.S. in the race to develop "clean" coal. That's one implication of recent news that China is adopting newer, more efficient coal burning technologies for its newest power plants. While the U.S. dithers, communist leadership delivers.

China, of course, is coming off a decade-long building binge of coal burning plants of much lesser efficiency and higher carbon dioxide emissions. But speedy approval and top-down edicts provide China with an advantage we don't have in getting things going quickly in the right direction.

To be clear, China's overall greenhouse gas emissions from new coal-fired plants will increase, not decrease, but the rate of increase will be less because of the country's centralized decision-making on retiring older technology and replacing it with newer technology.

Meantime, the U.S. under a new energy secretary is taking stock of things. An American initiative to develop "coal gasification and carbon capture-and-sequestration" technologies needs to speed up. Storing spent carbon deep underground or under seafloor beds promises to cut greenhouse gases in half.

U.S. investment and research into the problem are critical to solving the problem on this side of the globe. But political will and leadership are just as important. Obama has to give The Big Speech. Public education and support are crucial. Democracy is different, more deliberative and slower to move. But market and price signals are also going to be key.

The Chinese have a leg up in this regard, because they are already scaling the new technology to, well, China. With so much load to satisfy, the power generation sector is bringing a new coal-fired plant on-line every month. Thanks to economies of scale, per unit costs are reportedly less for building a new "ultra-supercritical" power plant in China than a less efficient coal-fired plant in the U.S.

The Jevons Paradox

There was a pressing Coal Question long before the recent one, just as urgent and with consequences as dire.

The latest iteration centers on whether coal can save us by providing cheap and abundant energy for a long, long time, if only we can make it clean enough.

The 19th-century question preoccupied the considerable intellect of political economist William Stanley Jevons, who correctly foresaw coal's unsustainability as fuel for industrial England's incredible productivity, prosperity, and rise to world power.

"Are we wise," he asked rhetorically, "in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?"

While credit is due Jevons for his prescient analyses of (get ready) finite energy sources, sustainability, limits to growth, overpopulation, overshoot, post-global relocalization, energy return on energy input, taxation of the energy resource, renewable energy alternatives, and resource peaking (whew!), his most intriguing contribution is to the issue of energy conservation efforts, and whether they do enough to abate energy demand and forestall resource depletion.

Jevons is known for the "paradox." The Jevons Paradox states that given efficiency improvements in gadgets that use energy to get work done, demand for those energy sources will go up, not down, because they are now less costly.

"It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth."

Watt's steam engine is the case in point, for Jevons saw that innovations in its design over the predecessor engine improved overall efficiency, reduced the effective cost of energy and in so doing broadened the application of the use of the engine and thereby increased the demand for coal.

Jevons was on the lookout for mitigation measures, assuming as he did that coal was finite and that energy depletion posed a long-term threat to English society. But conservation, it would seem, was not the answer.

This idea is finally getting some play, although in slightly altered form, in the contemporary concern over whether automobile fuel economy is achievable or even desirable.

Take the Prius. Increasing a car's fuel economy doesn't necessarily get drivers to drive less, because they have (theoretically) cut the cost of their gallon of gas in half. As David Owen puts it in the New Yorker last month, "Increasing the fuel efficiency of a car is mathematically indistinguishable from lowering the price of its fuel; it's just fiddling with the other side of the equation."

In other words, auto fuel efficiency, delivering drivers more gas for the buck, cannot do for the environment what doubling the cost of gas did last year by pushing down oil consumption, stimulating investment in renewable energy, increasing public transit ridership and killing the Hummer.

The same can be said for those new compact fluorescent bulbs that, while delivering longer watt-hours of life, may inadvertently promote less vigilant behavior. What's the point of conserving if you leave the lights on when you walk out of the room?

Bottom line: efforts to solve the energy crisis may in fact be hobbled, not helped, by energy efficiency.

To say the least, The Jevons Paradox is alive and well, and casts a pall over the energy debate today.

Take the Florida Solar Energy Center Quiz

Participants of GreenBuild 2008 in Boston were able to take this quiz at the FSEC booth. It's humbling. I missed more than half and guessed right on the other half. But it's all part of getting up on the learning curve.

It made me realize just how peculiar Florida and the sun-kissed southeast U.S. are with respect to home building design requirements. As my Aunt Nellie used to say, "it's not the heat so much as the humility!"

http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/media/events/conf-materials/greenbuild08/GreenBuild_Q-A-1.pdf

China's "Clean Revolution" Report by Climate Group

A new report details China's contribution to the development of renewable energy technologies and efforts to reduce GHG emissions.

http://www.theclimategroup.org/assets/resources/Chinas_Clean_Revolution.pdf

More later.

The Greening of Southie

There was a very good film documentary at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival that convinced me the green movement has a long way to go before it is mainstreamed in the construction trades and on the streets of blue-collar America.

http://www.greeningofsouthie.com/

"The Greening of Southie" is about the Macallen Building, a LEED certified luxury condo development in South Boston, and what happens when cultures collide in the process of building it. In this case, the cultures are the Irish-American working class neighborhood of South Boston, from which many of the construction workers are drawn, and the elite developers, apostles of a new paradigm of green architecture.

Separated by class, education and age (the developer and members of the design team are in their twenties), the construction crews often seem confused about or resent the implications of what they're doing, whether installing potted plants on the roof or double-flush toilets in the bathroom.

The documentary is fascinating for this central story line and tension, but it also makes a great teaching tool by taking the viewer through the point-scoring that goes on in order to get LEED certification.

You end up wondering if the LEED movement (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and the U.S. Green Building Council that promotes it should tamp down the elitism and begin immediate outreach programs to the building trades.

Earth Lab

Another site that helps you measure and evaluate your carbon footprint.

http://www.earthlab.com/

Emerald Bowl: Harnessing The Power of Hot Air

By all the news reports, you would have thought the old Dutch windmill in Golden Gate Park was spinning like an airplane propeller to power all those lights at the Emerald Bowl football game at AT&T Park, San Francisco.

But it was nothing more than about carbon offsets bought by the bowl organizers in order to give the American public a "teaching moment."

This is not a bad goal, by the way. It's just that public impressions are easily manipulated and mass misunderstanding can lead to poor policy and poorer governance.

There is nothing more abstract than buying a commodity that doesn't exist. But that's what the Emerald Bowl organizers bought when they purchased Green-e renewable energy credits for a reduction in greenhouse gases equal to the amount produced by illuminating the stadium with non-renewable power sources.

It's this transaction that made the Miami-Cal game "carbon neutral."

Whether or not these energy certificates do anything more than buy peace of mind or great corporate PR is anybody's guess at this time. But people fascinated by the profit opportunities of
financial derivatives, the kind that got us into our current mess, will be cheered by the possibilities of an uncontrolled, unregulated carbon offsets market.

It just might be the next great "windfall." For the Onion's hilarious take on the retail carbon offsets market:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/90883/

Oh, yeah, the windmill in the picture you see above is actually one of two windmills at Golden Gate Park's west end near the Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden. Not a mandatory tourist stop in San Francisco, but definitely worth a look if you go to the park.