Yet Another Climate Report--And More Denials

The latest report from the National Research Council should add some urgency to the debate over how to limit heat-trapping gases. But the responses are predictable, particularly from the global-warming-, climate-change-denying crowd.

The conclusions drawn are clear, if not the specific policy preferences: it is strongly suggested that probably the best way to reign in carbon emissions is to put an overall price on carbon, which has the effect of steering investments into low-carbon, energy-efficient technologies and processes.

The report's authors come from inside and outside the scientific establishment, encompassing business, industry, politics, and representing different ideological stripes.

Still, the broad-based call to arms is falling on deaf ears, even among Democrats who would rather focus on keeping the economy from stalling.

One can only wonder when it will be safe to go outside again and advocate an aggressive, comprehensive national energy policy of carbon mitigation.

The Fastest Passenger Train

The world's "fastest" passenger train service, measured by average trip speed, is currently the CRH Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway. The train averages about 200 miles an hour, but reaches top speeds of between 210 and 220 miles an hour. The thing really rips.

I recently took a ride, paying about 70 dollars to get from central China to the coast in a little more than three hours. I taped some of the ride, posted on the right, so you can see and feel the bullet train as it barrels through rural Hunan province.

Compare China's high-speed rail to our fastest train, the Acela, and it's sobering to see how we're being left behind in the development of rail infrastructure. The Acela can go 150 m.p.h., but averages 100 or less between Washington and Boston.

Critics say China's HSR is a boondoggle, a massively expensive showpiece project that squanders energy and saddles the government with costly debt service. Ticket prices cannot be raised high enough--ridership is too low as it is.

Still, this is how China invested its stimulus money and I think the bet on HSR will eventually pay off.

Go East, Young Man!

Florida is the real Big Sky country, make no mistake. Those billowy cumulus clouds that form ten thousand feet over your head are mountains of water.

But if only man could just vacate his sub- and ex-urban habitats and undo the plumbing he imposed on the vast River of Grass we know as the Everglades!

Pictures posted on the New York Times Opinionator blog today provide arresting visual proof of a once pristine wilderness in slow, inexorable decline. Absent any massive effort by the Army Corps to unplug the 'Glades, the region is consigning the place to "death by a thousand cuts."

Edge cities like Weston, Florida, a sprawling tract home development, are partly to blame. All of 20 years old, and constructed on the eastern fringes of what we currently call the 'Glades, Weston is basically an agglomeration of thousands of cookie-cut single family homes piled onto filled land, your archetypal Florida swamp turned into "paradise."

But the root cause of lasting, cumulative damage, has been the Army Corps of Engineers' region-wide latticework of canals, pumps, bridges, and containment ponds, creating the plumbing infrastructure that makes the development of a Weston possible.

While the engineering was lauded as a monumental achievement--a conquest of man over nature, which laid the foundation for south Florida's incredible growth and future real estate frenzy--this so-called "progress" was the 'Glades' environmental regress.

See Christoph Gielen's wonderful aerial photos (of a place I know well) here:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/they-unpaved-paradise/?hp

You are what you eat

In "Eating Animals" (2009), the author asks the reader to exercise her moral imagination.

For example, look at the pig's face. It seems sociable, curious, and intelligent. In fact, pigs are very intelligent. So what are we to make of the fact that man forces tens of millions of them into an overcrowded, hellish existence? We genetically engineer them, render them incapable of living in nature, stuff them with antibiotics, herd them into pens where they live on top of each other, sometimes beat them senseless with pipes or stick lit cigarettes into them, and generally make them suffer an abbreviated life until death at the slaughterhouse. The end must come as a release.

So why, asks Jonathan Safran Foer, when we buy a package of breakfast links, do we support such a system?

Of course, the ends justify the means, right? After all, we eat these animals--they are our food. And factory farming, a mode of corporate production spreading across China now, just as it has in the U.S., brings it to our table cheap. The bottom line is the only thing that matters.

Foer wants us to think about such things, because we currently don't think about them at all. We are in deep, collective denial.

For a moment, though, put aside the moral as well as the obvious dietary reasons not to eat factory farmed animals. The environmental reasons against it are compelling. Foer says millions of individual decisions to boycott farmed animals "will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history (p.257)."

Foer pines for the localized animal husbandry evident in the picture I took of the pig. That was in a small village in Yunnan province, China, where families raise pigs intimately and care for them as if a pet. Don't be confused, though, about the ultimate outcome. That pig will be slaughtered, probably at the hands of the village butcher, some of his parts eaten by the family, and the rest put to market.

The question is not one of animal rights, but animal welfare. Can we treat animals more humanely on their way to our table, or is factory farming here to stay?

Don't like this unit?: I have 10 million more

While rising prosperity in China has spurred demand for U.S.-style suburban tract housing, with gated entrances, man-made ponds, and roomy square footage that would make an Atlanta or Dallas hausfrau envious, there is also a very contrarian development taking place.

High-rise condos and apartment buildings are shooting up like a bamboo forest, many half filled with tenants while construction crews busily finish the other half. It seems they can't be built fast enough for the millions of migrants moving to China's mega-cities.

Construction in China goes on all day and night until completion, a manic energy that contrasts sharply with the seemingly glacial pace of U.S. construction. I remember it took two years to build one New Jersey high school. Time is money, and the difference can only be explained by the politics of union organization. Chinese labor is unorganized and cheap. But I digress.

The consequences of the dense urban living model are salubrious (to the environment), compared to the sprawling, commute-until-you-drop model of, say, a Weston, FL. The collapse of the U.S. residential real estate market, rising energy costs, and the rediscovery of more human scale "communal" urban living may force many Americans to re-examine their preference for the 'burbs.

Take a look at the NYT photoessay on China's "instant cities." The scale and pace of urban development is breathtaking:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/chinas-instant-cities

The 99-cent challenge to liberal orthodoxy

Transiting recently across the Florida-Georgia border, I came across a wholesale bookstore which advertised "no book over $3." Of course I couldn't resist. Imagine my dismay when I discovered it was a Christian bookstore with aisles overflowing almost entirely with bibles, notebooks and calendars, as well as such inspirational bestsellers as "The Christian's Guide to Eating Healthy" and the "The Divine Spirit's Home Repair Kit."

The clerk, however, did point out a small section, basically one table, for "secular" books. And it was there I discovered the "Nordhaus thesis" (a solemn hush comes over the room). Unless you are an environmental policy wonk, you might have missed out on this guy's essay a few years ago called "The Death of Environmentalism." I did.

The book I picked out of the pile, "Breakthrough," or, "From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possbility" is a worthwhile read. The hardcover copy, jettisoned from the Harford County library (Maryland?) cost all of ninety-nine cents. The authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, give you bang for the buck, bringing an erudite, and no doubt controversial, analysis to the whole global warming and climate crisis debate.

The book is ostensibly about global warming and the need for a vigorous global energy economy capable of handling it. But where it differs from other books on the subject is in its aim squarely at liberal interest-group environmentalism: its "small-bore" or techo-fix approach born of the sixties that fails today to summon ordinary people's energies and stimulate their imagination for thinking BIG.

Written at the time of the Democratic takeover of Congress, the book is not optimistic that the party of Franklin Roosevelt can transcend liberal, interest-group politics and promote a postindustrial, postmaterial agenda equipped to both grow the economy and slow climate change. Filing lawsuits against corporations is just so late twentieth century.

They bring many contemporary heavy-hitters to bear, including Thomas Kuhn ("The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"), Daniel Bell, and Francis Fukuyama. They invoke memories of old school favorites Nietzsche and Hegel.

Several passages are delicious, particularly the treatment of Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s obvious hypocrisy over the Cape Wind project, an elite case of NIMBY if ever there was one.

And the chapter devoted to Brazil should shame anybody who supports doing something about development in the Amazon forest without mentioning in the same breath the need for action reducing poverty in Rio's favelas. That the two problems are opposite sides of the same coin now seems too obvious.

One of their enduring ideas with me is that environmentalism will have to re-invent itself along the lines of Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. Don't laugh. They make a convincing case that a mass movement that translates into anything meaningful politically will probably need to be spiritual and ingrained in people's everyday lives. Their term for such necessary groundwork is "pre-political."

If you doubt that what they say is true, look around you. How many people are talking with passion about what can be done positively with the climate crisis? Al Gore is the poster boy of environmental "eco-apocalypse"--great for laying out the science, but equally adept at scaring the shit out of young children.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger are the same guys who propose getting us accustomed to the idea of adapting to a hotter world. What's wrong with that? Cope with it we must, no matter how much or quickly we reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

It's clear to me that what they say is true about the untapped potential for change: people are hungry for an inspiring narrative. Both political parties and mainstream environmentalism don't offer one. Until they do, and until a massive Apollo-like green energy program is launched, harnessing the great talents, energies, and aspirations of Americans, we will be left with buying compact fluorescent bulbs and trying to feel good about it.

P.S. Ted Nordhaus is not to be confused with his uncle, Yale economist William Nordhaus, who writes extensively about the economics of climate change.

The beginning and end of life

I have a sense of foreboding about the unabated BP gas and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The sugar-sand beaches at risk, from Pensacola east and south on Florida's gulf coast, are among the most beautiful beaches in the world.

If this disaster continues, what can my children expect to see when they go to the Redneck Riviera on their college spring break? Instead of coping with red tide, will they be forced to swim between bobbing tar balls, the shallow gulf waters devoid of life?

My thoughts turn darker: is man reversing in his short tenure on earth what took hundreds of millions of years of natural improvisation to bring to life in the seas and oceans?

Stromatolites are the first building blocks of earthly life, the single-celled organisms (see the picture) that can be found fossilized in ancient mud. You are looking at a life form billions of years old. And the key constituent ingredient making such life possible is oxygen.

Until these cyanobacteria were producing oxygen on their own through the very first photosynthesis--thereby promoting further experimentation with life--carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane and other gases unfriendly to life predominated in the atmosphere.

What the latest evidence says about the spill is that oxygen could be the first casualty. If oil and gas globules are deeply submerged and suspended in ten-mile-long blobs, how could marine life not be at threat of asphyxiation?

We simply don't know yet what the outcome is.

New BP logo--"Bum Pump"

No, "Bum Pump" isn't strong enough. How about "British Plunder."

The BP fiasco calls for a gas pump boycott by all who care about the environment, future energy policy, and corporate accountability.

One BP station off I-75 in Georgia covered the sign (logo) with a huge hood, better to conceal from motorists the true brand identity of the station. Sure wish I'd taken a picture.

As of this writing there is no end in sight of uncontrolled gushing from the broken pipe.

Take back the tap

Annie Leonard has done it again, creating a masterful animated video about bottled water, corporate greed, and the harm we do to ourselves and the environment when we unconsciously follow the dictates of mass marketing and advertising. Double click here:

The Story of Bottled Water

Posted using ShareThis

On the backburner

Has a perfect storm of events robbed advocates of a green economy the moral and tactical high ground?

It would seem so, at least temporarily.

The combination of an economy turned south, an unusually frigid winter, evidence of massaged climate data, the Wall Street meltdown, and alarming budget deficits has clearly chilled the plans of climate change activists and emboldened global warming deniers.

It’s fair to say the prospects for a stronger governmental role in shaping market incentives for alternative energy and industry-wide carbon mitigation appear to have significantly cooled.

In fact, the promises of green technology, a green jobs boom, reduced carbon dioxide emissions, and renewable energy for all, a kind of clean power Shangri-la, seem as far away from realization as ever.

Witness the deflation in Congress over cap-and-trade legislation, once thought to be possible economy-wide, is now only talked about in minimalist terms of a phasing-in over many years, with utilities being impacted first.

And then there’s the ideological counteroffensive of climate change naysayers who call the connection between man-caused emissions and potentially catastrophic warming patterns and other environmental impacts “one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated on the American people.”

This blog remains open to contrary views, so, against type, I picked up the latest issue of Newsmax, the cover story devoted to showing the IPCC has it all wrong, that we’re actually in a cooling phase, not a warming one.

The evidence for the contrarians is well-known: cloud science is too complicated to base predictions on, deep ocean currents may do more to counteract warming than is acknowledged, and sun spot activity may be helping plunge us into a new ice age.

Interesting points all, and they should prod us to redouble our efforts to understand and be careful about the science and scientific method undergirding our theories.

But let’s be clear: the reversal of fortune, and the change of public mood, have more to do with the bad economy, an upswing in anti-tax and anti-big government sentiment, and the politics of reaction than anything else.

Stakeholders in the status quo smell blood. And analogous to the health care reform debate, doing nothing about a subject as complex and controversial as climate change (and a scheme as difficult to understand as cap and trade) looks better than doing something.

They were wrong about health care reform, and they are wrong about the necessity of government devising strong market-driven incentives for a low-carbon economy.

Ecologism

With a protracted economic downturn stymieing efforts to combat global warming, it might be time to reflect on the spirit of the times and whether, as some say, the ecological movement, or that part of it believing industrial civilization should be re-ordered, is the "Communism of the twenty-first century."

Take this passage lifted from a passage lifted from French writer Guy Sorman:

"No ordinary rioters, the Greens are the priests of a new religion that puts nature above humankind. The ecology movement is not a nice peace-and-love lobby but a revolutionary force."

While Sorman is actually critiquing environmentalism (or what he calls "ecologism") from the socialist left--for its failure to confront capitalism as the real cause of planetary spoliation--it is hard to miss how his caricature of the green lobby might complement the picture drawn by free market Republicans in Congress trying to deep-six cap-and-trade legislation.

One of the most interesting debates today, so far largely unacknowledged by the mainstream media, is over the question of whether world capitalism is equipped to solve the enormous challenges of global warming and climate change. Marxist philosophers, of course, think not, owing to the inexorable raw material-exploiting, profit-maximizing logic of the capitalist system.

Most thinkers who are taken seriously on the subject of the climate crisis fall squarely into the capitalist camp, vowing to mitigate things by only modifying the existing rules of the game. The thought of changing the game doesn't occur to them.

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.