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.