LP4: The Lansing Post-Petroleum Planning Project

Good argument on relative importance of global heating vs. "energy independence"

2007-01-21T06:58:00.000-08:00

(Esp. since energy "independence" is a fantasy anyway.)

Energy Independence
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/20/AR2007012001152_pf.html
The wrong target for policymakers

Sunday, January 21, 2007; B06

BOTH CONGRESS and the Bush administration seem certain to return to energy policy this year. The subject is likely to be featured in President Bush's State of the Union address; a variety of energy bills have been proposed in Congress; and this year's reauthorization of the farm program may repackage agricultural handouts as ethanol-promoting energy policy. But there is a danger in the way political leaders are framing this issue. "Energy independence" is more elusive and less rewarding than is commonly perceived. It should not be allowed to take precedence over attempts to curb global warming.

The United States imports 60 percent of the petroleum it consumes, about double the share two decades ago. Those imports come mostly from countries whose governments are unstable, unsavory or overtly hostile to the United States: 60 percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Middle East, 10 percent in Africa, 6 percent in Venezuela and 5 percent in Russia. It sounds reasonable to argue that if the United States relied less on these regions for its fuel, it would be better off.

But consider this thought experiment: If the United States replaced all oil imports with domestically produced fuel, how much more secure would it be? Well, a Venezuelan or Iranian oil embargo could still hurt U.S. motorists and oil-consuming industries. An embargo would create a global scarcity of oil, and fuel prices would jump -- including the price of fuel in the United States. Admittedly, Americans would be paying those high prices to producers in their own country rather than to producers abroad, but the importance of this distinction is debatable. Some producers in the United States are foreign-owned, and many production operations abroad are U.S.-owned.

Some military planners say that, even so, energy independence would boost national security. The nation must be able to count on access to sufficient fuel to power its military machine and key industries. But two-fifths of the oil consumed in the United States is domestically produced, and the nation maintains a strategic petroleum reserve. Besides, it would take a truly formidable enemy to prevent the United States from buying oil simultaneously from the Middle East, West Africa and Latin America. True energy security comes not so much from energy independence as from diverse sources of supply.

Another security argument for energy independence is that by importing oil from radical Islamic regimes the United States is financing both sides in the struggle against terrorism. But it doesn't matter to Islamic radicals who buys their oil; the United States has banned Iranian oil imports since 1979, but Iran's crude still fetches the world price in the international market. It's true that, in pursuing energy independence, the United States would either restrict its consumption or boost its output; this would slightly alter the global balance of supply and demand, perhaps reducing the oil price and diminishing Iran's revenue. But even this effect is not certain: Saudi Arabia might respond by pumping less so that prices remained stable.

This is not to say that curing the American addiction to oil would bring no security benefits whatever. Over the long term it would probably exert a moderating influence on oil prices; this would reduce the influence of authoritarian petro-states such as Russia or Venezuela. But this distant and uncertain benefit should not be the prime driver of energy policy. Mr. Bush and Congress should focus their energy policy on mitigating climate change and accept security gains that may flow from that as a welcome byproduct.

When is "Tinkerbell" the enemy of good sense and community

2007-01-20T15:16:00.000-08:00

(I'm thinking about building eventually, and it will be a house where I
can grow old ...)

*_.and Tinkerbell Transit_*
<http://governing.typepad.com/13thfloor/2007/01/and_tinkerbell_.html>
*_http://governing.typepad.com/13thfloor/_*
*posted by Josh Goodman*
Only once every three or four blue moons do we receive an interesting
press release through our fax machine here on the 13th Floor, but this
_one_ <http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/news/2007/010.htm> from Fairfax
County, Virginia certainly qualifies. It introduced a new term to me:
Peter Pan housing.

Peter Pan housing refers to homes built in a way that seems to assume
their occupants will never grow old -- designs that prove troublesome
because their owners rarely seem to be blessed with perpetual youth.
Problematic features the county has identified include "entry stairs,
narrow doorways or lack of a first-floor bathroom."

In response to these concerns, Fairfax is reviewing building codes and
trying to increase financing options for retrofitting homes.
Retrofitting is expensive, but one Fairfax official pointed out that
having an elevator installed is cheaper than a year in assisted living.

Obviously, the aging of the Baby Boom generation makes this a big issue,
but so does the substantial _decrease_
<http://www.inthenews.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=10130> in the
percentage of American houses with only one story over the past few
decades. As a result, a lot of places probably need to go after Peter
Pan housing with Hook-like zeal.

Great article on the energy conundrum

2007-01-09T18:26:00.000-08:00

Read the whole thing--long excerpts below the link

_http://fcn.state.fl.us/fdi/edesign/news/9612/joyride.htm_

*Joy Ride to Global Collapse*
Reflections on Kunstler's/ Home from Nowhere/
No one is talking to us about giving up cars today - even though there
is hard scientific evidence that the freewheeling automotive world we
know today will have totally vanished within the lifetime of most of us
now living. A few idealists are talking about maybe getting us to
constrain our use a little bit. None of them are running for any
position of political influence in this country. They would be lucky to
get their family's vote. We don't want to hear it.

Auto mania is not confined to Americans. The love affair is
international and now grows fastest in the nations of the Second and
Third World. Humanity burns 70 million barrels of oil a day. At the
present rate of increase, it is projected we'll be burning 100 million
in 20 years. But we'll never get there. We are close to that peak of
global production which was foreseen almost half a century ago by Dr. M.
King Hubbert, the foremost petroleum geologist of his day. (See link at
the end of this column.) The descent from that peak only takes a few
decades. We know that petroleum is a finite resource. But even as
gasoline prices begin to creep upward some time in the not-too-distant
future we won't curtail our driving until real supply shortages
absolutely force the issue.

Take a look at an ugly future scenario:
*The sudden, agonizing death of the private automobile is a wall that
global society will hit full speed, pedal to the metal when a global
petroleum crisis finally catches up with us. We will not accept any
solutions that will soften the impact until the real shortage hits us at
some time (early) in the next century. If we continue to fail to take
any reasonable steps to prepare for it, and it comes upon us thus, the
constriction of the petroleum base of our global economy is quite likely
to begin a plunging, bucking, gasping downward spiral towards a deep and
lasting depression-with-inflation that could virtually end modern times
as we now know them.*

I will explain the combination of hard science and human hard-headedness
which backs the liklihood of this future. But first, let's examine where
we are.

Even if we believe that we are joyriding toward the abyss, few of us
will volunteer to be first to quit driving. I've tried it twice. Once in
Tallahassee as Florida's "Energy Czar," and once as a freelance
investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. What a royal pain it was to
be carless in Florida's sprawled-out, little, old capital city. What a
joy it was not to have to fool with parking in our nation's capital.
Cabs there were plentiful and cheap. Walking was a pleasure. The
excellent subway and bus lines were just a hop from my little flat three
blocks from the Library of Congress. But that urban experience is the
exception. For most Americans life without a car is unthinkable - even
in Washington, D.C. It is too late to talk about rational restraint.

As James Howard Kunstler's new book/ Home from Nowhere/ makes clear, the
entire complex of the American civilization and infrastructure that we
have built since World War II is almost unworkable without our massive
herd of private autos. We can't get along without them, although
Kunstler would clearly like to tame them. Kunstler's first best seller,/
The Geography of Nowhere/, was described by a Wall Street Journal
reviewer as "a sharp polemic." The language of/ Home from Nowhere/ is
just as crisp and creative as he continues his positive indictment of
America's post-World-War-II built environment.

I say "positive," because in/ Home from Nowhere/ Kunstler tries to focus
on curing the blight - what we are already beginning to do in a few
places, and what more we can and must do.* "we have the knowledge to do
the right thing; we lack only the will to do the right thing"* I,
however, turned immediately to the chapter entitled "Car Crazy." The
book's dust jacket says it "offers real hope to a nation yearning to
live in authentic places worth caring about." Not only does the car
chapter not deliver hope, Kunstler's auto jeremiad is almost as bleak as
my post-petroleum scenario. After a splendidly concise and eloquent
damning of what American car craziness is doing to our built
environment, he concludes his chapter, "We have the knowledge to do the
right thing; we lack only the will to do the right thing. The
inescapable conclusion is that our behavior is wicked, and that we are
liable to pay a heavy price for our wickedness by losing the things we
love, including our beautiful country and our democratic republic."

What makes the decline of the Petroleum Age so relentlessly damaging is
that there is no fuel that is going to substitute for it. I know the
technological optimists, with a lot of cynical hype from the
auto/petroleum industrial axis and a lot of naive wishing by the Greens,
vaguely promise a clean, beautiful, driving world on "a mixed fuel
economy." It is this promise that keeps us tranquilly driving along
burning it up for "a few more years" without feeling at all wicked. Some
cabal of scientists in white coats is going unmask the Second Law of
Thermodynamics as an oldthink fraud.* NONE of the promised alternatives
will replace petroleum* It ain't gonna happen. None (let me get way out
on the limb and repeat that: NONE) of the promised alternatives will
replace petroleum - not even vast stores of natural gas, which is the
closest potential substitute, but is also finite.

Nor will liquified and "scrubbed-up" coal juice. Nor (again disregarding
for the moment the environmental and safety questions) will the scores
of new nuclear plants needed to charge up electric cars be economically
supportable in a Post-Petroleum Age. Why? That was explained to us by an
almost forgotten scientist at the University of Florida over 20 years
ago. It is the concept of "net energy." If it takes one barrel of oil to
produce every ten barrels of oil, you have nine barrels of oil left to
run the rest of society. As oil becomes more difficult to find and
transport, the net yield decreases. There is less to run society. Oil
costs rise.

All other costs that are touched by oil (everything) also rise.
Eventually, you creep into recession-with-inflation, which economists
said wasn't supposed to happen - until it did happen after the 1973 oil
embargo. This is where economists display their ignorance of physics.
Many economists, people who should know better, say at that point people
go out and explore for more oil. (We're still finding new oil, but not
at the rate we're burning it. And there are a steadily diminishing
number of places on the planet where we haven't poked holes.) Or,
economists chirp, we'll find other energy sources and drive prices back
down. That is what happens for every other commodity, they say, and
energy is no different from any other commodity.

Energy is not just another commodity in our modern economic system.
Energy is the underlying power that carries the burden and makes our
modern economic infrastructure "more productive" (less labor intensive).
Petroleum is the dominant energy source for the transportation network
that undergirds the global economy, and the planet's most plentiful,
most versatile, most transportable and most efficient energy source. In
a very real and measurable sense the price of every other energy source
we have floats on a "subsidy" of cheap petroleum. In other words every
other energy form we use, including all of the "solar" energies are as
cheap and usable as they are because they are "underwritten" by cheap
oil. (Cheap petroleum and natural gas produce and transport those
silicon PV cells. When the oil is gone, the price of "solar" will
skyrocket, along with every other "alternative energy source," in direct
proportion to the petroleum used in every step of its production and
delivery.)* we would quickly turn our planet into a desert trying to run
our current automobile fleet on biomass*

"Gasohol" is another ideal example of an "alternative fuel" that floats
on a cheap petroleum subsidy. It takes cheap oil for each step of
planting, tending, fertilizing, spraying, harvesting, transporting and
processing corn into alcohol. It takes more cheap oil to blend that
alcohol into something that will (still imperfectly, compared to
gasoline) power your car. Gasohol from corn, sugar, peat, beets,
sawdust, tropical rain forest, or any other "biomass" is not going to
run our present global auto world, let alone the expanding auto world
glowingly predicted by the car industry for the future. Ignore, for a
second the fact that such massive use would quickly begin cannibalizing
the biomass that supports all life and supplies such basics as food and
oxygen.

"Biomass" is not a long-term massive source of global energy because
many of our current agricultural and forestry practices "mine the soil,"
and are, in the long run, neither "renewable," nor "sustainable." Ignore
the environmental concerns about CO2, ozone, etc. Ignore the shrinking
global biomass and arable land that will be needed in ever greater
amounts to feed, clothe and house a swelling human population. There
isn't enough biomass on earth to run our petroleum economy at its
present level if we are insane enough to try it. (And we are.) We would
quickly turn the planet into a desert trying to run our current
automobile fleet on biomass.

And so the real "Catch 22" for alternative fuels is that when the
petroleum economy begins to stumble over shortage, all of the
"alternative fuels" that are supposed to be waiting in the wings, are
going to rise in price dramatically. It is going to be an ugly,
cost-pushed, escalating thing that is going to cripple the global
economy and impoverish global society.* Congress can't print oil and
they can't repeal the second law of thermodynamics* Cleaned-up coal and
natural gas and perhaps even some nuclear will provide our electricity
for a period of time. And some niche-market transportation, too. Wind
power can be a real electric winner for many places on the planet (not
much wind here in Florida and cloud cover makes solar PV a marginally
expensive source on much of the planet).

But none of these sources, along with their electric cars, will run our
present automotive economy at the level of wealth and consumption we
enjoy in this glorious sunset of our Petroleum Age. Trans-continental
economies that are most strung-out on automobiles and trucks (the United
States, Canada, Australia, etc.) are likely to be hardest hit first. So
just when we need to make the transition to other fuels we will discover
that everything we do is much more expensive and we seem to have less
than we anticipated. It will puzzle economists. The economy will slow
down but the prices of everything will keep on rising. We will then
rediscover the age-old truth: money is not a real thing; it is only an
accounting device. Congress can't print oil and they can't repeal the
Second Law of Thermodynamics.

So after we have ritually fired the then-current crop of politicians and
the new ones haven't changed anything, we won't know who to blame. What
will be going on? Now pay attention economists. Here are three dicta
that may sound heretical.

First is Minter's Little Observation:* Neither capital nor labor can
create energy.*
Growing out of this observation is Minter's Little Law of Energy
Subsidy:* The shortage of a more efficient energy source in an economy
will always make the remaining sources of less efficient energy more
expensive and even less efficient.*

Will humanity belatedly begin to use all energy more efficiently when we
finally hear those sucking sounds in the petroleum barrel? Of course. We
will have to. But such efficiencies will not make us more prosperous (as
they do today). By that time they will only slow the rate at which we
get poorer. Why?

Heed Minter's Little Maxim:* A society's transition from a more
efficient energy source to a less efficient energy source will always
and invariably decrease the wealth, flexibility and options available to
that society.* In other words, just when we most need the wealth and
flexibility of cheap petroleum energy to make the transition to a less
energy-intensive infrastructure, everything is going to cost much, much
more. We will be poorer.

If this is all true, what should we be doing?
I do not have many answers. We should at least take off the rose colored
alternative fuel glasses that are blinding the Greens and providing a
smoke screen for short-sighted governments and industries. Until we do
that we can't accurately begin envisioning what a post-petroleum society
is really going to look like. Possibly we should stop sinking so much
money into long-term expansions of infrastructure to support
automobiles. Maybe a few advanced thinkers will begin considering
post-petroleum cities with electric-only cars, or without
private-passenger cars altogether. You tell me.

One thing that seems obvious is that we need to begin an honest net
energy analysis of all of the proposed alternative fuels, and just what
their/ true net/ is/ after all of the present petroleum subsidies are
worked out of the formula./ That is not going to be as easy as it
sounds. Petroleum subsidizes everything we make and do. But it is vital
if we are to make rational judgements not based upon the partisan
polemics of vested interests or true believers. Just what we will do
with this knowledge once we get it is another matter. The Western World
is run by corporate leaders who think quarter-to-quarter, politicians
who think election-to-election, and a public that is hostile to bad news
about their lifestyle (especially our beloved cars). The Pacific Rim
countries are enslaved to automobile exports (and petroleum poor).

The oil exporters are already exaggerating their reserves to get loans
and the global financial community is making those loans. Is there
anyone out there who isn't heavily vested in a continuation of the
existing myopia?* we probably don't have as much time as we think*

In an earlier column, I said that since we obviously are going to do
nothing about transportation until it is way too late, America's only
energy policy option is to work for efficiency in our buildings and
built environment. Certainly that is the focus of Kunstler's two books.
That is the focus of what we have been calling "Sustainable Design."
What is crucial for the design professions to realize is that we
probably don't have as much time as we think before we will not be as
rich as we once were.

To me that spells building for quality and endurance. It means an end to
"consumable" buildings. It means building for ourselves and posterity.
It means the old-fashioned conservative virtues of thrift and
investment, not burn-up and squander. To be Biblical, it means using the
remaining fat years to prepare for the coming lean years. Without
considering the decline of petroleum, Kunstler already thinks we are
wicked to be trashing our lives, our cities, and our infrastructure in
our mad romance with the automobile. Would he think us diabolic if he
understood we are really racing towards a post-petroleum economy that
stands to impoverish our posterity?

If so, he would probably be right. Morally what we are doing is very
much akin to burning the children's lifeboats on the Titanic to keep the
partying adults warm for another half an hour.

In the very humane, final chapter of Kunstler's book, he reflects on the
fine life that the success of his previous book,/ The Geography of
Nowhere/, has given him in a small town in New York. It's an idyllic
world of writing and painting in an almost car-free cocoon. He should
enjoy it with a clear conscience. He, at least, has jousted with the
beast and urged reform.

But we are unreformable, and it seems certain that any such modest
reforms as humanity would swallow will only delay the inevitable by a
few years. And so, as I understand it, a global economic crunch of epic
proportions, one that stands to debase much of our current wealth and
render much of our current infrastructure valueless, lies just over the
horizon sometime in the next century. The economic tremor of the early
'70s was but a mild hint of the times to come. Once again humanity is
going to demonstrate Voltaire's little maxim: "History teaches us that
history teaches us nothing."/ Jim Minter, Editor/

Oakland press joins the ethanomania bandwagon

2007-01-08T17:59:00.000-08:00

_http://www.theoaklandpress.com/stories/010707/opi_2007010731.shtml_

Smart meters indeed

2007-01-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

mart meters

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/business/08power.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
Taking Control of Electric Bill, Hour by Hour
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Ten times last year, Judi Kinch, a geologist, got e-mail messages telling her that the next afternoon any electricity used at her Chicago apartment would be particularly expensive because hot, steamy weather was increasing demand for power.

Each time, she and her husband would turn down the air-conditioners — sometimes shutting one of them off — and let the dinner dishes sit in the washer until prices fell back late at night.

Most people are not aware that electricity prices fluctuate widely throughout the day, let alone exactly how much they pay at the moment they flip a switch. But Ms. Kinch and her husband are among the 1,100 Chicago residents who belong to the Community Energy Cooperative, a pilot project to encourage energy conservation, and this puts them among the rare few who are able to save money by shifting their use of power.

Just as cellphone customers delay personal calls until they become free at night and on weekends, and just as millions of people fly at less popular times because air fares are lower, people who know the price of electricity at any given moment can cut back when prices are high and use more when prices are low. Participants in the Community Energy Cooperative program, for example, can check a Web site that tells them, hour by hour, how much their electricity costs; they get e-mail alerts when the price is set to rise above 20 cents a kilowatt-hour.

If just a fraction of all Americans had this information and could adjust their power use accordingly, the savings would be huge. Consumers would save nearly $23 billion a year if they shifted just 7 percent of their usage during peak periods to less costly times, research at Carnegie Mellon University indicates. That is the equivalent of the entire nation getting a free month of power every year.

Meters that can read prices every hour or less are widely used in factories, but are found in only a tiny number of homes, where most meters are read monthly.

The handful of people who do use hourly meters not only cut their own bills, but also help everyone else by reducing the need for expensive generating stations that run just a few days, or hours, each year. Over the long run, such savings could mean less pollution, because the dirtiest plants could be used less or not at all.

The vast majority of utility customers know only the average price of the electricity they used in any given month. But wholesale prices for electricity are set a day in advance, usually on an hour-by-hour or quarter-hour basis. Power companies and utilities are keenly aware of the pricing roller coaster, but they typically blend the numbers into a single monthly bill for their customers.

For most Chicagoans, the average summer price last year was 8.25 cents a kilowatt-hour. Although Ms. Kinch and her husband at times paid as much as 36.5 cents a kilowatt-hour — the peak price on the humid afternoon of Aug. 2 — they paid less than their neighbors over all. On 38 days, some of their power cost less than a penny a kilowatt-hour.

Other consumers who know the hourly price of their electricity have actually been able to get paid by utilities for power they did not use. In New York City last July, for instance, when there was a blackout in Queens, residents of one building on Central Park West voluntarily cut their demand as much as 42 percent and sold the capacity back into the electricity market so that it could be used where it was more needed.

Certainly, such situations are a big exception. The fact that most people have no idea how much their power costs has emerged as a sticking point in the ongoing effort to restructure the nation’s electricity business, which the federal government is moving from a system in which legal monopolies charge rates set by state regulators, toward a competitive system where the market sets the price.

But how does efficient pricing emerge in a business where access to information is so lopsided? A market, as defined by the courts, is a place where willing buyers and sellers who both have reasonable knowledge agree on a price; in the electricity markets, the advantage lies distinctly with those who make and distribute power.

Under either the traditional system of utility regulation, with prices set by government, or in the competitive business now in half the states, companies that generate and distribute power have little or no incentive to supply customers with hourly meters, which can cut into their profits.

Meters that encourage people to reduce demand at peak hours will translate to less need for power plants — particularly ones that are only called into service during streaks of hot or cold weather.

In states where rates are still regulated, utilities earn a virtually guaranteed profit on their generating stations. Even if a power plant runs only one hour a year, the utility earns a healthy return on its cost.

In a competitive market, it is the spikes in demand that cause prices to soar for brief periods. Flattening out the peaks would be disastrous for some power plant owners, which could go bankrupt if the profit they get from peak prices were to ebb significantly.

But as awareness of “smart meters” grows, so does demand for them, not only from consumers and environmental groups but also from government bodies responding to public anger over rising power prices. In Illinois, for example, the legislature passed a law in December requiring the program Ms. Kinch joined four years ago to be expanded from 1,100 customers to 110,000.

The law also required that Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago utility, hire a third party to run the program. It chose Comverge Inc., the largest provider of peak-load energy management systems in North America.

The smart metering programs are not new, but their continued rarity speaks in part to the success of power-generating companies in protecting their profit models. Some utilities did install meters in a small number of homes as early as three decades ago, pushed by the environmental movement and a spike in energy prices.

Today, the same set of circumstances seems to be prompting a revival of interest, and even the utility companies seem resigned to the eventuality of such programs. Anne R. Pramaggiore, the senior vice president for regulatory affairs at Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, said that in the past, interest in hourly meter was transitory.

“We really haven’t dealt with these issues for 30 years,” she said.
But a sustained effort to install more meters is likely now because of what Ms. Pramaggiore called a “fundamental change” in the energy markets. Rising fuel costs and environmental concerns are — once again — front and center.

When consumers know the price of their electricity in advance and can tailor their use, even minor changes in behavior can lead to lower home utility bills and less reliance on marginal power plants, said Kathleen Spees, a graduate student in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.

“Small reductions in demand can produce very large savings,” said Ms. Spees, who analyzed prices charged within the PJM Interconnection grid, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity for 51 million people from New Jersey to Illinois.

Consumers who cut back on power use at peak times can do more than just avoid high prices. They can make money, as people in the building on Central Park West learned last summer.

Peter Funk Jr., an energy partner at the law firm Duane Morris who lives in the 48-unit co-op, persuaded his neighbors three years ago to install a single meter to the Consolidated Edison system and then to operate their own internal metering system. That made the building big enough to qualify for hour-by-hour pricing.

When the next day’s prices are scheduled to soar, the building superintendent and a few residents get e-mail messages or phone calls. “We have an orderly plan all worked out to notify people” so they can reduce their power use during the designated times, Mr. Funk said.

The residents save more than just the money on power not used during peak periods, when pricing has been as high as almost 50 cents a kilowatt-hour. During the blackout in July, when parts of Queens were without electricity for up to nine days, the building cut demand as much as 42 percent and sold the unused capacity for about $3,000.

That money helps the building offer a valuable benefit: On most weekend mornings, electricity for residents is free.

Too many people

2007-01-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

December 31, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/opinion/31theroux.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

America the Overfull

By PAUL THEROUX

Haleiwa, Hawaii

AMERICAN crowing is harmless enough, but the announcement this year that the United States population had reached 300 million, had (to my ear) the unmistakable growl of a boast. It was as though the colossal agglomeration of people amounted to another great score in our love affair with bigness.

The news gave me no pleasure. I just felt sad, while at the same time hating my wistful mood. Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. As William Burroughs noted, in the 1950s, What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920.

It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn’t mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past — say, when there were half that number of people in the country. In some important ways life really was better then because of it. The overcrowded, much noisier, more hectic, intensely urbanized and vertical world of the present can seem hostile and hallucinatory to anyone who knew America in a simpler form.

In my lifetime the population has doubled. I’m glad I grew up when the number of Americans was so much smaller. How does one explain to anyone under 50, or to the grateful unfazed immigrant from an overpopulated nation, that this was once a country of enormous silence and ordinariness — empty spaces not just in the Midwest and the rural South but in the outer suburbs of New England, like the one I grew up in, citified on one margin and thinning to woods on the other. That roomier and simpler America shaped me by giving me and others of my generation a love for space and a taste for solitude.

Talking fondly, and sadly, of the past, it is impossible to avoid the elegiac tone of Edmund Gosse in “Father and Son.” In this, one of my favorite books, Gosse recalls the richness and beauty of the English shores of his youth, and the rock pools he had delved into with his father, who was a naturalist (and a crank). Gosse writes of “the soft and radiant forms, sea anemones, seaweeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them, undisturbed since the creation of the world,” and then speaks of their violation by collectors: “There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much.” Fifty years before, “on the coast of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the limestone at the water’s edge is wrought into crevices and hollows, the tide line was, like Keats’s Grecian vase, ‘a still unravished bride of quietness.’ ”

Even in its heyday, Medford, Mass., was never compared to a Grecian urn. But it is impossible for me not to feel a sense of grief when I reflect on how my part of Webster Street — the house footprint, indeed the whole block where I was born — is now buried under Interstate 93. Before that road was put through and Medford Square was still important, the Mystic River linked us to the world, and High Street rejoiced in the same sinuous contours it had in April 1775, when Paul Revere rode down it at midnight, warning of the British attack.

I grew up in a country of sudden and consoling lulls, which gave life a kind of pattern and punctuation, unknown now. It was typified by the somnolence of Sundays, when no stores were open. There were empty parts of the day, of the week, of the year; times when there were no people on the sidewalks, no traffic in the streets, no audible human voices, now and then no sound at all. In this hushed world, a bumblebee was a physical presence, the sound of a cicada could dominate an August afternoon.

Nowhere was solitude more available than on a long drive, especially at night; and it seems to me that my generation was defined by the open road, and the accompanying hope that a promise lay at the end of it. The almost trance-like experience of driving down the soft tunnel of a dark highway at night was something I relished. At most, there would be the distant red lights of a car far ahead, and always the murmur of the glowing radio, the hiss of the tires and, at a certain speed on narrower roads, the fizzing past of telephone poles with their rhythmic whiplash.

Late at night, in most places I knew, there was almost no traffic and driving, a meditative activity, could cast a spell. Behind the wheel, gliding along, I was keenly aware of being an American in America, on a road that was also metaphorical, making my way through life, unhindered, developing ideas, making decisions, liberated by the flight through this darkness and silence. With less light pollution, the night sky was different, too — starrier, more daunting, more beautiful.

I have not seen roads or night skies like that for many years. As Gosse said about the ring of living beauty of the English shore, “All this is long over and done with.”

A longing for a simpler world, for a glimpse of the past, is one of the motives in travel. But the rest of the world has fared no better in terms of population pressure, and in many places it is much worse, even catastrophic. The population of Malawi 40 years ago was small and sustainable. None of us Peace Corps volunteers there at that time thought in terms of rescuing the country but only of helping to improve it. Now Malawi can’t feed itself; it’s one of the many countries that people wish to flee, renowned for being hopeless, unjustly publicized as an enormous orphanage of desperate tots, needing to be saved, devoid of pride, lost without us. The notion that a pop singer (back then it would have been Elvis) would breeze through and scoop up a child in a condescending gesture of rescue was unthinkable then.

In India a few months ago, as I was leaving my hotel in Chennai, I noticed a hotel employee shadowing me. He warned me that the sidewalks were so packed with people I would be swallowed up and stifled. He was right. And I was unable to cross the main street in Bangalore, a leafy city of under a million people in 1973 and now a hectically improvised sprawl of seven million. Mumbai’s population of nearly 20 million rivals that of São Paulo, Brazil, and Lagos, Nigeria — nightmare cities.

Travel, except in almost inaccessible places, is no longer the answer to finding solitude. And this contraction of space on a shrinking planet suggests a time, not far off, when there will be no remoteness: nowhere to become lost, nothing to be discovered, no escape, no palpable concept of distance, no peculiarity of dress — frightening thoughts for a traveler.

Yet some of the most populous countries manage to be habitable because they are societies with strict, and civilized, codes of conduct. India, China and Japan are convenient examples, but I would include many African and Middle Eastern countries, too. The vindictive stereotype of the Muslim as a xenophobe does not tally with my experience of wandering in the Muslim world, where I have been treated hospitably, welcomed by strangers as “dayf al Rahman,” a guest of the Merciful One.

We are passing through a confused period of aggression and fear, characterized by our confrontational government, the decline of diplomacy, a pugnacious foreign policy and a settled belief that the surest way to get people to tell the truth is to torture them. (And by the way, “water boarding” was a torture technique at the worst of the Khmer Rouge prisons.) It is no wonder we have begun to squint at strangers. This is a corrosive situation in a country where more and more people, most of them strangers, are a feature of daily life. Americans as a people I believe to be easygoing, compassionate, not looking for a fight. But surely I am not the only one who has noticed that we are ruder, more offhand, readier to take offense, a nation of shouters and blamers.

Yes, it is just silly and fogeyish to yearn for that simpler and smaller world of the past. But one could ask for the past’s better manners, the instinctive decorum that has served to mitigate conflict. One of the lessons of travel is that, though half the world is wearing T-shirts and sneakers, they manage to live in overpopulated cities because they have not abandoned their traditional modes of politeness. These grace notes, which make traveling in crowded countries bearable, are a lesson to us in a mobbed and jostling world.

Paul Theroux is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Elephanta Suite.”

Should be the only ones allowed

2007-01-01T18:38:00.000-08:00

* Home Builders Association promoting energy efficient homes
Bay City Times
By Jeff Kart
The Bay County Home Builders Association has formed a Green Built
Michigan chapter to help train members and other licensed builders on
ways to build more energy efficient and environmentally friendly homes
in the area.
http://www.mlive.com/news/bctimes/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1167668169266220.xml&coll=4

A dark vision, powerfully described

2006-12-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

http://energybulletin.net/23259.html

The Actual Speech by Rickover-amazing foresight

2006-12-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

/Published on Saturday, December 2, 2006 by Energy Bulletin/

"Energy resources and our future" - remarks by Admiral Hyman Rickover
delivered in 1957

*By Rear Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, U.S. Navy*

------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOR RELEASE AT 7:00 P.M. TUESDAY, MAY 14, 1957

Remarks Prepared by

Rear Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, USN

Chief, Naval Reactors Branch
Division of Reactor Development
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
and
Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Ships for Nuclear Propulsion
Navy Department

For Delivery at a Banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of
the Minnesota State Medical Association
St. Paul, Minnesota

May 14, 1957
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Energy Resources and Our Future

I am honored to be here tonight, though it is no easy thing, I assure
you, for a layman to face up to an audience of physicians. A single one
of you, sitting behind his desk, can be quite formidable.

My speech has no medical connotations. This may be a relief to you after
the solid professional fare you have been absorbing. I should like to
discuss a matter which will, I hope, be of interest to you as
responsible citizens: the significance of energy resources in the
shaping of our future.

We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today
coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the world's energy; water power
accounts for only 1%; and the labor of men and domestic animals the
remaining 6%. This is a startling reversal of corresponding figures for
1850 - only a century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5% of the world's
energy, and men and animals 94%. Five sixths of all the coal, oil, and
gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel Age has been burned
up in the last 55 years.

These fuels have been known to man for more than 3,000 years. In parts
of China, coal was used for domestic heating and cooking, and natural
gas for lighting as early as 1000 B.C. The Babylonians burned asphalt a
thousand years earlier. But these early uses were sporadic and of no
economic significance. Fossil fuels did not become a major source of
energy until machines running on coal, gas, or oil were invented. Wood,
for example, was the most important fuel until 1880 when it was replaced
by coal; coal, in turn, has only recently been surpassed by oil in this
country.

Once in full swing, fossil fuel consumption has accelerated at
phenomenal rates. All the fossil fuels used before 1900 would not last
five years at today's rates of consumption.

Nowhere are these rates higher and growing faster than in the United
States. Our country, with only 6% of the world's population, uses one
third of the world's total energy input; this proportion would be even
greater except that we use energy more efficiently than other countries.
Each American has at his disposal, each year, energy equivalent to that
obtainable from eight tons of coal. This is six times the world's per
capita energy consumption. Though not quite so spectacular,
corresponding figures for other highly industrialized countries also
show above average consumption figures. The United Kingdom, for example,
uses more than three times as much energy as the world average.

With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the
enormous fossil energy which we in this country control feeds machines
which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves. Man's
muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, or one-twentieth
horsepower. Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker
with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push
his automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33
faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy
equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly,
the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once
owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings.
In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred
years just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.

Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability
to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing
population. Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the
role of energy resources in the rise and fall of civilizations.

Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for any kind of
civilization, for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles,
he must expend all his strength - mental and physical - to obtain the
bare necessities of life.

Surplus energy provides the material foundation for civilized living - a
comfortable and tasteful home instead of a bare shelter; attractive
clothing instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing food instead
of anything that suffices to appease hunger. It provides the freedom
from toil without which there can be no art, music, literature, or
learning. There is no need to belabor the point. What lifted man - one
of the weaker mammals - above the animal world was that he could devise,
with his brain, ways to increase the energy at his disposal, and use the
leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and spirit. Where man must rely
solely on the energy of his own body, he can sustain only the most
meager existence.

Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from his discovery
of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy resources he
was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to an agricultural
civilization he needed more energy. In the past this was found in the
labor of dependent members of large patriarchal families, augmented by
slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty. There are some
backward communities which to this day depend on this type of energy.

Slave labor was necessary for the city-states and the empires of
antiquity; they frequently had slave populations larger than their free
citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure attached
to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative sources of
energy were lacking; this may well have been the single most important
reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times.

A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led
to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of
life. For example, exhaustion of wood fuel is believed to have been the
primary reason for the fall of the Mayan Civilization on this continent
and of the decline of once flourishing civilizations in Asia. India and
China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle East.
Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a further
disastrous effect: lacking plant cover, soil washed away, and with soil
erosion the nutritional base was reduced as well.

Another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure of
population on available land. A point is reached where the land can no
longer support both the people and their domestic animals. Horses and
mules disappear first. Finally even the versatile water buffalo is
displaced by man who is two and one half times as efficient an energy
converter as are draft animals. It must always be remembered that while
domestic animals and agricultural machines increase productivity per
man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by intensive manual
cultivation.

It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia, who today
seldom go to sleep with their hunger completely satisfied, were once far
more civilized and lived much better than the people of the West. And
not so very long ago, either. It was the stories brought back by Marco
Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's eyes
to the riches of the East, and induced adventurous sailors to brave the
high seas in their small vessels searching for a direct route to the
fabulous Orient. The "wealth of the Indies" is a phrase still used, but
whatever wealth may be there it certainly is not evident in the life of
the people today.

Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing
populations and sank into such poverty that in many places man has
become again the primary source of energy, since other energy converters
have become too expensive. This must be obvious to the most casual
observer. What this means is quite simply a reversion to a more
primitive stage of civilization with all that it implies for human
dignity and happiness.

Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his
heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a cobblestone road, or who has
flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of
burden moving to market in Java - the slender women bent under
mountainous loads heaped on their heads - anyone who has seen statistics
translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of man's
stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can
afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded.

Where slavery represented a major source of energy, its abolition had
the immediate effect of reducing energy consumption. Thus when this
time-honored institution came under moral censure by Christianity,
civilization declined until other sources of energy could be found.
Slavery is incompatible with Christian belief in the worth of the
humblest individual as a child of God. As Christianity spread through
the Roman Empire and masters freed their slaves - in obedience to the
teaching of the Church - the energy base of Roman civilization crumbled.
This, some historians believe, may have been a major factor in the
decline of Rome and the temporary reversion to a more primitive way of
life during the Dark Ages. Slavery gradually disappeared throughout the
Western world, except in its milder form of serfdom. That it was revived
a thousand years later merely shows man’s ability to stifle his
conscience - at least for a while - when his economic needs are great.
Eventually, even the needs of overseas plantation economies did not
suffice to keep alive a practice so deeply repugnant to Western man's
deepest convictions.

It may well be that it was unwillingness to depend on slave labor for
their energy needs which turned the minds of medieval Europeans to
search for alternate sources of energy, thus sparking the Power
Revolution of the Middle Ages which, in turn, paved the way for the
Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. When slavery disappeared in
the West engineering advanced. Men began to harness the power of nature
by utilizing water and wind as energy sources. The sailing ship, in
particular, which replaced the slave-driven galley of antiquity, was
vastly improved by medieval shipbuilders and became the first machine
enabling man to control large amounts of inanimate energy.

The next important high-energy converter used by Europeans was gunpowder
- an energy source far superior to the muscular strength of the
strongest bowman or lancer. With ships that could navigate the high seas
and arms that could outfire any hand weapon, Europe was now powerful
enough to preempt for herself the vast empty areas of the Western
Hemisphere into which she poured her surplus populations to build new
nations of European stock. With these ships and arms she also gained
political control over populous areas in Africa and Asia from which she
drew the raw materials needed to speed her industrialization, thus
complementing her naval and military dominance with economic and
commercial supremacy.

When a low-energy society comes in contact with a high-energy society,
the advantage always lies with the latter. The Europeans not only
achieved standards of living vastly higher than those of the rest of the
world, but they did this while their population was growing at rates far
surpassing those of other peoples. In fact, they doubled their share of
total world population in the short span of three centuries. From one
sixth in 1650, the people of European stock increased to almost one
third of total world population by 1950.

Meanwhile much of the rest of the world did not even keep energy sources
in balance with population growth. Per capita energy consumption
actually diminished in large areas. It is this difference in energy
consumption which has resulted in an ever-widening gap between the
one-third minority who live in high-energy countries and the two-thirds
majority who live in low-energy areas.

These so-called underdeveloped countries are now finding it far more
difficult to catch up with the fortunate minority than it was for Europe
to initiate transition from low-energy to high-energy consumption. For
one thing, their ratio of land to people is much less favorable; for
another, they have no outlet for surplus populations to ease the
transition since all the empty spaces have already been taken over by
people of European stock.

Almost all of today's low-energy countries have a population density so
great that it perpetuates dependence on intensive manual agriculture
which alone can yield barely enough food for their people. They do not
have enough acreage, per capita, to justify using domestic animals or
farm machinery, although better seeds, better soil management, and
better hand tools could bring some improvement. A very large part of
their working population must nevertheless remain on the land, and this
limits the amount of surplus energy that can be produced. Most of these
countries must choose between using this small energy surplus to raise
their very low standard of living or postpone present rewards for the
sake of future gain by investing the surplus in new industries. The
choice is difficult because there is no guarantee that today's denial
may not prove to have been in vain. This is so because of the rapidity
with which public health measures have reduced mortality rates,
resulting in population growth as high or even higher than that of the
high-energy nations. Theirs is a bitter choice; it accounts for much of
their anti-Western feeling and may well portend a prolonged period of
world instability.

How closely energy consumption is related to standards of living may be
illustrated by the example of India. Despite intelligent and sustained
efforts made since independence, India's per capita income is still only
20 cents daily; her infant mortality is four times ours; and the life
expectance of her people is less than one half that of the
industrialized countries of the West. These are ultimate consequences of
India's very low energy consumption: one-fourteenth of world average;
one-eightieth of ours.

Ominous, too, is the fact that while world food production increased 9%
in the six years from 1945-51, world population increased by 12%. Not
only is world population increasing faster than world food production,
but unfortunately, increases in food production tend to occur in the
already well-fed, high-energy countries rather than in the
undernourished, low-energy countries where food is most lacking.

I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance
of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests upon a
technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels.
What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be
supplied by fossil fuels: The answer is - in the long run - none.

The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our
energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could
have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot.
Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent
than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with
ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel
leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted
fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million
years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.

In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the
exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one
respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways
of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our
economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible
parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his
children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and
irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one
whit how his offspring will fare.

Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics;
far-seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor
which must enter into all planning for the future; responsible
governments who realize that the well-being of their citizens and the
political power of their countries depend on adequate energy supplies -
all these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. In this
country, especially, many studies have been made in the last few years,
seeking to discover accurate information on fossil-fuel reserves and
foreseeable fuel needs.

Statistics involving the human factor are, of course, never exact. The
size of usable reserves depends on the ability of engineers to improve
the efficiency of fuel extraction and use. It also depends on discovery
of new methods to obtain energy from inferior resources at costs which
can be borne without unduly depressing the standard of living. Estimates
of future needs, in turn, rely heavily on population figures which must
always allow for a large element of uncertainty, particularly as man
reaches a point where he is more and more able to control his own way of
life.

Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an astonishing degree.
In part this is because the results differ greatly if cost of extraction
is disregarded or if in calculating how long reserves will last,
population growth is not taken into consideration; or, equally
important, not enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption
required to process inferior or substitute metals. We are rapidly
approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals will force
us to turn to poorer grades requiring in most cases greater expenditure
of energy per unit of metal.

But the most significant distinction between optimistic and pessimistic
fuel reserve statistics is that the optimists generally speak of the
immediate future - the next twenty-five years or so - while the
pessimists think in terms of a century from now. A century or even two
is a short span in the history of a great people. It seems sensible to
me to take a long view, even if this involves facing unpleasant facts.

For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total
fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today's unit cost,
are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if
present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into
account. Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will
be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so difficult to
mine that energy costs would rise to economically intolerable heights,
so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy
sources or to lower standards of living drastically.

For more than one hundred years we have stoked ever growing numbers of
machines with coal; for fifty years we have pumped gas and oil into our
factories, cars, trucks, tractors, ships, planes, and homes without
giving a thought to the future. Occasionally the voice of a Cassandra
has been raised only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery
revised estimates of our oil reserves upward, or a new coalfield was
found in some remote spot. Fewer such lucky discoveries can be expected
in the future, especially in industrialized countries where extensive
mapping of resources has been done. Yet the popularizers of scientific
news would have us believe that there is no cause for anxiety, that
reserves will last thousands of years, and that before they run out
science will have produced miracles. Our past history and security have
given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will never
really happen - that everything turns out right in the end. But, prudent
men will reject these tranquilizers and prefer to face the facts so that
they can plan intelligently for the needs of their posterity.

Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we cannot feel
overly confident that present high standards of living will of a
certainty continue through the next century and beyond. Fossil fuel
costs will soon definitely begin to rise as the best and most accessible
reserves are exhausted, and more effort will be required to obtain the
same energy from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel
synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel certain that
when economically recoverable fossil fuels are gone science will have
learned how to maintain a high standard of living on renewable energy
sources?

I believe it would be wise to assume that the principal renewable fuel
sources which we can expect to tap before fossil reserves run out will
supply only 7 to 15% of future energy needs. The five most important of
these renewable sources are wood fuel, farm wastes, wind, water power,
and solar heat.

Wood fuel and farm wastes are dubious as substitutes because of growing
food requirements to be anticipated. Land is more likely to be used for
food production than for tree crops; farm wastes may be more urgently
needed to fertilize the soil than to fuel machines.

Wind and water power can furnish only a very small percentage of our
energy needs. Moreover, as with solar energy, expensive structures would
be required, making use of land and metals which will also be in short
supply. Nor would anything we know today justify putting too much
reliance on solar energy though it will probably prove feasible for home
heating in favorable localities and for cooking in hot countries which
lack wood, such as India.

More promising is the outlook for nuclear fuels. These are not, properly
speaking, renewable energy sources, at least not in the present state of
technology, but their capacity to "breed" and the very high energy
output from small quantities of fissionable material, as well as the
fact that such materials are relatively abundant, do seem to put nuclear
fuels into a separate category from exhaustible fossil fuels. The
disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants is, however, a
problem which must be solved before there can be any widespread use of
nuclear power.

Another limit in the use of nuclear power is that we do not know today
how to employ it otherwise than in large units to produce electricity or
to supply heating. Because of its inherent characteristics, nuclear fuel
cannot be used directly in small machines, such as cars, trucks, or
tractors. It is doubtful that it could in the foreseeable future furnish
economical fuel for civilian airplanes or ships, except very large ones.
Rather than nuclear locomotives, it might prove advantageous to move
trains by electricity produced in nuclear central stations. We are only
at the beginning of nuclear technology, so it is difficult to predict
what we may expect.

Transportation - the lifeblood of all technically advanced civilizations
- seems to be assured, once we have borne the initial high cost of
electrifying railroads and replacing buses with streetcars or interurban
electric trains. But, unless science can perform the miracle of
synthesizing automobile fuel from some energy source as yet unknown or
unless trolley wires power electric automobiles on all streets and
highways, it will be wise to face up to the possibility of the ultimate
disappearance of automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors. Before all
the oil is gone and hydrogenation of coal for synthetic liquid fuels has
come to an end, the cost of automotive fuel may have risen to a point
where private cars will be too expensive to run and public
transportation again becomes a profitable business.

Today the automobile is the most uneconomical user of energy. Its
efficiency is 5% compared with 23% for the Diesel-electric railway. It
is the most ravenous devourer of fossil fuels, accounting for over half
of the total oil consumption in this country. And the oil we use in the
United States in one year took nature about 14 million years to create.
Curiously, the automobile, which is the greatest single cause of the
rapid exhaustion of oil reserves, may eventually be the first fuel
consumer to suffer. Reduction in automotive use would necessitate an
extraordinarily costly reorganization of the pattern of living in
industrialized nations, particularly in the United States. It would seem
prudent to bear this in mind in future planning of cities and industrial
locations.

Our present known reserves of fissionable materials are many times as
large as our net economically recoverable reserves of coal. A point will
be reached before this century is over when fossil fuel costs will have
risen high enough to make nuclear fuels economically competitive. Before
that time comes we shall have to make great efforts to raise our entire
body of engineering and scientific knowledge to a higher plateau. We
must also induce many more young Americans to become metallurgical and
nuclear engineers. Else we shall not have the knowledge or the people to
build and run the nuclear power plants which ultimately may have to
furnish the major part of our energy needs. If we start to plan now, we
may be able to achieve the requisite level of scientific and engineering
knowledge before our fossil fuel reserves give out, but the margin of
safety is not large. This is also based on the assumption that atomic
war can be avoided and that population growth will not exceed that now
calculated by demographic experts.

War, of course, cancels all man's expectations. Even growing world
tension just short of war could have far-reaching effects. In this
country it might, on the one hand, lead to greater conservation of
domestic fuels, to increased oil imports, and to an acceleration in
scientific research which might turn up unexpected new energy sources.
On the other hand, the resulting armaments race would deplete metal
reserves more rapidly, hastening the day when inferior metals must be
utilized with consequent greater expenditure of energy. Underdeveloped
nations with fossil fuel deposits might be coerced into withholding them
from the free world or may themselves decide to retain them for their
own future use. The effect on Europe, which depends on coal and oil
imports, would be disastrous and we would have to share our own supplies
or lose our allies.

Barring atomic war or unexpected changes in the population curve, we can
count on an increase in world population from two and one half billion
today to four billion in the year 2000; six to eight billion by 2050.
The United States is expected to quadruple its population during the
20th Century ¬ from 75 million in 1900 to 300 million in 2000 - and to
reach at least 375 million in 2050. This would almost exactly equal
India's present population which she supports on just a little under
half of our land area.

It is an awesome thing to contemplate a graph of world population growth
from prehistoric times - tens of thousands of years ago - to the day
after tomorrow - let us say the year 2000 A.D. If we visualize the
population curve as a road which starts at sea level and rises in
proportion as world population increases, we should see it stretching
endlessly, almost level, for 99% of the time that man has inhabited the
earth. In 6000 B.C., when recorded history begins, the road is running
at a height of about 70 feet above sea level, which corresponds to a
population of 10 million. Seven thousand years later - in 1000 A.D. -
the road has reached an elevation of 1,600 feet; the gradation now
becomes steeper, and 600 years later the road is 2,900 feet high. During
the short span of the next 400 years – from 1600 to 2000 - it suddenly
turns sharply upward at an almost perpendicular inclination and goes
straight up to an elevation of 29,000 feet - the height of Mt. Everest,
the world's tallest mountain.

In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D.
world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion, with 90%
of that growth taking place during the last 5% of that period, in 400
years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish
the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but
the next doubling will require only 50 years. Calculations give us the
astonishing estimate that one out of every 20 human beings born into
this world is alive today.

The rapidity of population growth has not given us enough time to
readjust our thinking. Not much more than a century ago our country –
the very spot on which I now stand was a wilderness in which a pioneer
could find complete freedom from men and from government. If things
became too crowded - if he saw his neighbor's chimney smoke - he could,
and often did, pack up and move west. We began life in 1776 as a nation
of less than four million people - spread over a vast continent - with
seemingly inexhaustible riches of nature all about. We conserved what
was scarce - human labor - and squandered what seemed abundant - natural
resources - and we are still doing the same today.

Much of the wilderness which nurtured what is most dynamic in the
American character has now been buried under cities, factories and
suburban developments where each picture window looks out on nothing
more inspiring than the neighbor's back yard with the smoke of his fire
in the wire basket clearly visible.

Life in crowded communities cannot be the same as life on the frontier.
We are no longer free, as was the pioneer - to work for our own
immediate needs regardless of the future. We are no longer as
independent of men and of government as were Americans two or three
generations ago. An ever larger share of what we earn must go to solve
problems caused by crowded living - bigger governments; bigger city,
state, and federal budgets to pay for more public services. Merely to
supply us with enough water and to carry away our waste products becomes
more difficult and expansive daily. More laws and law enforcement
agencies are needed to regulate human relations in urban industrial
communities and on crowded highways than in the America of Thomas Jefferson.

Certainly no one likes taxes, but we must become reconciled to larger
taxes in the larger America of tomorrow.

I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our
responsibilities to our descendents - those who will ring out the Fossil
Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as parents and as citizens, is to
give America's youngsters the best possible education. We need the best
teachers and enough of them to prepare our young people for a future
immeasurably more complex than the present, and calling for ever larger
numbers of competent and highly trained men and women. This means that
we must not delay building more schools, colleges, and playgrounds. It
means that we must reconcile ourselves to continuing higher taxes to
build up and maintain at decent salaries a greatly enlarged corps of
much better trained teachers, even at the cost of denying ourselves such
momentary pleasures as buying a bigger new car, or a TV set, or
household gadget. We should find - I believe - that these small
self-denials would be far more than offset by the benefits they would
buy for tomorrow's America. We might even - if we wanted - give a break
to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here
and there so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments
which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.

One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-energy
consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The
tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller
number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which control - the largest
energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem
of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we
have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this
dominant position for our own country.

/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Contributor Rick Lakin writes:

Admiral Rickover was considered the Father of the Nuclear Submarine.
As an employee of the US Atomic Energy Commission, later Department
of Energy, he had great influence on the development of our
country's civilian Nuclear Power Generation Industry.

This speech, given almost 50 years ago, sheds an important light on
our current discussion about the future of energy in our country. In
the 1970s, Admiral Rickover worked closely with President Jimmy
Carter on energy issues. I served on Navy Nuclear Submarines as a
Nuclear Reactor Operator for 8 years.

I would like to give special thanks to Theodore Rockwell, author of
*The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference* for searching
his files and sending me a copy of this speech so that I could
convert it for digital publication. Mr. Rockwell has a more recent
book, *Creating the New World: Stories & Images from the Dawn of the
Atomic Age*. Both are available on amazon.com <http://amazon.com>.

Biography of Hyman G. Rickover from Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover>

Many thanks to Rick Lakin and Theodore Rockwell who have made this
historic document available. Rickover's speech was covered in an
excellent 1957 article in the Christian Science Monitor that EB just
posted: Admiral Rickover: The future of fossil fuels
<http://energybulletin.net/22890.html>.

This document is also posted at
http://www.hilltoplancers.org/photos/rickover0557.pdf.

-BA/
/*Article found at : *
http://www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=23151

*Original article : *
http://www.hilltoplancers.org/photos/rickover0557.pdf
/

A commodities trader takes on ethanomania

2006-12-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

Ethanol skeptic sees painful realities ahead

http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/11/30/local/doc456e13dc546e6066474346.prt
BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
Thursday, Nov 30, 2006 - 12:07:16 am CST
What he can’t see coming from his seventh-floor office window in
downtown Lincoln, Doug Carper can usually piece together on the four,
super-sized computer screens at his desk.

Having pored over all the charts and graphics, and having weighed the
numbers against his many years as an agricultural commodities broker,
the 56-year-old Carper sees trouble coming for Nebraska’s ethanol industry.

He sees more of the same for much of the agricultural economy that
supports ethanol.

“I’m not posturing. I have no agenda,” Carper said in a Tuesday
interview in his office. “I see trouble looming here in the American
heartland and a lot of good, well-intentioned people facing some
terrible and ruinous losses.”

His sense of trepidation may seem completely at odds with recent reality.

Expansion in the ethanol industry in Nebraska is proceeding at an
unprecedented pace. Corn prices are rising. Congress seems poised to
expand its mandate of renewable fuels.

But circumstances that lead others to conclude there’s money to be made
by aggressive investment have Carper thumping his desk so hard pens leap
in the air.

“For what constructive purpose are we disrupting agriculture in this
manner?” he asked. “For what constructive purpose have we embarked on
this dangerous public policy initiative?”

As far as Carper is concerned, there is no constructive purpose to
putting so much emphasis on ethanol as an answer to shrinking energy
resources.

Even if every bushel of corn in the United States were turned into
ethanol, it wouldn’t make much of a dent in overseas oil dependence, he
said.

“It’s a delusion that somehow we are solving the country’s energy needs
when, in fact, at the extreme, ethanol could never be a substantial
solution to the nation’s energy requirement. It’s patently wrong and
absurd to think we can.”

Beyond that, he sees so much emphasis on ethanol leading to higher food
prices. He sees what he called a tremendous negative effect on the
state’s cattle feeders, possible disruption in the food distribution
system and some substantial portion of new ethanol plants failing to
make a go of it as profit margins inevitably narrow.

How sure is he he’s right about that last point?

“As sure as I can be that poorly capitalized, shakily managed companies
almost always have a fairly high fatality rate.”

With politicians of every political stripe singing ethanol’s praises,
Carper knows how hard it is to make criticism heard. Maybe that’s why
his voice tends to rise in volume as he refers to what he describes as
“the realization phase” and replies to questions that call for some detail.

“We’re going to need the largest year-to-year increase in corn
production,” he said.

“We’ve never shifted more than 3 million acres in history. And we’re
going to need 6 or 7 million, if not 10 million acres, this (next) year.”

Furthermore, counting so heavily on ethanol as an energy answer leaves
no room for a poor crop, he said.

“You can only imagine that the job next year becomes even more
difficult, because we continue to ramp up. ... We’re simply raising the
bar and raising it every year.”

Nebraska will pay a price in increased irrigation consumption, in
removal of erodible acres from the Conservation Reserve Program, and in
less obvious ways, he said.

“Farmers are good stewards of the land,” he said, “but money talks.”

At distant points that count on the United States for corn exports,
hunger will be a result of what he describes as a food or fuel fight.

“You won’t go hungry. I won’t go hungry. But somebody will go hungry.”

Don Hutchens, executive director of the Nebraska Corn Board, sees no
reason, so far, to worry about ethanol causing corn producers to fall
behind in efforts to keep up with the state’s corn demand.

“If we look into what we know is under construction in Nebraska today
and at the picture as it might look in three years, I’m not very nervous
about that aspect,” Hutchens said.

Nebraska exports about 420 million bushels of corn per year, he said.
More ethanol means more value added to a product that stays at home.

“I think, economically, we become much better off than to load it on a
rail car to the international marketplace or to another domestic location.”

What about hunger in far-off places? Hutchens answered with another
question: “Is it the responsibility of the Nebraska corn farmer to keep
prices as low as he possibly can so no one in the world has food
availability issues?”

Back at Carper’s office, a much more skeptical ethanol watcher cites
“the most bullet-proof scheme that any lobbying group ever devised in
such a short period of time.”

And he said he’s not vulnerable to accusations of occupational ax grinding.

For whatever influence ethanol may have on grain trading, he’s out of
that business now and into managing other people’s money.

But his previous occupation, which he took up at age 22, gives him some
historical frame of reference on remarkable and uncertain times for the
nation’s ethanol-energy connection.

“We’re really embarking on uncharted territory,” he said. “In all the
years I’ve been trading, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

/Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net
<mailto:ahovey@alltel.net>./

Very cool thinking from frieght officials for a change

2006-11-29T06:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-maglev28nov28,1,3887348.story?coll=la-headlines-california
Ports considering maglev trains to cut smog
Officials see magnetic levitation technology as a clean, high-speed way to move goods inland, ease traffic congestion and reduce pollution.By Dan Weikel
Times Staff Writer

November 28, 2006

Searching for ways to reduce air pollution and highway congestion, local harbor officials might resort to so-called maglev trains to haul cargo containers to and from the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports — the first freight application of the technology anywhere in the world.

Now under study at Cal State Long Beach are three maglev proposals to shuttle cargo to rail yards in Los Angeles and to inland distribution centers in Victorville and Beaumont.

In the months ahead, the Southern California Assn. of Governments and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are planning to launch their own feasibility studies of the technology.

Maglev, or magnetic levitation, trains produce no air pollution along their routes and are powered by magnetic fields in guideways that pull them along at speeds up to 300 mph. So far, two systems have been built for commercial passenger service in China and Japan.

Adapted for freight, researchers say, maglev trains could do the work of thousands of trucks and conventional locomotives, cutting harmful emissions in the port area and alleviating congestion on rail and highway corridors that serve the nation's largest harbor complex.

"If we are going to get serious about cleaning up the port, we need to bring electric power into the transportation system. We need to be emission free if we are going to grow," said S. David Freeman, president of the Los Angeles Harbor Commission. "Maglev is one of several options we are looking at. It has a lot going for it."

The search for new technologies became more imperative on Nov. 20 when the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach approved a $2-billion plan to transform the harbor into a clean-air model for seaports worldwide.

To achieve that goal, many proposals are being considered, including alternative rail systems, emissions controls and low-sulfur fuels for trucks, heavy equipment, locomotives and cargo ships.

But cleaning the air and keeping the cargo moving will be a monumental task. By 2030, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are expected to handle the equivalent of 21 million, 40-foot cargo containers annually — triple today's volume.

Truck trips on the Long Beach Freeway are expected to increase from 40,000 a day to more than 90,000 in the next 25 years.

Demand for freight rail service is also expected to more than double, choking the existing track network in Southern California. Congested corridors already are delaying freight trains going into and out of the region.

"Just widening roads is not going to cut it," said Sam Gurol, director of maglev systems for General Atomics in San Diego, which is developing a system for cargo containers.

General Atomics is participating in a study of maglev systems by the Center for the Commercial Deployment of Transportation Technologies at Cal State Long Beach.

Researchers are evaluating a 4.7-mile system between Terminal Island in the Port of Los Angeles and the proposed Southern California International Gateway, a rail terminal to the north. The line would cost about $575 million to build and $9.2 million a year to operate.

Also under study is a 20-mile, $2.4-billion line along the Long Beach Freeway, and a 100-mile network that would connect the port to distribution hubs in Victorville and Beaumont. The estimated cost is about $8.5 billion.

Capable of traveling 90 mph, the trains would run on elevated guideways built in highway medians or along utility rights of way.

Spurs would extend from the main line to port terminals where heavy equipment would shuttle containers from ships and storage yards to maglev cars.

At their destinations, similar methods would be used to transfer the containers to trucks and trains.

Researchers say maglev freight systems are becoming economically attractive because of the need to reduce air pollution and the high cost of building highways and conventional rail lines.

At roughly $100 million a mile, the cost of building a maglev system for cargo is approaching that of building a mile of freeway in urban areas.

It is also cheaper than the $200 million a mile required for maglev passenger trains — an enormous cost that has often been an impediment to commercial projects.

After almost a half century of research in Europe and Asia, Japan and China have built the only two maglev passenger lines in the world.

If the freight system is built, the Cal State Long Beach study indicates that moving containers by maglev would cost considerably less than by trucks or conventional trains.

The estimated savings ranges from 25% to 50%.

"This technology is coming. No doubt about it. The costs are coming down," said Steven Hinds, program administrator for the Cal State Long Beach research center.

Officials at the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a regional planning agency, say, however, that the Cal State study may have overstated the economic feasibility of the maglev system by underestimating the costs of moving cargo at port terminals and rail yards.

Danny Wu, the manager of SCAG's goods movement program, said association officials discussed the Cal State Long Beach study about six months ago.

"We felt they did not consider all the complexities of the logistics chain," Wu said. "They underestimated the costs, which goes to feasibility."

Gurol said the research team would welcome input from other agencies interested in maglev because some factors could have been overlooked for the study.

"This is a new way of moving shipping containers," Gurol said. "Even when you go talk to the ports, there are many questions they can't answer about moving cargo."

Some of the issues, SCAG officials say, will be addressed in future studies planned by the ports and SCAG, as well as the environmental review for improvements proposed for the Long Beach Freeway.

"We still need to do the assessments," said Philip Law, manager of SCAG's transportation corridor program. "What makes maglev attractive are zero emissions and electric power, which gives it an advantage over diesel trucks. But it's pretty expensive, and how to get containers from ships to the trains needs to be worked out."

*

Important new book

2006-11-16T06:42:00.000-08:00

Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction
by Terry Tamminen

ISBN: 1597261017

How much would you pay for a gallon of gas? $4.00? $10.00? Would you pay with the health of your lungs or with years taken from your lifespan? The infamous "pain at the pump" runs much deeper than our wallets, argues Terry Tamminen, former Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and current Special Advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Petroleum may power our cars and heat our homes, but it also contributes to birth defects and disorders like asthma and emphysema, not to mention cancer. In Lives per Gallon, Tamminen takes a hard look at these and other health, environmental, and national security costs hidden in every barrel of oil.

While the petroleum industry is raking in huge profits, Tamminen shows, it is studiously avoiding measures that would lessen the hazards of its products. Using the successful lawsuits by state governments against big tobacco as a model, the author sets forth a bold strategy to hold oil and auto companies accountable and force industry reform. He also offers a blueprint for developing alternative energy sources based on California's real world experiences.

Certain to be controversial, Lives per Gallon is an unblinking assessment of the true price of petroleum and a prescription for change. The choice is clear: continuing paying with our health, or kick our addiction and evolve beyond an oil-dependent economy.

Review:
"America's prosperity, our independence and security, our democracy and our ideals, our international leadership and national pride are all dependent on our breaking our lethal oil addiction. Terry Tamminen has turned the spotlight of clarity on the defining issue of our age." Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Waterkeeper Alliance

Review:
"Tamminen does more than point to the problems. He lays out step-by-step solutions to ending our oil addiction. I only wish that all members of Congress would read this book." Dick Morris, Fox News political analyst and former advisor to President Clinton

Review:
"The book reads like a gangster thriller, while providing detailed and painful truths about how much the oil and auto industries have controlled development (or lack thereof) in the U.S....a definite 'must read' for anyone interested in improving America's future and national security." Jonathan Patz, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Review:
"Crude is, sadly, much more than a fad, and our energy-intense lifestyle is more than the handiwork of deceitful oil and car companies. If only it were so easy." Washington Post

Synopsis:
Tamminen takes a hard look at health, environmental, and national security costs hidden in every barrel of oil. He also offers a blueprint for developing alternative energy sources based on California's real world experiences.

About the Author
Terry Tamminen is a leading expert on pools and spas, serving as technical advisor on a variety of water chemistry and pool technology projects. He is the executive director of Environment Now, working with activist organizations such as the Santa Monica Bay Keeper and the San Diego Bay Keeper, dedicated to preserving and protecting coastal resources in California.

ISBN: 1597261017
Subtitle: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction
Author: Tamminen, Terry
Author: Tamminen, Terry
Author: Tamminem, Terry
Publisher: Island Press
Subject: Public Policy
Subject: Petroleum industry and trade
Subject: Energy policy
Subject: Government - U.S. Government
Subject: Public Policy - Economic Policy
Subject: Industries - Energy Industries
Copyright: 2006
Publication Date: November 2006
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Pages: 262
Dimensions: 916x630x94 111

No worries, mate, plenty of oil! (Yergin)

2006-11-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

* Expert debunks oil-crisis theory
Detroit Free Press
By Kevin G. Hall
Far from being a nearly exhausted resource, the world's oil reserves are three times bigger than what some popular estimates state, and peak global oil production is still about a quarter-century away, according to a new study by Pulitzer Prize-winning oil historian Daniel Yergin. http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061115/BUSINESS07/611150388/1020/BUSINESS

Home Based Combined Heat/Power Systems?

2006-11-13T17:38:00.000-08:00

from the November 14, 2006 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1114/p01s02-usec.html

It heats. It powers. Is it the future of home energy?

*Residential 'micro-combined-heat-and-power' units are efficient
furnaces that create electricity.*

*By Mark Clayton
<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=CDE1F2EBA0C3ECE1F9F4EFEE>*
| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Down in Bernard Malin's basement is a softly thrumming metal box that
turns natural gas into hot water and generates $600 to $800 worth of
electricity a year - a bonus byproduct of heating his home.

"It's like printing money," says Mr. Malin, the first person in
Massachusetts - perhaps in the nation - to own a residential "micro
combined-heat-and-power" system, also known as micro-CHP.

But he's not likely to be the last.

Since Malin changed his home heating system to micro-CHP in February, 18
other families in the Boston area also have adopted the technology,
which squeezes about 90 percent of the useful energy from the fuel.
That's triple the efficiency of power delivered over the grid.

Factories and other industrial facilities have used large CHP systems
for years. But until the US debut of micro-systems in greater Boston,
the units had not been small enough, cheap enough, and quiet enough for
American homes. Add to that the public's rising concern about
electric-power reliability - seen in a sales boom of backup generators
in the past couple of years - and some experts see in micro-CHP a
power-to-the-people energy revolution.

"Right now these residential micro-CHP systems are just a blip," says
Nicholas Lenssen of Energy Insights, a technology advisory firm in
Framingham, Mass. "But it's a ... technology that ... could have a big
impact as it's adopted more widely over the next five to 10 years."

*The Japanese are early adopters*

Home heating systems that produce a kilowatt of electricity - like
Malin's - and bigger units that pump out about 4 kilowatts are already
available in Europe and Japan. They'll make their commercial US debut in
New England in January.

Of course, other home-based power-supply options - solar panels and wind
generators - have preceded micro-CHP, with varying degrees of
acceptance. Both can be costly and hard to site. Fuel cells are another
much-anticipated option, but remain too costly for commercialization.
Micro-CHP, by contrast, is an advanced hybrid of existing technologies:
an internal-combustion engine generator married to a high-efficiency
home furnace.

In Japan, more than 30,000 homeowners have installed micro-CHP systems
driven by quiet, efficient internal-combustion engines, each housed in a
sleek metal box made by Honda. Japan is ahead because gas utilities have
been subsidizing and promoting the systems. In Britain, where the
systems look like dishwashers and sit under kitchen counters, 80,000
systems made by a New Zealand company are on order.

At least five companies are building micro-CHP systems worldwide. Two
are trying to enter the US market: Marathon Engine Systems of East Troy,
Wis., plans to bring a 4-kilowatt hot-water system it sells in Europe to
the US early in 2007. Climate Energy of Medfield, Mass., has developed a
forced-hot-air system that marries a high-efficiency furnace to a
superquiet Honda generator. That system has been deployed as a pilot to
several US homes, including Malin's.

Such systems help people like Lynn Denoy insulate themselves from high
electricity prices because they draw power from the commercial grid much
less often in winter.

"I feel good about money we're saving - and the environment - because
we're using less gas [than the old furnace] and creating our own heat
and electricity," says the speech therapist from Braintree, Mass. Ms.
Denoy's family will buy some power this winter - and all spring and
summer when the furnace system is not running.

Still, micro-CHP makes some utilities nervous, experts say. "In North
America I don't see utilities embracing it. I think they'll see it as
more of a threat initially," says Jon Slowe, a director at Delta Energy
& Environment, an energy consulting company in Glasgow, Scotland.

At the municipal utility in Braintree, Mass., where Malin and Denoy
live, officials say micro-CHP could bolster the grid in their area with
extra power, if the idea catches on. "If 1,000 homeowners bought these
in Braintree, that would be great - about 10 percent of our residential
load," says William Bottiggi, director of the Braintree Electric Light
Department, which partnered with the American Public Power Association
to subsidize some local installations.

But William Steeley of Distributed Energy Resources at the Electric
Power Research Institute, whose members include investor-owned
utilities, says the jury's out. "We are very intrigued by micro-CHP and
its potential," he says. "It is competing against well-established
technologies. So we'll have to see."

Wind-powered turbines in back yards, solar panels on rooftops, and
micro-CHP are part of a gradual shift by homeowners from central power
plants and toward self-generated power.

Slowly gaining ground, the trend is "not at all pie in the sky," says
Cheryl Harrington of the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit that
helps states and nations develop energy policy. "The question is how to
get electric utilities to actively support this kind of generation when
it is on the customer's side of the meter."

*And the price tag is...?*

Micro-CHP doesn't come cheap - just with a long-term discount. Basic
systems cost from $13,000 to $20,000, installed. Even at the lower
range, that's at least $6,000 more than a new high-efficiency hot-air
furnace, even after a gas company rebate. Result: The payback period on
the initial investment is three to seven years, depending on the cost of
electricity, say officials at Climate Energy. The company expects to
install about 200 systems next year, mostly in New England.

Given consumers' interest in having a backup power generator on site,
micro-CHP systems that provide that, as well as cut electric bills, may
hold the most promise, say analysts.

Climate Energy won't have a model with backup capability until 2008, but
is poised to sell its "Freewatt" system that chops electric bills by
about 50 percent. Marathon, which makes larger home systems, will offer
backup capability when its systems roll out early next year.

While all CHP systems use fossil fuel, some states and environmental
groups have endorsed them as a step in the right direction. Through
efficiency gains, a Climate Energy system cuts carbon-dioxide emissions
for electricity used in the home by 40 percent, company officials say.

If micro-CHP can capture even 1 percent of the 3 million home furnaces
sold each year, that would be enough to make it more broadly affordable,
says Eric Guyer, CEO of Climate Energy. "I think there will be a mind
shift over time."

For Richard Hillel of Belmont, Mass., that shift is here. "When you can
have something producing heat and electricity, too, it's great," he
says. "We should be doing anything we can to save energy."

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and
related links <http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1114/p01s02-usec.html>

Ethanol: more costly, less efficient

2006-11-02T07:07:00.000-08:00

Costs Limit Bigger US Move to Biomass Ethanol

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/38792/story.htm

CHICAGO - Scientists have developed ways to make ethanol from corn stalks, switchgrass, wood chips and other plant materials, but high production costs and lack of easy access to those materials have slowed the technology's move to widespread commercial use.

In the United States, Ethanol is made primarily from corn, but industry experts have said waste materials from agriculture or forestry could be a cheaper alternative in the future.

"Some (corn-based) ethanol plants are not getting built because people are worried about corn supply. Do you think you would really want to fund a biomass plant because then you're really going to be worried about feedstock supply," said Martha Schlicher of Renewable Agricultural Energy, Inc.

"The minute we start to pay for those biomass feedstocks, the cost of those biomass feedstocks is going to go up," said Schlicher, the vice president of operations and engineering.

She was attending a conference on cellulosic ethanol that discussed issues such as the investment climate, challenges in commercialization and the crucial next steps in the sector.

The US Department of Energy has estimated the cost of producing a gallon of cellulosic ethanol is about US$2.20 per gallon, about twice the cost of producing ethanol from corn.

In his State of the Union address in January, President George W. Bush said the best way to break America's addiction to foreign oil was through the development of new technology to provide more reliable and cheaper alternative fuels.

But efficient harvest and delivery of feedstock materials such as switchgrass, wood chips, or agricultural waste is crucial for a plant's profitability, experts said.

Many investors have been reluctant to finance the new plants, which are costlier than current corn-based plants due to the extra steps needed to break down cellulose into sugars before they can be processed into ethanol.

Farmers have a narrow window to harvest corn for grain. A second harvest to cut stalks and leaves would not only take more time but could hurt future yield potential by compacting soils and removing potential nutrients, Schlicher said.

For other cellulosic feedstocks such as switchgrass or wood biomass, the machinery needed to harvest and compact those materials for shipment, then move them from fields to plants is still being developed and streamlined, the experts said.

MOVING FROM LABORATORY TO REAL WORLD
Scientists have been able to produce cellulosic ethanol from numerous feedstock sources in smaller pilot plants under nearly ideal conditions, the experts said. But making the technology work on a much larger scale, and thus making it a profitable enterprise, remains a key challenge, they said.

"Enzymes work really, really well at the pilot scale or the lab scale," said Jeff Passmore, executive vice president of Iogen Corporation, which plans to open a cellulosic ethanol plant in Idaho using barley straw as its main feedstock.

"But when you put them into the industrial scale and you're bringing in pounds and pounds of straw from farmer's fields, with all the intruders you expect to find in a bale of straw, like dirt, dead mice, whatever... they have to design a more robust enzyme," he said.

Investors are hesitant to build the high-cost cellulosic facilities until large-scale plants are proven to be profitable, although cellulosic ethanol production costs have fallen by more than half in the past five years.

Genetic engineering will most likely be utilized to produce crops that grow faster and in less ideal conditions, with more plants per acre to push the upper yield limits in the future.

"In real estate they say the three most important things are location, location, location. In a business such as this the three most important things are yield, yield, yield," said Charles Wyman, professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Riverside.

Story by Karl Plume
Story Date: 2/11/2006

Governing mag pundit on why power dereg failed

2006-10-30T11:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.governing.com/notebook.htm

Why Dereg Didn’t Work
Electricity and Economics 101
Deregulation was a great success in the airline and trucking industries. So why has it been such a flop among electric utilities? There are many reasons, but one stands out: It takes a long time and a lot of money to build a power plant. Why is that important? Glad you asked. Grab a seat. The Economics 101 class is about to begin.

As any economist will tell you, free markets are efficient. When we want stuff that’s in short supply, prices rise, and before you know it, factories are pumping out the things we want. And then something fascinating happens: As all these things flood the market, prices level off, then decline, and factories stop producing so much. If demand surges again (or supplies dwindle), prices rise, factories call back the third shift, more stuff gets produced, and on and on it goes.

Notice the role that prices play. Funny to think about them this way, but at their core prices are high-quality information, signals that tell businesses when to step up production, add more assembly lines, build new factories ... or cut production, close assembly lines and shutter plants. (In communist countries, governments tried substituting plans for prices, but it didn’t work because five-year plans don’t deliver information as quickly or decisively as prices.)

So what does this have to do with deregulation? For prices to work their magic, they need a reasonable response time, a time during which signals (we want more!) result in action (call in the third shift and start building a new factory!). It turns out that airlines and trucking companies can respond to those signals in a reasonable amount of time, but electric-generation companies can’t.

Why? Because it takes so much time and money to build a plant. In the years it takes to site, build and power up a generation plant (given the engineering and environmental restrictions, not to mention objections from neighborhood groups), prices can go up, down or sideways numerous times. And not just at the consumer level. Most of the power plants built in recent years burn natural gas, which was cheap, available and more environmentally friendly than coal until ... oops, Hurricane Katrina knocked out much of Louisiana’s natural-gas production last year and gas prices went through the roof.

Well, if it’s so hard to predict a decade out how much electricity we’ll need, how have power companies managed it in the past? Through a system of shared responsibility. The electric companies made their guesses, state public service commissions verified the reasonableness of the estimates, then committed the state’s consumers to paying for those plants, regardless of how things actually turned out.

Compared to the mess caused by deregulation, that looks like a reasonable way of providing such a vital but difficult-to-create commodity. Not convinced? Ask consumers in Houston, where, according to the New York Times, a botched state deregulation plan has produced electric rates nearly double the national average.

Footnote: There are other reasons electric deregulation hasn’t worked as planned. In some cases, the deregulation schemes were deeply flawed (deregulating, for instance, the prices utilities paid their suppliers but continuing regulation of consumer rates). In others, the free market wasn’t really free; that is, not enough companies jumped into the electric generation business to create a free market. And, of course, deregulation opened the door to all kinds of financial shenanigans and outright market manipulation. One word describes how heedlessly state legislatures deregulated electric power: Enron.

Posted October 27, 2006

Great idea -- commuter rail in Michigan

2006-10-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

* Passenger rail idea has a powerful advocate Railroad owner backs mayor
on concept Ann Arbor News By John Mulcahy
Louis Ferris joins up with Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje and other
proponents of a commuter rail service between Ann Arbor and Livingston
County and perhaps other points north.
http://www.mlive.com/news/aanews/index.ssf?/base/news-20/116210808018291
0.xml&coll=2

Passenger rail idea has a powerful advocate Railroad owner backs mayor
on concept
Sunday, October 29, 2006
BY JOHN MULCAHY

News Staff Reporter

Louis Ferris - salesman, entrepreneur, financier and now railroad owner
- believes a lot in creativity.

That will be a key element as Ferris joins up with Ann Arbor Mayor John
Hieftje and other proponents of a commuter rail service between Ann
Arbor and Livingston County and perhaps other points north.

In March, Ferris bought the Tuscola Saginaw Bay Railway and renamed it
the Great Lakes Central Railroad. Operating on tracks that run north
from Ann Arbor, through Howell and all the way to Traverse City, the
line hauls cherries, logs, sand, rock and tons of grain.

But a major goal for Ferris is offering passenger service.

"As I would see it in my lifetime, for this generation, the ultimate
goal is to bring passenger rail successfully to the state of Michigan
... between Ann Arbor and the northwest cities, and that includes
commuter rail,'' Ferris said.

Hieftje, who has long advocated some kind of rail service from
Livingston County as an alternative to expanding US-23 to ease traffic
congestion, contacted Ferris this spring.

"When we heard that Great Lakes Railroad had bought the rights to the
line and that they were interested in commuter rail, we were thrilled,''
Hieftje said. "We thought it was a piece of providence that had fallen
into our laps.''

Both Ferris and Hieftje will face formidable challenges making the
commuter rail dream come true. While the estimated $27 million needed to
start the service is small by railroad startup standards, the tracks and
signals along the aging route will have to be improved, stations will
have to be built and some form of operating subsidy will almost
certainly have to be found.

Having Ferris on his side has lent some credibility to Hieftje's claim
that the commuter service, or some portion of it, can be up and running
in three years.

"Great Lakes Central Railroad is certainly a huge component if we're
going to achieve commuter rail from Ann Arbor to Howell,'' Hieftje said.

A track record of success

There can be little doubt that Ferris is a can-do kind of guy. He lives
on a 100-acre estate in Superior Township in a 20,000-square-foot house
that could be mistaken for a Frank Lloyd Wright design. After starting
out as a salesman, in 1974 he founded what grew over the years into
Federated Financial Corp. of America. The company finances industrial,
manufacturing and transportation equipment, buys large amounts of
commercial debt at discounts and collects on it, installs technology in
national-chain retail outlets and invests money in other businesses.

Ferris has helped finance, or has had an interest in, businesses as
divergent and far-flung as a restaurant in Ann Arbor, cellular phone
leasing and sales, and a company in Europe that rebuilds automatic
transmissions. More recently, he bought what is now Bella Vino
Marketplace on Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor, which he supplies with
mutton, blueberries, vegetables and honey produced on his estate.

Ferris grew up near downtown Detroit. His father was a skilled tradesman
at the General Motors Willow Run plant, his mother a homemaker. Early in
life, he said, he wondered about the difference between those who drove
large cars and wore suits to work, and everybody else.

"I realized there wasn't any difference between people,'' he said.

With that in mind, Ferris set out to achieve some goals. From being a
top shoe salesman at 15, he graduated to selling electronic protection,
background music, computer time shares and other products. He became a
salesman in several industries and by age 31 was constructing his own
building at Northwestern Highway and 13 Mile Road, where Federated
Financial Corp. of America still is based.

His company has leased and lent out more than $2 billion over its
history, he said.

"I'm really in the wholesale-retail business,'' he said. "I buy money
wholesale and I lend it out retail, and I take the risk.''

Ferris has been able to see opportunity where others haven't. For
instance, in the early days of cellular phones, when many people found
they couldn't pay the monthly charges, Ferris worked out a deal with the
cellular phone companies that allowed him to lease phones, collect those
in default and resell them. At one point, he says he had an inventory of
1 million phones.

But can a man who made his money in sales, leasing and financial
services successfully operate at passenger rail line?

"It's all about creativity,'' Ferris said during an interview at his
home in front of a fireplace looking out on a pond and fountain. "Yes,
goals have a lot to do with it. But creativity is more how an idea is
made.''

With creativity, up in

3 years

Though it may take a good deal of creativity, at least some rail service
between Ann Arbor and Livingston County could be up and running in as
little as three years, said Eli Cooper, transportation program manager
for the city of Ann Arbor.

For instance, with a park-and-ride lot and a boarding platform at an old
industrial site where the Great Lakes track crosses Eight Mile Road,
another boarding platform at Barton Drive and Plymouth Road in Ann
Arbor, and some buses to meet the train, a portion of the proposed
commuter line could be up and running in a relatively short time and
with relatively little cost, Cooper said.

Rather than go through the time-consuming process needed to get federal
short-line start-up funds, the city could more quickly seek the needed
money piecemeal from a variety of federal and state programs - including
federal pollution mitigation funds, some federal surface transportation
funds and some state transportation funds that come to the city to be
used for pedestrian improvements, to name some examples, Cooper said.

He said he also believes the private sector may be willing to invest.
One idea: What if the boarding platform and park-and-ride lot at Eight
Mile Road was part of some mixed commercial and residential development
on that land?

"I'm not sitting here saying that these are highly likely funding
sources,'' Cooper said. However, there is some advantage in getting
something up and running sooner rather later for people who frequently
get stuck in the congestion on US-23 on their way to work, he said.

Ultimately, there will have to be some kind of operating subsidy for the
rail service, since no public transport anywhere in the country operates
just on revenue from the fare box, Cooper said. That, also, might be
some combination of public and private money. The city, or whatever
entity was chosen to be in charge of the service, would negotiate a deal
with Great Lakes Central Railroad to operate the service, he said.

State's timetable slower

Cooper and Hieftje have some support for their view that some level of
commuter service can be up and running in a relatively short time.

"I think it's going to depend a great deal on whether MDOT steps up to
the plate and gets serious about rail in the state,'' said Terri
Blackmore, executive director of the Washtenaw Area Transportation
Study.

In August, the Michigan

Department of Transportation announced a $500,000 study of the US-23
corridor that will

include the existing rail line as a possible way to improve
transportation along the corridor. Another much-talked-about option
would add a bus or high-occupancy-vehicle-only lane in each direction.

In either case, the study will take 18 months and will provide only the
initial steps of the full-blown environmental impact statement that
would be necessary before the state could even seek federal construction
funds for widening the highway, improving the tracks or any other
proposed improvements.

Backers of the commuter rail idea want to avoid that excruciatingly slow
timetable.

Ronald DeCook, director of MDOT's Office of Governmental Affairs, said
Ann Arbor will not be able to get federal rail startup funds without the
environmental impact statement, but that doesn't preclude city officials
from trying some other means to get a rail service running.

"If they've got a plan for it, that's fine,'' DeCook said. "I applaud
the mayor.''

Hieftje said he wants to see rail tried before improvements to US-23. He
compares the projected $500 million cost of adding a third lane in each
direction to the highway between Ann Arbor and Brighton with the
estimated $27 million for the rail project.

"Why would we spend $500 million expanding US-23 before we see what we
can do for $27 million?'' he asks.

For his part, Ferris is convinced that passenger rail service has a
great future in the United States.

"Somebody is going to have to make this model work, because it works in
Europe, it works everywhere in the world, it's working in the United
States,'' Ferris said.

Ferris, who bought 52 double-decker, stainless steel railroad cars even
before he bought the railroad, believes he can draw on the technology,
people and equipment he already has to make rail passenger service a
success.

"I bought the railroad because I want to do passenger rail,'' Ferris
said. "If you believe in the goals you set for yourself, you can achieve
them. I really believe that.''

John Mulcahy can be reached at jmulcahy@annarbornews.com or
734-994-6858.

As temps go up, R&D $ to combat global heating dropping

2006-10-30T11:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/business/worldbusiness/30energy.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
October 30, 2006
The Energy Challenge
Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
DENVER — Cheers fit for a revival meeting swept a hotel ballroom as 1,800 entrepreneurs and experts watched a PowerPoint presentation of the most promising technologies for limiting global warming: solar power, wind, ethanol and other farmed fuels, energy-efficient buildings and fuel-sipping cars.

“Houston,” Charles F. Kutscher, chairman of the Solar 2006 conference, concluded in a twist on the line from Apollo 13, “we have a solution.”

Hold the applause. For all the enthusiasm about alternatives to coal and oil, the challenge of limiting emissions of carbon dioxide, which traps heat, will be immense in a world likely to add 2.5 billion people by midcentury, a host of other experts say. Moreover, most of those people will live in countries like China and India, which are just beginning to enjoy an electrified, air-conditioned mobile society.

The challenge is all the more daunting because research into energy technologies by both government and industry has not been rising, but rather falling.

In the United States, annual federal spending for all energy research and development — not just the research aimed at climate-friendly technologies — is less than half what it was a quarter-century ago. It has sunk to $3 billion a year in the current budget from an inflation-adjusted peak of $7.7 billion in 1979, according to several different studies.

Britain, for one, has sounded a loud alarm about the need for prompt action on the climate issue, including more research. [A report commissioned by the British government and scheduled to be released today calls for spending to be doubled worldwide on research into low-carbon technologies; without it, the report says, coastal flooding and a shortage of drinking water could turn 200 million people into refugees.]

President Bush has sought an increase to $4.2 billion for 2007, but that would still be a small fraction of what most climate and energy experts say would be needed.

Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, has nearly quadrupled, to $28 billion annually, since 1979. Military research has increased 260 percent, and at more than $75 billion a year is 20 times the amount spent on energy research.

Internationally, government energy research trends are little different from those in the United States. Japan is the only economic power that increased research spending in recent decades, with growth focused on efficiency and solar technology, according to the International Energy Agency.

In the private sector, studies show that energy companies have a long tradition of eschewing long-term technology quests because of the lack of short-term payoffs.

Still, more than four dozen scientists, economists, engineers and entrepreneurs interviewed by The New York Times said that unless the search for abundant non-polluting energy sources and systems became far more aggressive, the world would probably face dangerous warming and international strife as nations with growing energy demands compete for increasingly inadequate resources.

Most of these experts also say existing energy alternatives and improvements in energy efficiency are simply not enough.

“We cannot come close to stabilizing temperatures” unless humans, by the end of the century, stop adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than it can absorb, said W. David Montgomery of Charles River Associates, a consulting group, “and that will be an economic impossibility without a major R.& D. investment.”

A sustained push is needed not just to refine, test and deploy known low-carbon technologies, but also to find “energy technologies that don’t have a name yet,” said James A. Edmonds, a chief scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland and the Energy Department.

At the same time, many energy experts and economists agree on another daunting point: To make any resulting “alternative” energy options the new norm will require attaching a significant cost to the carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas.

“A price incentive stirs people to look at a thousand different things,’ ” said Henry D. Jacoby, a climate and energy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For now, a carbon cap or tax is opposed by President Bush, most American lawmakers and many industries. And there are scant signs of consensus on a long-term successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty obligating participating industrial countries to cut warming emissions. (The United States has not ratified the pact.)

The next round of talks on Kyoto and an underlying voluntary treaty will take place next month in Nairobi, Kenya.
Environmental campaigners, focused on promptly establishing binding limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases, have tended to play down the need for big investments seeking energy breakthroughs. At the end of “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary film on climate change, he concluded: “We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.”

While applauding Mr. Gore’s enthusiasm, many energy experts said this stance was counterproductive because there was no way, given global growth in energy demand, that existing technology could avert a doubling or more of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in this century.

Mr. Gore has since adjusted his stance, saying existing technology is sufficient to start on the path to a stable climate.

Other researchers say the chances of success are so low, unless something breaks the societal impasse, that any technology quest should also include work on increasing the resilience to climate extremes — through actions like developing more drought-tolerant crops — as well as last-ditch climate fixes, like testing ways to block some incoming sunlight to counter warming.

Without big reductions in emissions, the midrange projections of most scenarios envision a rise of 4 degrees or so in this century, four times the warming in the last 100 years. That could, among other effects, produce a disruptive mix of intensified flooding and withering droughts in the world’s prime agricultural regions.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the chief of Britain’s economic service and author of the new government report on climate options, has summarized the cumulative nature of the threat succinctly: “The sting is in the tail.”

The Carbon Dioxide Problem
Many factors intersect to make the prompt addressing of global warming very difficult, experts say.
A central hurdle is that carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere like unpaid credit card debt as long as emissions exceed the rate at which the gas is naturally removed from the atmosphere by the oceans and plants. But the technologies producing the emissions evolve slowly.

A typical new coal-fired power plant, one of the largest sources of emissions, is expected to operate for many decades. About one large coal-burning plant is being commissioned a week, mostly in China.

“We’ve got a $12 trillion capital investment in the world energy economy and a turnover time of 30 to 40 years,” said John P. Holdren, a physicist and climate expert at Harvard University and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “If you want it to look different in 30 or 40 years, you’d better start now.”

Many experts say this means the only way to affordably speed the transition to low-emissions energy is with advances in technologies at all stages of maturity.

Examples include:
¶ Substantially improving the efficiency and cost of solar panels;
¶ Conducting full-scale tests of systems for capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and pumping it underground;
¶ Seeking efficient ways to generate fuels from crops;
¶ Finding new ways to store vast amounts of energy harvested intermittently from the wind and sun.
Carbon dioxide levels will stabilize only if each generation persists in developing and deploying alternatives to unfettered fossil-fuel emissions, said Robert H. Socolow, a physicist and co-director of a Princeton “carbon mitigation initiative” created with $20 million from BP and Ford Motor.

The most immediate gains could come simply by increasing energy efficiency. If efficiency gains in transportation, buildings, power transmission and other areas were doubled from the longstanding rate of 1 percent per year to 2 percent, Dr. Holdren wrote in the M.I.T. journal Innovations earlier this year, that could hold the amount of new nonpolluting energy required by 2100 to the amount derived from fossil fuels in 2000 —a huge challenge, but not impossible.

Another area requiring immediate intensified work, Dr. Holdren and other experts say, is large-scale demonstration of systems for capturing carbon dioxide from coal burning before too many old-style plants are built.

All of the components for capturing carbon dioxide and disposing of it underground are already in use, particularly in oil fields, where pressurized carbon dioxide is used to drive the last dregs of oil from the ground.

In this area, said David Keith, an energy expert at the University of Calgary, “We just need to build the damn things on a billion-dollar scale.”

In the United States, the biggest effort along these lines is the 285-megawatt Futuregen power plant planned by the Energy Department, along with private and international partners, that was announced in 2003 by President Bush and is scheduled to be built in either Illinois or Texas by 2012. James L. Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the Bush administration was making this a high priority.

“We share the view that a significantly more aggressive agenda on carbon capture and storage and zero-pollution coal is necessary,” he said, adding that the administration has raised annual spending on storage options “from essentially zero to over $70 million.”

Europe is pursuing a suite of such plants, including one in China, but also well behind the necessary pace, several experts said.

Even within the Energy Department, some experts are voicing frustration over the pace of such programs. “What I don’t like about Futuregen,” said Dr. Kutscher, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., “is the word ‘future’ in there.”

Beyond a Holding Action
No matter what happens in the next decade or so, many experts say, the second and probably hardest phase of stabilizing the level of carbon dioxide will fall to the generation of engineers and entrepreneurs now in diapers, and the one after that. And those innovators will not have much to build on without greatly increased investment now in basic research.

There is plenty of ferment. Current research ranges from work on algae strains that can turn sunlight into hydrogen fuel to the inkjet-style printing of photovoltaic cells — a technique that could greatly cut solar-energy costs if it worked on a large scale. One company is promoting high-flying kite-like windmills to harvest the boundless energy in the jet stream.

But all of the small-scale experimentation will never move into the energy marketplace without a much bigger push not only for research and development, but for the lesser-known steps known as demonstration and deployment.

In this arena, there is a vital role for government spending, many experts agree, particularly on “enabling technologies” — innovations that would never be pursued by private industry because they mainly amount to a public good, not a potential source of profit, said Christopher Green, an economist at McGill University.

Examples include refining ways to securely handle radioactive waste from nuclear reactors; testing repositories for carbon dioxide captured at power plants; and, perhaps more important, improving the electricity grid so that it can manage large flows from intermittent sources like windmills and solar panels.

“Without storage possibilities on a large scale,” Mr. Green said, “solar and wind will be relegated to niche status.”
While private investors and entrepreneurs are jumping into alternative energy projects, they cannot be counted on to solve such problems, economists say, because even the most aggressive venture capitalists want a big payback within five years.

Many scientists say the only real long-term prospect for significantly substituting for fossil fuels is a breakthrough in harvesting solar power. This has been understood since the days of Thomas Edison. In a conversation with Henry Ford and the tire tycoon Harvey Firestone in 1931, shortly before Edison died, he said: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

California, following models set in Japan and Germany, is trying to help solar energy with various incentives.
But such initiatives mainly pull existing technologies into the market, experts say, and do little to propel private research toward the next big advances. Even Vinod Khosla, a leading environment-oriented venture capitalist who invests heavily in ethanol and other alternative energy projects, said in an interview that he was not ready to back solar power because it did not appear able to show a profit without subsidies.

The Role of Leadership
At the federal level, the Bush administration was criticized by Republican and Democratic lawmakers at several recent hearings on climate change.

Mr. Connaughton, the lead White House official on the environment, said most critics are not aware of how much has been done.

“This administration has developed the most sophisticated and carefully considered strategic plan for advancing the technologies that are a necessary part of the climate solution,” he said. He added that the administration must weigh tradeoffs with other pressing demands like health care.

Since 2001, when Mr. Bush abandoned a campaign pledge to limit carbon dioxide from power plants, he has said that too little is known about specific dangers of global warming to justify hard targets or mandatory curbs for the gas.

He has also asserted that any solution will lie less in regulation than in innovation.
“My answer to the energy question also is an answer to how you deal with the greenhouse-gas issue, and that is new technologies will change how we live,” he said in May.

But critics, including some Republican lawmakers, now say that mounting evidence for risks — including findings that administration officials have tried to suppress of late — justifies prompt, more aggressive action to pay for or spur research and speed the movement of climate-friendly energy options into the marketplace.

Martin I. Hoffert, an emeritus professor of physics at New York University, said that what was needed was for a leader to articulate the energy challenge as President John F. Kennedy made his case for the mission to the moon. President Kennedy said they were imperative, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

In a report on competitiveness and research released last year, the National Academies, the country’s top science advisory body, urged the government to substantially expand spending on long-term basic research, particularly on energy.

The report, titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” recommended that the Energy Department create a research-financing body similar to the 48-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to make grants and attack a variety of energy questions, including climate change.

Darpa, created after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, was set up outside the sway of Congress to provide advances in areas like weapons, surveillance and defensive systems. But it also produced technologies like the Internet and the global positioning system for navigation.

Mr. Connaughton said it would be premature to conclude that a new agency was needed for energy innovation.
But many experts, from oil-industry officials to ecologists, agree that the status quo for energy research will not suffice.

The benefits of an intensified energy quest would go far beyond cutting the risks of dangerous climate change, said Roger H. Bezdek, an economist at Management Information Systems, a consulting group.

The world economy, he said, is facing two simultaneous energy challenges beyond global warming: the end of relatively cheap and easy oil, and the explosive demand for fuel in developing countries.

Advanced research should be diversified like an investment portfolio, he said. “The big payoff comes from a small number of very large winners,” he said. “Unfortunately, we cannot pick the winners in advance.”

Ultimately, a big increase in government spending on basic energy research will happen only if scientists can persuade the public and politicians that it is an essential hedge against potential calamity.

That may be the biggest hurdle of all, given the unfamiliar nature of the slowly building problem — the antithesis of epochal events like Pearl Harbor, Sputnik and 9/11 that triggered sweeping enterprises.

“We’re good at rushing in with white hats,” said Bobi Garrett, associate director of planning and technology management at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “This is not a problem where you can do that.”

Looks like a must-read

2006-10-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

"This book should be read by every intelligent person."
– Robert Lieberman, Cornell University

The Second Law of Life
Energy, Technology, and the Future of Earth As We Know It
By John E.J. Schmitz, $27.99

http://www.williamandrew.com/titles/1537.htm

Each moment of every day, we lose irreplaceable energy, and “modern”
technology is not helping. In fact, it is accelerating the problem at a
catastrophic rate. This compelling and important book explains how
entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) leads to seeing our
environmental and energy problems more clearly. Understanding this
critical science will lead to more complete solutions and future
generations will not be faced with the most severe of consequences.

MORE REVIEWS
"The book gives an excellent overview of thermodynamics and
entropy...Certainly the relationship with environmental issues is clear…"

- Martin Heerschop, General Electric

"As a lay reader, I found this book on thermodynamics to be fascinating
and easy to follow. Schmitz gives the reader a solid understanding of
basic thermodynamics theory and the concept of entropy, along with a
systematic description of how these ideas relate to every day life."

– Paul Newman, University of Texas at Austin

"This is one of the most personal science based books I've ever read,
explaining not just the history of the topic, but the author’s own
personal journey into discovering it's wonders and implications for us
all. For fellow fans of Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' TV series on Astrophysics,
this book has the same style. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did."

- Matt Grimshaw, Future Fab International

If you have any questions or comments, please contact Brent Beckley via
email at brent.beckley@williamandrew.com. If you do not wish to receive
such emails, please reply and type REMOVE into the subject line.

William Andrew Publishing
13 Eaton Avenue
Norwich, NY 13815
USA

Excellent ethanol survey (Chi Trib)

2006-10-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

Beyond corn: Ethanol's next generation
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0610130128oct13,0,7209827.story?coll=chi-business-hed
Scientists seek cheap, plentiful energy alternatives

By Michael Oneal
Tribune staff reporter
Published October 13, 2006

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Sitting in a cluttered, windowless office here surrounded by pictures of her three grandchildren, Nancy W.Y. Ho did her best on a recent afternoon to show why everything you thought you knew about ethanol is wrong.

It's not just about distilling auto fuel from corn, explained the 71-year-old molecular biologist from China. It's about weaning America from its self-destructive oil habit by tapping the energy in everything else that grows--and rots--all around us.

Ho has spent the better part of a career at Purdue University figuring out how to rejigger the DNA of a simple form of brewer's yeast by cloning a gene nobody else had thought to clone.

Now, if you stir her creation into a beaker filled with the sugars derived from throwaway organic materials like wheat straw, switch grass, orange peels, even municipal garbage, it will gradually convert most of them into high-octane auto fuel.

"Everybody knows that [corn] is not enough," Ho said. "We have to use all the resources we can."

As the combines roll across fields throughout the Corn Belt this harvest season, the debate over ethanol has never been hotter. On Wednesday, President Bush reiterated his support for ethanol funding at a conference on renewable energy in St. Louis. But critics bemoaning the folly of hefty government subsidies over the years continue to insist that ethanol is a wasteful, extravagant boondoggle.

Producing ethanol from corn in any real volume, they say, threatens the food supply, uses too much land and creates a litany of messy environmental issues. The U.S. burns through 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year. Replacing that with ethanol is pipe dream.

Changing the game

For a growing number of scientists, entrepreneurs and policymakers, however, the constant grumbling about corn ethanol entirely misses the point. While they don't disagree that the corn-based fuel has major limitations, they insist that obsessing over them is like disparaging first-generation personal computers for being slow and unwieldy.

Breakthroughs in genetic and industrial engineering, they insist, are changing the game. Not only is technology making corn ethanol more efficient, but researchers like Ho are making striking progress toward tapping what scientists call cellulosic biomass, the vast store of non-food plant matter that grows and renews itself daily.

If they succeed, many experts believe, cellulosic ethanol could be a plentiful, cheap and easily renewable oil alternative, with few of the negatives that plague the corn-based variety.

"It's the holy grail ... if you can make it work," said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute.

The question is, can you really make it work?

On a sun-baked plateau in Golden, Colo., scientists at the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have been working on that question for three decades. James McMillan, a top biochemical engineer at the lab, said the outlook has never been brighter.

One measure of that promise is the unprecedented investment pouring into the industry. Most recently, British transportation magnate Richard Branson has pledged $3 billion over 10 years for research into cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels. BP PLC, the world's second-largest oil company, has earmarked $1 billion to be split evenly between research and venture financing.

Even Bush has surprised his allies in the oil business by pushing the Energy Department to dole out more than $400 million in fresh funding for ethanol-related research and development.

"This country's got to use its talent and its wealth to get us off oil," Bush said on Wednesday. "I believe, and Congress agrees, that the proper use of tax credits will help stimulate a new industry that will help our economy and help us with national security."

Strolling through a state-of-the-art test facility in Golden devoted to distilling cellulosic ethanol, however, McMillan makes it clear that the future isn't here yet. The building is a welter of pipes, tanks and valves, and as he points out the different phases of the production process he notes that crucial improvements must be made to each if cellulosic ethanol is ever going to truly compete with oil.

Looming stubbornly in front of researchers is a masterpiece of evolution: the rigid cell walls that give plants their strength and resiliency. Developed over the eons, these walls allow a slender stalk of prairie grass to bend like a ballerina in the wind yet snap back to attention to fend off cold, heat and pestilence. They help explain why a field of corn can grow over a man's head in a matter of a few short months.

The problem is, breaking down those walls is like robbing a bank. While the starch in corn kernels gives up its energy-packed sugars easily, the sugars in plant cell walls are locked into winding structures of complex carbohydrates designed to give plants backbone and protection.

Getting at those sugars in an efficient way is the secret to tapping the energy potential of cellulosic biomass, McMillan explained. Researchers long have known how to do it in the lab. But nobody has yet proved it can be done profitably in a commercial-scale plant. To get there, some of the best minds in science are creating such wonders as fungi that are genetically modified to spit out vats of powerful enzymes, and transgenic prairie grasses that are bursting with energy yet engineered to break down more easily.

"This is transformative technology," said Sharlene Weatherwax, a program manager in the U.S. Energy Department's Office of Science. "It's pretty daunting."

What's even more daunting is the economic challenge. Estimates are unreliable, but at the moment most experts believe it is probably more expensive to produce a gallon of cellulosic ethanol than an equivalent volume of gasoline. The comparison is even less favorable if you consider that ethanol produces about a third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline in typical engines. Fighting through these hurdles is attractive when oil is at $70 a barrel, but less so as the price falls. Most experts agree that corn ethanol is cost competitive when the price per barrel of oil is $40 or higher.

Despite using cheaper feedstocks to make cellulosic ethanol, the capital outlay to build more complicated plants drives up costs. McMillan said that it runs from $2.50 to $4 per gallon of capacity to build a typical cellulosic-ethanol plant. That compares with $1 to $1.50 for a corn-ethanol plant.

Plowing ahead

None of this has stopped pioneering companies like Canada's Iogen Corp. or Spain's Abengoa Bioenergy from plowing ahead with plans to build what the ethanol industry calls biorefineries. The Department of Energy has allocated $160 million to help develop three cellulosic demonstration plants. Iogen, Abengoa and several others have applied.

These ventures are highly risky but exactly what the industry needs, said Steven Koonin, oil giant BP's chief scientist. As the technology matures, he said, somebody like Iogen needs to build a plant, power through the learning curve and solve the inevitable problems that crop up.

Jeff Passmore, Iogen's executive vice president of development, is confident his company is well on the way to cracking the cellulosic-ethanol problem. But he also concedes that developing a new plant at commercial scale represents more a voyage of discovery than a hard and fast business plan.

"The more you know," Passmore said, "the more you know you don't know."

The reason Passmore and others persevere is that the knowledge gap has been closing faster over the past several years than it has for the past three decades. Breakthroughs in biotechnology are producing gains in productivity that are steadily driving costs out of each phase of the cellulosic production process.

Iogen, for instance, is using Ho's genetically modified yeast organism to address a major competitive handicap. As much as 40 percent of the sugars contained in typical forms of cellulosic biomass are of a type that normal yeast won't metabolize. Consequently, the process starts out at a 40 percent efficiency disadvantage to corn ethanol, which produces sugars that are 100 percent convertible with normal yeast.

The goal of Ho's cloning exercise was to tweak the yeast into converting both kinds of sugars almost simultaneously, boosting fermenting efficiency substantially. The result is a major step forward, but Ho and her colleague, Miroslav Sedlak, hope to do better. They are toiling to make the organism more efficient.

"With industry," Ho said. "if its not efficient, nobody is going to use it."

For Chicago native Mark Emalfarb, who founded a Florida biotech company called Dyadic International Inc., the hard work originally involved stonewashed jeans.

In the early 1990s, he ferreted out a fungus discovered on the floor of a lakeside forest on Russia's Pacific Coast. Known as chrysosporium lucknowense, or C1, the organism produced the kinds of cotton-fading enzymes that allowed denim companies to take the stones out of the stonewash process.

What the enzymes actually did was break down the plant cell walls in cotton, the same metabolic process needed to release the sugars for cellulosic ethanol. Unfortunately, the fungus produced the enzymes only in tiny amounts. So Emalfarb hired a team of scientists to bombard C1 with ultraviolet radiation until it one day mutated into a "biofactory" that could spit out enzymes in commercial quantities.

"We don't even know how the hell it happened," Emalfarb said. "It was serendipitous."

Dyadic has since introduced C1 into the same kind of high-speed robotic screening process that pharmaceutical companies use to ferret out new drugs. That means splicing different sequences of DNA into thousands of individual C1 fungi at a time and seeing what enzymes each one produces as a result of its newly altered genome.

The goal is to find enzymes, or "cocktails" of enzymes, that are particularly adept at breaking down various kinds of plant matter. Once researchers find the right enzyme recipe for breaking down, say, wood chips, they can genetically alter C1 to produce that particular blend of enzymes in quantity, something evolution might take eons to do.

"It's like Charles Darwin on steroids," said Dyadic Vice President Sasha Bondar.

Ancient discovery

Mike Himmel, a principal scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said this sort of eye-popping research is happening across many branches of science and engineering. He recently attended a conference in Aspen, Colo., where a plant geneticist gave a paper on primordial plants that had low levels of a substance called lignin and high levels of sugar. Because the plants grew in swamps, they hadn't yet evolved the defensive structures that lignin offers modern plants.

"It occurred to me that what people are really going to be doing here is redefining modern plants to look more like ancient plants," Himmel said.

Richard Hamilton, CEO of a California plant genetics company called Ceres Inc., is trying to do exactly that. By analyzing 12,000 switch-grass genes and characterizing the genetic variation associated with each one, Ceres has created a trait database that it hopes to use to create the most effective varieties of "energy crops."

Already, Ceres and its partner, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, are marking genes to increase the effectiveness of conventional breeding. But they are working to perfect cloning strategies that turn on or turn off specific genes that regulate traits like yield, drought tolerance or plant structure.

Using the fruit fly of the plant world, a rapid-growing species called arabidopsis thaliana, the company clones hundreds of transgenic plants a week. The goal is to find novel traits--plants that might break down more easily in a biorefinery, for instance, or varieties that produce more energy per acre.

That would address what Hamilton termed "the tyranny of distance," a major cost issue for would-be producers of cellulosic ethanol. If a refinery needs tons of biomass to produce fuel, he said, "by the end of the year you're driving your truck a long way to get that wheat or corn stover." If Ceres could develop a higher-yielding plant, travel distance, and cost, would shrink accordingly, he said.

When asked how long it will take to transform some of these ideas into reality, Hamilton and others in the industry tend to shrug.

"Trying to predict technology trends is a fool's game," he said. "I wish I could put my finger on just one bottleneck. But it doesn't work that way."

On the other hand, most experts in the field agree that focus is a powerful thing, especially when the federal government starts to put real resources behind an idea. As evidence that giant steps can be made in a hurry, McMillan points to two enzyme companies called Novozymes Inc. and Genencor International. They took approximately $40 million in Department of Energy funding over five years and knocked the cost of the latest enzymes down from about $5.50 per gallon to about 20 cents.

The Department of Energy has set a goal of supplying 30 percent of the nation's need for transportation fuels with ethanol by 2030, a tall order given that ethanol currently supplies about 3.6 percent of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline we consume each year.

But even some unlikely sources say the need for oil alternatives is severe enough to drive a major transformation.

"We're not going to replace oil in the next 20 years, but the resource is finite," said BP chief scientist Koonin. "The world is going to need more diverse hydrocarbons going forward. ... For many reasons it seems that this is the right thing at the right time. It's very exciting."

----------

mdoneal@tribune.com

- - -

Not all ethanol created equal

The vast majority of U.S.-made ethanol uses corn as its primary ingredient, but some researchers say that ethanol made from cellulosic biomass, or plant waste, is a better alternative.

U.S. ETHANOL PRODUCTION

For fuel, scale in billions of gallons

1980 '85 '90 '95 2000 '05

2005: 3.9 billion

CORN-BASED

Primary ingredient: Corn kernels

PROCESS

Grinding

Corn kernels are ground into flour, and water is added to form a "mash."

Unlocking sugars

Common enzymes are added to the mash to convert starches into dextrose, a simple sugar.

Cooking

The mash is cooked to reduce bacteria levels and then cooled.

Fermenting

Yeast is added to the mash in fermenters. After 40-50 hours, the sugar in the mash ferments into ethanol.

Distilling

Ethanol is separated from the rest of the mash and concentrated.

Blending

Ethanol is blended with about 5 percent of a denaturant to make it undrinkable and thus not subject to a liquor tax.

Finished ethanol for storage

Pros

- Starch in kernels contains easily accessible sugars to be converted to energy.

Cons

- Expanded use could lead to an increase in food prices and the need for much more cropland.

- Growing more corn and processing it into ethanol would require additional use of fossil fuels.

CELLULOSIC

Primary ingredient: Corn stalks, switch grass, wood chips, organic waste.

HOW CELLULOSIC PROCESS DIFFERS:

(Switch grass illustrated)

Unlocking sugars

Because its sugars are more difficult to extract, extensive pretreatment with acid or steam is required. Special enzymes also are used due to the stronger composition of the biomass.

Fermenting

Genetically modified yeast or another fermenting agent is required.

Pros

- Made from cheap, abundant materials.

- Expanded use of cellulosic ethanol would have no effect on the food supply.

- Production creates far fewer greenhouse gases than corn-based ethanol, in part because one of its byproducts, lignin, can be used to help power the plant.

Cons

- Requires an expensive process that is unproven on a commercial scale.

- The cost to build a biorefinery is $2.50 to $4 per gallon of production capacity compared with $1 to $1.50 for corn-based ethanol.

Sources: Renewable Fuels Association, Tribune reporting

Chicago Tribune/Adam Zoll and Phil Geib

The cost of failing to act on global heating: 20% of world GDP

2006-10-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

Climate change: US economist's grim warning to Blair's Cabinet
The stark findings of Nicholas Stern's report yesterday increased the pressure on the PM to act
By Andy McSmith and Colin Brown
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1932727.ece
Published: 27 October 2006
Global warming could cost the world's economies up to 20 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) if urgent action is not taken to stop floods, storms and natural catastrophes.

That stark warning was given to Tony Blair and his cabinet yesterday by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist, and is said to have left cabinet ministers chastened by the magnitude of the threat posed by climate change.

In a preview of a report he is to deliver next Monday, Sir Nicholas told the Cabinet the world would have to pay 1 per cent of its annual GDP to avert catastrophe. But doing nothing could cost 5 to 20 times that amount. He told them: "Business- as-usual will derail growth."

The massive 700-page report - commissioned by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown - was described as "hard-headed" and "frighteningly convincing". It focused on the economic peril now confronting the world, unless action was taken to combat harmful CO2 emissions that contribute to global warming.

"He left no one in any doubt that doing nothing is not an option," said one Whitehall source. "And he stressed that the need for action was urgent."

His review could be a watershed in overcoming scepticism about the existence of global warming. "It was hard-headed," said another source. "It didn't deal in sandals and brown rice. It stuck to the economics."

Mr Brown believes it could force the oil-dominated White House of George Bush to concede the importance of action to curb climate change. One minister who was present said it destroyed the US government's well known argument that cutting carbon emissions was bad for business.

His report, covering the period up to 2100, warns that climate change could cause the biggest recession since the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. A downturn of that magnitude would have "catastrophic consequences" around the globe, with the poorest countries hit first and hardest, Sir Nicholas told the Cabinet. Insurance analysts, who submitted their evidence for his report, said they feared insurance claims could exceed the world's GDP.

One witness said: "The entire pitch of the report is that there is nothing in it about the need to be green, or about caring for the environment, it's all hard-headed economic reality," he said.

The Treasury believes that publication of the Stern report could be a turning point in public opinion in America, to force the Bush administration to accept the scientific evidence that global warming is happening.

"It is huge, a desk-breaker. It could be as important for climate change as the Africa Commission was for poverty in Africa. Its biggest impact could be on public opinion in America, which is like turning around a tanker," said one official. It is expected to dominate the UN international climate talks scheduled to start in Nairobi, Kenya, next week.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said the Cabinet recognised "this was a very serious piece of work on a very serious subject and a very clear piece of thinking about the economic benefits of dealing with climate change now."

The Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, is believed to have been extrapolating from the findings when she warned this week that global warming could cause more conflicts as a result of massive population shifts because of rising sea levels and flooding.

Downing Street appeared to be gearing up last night to use the Stern report to launch a fightback over the Government's record on climate change which was attacked yesterday as "woeful" by Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader. The Chancellor gave the clearest hint so far that he would use his forthcoming Budget and the pre-Budget report next month to raise "green" taxes, including the cost of motoring. He promised legislation on climate change, but he appeared to resist the growing demands for binding annual targets for reducing CO2 emissions.

The Conservative leader, David Cameron, put forward his own Bill to impose annual targets monitored by a new independent commission. That strategy is supported by a growing cross-party coalition of more than 400 MPs who may still force the Chancellor to change his mind.

MIT eyes more clever way to use ethanol to improve efficiency

2006-10-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

Scientists Eye Ethanol Boost For Gasoline Engines
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/38678/story.htm

BOSTON - Injecting small quantities of ethanol into car engines at moments of peak demand -- such as accelerating sharply or climbing a steep hill -- could improve the fuel economy of gasoline engines by 20 percent to 30 percent, a scientist said on Wednesday.

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working on the system, which scientists say would allow carmakers to use smaller engines in their vehicles, reducing weight and improving fuel economy at a lower cost to consumers than by adding a hybrid engine.

"To have a big impact on reducing oil consumption, one needs a low-cost way of improving efficiency, so a lot of people buy the car," said Daniel Cohn, senior research scientist at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He estimated that adding the ethanol injection system to a car would cost about $1,000 and that cars using the new system could be in mass production by 2011.

"We view it as a very important near-term way to reduce oil consumption," Cohn said.
Volatile US retail gasoline prices -- which hit a record high above $3 per gallon this summer but have since eased to around $2.20 per gallon -- have piqued consumer interest in fuel-efficient cars.

"It's crucial that the internal combustion engine, whether it's gasoline or advanced diesel, is improved to the point where those improvements are meaningful," said Ron Cogan, editor of the Green Car Journal, a quarterly magazine focused on alternative powertrains.

Much attention has focused on hybrid cars, such as Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius, which couple an electric motor with a traditional gasoline engine to improve fuel efficiency. But they are pricey -- hybrid engines can add $3,000 or more to a car's cost -- and account for just about 1 percent of new car sales in the United States.

HOW IT WORKS
The U.S's Big Three Detroit automakers -- General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler unit of DaimlerChrysler AG -- as well as the White House have backed the adoption of cars that can burn the 85 percent ethanol-15 percent gasoline blended fuel known as E-85 as an alternative to pure gasoline, which is made from petroleum.

But the limited supply of ethanol, which is made from plant matter, limits its usefulness as a primary fuel source. There are only 900 pumping stations nationwide that sell E-85.

The MIT scientists' plan gets around the ethanol supply issue by using small amounts of it -- so little that Cohn estimated the ethanol tank in cars using the technology would need to be refilled every three months or so.

A turbocharger is added to produce more power. The ethanol injection system with the turbocharger would give a driver more power than a conventional engine of the same size.

The higher pressures and temperatures of a turbocharged engine can lead to a problem known as knock, which occurs when the fuel and air in the engine explode prematurely, hurting performance and potentially damaging the engine.

Cohn said his group's technology avoids that problem by injecting ethanol into the engine when knock is likely to occur. The ethanol vaporizes and cools the fuel-air mixture, keeping it from exploding until the engine is ready.

"This is a very special feature of ethanol," Cohn said.
Story by Scott Malone

Press notices that deregulation didn't lower energy costs

2006-10-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/15utility.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

October 15, 2006
Competitive Era Fails to Shrink Electric Bills
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

A decade after competition was introduced in their industries,
long-distance phone rates had fallen by half, air fares by more than a
fourth and trucking rates by a fourth. But a decade after the federal
government opened the business of generating electricity to competition,
the market has produced no such decline.

Instead, more rate increase requests are pending now than ever before,
said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the
association for the investor-owned utilities that provide about 60
percent of the nation’s power. The investor-owned electric utility
industry published a June report entitled “Why Are Electricity Prices
Increasing?”

About 40 percent of all electricity customers — those in 23 states and
the District of Columbia where new competition was approved — mostly
paid modestly lower prices over the past decade. But those savings were
primarily because states, which continue to have some rate-setting
power, imposed cuts, freezes and caps at the behest of consumer groups
that wanted to insulate customers from any initial price swings.

The last of those rate protections expire next year, and the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission and other federal agencies warn in a draft
report to Congress that “customers may experience rate shock” as
utilities seek to make up for revenue they did not collect during the
period of artificially reduced prices and to cover higher costs of fuel.
They warned that “this rate shock can create public pressure” to turn
back from electricity prices set by the market to prices set by
government regulators.

The disappointing results stem in good part from the fact that a
genuinely competitive market for electricity production has not developed.

Concerned about rising prices, California and five other states have
suspended or delayed transition to the competitive system.

And voters around two California cities, Sacramento and Davis, will
decide next month whether to replace investor-owned utilities with
municipal power in hopes of lowering rates. Drives are under way to
expand public power in Massachusetts. In Portland, Ore., the city
council tried and failed to buy the local utility company.

Electric customers in other states are facing rude surprises.

In Baltimore, an expected 72 percent rate increase in electricity prices
has aroused so much protest that the state legislature met in special
session, where it arranged to phase in the higher costs over several
years. In Illinois, rates are about to rise as much as 55 percent.

The three New York area states opened their electricity markets to
competition, with different results.

In Connecticut, residential electric rates rose up to 27 percent last
year to an average of $128 a month, and are expected to go up as much as
50 percent more in January.

In New Jersey, rates rose up to 13 percent this year, and are poised to
go much higher.

New York residential customers, by contrast, paid an inflation-adjusted
average of 16 percent less in 2004 than in 1996, a state report said. It
is not known how much of that is attributable to government-ordered rate
cuts, but the state benefited from huge increases in power generated by
its nuclear plants and by buying power from New England plants that,
starting next year, may have less electricity to sell to New York.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and five other agencies, in the
draft of the report to Congress, are unable to specify any overall
savings. “It has been difficult,” the report states, “to determine
whether retail prices” in the states that opened to competition “are
higher or lower than they otherwise would have been” under the old system.

Joseph T. Kelliher, the commission chairman, said Friday that eventually
“market discipline will deliver the best prices” and noted that every
administration and Congress since 1978 had pushed the industry toward
competition. He added that the commission recognized a need for
“constant reform of the rules.”

Under the old system, regulated utilities generated electricity and
distributed it to customers. Under the new system, many regulated
utilities only deliver power, which they buy from competing producers
whose prices are not regulated. For example, Consolidated Edison, which
serves the New York City area, once produced almost all the power it
delivered; now it must buy virtually all its electricity from companies
that bought its power plants and from other independent generators.

The goal is for producers to compete to offer electricity at the lowest
price, savings customers money.

Independent power producers, free-market economists and the Clinton
Administration cheered in 1996 when the federal government allowed
states to adopt the new system. The new rules “will benefit the industry
and consumers to the tune of billions of dollars every year,” Elizabeth
A. Moler, then chairwoman of FERC, said at the time. She said the new
rules would “accelerate competition and bring lower prices and more
choices to energy customers.”

But that has not happened. A truly competitive market has never
developed, and, in most areas, the number of power producers is small.
In New Jersey, for example, only six companies produce power, and not
all of them sell to every utility.

Some utilities have decided to buy electricity not from the cheapest
supplier but from one owned by a sister to the utility company, even if
that electricity is more expensive. That has been the case in Ohio.

And if electricity is needed from more than one producer, utilities pay
each one the highest price accepted in the bidding, not the lowest. This
one-price system, adopted by the industry and approved by the federal
government, is intended to encourage investment in new power plants,
which are costlier than older ones.

But critics say that, as in California five years ago in a scandal that
enveloped Enron, the auction system can be manipulated to drive up
prices, with the increases passed on to customers. What is more,
companies that produce electricity can withhold it or limit production
even when demand is at its highest, lifting prices. This happened in
California, and the federal commission has found that it occurred in a
few more instances since then. Critics say that more subtle techniques
to reduce the supply of power are common and that the commission shows
little interest in investigating.

Bryan Lee, a FERC spokesman, said complaints of manipulation are
investigated, but only last year did Congress give the commission the
legal tools to punish manipulators.

Under the new system there have been some big winners — including
Goldman Sachs and the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm — that
figured out that there were huge profits to be made in one area of the
new system.

Such investors have in some cases resold power plants they just bought,
making a large profit. In other cases, investors have bought power
plants from the utilities at what proved to be bargain prices, then sold
the electricity back at much higher prices than it would have cost the
utility to generate the electricity.

Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, said the
supposedly competitive market has been “a complete failure and colossal
waste of time and money.”

He asked the federal commission to revoke competitive pricing in his
state, but the commission dismissed the complaint last Wednesday, saying
the state had not proved its case.

Advocates of moving to the new system say that, in time, the discipline
of the competitive market will mean the best possible prices for
customers. Alfred E. Kahn, the Cornell University economist who led the
fight to deregulate airlines and who, as New York’s chief utility
regulator in the 1970’s, nudged electric utilities toward the new
system, said that he was not troubled by the uneven results so far.

“Change,” Professor Kahn said, “is always messy.”

But some advocates of introducing competition to the electric industry
have soured on the idea. They include the Cato Institute, a leading
promoter of libertarian thought that favors the least possible
regulation and that concluded earlier this year that government and
electric utilities have made such hash of the new system that the whole
effort should be scrapped.

“We recommend total abandonment of restructuring,” Cato said. If the
public rejects a greater embrace of markets, Cato wrote, the next best
choice would be a “return to an updated version of the old” system.

The conflicting results among the many studies of electric prices stand
in contrast to the sharp, unambiguous drops in the prices of telephone
calls, air travel and trucking.

One study by the utility economist Mark L. Fagan, a senior fellow at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a consultant to various
businesses who favors a competitive system, found that the new system
often produces better results. He found that in 12 of 18 states that
restructured, prices were lower for industrial customers than they would
have been under the old system. But he also found that prices were
somewhat lower than his model predicted in seven of 27 states that did
not open to competition.

In Virginia, a state that did not move to the new system, a report last
month by the agency that regulates utilities found “no discernible
benefit” to customers in the 16 states that had gone the farthest and
warned that electricity prices in those states “may actually be
increasing faster than for customers in states that did not restructure.”

And Professor Jay Apt, a former astronaut who runs the electricity study
center at Carnegie-Mellon University, found that savings from
introducing competition to sales of electricity to large industrial
customers “are so small that they are not meaningful.”

Regardless of the debate over the effectiveness of the new system,
electricity prices are expected to rise in the next few years for
several reasons apart from any rise in the price of coal, natural gas,
oil, uranium and other fuels.

A study issued in June by the Edison Foundation, which represents
investor-owned utilities concluded that utilities would have to raise
rates to upgrade local distribution systems and to finance long-distance
transmission lines, as well as for new power plants. The study found
that utility profit margins had thinned and financial strength had
weakened. It called for relief in the form of higher rates.

At last, the industry with the most to lose stirs . . .

2006-10-12T18:56:00.000-07:00

from the October 13, 2006 edition - note highlighted paragraph below

New combatant against global warming: insurance industry

The world's second-largest industry, worried about losses related to
climate change, offers incentives to 'go green.'

By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
NEW YORK

Insurance companies, who like to stay out of the limelight, are becoming leading business protagonists in the assault on global warming. . . .

The insurance industry's clout is sizable. It's the second-largest industry in the world in terms of assets, and has a direct link to most homeowners and businesses. It insures coal-fired power plants as well as wind farms, so it can influence the power industry's cost structure.

With its financial muscle, the industry could help advance the use of new financial instruments designed to allow companies to trade greenhouse-gas emissions in the same way that commodities are bought and sold.

"The insurance industry has the ability to change behavior, policies and communicate with clients," says Nancy Skinner, US director of the Climate Group, which lobbies for business and government action to address global warming. . . .

"Climate change represents an ever- increasing risk, a risk far too great to ignore," says Clement Booth, a member of the Board of Management at Allianz AG, one of the world's largest insurance firms.

This week, Allianz, in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund, issued a report on steps the insurance industry could take to reduce the physical impact of global warming or to help society adapt.

"The industry is in a unique position to incentivize," says Miranda Anderson, an author of the report and a vice president at David Gardiner & Associates. "This is the very beginning of thinking through this issue." . . .

The attention on climate change is likely to receive a boost from state insurance regulators, who had planned to discuss its risks in September 2005 in New Orleans, at their annual meeting. Hurricane Katrina intervened, however, and the meeting was moved to Chicago.

"As a result, regulators spent an enormous amount of time on climate change and what changes to promulgate to make sure the companies are financially sound," says Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a coalition of investors, environmental groups, and public-interest organizations in
North America.

Ceres has made two reports on what the insurance industry can do to profitably manage climate change. In a report issued in August, Ceres details some steps currently under way, such as Swiss Re's investment in new solar technology, Munich Re's insurance renewable energy projects, and Lloyds of London's insurance on predicted energy savings.

In the US, one of the more unique and potentially far-reaching efforts will be rolled out this fall by Fireman's Fund. After a building is damaged, Fireman's will specify that it must be repaired with "greener" materials, including consumer electronics that must have Energy Star ratings from the Environmental Protection Agency. If a building is a total loss, it will be rebuilt as a "green" building. The insurer also plans to pay for an engineer to make sure ventilation systems and boilers are installed properly, which could also save energy.

"All the evidence suggests [that] if you decrease energy usage in a building, the owner's net operating income increases and you will improve the asset value," says Steven Bushnell, product director of Fireman's, owned by Allianz. . . .

Global Heating Climate Chaos: Cheaper to Prevent than Respond

2006-10-12T18:35:00.000-07:00

*The Economics of Global Warming*

The world would have to give up only one year's economic growth over the next four decades to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to stave off the threat of global warming. Consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers offer a "green growth plus" strategy, combining energy efficiency,
greater use of renewables and carbon capture to cut emissions by 60% by 2050 from the level reached by doing nothing. Nuclear energy, it says, can play a role, but it is not crucial.

. . .

A shift to a much less carbon-intensive fuel mix would more than double the current non-fossil fuel primary energy share to about 30% by 2050. That alone would be sufficient to reduce carbon emissions by 25%. PwC's view that renewables could do the job without having to use nuclear technology could undermine Tony Blair's argument that atomic power is crucial. Increasing energy efficiency gains to 2.6% a year from today's 1.6% would reduce emissions by a third, while carbon capture and storage - pumping power station emissions into disused gas fields underground - could achieve a further 20%. The report says a combination of all these
measures will be necessary to stabilise global CO2 levels at 450 parts per million, the figure scientific opinion judges to be broadly acceptable.

An effective renewable portfolio approach that works quickly

2006-10-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

In Ontario, Making 'Clean Energy' Pay

Utilities Ordered to Compensate Homeowners For Power From Solar, Wind, Water Projects
By Doug Struck
Thursday, October 12, 2006; A16

TORONTO -- Leonard Allen, who runs a small solar panel company here, finally has something good to tell callers, he says. For the first time, he can promise it won't take 50 years to recoup the money they spend on a rooftop solar system.

Canada's Ontario province has ordered local utility companies to pay homeowners or businesses for any electricity they generate from small solar, wind, water or other renewable energy projects, beginning next month.

. . .

Insurance industry notices what W refuses to see

2006-10-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Global Warming Seen Pushing up Insurance Costs
US: October 11, 2006

WASHINGTON - Global warming will push up insurance premiums in high-risk areas like coastal Florida and other hurricane-prone parts of the United States, an insurance company official said on Tuesday.

"That it will cost more, there's no question; we can put that on the table right at the beginning," said Clem Booth, a board member of Allianz Group. "The pricing of an insurance portfolio in a coastal region is a matter of the number of incidents to be expected within a given time and the size of incidents at certain levels."

Other likely consequences of global warming, including an increase in wildfires in the American West, will also need to be taken into account by US insurers, according to a report released by Allianz and conservation group World Wildlife Fund.

"To me as an insurance person, climate change is an absolute reality," Booth said in a telephone interview. "We could debate to what extent it's affected by human activity or not but it doesn't change the fact that we have to deal with the additional risks."

Currently, he said, insurers withdraw from these high-risk areas entirely.

"We're in the business of solving our customers' problems and providing risk solutions, so pulling out may be a short-term way of doing that ... but getting into the underlying causes is fundamental to our business," Booth said.

The report, "Climate Change and Insurance: An Agenda for Action in the United States," found that US insurance companies are good at modeling risk on historical models, but they lag behind their European counterparts in studying climate change to estimate future risk.

WAKING UP TO RISK

"This report and other reports are making it clear that there is a direct correlation between climate change, forest fires, storm surges and people's livelihoods," said Carter Roberts, president of World Wildlife Fund in the United States. "I think right now the US public is
waking up to just what an enormous risk this represents for them."

Booth said the disastrous 2005 US hurricane season, especially the costly destruction of Hurricane Katrina, was a wake-up call for US insurers. Beyond setting the correct premiums on areas expected to bear the brunt of global climate change, Booth said insurers need to work with government to make sure construction in those areas dealt with the risk and did not continue as "business as usual."

The report stressed that government-subsidized flood insurance may have encouraged people to live in high-risk zones, and suggested that these subsidies end.

The Bush administration has been skeptical of the link between global climate change and hurricanes and wildfires, and President George W. Bush has only recently acknowledged a relationship between human activities and global warming.

Booth said, however, that he was confident that the American people and their local and state governments would push for a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases, which spur global warming.

"There's no question that business leaders like Allianz, GE and others are way ahead of the current administration," Roberts said.

Booth said the Allianz unit Fireman's Fund represents between 2 percent and 3 percent of the US market share.

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/38457/story.htm

A good post-peak strategy for making better use of urban land

2006-10-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

PROBLEM PROPERTIES

When Wilmington, Delaware, Mayor James M. Baker took office in 2001, more than 1,500 abandoned and vacant properties peppered the city, bringing crime, contributing eyesores to community landscapes and lowering property values.

To encourage owners to rehabilitate or sell the properties, Baker persuaded the city council to enact the Vacant Property Registration Fee Program in 2003-an ordinance that bases a sliding annual registration fee on the total number of years a property is vacant. The fee starts at $500 for a building that has been vacant for more than one year and goes up to a maximum of $5,000 for 10 years.

Before a bill is sent out, the city sends a notice informing the owner of the years of vacancy and the size of the fee. The program also allows fee waivers, which give property owners one year to rehabilitate, sell or demolish their properties. Since the program's creation, the number of vacant homes in the city has declined by 22 percent, from 1,455 to 1,135, and has brought in nearly $1 million in fees to the city and spurred over $15 million in new development.

To learn more, visit www.ci.wilmington.de.us/vacantproperties.htm, or call the Department of Licenses and Inspections at 302-576-3096.

(From Governing.com)

For those interested in alt transport fuels

2006-09-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

ADVANCING CHOICE

OCTOBER 12, 2006

AT: Holiday Inn South, Cedar & I-96, Lansing, MI

Registration: 7:45 A.M.

LIMITED SEATING PLEASE REGISTER ON LINE: glaccc@hotmail.com

ON THE PROGRAM:

“Fuel Cell Operation and Use of Hydrogen”

Prof. John Hanley, Lansing Community College

“What’s Happening in the Propane Industry”

Gary Shepherd, Mid-Michigan Equipment

“Alternative Fuels Education in Michigan

Jim Pitts, Lansing Community College

“New Technologies in Diesel Cleanup”

Donaldson, Autotherm

“Bio-Fuels Today”,

Keith Reinholt, Michigan Soybean, Crystal Schulz, Michigan Corn Growers,

Bob Boehm, Michigan Farm Bureau

.“Biodiesel Experiences”

Brian Watts, Michigan State University, Joel McDowell,

Lansing Board of Water and Light, Wayne Hettler, St. Johns Public Schools,

Carol Miller, Eaton Rapids Public Schools

“How Clean Cities Can Help”

Tim Shireman Michigan Energy Office, Jim Pitts, Lansing Clean Cities

Informational Displays

Vehicle Displays

“Join us and Visit With Leaders in the Alternative Fuels Industry”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Since the Department of Energy (DOE) is no longer funding informational programs, we find it necessary to charge a Registration Fee of $20.00 to help defray expenses. Payment may be made at the registration table by check or cash. Make checks payable to GLACC.

Thank you, and we are looking forward to seeing you on October 12.

Program sponsored by:

Lansing Community College and Greater Lansing Area Clean Cities

Jim Pitts
Michigan recycles 95 out of every 100 deposit bottles and cans, twice as much as most other states!

Michigan kicks off new energy research center

2006-09-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

U-M moves ahead with energy research site
Institute could put U-M, region at forefront of development
http://www.mlive.com/news/aanews/index.ssf?/base/news-19/115867693593830.xml&coll=2
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
BY MIKE RAMSEY News Business Reporter
The University of Michigan is expected to announce today a $20 million energy research center at its former nuclear reactor facility that could put the university and the region at the forefront of energy research in the United States.

The Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute located on U-M's North Campus will pull together research spread across different laboratories, add new disciplines and put an emphasis on bringing technology to the marketplace. . . .

"The energy institute is really something that is happening at a perfect hour for a region that desperately needs it, and this university is primed to do it,'' said Stephen Forrest, vice president of research at U-M.

With $35 million in energy research already under way at the university, it is among the leading research institutions in the nation. The new center is expected to help the university land research funding and spin off technology into start-up companies. . . .

Forrest and others think the state of Michigan is ideally suited to be a leader in energy research and development because it is the home of the auto industry, which uses 50 percent of the petroleum consumed in the U.S., and is also a major producer and user of electric power.

Areas of focus will include alternative fuel development aimed at the transportation industry, solar technology, wind, hydrogen fuel, geothermal and nuclear energy. The institute also would tackle the spectrum of energy research and plans to partner with other Michigan research universities that have stronger programs in certain areas.

For example, Michigan State University has a strong biofuel research program and U-M does much less work in that field.

As it stands, no area of the country has a clear lead in alternative energy research and development, but many universities - seeing the opportunity in energy research - already have established centers like that of U-M. . . .

The creation of the institute is the result of a recommendations made by the Michigan Energy Research Council, a group made up of university faculty and administrators and led by former U-M president James Duderstadt.

"If I look around at the major initiatives that the university is spinning up, it's hard to find a more important one,'' Duderstadt said. "The hope is a lot of (energy development) is spawned in the Ann Arbor and southeast Michigan area. We see this as a very important economic driver.'' . . .

Gary Was, one of Michigan's top nuclear engineering professors, has been named as director of the institute. U-M has one of the best - if not the best - nuclear engineering programs in the world. He said U-M will start out ahead of other universities that have fledgling programs of their own.

"We have a depth and breadth of research that's hard to match, and we have a clearer plan of where we are going,'' he said.

Included in that depth is a strong nuclear engineering program and hydrogen fuel cell development. While nuclear energy had fallen out of favor in the 1980s and 1990s, it may hold more promise in the future as safety technologies have improved and the demand for alternatives to coal-burning electricity plants increases. . . .

The institute also will be working closely with NextEnergy, the Detroit-based energy company business accelerator.
Jim Croce, CEO of NextEnergy, said his agency already is working with the university. The new institute will give important new emphasis to energy research, but he also hopes its leaders will work to establish strong contacts with other universities.

"It's going to take everybody pulling together on a statewide basis, and perhaps be a little less competitive and more collaborative across universities,'' he said.

More insight from Dennis Meadows--particularly relevant to Michigan

2006-09-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

(Excerpt from a longer interview here: http://transitionculture.org/?p=457)
One thing I think we need to know is that sustainability isn’t a destination, its how you make the trip. So there are all kinds of values, principles and attitudes that people have to have. I’m starting now to create a centre that will work on urban sustainability. It’s an interesting unit of analysis, how to make a city more sustainable.

I would teach energy auditing as an essential skill, because I think that someone who becomes really tuned in to energy content and energy density and flows will be led to do something that will be useful even if they don’t think about the oil peak. I’m trying to make this in the state of New Hampshire where I live right now, which imports all of its oil!

It has no fossil fuels of its own, no gas, no oil, no coal, it just imports everything! I’m saying to them, to the local authority, just count it up, see what you’re doing to yourself. You don’t have to believe in depletion or anything just look at what you’re doing! You’re sending all this money to Saudi Arabia, and if you just spent a little bit of money on efficiency and mass transit, you could drastically reduce the amount of money you send out of the state, and you could drastically increase the number of jobs in the State, which is a problem for us.

Plus you could build up some saleable technological competence! If you have some companies who are building devices to help you measure heat efficiency in a house, then not only can we use them in New Hampshire but we could sell them to Massachusetts etc. So this requires energy auditing which I think is a very important place to start. . . .

Gore: GHG emissions freeze needed now

2006-09-19T05:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/washington/19gore.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
September 19, 2006
Gore Calls for Immediate Freeze on Heat-Trapping Gas Emissions
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Former Vice President Al Gore called yesterday for a popular movement in the United States to seek an “immediate freeze” in heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases linked by most scientists to global warming.

Speaking at the New York University law school, Mr. Gore said that rising temperatures posed an enormous threat and that only a movement akin to the nuclear freeze campaign for arms control a generation ago, which he said he opposed at the time, would push elected officials out of longstanding deadlock on the issue.

“Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach,” Mr. Gore said. “In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done, when in fact it is not.”

President Bush has opposed requiring cuts in heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, saying a better payoff will come from a long-term effort to find or improve technologies that provide energy without emissions. The White House last night defended that approach.

“This administration is not just talking about climate change,” said Kristen A. Hellmer, a White House spokeswoman. “There are more than 60 programs in place aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that do not hurt the economy or move jobs overseas.”

Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the Gore proposals would create “economic calamity.”

Several representatives of industry groups said yesterday that the White House had been consulting with industry officials to consider a new energy initiative.

In his speech, Mr. Gore also renewed a longstanding proposal to replace all payroll taxes with taxes on pollution, including carbon dioxide. And he said the United States should rejoin the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty, rejected by President Bush that requires industrialized countries to cut emissions.

Mr. Gore has ridden a wave of attention since spring over “An Inconvenient Truth,” the popular film and best-selling book built around an illustrated talk on what he calls a “planetary emergency.”

His speech in Manhattan came ahead of a burst of planned discourse on global warming this week, including five Congressional hearings and three days of workshops at the Clinton Global Initiative, which are intended to solve the biggest problems hampering international development.

Philip E. Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, a Washington group pressing for limits on heat-trapping gases, said he welcomed Mr. Gore’s speech.

“There is no excuse anymore to continue to increase our emissions,” Mr. Clapp said.

Rebutting ethanomania

2006-09-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

Even with source biases considered, this is a nice overview. Note the graphic especially.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/index.php?p=22&js_enabled=1

A most important speech

2006-09-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

/Published on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 by Post Carbon Institute/

Cities Can Save the Earth: the urban solution to climate change, species extinctions and peak oil

*By Richard Register*

Note: Delivered to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, September 7, 2006.

A bicyclist friend of mine appeared the other day in a T-shirt reading, “Ask me how I lost 3,600 pounds in a day.” By getting rid of his car, obviously! I’m going to be talking about some of the big things we are going to need to change. For example, designing cities around something
that weights 3,600 pounds instead of whatever you weigh, is something that needs to change. I’m hoping you will have your sense of proportion honed some and will hear some useful ideas for making your own city and planet a little healthier, or in fact, a lot healthier.

I’m going to be talking today about something that sounds rather ambitious, namely solving the crisis millions of people are being alerted to by Al Gore’s new movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” In fact, beyond solving global heating, the subject of that film, I’m going to claim to have one of the most important solutions to that and the crisis of species extinctions and the crisis that is called these days “Peak Oil,” “Peak Oil” being the period of time when world oil production tops
out and begins sliding away forever. If yesterday’s announced new Chevron oil field in the Gulf of Mexico proves to be a large one, the date of peak oil production will be pushed back only a very small fraction of the lifetime of this limited resource on this planet. And ironically, the longer we can feel secure in having the oil to burn, the worse for climate stability by way of CO2 build up in the atmosphere.

This conundrum can be avoided by building a civilization that runs on a small fraction of today’s energy requirements. For the small amount of energy it does require, though intrinsically more expensive than today’s fossil fuels, it can be renewable energy like solar and wind. Such a
civilization would be one of ecologically healthy cities, towns and villages. Such built communities, a goal now since none actually exist, are ever more widely becoming known as “ecocities.”

Without too much elaboration I need to say now, for clarity later in my talk, that my information suggests that solar and wind energy will never be cheap in the way that oil has been cheap in the past. This is so because we will have to do the work that the biology and geology of
planet Earth did for us in concentrating solar energy in the fossil chemicals over something more than 150 million years. Renewable energy sources are diffuse and need human work and developed technologies in order to be concentrated into useable form. The Earth’s endowment of oil and natural gas is going fast, replacements like coal and nuclear are more expensive, environmentally damaging and toxic, and even sources of energy like hydropower are more tenuous in the long run than we’d like to believe. Dams fill up with silt. Having grown up in New Mexico I’m familiar with dams that are already useless, surrealistic planes of sand with cottonwood trees and sage brush right up to the edge of the dry spillways.

Take ethanol, too, for example. That’s grain alcohol, mainly from corn in the United States. If the United States were to drive its fleet of cars on ethanol it would need to dedicate more than its entire agricultural land area to producing the fuel. The social equity and justice issue here becomes gigantic: would we really rather use farmlands to feed our cars than feed people? If that sounds like a distant possibility, perhaps a theme for a Blade Runner type movie, it
is not. It’s actually here and now and growing rapidly. Already 10 million acres of land are given over to ethanol production for motor vehicles in the United States. That’s about halfway between the total land area of Maryland and West Virginia.

Again, what replacements we have for our recently cheap energy sources are either more dangerous or environmentally destructive or expensive. The solution is to build a civilization that uses precious little energy, or in other words, uses it very well. By use it very well I mean
use it to bring civilization into harmony with nature for the long haul.

Returning to our crisis of the three linked crises in climate, biodiversity and energy, it is important to notice just how large it is and thus to give it absolute top priority for our attentions and efforts. It’s effects are changing evolution on the planet as much as any mass extinction in the Earth’s multi-billion year past, and therefore I’ll use the term “ultimate crisis” which a friend of mine named David Greenberg has been using for a number of months. It is a crisis of unprecedented scale and, as the melting of the Earth’s glaciers and the disasters of Hurricane Katrina illustrate, a crisis already well underway. Putting the contribution of ecological city
redesign into perspective can give us a clear strategy, something very close to what Lester Brown has lately been calling a Plan B for surviving and thriving on this planet. However, there are major contradictions in his approach that I’ll discuss shortly, and Al Gore’s approach as well. Building ecological cities, however, resolves these contradictions and empowers what could be a truly effective strategy for, as Buckminster Fuller called it, “human success.”

Changing a light bulb and inflating your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less, as Mr. Gore prescribes among his ten things to do to start solving the climate change crisis, is not going to do the trick. It’s going to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and live in them. In all honesty, how could solutions be easy when confronting a crisis of this enormous scale? How could we just continue living essentially as we are?

Yet at the same time I’m saying confronting this crisis and solving this overarching problem will be difficult, I’ll make the assertion that if we put in the real imagination, clear thinking and hard work required, our children will reap the reward of a world far more beautiful and lively than can be imagined by any extrapolation of the best of today’s ways of doing things.

I can say this, and it sounds good enough, but if you look around you notice cars dominate cities thoroughly in the rich countries and they are swamping the poor countries more every day as well. Car factories and highways are being built rapidly in China and India with massive
investment from the big auto companies and loans from the World Bank. Many cities, like Berkeley, where I lived for 29 years, haven’t a single pedestrian street – and their citizens don’t even notice how completely given over to the car their towns are. Evidently, then, we have not
progressed very far toward establishing the city for pedestrians and the city based on ecological awareness. It is also interesting to note that only one out of ten people on the planet actually drive cars (which is hard to believe in America and world culture big cities, though true) and they, through the automobile/sprawl pattern of development, are causing a vastly disproportionate share of planetary damage. The operative plan today is to vastly increase their numbers. Very bad plan!

The difficultly, I believe, is partially psychological: people are afraid of change (though I for one am much more afraid of what will happen if we don’t change). I say people must be afraid of change because the concepts behind the ecological city are fairly simple. Here they are: Switch to a pedestrian and transit oriented infrastructure with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit. Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture. Attach renewable energy systems while making things recyclable and using non-toxic materials and technologies.

There you have it! Only three short sentences for the essence of it. Not so difficult conceptually. The whole pattern can be characterized as shifting development toward centers of high diversity.

There is another difficulty in communicating about and actually building ecological cities, too, and that is that we have built cities for cars for the last 100 years and thus many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just to low to allow efficient, affordable transit.

Nonetheless, there are tools available and we can start moving in the right direction immediately. Some of the tools that can help us actually build ecological cities I’ll mention at the end of this talk, but for now note that in may places, such as San Francisco, Chicago and Portland, and even better in Curitiba, Brazil, a certain amount of this “ecocity” thinking is already going on. While people feel dependent on cars, nonetheless even Americans greatly enjoy car-free environments such as the plazas and parks that do exist, malls and playgrounds,
sports fields and fairs, festival and expositions. Also, creeks and urban waterways that do exist are much loved in places like San Luis Obispo, California, Boulder, Colorado and San Antonio, Texas.

I started out saying, “Ask me how I lost 3,600 pounds in a day.” Cars are big and the infrastructure that provides for them is even much bigger yet. On our way to doing a good job of prioritizing what needs to be done, this is an important point and I’ll flesh it out with a little
more detail now.

If one designs an infrastructure - buildings, streets and open spaces and systems for supply, recycling and disposal – to go along with one set of things that are 30 time bigger and heavier than the other, car bodies versus human bodies, very different results are likely, right? What if the heavy things move about ten to twenty times faster than the light-weight ones when functioning in their usual way, accelerating and decelerating constantly, burning up energy the whole time? Basic physics suggests enormous quantitative and qualitative differences between
design parameters. The mass/energy/spatial requirements of cars, as compared to human beings, is on the order of hundreds to one. What if one runs on a toxic fuel that is profoundly transforming the entire atmosphere into an artificial bubble of gasses with a substantially
different composition than the planet had for at least 400,000 years, maybe even millions of years while the other eats cereal for breakfast?

What about cities designed and planned to satisfy the requirements of such hurtling 3,600 pound objects, such requirements as massive parking structures and freeway interchanges. What about requiring “Big Digs” like Boston’s in which, for tens of billions of dollars, people one at a time in big steel, glass and plastic boxes, can rush from Suburb #1. over to Suburb #2. – which look almost just like Suburb #1. – right under the center of massive downtown buildings and very, very wet waterways? If it sounds a little insane, it think it really is. Especially at this time in history when we are waking up to the triple ultimate emergency.

Could it be that such automobile based cities would be substantially different from cities designed on the parameters of the human body, its speed and its requirements for food, exercise, physical space, rest, culture, inspiration and beauty? Absolutely. Maybe human beings even need and love nature itself, no matter how deeply such “biophilia” might be buried in our everyday world of asphalt, manufactured splendor and intervening suburban sprawl. Could in fact cities be built for humans on foot and for the healthiest conceivable natural world possible?

This is my starting point: I think cities can be built for just these purposes, but to accomplish such a positive goal, we will actually have to talk about it directly, openly, honestly and think it through like I am trying to do here today. We have to get past the psychological resistance to discussing it. On the positive side it is heartening to note that cities used to be built for pedestrians. The cores of some such cities remain in Europe and some in China, though in China they are being bulldozed to dust as we speak. Some cities like Venice, Italy, the Medina of Fez and a hilly Gulongyu, China are 100% car-free – and very successful. As they say in general, so it applies to car-free pedestrian cities: “If they exist they are possible.” We can build ecological
cities and we will if we are ever to solve this looming triple ultimate crisis.

The Biggest Things We Build

Now this next part of my talk I’m calling “Cities – The Biggest Things We Build” because I want to emphasize dealing with the appropriate scale. If we have a big problem we need a big solution, simple as that.

Thus I think it is puzzling no end that almost no one connects the largest things we build – our cities – to the largest problems that we are experiencing, much less connects them to solutions to those problems. But that seems to be the case. Consider this story: I was the convener of the First International Ecocity Conference in 1990, followed by four more conferences, one each in Australia, Senegal, Brazil and China. Next comes India, number six, in December. At the first of these conferences our keynote speaker was Denis Hayes, chief organizer of Earth Day in 1970 and past director of the US Solar Energy Research Institute, dismantled by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Denis’ major point was that despite all the good progress we had been making in the environmental movement, all the battles we had won, all the good laws and policies, adjustments in lifestyles and better recycling and energy conservation and so on, somehow in regard to the largest problems of all - chief among which he cited climate change and species extinctions - we were losing the war. To “win the war” he proposed that we needed vision, and in particular the sort of vision we might attain by looking at the way whole cities are designed, built and function. Then, at another talk ten years later, I saw him say almost exactly the same thing as we were entering our new century.

His keynote at our conference was powerful and inspiring but a little vague, delivering neither an image of such cities nor the tools that might be used to built them. But my main point now is that we haven’t won that war for the health of the environment, and in fact are worse off now than ever simply because we never confronted the largest things we build. We said, “Let’s change a light bulb and fill our tires up more,” rather than, “Let’s face the big one.” We still have not looked the city dead in the eye and said, “Hey, what’s really going on here? How is this thing structured? Why does it consume so much land and energy and cause so much environmental and human damage?”

If we do look fairly closely at cities we can see they are what is known as “whole systems,” and that they function something like living organisms. Their main organs are linked together complementing each other’s services for the benefit of the whole and relating the whole to its environment, its resource base if you will, in a way that could be of reciprocal benefit to all organs and the whole organism. The city’s organs include structures for living and working, education and shopping, recreation and entertainment, manufacturing and distribution,
transportation and, there are the various networks of nature and resources that connect with and support the city.

If we take this view we can notice immediately that the whole organism of the city we’ve been constructing for the last 150 years has been built on the basis of linking functions through ever lengthening strands of connection. First there were rails and trains and streetcars, then much more massively, highways, cars and trucks. Now, in the wealthy world, our cities are whole systems made up of low-density development called suburbs, largely “single use” downtowns called Central Business Districts, and cars, asphalt and paving covering vast areas of land. This was all supported by an oil infrastructure that stretches from our local gas stations out to our 725 American military bases scattered around the world and heavily concentrated in and around the Middle East and Central Asian oil fields. This scattered city of suburbs is very, very big. With its far flung support systems, says social critic and author James Howard Kunstler, it constitutes “the greatest misallocation of resources in history.” This diffuse structure of the city has been based on fossil fuel energy that became cheaper and cheaper for a long 150 years. Now is getting more and more expensive as it is approaching peak oil production, and after that, it will slide into oblivion and higher prices due to scarcity – for such is the fate of any non- renewable resource that is burnt up instead of recycled.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Cities can be designed for pedestrians and bicyclists, taking up very small areas of land in more compact development. Taller buildings with rooftop gardens and solar greenhouses can be linked to other buildings with pedestrian connections between rooftops and terraces above ground level, making city centers intimately accessible to people on foot. While we are adding population and ecological architecture in pedestrian/transit centers we can be gradually removing low density development farthest from those centers and opening up landscapes for restoration of buried creeks, expansion of parks and community gardens, preservation and recovery of open ridgelines with beautiful views, open spaces for recycling and so on.

If one imagines today’s typical metropolis of low density development and scattered higher density city centers linked by freeways it is possible to imagine a transition in which city centers, district centers and neighborhood centers are becoming much more “mixed use,” as planners say, with more people moving closer to jobs and commerce in areas that can be served well by bicycles and transit. We can imagine city centers in which creek restoration projects open up landscapes beside public plazas as counterpoint to the taller buildings, and we can imagine that the presence of nature in this form is celebrated in conjunction with the gathering places for people. Here, culture and nature link and reinforce one another in this manner. People acknowledge the healthy union of both culture and nature in their architecture and layout of
public open spaces. Higher places in buildings celebrate nature by bringing people up into the beautiful views provided by higher elevations in the city. Having public accessibility to rooftop terraces, restaurants and cafes, shops, promenades and mini-parks elevated into the view where we can watch weather developing and rolling across the landscape and enjoy sunsets and sunrises is a powerful contribution to understanding our place in nature.

Meantime, while development shifts toward the centers, bicycle and pedestrian paths begin to reach into the suburban fabric beside formerly buried creeks that are restored, reviving natural plant and animal communities along with refreshed water circulation and filtration. Community gardens and parks appear and expand along these networks of waterways and bicycle paths. Where buildings are dilapidated or damaged by fire, termites, earthquakes, floods or dry rot in these areas, they are removed rather than replaced with new low-density, car-dependent
development. With time, larger agricultural areas reappear, and nature can reach in to meet citizen rather than citizen having to drive for half and hour or more through the suburbs to get “out” to nature. In addition, real wilderness expands into areas now invaded by sprawl, and
some far-flung patches of exurban sprawl find their centers, add ecologically informed development there and become vital towns and villages with a real connection to the land. They become beautiful, lively, productive places to live in and visit.

Contrary to this vision I’m asking you to contemplate now, many architects and planners claiming to represent something they call “good urbanism” say that city is city and nature is nature and never the twain shall meet. Creek restoration projects I’ve been involved in have been opposed by such architects and planners.

I think this is one of the worst ideas in vogue in architecture and city planning circles today. If we don’t dramatically celebrate nature as brought into cities in small but rich ways, such as by way of waterway restoration with some actual living critters such as fish, crawdads, dragonflies, humming birds and butterflies, then we are in serious trouble. We are already in trouble as evidenced by global heating and species dying all around the planet, and we are in worse trouble if we continue to extend into the future ideas that banish nature from city dwellers. If the biggest things we build are our cities, then it is one of the biggest mistakes we can make to exclude the experience of nature from people who live in them. But if we learn from nature and we come to understand our cultural foundations in nature, we can then understand what sort of foundation in land use patterns and design we need for so-called sustainable cities.

Prioritization

Now in this section of my talk I’d like to make a special point of prioritization. Denis Hayes says we need vision, but equally importantly, maybe even more importantly, I think we need a sense of proportion and the ability to prioritize very, very well. After all, a spectacular vision can be corrupting and corruptible and is generally harshly criticized as utopian. So a fairly good vision will probably be good enough and we can improve on it as we go. I think ecocities are one such imperfect but very adaptable vision. Former Mayor Jamie Lerner of Curitiba, Brazil, perhaps the worlds most advanced practitioner of ecological city design, building and administration has said that city planning is “a very forgiving process” – you learn along the way and if
the feedback is negative you amend your plan and continue on. That’s an applicable vision, a practical one.

But to prioritize the must-do-now things, in times when time itself is getting short, is of crucial importance. I’ll illustrate this with the following set of observations:

Recently at a book store I saw a title advancing 1001 ways to improve our world in difficult times. Shortly after, a friend said he’d like to subtitle a book of his something like “One Hundred Inconvenient Truths.” This is, of course, taking off from the current interest in Al Gore’s
recent movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

I responded saying that 100 different scrambled problems and solutions was too random, too lacking in a system or order, wasn’t cognizant of the way ecological systems really work and would perpetuate not doing anything effective while precious time slips away. The number 100 was too big, much less the number 1001, the differences between the “truths,” whatever they might be, muddled by the grab bag quality of mixing oranges and apples - much less throwing in blueberries and watermelons and poisonous and medicinal fruits to boot. People tend to
take the easy one and think they were making progress - while postponing the difficult ones as precious time slips away.

But there is one approach that looms far larger than anything else I can think of: getting a sense of proportion and learning to prioritize. If we can do that then we will see there are 5 big inconvenient truths under which all others are subsumed. Understanding this approach we can
sort out the real solutions in the confusion we see seething about us now. We can eliminate the paltry and the contradictory steps and get on with doing something relevant and powerful. I’ll propose these as the five big inconvenient truths we have to deal with. They expand beyond
ecocity building, but they outline the larger picture and provide the larger context very well I believe.

#1. Inconvenient big truth number one. Humanity is overpopulated and must reduce its numbers, and do it peacefully since violence replicates and amplifies itself. This is not a racist statement in the slightest as often claimed by people victimized by actual racists making the
statement in the past or still making it today. It is instead relevant to the species-ist humans driving other species into extinction by way of taking almost all of the land of the planet for their own utility and pleasure. Species-ism is even larger and ultimately more destructive than racism, as horrible a scourge as racism has proven to be. That we are overpopulated is massively evident in the fact that human beings constitute more than 100 times the biomass of any other species in our general size range to ever inhabit the planet. That’s too big and all of
us need to face it. Inconvenient truth #1.

#2. The built infrastructure - my subject of specialization and main subject of this talk. You’ve already heard about this inconvenient truth, that we needs to shift from cars, sprawl, paving and cheap energy infrastructure to pedestrian oriented ecocities that fit by design perfectly with renewable energy systems.

#3. We need to eat lower on the food chain. Among the changes that imply enormous savings and amount to re-investing in long-term sustainability, agriculture for meat needs to be recognized as highly inefficient. Costing five to ten times the land and energy of eating vegetable foods directly, a diet high in meat is a big part of the geopolitical and energetics problem on Earth, and a diet very low in meat is a big part of the solution. This isn’t a call for a ban on meats but to face the inconvenient truth that a substantial shift away from meats holds very large benefit for life support and biodiversity on the Earth. Small amounts of meat for ample protein and flavoring in mainly vegetable dishes, common in Chinese cuisine for example, is a very different thing from the giant slabs of meat as stakes and big burgers and other large
meat portions.

#4. Need needs to replace greed, as Gandhi said. That means we need to invest in the future health of the world – not just in our wealth as individuals – by way of supporting solutions to the problems identified by the big inconvenient truths. We need a new wave of generosity, especially as expressed in giving back to the Earth. In other words we have to tax ourselves more and the wealthier folks even more yet, and do a much better job of spending the money for the general good. We need to prioritize for the best investments. What's new these days in this situation is that finally, with the ultimate crisis beginning to enter our lives in ever more disruptive ways, it is soon to become conspicuous that the children of the rich as well as the children of the poor will inherit a poverty stricken, chaotic and violent world if everybody
doesn't contribute substantially to addressing the 5 Inconvenient Truths with real investment and action. Since the wealthy have much more, they need to give more. The fantasy option of holing up in a gated community or super-rich castle retreat with armed guards, with the middle class turning into peasants to harvest our gourmet food and wine, is soon to go out the window if we don't act more generously now.

#5. Education needs to stop chasing the money for its own sake and promoting growh, growth, growth. It needs to shift away from supporting "whatever's coming down the road to maximize prosperity" (at the expense of nature's prosperity) while attempting to make the whole enterprise a little “greener,” for real or for PR reasons. It has to powerfully educate about the four big inconvenient truths, just mentioned. Also, we as individuals need to realize that we self-educate ourselves for nothing in particular if we are staring at television for billions of
hours collectively every year or otherwise, literally, distracting ourselves, distracting ourselves from crucial learning and work that needs attention now. Education can help preserve or destroy natural systems and biodiversity depending on what is being learned. Beyond “reading and writing and ’rithmetic,” education is not per se a virtuous pursuit in itself. It depends on what it addresses and what it creates. The content is all-important. Again 100 random things is not a good idea. We need to prioritize and not put the big things on hold.

I assume with near certainty that former US Vice President Al Gore knows the ten steps he puts forward in “An Inconvenient Truth” for taking action are very small up against the coming crisis. I am almost positive he is hoping to give people a chance to start off small and graduate to
bigger, more effective, more basic things later. His movie is a great wake up call, and if rather late in the game relative to already collapsing climate stability, biodiversity and cheap energy, it’s an essential step, and much better late than never.

The problem is this, though: it is hardly the first step. Back in 1970 on Earth Day we were actually ahead of where we are now in strategic approach. By now humanity has eaten up most of our energy and biodiversity options that were plentiful those 36 years back. We did not do a good job of facing the Five Big Inconvenient Truths in the meantime and we still are not. We haven’t built a very good foundation for reshaping our physical civilization upon ecological principles. We had every opportunity to get started with the smaller steps to solving world
environmental and resource problems and to use that as a kind of first grade schooling for higher education and more fundamental education and practice in the future. But rather than move on to those fundamentals we were satisfied to stick with the easy first steps. To start off again with those first steps and not address the more difficult ones, is to attempt again a strategy that has failed once already.

Lester Brown’s “Plan B” is another important touchstone for coming to understand what we need to do. Certainly a program by which we can change policy around the world is needed, as he suggests, and he lays out copious good information and many good ideas about what to do. His writings, however, have certain major contradictions that need to be resolved before his plan is ready for application. His strategy is once again to give people the idea that they can get moving with some small but substantial actions. He does in fact face population and meat eating
head on, but unfortunately among his most vigorous promotions is the promotion of the energy efficient car, which completely subverts ecological cities, by promoting sprawl development and avoiding whole system thinking, and makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to move forward with a well conceived plan.

Unfortunately, other scientist friends are not helping as much as they could either. You’d think they’d be there ready to rescue us with their superior information and theories, but many of them are lost in the details and don’t see the larger pattern and are not helping us connect the dots and prioritize. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, while providing excellent information and numerous suggestions for government policies to combat global heating, such as promoting trading pollution credits, has practically nothing to say about policy to move cities away from car-oriented and cheap energy design and toward infrastructure based on the measure of the human body and the dynamics of ecological systems.

It seems everyone trying to help avoid global heating is afraid of fear itself. The notion is, “The people can’t handle it. They’ll panic, close down, act in fear and nothing else. Give them something easy and non-threatening. Later we’ll up the stakes, raise the bar.”

But we all have to wake up sometime. At some point you just have to put your faith in people and trust that they can handle the truth of the matter. When you finally get it that Paul Revere has warned you and the British are coming for real, you don’t get out your boots and coat, set
the alarm clock for 7:00am and go back to bed. You realize there is a clear and present danger, pick up your weapon (or tool, as our comparison might have it) and move out now!

I’m saving the best news until last. I’ve said earlier that the tools exist with which to build ecocities. You’ve heard my thoughts on prioritization – and that we need it probably more than anything else – and you have a basic idea what an ecologically healthy city might look like. Though I don’t have time to develop what the ecocity-building tools are in any detail, I can at least introduce you to some of the stronger ones.

First there is Ecocity Mapping. It amounts to literally mapping your city so you have a clearer sense where you centers of most vitality are. The map portrays where to increase density and diversity of development, which is in those centers, and where to best open up the landscape for such features as restored creeks and expanded community gardens and parks, which is in the areas farthest from those centers. Thus it directs change, along with the ecocity general plan that lays out policies for ecocity transformation.

The Ecocity General Plan, like any other general plan, lays out policies for the development and maintenance of the city’s physical expression and its functioning. But in the case of the Ecocity General Plan, many policies are described that facilitate an ecocity transition. Those include policies calling for Ecocity Mapping, just mentioned, Transfer of Development Rights, which I’ll mention next, and many others. Those policies have to also include specific reference to financial investment in making sure the action policies are carried through. If the City does not allocate money for the transition, its plan is just symbolic window dressing, an exercise in pretend. No serious money spent, no serious progress made.

Transfer of Development Rights, or TDR, is a powerful real estate investment and development tool. It provides a height bonus for developers willing to put higher density housing or other structures in exactly the right place according to an ecocity transition plan. The developers pay for the purchase of development rights that are transferred from one part of town to their taller buildings in the growing pedestrian transit centers. At the sites where the development rights are purchased, the buildings are removed and no more development can be built there. This tool is a willing seller/developer transaction – when the seller wants to leave, a ready fund is there to buy his or her property. After the sale the building is demolished and recycled and
open space such as creek restoration or community garden is created, thus shifting the patterns of development from the fringes and off of natural features and toward the pedestrian transit centers.

There are many other tools, such as car-free by contract housing which encourages building apartments and condominiums with zero car parking provided because their residents don’t need or want cars. Any policy that establishes and expands the pedestrian environment is a tool for building ecocities. Such policies can be used to shape buildings to utilizes the sun’s energy, provide for social equity by eliminating the necessity of having to pay for a car to get access to the city’s benefits, to helping restore natural features. Such tools produce pioneering transit systems fit to low energy infrastructure in Curitiba, Brazil, and provide free public transportation in downtown Portland. There are many, they work beautifully and I write about them in my books, but it’s time to stop.

After one last story anyway. A year ago I took a long ride on Amtrak. It came in eight hours late. It’s conductors and dining car waiters were so embarrassed. They just couldn’t really complete, they said. Those sad Amtrak employees shook their heads and said they just couldn’t function without government subsidies. They couldn’t afford upkeep on rolling stock and had to search around to find available cars. They couldn’t afford their own tracks and so they were operating on Union Pacific’s freight tracks and had to pull over whenever Union Pacific’s trains came through.

Wait a minute! The entire federal government budget for the national passenger rail system for the United States of America, no small Balkan backwater, in 2005 was $1.2 billion. Do you know what the cost of one and a half miles of replacement freeway in West Oakland was for the
section of the Cypress Viaduct structure that fell down in the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989? Almost exactly the same amount! Does anyone talk about “subsidies” to car drivers when government gives them these gigantic public works to keep them driving and driving and driving? Those proportions are way, way out of balance, and in the wrong direction at that. These expenditures should be seen as investments, and should be called that, whether they are for passenger rail that fits perfectly with ecologically tuned cities or investments in perpetuating
our trajectory deeper into the ultimate crisis.

But what this tells us is that, late though the hour may be for dealing with the triple crisis of climate, extinctions and energy, and flood of money and resources and potential it represents is colossally enormous. It’s like a giant fire hose aimed in the wrong direction, accomplishing
in many cases exactly the opposite of what it should do. Imagine shifting that intense stream gradually in the right direction. Little by little, then ever more quickly we’d have the transition to a kind of city that can bring CO2 in the atmosphere down to below what it was at
the beginning of the industrial area. Maybe it really can.
/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Richard Register is president of Ecocity Builders Inc.
http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/>

and author of Ecocities: Rebuilding
Cities in Balance with Nature
http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/books.html> (New Society Publishers).

From Richard's blog profile:

Born in El Paso, Texas, 1943. Many years in New Mexico, many more in
Califonia. Have a seedling in my window box whose parent is the
oldest living thing in the world - about 4,700 years old.

*Article found at : http://www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=20364

*Original article : http://www.postcarbon.org/node/4190/

Amazingly good regional environmental journalism series on impacts

2006-09-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

Given the way media companies ape each others' bad ideas shamelessly, is it too much to hope for that, all over America, papers do as good a job reporting on the effects of global warming as this tiny Pac NW newspaper chain?

Consumer Reports on Ethanomania

2006-09-10T19:37:00.000-07:00

The ethanol myth
Consumer Reports' E85 tests show that you’ll get cleaner emissions but poorer fuel economy ... if you can find it

See the complete writeup here.

Useful site for natural gas prices/trends

2006-09-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

Is here

A must-read post on ethanomania

2006-09-10T16:34:00.000-07:00

Is here, at the excellent i-r-squared blog

Energy Hunger-- is coalbed methane worth destroying the land?

2006-09-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

(This may seem a little distant from Michigan, but as our own natural gas supply has dwindled quickly, and essentially all of us heat our homes with natural gas, our energy hunger has environmental consequences that push further and further out. The more places we allow to be destroyed to serve our energy needs, the less likely we will be able to resist the destruction of our own place in turn.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/us/10river.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

September 10, 2006

In the West, a Water Fight Over Quality, Not Quantity

By JIM ROBBINS

MILES CITY, Mont. — It is a strange fight, Montana ranchers say. Raising cattle here in the parched American outback of eastern Montana and Wyoming has always been a battle to find enough water.

Now there is more than enough water, but the wrong kind, they say, and they are fighting to keep it out of the river. . . .

But the search for a type of natural gas called coal bed methane has come to this part of the world in a big way. The gas is found in subterranean coal, and companies are pumping water out of the coal and stripping the gas mixed with it. Once the gas is out, the huge volumes of water become waste in a region that gets less than 12 inches of rain a year. . . .

“It makes the soil impervious,” said Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who is a soil scientist. “It changes it from a living, breathing thing into concrete.” . . .

http://peakoillansingmi.blogspot.com/

W's legacy--drowning all the other coastal cities too

2006-09-04T09:51:00.000-07:00

TOP U.S. SCIENTIST: SEA COULD RISE 13 FEET IN NEXT CENTURY

ROGER HARRABIN BBC - One of America's top scientists has said that the world has already entered a state of dangerous climate change. In his first broadcast interview as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted. . . .

"We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we're going to experience more," Professor Holdren said. He emphasized the seriousness of the melting Greenland ice cap, saying that without drastic action the world would experience more heat waves, wild fires and floods. He added that if the current pace of change continued, a catastrophic sea level rise of 4m (13ft) this century was within the realm of possibility; much higher than previous forecasts. To put this in perspective, Professor Holdren pointed out that the melting of the Greenland ice cap, alone, could increase world-wide sea levels by 7m (23ft), swamping many cities.

He blamed President Bush not only for refusing to cut emissions, but also for failing to live up to his rhetoric on harnessing technology to tackle climate change.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/sci/tech/5303574.stm

What Lansing Ought to be Doing

2006-09-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

LISTEN TO STORY

Portland going 100% renewable

Listen to this story

Portland, Ore. is throwing all its weight into the fight against global warming by promising to run on 100% renewable energy starting next year. Mitchell Hartman reports.

Portland, Ore., Office of Sustainable Development

Renewable Northwest Project

SCOTT JAGOW: Portland, Ore., has a reputation for being a very environmentally conscious city. Great public transportation, recycling programs, things like that. With all the talk about global warming, Portland has decided to take things a step further. Mitchell Hartman reports.

SOUND: And our headliner tonight, Anna Cohen, is a high-fashion line of apparel created using organic and natural fiber innovations including bamboo, cotton, hemp, wool and soy. Let the models hear it from you, hit the music, this is set number one . . .

MITCHELL HARTMAN: A recent fashion show at Portland City Hall showcased clothing for the green-leaning Gucci set. But the electricity for the lights and PA system? Not exactly green. It comes mostly from coal and huge, hydroelectric dams. Only a tiny fraction of the power in the Northwest is generated from renewable sources like the wind and sun.

But starting next year, the juice that runs City Hall will be 100 percent renewable. In a complex deal between power broker Sempra Energy Solutions, local landowners, and a regional wind developer, all city operations will run from wind power.

JEFF COGEN: "We're the first effort by a customer to get renewable energy on this scale."

Jeff Cogen is a senior aide on energy matters for the Portland City Council.

COGEN: "Municipalities, companies, nonprofits can do this, anyone who's a large enough consumer of electricity that they can get into, frankly, direct negotiations with wind developers."

Why the switch to renewable power? In a word — or rather, a few letters — the reason is CO2. Fossil fuels that power utilities are one of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide that's warming the atmosphere. Use non-fossil fuels, and the CO2 goes away.

If Portland goes to all renewable green power, it will be the equivalent of taking nearly 12,000 cars off the road every year. Portland's global-warming plan doesn't specify which renewable resource the city has to use. And there are plenty of options.

There's hydroelectric. But nobody's building new dams these days, since the existing ones have wreaked havoc on Columbia River salmon runs.

WEATHERWOMAN: "The east side of the Cascades looks sunny. All that storm activity, gone for now. Temperatures will be in the . . . "

There's solar, but so far solar panels can't produce electricity anywhere near as cheaply as fossil fuels. You can burn wood and agricultural waste, or tap underground geothermal sources. Even capture the energy of ocean waves. But most of these are economic pipe dreams right now, at least for large-scale energy production. Troy Gagliano is a policy analyst with the Renewable Northwest Project.

TROY GAGLIANO: "Most of the cost of a wind plant is in the turbines and building it. So once you've got all the equipment in the ground, you don't have to buy the wind that blows across the land."

Gagliano points out that the price of fuels like natural gas, coal, oil, and uranium has soared in recent years, and utility rates reflect that. With wind, you can lock in a contract and get stable pricing for a decade or more.

And that's already made some area farmers a bit wealthier. A few hours east of Portland, a steady wind ripples across golden wheat. Farmer Earl Pryor says his 15,000-acre spread of dry rangeland supports three crops:

EARL PRYOR: "Wheat, cattle and wind. We're essentially farming the wind. It's an alternate crop for us."

As the green power flows out, another kind of green flows in. The average windmill pays $3,000 to $4,000 a year. Plant wheat on the land, and it pays about $250. Pryor and other landowners have installed hundreds of windmills in the past decade to feed the regional power grid. That's sent local property taxes up, helping to support schools and road repair.

Back in Portland, City Commissioner Dan Saltzman is overseeing negotiations to develop the new wind farm that will supply all of the city's energy needs. And he's glad to see that it's the region that will benefit. DAN SALTZMAN: "We're also contributing . . . you know, building jobs, economic development opportunities in a rural economy. This state, like a lot of states throughout the country, has a tremendous urban-rural divide." In money terms, that means about $14 million a year in city power purchases flowing to landowners and counties in rural areas. So, instead of paying for coal from Montana, or natural gas from Canada and the Far East, Portland taxpayers will be buying a thoroughly domestic resource: Eastern Oregon wind.

In Portland, I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

Full-blown Ethanomania Outbreak in Lansing

2006-09-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

MSU's Dr. Bruce Dale continues to promote the absurd claim that ethanol has higher net energy than petroleum, which has been exhaustively debunked by Robert Rapier in a long-running and very informative debate about ethanol with its national proponents, which is available here.

Ethanomaniacs flip back and forth between talking about efficiency (energy yield per unit energy input) and process energy balances, both of which show that ethanol is an enormous boondoggle that does nothing but persuade the public that nothing need be done about radically reducing demand for transportation fuels.

Rapier has done a real public service with his tenacious refusal to allow the ethanomania to go unchallenged.

This op-ed appeared in today's Lansing State Journal. [Responses in brackets.]

==========================================
Bruce E. Dale: Biofuel investment is huge opportunity

[Look out pilgrim--someone is touting a great opportunity: your chance to give them money.]

Lansing State Journal, 9/3/06

The age of cheap oil has ended. It will not return.

[True.]

However painful they may be, higher oil prices pave the way for unprecedented opportunities to develop alternative liquid fuels, including shale oil, coal to liquid fuels and biofuels.

[Apparently Dr. Dale cares nought about global warming.]

Biofuels, including ethanol made from corn and cellulosic materials (grasses, crop residues and wood), and biodiesel offer many advantages to the U.S. and to Michigan. National and regional energy security, climate security and especially economic development are all positively affected by biofuel production and use.

[Biofuels from corn are an ecological disaster that serve only to enrich Archer Daniels Midland and the people enjoying the ethanol subsidy to sell petroleum recycled into ethanol at an even higher profit. The verdict is not in on cellulosic ethanol from sources such as switchgrass; like nuclear fusion, switchgrass seems to be an attractive option if only it can be made to work. Meantime, the crisis is upon us now and, so far, cellulosic is the Star Wars Missile Defense System of agriculture--a project that is always going to work if we just keep pumping in more money.]

Last year, we produced more than 4 billion gallons of ethanol, mostly from corn. Ethanol is currently our premier alternative fuel.

[And how much energy did it require to produce that 4 billion gallons? How much water? How many tons of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizer poured into streams and rivers as a result? How much fertility was left in the soil?]

This industry is growing rapidly, with five corn ethanol plants either operating or being built in Michigan and more than 100 such plants across the country.

[Yes, and they burn 300 tons of coal a day each. So, just as modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food, modern ethanomania adds a walloping amount of extra atmospheric mercury and CO2 production to the mix.]

However, the amount of corn that can be devoted to ethanol production is limited. We probably cannot produce more than about 15 billion gallons per year (roughly 10 percent of the gasoline we use) before hitting these limits.

[And if we made the ethanol plants use ethanol for their heating requirements, we'd produce a lot less.]

Cellulosic ethanol can provide much larger volumes of liquid fuel ... if we overcome some myths, solve key technical problems and maintain our political will.

First let's consider three of the myths.

Myth No. 1: Ethanol has a negative "net energy" and is a poor fuel.

Reality: Ethanol has a better net energy than gasoline and, if burned efficiently, will provide mileage equivalent to gasoline.

[Actual reality: ethanol produces, at best, on the order of 1.3 Btu of energy for each 1 Btu consumed; 1 Btu of petroleum typically yeilds on the order of 10 Btu oil, which converts to 8 Btu of gasoline. Nor can ethanol provide mileage equivalent to gasoline, because 1 gallon of ethanol has only 2/3 the heat value of a gallon of gas.]

Myth No. 2: Producing lots of ethanol will destroy the soil and drive up food prices.

Reality: Ethanol production, especially from cellulosics, can improve soil quality and increase food supplies.

[This is unclear. Difficult to see how taking organic matter _out_ of the soil for use in distilling ethanol leads to improved soil quality. Shifting to cellulosic could certainly increase food supplies because it would mean no longer using grains for transport fuel.]

Myth No. 3: Ethanol will always cost more than gasoline.

Reality: A mature cellulosic ethanol industry will produce ethanol for well under $1 a gallon.

[And nuclear power will be too cheap to meter.]

To produce ethanol this cheaply, we need focused, sustained laboratory research combined with large scale testing of promising technologies. The price tag for this research and development work is equivalent to about two days' worth of oil imports.

[Funny--if there is a real chance that we could displace $3/gal gas with a renewable product at less than $1/gal, you wouldn't think that finding investment funds would be hard. And two days worth of US oil imports -- on the order of 14 million barrels at $70 each -- is only about 2 billion. Should be pretty easy to form Standard Ethanol and raise $2B on Wall St. if things are as certain as this.]

In the past, funding of such R&D has risen and fallen with oil prices. If we want to break free of our "oil addiction," we must have the political will to develop alternative fuels, especially ethanol, and overcome the barriers to large scale ethanol adoption. Barriers include political manipulation of oil prices, enough vehicles to burn ethanol and enough pumps and other infrastructure to distribute it.

[Oh, OK--we need to spend money installing pumps to dispense a fuel that we _might_ later produce. Uh-huh. Sure.]

To their credit, many of Michigan's leaders understand how critical it is that we develop alternative fuels. Gov. Jennifer Granholm has made alternative fuels an important part of the Jobs Fund program. Congressman Mike Rogers and Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow strongly support ethanol and other biofuels.

In addition, President Lou Anna Simon has made developing the bioeconomy, including biofuels, a signature emphasis for Michigan State University.

[Any science that can only be justified by citing politicians means "Watch your wallet!" and don't count on any results.]

Michigan is uniquely positioned to build an expanded bioeconomy and develop biofuels. As we build the bioeconomy, we will give our state a competitive advantage in meeting the growing demand for biofuels and for many other products made from renewable plant resources.

[Michigan is uniquely positioned near the Great Lakes. We have very little fossil energy of our own, so all the energy needed to make the ethanol will have to be imported, just as now. There's no particular reason that Michigan is better suited to grow crops for ethanol than others--obviously we are not as well suited to the industrial corn farming as Iowa and Illinois, thank goodness, but neither do we have any unique advantages for cellulosic (i.e., those not available to other states). This whole line of argument appears to be nothing but rah-rah intended to use Michigan's economically depressed condition as an argument for squandering even more of our resources on trying to keep the easy motoring lifestyle alive. Good luck.]
==========

Bruce E. Dale is a professor in Michigan State University's Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science.

Wyandotte mulls wind

2006-09-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

* Power of the wind
The News-Herald
By Jim Kasuba
City officials now are seeking expert opinions on using wind power
as an alternative energy source.

http://www.thenewsherald.com/stories/090306/loc_20060903005.shtml

Kicking the Auto Addiction (book)

2006-09-03T10:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/02/AR2006090200144_pf.html
Contentment Without a Car

By Michelle Singletary
Sunday, September 3, 2006; F01

. . .

Balish's mission is simple. He wants all of us to challenge the notion that we need a car. Most importantly, he says we all should reevaluate the cost of car ownership. . . .

Balish, a broadcast journalist who lives in Southern California, has been living without a car since 2003. He began his car-free existence after deciding to sell his $36,000 Toyota Sequoia SUV because of its gas addiction. . . . "I was actually angry with myself for never sitting down before this to figure out how much money I was spending on my car," he said.

In the three years he's been without a car, Balish said he's saved $36,926.

Here's how he broke it down for me:

· $17,822 in car payments

· $5,054 in car insurance premiums

· $8,400 in gas

· $3,600 in parking (at work and at home)

· $1,800 in repairs

· $250 in car washes and oil changes

"With that money I paid off all my credit cards, a personal loan, and became debt-free for the first time in my adult life," he said.

The average annual cost to own a car is $8,410, including car payments, insurance, gas, oil, car washes, fees, taxes, parking and repairs, Balish reports. The average American spends 18 cents of every dollar earned on transportation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2003 Consumer Expenditure Survey.

There are other reasons to go car-free. Balish, who is 39 and single, said his social life actually improved. . . .

If you are interested in discussing this month's book selection, join me online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ at noon on Sept. 28. Balish will be my guest.

Stephen Hawking on the Present Danger

2006-09-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

"The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide,* trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can." -- Physicist Stephen Hawking, ABC News interview, August 16, 2006.

[* probably meant to say methane]

Highly recommended viewing/listening

2006-09-01T06:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461

Bloomberg on PO

2006-08-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=arur.i7moHMs&refer=news#
Peak Oil Forecasters Win Converts on Wall Street to $200 Crude
By Deepak Gopinath

. . . a second Great Depression.

That's not the prophecy of some apocalyptic cult. Kadijk, a hedge fund adviser, had flown from Amsterdam to attend a conference on a geologic theory known as peak oil.

Proponents of this controversial idea say global oil production is now at or near its zenith. Once the flow crests and starts to decline -- and some geologists say it already has -- oil will no longer be able to slake the world's growing thirst for energy. The result will be the oil shock to end all oil shocks. The price of a barrel of crude will spiral to $200 -- and keep rising. To the peaksters, today's energy crunch is nothing next to the pain that will follow.

``Peak oil is a reality,'' says Kadijk, a senior equity salesman at Kepler Equities, an Amsterdam-based brokerage. He plans to start a fund to capitalize on what he sees as a looming crisis for the world's fossil fuel-based economy and the ultimate bull market in oil.

As energy prices soar and violence convulses the Middle East, the peak-oil movement -- an unlikely alliance of geologists, physicists, oil industry consultants and environmental activists -- is winning converts. Peak-oil ideas are bubbling up from scientific journals and offbeat Web sites, much the way warnings of global warming did a decade ago. For the first time, the peaksters have begun to grab the attention of Washington and Wall Street.

Congressional Caucus

U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, former boss of Boston- based Cabot Corp., an oil and chemicals company, has asked the National Petroleum Council, which advises him, to investigate whether oil supplies can keep pace with demand. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog, is due to release a study on peak oil this November. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican, has formed the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus to sound the alarm.

``The world has never faced a problem like this,'' Bartlett says.

Everyone agrees we'll run out of crude eventually. Oil, after all, is a finite resource: The Earth holds only so much of it. The controversial issue is when a global peak will occur -- and what will happen then.

Colin Campbell, a British geologist who popularized the peak- oil theory in his book ``The Coming Oil Crisis'' (Multi-Science Publishing Co. and Petroconsultants SA, 1997, 210 pages) says world production of conventional oil, the kind that comes from gushing wells, is reaching its apex.

End of Oil Age

Society isn't prepared for the consequences, Campbell, 75, says. It's too late to develop alternative sources of power, such as solar cells, nuclear reactors and windmills, to fill the oil gap before energy prices soar, says Campbell, who has a doctorate in geology from the University of Oxford and more than 40 years of experience in the oil industry.

``We have come to the end of the first half of the Oil Age,'' Campbell says.

Nonsense, says Russ Roberts, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest oil company. Exxon Mobil, which has reaped record profits as the price of oil has surged, has taken out ads dismissing peak oil in U.S. newspapers such as the New York Times.

The Irving, Texas-based oil giant says the peaksters are being alarmist. In all, the world probably has 4 trillion barrels of oil left, four times the amount we have used so far, the ad says.

. . .

It was just 84 years after Revere took his ride, on Aug. 27, 1859, that Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, ushering in the Oil Age. Exxon Mobil says the era of oil isn't about to end. In one of its ads, the company says, ``Oil is a finite resource, but because it is so incredibly large, a peak will not occur this year, next year or for decades to come.'' The ad depicts a man looking through binoculars at a snowcapped mountain whose summit is hidden by clouds.

Campbell says the illustration actually drives home the point Exxon Mobil is trying to avoid. ``Even though it is obscured by clouds, we know there is a peak,'' Campbell says. His investor followers are betting he's right.

Strikingly good global warming primer

2006-08-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

(In an investment discussion no less.)

http://www.sprott.com/pdf/climate.pdf

A most significant short paragraph

2006-08-28T19:06:00.000-07:00

The tipping point in terms of climate is 2°C above pre-industrial levels. This is the point of no return. We look set to go soaring through that. We need a mass withdrawl from carbon emissions. We must leave the coal in the ground. The bottom line is that coal is the killer. We have plenty of it, and we do have the option of seeing if every Government research lab IN THE WORLD is wrong. If we panic and use coal it will be our epitaph.

--- Jeremy Leggett
(Former oil exploration geologist)

http://www.energybulletin.net/19769.html

Transcript of Call-in/Interview Show with Matt Simmons & Jim Kunstler

2006-08-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

A great intro to understanding peak oil and the issues it will create
for us (and U.S.)

http://www.energybulletin.net/19686.html

Sacrificing Midwestern foodlands for merchant coal

2006-08-27T20:05:00.000-07:00

http://grist.org/news/maindish/2006/08/24/laseur/index.html

Gotta get the coal so we can fuel our ethanomania plants making "clean
ethanol" [if you don't count the coal].

I guess we can always eat pavement, right?

The warnings of Jared Diamond's "Collapse" don't apply to USA! USA!
because "Dude, we've got technology," right?

Norway's EPA demands CO2 capture if IGCC plant to be approved

2006-08-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

Norway Authority Demands CO2 Capture at Gas Plant

OSLO - Norway's environmental authority recommended on Friday that a gas-fired power plant planned for Statoil's Mongstad refinery should be allowed only if it is equipped to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Energy group Statoil said the requirement could make the entire US$635 million project unfeasible.

The decision by the Norwegian Pollution Control Authority (SFT) contradicts an earlier recommendation by the country's energy authority NVE that the company should be permitted to build the plant without a CO2 capture system at the start-up.

The government will make the final decision on what kind of permit should be granted for the combined heat and power station, designed with capacity of 280 megawatts of power and 350 MW of heat, for a 2008-2009 start-up. . . .

Statoil said that the project would be impossible to implement if the government follows the SFT's recommendation and demands CO2 capture from the start. But it said it would not appeal against the SFT decision.

The SFT said in a statement it doubted that a CO2 capture system would ever be installed if the plant project were allowed to proceed initially without such equipment. . . .

CLIMATE CHANGE

"CO2 capture from day 1 gives the best security that a plant will be established at Mongstad that will not contribute to increase Norwegian emissions of climate gases in the long term," SFT Director Haavard Holm said in the statement.

"Human-created climate change is one of the biggest environmental challenges that the world faces," the SFT said. The SFT said that, without CO2 capture, the planned plant would have emissions of around 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 annually, though improvements to the refinery's efficiency would curb it to around 950,000 tonnes.

The planned Mongstad plant is one of three concrete plans for developing gas-fired electricity generation in Norway, which is Western Europe's biggest natural gas exporter but currently uses no gas for inland power production.

Use of gas has been highly controversial in Norway as it would boost emissions in a country that currently produces almost all its power at non-polluting hydroelectric stations.

But gas-fired generation projects have wide support in industry and have won political support as Norwegian power consumption has outstripped growth in production and Norway has no more major waterways to dam up to increase hydropower output.

Story by John Acher

Story Date: 21/8/2006

An economy dependent on low gas prices . . .

2006-08-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

to leave room for McMansion mortgages has a hard time with $70-75/bbl oil.

Housing Gets Ugly

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Bubble, bubble, Toll’s in trouble. This week, Toll Brothers, the nation’s premier builder of McMansions, announced that sales were way off, profits were down, and the company was walking away from already-purchased options on land for future development.

Toll’s announcement was one of many indications that the long-feared housing bust has arrived. Home sales are down sharply; home prices, which rose 57 percent over the past five years (and much more than that along the coasts), are now falling in much of the country. The inventory of unsold existing homes is at a 13-year high; builders’ confidence is at a 15-year low.

. . .

The current downturn, Mr. Toll now says, is unlike anything he’s seen: sales are slumping despite the absence of any “macroeconomic nasty condition” taking housing down along with the rest of the economy. [?????? Oil prices?????]

He suggests that unease about the direction of the country and the war in Iraq is undermining confidence. All I have to say is: pop!

. . .

As far as I know, Nouriel Roubini of Roubini Global Economics is the only well-known economist flatly predicting a housing-led recession in the coming year. Most forecasters consider his call alarmist, and many Federal Reserve officials remain optimistic. Last week, Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, dismissed “Eeyores in the analytical community” who worry about a possible recession.

Call me Eeyore. While I don’t share Mr. Roubini’s certainty, I see his point: housing has been the main engine of U.S. economic growth over the past three years, and with that engine now going into reverse, it’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.

The Centrality of Oil over All

2006-08-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

*Six Questions for Michael Scheuer on National Security*

By Ken Silverstein
Harper's Magazine

Wednesday 23 August 2006

(snip--go read it, it's excellent)

*7. And finally, an extra question - what needs to be done?*

This may be a country bumpkin approach, but the truth is the best place to start. We need to acknowledge that we are at war, not because of who we are, but because of what we do. We are confronting a jihad that is inspired by the tangible and visible impact of our policies. People are willing to die for that, and we're not going to win by killing them off one by one. We have a dozen years of reliable polling in the Middle East, and it shows overwhelming hostility to our policies
- and at the same time it shows majorities that admire the way we live, our ability to feed and clothe our children and find work. We need to tell the truth to set the stage for a discussion of our foreign policy.

At the core of the debate is oil. As long as we and our allies are dependent on Gulf oil, we can't do anything about the perception that we support Arab tyranny - the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other regimes in the region. Without the problem of oil, who cares who rules Saudi Arabia? If we solved the oil problem, we could back away from the contradiction of being democracy promoters and tyranny protectors. We should have started on this back in 1973, at the time of the first Arab oil embargo, but we've never moved away from our dependence. As it stands, we are going to have to fight wars if anything endangers the oil supply in the Middle East.

What you want with foreign policy is options. Right now we don't have options because our economy and our allies' economies are dependent on Middle East oil. What benefit do we get by letting China commit genocide-by-inundation by moving thousands and thousands of Han Chinese to overcome the dominance of Muslim Uighurs? What do we get out of supporting Putin in Chechnya? He may need to do it to maintain his country, but we don't need to support what looks like a rape, pillage, and kill campaign against Muslims. The other area is Israel and Palestine. We're not going to abandon the Israelis but we need to reestablish the relationship so it looks like we're the great power and they're our ally, and not the other way around. We need to create a situation where moderate Muslims can express support for the United States without being laughed off the block.

A caustic warning

2006-08-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

A caustic dose of James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency," "The Geography of Nowhere" and "Return from Nowhere." His insight into the ethanomania is dead on. Michigan is supposedly preparing a long-range transportation plan, but the reality of a low-energy future doesn't seem to have penetrated the planners' inner sanctums.

====================
Sooner or later America is going to lose access to the roughly 20 percent of the total oil imports it gets that come from the Middle East. The foothold in Iraq was an attempt to postpone that day. It looks like it will not work out. The US army is exhausting itself and bankrupting the civilian treasury. Sixty percent of the US public now disapproves of our continued presence there. Internal pressures among the Middle East oil producers themselves -- including those on the sidelines of the war -- will create additional stresses. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, the UAE, all have peaked now in terms of oil production. Meanwhile, their populations still grow, their internal oil consumption increases, leaving less for export, and the quality of the crude goes from light-and-sweet to heavy-and-sour, with further difficulties for refining and marketing.

If America loses 20 percent of its oil imports -- on top of steep depletion rates elsewhere (Mexico, the North Sea), plus political trouble in places like Nigeria and Venezuela -- then we can kiss goodbye a whole roster of things like WalMart, easy motoring on the interstate highway system, Walt Disney World, a continued profitable build-out of suburbia, and a diet of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi. I am on record, of course, as not being in favor of these things, but it would be very messy indeed if they all ground to a halt in a few mere months.

We've done a lousy job of preparing ourselves to live differently. In fact, the whole thrust of American politics along the whole spectrum has been to keep the current racket going. This is why the only broad discussion now occurring over our energy problems is focused to the point of neurotic obsession with keeping the cars running by other means at all costs. This is true on left as well as the right. The left is lost in raptures of driving around in cars fueled by used french-fry oil. The right is lost in raptures of executive pay packages for retiring oil company executives. We are putting no thought, meanwhile, into how we will grow our food in an energy-scarce future, how we will conduct manufacturing and trade, or how we will heat all the McHouses.

From http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

Not necessarily a portable process

2006-08-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/19/AR2006081900842_pf.html

Brazil's Road to Energy Independence
Alternative-Fuel Strategy, Rooted in Ethanol From Sugar Cane, Seen as Model

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 20, 2006; A01

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Record oil prices have made the world's energy landscape a darkly foreboding place this year, inhospitable to optimism and celebration. Except in Brazil.

It has been something of a banner year here, full of milestones. The government predicts that for the first time in its history, Brazil will achieve energy equilibrium, exporting as much oil as it imports. The production of sugar cane-based ethanol is expected to reach an all-time high. And just three years after the introduction here of flex-fuel vehicles -- cars that run on either ethanol or gasoline -- several major automakers predict that such vehicles will represent 100 percent of their production by the end of the year, eliminating gas-only models.

Pull up to most service stations in this country of 185 million people and you will find fuel pumps offering three choices: ethanol, gasoline or premium gasoline. The labels are slightly misleading: The gasoline varieties are blends that contain at least 20 percent ethanol. The pure ethanol is usually significantly cheaper -- 53 cents per liter (about $2 per gallon), compared with about 99 cents per liter for gasoline ($3.74 per gallon) in Sao Paulo this past week. . . .

The rapid increase in the use of ethanol already has stretched existing resources thin, and that stress has highlighted environmental threats that represent some of the industry's most daunting challenges. . . .

Recent studies in the United States have suggested that the entire American corn crop would provide enough fuel to replace only about 12 percent of U.S. gasoline demand. To help plug that potential gap, some in the United States have advocated importing ethanol from Brazil. Though Brazil currently provides about 5 percent of U.S. ethanol, a duty of 54 cents per gallon -- a measure designed to protect American farmers -- makes a large-scale trade relationship unlikely.

"We would never be able to supply the United States with any substantial quantity of ethanol," said Carvalho, of the producers union. "But we could offer an equilibrium supply if the consumers in the U.S. had a voice in the matter. But it's the Midwest corn producers that are holding it up."

Comparing sugar cane ethanol with corn-based fuel in terms of the reduction of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases is one that Brazilians such as Carvalho love to make. The ethanol extracted from corn yields only about 15 to 25 percent more fuel than the fossil fuels that were used to produce it. In Brazil, according to industry studies, the sugar-based ethanol yields about 830 percent more.

However, many experts in all aspects of Brazil's industry agree that the future of ethanol resides neither in sugar nor corn, but in cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel that theoretically could be extracted from almost anything from switch grass to scrap paper. The United States is leading research into developing cellulosic technology, and the Energy Department this month announced it was dedicating $250 million for two new research centers dedicated to the cause. . . .

Even the guys who get it best don't always get it

2006-08-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

Bob Hirsch, of Hirsch report fame, gave a presentation at the 5th Assn. for Study of Peak Oil conference in Pisa, Italy. Looks like he's planning for business as usual on climate--sees no limit to the amount of liquid fuels we can make from coal if we simply apply enough money. The thought that we might not all need to be driving apparently hasn't entered into the calculations yet.

http://www.oilposter.org/blog/hirschslides.htm

Watch Ross Gelbspan DVD in Lansing, 8/30

2006-08-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

The Lansing Post-Petroleum Planning Project concludes the sensational summer sustainability stories series with a new DVD presentation featuring Ross Gelbspan, author of "Boiling Point" and "The Heat is On," called "Boiling Point II."

Produced by Waterplanet Environmental Broadcast Service (WEBS) and Sustainable Marin, the 58 minute DVD was created on 11/15/05 and features Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gelbspan and guest Drew Dellinger, and includes a special feature on Hurricane Katrina.

The showing is free, and will be at "Everybody Reads" bookstore in Lansing at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, August 30.

We hope you will join us for the last of the summer showings.

Details about the Fall series are still being decided (though we know that the series will probably move from Wednesdays).

If you have titles to recommend, please feel free to contact us or leave
a comment.

Help Michigan DOT---they desperately need it

2006-08-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

State of Michigan's new long-range strategic plan for transportation is here.

You can leave comments about the plan here.

This "plan" is the kind of thing that will be held up for future Michiganders to consider in the same way that airport security people are going to study the 9/11 attacks and that medical students look at Galen's idea of all health proceeding from four "humors."

Essentially, the values gathered propose a state in which we have MORE of everything, and where no transportation choices--say, more freeways--reduce the amount of any other choices (say, bikeable communities).

The "values" represent perfect Democratic interest-group politics: the values listed mention every single identifiable group with any interest in transportation--manufacturers, the handicapped, people who want to fly, people who want to take trains, people who want less congestion, developers who want to build "corridors," etc. etc.

There is not even one mention of CO2 emissions or global warming. There is no consideration of limiting CO2 from transportation. There is no recognition that the best scientific analysis suggests that we have less than a decade to REVERSE COURSE on CO2 and only until about 2050 to reduce our CO2 emissions by 75%.

Nor does the values document suggest that anyone connected with the enterprise is even slightly aware of the rising concern about "peak oil," the name given to the point at which the rate of oil extraction peaks and then begins to decline---a point that would seem to require a radical change in your ideas of transportation planning. A number of serious geophysicists and oil geologists say that we are at peak now; the rest say we will be soon--within a generation at most, which is about the time scale for this plan.

The US Government-commissioned "Hirsch Report" avoids taking a position on when peak will occur, but does say that we would need a 20 year headstart on the problem via a crash program on the scale of the Manhattan Project to avoid catastrophic consequences from peak. In other words, no matter when it occurs, we need to have started planning for a radical increase in the efficiency with which we use oil 20 years before.

You can read a summary of the Hirsch Report here.

If you wanted to do something important for the long-range health of Michigan, it would be hard to find an easier thing to do than to go to the comment link, and say something along the lines of "Any long range transportation plan has to address global warming and peak oil."

Just in time--a critique of Just In Time (JIT) Inventory Strategies

2006-08-13T19:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.energybulletin.net/19233.html

My circa 1993 master's degree is in Engineering Management, where we got the full-throated gospel of JIT with every course. I later taught some Operations Management classes for the University of Phoenix, which let me see how widespread the religion had become. (UOP uses a standardized curriculum across its many "campuses," classrooms in corporate office parks.) I later did some consulting for Hewlett-Packard at a manufacturing facility where they made inkjets, turning truckloads of parts into pallets of printers---it seemed like you could almost feed the driver lunch and then have him drive around the other side of the plant and refill his rig with the printers made from the materials he delivered earlier.

JIT inventory management, like juggling expensive crystal goblets, is a thing of beauty . . . when it works.

But even minor energy disruptions--not to mention full-fledged price explosions--are to JIT what a swarm of bees are to a juggler . . . a show-stopper. The URL above leads to a very good article pointing out that what little manufacturing left in the US is often perilously dependent on absolute, unswerving deliveries powered by endless cheap oil . . . just the reality we're leaving behind.

The mother of all positive feedback cycles

2006-08-13T18:17:00.000-07:00

http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntget=2006/08/12/nyregion/12generator.html&tntemail0=y

August 12, 2006
In Heat Waves, Generators Double as Saviors and Polluters
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA (NYT)
Hundreds of businesses and government agencies fired up diesel generators during last week's heat wave, one of the dirtiest energy sources available.

Talk Energy with Jim Marcinkowski

2006-08-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

There are several opportunities to meet congressional candidate for Michigan's 8th District (which includes all of Ingham County) Jim Marcinkowski. I gave Jim a new paperback copy of David Goodstein's book "Out of Gas" two weeks ago, so you can quiz him to see how much he's picked up.

Events are in Okemos and in Lansing's West Side Neighborhood on Sunday, August 20th at 3 p.m. (Okemos) and 5 p.m. (Lansing).

If you want to attend, leave a comment with your e-mail and I'll let you know where to be.

(Out of Gas is a very good, short, profound book that says a lot without ever ranting or making things seem worse than they already are. It's available at Everybody Reads on Michigan Ave.)

Green Buildings Rise with Power Rates

2006-08-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401612_pf.html

As Power Bills Soar, Companies Embrace 'Green' Buildings

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 5, 2006; A01

When bank executive Gary J. Saulson told his project team that he wanted to turn a partly constructed operations center in Pittsburgh into a "green" building, they called him "well-intentioned" -- but "crazy."

Five years later, no one is questioning Saulson's sanity. Thanks to midcourse changes in the building's design, materials, lighting, and heating and cooling systems, the 647,000-square-foot steel, stone and curved glass structure overlooking the Monongahela River spends $1.5 million a year on utilities -- 26 percent less per square foot than one of the bank's comparable standard buildings.

Today, Saulson, director of corporate real estate for PNC Financial Services Group Inc., is overseeing the construction of new "green" PNC branches.

Green construction and renovation techniques are spreading in the commercial real estate industry. Innovations -- such as sun-reflecting ceramic dots in windows, giant vats of ice for overnight energy storage, plant-covered rooftops, bigger eaves and compact fluorescent lighting -- are being used in structures ranging from an unassuming PNC branch that opened last month in Ashburn to the new Bank of America building that will soon be New York City's second-tallest skyscraper. The new designs have been spurred not only by concerns for the environment but also by the cold, hard calculation of the potential savings in energy bills.

"It's prudent on many levels," said Kathy Barnes, senior vice president for property management at Akridge, which has 18 commercial buildings in the Washington area. "We all have a civic responsibility." And, she added, "if we're not doing it, we're not going to be competitive in the marketplace."

Commercial buildings devour more than a third of the nation's electricity. During heat waves like the one this week, they often rely on auxiliary generators that are less efficient and more polluting than electricity on the grid.

While industrial use of electricity has flattened over the past decade, consumption by commercial buildings has risen about 4 percent a year, according to the Energy Information Administration. Energy-efficiency experts say that better construction techniques, new energy-saving devices and smarter management can reduce electricity consumption by 20 percent in older commercial buildings and up to 50 percent in new ones, vastly reducing air pollution and utility bills.

"We can do a lot," said Quilian Riano, who works with a group called Architecture 2030. By 2035, virtually all commercial buildings will be new or renovated. "Are they going to be energy hogs or are they going to be different?" he said.

Perhaps the flashiest green building will be the 945-foot Bank of America tower under construction on West 42nd Street in Manhattan. Architect Robert Fox used a computer model to determine the energy effects of altering the walls, ceilings, mechanical devices and other parts of the 2.2 million-square-foot building.

As these techniques become more common, costs are falling. Fox said "greening" the tower will add just 2 percent to its $1.3 billion cost.

"One of the more important things is to understand how your building acts," Fox said. "It's not just a matter of how much insulation you use." Central to the energy efficiency of the building is a five-megawatt cogeneration unit that will recapture energy from the heat that goes up the building's chimney, cutting energy costs 40 percent.

Fox made the ceilings about a foot higher than in most office buildings to let in more sunlight and reduce lighting costs. Interior lights typically account for 20 to 30 percent of energy use, according to a Harvard Business Review article by consultant Charles Lockwood, because they use electricity and generate heat that boosts air-conditioning needs.

To keep the sun from overheating the building through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, Fox is using double-paned glass with tiny dots of ceramic baked to the inside surface to reflect the sun's rays. The dots will be dense toward the floor and ceiling, and unnoticeable at eye level.

The building will also have LED lighting and an under-the-floor ventilation system that will give individual employees more control over the temperature at their work spaces.

"Our goal is to absolutely consume the least amount of power," Fox said. Two things he rejected were a windmill at the top of the building and solar panels. The windmill wasn't economical and the dark solar panels didn't match the transparent look of the tower, he said.

Owners of older buildings are also looking for ways to save energy. An Akridge official said that after real estate taxes, utilities are the most expensive component of operating a building, with costs ranging from $2.60 to $2.85 a square foot, up from $1.75 five years ago.

So last year Akridge budgeted $20,000 for energy-saving measures in each of its buildings, and it aims to cut electricity consumption by 5 percent this year. It has changed the ballasts that drive fluorescent tubes with more efficient ones, replaced the 40-watt bulbs in exit signs with LEDs that use as little as six watts, wrapped blankets around water heaters and installed motion sensors that turn off the lights when rooms are empty. With thousands of fixtures in a building, the savings add up, said Barnes, the Akridge manager.

A lot of energy-saving technology has improved, she said. For example, motion sensors are more reliable and less ugly, she said, and "now we can put them in a restroom without worrying about someone being left in the dark."

Akridge this year bought a $9,000 infrared camera so it could monitor heat lost from its buildings in winter and plug the escape routes.

Akridge has also shut off equipment that sucks up electricity without serving much purpose. It turns down some heating and cooling systems half an hour earlier, which has no effect on office climate until after most people have gone home. If hardworking lawyers come in on the weekend, a system linked to their keys will provide ventilation specifically for those zones.

Akridge rejected new windows or heat-blocking filters on existing windows as too expensive. But Patrick Clugston of Eastern Metallizing Inc. said that putting sun-filtering film on windows can pay off in 14 to 24 months. He said his firm has done that for the American Institute of Architects, the National Geographic Society and World Bank.

Black rooftops can waste energy. Fox's firm is going to put plants on the roof outside its penthouse New York office. On Thursday afternoon it measured the temperature on the roof: At 2:30, the average reading was 174 degrees. A green roof is rarely hotter than 100.

After its Pittsburgh operations center went up, PNC began erecting green bank branches; it opened its 23rd on July 19 in Ashburn. Saulson said that each 3,650-square foot PNC branch costs $1.3 million to $1.4 million, at least $100,000 less than those built by competitors.

The branches use about 45 percent less energy than those of similar size elsewhere, taking advantage of natural light, sun shades and big eaves. "We build the building around the windows," Saulson said. The branches are modular and can face any direction, depending on the orientation of a site. In some places, college architecture classes have visited. "These are things you wouldn't necessarily associate with a bank branch," Saulson said.

Fox said green buildings can be healthier and more comfortable for employees, too, because they use different air filters, carpeting material and furniture. His firm is looking at redesigning a building in South Korea, and it is designing a green apartment building that the Louis Dreyfus Group is planning at Second and H streets NE in the District.

"The corporate world is catching on real fast," Fox said. "They understand the financial benefit, but they also see this as the right corporate model. Stockholders are asking them what they are doing about climate change. When you get a blank stare from the CEO, that's a problem."

Finally, an ethanol project that might make sense

2006-08-02T05:58:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK - One company's drive to locate domestic sources of energy is taking a turn into the barnyard.
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/37477/story.htm

Panda Ethanol Inc. has secured nearly US$160 million in financing to build an ethanol plant that will be fired by mountains of manure in Hereford, a cattle town in the Texas panhandle.

"We've located a project in what I would call the Saudi Arabia of manure," said Todd Carter, the company's chief executive officer.

The plant will gasify 1 billion pounds of manure a year to make 100 million gallons of ethanol. The manure will save the plant nearly 365,000 barrels of oil equivalent per year. Panda hopes to get it running by late next year.

Companies are racing to build ethanol plants as the oil industry uses the fuel as a replacement for gasoline additive MTBE, a suspected carcinogen. Growing US motor fuel demand means ethanol production will need to grow by about 1.5 billion gallons per year.

Some environmentalists have questioned the green benefits of ethanol because some of the fuel's refineries use electricity from plants fired by coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

But Carter's "poop to pump" ethanol plant will fuel more than 90 percent of its own energy needs by heating up manure until it releases methane, which it will then burn to make steam to fuel the plant. The process destroys the methane, a greenhouse gas at least 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Some environmentalists worry that runoff from farms that group large numbers of cattle together can pollute water supplies. But Carter said the plant will turn what already exists in the region into something useful. Ash from the process can be used to make cow bedding and cement, he said.

Panda hopes to soon build another plant using the same technology in Kansas. The company expects to become publicly traded by the fall.

When it comes to harvesting manure, timing is important. "It can't be too fresh and it can't be too old," said Carter.

Free film in Lansing: Building a Straw Bale Hybrid Home (8/2, 8/16)

2006-08-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Join the Lansing Post-Petroleum Planning Project for a FREE two-part showing of
the unique DVD "Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home."

The 2 h, 42 min film will be shown over two evenings
Wednesdays Aug. 2 and 16 at 7 p.m., in the Community Room at

EVERYBODY READS bookstore,
2019 E. Michigan Ave, Lansing (next to Gone Wired Cafe).

Everyone is welcome.

Here is information about the teaching film from the producer's website:

Building With Awareness.com
Learn About Straw Bale Home Construction, Solar House Design,
and Green Building With Our How-To DVD Video, Books, and Website

Building With Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home Is The Award-Winning DVD Video On How To Build Beautiful and Energy-Efficient Solar-Powered Straw Bale Homes With Straw Bale, Adobe, Mud, Cob, and Other Natural Materials. Every step, from breaking ground to the final coat of earth plaster, is beautifully presented and easy to understand. Building an energy-efficient solar home requires more than just using straw bale walls. Every element of the design can have a positive effect on reducing or eliminating your energy bills. Energy-efficiency and beautiful aesthetics can both come from the same materials. This web site shows how green building techniques can make both large and small buildings dramatically more energy efficient.

Our Building With Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home DVD video follows the construction of one straw bale solar house, from start to finish. This DVD video will educate you on how both materials and the design of the building will determine its energy efficiency, visual appeal, and construction cost.
============================================

Your host: The Lansing Post-Petroleum Planning Project is a local group made up of people concerned with helping the Greater Lansing area create a plan to thrive in the very challenging years that are coming up, as the world supply of cheap energy begins to diminish and the need for drastic reductions in overall fossil-fuel usage further limit our options.

Please post/publicize/forward wherever appropriate.

http://peakoillansingmi.blogspot.com/

Previous films shown in this summer sustainability stories series:

June 21 7 p.m. THE END OF SUBURBIA: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream

July 5 7 p.m.THE POWER OF COMMUNITY: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

July 19 7 p.m. PEAK OIL: IMPOSED BY NATURE

Something that could actually work

2006-08-01T05:52:00.000-07:00

Pollute Less and You Could Cash In, Britons Told

LONDON - Britons could soon be making money out of a greener lifestyle under a government proposal for personal carbon emissions allowances.

A government study will focus on personal carbon caps which, if adopted, could allow the public to cash in if they cut down on their emissions of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming.

Those who produce less carbon under their personal cap could earn credits, which might be used like points on a loyalty card or sold on to those who pollute more.

The plan will be unveiled by Environment Secretary David Miliband later on Wednesday.
"Imagine a country where carbon becomes a new currency," Milliband will tell the Audit Commission's annual lecture. "We carry bank cards that store both pounds and carbon points. When we buy electricity, gas and fuel, we use our carbon points, as well as pounds."

Under the proposed scheme, carbon allowances would cover energy use through electricity, gas, petrol and air travel. Such emissions make up 44 percent of total UK emissions.

"People on low incomes are likely to benefit as they will be able to sell their excess allowances," Milliband will say. "People on higher incomes tend to have higher carbon emissions due to higher car ownership and usage, air travel and tourism, and larger homes."

Personal carbon allowances are one of several options Britain is looking at to help the public get involved in tackling climate change.

Other ideas include carbon loyalty cards, league tables, the use of carbon offsets at point of purchase for certain sectors, product carbon labelling and carbon calculators.

Story Date: 20/7/2006

http://www.planetark.com/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=37343

Clever Ads on Sustainability Topics

2006-07-31T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Creative Gallery on Sustainability Communications is available on
UNEP website: www.unep.fr/sustain/advertising/ads.htm

Energy topics:
http://www.unep.fr/pc/sustain/advertising/ad/ad_list.asp?cat=8

Jeffords shows the way

2006-07-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not voting for anyone who won't sign on for this.
---------------------------------------------

check out Sen. Jeffords' Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act. Here
are the highlights:
=============================================================

· Requires that the U.S. reduce its emissions between 2010 and 2020
to 1990 levels. By 2030, the U.S. must reduce its emissions by 1/3 of
80% percent below 1990 levels, by 2040 by 2/3 of 80% percent below 1990
levels and by 2050, to a level that is 80 percent below 1990 levels.

· Requires that power plants, automobiles and carbon intensive
businesses reduce their global warming pollution.

· In the event that global atmospheric concentrations exceed 450
parts per million or that average global temperatures increase above 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial
average, EPA can require additional reductions.

· Provides for standards and grants for sequestration of greenhouse
gases.

· The National Academy of Sciences will report to EPA and the
Congress to determine whether goals of the Act have been met.

· Requires the US to derive 20% of its electricity from renewable
sources by 2020.

· Establishes energy efficiency standards similar those found in
California and ten other states.

· Invests in innovative technologies.

Is there a candidate smart enough to seize on this?

2006-07-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

Note the promise of the last sentence in the penultimate
paragraph--the question is whether there are any candidates smart
enough to see the potential of making a sane response to global
warming Public Issue #1

---------------------

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Stupidity

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/opinion/29ellison.html?th&emc=th
KATHERINE ELLISON
Published: July 29, 2006

San Anselmo, Calif.

I WENT to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last weekend, but the theater was
closed. The power was out because of an overheated transformer. It was
Day 9 of our 11-day, record-melting heat wave here in the San Francisco
Bay Area, where Mark Twain once supposedly, but probably apocryphally,
compared our foggy summer to the coldest winter he’d ever known.

The fog — the Coast’s natural air-conditioner — kept failing to arrive,
however, as we sweltered in triple-digit heat. I briefly remembered the
single night I’d hated the fog, freezing in extra innings at Candlestick
Park. But mostly I recalled the sheer wonder of watching it spill over
sun-struck mountains, summer after summer, and I yearned for its return.
Where had it gone?

I’d just returned from a week in a Mexican desert to find it several
degrees hotter at home, in a marathon that meteorologists have called
unprecedented. My 7-year-old’s skin was so warm that I took his
temperature. A neighbor had to shut down the emergency sprinkler system
at his house, which, sensing fire, was about to douse his furniture. The
water scalded his hands.

Inland, where incomes are lower and temperatures normally higher, the
elderly and infirm have been quietly dying in their overheated
apartments and cars, sometimes slumped in front of running fans.
Yesterday, state authorities were blaming the heat for more than 130 deaths.

Certainly, it was nothing compared to the 2003 killer heat wave in
Europe, which led to tens of thousands of deaths, and yes, we know that
much of the rest of the country is suffering hot weather too. But it was
our heat wave, and we hated it just the same. Power failures left
hundreds of thousands of Bay Area customers cursing Pacific Gas and
Electric in the dark. One repairman reported that his crewmen had just
installed a fresh transformer and were taking a break, sipping some
Gatorade, when he watched their work explode into sparks.

Local meteorologists offered clashing opinions about why the fog stayed
away, but they agreed that the culprits included a mass of warm air that
shifted northward from the Four Corners and parked over the Great Basin.
Part of this high-pressure air mass extended over California’s coast,
tamping down the cool sea breezes. The days were scorching, the nights
sticky and hot.

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article headlined “Scientists
Split on Heat Wave Cause,” which said some climate experts attributed
the heat wave “at least partly” to global climate change. “Others,
however, disagree,” the article continued, “and say it’s still too early
to blame the current weather on the planet’s changing climate.”

This made me wonder: when will it be too late? I get it that you can’t
blame climate change for any one weather event. But I can also see that
there’s a pattern emerging — and it sure looks a lot like what
mainstream scientists have been predicting for several years. They’ve
been warning of more frequent and severe heat waves and warmer nighttime
temperatures that rob you of any relief. You don’t really need a
climatologist to know which way the wind is blowing.

“It’s so hot,” my friends and I say to one another. “It’s scary.” And we
shrug.

“Aren’t you scared?” I asked my husband.

“Sure,” he said, and went back to watching the A’s.

I know he’s mentally healthier than I. Twain, after all, also is
supposed to have said that everyone complains about the weather but
nobody ever does anything about it. At the time, his comment was pithy
and wise. But times have changed: a consensus of leading scientists
suggests the world has a chance of stalling climate change if we make
deep and immediate reductions in our fossil fuel consumption. This would
take some leadership, but I’d put my children in day care and work full
time for someone with that kind of vision, and I’d bet parents across
the country would do the same.

The fog finally rolled inland on Thursday. But the clock is still tick- ing.

Katherine Ellison is the author of “The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood
Makes Us Smarter.’’

For those who wonder why industrialists are so often portrayed as self-interested pigs

2006-07-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Spend some time visiting John Engler's cukoo-cloud land where global
warming is just a left-wing conspiracy

http://blog.nam.org/archives/global_warming/

(Then spend some time at realclimate.org to find out what actual climate
scientists have to say.)

Interesting: Intriguing local problam solving format takes on energy

2006-07-27T19:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know how much of this will be substantive, but this is an
interesting attempt to take discussion out of the sterile "panel
discussion with Q&A" mold and try a different setting and approach.

August 13th -- Meet Minds, Solve Problems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On Sunday August 13, 2006 the first “Meeting of the Minds” will take
place in the Red Light Lounge of the Temple Club located on 500 N. Grand
River in Lansing. This newly forming group is being created to focus on
a single socio/political issue each month, to address important issues
in the community, and to support local organizations that are working to
create solutions.

The format for the first meeting will be:
4:00 PM Doors open, A\V presentations from local artists, board games.
6:00 PM Dinner & organizations speak focus topic.
7:00 PM Participant discussion in the form of "Five Minutes of Fame" on
state commentary on the focus topic.
11:00 PM Networking.
The August meeting will focus on energy issues. For more info, contact
Josef A. Petrous at (517) 507 1799 or mrpeligro@gmail.com.

__._,

__,_._,___

Should brave men die . . .?

2006-07-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

Should Brave Men Die So That You Can Drive?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/25/161546/473

Ethanomania further debunked.

2006-07-26T16:27:00.000-07:00

This guy does a great job on his very thorough blog.

Peak Oil Medicine Blog--how is health care to work in the low-energy future?

2006-07-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

http://peakoilmedicine.com/

LP4: The Lansing Post-Petroleum Planning Project

Good argument on relative importance of global heating vs. "energy independence"

When is "Tinkerbell" the enemy of good sense and community

Great article on the energy conundrum

Oakland press joins the ethanomania bandwagon

Smart meters indeed

Too many people

America the Overfull

Should be the only ones allowed

A dark vision, powerfully described

The Actual Speech by Rickover-amazing foresight

A commodities trader takes on ethanomania

Very cool thinking from frieght officials for a change

Important new book

No worries, mate, plenty of oil! (Yergin)

Home Based Combined Heat/Power Systems?

Ethanol: more costly, less efficient

Governing mag pundit on why power dereg failed

Great idea -- commuter rail in Michigan

As temps go up, R&D $ to combat global heating dropping

Looks like a must-read

Excellent ethanol survey (Chi Trib)

The cost of failing to act on global heating: 20% of world GDP

MIT eyes more clever way to use ethanol to improve efficiency

Press notices that deregulation didn't lower energy costs

Read more about ehtanomania and sister biofuel illnesses

At last, the industry with the most to lose stirs . . .

Global Heating Climate Chaos: Cheaper to Prevent than Respond

An effective renewable portfolio approach that works quickly

Insurance industry notices what W refuses to see

A good post-peak strategy for making better use of urban land

For those interested in alt transport fuels

Michigan kicks off new energy research center

More insight from Dennis Meadows--particularly relevant to Michigan

Gore: GHG emissions freeze needed now

Rebutting ethanomania

A most important speech

Amazingly good regional environmental journalism series on impacts

Consumer Reports on Ethanomania

Useful site for natural gas prices/trends

A must-read post on ethanomania

Energy Hunger-- is coalbed methane worth destroying the land?

In the West, a Water Fight Over Quality, Not Quantity

W's legacy--drowning all the other coastal cities too

What Lansing Ought to be Doing

Full-blown Ethanomania Outbreak in Lansing

Wyandotte mulls wind

Kicking the Auto Addiction (book)

Stephen Hawking on the Present Danger

Highly recommended viewing/listening

Bloomberg on PO

Strikingly good global warming primer

A most significant short paragraph

Transcript of Call-in/Interview Show with Matt Simmons & Jim Kunstler

Sacrificing Midwestern foodlands for merchant coal

Norway's EPA demands CO2 capture if IGCC plant to be approved

An economy dependent on low gas prices . . .

The Centrality of Oil over All

A caustic warning

Not necessarily a portable process

Even the guys who get it best don't always get it

Watch Ross Gelbspan DVD in Lansing, 8/30

Help Michigan DOT---they desperately need it

Just in time--a critique of Just In Time (JIT) Inventory Strategies

The mother of all positive feedback cycles

Talk Energy with Jim Marcinkowski

Green Buildings Rise with Power Rates

Finally, an ethanol project that might make sense

Free film in Lansing: Building a Straw Bale Hybrid Home (8/2, 8/16)

Something that could actually work

Clever Ads on Sustainability Topics

Jeffords shows the way

Is there a candidate smart enough to seize on this?

For those who wonder why industrialists are so often portrayed as self-interested pigs

Interesting: Intriguing local problam solving format takes on energy

Should brave men die . . .?

Should Brave Men Die So That You Can Drive?

Ethanomania further debunked.

Peak Oil Medicine Blog--how is health care to work in the low-energy future?