If you've been watching the Olympics, you might have seen an ad for Sun Chips that features its "compostable bag." The plastic in the bag is derived from GMO corn and made by Cargill. The ad neglects to mention those inconvenient truths, though it does claim that its bag will break down in home compost "under ideal conditions."
Even worse, with the possible exception of the Sun Chips bag, corn plastic generally will not break down in home compost, even under ideal conditions -- it's only compostable in "industrial-scale" composting systems. So for those of you who live in San Francisco, which actually has municipal composting, that's all well and good, I guess. But for the rest of us, this stuff is still plain, old [genetically engineered] garbage.
But now researchers in the UK may have just fixed all that:
Scientists at Imperial College London are working on bioplastic packaging - made from trees and grass - that can break down in home composting bins.
The polymer developed by the scientists is made from sugars that come from the breakdown of fast-growing trees and grasses, or agricultural and food waste.
The scientists from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council purposely focused on non-food crops - many common bioplastics come from corn or sugar cane waste - and using low-energy and low-water processes.
Very cool. Keep an eye on this stuff. It could really be the packaging of the future.
In 2004, Colorado became the first state to pass a renewable energy standard (RES) by popular vote, a measure requiring large utilities to produce 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2015.
Three years later, after it became clear the RES goal of 10 percent was going to be achieved nearly eight years ahead of schedule, the state legislature doubled down with a new 20 percent mandate by 2020.
The point is that these targets often prove much easier to achieve than corporations like to admit. We have a corporate community that by and large provides kneejerk resistance to regulation so it's good to be reminded (again) that their predictions of doom/failure are usually unfounded and frequently just plain wrong.
There is no doubt in my mind that the same will prove true in the case of cap and trade. Industry, as it has countless times in the past, will discover how easy it is to function, even thrive, in a world where carbon comes with a price tag. But Colorado's experience also suggests that, in the event a climate bill fails this year or, as the WSJ speculates, is scrapped, Congress should indeed go ahead and enact an ambitious renewable energy standard -- something even cap-and-trade hating folks like Sen. Blanche Lincoln and American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman are on record supporting. In the end, success with renewables might make coming back and enacting cap-and-trade that much easier.
Do Diesel-based Farmers Dream of Electric Tractors?
Writer George Monbiot's recent Peak Oil article entitled "If Nothing Else, Save Farming" included this comment:
There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle's low-end torque are both advantages for tractors.
I read this and immediately tweeted the question "Where are the electric tractors?"
Well, scientist-turned-farmer John Hewson has responded to Monbiot's assertion with an explanation that lacks Monbiot's, shall we say, sanguinary spirit:
[T]o anyone who has worked with farm machinery, especially on smaller and poorer farms, the idea of electric tractors will seem ridiculous. So far, electric traction has been developed only for transport, and most successfully in railway trains. The development of batteries and control systems has been directed at the needs of passenger cars, which do not have to pull heavy loads at low speeds for long periods.
Electric tractors do exist, but are light machines similar to ride-on lawn mowers, with power outputs of around 40kW. Typical farm tractors have outputs of 100kW-200kW, and no currently available batteries could provide anything like this amount of energy, or anything approaching the working life of a diesel engine.
The best lithium-ion electric car batteries and motors work at high voltages (500V for example). As an engineer, I would blench at the idea of maintaining a 100KW, 500V system in a damp and muddy farmyard, let alone carrying out running repairs in the middle of a 50-hectare field, in the rain.
As far as I know, electric traction for farm machines has not yet been even considered as an option. If it ever reaches the stage of production, it will be very expensive indeed -- far beyond the budgets of even large farms.
But here's the good news. Hewson appears to be, to a large extent, wrong!
With David Leonhardt's piece on a new weatherization program/jobs bill nicknamed "Cash for Caulkers" generating some buzz, as well as questions, it seemed a good time to resurrect a post I wrote about a year ago on the general subject of energy efficiency improvement. I had been inspired by a lengthy post at Grist on a post-carbon economy which observed that the way to jumpstart efficiency and incentivize improvements is to copy the British and set per square foot emissions levels for building (unlikely, I know). But more practically, we should also make energy efficiency a "utility" like electricity, gas or water. Here's what I wrote:
[N]ew entities called "efficiency utilities" ... would pay for efficiency upgrades in order to bring an existing building in compliance with the limits. Owners/tenants would pay for these improvements via a monthly bill and, though they would be part of the building, the improvements' cost wouldn't require "recouping" by the owner in the form of rent hikes or higher a sales price. A particular unit would simply have a particular monthly cost for "efficiency" like it has a monthly cost for heating.
And like electric service, the "efficiency" bill can be stopped - if an apartment sits unrented, for example. Because both the utility as well as the bill itself could be subsidized in various ways it would, according to Lipow, remove a major stumbling block to making improvements in existing buildings. For the record, an efficiency utility could cover the costs associated with:
Of course an efficiency utility wouldn't just cover insulation, caulk and new windows -- it would cover heating systems, appliances, shower heads, etc. A further advantage to a utility model over the financing model that Leonhardt discusses -- the idea of adding weatherization costs to homeowner's property tax bills -- is that it addresses the fact that weatherization doesn't lend itself to one-size-fits-all solutions. As Leonhardt observes, the complexity of retrofitting old homes is enormous:
What share, say, of Midwestern homes built before 1950 could use more attic insulation? How quickly would the insulation pay for itself on average? Every home is different, obviously. But without any reference point, many people won’t be confident enough to plunge into a project.
Even if they don't ultimately perform the work themselves, a utility would have the scale to provide the expertise as well as the data for what particular homeowners should do. Obviously, this kind of program would go beyond what any stimulus bill is likely to enact. But if we want to make efficiency a goal unto itself, a utility model -- not to mention per square foot emissions limitations -- is the way to go.
The Market Speaks But Collin Peterson Isn't Listening
Speaking of techno-fixes, I wonder how things are going on the next-generation, cellulosic ethanol front. According to the Des Moines Register, not well:
The Obama administration has issued just two conditional commitments for such guarantees, one for $80 million and another for $25 million.
"Very few credit providers even with loan guarantees are willing to take much risk at all," Dallas Tonsager, the Agriculture Department's under secretary for rural development, told the House Agriculture Committee.
Plants that would make fuel from crop residue and other sources of plant cellulose will cost far more to build than conventional corn ethanol plants. The capital costs on a traditional ethanol plant run about $2 to $2.50 per gallon of production capacity, while cellulosic facilities will cost "several multiples of that. You're taking larger risk on larger projects," said Tonsager.
The chairman of the committee, Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said that criticism of corn ethanol and its impact on food supplies and greenhouse gas emissions is discouraging investment in next-generation fuels.
"It's no damn wonder that nobody's investing," Peterson said. "I wouldn't put money in with all this that's going on."
Wait, what? Cellulosic ethanol is so lame that even Collin Peterson wouldn't invest in it? Oh, the irony! Actually, I think he was really just cursing those meddling kids for ruining a good time.
Looks, here's how it works, Collin, my boy. Capital flows along the path of quickest profits for the lowest risk. Having stuck with a ten year time horizon for bringing cellulosic ethanol to market -- for the last twenty years, mind you -- the industry has done a pretty good job of scaring away potential investors. It might be different if anyone had actually managed to produce cellulosic ethanol on any scale. But, no. Nothing yet. Check back in five years!
I wonder if now would be the time to point out that hitching farmers' wagons to ethanol may have worked for a while but really wasn't such a good idea for the long term. In the event that ethanol really starts to founder (not that I'm holding my breath, of course), we can turn our attention to helping farmers truly adapt to climate change and even, dare I say it, reforming ag subsidies?
Let's accentuate the positive today, shall we? The NYT's Green Inc. blog is reporting that a startup has an operating plant in the DC area that can convert used plastic (i.e. garbage) into usable fuel:
Entrepreneurs have been trying for years to turn low-value wastes into high-value products. Waste plastic is among the lowest in value, and gasoline or diesel fuel the highest, but machines to do that conversion usually consume a lot of energy and get gummed-up by leftover material that they cannot convert.
Now a company in Washington, D.C., is trying out a new way -- heating the plastic to a very carefully controlled temperature range, with infra-red energy.
The company, Envion, is expected to cut the ribbon on Wednesday morning on a $5 million plant that it says will annually convert 6,000 tons of plastic into nearly a million barrels of something resembling oil. The product can be blended with other components and sold as gasoline or diesel.
"We are the world's largest oil consumer and the world's biggest producer of waste," said Michael Han, chairman and chief executive of the company.
This process will convert one to the other for about $10 a barrel, he said.
An important element to the conversion is that the process is electrically powered -- no fuel is burned on-site to run the converter -- so that a renewably-powered plastic-to-gasoline facility is inevitable.
This is quite a game-changing development given that we're drowning our land and choking our seas with plastic -- much of it not recyclable. This process offers at least the hope that we'll find a way to stay afloat.
On the other hand, it's worth observing that plastic represents a fairly stable way to sequester carbon. By turning it into fuel and then burning it, we're putting even more carbon into the atmosphere. But if this scales massively and ultimately is able to displace conventional oil production (itself a carbon-intensive process) we might be looking at a real win-win. See! I stayed positive all the way to the end. Photo by meaduva used under a CC license
When I mentioned the fact that many and varied changes in policy will likely be required to address the obesity epidemic, I wasn't specifically thinking about gas taxes. But clearly, I should have been. Matt Yglesias points to this news from Forbes of research indicating that increasing gas taxes could have a significant effect on obesity rates:
Charles Courtemanche, an economist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has produced a study suggesting that permanent hikes in gas prices may slash obesity rates. The amount is hardly nominal: A sustained $1 increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline equals a 10% dip in the nation’s obesity rate--that's about 9 million fewer obese people clogging up health care systems and costing society (and themselves) money. "The price of gas is a powerful lever when it comes to medical expenses and mortality rates," Courtemanche says. "There’s a savings in this for all of us."
Americans' sedentary lifestyle has long been known as a major contributing factor to the obesity crisis -- but the policy focus has of late been almost entirely on food, e.g. junk food taxes, health food subsidies and calorie labeling. Courtemanche offers compelling evidence that transportation and energy policy deserves its place in the mix. He provides a fairly complete mechanism as well:
Courtemanche found evidence in his data that rising gas prices resulted in more Americans walking and more Americans bicycling. Perhaps just as important, he noticed that, as gas prices increase, people eat out at restaurants less. In addition to more strolling and cycling, people use public transportation more, Courtemanche says, and that, too, burns far more calories than sitting in a bucket driver’s seat, sipping coffee, and flipping through radio channels. People who use subways, buses, trolleys or commuter rail services need to get to and from mass transit stops, and that probably means more walking on both ends. A $1 rise in gas means 11,000 fewer lives lost to obesity-related causes and $11 billion per year saved on health costs, Courtemanche says.
Good stuff. The connection to rising gas prices and reduced restaurant visits is fascinating and one that I certainly would not have immediately recognized. The same goes for the fact that public transportation use burns more calories than driving -- obvious in retrospect but still easy to overlook.
And once gas gets up north of $6 a gallon, according to Courtemanche anyway, that's when you'd start to see a transformation away from a car-centric culture as gas prices start to affect housing and relocation decisions. Of course, we may not need gas taxes for all that -- economic recovery plus peak oil may yet get us to the same place. It's just a further indication that our policy choices for addressing obesity need to include "all of the above."
Tough enough to drive over the Great Wall? Photo credit: GM.comI can't say as I know exactly what's going through the minds of the top executives at Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd. who have reportedly just purchased the Hummer brand from GM. I'll say one thing, though. I'm pretty sure they're not Peak Oilers. Still, give them credit for some much-needed greenwashing:
[Hummer spokesman Nick] Richards said the buyer planned to continue selling Hummer's current lineup as it developed "more efficient" vehicles. The brand will eventually sell trucks fueled by diesel, ethanol and other alternative fuels, he said.
That's the spirit! Although getting 10 miles/gallon running on anything will start to pinch when that anything costs $5 a gallon again.
Drilling for oil in a corn field: will Big Oil squeeze out King Corn?Back in March, Tom Philpott flagged some moves from Shell Oil and Valero Energy (the largest U.S. oil refiner) that indicated Big Oil was falling for biofuels. Now, the NYT shows Tom had it right with a piece detailing the increasing amount of money Big Oil is spreading around to biofuel startups. This comes despite Big Oil's historical hostility to the ethanol industry. In fact, their objections to conventional ethanol might sound strangely familiar:
For decades, the big oil companies and the farm lobby have been fighting about ethanol, with the farmers pushing to produce more of it and the refiners arguing it was a boondoggle that would do little to solve the country's energy problems.
Oil companies still dislike corn ethanol, dubbing it corrosive and inefficient. Instead, their new investments are in second generation biofuels that use non-food crops, waste wood, and garbage as feedstocks.
With all the depressing talk about corn ethanol and how its allies may yet derail the Waxman/Markey climate change bill, I thought I'd throw out some more positive news on the biofuels front. One of the leading candidates for second generation feedstock is jatropha. It's basically a tree-like weed that grows quickly and doesn't need massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. To listen to experts describe it, jatropha sounds like the perfect biofuel feedstock:
The fuel emits almost no greenhouse gases, and the trees can capture four tons of carbon dioxide per acre. Jatropha takes almost no machinery to harvest
Now, jatropha is nothing new and is surrounded by as much controversy as other second gen feedstocks like switchgrass. As has been observed, any crop, food or not, can ultimately displace food crops and contribute to a negative land-use impact. As the UK Guardian points out, jatropha turns out not to do as well as advertised on marginal agricultural land without the use of fertilizers. There's no free lunch with biofuels, if you'll pardon the expression. But here's the twist, what if jatropha is explicitly introduced into particular regions of the world to displace narcotics crops? Two companies mentioned in this article -- one American and one Colombian -- are partnering in order to do exactly that.
Finding alternatives economic systems that can compete with the illicit drug trade is one of the greatest challenges for Colombia. I'm willing to consider jatropha and biofuels if the choice is narcotics and warlords. Now, of course, the two companies involved, Agrasun from the US and Live Systems Technology in Colombia, are very possibly practicing a bait-and-switch. They hold out the possibility of displacing drug crops but instead follow the same path as others and pick the low-hanging fruit of displacing food crops. Still, the notion of displacing coca with jatropha is an intriguing one. Let's hope they (and presumably the Colombian government) pursue this idea and don't just use it to sweeten their press releases.
Photo by R. K. Henning at www.Jatropha.org used under a CC license
The Congressional Budget Office just released a paper looking critically at the relationship between ethanol, food prices and carbon emissions. But it gets better. The CBO blogged about it!
Most ethanol in the United States is produced from domestically grown corn, and the rapid rise in the fuel's production and usage means that roughly one-quarter of all corn grown in the U.S. (nearly 3 billion bushels) is now used to produce ethanol. The demand for corn for ethanol production has exerted upward pressure on corn prices and on food prices in general. CBO estimates that the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008.
In turn, increases in food prices will boost federal spending for mandatory nutrition programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps) and the school lunch program by an estimated $600 million to $900 million in fiscal year 2009. The Special Supplemental Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children--better known as WIC--is a discretionary program that provides a specific basket of goods to recipients rather than a set cash benefit, so changes in food prices in 2008 had an immediate impact on costs for the program. Under the assumption that the effects are much the same, increased production of ethanol would have added less than $75 million in fiscal year 2008 to the cost of serving the same number of WIC participants as in 2007.
Last year the use of ethanol reduced gasoline usage in the United States by about 4 percent and greenhouse-gas emissions from the transportation sector by less than 1 percent. The future impact of ethanol on greenhouse-gas emissions is unclear. Research suggests that in the short run, the production, distribution, and consumption of ethanol will create about 20 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the equivalent processes for gasoline. In the long run, if increases in the production of ethanol led to a large amount of forests or grasslands being converted into new cropland, those changes in land use could more than offset any reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions--because forests and grasslands naturally absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than cropland absorbs. In the future, the use of cellulosic ethanol, which is made from wood, grasses, and agricultural plant wastes rather than corn, might reduce greenhouse-gas emissions more substantially, but current technologies for producing cellulosic ethanol are not yet commercially viable.
Apologies for the long quote, but when bureaucrats speak with such venom, it's hard to resist. Okay, maybe it only reads as venomous if you're an ethanol lobbyist or House Ag Chair Rep. Collin Peterson. I especially liked the direct linkage between ethanol's effects on food prices and the increased cost to the government via the school lunch program. And hearing a government agency expressing real concern over land-use issues surrounding ethanol is music to my ears. Even the future value of cellulosic ethanol is questioned. It's all good.
Bonus: Once you start pitting interest groups against each other (i.e. nutrition vs. ethanol), you have a much better chance of finding the political will to attack wasteful programs. This a pretty loud clarion call that the end is nigh for corn ethanol's Congressional free pass.
Much has been made of this quote from President Obama's auto restructuring team regarding GM's Chevy Volt:
In an attempt to leapfrog Toyota, GM has devoted significant resources to the Chevy Volt. While the Volt holds promise, it is currently projected to be much more expensive than its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable.
Now, it's true that betting the company on a non-existent market segment (i.e. plug-in hybrids) when even plain-vanilla hybrid sales represent only a fraction of the auto market seems questionable. And the restructuring that GM needs goes far beyond its failure to have a competitor to the Toyota Prius. But then again this was the company that previously centered its business and environmental strategy on the fantasy of the so-called "hydrogen economy" -- a transformation that was as far-off as it was unlikely. There's always been a haze of unreality hovering over GM's "green" initiatives (probably because global warming is a "crock of sh*t"). With the Volt, GM seems to have come asymptotically close to coming up with a winner. At best, GM appeared to recognize that it couldn't compete in today's car market, so why not make a car that might compete (eventually) in tomorrow's.
GM certainly couldn't have imagined it would sell too many $40,000 sedans -- which is how much the Volt will(?) would have(?) cost (while a Prius costs about $24,000). You'd think that affordability would've been an issue during the design phase. Given that the car carried its own recharger (in the form of a gasoline engine that kicked in when the battery charge was low), you have to wonder why they insisted on a battery with a 40 mile range -- way beyond what anyone else was attempting with plug-ins. Sadly, it appears that GM, seeking a game-changer, may have fatally over-reached. Because if there's a fatal flaw in the Volt (especially as GM's silver bullet), it's that darn battery. A Bloomberg article (via Joe Romm) that came out early this month sums it up:
General Motors Corp.'s Volt electric car may be too expensive to buy and operate to displace Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius hybrid as the industry benchmark for cutting fuel use and cutting carbon exhaust.
A rechargeable auto with the Volt's target range of 40 miles on electricity is "not cost effective in any scenario," a study by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found. Plug-in cars with smaller batteries may be a better value, according to the study, which doesn't cite the Volt by name.
"Forty miles might be a sweet spot for making sure a lot of people get to work without using gasoline, but you're doing it at a cost that will never be repaid in fuel savings," Jeremy Michalek, an engineering professor who led the study, said in an interview.
The study is an attempt to test how prices and driving habits may shape consumer choices among current hybrids and new models such as the Volt and a Prius able to be recharged at a household outlet.
With lighter, cheaper batteries, a plug-in with 7 to 10 miles (11 to 16 kilometers) of electric range or a conventional hybrid may provide the best mix of price, faster charge times and efficiency, Michalek said.
In case you're wondering, the researchers based their numbers on $6 a gallon gas. Meanwhile, the battery alone is thought oto cst $16,000 -- you can get a decent small car for that. It's also the difference in cost between a Toyota Prius and (as estimated) the Volt itself. The Volt is a second generation plug-in hybrid when all GM needed was a first. It will be interesting to see if the new management tries to save the Volt by downsizing the battery -- assuming the company's still around to build it.
So says USDA Chief Tom Vilsack. What he's referring to is the so-called Blend Wall for ethanol in gasoline. The EPA currently sets a limit of how much ethanol can be mixed into gas and then sold at your local gas station -- 10%.That limit is effectively the sales ceiling for ethanol -- once ethanol producers hit that "wall," refiners won't buy another drop.
With fuel consumption and oil prices both tanking which has led to a cratering of demand for ethanol, ethanol producers and their main suppliers -- corn farmers -- are desperate for a government handout. At first they asked for some of that stimulus money in the form of a direct bailout -- Vilsack didn't bite. No loans, no grants, no nothing. At the same time, Vilsack has said he wants to "maintain the infrastructure" of ethanol production while moving away from corn as the primary feedstock. The problem is that you can't do that without supporting the current ethanol industry, which is fueled by lots and lots (and lots) of that selfsame primary feedstock -- corn.
It's hard to imagine just how much corn is required to make a usable amount of ethanol. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute has a great quote that sums it up: "The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year." A year of food for a fill-up? In 2007, the US produced 6.5 BILLION gallons of the stuff. Do I really need to go on?
Fine, I will. Let's look at those 6.5 billion gallons of ethanol.That's a lot of gallons. It must be a big chunk of our annual gasoline use, right? Wrong. We used 142 billion gallons of gasoline last year. We grew all that corn -- corn that could have fed over two hundred million people for a year -- and all we got was less than 5% of the fuel we need. There's a t-shirt in there somewhere -- I just know it.
Meanwhile the climate impact from corn ethanol is staggering. Any study that attempts to take factors into account other than the energy content of corn vs. the energy content of gasoline shows corn ethanol to be a lousy option that offers no climate benefits. That's because you simply can't look at corn ethanol in isolation (which is how the corn farms and the ethanol lobby do it). Corn requires lots of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel fuel to grow and harvest. Ethanol is also moved around by truck (rather than pipeline) so you need to take transportation into account - transport from the field to the factory and from the factory to the distributor and from the distributor to the gas station. That's a lot of trucking.
According to a new study out of Duke, the greenhouse gas contributions of just farming the corn entirely offset any carbon advantage from burning ethanol instead of gasoline in cars. Their conclusion: you're better off leaving the soil fallow. But you can't fully estimate the full effect of corn ethanol unless you take land use into account. Let me repeat that in All Caps: YOU HAVE TO TAKE LAND USE INTO ACCOUNT. And the land use issues are huge.
It's not just a question of using food for fuel. You have to calculate how many farmers will switch to corn from other less-profitable crops. You have to determine how much ecologically fragile land will be plowed under in the demand for corn. You have to look at how countries like Brazil will respond to US increases in corn production. Answer: they will burn down their rainforests so that they can grow the food crops we're not growing. A team from Woods Hole Research Center determined that expanding corn ethanol production will thus cause a big jump in greenhouse gas emissions. And Lester Brown points out the same may be true for non-food crops like switchgrass (a feedstock for cellulosic ethanol), "if it is that profitable on marginal land, imagine how profitable it would be on prime crop land."
So here we are with our backs to the blend wall. I should note that Vilsack and industry shills like retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who now works for the new ethanol lobby group Growth Energy, are not in fact asking the President to change the blend wall. They are asking the EPA. In the past, the EPA has evaluated the "safety" of mixing ethanol in gasoline based on damage the ethanol might do to a car engine and/or its catalytic converter. And that's why, as Ob Fo noted yesterday, Vilsack thinks "that this is something that can be done within existing regulations without a great deal of time spent reviewing the science." Indeed, Reuters reports that "many believe the EPA has the authority to allow a temporary jump to 12 or 13 percent" without any meaningful review. That "authority" flows entirely from the EPA's past car engine research.
And there's the rub. Is it possible that EPA scientists will ignore the carbon issue in the course of considering a change in the blend wall? The controversy over corn ethanol's climate impact is fairly well recognized. For all the lobbying (with even climate-friendly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi supporting the change), the EPA could still punt and say that the new data on climate impacts require them to look at the blend wall more closely. The EPA is, after all, on the verge of making its official "endangerment" finding, as required by a recent Supreme Court case, that carbon dioxide must be regulated as a pollutant. Any blend wall decision could be mooted by that finding.
This whole ethanol mishegas is what happens when a shortsighted energy policy based on "reducing our dependence on foreign oil" (rather than reducing our dependence on carbon period) meets one of the all-time greatest government giveaways (in this case to industrial agriculture) - aka the corn ethanol boondoggle. As Ezra Klein memorably put it, corn ethanol "is agribusiness's get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as an energy policy." And boy, are we paying for that profligacy now.
In what will not, I hope, be the last strikethrough of Bush administration EPA rules, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson effectively re-instated a ban on new coal-fired power plants. In the waning days of the Bush era, then EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson refused to allow the EPA to regulate carbon emissions as a pollutant from coal-fired power plants claiming that a ruling of law on the matter was merely a "suggestion." Jackson, as expected, disagreed and has now kicked off a new rule-making process for carbon from coal plants. As Grist observes, this may be the starting point for the EPA to regulate carbon more generally under the Clean Air Act. And as the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel David Bookbinder points out, the uncertainly surrounding the regulation will likely freeze financing for investments in coal. Good times.
In what may be a watershed, the NYT broached the subject of the death of coal. Who ever thought you'd read this kind of thing in a paper of record any time soon:
The coal industry, which powered the industrial revolution and supplied America with much of its electricity for more than 60 years, is in a fight for its survival.
With concerns over climate change intensifying, electricity generation from coal, once reliably cheap, looks increasingly expensive in the face of the all-but-certain prospect of regulations that would impose significant costs on companies that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The article goes on to describe the obstacles to implementing so-called "clean coal" - like the idea that rock in many parts of the South is too porous for carbon capture and sequestration technology to work: the carbon gas would just leak out. And the likelihood that coal will stay in our energy mix for a long time - mostly because of the 600 legacy coal-fired power plants still running.
But the article misses a couple of important points. A lot of attention is given to the costs for coal power associated with climate change legislation in terms of a market price for carbon as well as the costs to incorporate carbon capture (which will likely run into the billions per coal plant). But that ignores the fact that, even now, when coal plants are proposed that use the best available anti-pollution technologies for mercury, nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide, they turn out to be more expensive (and take longer to build) than cleaner alternatives. Now that the Obama EPA re-writing mercury emissions regulations, the coal industry will have trouble just complying with those. It's easy to see why states are losing interest in coal-fired power plants having nothing to do with carbon capture.
So the only question that matters, it seems to me, is how you get rid of those 600 legacy plants. And the answer is: energy efficiency. The Rocky Mountain Institute recently published a study on what they called the "efficiency gap." They determined that if all 50 states were as energy efficient as the top ten most efficient states then "more than 60 percent of coal-fired generation could be displaced" - as in shut down. That's 360 coal-fired power plants right there.
It's also crucial to allow what's called "decoupling" so that utilities can adjust rates more freely in order to reward customers for energy efficiency (most utilities currently have the perverse incentive to encourage energy use among their customers since they are only allowed to make money by selling more electricity). California currently practices this (as Joe Romm explains in detail) which is part of the reason why their energy use per capita has remained at 1990 levels. Rep. Henry Waxman attempted (and, I believe, failed) to insert a decoupling provision in the stimulus.
If we focus on those two things, we'll have a lot more luck getting rid of coal than if we throw billions of dollars and years of effort on carbon capture. Which is why I'm much happier when Steven Chu agrees with me, than when he doesn't.
Felix Salmon mused on the subject of Peakniks recently (and what a neologism THAT is!) after reading Ben McGrath's entertainingly morbid piece "The Dystopians" in The New Yorker ($ub req'd). While it's worth observing that "peaknik" has typically referred to Peak Oilers, I think it's safe to say that we're all peakniks now.
McGrath talks mostly about financial doomsayers, i.e. Peak Debt and Peak Dollars, but refers generally, if somewhat dismissively, to the "Peaknik Diaspora" and some of its adherents. These would be folks who "believe" in Peak Oil, Peak Carbon, Peak Dirt, Peak Fish. Personally, I think Peak Carbon is a not terribly useful way to refer to climate change - although "climate change" is itself a not terribly useful way to refer to climate change (something that Gar Lipow has taken it upon himself to fix). Peak Things, in my humble opinion (speaking of which, why did IMHO go out of favor? Is there no longer any humility on the Internet?), should only refer to resource maximums. Switching that around for carbon - i.e. we're trying to stop producing carbon so we can declare/achieve Peak Carbon and continue reducing from there - is just plain confusing. So let's dispense with Peak Carbon.
Peak Dirt (aka Peak Soil), on the other hand, is very real. Or rather the underlying problem of soil erosion is very real. Industrial agriculture with its "fencerow-to-fencerow" monocropping techniques and mass applications of synthetic fertilizer further exacerbates the problem (although there's a peak for fertilizer, too - Peak Phosphorus). Anyway, I happen to think "Peak Dirt" is also confusing - I prefer "The Soil Crisis." Yes, we're losing topsoil at an alarming rate. But we're also expanding the amount of land under the till in many parts of the world. Ironically, we're doing it in most cases via deforestation or through expansion into marginal or ecologically fragile land, which only increases the rate of erosion. Indeed, farmers in the US responded to spiking prices and damaging floods last summer by making a forceful but failed attempt to get government permission to plant on land protected under federal conservation programs.
Meanwhile, development pressures in urban and suburban areas continue to reduce farmland in and around cities - which has nothing to do with erosion. The land is still fertile, it's just more valuable with a house on it. Well, maybe not at the moment - which begs the question, when will we start plowing all those McMansions under and planting organic vegetables on top of them? No one wants big houses anymore, right? And, of course, none of this takes into account the coming conflicts over land use for alternative energy as solar, wind and biofuel development contend with agriculture for acreage around the world. Definitely less of a Peak than a Crisis.
Some even argue that soil is a more precious resource than any of our other supposed peak resources. As food progressives Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson declared in their NYT op-ed on soil, "Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute." Without soil, there is no agriculture, full stop. Does that mean food is a candidate for Peak-hood now?
As for oil, yes, Salmon is right that peak oilers tend towards shrillness. But their number includes the International Energy Agency (a 28 member intergovernmental body that has historically assumed oil production would simply increase with demand. Not anymore) along with several CEOs of major oil companies. Oh, and half of oil company CFOs cotton to the idea as well (thanks for all that, Joe). Are they shrill, too? They seem more like Very Serious People.
Of course, the mother of all Peaks is one that McGrath didn't even mention - Peak Water. Sure, we're surrounded by it - but most of it is too salty. And though we drink, bathe in and flush a lot of it, agriculture uses the most by far. The water cycle doesn't itself increase the amount of freshwater in the world and we're draining most underground aquifers far faster than they are replenished (especially this one). Meanwhile, soil erosion contributes to flooding and leads to less efficient watersheds. And climate change is expected to bring superdroughts. It's enough to make you wonder how we'll have enough of the wet stuff to satisfy the needs of 9.2 billion people by 2050. Let's hope GE is right that soon we'll be able to drink the ocean thanks to clean-powered desalination.
So I will leave to others the worries over Peak Debt and Peak Dollars. I've got enough on my plate as it is.
Well, that was quick. In power 48 hours and already putting the kaibosh on new coal plants. Via the Sierra Club:
This is a great day for clean energy and people's health: Today the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overturned the State of South Dakota's approval of the massive Big Stone II coal-fired power plant. The EPA's decision comes after the state failed to require state-of-the-art pollution controls for the coal plant - controls that would address harmful soot, smog and global warming pollution.
...The proposed Big Stone II 500-megawatt coal plant would have emitted more than 4 million tons of global pollution annually. The Sierra Club and Clean Water Action have been working to stop the Big Stone II project... for more than three years.
And THAT, my friends, really is change you can believe in.
Now, don't anybody throw shoes at me just because I'm talking about coal. It's still bad and we should stop using it. That said, the Illinois legislature just approved a new coal-fired power plant with some interesting implications. True, Sean Casten at Grist isn't happy. The idea that his home state of Illinois, having just bequeathed us The. Best. President. Ever, is now gifting us another coal plant has prompted no small amount of teeth-gnashing. But despite his clenched teeth, he did take a moment to observe the that the state law under which the plant will be built will require the capture and sequestration of at least 50% of the plant's carbon emissions.
No, I'm not jumping for joy at the news. But it's worth pointing out that this will be an IGCC (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) coal plant, which means it turns the coal into gas before burning it. IGCC lets you take out most of coal's impurities (such as mercury and sulfur dioxide) and is the leading technology for so-called "carbon capture-ready" coal plants. There are only a few such plants currently in existence because - wait for it - they're really really expensive to build - up to triple the cost of conventional coal plants. Sorta takes the "cheap" out of what's billed as a cheap and abundant power source.
But back to the Illinois plant. Thanks to Casten's math and Kevin Drum's insights, most of the blog work is already done. Casten calculated that once you include rate increases, the new plant - which won't come online until 2014 - will generate power at about 20 cents/kWh. For the sake of comparison, I can buy baseload wind power today through a local power co-operative here in Philadelphia at an "unsubsidized" cost of 16.2 cents/kWh. Better not tell the Illinois legislature.
Moreover, Casten did even more math and determined that Illinois ratepayers are being charged about $400 per ton of carbon. Which is, as Kevin Drum points out, a market price for carbon that environmentalists would kill for and about 25 times the market price for carbon on the European carbon exchange (the only fully functioning carbon market in the world right now).
But here's where things get interesting. The EPA is supposed to develop carbon emissions standards for coal plants. The Supreme Court and the EPA's own Environment Appeals Board said so. And now we know that capturing 50% (and possibly as much as 60%) of carbon emissions from coal plants can be done without much effort. Even the Illinois legislature's plan calls for capturing 90% of carbon emissions for any plants coming on line after 2017. The question will be - is 50% going to be the standard for the EPA? Why not shoot for that 90% target right away? Lisa? Any thoughts?
And finally, to temper your own gnashing of teeth, the Sierra Club observes on its terrific coal-fired power plant tracking page (ah, the Internets) that this law really just kicks off a cost study, which could take up to a year to complete. And even then, the legislature could vote not to proceed (not to mention the fact that Blago's replacement may not be quite so coal friendly). In the interim, any number of cheaper renewable projects could come up for consideration with a lower cost and a quicker turnaround.
All in all, I actually see in this a small victory. To get a coal plant off the ground, Illinois:
set a short window for coal-fired power that incorporates anything less than 90% emissions capture
set a market price of at least $400 per ton of carbon emissions
could stop this plant in its tracks well before construction starts.
Not exactly a "shovel ready" project. I'm not a betting man (as far as you all know) but I wouldn't put money on this thing ever making it off the drawing board.
Over at Grist, Sean Casten observes that many innovations which seem like perfect solutions at a small scale often bring massive unintended and damaging consequences at a large scale. He uses some nifty examples from the past to illustrate his point. My favorite item, though, is the fact that, at its introduction a century ago, the automobile was hailed as a miraculous, trouble-free solution to the reigning urban pollution crisis of the day - fetid air and streets full of animal "byproducts." No one at the time imagined that hundreds of millions of cars worldwide might ever exist, much less one day create pollution problems of their own.
Casten goes on to list the likely but unintended consequences of scaling up the alternative energy technologies required for our transformation to a low-carbon economy.
The solar industry depends on massive volumes of silicon, which must be mined from quartz and purified of its oxygen with a healthy dose of coal and/or charcoal. Do we comprehend the increased size of quartz mines and (char)coal use to meet a solar-dependent grid?
Any central power generation technology requires prodigious amounts of copper in the wires, which must be mined and purified, often with significant acid leaching.
Any battery-intensive future -- whether for automotive or electricity storage -- is implicitly a world that puts us homo sapiens in much closer contact with large concentrations of heavy metals, from lead to cadmium or lighter metals like lithium.
Fuel cells require large volumes of rare earth metals (platinum, rhodium, etc.) that tend to be concentrated in parts of the globe not always known for political pleasantry.
Efficiency, unsexy but powerful - you know, like Dick Cheney - holds the key. We need to squeeze every last joule out of our power and waste energy sources without relying on a 1 for 1 replacement of dirty power with "clean" power. We can't just scale up alternative energy sources to the same level as our fossil fuel-based system - we need to scale down our power demands, too. The good news is that Dr. Secretary Stephen Chu (or is it Secretary Dr.?) at the DOE is a big efficiency fan.
The even gooder news is that a slew of old, highly efficient technologies that had been washed away by the 20th century flood of cheap oil are reappearing as the floodwaters recede. greentechmedia offers a fun list for those keeping score at home. To some extent, the list simply confirms the fact that many of the technologies central to our low-carbon future have actually been around for upwards of a century. Things like geothermal cooling, solar thermal water heaters, gas plasma lighting, zinc batteries, biodiesel and even electric cars are all in that category. Tidal power, meanwhile, goes back a nifty 900 years. But there are also old and, in some cases, ancient technologies like "swirly water" - which involves using vortexes to purify water, dung "gasification" and ambient cooling systems that are just now being "rediscovered" as having commercial-scale potential.
But the fact remains, whether we're traveling back to the future or in, through and beyond, we're going to have to focus on doing more with less power. Anything else is a waste. Photo courtesy the US National Archives
The TVA slams it shut now that the horse has finally gone. Maybe. According to the AP, the TVA is now "reviewing storage options" with the idea that maybe they should do something different with all that coal ash.
As Atrios would say, no one ever could have imagined that this would happen. Storing 1.7 5.4 million tons of coal ash in giant ponds next to rivers is just such a fantabulous idea. Flushing toxic sludge down nature's toilet sure doesn't seem clean to me. What would the caroling coal lumps say? Photo by Steffe used under CC license
Remember that watershed ruling by the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board that seemed to require the EPA to study carbon emissions from coal plants before allowing new ones to be built? Well, the Bushies may be enemies of freedom, the environment and capitalism and all that, but they are careful readers. According to a report in the NYT, the ruling did not in fact require the EPA to consider carbon emissions in the permitting proces. It just said they "can" - a detail that was noticed by the EPA's lawyers, if not the rest of us. And that, as Robert Frost might say, has made all the difference.
Outgoing EPA administrator Stephen Johnson, so effectively filleted in a recent series of Philadelphia Inquirer articles, has stuck one more of his substantial collection of shivs into the back of the environmental movement by declaring Thursday, "The current concerns over global climate change should not drive E.P.A. into adopting an unworkable policy of requiring emission controls." And so it won't. With that statement, so went the moratorium on new plants. You can still hear the coal industry cheering.
In the end, the Obama administration can indeed require carbon emissions controls under the Appeals board ruling for new plants. But it looks like several thousand megawatts of new coal-fired power will come online before they get to it. Oh well. It's just the climate, right?
For those of you terrified by Obama's comment at yesterday's press conference that "the solution to our energy crisis will be found not in oil fields abroad but in our farm fields here at home," allow me to sum up the biofuel future in one word: Agrichar. Okay, two words because it's sometimes called biochar.
I just wish someone would say it to our President-elect, since, though he's clearly outside the "Iraq bubble," he appears to still be in the "ethanol bubble." Perhaps Time Magazine's Person of the Year might like to peruse the April 2008 issue of said mag in which Michael Grunwald popped that bubble so effectively for the rest of us. Said he:
...Several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Time Magazine. Last April. It's nice that Obama reads the NYT Sunday Magazine but he needs to broaden his horizons a bit. I think it's pretty clear that Obama wants to move away from corn ethanol - he said as much yesterday and, as previously noted, incoming DOE head Steven Chu is quite hostile to it as well. But switching from corn to cellulose as the source 1) will take too long 2) probably won't work and 3) if Grunwald is to be believed, is misguided anyway.
At a minimum, the much discussed five-to-ten year window to get cellulosic ethanol up to scale is five to ten years' worth of money and effort that we waste on the corn ethanol program or, as Ezra Klein calls it, "Agribusiness's get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as an energy policy." Even the "promising" alternative that Vilsack appears to support of importing our ethanol from Brazil isn't really worth much optimism. Brazil may be good at making ethanol from sugar but, according to Grunwald, the process is causing "the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel" - the Amazon rain forest. But wait, there's less:
Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation...
...This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.
Pass the sugar ethanol? No way. Which brings us back to that funny word at the top of the post that points to a solution that can keep US corn farmers (relatively) happy and that doesn't involve ethanol at all. And, via Scientific American, it's all based on a fancy-pants way to make charcoal.
By using a special kiln, you can take agricultural wastes such as - are you listening, Iowa? - corn leaves and stalks, burn it in the absence of oxygen and then use the gas byproducts to create electricity. You also get large nuggets of pure carbon (okay, charcoal). The charcoal can then be plowed back into the soil and, according to the latest research, will nourish the soil and stay there possibly forever. The upshot is that a good chunk of the carbon "fixed" by the plant matter is now permanently sequestered in the soil. And there's even some indication that the burning and "gasification" process itself may be carbon negative. Zowie.
Interestingly, there's an especially hopeful cameo buried in the Scientific American article on agrichar. Who should turn out to be a big supporter of agrichar research? No, not Tom Vilsack. Rather, Ken Salazar, the newly minted Interior Secretary who has many environmentalists up in arms. And none of this is news to the USDA, which already funds agrichar research. Perhaps Ken, Tom and Steve could have a little sit-down and hash all this stuff out? In the Bush administration, having three cabinet secretaries sit down together would generally lead to a war, the destruction of an inconvenient personal liberty or a tasty giveaway to some favored industry. But this troika has it within its power to revolutionize agriculture and energy. If, that is, they're willing to pop that darn bubble. Photo by SantiMB used under CC license
When Steven Chu of the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab was first announced as Secretary of Energy, Matt Yglesias' joy was somewhat muted. After acknowledging the benefits of Chu's appointment, Yglesias pointed out a certain reality:
Unfortunately, the Department of Energy isn't actually the policy juggernaut one might think it is. In the real world, the department's responsibilities are pretty limited, and a lot of them relate to our nuclear weapons arsenal rather than energy policy as such.
All of which is true. But I would respond with an answer to Andy Revkin's question as to whether this country needs a Department of Innovation. We don't need one because we already have one - it's called the Department of Energy. And that fact has everything to do with why Steven Chu may soon become the most important scientist in America.
Just look at what the DOE has given us so far. Joe Romm runs the numbers and they are stunning. He quotes from a National Academy of Sciences study on the return on investment from:
... 17 R&D programs in energy efficiency and 22 programs in fossil energy funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). These programs yielded economic returns of an estimated $40 billion from an investment of $13 billion.
Three energy-efficiency programs, costing approximately $11 million, produced nearly three-quarters of this benefit. Most significant were advances made in compressors for refrigerators and freezers, energy-efficient fluorescent-lighting components called electronic ballasts, and low-emission, or heat-resistant, window glass. Standards and regulations incorporating efficiencies attainable by these new technologies ensured that the technologies would be adopted nationwide, thus dramatically compounding their impact.
Now that's bang for the buck. And his impact in guiding DOE research will probably be further amplified given the expected drop in corporate R&D dollars during this recession. As an aside, it's worth mentioning that the low-e windows referred to above were developed in the late 1970s at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. It cost $3 million to develop the underlying technology while their use has saved close to $1 billion in energy costs over the last 30 years (a detailed history is here). And it was something that private industry had no interest in working on. Not bad for a bunch of government scientists. Innovation indeed.
This may explain why energy efficiency is already atop Chu's wishlist. But what about all the money spent on fossil fuel projects? Aside from coal-related projects, spending on fossil fuel research is being slowly supplanted by alternative energy projects.
But which of the various alt energy paths should Chu have the labs take? Stanford scientist Mark Jacobson provides a helpful list. He studied the cumulative benefits of various forms of alternative energy. The result has wind, solar thermal, geothermal and waves at the top and, surprisingly, ethanol of all types (corn and cellulosic) at the bottom - below even coal and nuclear. USDA take note. It turns out that when you start to take account of land use issues along with the risk of deforestation, ethanol simply can't compete. Wind on the other hand is surprisingly efficient in its use of land. For example:
The entire U.S. vehicle fleet could be operated on power produced by 3 square kilometers of land planted as wind farms, he claimed. Getting the same amount of energy from corn or cellulosic ethanol would take 30 times the amount of land.
Thanks to Tom Philpott, we already know that Chu is not a believer in corn ethanol. But he does seem very supportive, along with Obama, of cellulosic ethanol (his lab has received major funding for their cellulosic research). Ideally, Chu will put more effort into things like the DOE's potentially breakthrough wave power research rather than into billion dollar ethanol plants. But even so, Chu represents a chink in the armor of corn ethanol, which is a very good thing. After all, he'll be in charge of one of the two major ethanol subsidy programs. While the USDA pays growers for the raw materials (i.e. the corn), the DOE pays the companies that make it into fuel. If he reduces DOE support for corn ethanol, the USDA will have to follow. Depending on Obama's USDA pick, it could make for some interesting cabinet meetings.
All this focus on innovation is, in my view, doubly important because it's becoming clear from what's going on in California and Europe, that implementing a cap-and-trade system is going to be a nightmare. Congress, the EPA and the Commerce Department (along with the DOE) are going to have their hands full trying to put one together. Given the complexities, cap-and-trade can't be relied on to be one of the magic bullets for climate change. Those may very likely be supplied by Dr. Chu.
Obama's naming Dr. Steven Chu as head of the Department of Energy is a very big deal. Ezra Klein and Joe Romm have good posts on the importance of this specific appointment. I'll add to their comments my observation that it's impossible not love a guy who says, "Coal is my worst nightmare." True that. Suffice it to say that there is no stronger signal to send on the priorities of the DOE than to have the Nobel Laureate scientist who runs Laurence Berkeley, a DOE National Lab, and who is a vocal supporter of the fight against climate change and of energy efficiency now running the entire Department.
It would be hard to find a more illustrious or accomplished Energy Secretary ever. That's not too surprising since it has historically been a place where you park lobbyists or energy industry types (Bill Richardson being a notable exception). But with the DOE's National Labs doing crucial research on cleantech and energy efficiency while other important large-scale DOE projects like FutureGen, a zero-emission coal-fired power plant, are currently on hiatus due to mismanagement, Chu seems like a guy who can really make a difference.
Having now wrested one cabinet position from the lobbyists who typically run it, Obama will be, I hope, reluctant to hand another over to the lobbyist class that clearly expects it. With Nick Kristof in the NYT spreading the gospel of a "Department of Food" rather than a Department of Agriculture, the momentum for a reformer there is stronger than ever. I think we can take it as another good omen then, that (via Swing State Project) Colorado's Rep. John Salazar is reportedly taking a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. He will thus withdraw from consideration for Secretary of Agriculture which, given that he's a "conventional ag man", is a good thing. It would be cruel, having been given Steven Chu, for us to have to accept a conventional pick for Agriculture chief. One more bold cabinet move from our President-elect wouldn't suck.
You know you've crossed a line when US Circuit Court judges repeatedly compare your legal logic to something out of Alice in Wonderland. But as an article in yesterday's Philly Inquirer details, that's exactly how things go down in court with the Bush EPA. As we watch the Bushies in their final throes of environmental degradation, it's worth our reviewing the EPA's recent history. Boy, were they bad - though it was no accident. From attempting to gut New Source Review (which was apparently the reason Bush's first EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman quit) to setting a mercury limit so high that no power plant would actually have to reduce its emissions, these evildoers let no bad deed go undone.
The highlight, though, has to be their efforts to limit sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution from power plants. The cap-and-trade system that the Bush EPA came up would have at least made some reductions, however meager. Power companies were indeed investing in billion dollar scrubbers to comply so it was by no means a total smoke and mirrors system. But the implementation of the rules was so flawed as to be irreparable - the court felt compelled to junk the whole system. As a result, "the court took a big anti-pollution rule off the books - the one that the EPA believed could prevent thousands of premature deaths annually." In other words, when they weren't derelict in their duties, they were incompetent.
It will take years to rewrite the regulations (although Congress could act sooner to reinstate the system in some form). So now coal plants, like the Brunner Island plant which dates from the 1960s and sits outside of Harrisburg, no longer have the incentive to finish their scrubber systems. What looked to be a competitive advantage when the companies were facing emissions limits is now perceived by them to be a disadvantage. And of course, the power companies all lost tens of millions of dollars each when the bottom fell out of the emissions trading market after the court ruling. Meanwhile:
Twelve thousand tons of coal arrive by railcar daily at the... Brunner Island plant, and, until the scrubber goes online, it will continue to spew sulfur dioxide and particulate matter into the air. The pollution wafts from a 600-foot-high smokestack and drifts east toward Philadelphia.
Now that's a legacy to be proud of. If you're an industry lackey, that is. Can we just declare tomorrow to be January 20th, 2009 and get this over with?
I think it's worth taking a moment to let the impact of Obama's weekend announcement of the details of his stimulus package sink in by reviewing the NYT's writeup from Sunday. What stunned me was not so much the dollar figure (which is still up in the air anyway) but rather the breadth of what he's talking about. The favored comparison has been to Eisenhower's federal interstate highway program. But even on the low end of the dollar estimate - $400 billion - it would be about double what was spent (in today's dollars) to build the entire interstate highway system. So it should come as no surprise that the list of projects under consideration goes way beyond building roads:
Although Mr. Obama put no price tag on his plan, he said he would invest record amounts of money in the vast infrastructure program, which also includes work on schools, sewer systems, mass transit, electrical grids, dams and other public utilities. The green jobs would include various categories, including jobs dedicated to creating alternative fuels, windmills and solar panels; building energy efficient appliances, or installing fuel-efficient heating or cooling systems.
Those projects directly or indirectly impact every aspect of the economy. Part of this, of course, is the need to find ways to spend $400+ billion - not so easy to do as it turns out. But the scope of this plan is still staggering - we're talking about addressing in a single shot infrastructure shortcomings (if not outright crises) that have been festering for decades. We all knew that Obama represented change - but this is more like an outright transformation of the country.
I'd also take issue with the NYT's "green jobs" category in the above list. Money spent on "mass transit, electrical grids, dams and other public utilities" (and probably investment in our broadband infrastructure, which is also being discussed) should certainly be considered green investments given the outlook of the incoming administration. It's fair to say that the country will be almost unrecognizably greener at the end of this buildout.
In fact, along with funding for winterizing homes and making government buildings more energy efficient (whose importance you can read more about here and here), investing in the national grid may be, from a green perspective, the most significant aspect of the entire stimulus plan. Modernizing and expanding the grid to, among other things, bring it closer to the where our sun and wind resources are is the number two priority of Al Gore's climate plan. For a while, it seemed like the grid improvements would be something that flew under the radar, invisible to congressional appropriators in the competition for limited funding. Now it's just another tick mark on Obama's list.
From a political perspective, that's the most notable thing to me about the stimulus plan. It literally cuts off debate on whole areas of investment that have represented fairly significant conflict over the last decade or so. And this doesn't just apply to new projects - fully funding chronically underfunded existing programs and likely allowing the government to properly staff its departments (hello, new food inspectors!) are some pretty nice fringe benefits to this plan. I guess it's a lot easier to find the money for things when you can just print more of it.
And if he does indeed sign it on January 20th, I'd say it would represent a pretty good first day's work.
I will leave to others the details of the auto bailout. Whether it's extra special super-secret let's-not-call-it-bankruptcy debt refinancing or loans or tax credits, I don't have much to contribute. My only question for the Big Three now is: Where are the diesels?
I know what you're thinking. Dirty diesel? Surely, I must be joking.
It thus bears repeating that diesel fuel was - until the advent of hybrids - the sine qua non of fuel efficiency. A 1990 diesel-powered Volkswagen Jetta can go 39 highway miles on a gallon of the sticky stuff. It takes a Prius to get that kind of mileage out of a similarly sized car that burns gasoline.
Of course, diesel engines were also the sine qua non of foul clouds of odoriferous soot, which was a problem. That never bothered Europeans, who have a long history of embracing diesel cars - to this day American car makers introduce diesel models there and not here. It also helps that European fuel taxes don't discriminate against diesel, as they do in the US, which is why diesel is so much more expensive here.
But "clean diesel" has at last arrived. And unlike it's linguistic sibling "clean coal", clean diesel is very clean and very real. It actually refers both to the fuel and the engine. First came Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel fuel thanks to EPA rules initiated during the Clinton Administration. Removing the sulfur, which interferes with various chemical reactions, allows for catalytic converter-like systems that can take out just about everything else: nitrogen oxides, soot, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxides. And to top it all off, clean diesels actually have lower carbon emissions than even hybrids. Popular Mechanics tested a European Prius against a (smaller) VW Polo clean diesel. At 5% fewer greenhouse emissions and over 70mpg on the highway (yes, miles not kilometers), the Polo was impressive to say the least.
And what happens when you throw a clean diesel engine into a hybrid electric motor? You get scads of fuel efficiency goodness. The problem right now is that diesel-electric hybrids are too expensive. Treehugger recounts the tragic tale of the VW Golf diesel hybrid: announced in Febrary 2008 and withdrawn two months later.
Meanwhile European automakers are showing off their clean diesel wares. At the recent Los Angeles auto show, there were diesel press conferences and new model showcases from Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes. And as for US carmakers presumably poised to exploit this growing market? Quiet, was the watchword apparently.
In fairness, GM did show a concept version of the Volt built for Opel, its European division. This car, called the Flexstreme, works the same way as the Volt, except a small diesel engine charges the battery instead of the Volt's gas engine. Given the Opel badge, the possibility exists that GM will once again deny American drivers the diesel option, but according to Green Car Congress, GM plans to release a version of the Flexstreme under its Saturn line.
All this to say that if US car companies wanted to immediately improve their fuel efficiency, it wouldn't take years of innovation - just the right kind of incentives. Thanks to the EPA for forcing industry to clean up diesel's act, there's a market for the taking. Sure there are issues to work out, but we're on the verge of trying to save the auto industry. Perhaps the bailout legislation could give things a push. The US car companies, having once dismissed hybrids as a fad, might then want to consider taking advantage of the coming diesel revolution. You know, maybe they could sell some cars.
[Updated 10:45pm Sunday] And if you need more evidence, just check out this rave review from Sunday's NYT of the new clean diesel VW Jetta. Ulrich, the reviewer, managed to get 48mpg during 150 miles of highway driving just by sticking to 60mph (he claims over 50mpg is possible if you hypermile). Either way, that beats the Prius - on the highway at least...
Holy Toledo. Obama just released this video of a "surprise" speech to be delivered to the bipartisan Governors Global Climate Summit being held today in Los Angeles.
Says Obama, "my presidency will mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change." Of course, given the embarrassment of the last eight years, even acknowledging that climate change is a problem represents a whole new volume, much a less a new chapter. He goes on to lay out his climate change strategy. It will include:
a federal cap and trade system to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and then an additional 80% by 2050
investing $15 billion annually in clean energy including solar, wind, and next generation biofuels
"tap" nuclear power safely and develop clean coal technology
He sums up by declaring that, "delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences too serious."
I hadn't blogged about this yet probably because I'm in the middle of writing an article on coal already and so many folks jumped on it immediately. But still, it's worth a mention.
In a nutshell, we appear to be in an unexpected year-long moratorium on the building of coal-fired power plants. Coal plants account for about 45% of US carbon emissions and most everyone agrees that if that number doesn't soon start on a path to zero, the planet is doomed. But almost out of nowhere, an EPA appeals board has single-handedly stopped new construction. Green, Inc. has more:
The decision — which responded to a Sierra Club petition to review an E.P.A. permit granted to a coal plant in Utah — does not require the E.P.A. to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, something which environmentalists have long sought.
Rather, it requires the agency's regional office to at least consider whether to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, before the agency gives a green light to build the Utah plant. On a broader scale, it will delay the building of coal-fired power plants across the country, long enough for the Obama administration to determine its policy on coal, according to David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club.
Among other things, it appears at best to require the EPA to come up with so-called BACT (Best Available Control Technologies) standards for carbon and at worst it allows the Obama administration to come up with a coal strategy. Now if you want details on what all that might look like, see It's Getting Hot in Here or Joe Romm at Climate Progress. I can tell you that it will NOT involve carbon capture and sequestration, which at $1 billion per plant and essentially unproved, is still on the drawing board. But it's a first step.In fact, as far as I'm concerned, this is the starter gun going off. How Obama, Congress, the government and industry react to this ruling - what they really DO about this - will tell us whether or not this country can begin to address global warming. Remember, we've got 42 years to cut 14 gigatons of carbon emissions or we're, quite literally, toast.
If the "Clean Coal" lobby's insipid paeans to America's love for cheap coal-fired electricity weren't bad enough, now we may have to sit through ethanol ads. Ethanol producers have announced their own advocacy astroturf group, Growth Energy. Its mission?
Through smart policy reform and a proactive grassroots campaign, Growth Energy promotes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, expanding the use of ethanol in gasoline, decreasing our dependence on foreign oil, and creating American jobs at home.
Not necessarily in that order, I would imagine. Thankfully, they don't have a TV ad. Yet. But the most tantalizing part is their smackdown of the Grocery Manufacturers Association for suggesting, damn them, that ethanol might have had something to do with rising food prices. I smell a lobbyist cage match! Meanwhile, Growth Energy conveniently ignores what those yahoos at the the World Bank are saying about biofuels and food prices. This is AMERICA, dammit!
Now that we have our first Midwestern president since Harry Truman, corn producers are clearly in a tizzy. It certainly doesn't help that Obama has been such a strong supporter of ethanol. There's really only one solution to the threat of an ethanol hegemony: a biofuel grudge match. Bring in Big Algae! Let's go, pond scum producers! Get your game on!
Thanks to Atrios, we get a nice coda to my proximity post. It turns out that the Erie Canal is alive and well (and getting better). And not because of some nostalgic effort to turn the canal into some kind of frozen-in-time theme park. Hard nosed economics plus low-carbon goodness make for a beautiful friendship:
The canal still remains the most fuel-efficient way to ship goods between the East Coast and the upper Midwest. One gallon of diesel pulls one ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train and 514 miles by canal barge, Ms. Mantello said. A single barge can carry 3,000 tons, enough to replace 100 trucks.
And because I love it when a plan comes together, we get this bit of grand unity:
When a company called Auburn Biodiesel decided to convert an old factory in Montezuma into a biodiesel plant, the building's location beside the canal "was merely an incidental consideration," said David J. Colegrove, the company's president. But after watching the number of cargo shipments along the canal grow, Mr. Colegrove said he hoped to bring soybeans in by barge and use the canal to ship finished product to New York City.
And the money quotes come fast and furious:
"I've worked the East Coast, the West Coast and the Panama Canal, but up here is some of the most beautiful country you can ever see," said John Schwind, 62, the captain of the Margot, who first learned to pilot tugs here in the 1970s.
It's enough to bring tears to the eye of this New York native. But the kicker comes from Colegrove:
"The amount of money you can save is really eye-popping," he said. "I'm fascinated by the history of the canal, and I'm intrigued by how well it still works."
I don't usually expect to find hope in the NYT Business section, but this weekend was an exception. An article on green jobs in the Midwest drew what looked to me like a fairly convincing virtuous circle. Let me say that I've been to this point skeptical about green jobs - not that they won't exist, but whether they will represent an engine of job growth that can replace the disappearing manufacturing and low-level white collar jobs, especially in the industrial Midwest. For proof, I just look at Silicon Valley which, for all its success, doesn't actually employ all that many people and never truly replaced the jobs lost in the 90s' collapse of California defense contractors.
That said, this article made me think there could be something to this whole green jobs thing. What's interesting about it is that, as the NYT describes it, proximity has become important again.
The article focuses on the growing wind turbine assembly industry in Iowa. Why Iowa? Well, Iowa is "[p]erched on the edge of the Great Plains -- the so-called Saudi Arabia of wind." These turbines are so enormous that you want to make them as close as possible to the location you want to use them. Off-shoring simply isn't an option. TPI, an Arizona turbine blade company, was looking for a location to site their new plant and ended up in Iowa. The reason - and when was the last time you heard that this mattered for manufacturers:
Although TPI was considering a site in Mexico with low labor costs, Newton had a better location. Rail lines and Interstate 80 connect it to the Great Plains, where the turbines are needed.
Rail lines?! Interstates!? Holy 20th century, Batman! No wonder the Rust Belt is taking notice.
While the proximity issue isn't paramount for every green industry, certainly wind - which may be used to generate one-fifth of US electricity by 2030 according to the DOE - and perhaps even solar (panels are, after all, made of GLASS!) will find that proximity to the customer will matter. If that's the case, we get to our virtuous circle. Like the auto industry of old, which was a web of manufacturers and suppliers based near one another, the clean tech industries may spin something similar, trapping some significant numbers of jobs currently flying overseas. Now that's a hopeful thought for the dawn of a new era, isn't it?
