Clean Energy
GM's Fall Can Become Green Economy's Rise
Published June 03, 2009 @ 09:49AM PT
"De-carbonizing" the US economy means slashing our reliance on fossil energy to drive job growth and wealth, and replacing it with naturally-replenished, clean energy sources and materials.
The employment that would be created in the process gets shorthanded in public discourse as "green jobs."
Painting millions of roofs white to reflect heat back into space, an adaptation and mitigation strategy recently endorsed by Energy Secretary Chu? Reforesting North America? These are just the low-hanging fruit of green jobs that can help the environment, restore the stability of the climate, and put people to work for pay they can live on and outcomes they can take pride in.
Green For All's Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins believes that we as a nation can use the economy-shocking bankruptcy of General Motors to catapult the U.S. into a decarbonized economy.
On yesterday's MSNBC Morning Joe show, Ellis-Lamkins put it pretty simply: Green jobs will turn the U.S. back into being a global manufacturing leader.
Today she goes into more depth at CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 blog. GM "rejected improving the environmental and safety standards of its vehicles and shipped thousands of American jobs overseas," she writes. "Meanwhile, Japanese and German cars improved their gas mileage and safety – and foreign auto industries took off.
"GM also callously misjudged the American people believing that the size and speed of our gas guzzlers was what mattered most."
General Motors is just one of the foundering American mega-corps that long ago stopped making cars, and started making profit. It sacrificed the pride of doing a job well for doing anything to make a buck.
Now those chickens have come home to roost. Your business cannot endure if you send auto factories overseas to slash costs, and then rely upon Americans facing ever-worsening prospects for steady jobs and good pay back home to buy those cars.
Trying to stop time by ignoring global energy and environmental trends just intensifies the scope of that failure.
Ellis-Lamkins offers a way out:
The promise of American economic growth and jobs still remains in manufacturing, though the products we make must change.
Our industrial manufacturing economy has relied on unregulated consumption of fossil fuel for too long – consumption which steadily destroys our air, our communities, and our planet.
We should not salvage the gas-guzzling U.S. auto industry. But that does not mean the factories in Flint, Michigan, should stay shuttered. Instead, the manufacturing industry in the United States must be revitalized to build the infrastructure for a clean energy economy.
Imagine America’s ‘Rust Belt’ transformed into a green belt of clean energy manufacturing. Imagine the factories of Detroit making wind turbines and solar panels to power America.
The rest of the world is already racing to implement clean energy solutions. The U.S. must catch up and blaze a new trail.
The U.S. can help create a more secure, healthy, abundant future for ourselves and the rest of the world, by seizing this moment to fundamentally remake how we make goods, and make money.
That future won't happen as long as we continue to do business as usual: depending upon energies and technologies invented in the 18th and 19th centuries to save us in the 21st.
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Image via Sustainy
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Obama must strengthen green jobs provisions of #climatebill
Published June 02, 2009 @ 05:50PM PT
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Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, the CEO of green economy-environmental justice group Green for All, was on MSNBC's Morning Joe show yesterday, speaking on how the Obama administration needs to strengthen the provisions of the American Clean Energy and Security Act to spur green manufacturing jobs:
"Will we be a country that imports batteries from China, and oil from the Middle East? Or will be be a country that creates our own energy? You know, China is spending $12 million an hour to figure out how to become energy independent. This bill will allow us to do that.
"Now, We'd like to see it strengthened, so it provides real protection for jobs and creates manufacturing in the United States. But we think it's a positive step forward...
"This really is about what kind of economy we want to be. And it's sad that it's been a fight just about global warming, instead of, 'Will we become energy independent?' 'Will we really cultivate industries that can bring this economy back, and bring manufacturing back to this country?'
"We really hope that's the debate that we have."
Watch the whole thing, as the chatty group -- including NBC eminence grise Tom Brokaw -- delves into the missteps of the US auto industry in resisting energy efficient cars, how Gen Y has green in its genes, why clean power industries can revive our economy, and more.
What's Your Opinion on the Climate and Energy Bill?
Published June 01, 2009 @ 12:11PM PT
When the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) on May 21, that was just the end of Round One. Several other House committees have jurisdiction over the bill, and any one of them could kill it for good simply by burying it in a subcommittee, or never bringing the legislation to a full committee vote.
At the least, more concessions to those industries implicated in the bill's provisions are sure to be made.
Grist's Kate Sheppard has a good committee-by-committee round-up of what's next for ACES:
The House parliamentarian has referred the bill to nine committees, though only four have signaled that they intend to review it in the next weeks. Some estimates of how many committees may want a chance to modify the legislation go as high as 11, and it’s certain that the Ways and Means, Agriculture, Science, and Natural Resources committees will all play some role in the development of the bill.
All of this will take place before the bill goes up for a vote in the full House, which could come by the end of June, if some reports are to be believed.
Those reports, which surfaced last week with Joe Romm, on Climate Progress, are that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants the bill on the floor of the House for a vote by the last week in June:
That is consistent with what Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said (see “House Majority Leader says climate bill will see fast action“). But it will require a lot of speedy deal-making.
Still, it suggests the speaker does not see any deal breakers in the path to House passage, even though, as Wonk Room reports, “Brown Dogs Poised To Block Green Economy Legislation.”
And Sen. Boxer (D-CA) can certainly get something close to the Waxman-Markey bill out of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee by the fall. And let’s assume for now it doesn’t get mired in any other committees.
Meanwhile, over at the Senate a group of legislators dubbed the "climate champions" is reported to have begun laying the groundwork to move the bill through the Senate.
The average climate-aware citizen should be forgiven if she or he confesses to confusion on how to react to and act on this bill, which is a policy wonk's dream involving pollution credits, carbon offsets, clean energy mandates, pollution cap and trade mechanisms, and much more. Advocates of action on global warming are not marching in lockstep support for the measure, so one actually needs to hunker down and decide for one's own self what's wrong and what's right.
My thoroughly unscientific and cursory glance around the green scene finds among the bill's supporters: the League of Conservation Voters, the National Wildlife Federation, the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and NRDC.
Creative Financing to Make Solar Panels Affordable
Published May 26, 2009 @ 06:54PM PT
Solar power panels are still a hefty investment for most American home-owners -- costing tens of thousands for the average home. And although photovoltaic technologies and materials have made huge gains in efficiency, typically they still don't pay themselves back in reduced electricity costs for over five years.
(I've heard experts call this five-year amortization mark the "sweet spot" for mass adoption of solar.)
But the climate can't wait. So cue innovative financing arrangements that help make solar financially accessible.
Over at Cool Tools (where, full disclosure, I recently contributed a piece), Californian Kevin Kelly describes how and why power companies will front the costs of going solar:
You sign up with a company that installs high-quality panels on your property for no money down. Zero dollars! On sunny days the panels make electrons which run your meter backwards. The quantity of panels are sized to cover about 80-90% of your current electric bill, so that you should be expected to pay the utility only 10-20% of what you pay now. In addition to the much smaller payment to your electric grid company you will also now pay the solar company a fee based on the number of watts you send into the grid. This is how they make money to cover the costs of installing the panels and their profit.
The rates they will charge you per kilowatt will be less than the utility rates, so your total bill for electricity will be less each month. (Not zero, not half, but less.) Because the solar company makes money by how much electricity your panels produce they have a clear incentive to maintain the panels' performance and keep them clean and the inverters going. After 15-18 years, you own the panels and set up free and clear.
This kind of financial arrangement is called a "solar power purchasing agreement," or solar PPA. Kelly eventually went with a different kind of solar PPA, putting down half the cost of the panels in return for better rates on power. "In fact for the next 18 years we pay a fixed rate for electricity. The average California rate is expected to at least double, and we are projected to save $80,000 over 18 years."
The New York Times recently reported on another option that's becoming more available around the country: municipal financing. Around six cities in California are offering low-interest loans, secured by property taxes, to help homeowners go solar. Rick Clark had 48 solar panels installed on the roof of his garage, financed by the city of Palm Desert, wrote Leslie Kaufman:
...Mr. Clark decided to install a $62,000 solar power system because of a new municipal financing program that lent him the money and allows him to pay it back with interest over 20 years as part of his property taxes. In so doing, he joined the vanguard of a social experiment that is blossoming in California and a dozen other states.
The goal behind municipal financing is to eliminate perhaps the largest disincentive to installing solar power systems: the enormous initial cost...But cities like Palm Desert lobbied to change state laws so that solar power systems could be financed like gas lines or water lines, covered by a loan from the city and secured by property taxes. The advantage of this system over private borrowing is that any local homeowners are eligible (not just those with good credit), and the obligation to pay the loan attaches to the house and would pass to any future buyers.
Often there are state rebates to help residents finance solar installations, as well as federal tax incentives.
Municipal financing has its critics, who argue that "government is essentially subsidizing and encouraging a form of energy production that would otherwise not be cost effective," writes Kaufman. Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley, told Kaufman that “It would be better for local governments to do energy efficiency and skip the solar panels. If you count the full-interest cost without the tax subsidy, residential solar panels never pay for themselves. “We shouldn’t be making it a major public priority.”
This view fails to account for the costs of global warming's disruptions to agriculture, water supplies, and infrastructure. And there's no reason cities can't do energy efficiency and municipal financing of renewable, clean energy. Further, as Kaufman writes, "for cities like those in California that are required by state laws to reduce their carbon emissions, officials have to make calculations other than costs and are going ahead anyway."
In addition to California, Colorado already enables public financing of solar power systems, according to Facing South magazine, and least six states including Arizona, Texas, Virginia, and Washington are considering such laws.
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Image: Solar panels on the roof of a home in Palm Desert, Calif. Via Heliotex Solar Panel Cleaning Systems.
The Military Responds to Global Warming
Published May 25, 2009 @ 04:47PM PT
Could the U.S. military help lead the nation into a clean energy future?
Even as the Bush administration sought to suppress science and delay action on climate change, the Department of Defense began working on freeing itself from reliance on oil, and to plan for the risks of global warming.
I first encountered this myself in 2004, when I wrote up the Pentagon's report on the military and environmental risks of extreme climate change for a news service. Global warming "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern," declared the authors of that study.
A couple years later I was reporting and writing two articles about community biodiesel plants for Grist in in 2006. One of my sources told me that the Air Force was among those most interested in small-scale biodiesel and wind power technologies -- viewing it as a national security risk to remain dependent on foreign oil imports, and vulnerable to the volatility of oil pricing.
Since then, the information's become much more common knowledge, and Defense cites both green and security concerns in its push for energy independence. As Reuters & New Scientist reported jointly last year,
The US military has a history of fostering change, from racial integration to development of the internet. Now Pentagon officials say their green energy efforts will help America fight global warming.
By size alone, the US Department of Defense can make waves. It accounts for 1.5% of the nation's energy consumption.
The military has set a goal that 25% of its energy should come from renewable sources by 2025 and aims to create machines and methods to help "Main Street America" reach similar targets, says Alan Shaffer, a retired air force officer who leads the Pentagon's research and engineering arm.
"It's only the Department of Defense that is big enough and has the federal mandate for the necessary scope of development" of new energy technologies and products, he says.
...These energy technologies may one day spread to households, as a byproduct of a more efficient military, said Colonel Dave Belote, commander of Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada. The biggest solar power array in the US has been operating at Nellis since November in a public-private partnership.
On the downside, even the pragmatists in the Department of Defense sometimes fall prey to magical thinking. Last year, the US Joint Forces Command issued a long-range planning report, "Joint Operating Environment 2008," claiming that the scientific data on what's causing climate change was still open to doubt. Recycling this tired disinfo meme earned the agency rebukes from both strategic and scientific experts, as the Boston Globe reported:
Sharon Burke, a former Pentagon and State Department official who is now a specialist at the Center for a New American Security, said the report was factually "wrong" and "out of line," saying that there is a wide consensus that human activity, namely the production of greenhouse gases, is responsible for global warming.
Other specialists had similar reactions when they read the report.
"It's very wrong," said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose work was cited in the military report. "The jury is not out" on what is causing global warming, he added. "I don't know where that statement came from, but it's pretty bizarre."
Emanuel also took issue with the report's assertions about future storm intensity.
"Everyone pretty much agrees that the intensity of events could go up with global warming, although we argue how much," he said in an interview.
Energy-Climate Bill Wrap-up: US inches towards a brighter future
Published May 22, 2009 @ 07:50AM PT
Above: Secretary of Energy Dr. Stephen Chu speaking with the BBC on the need for US greenhouse gas emissions cuts.
Clean energy and climate action advocates scored a big win last night, as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 -- aka the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill -- was passed out of committee on a decisive vote of 33-25. As currently written the bill would promotes renewable energy and energy-efficiency measures, and create a carbon cap-and-trade market that would greenhouse-gas emissions about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and take them to about 80 percent of 2005 levels 2050.
It's the first time such a measure has advanced so far in the House of Representatives.
During the grueling day-into-evening of deliberations, the committee heard and voted down scores of amendments introduced by GOP members to derail the bill. These included several "off-ramps" that demanded suspension of the act based on possible job losses or increases in energy costs.
"Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking Republican on the committee and an outspoken climate skeptic, offered a substitute amendment that would have removed the cap-and-trade provision from the bill, invalidated the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA climate decision, and ramped up production of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power," writes Grist's Kate Sheppard -- one of the many climate reporters and bloggers who were tweeting live, either from hearing or watching it on CSPAN. "That went down in flames, with all Democrats and one Republican, George Radonovich of California, voting against it, plus two other Republicans, John Shadegg of Arizona and Greg Walden of Oregon, voting 'present' rather than weighing in one way or another."
The vote came down largely along party lines, with Democrats representing a wide array of interests -- from conservation to Big Coal. Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California's 45th district was the sole Republican 'yes' on the bill. Rep. Zack Space of Ohio's 18th also emerged as a hero of the evening with his 'yes' vote, which will likely not prove popular in his conservative Democratic district.
In a brief bit of laudatory boilerplate, President Obama praised Chair Henry Waxman and members of the committee for moving the bill along. "We are now one step closer to delivering on the promise of a new clean energy economy that will make America less dependent on foreign oil, crack down on polluters, and create millions of new jobs all across America," he said in the statement. "The bill is historic for what it achieves, providing clean energy incentives that encourage innovation while recognizing the concerns of sensitive industries and regions in this country."
Mr. Obama's statement took the opportunity to affirm his emphasis on coalition-building: "[T]his achievement is all the more historic for bringing together many who have in the past opposed a common effort, from labor unions to corporate CEOs, and environmentalists to energy companies."
The bill still faces an uphill climb. The House Agriculture, Ways and Means (aka revenue and taxes) and three other House committees that have some or other jurisdiction over its fate. In Agriculture, chair Colin Peterson (D-Minn.) wants "de facto veto power over Waxman-Markey’s content before it ever leaves the energy committee," reports Grist's Tom Philpott. "And if he doesn’t get it, he vows that all 26 Democratic reps who serve on his committee will vote against the bill, a potentially lethal blow."
Ways and Means chair Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) "told reporters that he plans to put President Obama's health care reform agenda ahead of Waxman's global warming bill," according to Darren Samuelsohn in today's New York Times. And "Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) said he wants to make his own contribution that promotes domestic energy production on the outer continental shelf and federal lands."
And this is all before the bill even reaches the floor of the House, or gets the Senate.
So there is still plenty for advocates of clean energy and climate action to do in the coming weeks and months -- not just to get this legislation through Congress, but to get it through sufficiently intact to slash greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade.
Cape Wind Power Project Clears a Hurdle
Published May 21, 2009 @ 04:33PM PT
The Cape Wind project made a big step forward today, as Massachusetts regulators unanimously approved an comprehensive permit on electric power cables connecting the proposed 130-turbine offshore wind farm.
This completes the project's state and local permitting. It now awaits a sign-off on federal permitting from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; 107 members of the Massachusetts state legislature have signed on to a letter urging him to approve Cape Wind "as soon as possible," according to The Boston Globe's Beth Daley. The U.S. Minerals Management Agency declared in January that the project would have little impact on navigation, tourism, and wildlife.
Cape Wind has been a poster child for the supposed trade-offs of transforming our energy infrastructure. Opponents say it will mar views of Nantucket Sound from Cape Cod, and kill birds. In March, the Massachusetts Audubon Society -- not known for taking threats to birds lightly -- said its preliminary studies showed that the turbines would not significantly harm birds. The group would like additional assessment of avian flight paths and has challenged Cape Wind's developers to agree to ''comprehensive and rigorous monitoring to reduce the risk to birds and other wildlife."
The personal value of a viewscape is question to which there may be no right answer. But consider ocean acidification, which threatens to devastate marine ecosystems worldwide. It's well understood among marine researchers that the oceans are taking up huge, and growing, amounts of CO2 because of the higher atmospheric concentration of CO2 in our era.
This is rapidly changing the ocean's chemistry, about 100 times faster than at any other time in the past 650,000 years, with "calcifers" -- organisms that use calcium carbonate to construct their shells or skeletons -- at increased risk. These range across all levels of the marine food chain, from minute coccolithophores and foraminifera, to echinoderms like starfish, corals, crustaceans and molluscs.
Some wind turbines on the horizon seem like a modest price to pay for preserving the balance of life in the ocean -- as long as they truly result in cutting our demand for fossil energy.
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Image: Nysted offshore wind farm, Denmark
