Dependable Energy Sources

"We are going to exit the fossil fuel era."

2018-01-18T22:25:00.000-08:00

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. #RobertFrost

"We are going to exit the fossil fuel era. It is inevitable." - Elon Musk

100% renewable energy worldwide isn’t just possible, it’s more cost-effective than existing system https://www.salon.com/2017/12/23/100-percent-renewable-energy-worldwide-is-not-just-possible-it-is-more-cost-effective-than-existing-system_partner/ …

Solar-Powered Kettle Chips Will Help Test Renewable Energy Batteries In Salem

2016-05-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT | ENERGY
Solar-Powered Kettle Chips Will Help Test Renewable Energy Batteries In Salem
Ecotrope | May 31, 2013 11:08 a.m. | Updated: May 31, 2013 1:16 p.m.

CONTRIBUTED BY:
Cassandra Profita
Courtesy of Portland General Electric

The Salem Smart Power Center opens today with the battery power of 1,440 electric cars. A room full of batteries, shown here, will be used to store renewable energy when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining so it can be used later when power is in short supply.

Kettle Brand has enough solar panels on the roof of its Salem plant to make 250,000 bags of Kettle Chips. But they only work when the sun is out.

When clouds block the sun from reaching solar panels, the renewable power generation at the Kettle Chips plant takes a dive.

A new smart grid project launching today in Salem is aiming to fill the gaps in solar power at the Kettle Chips plant with renewable energy stored in a room full of lithium ion batteries. The batteries are housed in a new facility called the Salem Smart Power Center, which can store up to 5 megawatts of electricity – enough to power 3,500 homes. It's a breakthrough in smart grid technology, though it's just starting up as a demonstration project.

"This is the first of its kind in the nation and in the industry," said Kevin Whitener, smart grid project manager for Portland General Electric. "We're used to calling upon energy sources when we need them, but sun and wind aren't great for that. With this project, we can take that sun and wind energy and store it so it can be available when our customers want to use it."

The Kettle Foods potato chip factory in Salem has 616 solar panels on its roof, but the amount of power they produce fluctuates with the availability of the sun.

PGE's Salem Smart Power Center holds promise for resolving the Northwest springtime power conflicts between wind and hydropower, when dams are wind farms together produce more power than the region needs. It could also store wind power generated at night, when power demand is low, and release it during the day when power use peaks. Long term, it could help wind and solar power compete with other sources of electricity that offer a steadier, more reliable source of power.

Battery storage could save utilities money at times when they would otherwise have to shut down wind turbines, sell renewable power at a discount when it's not needed or buy extra power to meet high electricity demand, Whitener said. Those savings, and any income from selling stored power at a higher price when it's most needed could justify the $23 million cost of building the storage facility.

PGE will be working with the Kettle Chips plant to test whether battery power can fill in for solar panels when the sun isn't shining.

The main production facility for Kettle Chips is in Salem.

Kettle Brand has had a 114 kilowatt solar array on the roof of its potato chip plant since 2003. You can see how the power supply from the plant's 616 solar panels fluctuates in the graphs generated by this online monitor.

The solar signal from those panels will tell the Salem Smart Power Center when to release electricity from its batteries to make up for dips in solar supply.

"The output from that system is simply coming and going as the sun rises and sets or the clouds pass over the factory," said Whitener. "The solar output from that system is not always 114 kilowatts. It varies all over the place – from zero up to 114 kilowatts.

"We can have a bright sunny day but you can still get that one cloud that passes overhead and causes that power drops down to zero in a matter of seconds. What do you do with those resources that come and go in a one-second time frame? That's what our energy storage facility can do. As solar output drops down for some random period of time, we can fill in that gap. It smooths out the curve and makes it look like it was steady."

The Smart Power Center will also work with the state of Oregon to use batteries to keep electricity flowing during power outages, with help from the state's back-up generators.

Source: http://www.opb.org/news/article/solar-powered-kettle-chips-will-test-renewable-energy-storage-in-salem/

IBM solar collector magnifies sun by 2,000x

2016-05-14T20:13:00.002-07:00

IBM solar collector magnifies sun by 2,000x (without cooking itself), costs 3x less than similar systems

Michael Graham Richard (@Michael_GR)
Energy / Renewable Energy
April 23, 2013

© IBM

Cleverly combining solar PV with solar thermal to reach 80% conversion efficiency

Concentrating the sun's ray onto solar photovoltaic (PV) modules requires walking the fine line between optimizing power output and not literally melting your very expensive super-high-efficiency solar cells. A team led by IBM Research seems to have found a way to push back the line. They have created a High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system that is capable of concentrating the power of 2,000 suns onto hundreds of triple junction photovoltaic chips measuring a single square centimeter each (they even claim to be able to keep temperatures safe up to 5,000x). The trick is that each solar PV cell is cooled using technology developed for supercomputers; microchannels inspired by blood vessels but only a few tens of micrometers in width pipe liquid coolant in and extract heat "10 times more effective than with passive air cooling."

© IBM

Waste not

The beauty is that this heat is not just thrown away. This system gets useful work out of it. So while the PV modules are 30%+ efficient at converting the sun's light into electricity, another 50% of the sun's energy is captured as heat and can then be used to do things like thermal water desalination and adsorption cooling. This means that the system is capable of converting around 80% of the collected solar energy into useable energy (though the electricity is of course more useful than the thermal energy).© IBM

A single collector can produce about 25 kilowatts of electricity. Below is a closeup of some PV cells where the light is being concentrated. Notice the piping to bring the liquid coolant.

© IBM

In the video below, IBM research scientist Bruno Michel gives an overview of the project:

© IBM

Keeping costs low

It's great to see that efforts have been made to kind costs low. Some parts are very high-tech, but others are decidedly not:

"The design of the system is elegantly simple," said Andrea Pedretti , chief technology officer at Airlight Energy. "We replace expensive steel and glass with low cost concrete and simple pressurized metalized foils. The small high-tech components, in particular the microchannel coolers and the molds, can be manufactured in Switzerland with the remaining construction and assembly done in the region of the installation. This leads to a win-win situation where the system is cost competitive and jobs are created in both regions."

© IBM
They are targeting a cost below $250 per square meter, which would be three-times lower than comparable systems and bring "levelized cost of energy" to less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh). At this price, it would be a good fit for Southern Europe, Africa, the Arabic peninsula, the southwestern United States, South America, and Australia.

© IBM

Via 300,000 mirrors: World's largest thermal solar plant (377MW) under construction in the Mojave

Izhar cardboard bike project on Vimeo

2012-10-03T14:51:00.001-07:00

Izhar cardboard bike project on Vimeo

ERB provides a full-spectrum of customized financial services for start-up, high-tech, financial, commercial and multi-national clients. For close to two decades our more than 60 strong multi-disciplinary team of management and finance consultants has been providing financial guidance and support to over 300 companies operating in Israel.

The firm has a proven track record for working with and supporting start-up companies and helping them grow. Over the years, ERB has accompanied their clients in raising hundreds of millions of dollars. ERB has also been involved in its clients’ M&A transactions amounting to over one billion dollars. Known for being astute, quick to respond, transparent and professional, clients trust the ERB team to effectively manage the financial aspects of their operations. The advantages are clear: 1) Reducing expenditures by outsourcing financial services; 2) More time for the client to focus on what they do best; and, 3) The peace of mind of knowing that the company’s finances are in good hands.

Izhar cardboard bike project

by Giora Kariv 7 months ago

Film-maker & producer: Giora Kariv. gigicom77@gmail.com Photography: Uri Ackerman

Contact for the bike: danit@erb.co.il

For more information and content about this project:

erb.co.il/en/aboutus.asp?p=yxdn-vrjd-ufzg-ukyv

ERB in Facebook:

facebook.com/pages/ERB-Financial-Group/108159489328980

ERB in Twitter:

google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fdanit92958022&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNETdWvfItdtB1yvRqTSVlER14BQ_Q

Izhar cardboard bike project on Vimeo

Small is Beautiful

2012-09-19T12:57:00.004-07:00

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Eco Power Africa - A Mini Power Grid Startup

Eco Power answers a need for more mini-grid energy startups across the continent.Their product could be self built or purchased:

The GEK gasifier which is designed to consume kilos, not tons of biomass daily. The GEK gasifier is clearly a winner for those who have plenty of biomass lying about, such as lumber sawmills, farmers or food processors. Other entrepreneurs will have to obtain biomass. Since biomass is waste by-product, the main expense will not be the biomass itself but transporting it to the gasifier.

A need for decentralized micro-grids:

the solution is modeled on the telecom breakthrough in Africa. Following the central-station model as practiced in the West meant that Africa had no tele–communications for decades. Cellular telephone technology allowed local entrepreneurs to build small, cheap, and rapidly deployable cell towers. Cellular technology enabled Africa to avoid replicating the expensive centralized model.

The same can be done with electricity generation. Instead of investing billions in constructing major power stations, transmission towers, and distribution and metering infrastructure, it is much easier to deploy micro-to-small power generating nodes that will supply electricity efficiently on a localized basis.

By default, power generation in most of Africa is already Distributed Generation. Institutions and individuals that can afford it use diesel genrators. But diesel is much too expensive, inefficient and polluting.

Because there is no readily available distribution network for conventional fossil fuels – gas, oil or coal – distributed generation in Africa will depend on the advent of green technologies.

EcoPower Africa’s solution is to generate electricity with locally available biomass fuel, making electricity much more affordable.

Coupled with biogas generation, mini-grids like these could solve the energy power generation problem.

Source: http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.ca/2012/09/eco-power-africa-mini-power-grid-startup.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/cNFJo+%28Timbuktu+Chronicles%29

CHART OF THE DAY: The American Paycheck Now Buys Half As Much Gas As It Did 10 Years Ago - Business Insider

2012-09-18T15:31:00.001-07:00

Eye Opening Chart: We all feel it at the pump but this simple picture tells the story of your irritation every time you pull up to the pumps.

Over the last decade, the price of gas has moved higher while wages have been driven lower.

Here's a sad chart plotting how many gallons of gasoline can be bought at average U.S. hourly wage since 1998, from Reuters by way of Marc Chandler.

Follow Money Game Chart Of The Day and never miss an update!

Make Renewable Energy Competitive

2012-07-01T02:35:00.001-07:00

How to Make Renewable Energy Competitive

By FELIX MORMANN and DAN REICHER

STANFORD, Calif.

Renewable energy needs help. Technological innovation has significantly reduced the cost of solar panels, wind turbines and other equipment, but renewable energy still needs serious subsidies to compete with conventional energy. Today, help comes mostly in the form of federal tax breaks.

These tax incentives, and the Congressional battle over extending them for wind projects beyond the end of this year, mean that other, more powerful policies to promote renewables are not getting the attention they deserve. If renewable energy is going to become fully competitive and a significant source of energy in the United States, then further technological innovation must be accompanied by financial innovation so that clean energy sources gain access to the same low-cost capital that traditional energy sources like coal and natural gas enjoy.

Two financial mechanisms that have driven investment in traditional energy projects — real estate investment trusts and master limited partnerships — could, with some help from Washington, be extended to renewable energy projects to lower their cost and make America’s energy future cleaner, cheaper — and more democratic.

Federal support for renewable energy today consists primarily of two tax breaks: tax credits and accelerated depreciation rates. But both tools have a very limited reach. Only investors with hefty tax bills, typically big banks or corporations, can exploit them to reduce their tax burden. Most potential investors, including tax-exempt pension funds and, importantly, retail investors trading stocks, don’t have big enough tax bills to exploit the break. As a result, the few remaining players whose considerable tax bills place them in the market for tax breaks are able to demand returns of up to 30 percent for investing in renewable energy projects — an investment known as “tax equity.”

There are better options. They may sound wonky, but they could prove revolutionary.

Real estate investment trusts, or REITs, which are traded publicly like stocks, could tap far broader pools of capital to vastly lower the cost of financing renewable energy. REITs have a market capitalization of over $440 billion while paying shareholders average dividends below 10 percent — roughly a third of the cost of tax equity investments for renewable energy.

Master limited partnerships carry the fund-raising advantages of a corporation: ownership interests are publicly traded and offer investors the liquidity, limited liability and dividends of classic corporations. Their market capitalization exceeds $350 billion. With average dividends of just 6 percent, these investment vehicles could substantially reduce the cost of financing renewables.

But current law makes using both of these investment vehicles for renewable energy difficult if not impossible. Washington could help in two ways. First, the Internal Revenue Service needs to clarify the eligibility of renewable power generation for REIT financing. Second, Congress needs to fix a bizarre distinction in the tax code that bars master limited partnerships from investing in “inexhaustible” natural resources like the sun and wind, while allowing investments in exhaustible resources like coal and natural gas. In 2008, as surging gasoline prices were infuriating American voters, Congress amended the tax code to enable master limited partnerships to invest in alternative transportation fuels like ethanol. We should treat power sources, like wind and solar farms, similarly.

There is hope. Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, plans to introduce a bill to allow master limited partnership investment in renewable energy. This approach is preferable to a recent proposal by Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, to eliminate this investment option for fossil-fuel projects. Both moves would level the playing field between conventional and renewable energy, but the Coons bill does so by promoting, rather than limiting, economic growth across the energy industry.

These approaches could help renewable energy projects reduce their financing costs up to fivefold. These cost improvements could significantly reduce the price of renewable electricity and, over time, erase the need for costlier subsidies. Of course, making renewable energy eligible for master limited partnership and REIT financing would amount to a new kind of subsidy, because both are exempt from income tax. Indeed, some members of Congress fear that expanding master limited partnerships will erode the federal tax base. We don’t think so. Investors in master limited partnerships and REITs still pay taxes on dividends. Moreover, these investments would most likely bring many more renewable energy projects online, actually raising overall tax revenue.

A more valid concern is whether renewable energy master limited partnerships might be abused as tax shelters, reminiscent of what happened in the 1980s California “wind rush.” Back then investors cared more about putting turbines in the ground to secure tax credits to lower their tax bill on other income than whether the machines actually produced electricity.

History, however, need not repeat itself. Renewable energy master limited partnerships can guard against such abuse by ensuring that these tax privileges actually result in green electricity.

There’s another benefit to expanding the pool of renewable energy investors: It would help democratize, and thus build support for, these new energy sources. Today, all American taxpayers fund renewable energy subsidies, but only a deep-pocketed few can cash in on the tax benefits. Publicly traded master limited partnerships and REITs would empower all Americans to invest and have a stake in the transition to cleaner energy.

Renewable energy has come a long way since the 1970s energy crisis but much work remains. We must complement continued technological innovation with critical financial innovation — to level the playing field, incentivize growth, reduce subsidies and democratize America’s energy future.

Felix Mormann is a fellow, and Dan Reicher is the executive director, both at Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance.

How to Make Renewable Energy Competitive - NYTimes.com

Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/opinion/how-to-make-renewable-energy-competitive.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Begin now to creat the life that you want for yourself while adhering to the principles of sustainability, compassion and fairness.

2012-06-12T05:34:00.003-07:00

Purpose: What do you want to provide meaning and engagement in your life. What meaning do you want to give to your life knowing that the meaning of life is the meaning you give to it?

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
- Epictetus

Whatever you do, do with all your might. ~ Cicero

The energy of the mind is the essence of life. ~ Aristotle

Be clear about what you want and make the appropriate decisions and choices...

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. ~ William James

Persevere and Persist...

When something of an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
~ Rousseau

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity. ~ Seneca

“When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice.
You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser. The choice is yours and yours alone.
Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure.”
– Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics

Learn from your mistakes...

Failure defeats losers, failure inspires winners.
- Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad)

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems. ~ Descartes

When you’re ready to quit, you are closer than you think.
– Bob Parsons (Founder Of Go Daddy)

As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
- William Hazlitt

"One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity."
~Albert Schweitzer

Being true to our own set of values and always remembering to give life the meaning we want by the actions we take and the choices we make. This will provide us the greatest satisfaction in the long run.

We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform.
– Pete Cashmore (Founder Of Mashable)

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” -- Steve Jobs

"And in the end it's not the years in your
life that count. It's the life in your years."
- Abraham Lincoln

Be Here Now...

Projecting our thoughts far ahead of us, instead of adapting ourselves to the present, is cause of fear. Foresight, the greatest blessing humanity has been given, is also a curse.
~ Seneca, Roman philosopher and politician, Letters to Lucilius

Creating something from nothing is the meaning of being an entrepreneur...

Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist

Timing, perseverance and 10 years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.
– Biz Stone (Twitter)

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.”
- Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-founder of Broadcast.com, founder of HDNet

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that.
A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now.
Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s

Quotes

2012-06-11T15:32:00.001-07:00

Whatever you do, do with all your might. ~ Cicero

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
~ Rousseau

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
~ John Locke

All things deteriorate in time. ~ Virgil

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems. ~ Descartes

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil. ~ Marcus Aurelius

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one. ~ Rousseau

No one is laughable who laughs at himself. ~ Seneca

The energy of the mind is the essence of life. ~ Aristotle

It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law. ~ Thomas Hobbes

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms. ~ Aristotle

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one. ~ Rousseau

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity. ~ Seneca

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it. ~ Seneca

By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man. ~ Kant

A man of courage is also full of faith. ~ Cicero

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
~ Epictetus

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions. ~ Cicero

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. ~ William James

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long. ~ Marcus Aurelius

The 5 Investing Realms Of Renewable Energy - Seeking Alpha

2012-04-20T15:31:00.001-07:00

The 5 Investing Realms Of Renewable Energy - Seeking Alpha
This article is presented here as a good synopsis of the 'players' in the public company realm of enterprises managing renewable energy projects.

The 5 Investing Realms Of Renewable Energy

January 24, 2012 | 2 comments | includes: AMSC, EBR, FSLR, GE, MY, ORA, SI

The future must entail clean, renewable energy. Drilling for oil isn't sustainable and is increasingly getting dangerous as companies move offshore. Natural gas prolongs the inevitable and requires significant infrastructure changes. Nuclear energy has always been a double-edged sword from both a political and environmental standpoint. Coal remains a cigarette in the mouth of the world. As a result, there are only a few alternatives, all of which have their advantages and their setbacks. Solar energy, Biofuels, Geothermal energy, Hydropower, and Wind energy stand as the known core alternatives to the hydrocarbon-based energy standard we have today.
Investors of today may be disappointed by much of their choices when it comes to direct investment in sustainable energy. The most stable and profitable companies remain the conglomerates who derive a small portion of their profits from such sources. As for the direct players, nearly all have been victim to the latest struggles of their respective industries. Yet in each sector, there remain viable direct investments that prospective investors may wish to look into.
Solar Power. The solar industry has practically collapsed under the weight of falling subsidies and inventory dumping. The ongoing European Debt crisis casted a shadow of uncertainty in the largest market for solar. Yet renewed hope came in the form of Warren Buffett's investment into two utility-scale solar projects supplied by First Solar (FSLR). Falling solar panel prices also bode well for consumers as widespread acceptance and increasing affordability have increased the industry's demand and long-term future. First Solar remains one of the few viable investments in this sector, with its industry-leading margins that have kept the company profitable throughout the crisis.
Biofuels. The industry is trying to shake off its negative connotation to unsustainable ethanol in light of innovative and proven second generation technology. The struggle remains to be the ability to raise capital and public acceptance in order to bring online production capacity to work on a commercial scale. One of the bright shining lights in this industry remains Solazyme (SZYM), which utilizes algae-based technology to convert non-food sources into renewable oil equivalents, chemicals, food and even cosmetics. Out of companies that provide sustainable ethanol, investors may want to consider Cosan (CZZ), a Brazilian-based sugar company with leading ethanol production capacity and distribution capabilities. Especially as American ethanol subsidies have come to an end, Brazilian-based ethanol companies may continue to outshine their ethanol counterparts in America with access to cheaper input materials.
Geothermal Energy. Geothermal is practically non-existent from the public trading realm and is much smaller in size. Yet it also remains one of the more stable prospects. One of the most direct plays on the industry remains Ormat Technologies (ORA). The company was founded 1965 and remains the only vertically integrated provider of geothermal and recovered energy-based equipment.
Hydropower. Another stable industry, hydropower companies tend be utility companies governed by municipalities in light of the high capital expenditures necessary to build a dam. Brazil remains one of the greatest developers of hydropower with its vast river resources, abundant rains, and lack of alternatives when it comes to energy sources. Centrais Electricas Brasileiras (EBR), more commonly known as Electrobras, operates 29 hydroelectric plants throughout Brazil. The company remains diversified into thermal, coal and oil power generation units, however, and therefore is a far stretch from being a pure play on hydropower.
Wind Energy. The wind industry has been dominated by the Chinese market, which dethroned the United States in 2010 as the largest wind power installer. Yet publicly traded Chinese companies in America came under increased scrutiny in early 2011 that resulted in a lack of viable wind investments. The most viable investments may continue to be General Electric (GE) or Siemens (SI), neither of which are pure plays on the industry. American Superconductor Corp (AMSC) would have been a solid company to consider had the company not been victimized by China's Sinovel through corporate espionage. One of the more direct plays to consider is China Ming Yang Power Group (MY), which IPO'd on the NYSE in 2010, and stands as the largest non-state owned wind turbine manufacturer in China. The company has encountered rising expenses and difficulties including weather that interrupted installations. Yet management has initiated a share repurchase program for $50 million, which is impressive for a company currently trading with a market capitalization of $359 million as of January 23, 2012.
Disclosure: I am long FSLR, SZYM.

We Need An Aurthentic Measure of Wealth

2012-04-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

The Mismeasure of Wealth | NationofChange

Anatha Duraiappah and Partha Dasgupta

Project Syndicate / Op-Ed

"As a whole, humanity has achieved unparalleled prosperity; great strides are being made to reduce global poverty; and technological advances are revolutionizing our lives, stamping out diseases, and transforming communication.”

The Measure of Wealth

http://www.nationofchange.org/mismeasure-wealth-1333891185

Despite many successes in creating a more integrated and stable global economy, a new report by the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability

Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing

recognizes the current global order’s failure, even inability, to implement the drastic changes needed for true “sustainability.”

The Panel’s report presents a vision for a “sustainable planet, just society, and growing economy,” as well as 56 policy recommendations for realizing that goal. It is arguably the most prominent international call for a radical redesign of the global economy ever issued.

But, for all of its rich content, Resilient People, Resilient Planet is short on concrete, practical solutions.

Its most valuable short-term recommendation – the replacement of current development indicators (GDP or variants thereof) with more comprehensive, inclusive metrics for wealth – seems tacked on almost as an afterthought.

Without quick, decisive international action to prioritize sustainability over the status quo, the report risks suffering the fate of its 1987 predecessor, the pioneering Brundtland Report, which introduced the concept of sustainability, similarly called for a paradigm shift, and was then ignored.

Resilient People, Resilient Planet opens by paraphrasing Charles Dickens: the world today is

“experiencing the best of times, and the worst of times.”

As a whole, humanity has achieved unparalleled prosperity; great strides are being made to reduce global poverty; and technological advances are revolutionizing our lives, stamping out diseases, and transforming communication.

On the other hand, inequality remains stubbornly high, and is increasing in many countries.

Short-term political and economic strategies are driving consumerism and debt, which, together with global population growth – set to reach nearly nine billion by 2040 – is subjecting the natural environment to growing stress.

By 2030, notes the Panel, “the world will need at least 50% more food, 45% more energy, and 30% more water – all at a time when environmental limits are threatening supply.”

Despite significant advances in the past 25 years, humanity has failed to conserve resources, safeguard natural ecosystems, or otherwise ensure its own long-term viability.
Can a bureaucratic report – however powerful – create change?
Will the world now rally, unlike in 1987, to the Panel’s call to “transform the global economy”?
In fact, perhaps real action is born of crisis itself. As the Panel points out,it has never been clearer that

we need a paradigm shift to achieve truly sustainable global development.

The 2010 Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress echoed the current consensus among social scientists that

we are mismeasuring our lives by using per capita GDP as a yardstick for progress.

We need new indicators that tell us if we are destroying the productive base that supports our well-being.

...working to find these indicators for its “Inclusive Wealth Report” (IWR), which proposes an approach to sustainability based on natural, manufactured, human, and social capital. ...to provide a comprehensive analysis of the different components of wealth by country, their links to economic development and human well-being, and policies that are based on social management of these assets.

The first IWR, which focuses on 20 countries worldwide, will be officially launched at the upcoming Rio+20 Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Preliminary findings will be presented during the Planet under Pressure Conference in London in late March.

The IWR represents a crucial first step in transforming the global economic paradigm, by ensuring that we have the correct information with which to assess our economic development and well-being – and to reassess our needs and goals.

While it is not intended as a universal indicator for sustainability, it does offer a framework for dialogue with multiple constituencies from the environmental, social, and economic fields.

The situation is critical.

As Resilient People, Resilient Planet aptly puts it, “tinkering around the margins” will no longer suffice – a warning to those counting on renewable-energy technologies and a green economy to solve our problems.

The Panel has revived the call for a far-reaching change in the global economic system.

ABOUT Partha Dasgupta

Partha Dasgupta is Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. His most recent book is

"Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment".

Again: Red Meat is harmful...

2012-03-25T17:42:00.001-07:00

This article is presented to contrast the fact that a large portion of the world's population goes to bed hungry. Yet certain rich societies enjoy so much of the most expensive protein source - red meat that it can become a hazard to good health.

People dealing with M.S. and other health conditions know to watch their diet and their health in general because they are fighting a great battle with a progressive disease and need to maintain their strength.

All red meat is bad for you, new study says - latimes.com

All red meat is bad for you, new study says

A long-term study finds that eating any amount and any type increases the risk of premature death.

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times March 12, 2012, 4:28 p.m.

Eating red meat — any amount and any type — appears to significantly increase the risk of premature death, according to a long-range study that examined the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for more than 20 years.

For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat — picture a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards — to one's daily diet was associated with a 13% greater chance of dying during the course of the study.

FOR THE RECORD:
Red meat: An article in the March 13 LATExtra section about a study linking red meat consumption to an increased risk of premature death said that preservatives like nitrates probably contributed to the danger. It should have included nitrites as well. —

Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.

"Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk," said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Crunching data from thousands of questionnaires that asked people how frequently they ate a variety of foods, the researchers also discovered that replacing red meat with other foods seemed to reduce mortality risk for study participants.

Eating a serving of nuts instead of beef or pork was associated with a 19% lower risk of dying during the study. The team said choosing poultry or whole grains as a substitute was linked with a 14% reduction in mortality risk; low-fat dairy or legumes, 10%; and fish, 7%.

Previous studies had associated red meat consumption with diabetes, heart disease and cancer, all of which can be fatal. Scientists aren't sure exactly what makes red meat so dangerous, but the suspects include the iron and saturated fat in beef, pork and lamb, the nitrates used to preserve them, and the chemicals created by high-temperature cooking.

The Harvard researchers hypothesized that eating red meat would also be linked to an overall risk of death from any cause, Pan said. And the results suggest they were right: Among the 37,698 men and 83,644 women who were tracked, as meat consumption increased, so did mortality risk.

In separate analyses of processed and unprocessed meats, the group found that both types appear to hasten death. Pan said that at the outset, he and his colleagues had thought it likely that only processed meat posed a health danger.

Carol Koprowski, a professor of preventive medicine at USC's Keck School of Medicine who wasn't involved in the research, cautioned that it can be hard to draw specific conclusions from a study like this because there can be a lot of error in the way diet information is recorded in food frequency questionnaires, which ask subjects to remember past meals in sometimes grueling detail.

But Pan said the bottom line was that there was no amount of red meat that's good for you.

"If you want to eat red meat, eat the unprocessed products, and reduce it to two or three servings a week," he said. "That would have a huge impact on public health."

A majority of people in the study reported that they ate an average of at least one serving of meat per day.

Pan said that he eats one or two servings of red meat per week, and that he doesn't eat bacon or other processed meats.

Cancer researcher Lawrence H. Kushi of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland said that groups putting together dietary guidelines were likely to pay attention to the findings in the study.

"There's a pretty strong supposition that eating red meat is important — that it should be part of a healthful diet," said Kushi, who was not involved in the study. "These data basically demonstrate that the less you eat, the better."

UC San Francisco researcher and vegetarian diet advocate Dr. Dean Ornish said he gleaned a hopeful message from the study.

"Something as simple as a meatless Monday can help," he said. "Even small changes can make a difference."

Additionally, Ornish said, "What's good for you is also good for the planet."

In an editorial that accompanied the study, Ornish wrote that a plant-based diet could help cut annual healthcare costs from chronic diseases in the U.S., which exceed $1 trillion. Shrinking the livestock industry could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt the destruction of forests to create pastures, he wrote.

eryn.brown@latimes.com

Walk More

2012-02-11T23:58:00.000-08:00

DocMikeEvans's Channel - YouTube: "

" The Doctor has many more of these self-help videos on his channel.

'via Blog this'

14 Smart Things Adam Smith Said About Money

2011-12-13T20:41:00.001-08:00

1. We want money to buy things
Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.

It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.

2. You need money to make money

A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have a little, it is often easier to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.

3. The pursuit and exchange of money is uniquely human
Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.

4. The first money was labor
Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.

5. It is our nature to accumulate money
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.

6. If you have money, you should be able to spend it as you see fit
It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries.

7. The joy of having money is to show it off

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

8. We want payment on land we control
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

9. The production and sale of goods is not for the welfare of others
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

10. Monopolies are a fact of life
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

11. Taxes should be gentle

Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.

12. Taxes should be convenient

Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.

13. The government's job is to protect those who have money from those who don't

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

14. Times get rough when too many people don't have money
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

Excerpts from The Wealth of Nations

Warren Buffett Backs Estate Taxes

2011-11-18T20:46:00.001-08:00

This business article puts a different twist on Warren Buffet's calls for the 'Rich' to be made to pay more taxes. Mr. Buffett appears to be a most generous businessman but the article implies a certain level of spin is involved in his stellar reputation.

The Real Reason Warren Buffett Backs Estate Taxes:

Here’s the true reason why Buffett likes a tax code that is hard on billionaires like him, as explained by journalist Tim Carney in his book “The Big Ripoff: How Big Business And Big Government Steal Your Money”:

Warren Buffett’s business is buying businesses. Bill Gates makes software and Paul Newman makes movies and salad dressing, but Warren Buffett makes money. He runs Berkshire Hathaway as CEO and principle owner. Berkshire Hathaway used to make textiles, but now they simply own other companies. Some familiar Berkshire Hathaway properties are GEICO, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, and the Buffalo News.

While Buffett is clearly an unusually brilliant investor, what he has done with his company has been straightforward in some ways. He buys companies that are worth more than the selling price. He buys things that will go up in value.

One great way to buy something that is going up in value is to buy a company that is already very profitable, but whose owner(s) have to sell. One common way that happens is when the owner dies and the heirs cannot afford to pay the estate tax on the properties they stand to inherit. They are therefore forced to sell them to pay the taxes. Carney cites the case of the Buffalo News, a highly profitable family-owned newspaper that Buffett bought after the family matriarch died without doing proper estate planning. Dairy Queen was acquired in a similar manner.

When the estate tax forces an owner to sell his business, it provides an opportunity for a bargain, but that opportunity is not available to everyone ... When the estate tax puts a business on the market, it is a market that is only open to big business.

Beyond making it easier for Buffett to find bargains, the estate tax drives customers to his primary business interest, insurance, including life insurance. The estate tax has created an entire industry called “estate planning.” Anyone with a business or large assets sooner or later needs to engage in estate planning, which involves hiring tax specialists, attorneys, and accountants ... Two central elements of estate planning are life insurance and annuities.

Bear that in mind the next time a liberal writer extols Buffett’s selflessness.

'via Blog this'

Siemens Boosts Its Stake in Tidal Power

2011-11-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

Siemens Boosts Its Stake in Tidal Power

The engineering giant likes the predictability of marine power—which can be "calculated for centuries in advance."

By Peter Fairley

Marine energy has long looked to be a niche area, capable of meeting just a few percent of global power demand. But this seemingly limited energy source is drawing some big players, the latest being Siemens. The German engineering giant boosted its stake this month in Bristol, U.K.-based tidal energy developer Marine Current Turbines from under 10 percent to 45 percent. The attraction, according to Michael Axmann, chief financial officer for Siemens's solar and hydro division, is the predictability of marine power.

Solar and wind farm operators struggle to predict tomorrow's output, and bad forecasts can wreak havoc with power transmission planning and market prices. In contrast, the gravitational pull of the moon and sun that controls tidal cycles provides a sure means of anticipating the output from tidal generating stations. "Power output of the systems could be calculated for centuries in advance," says Axmann.

The result could be higher revenues. Axmann notes that tidal power is "not subject to volatility. This increases the value of the energy produced, and hence makes the business case more reliable for the investor and operator."

Axmann declined to say how much value would be added by that predictability. But he anticipates that, by 2020, marine turbines will deliver power at a cost that's competitive with today's offshore wind farms—in spite of the challenges involved in engineering for underwater operations.

Marine Current Turbines CEO Andrew Tyler says a combination of cost reductions and government incentives will ensure the profitability of his firm's tidal power parks. He expects a return on investment for the company's first two offshore power parks: a proposed four-turbine array off Scotland's Isle of Skye and a five-turbine array off the northwest coast of Wales.

Cost reductions will come in part from scaling up its dual-rotor units to two megawatts from the 1.2 megawatts generated by its demonstration turbine, which has been producing power in Northern Ireland's Strangford Lough since 2008. Future cost reductions, Tyler says, will come primarily from efficiency in equipment assembly and logistics, drawing on Siemens's expertise in these areas.

The company also anticipates incentives in the form of U.K. and Scottish installation grants. The tidal power parks will also provide the company with renewable generation credits, which utilities need to acquire to comply with the U.K.'s renewable power standard. Last month, the U.K. announced plans to boost the credits for wave and tidal energy plants from two to five for every megawatt-hour of electricity generated. In comparison, offshore wind farms will earn two credits, and power stations burning biomass will earn one.

Tyler estimates that his first power parks will produce 15,000 to 20,000 megawatt-hours per year, meaning the tidal turbine arrays could earn £3.75 million ($6 million) in incentive payments annually.

Tyler says Siemens's backing will be crucial to raising the £100 million in private investment needed to finance the projects: "It completely changes their perception about our credibility," he says.

Paris-based Alstom Group, which competes against Siemens in power equipment and high-speed trains, also expects to make a splash in tidal power next year. Alstom is building a one-megawatt demonstration turbine using technology licensed from Canada'sClean Current Power Systems. At a meeting in Bali last month, Phillippe Gilson, Alstom's ocean energy manager, affirmed that Alstom plans to install the 20-meter-tall, fully submersible turbine in Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy in 2012.

Source:

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/39119/
Copyright Technology Review 2011.

California Reaches Solar Power Milestone | NBC Bay Area

2011-11-10T22:47:00.001-08:00

California Reaches Solar Power Milestone | NBC Bay Area: "

The golden state has installed enough solar panels on rooftops of homes and businesses to produce one gigawatt of power, KQED's Climate Watch reports.

One gigawatt is equal to one thousand megawatts, or enough to power 600,000 homes. Only five other countries in the world can claim that, including Germany, which has reached 17 gigawatts.

“Getting to one gigawatt is a fantastic marker of the momentum towards California's clean energy future,” Sungevity President Danny Kennedy said in a report by Environment California. “Riding the exponential curve of growth, which is akin to the mass adoption of cell phones or satellite TVs, will create many more good jobs and great opportunity for the Golden State.”

One gigawatt is impressive, but California isn't stopping there. It's aiming for three gigawatts of rooftop solar by 2016 -- which was mandated by California's Million Solar Roofs Initiative five years ago."

'via Blog this'

Solar Energy is becoming competitive

2011-11-10T21:38:00.001-08:00

The shrinking cost of solar energy: By the numbers - The Week:

BY THE NUMBERS

As harnessing the sun's energy becomes cheaper and more efficient, some analysts believe solar will overtake fossil fuels in a matter of decades

Photo: Michael DeYoung/Blend Images/Corbis
It takes the sun only 14.5 seconds to provide as
much energy to Earth as all of human civilization uses in a day.
.................................................................................................

The shrinking cost of solar energy: By the numbers:

According to Moore's Law, the price of computing power is slashed in half every two years — which helps explain why personal computers become outdated so quickly. But now, as Paul Krugman at The New York Times notes, the solar energy industry is experiencing a similar trend. The price of producing solar power cr continues to fall — thanks to technological improvements and heavy subsidies in countries like China — and this onetime punchline of an energy sector continues to expand. Will solar power eventually overtake oil as Earth's primary energy source? Perhaps. In the meantime, a look at the shrinking cost of solar energy, by the numbers:

65 Percentage growth experienced by the solar energy industry in each of the past five years

7 Percentage decline in the annual price of solar energy, adjusted for inflation

17 Percentage drop in the price of installing solar panels in the U.S. in 2010, says the, says the Washington Post. "Solar companies are figuring out how to set up systems cheaply."

17 Gigawatts of solar power that were created or used in the United States in 2010. That's roughly equivalent to the output of 17 nuclear power plants.

700 Watts of power that the sun shines on every square meter of Earth

89 quadrillion Watts of power shining on the Earth at any given moment. One quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros.

15 trillion Watts of power used by "all of human civilization" each day. It may be a big number, but it's just "one six-thousandth" of the 89 quadrillion watts shining on Earth at any given moment, says Scientific American.

14.5 Seconds it takes for the sun to provide as much energy to Earth as humanity consumes in a day

88 Minutes it takes for the sun to provide as much energy to Earth as humanity consumes in a year

2018 The year that analysts expect solar power to become affordable enough to compete directly with fossil fuels

2060 The year that analysts expect solar power may satisfy more than half of the world's energy needs

$491 billion Amount that U.S. drivers are expected to spend on gasoline this year

Sources: Forbes, Los Angeles Times, NY Times, Scientific American,Washington Post

Krugman: It's time for solar power

2011-11-09T03:45:00.001-08:00

Solar Power has been my pick for the future of alternative, sustainable energy for a while now - years not weeks. China has weighed in on solar by with aggressive trade practices to kill competition, distorting pricing and otherwise upsetting the course of the industry built up around solar power. Its not a walk in the park to see how to invest in this area. Lots of money has been lost already by investors and companies bankrupted....

Solar Power
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES
Updated Monday, November 7, 2011

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore's Law - in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months - has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

The success story you haven't heard about is Solar Energy

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That's right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

These days, mention solar power and you'll probably hear cries of "Solyndra!" Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste - although claims of a major scandal are nonsense - and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra's failure was actually caused by technological success: The price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn't keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, "there's now frequent talk of a 'Moore's law' in solar energy," with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues - and if anything it seems to be accelerating - we're just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it's likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

A large part of our political class, including essentially the entire GOP, is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers' money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we're willing to let it in.

Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.

Source:
http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Krugman-It-s-time-for-solar-power-2257045.php

Mankind's Report Card

2011-11-03T19:24:00.001-07:00

20 ways the world has changed since 1st Earth Summit - Politics - CBC News

The United Nations says humans are more concerned about damage done to the environment than we were 20 years ago — but we're still destroying it faster than we can fix it.

That's part of a snapshot prepared by the United Nations Environment Program in a report called Keeping Track that looks at a wide range of changes that have occurred since the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.

The report is designed to be used by legislators at the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio next May.

And far from being a thick report that will just gather dust, Keeping Track is actually a bit of a page-turner, filled with surprising and often encouraging news about our stewardship of the Earth.

The report uses a minimum of text and relies on colourful graphics, charts and satellite pictures to show the major environmental and social changes that have occurred on Earth since the early 1990s, from growing cities in China to the rapidly spreading footprint of Alberta's oil sands.

Changes in the world over the last 20 years.
1. The number of megacities has doubled.

2. The world is eating 26 per cent more meat.

3. Global temperatures continue to rise, with the last 10 years the warmest on record.

4. World industry is 23 per cent more energy efficient.

5. Plastic consumption has skyrocketed — with annual production reaching a record 265 million tonnes worldwide in 2010.

6. The 1990 Montreal Protocol to limit ozone-destroying chemicals is the world's most successful international agreement, producing a 93 per cent drop in the damaging emissions since 1992.

7. Cement production is the fastest-growing source of C02 emissions.

8. The Mesopotamian Marshlands, the largest in the Middle East, are recovering from deliberate draining by Iraq in the 1990s.

9. Saudi Arabia has transformed from an importer of food to an exporter due to irrigation.

10. Environmentally protected areas have increased worldwide by 42 per cent.

11. Fish stock depletion is now one of the most pressing environmental issues.

12. Renewable energy has skyrocketed, with solar energy leading the way — up 30,000 per cent since 1992.

13. Biofuel production — up 300,000 per cent — is converting more land from farming to production of fuel.

14. Organic farming is up 240 per cent since 1999.

15. The Amazon rainforest has been largely destroyed due to drought and farming.

16. Tourism and travel is the world's largest business sector — and ecotourism is the fastest-growing type of tourism, up 20-34 per cent per year.

17. Passenger trips by airplanes have doubled in the past two decades.

18. Clean drinking water access increased to 87 per cent, but widespread sanitation is still slow.

19. 30 per cent more private companies are adopting environmental standards every year.

20. Women's influence is rising with more 60 per cent more seats in national parliaments.

......................................................................................

.................................................................
Megacities:

Pop. in millions, 2010

1. Tokyo, Japan
36.7

2. Delhi, India
22.2

3. Sao Paulo, Brazil
20.3

4. Mumbai, India
20.0

5. Mexico City, Mexico
19.5

6. New York - Newark, USA
19.4

7. Shanghai, China
16.6

8. Kolkata, India
15.6

9. Dhaka, Bangladesh
14.6

10. Karachi, Pakistan
13.1
.........................................................................

Wall Street Protests Are Growing

2011-10-07T19:29:00.001-07:00

"Men., it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

- Charles Mackay
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

World stares as Americans burn food to stay on the road.

2011-04-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/world-starves-as-americans-burn-food-to-stay-on-the-road/story-fn59niix-1226025033392

Government intervention always distorts ...

SPECTATORS at February's Daytona 500 in Florida were handed green flags to wave in celebration of the news that the race's stock cars now use gasoline with 15 per cent corn-based ethanol. It was the start of a season-long television marketing campaign to sell the merits of biofuel to Americans.

On the surface, the "greening of NASCAR" is merely a transparent (and, one suspects, ill-fated) exercise in "greenwashing" for the sport. But the partnership between a beloved American pastime and the biofuel lobby is also the latest attempt to sway public opinion in favour of a truly irresponsible policy.

The US spends about $6 billion a year on federal support for ethanol production through tax credits, tariffs, and other programs. Thanks to this financial assistance, one-sixth of the world's corn supply is burned in American cars; enough corn to feed 350 million people for an entire year.

Government support of rapid growth in biofuel production has contributed to disarray in food production. Indeed, as a result of policy in the US and Europe, including aggressive production targets, biofuel used more than 6.5 per cent of global grain output and 8 per cent of the world's vegetable oil last year, up from 2 per cent of grain supplies and virtually no vegetable oil in 2004.

We have been here before. In 2007 and 2008, the swift increase in biofuel production caused a food crisis that incited political instability and fuelled malnutrition. Developed countries did not learn. Since 2008, ethanol production has increased by 33 per cent.This year, after a particularly bad growing season, we see the results. Global food prices are the highest they have been since the UN started tracking them in 1990, pushed up largely by increases in the cost of corn. Millions more people will be undernourished than would have been the case in the absence of official support for biofuels.

Biofuels were initially championed by environmental campaigners as a silver bullet against global warming. They started to change their minds as research showed that biofuels from most food crops did not significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions - and in many cases, caused forests to be destroyed to grow more food, creating more net carbon-dioxide emissions than fossil fuels. Some green activists supported mandates for biofuel, hoping they would pave the way for next-generation ethanol using non-food plants. That hasn't happened.

Today, it is difficult to find a single environmentalist who still backs the policy. Even Al Gore - who once boasted of casting the deciding vote for ethanol support - calls the policy "a mistake". He now admits that he supported it because he "had a certain fondness for the [corn] farmers in the state of Iowa" - who were crucial to his 2000 presidential bid.

It is refreshing that Gore has changed his view in line with the evidence. But there is a wider lesson. A chorus of voices from the Left and Right argue against continued government support for biofuel. The problem, as Gore has put it, is that "it's hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going".

Politicians can't stop such rent-seeking behaviour. What they can do is craft policies that maximise social welfare. Unfortunately, when it comes to reining in global warming, protecting the environment, or creating green jobs, we make hasty decisions that don't pass the test.

Government support for biofuel is only one example of a knee-jerk green policy that creates lucrative opportunities for self-interested businesses but does little to help the planet. Consider the financial support afforded early-generation renewable energy companies.

Germany led the world in putting up solar panels, funded by $75 billion in subsidies. The result? Inefficient, uncompetitive solar technology sitting on rooftops in a cloudy country, delivering a trivial 0.1 per cent of Germany's total energy supply, and postponing the effects of global warming by seven hours in 2100.

Given the financial stakes, it is little wonder that alternative energy companies, green investment firms, and biofuel producers are lobbying for more government largesse, and marketing their cause to the public by highlighting its supposed benefits for the environment, energy security, and employment, none of which withstand scrutiny.

"The NASCAR deal will push American ethanol into the stratosphere," declared Tom Buis, chief executive of the ethanol trade association Growth Energy.

At least one group is sold: presidential contenders. In Iowa last month, possible Republican candidate Newt Gingrich derided "big-city attacks" on ethanol subsidies. And, in what must be music to the industry's ears, an Obama administration official declared that even amid the highest food prices ever, there is "no reason to take the foot off the gas" on biofuel. In fact, there are millions of reasons - all of them suffering needlessly - to apply the brakes.

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.

Coal C Dirty Coal, Clean Future By JAMES FALLOWS

2010-11-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/dirty-coal-clean-future/8307/3/

The Technical Challenge

What would progress on coal entail? The proposals are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned. In “post-combustion” systems, the coal is burned normally, but then chemical or physical processes separate carbon dioxide from the plume of hot flue gas that comes out of the smokestack. Once “captured” as a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide, this part of the exhaust is pressurized into liquid form and then sold or stored. Refitting an existing coal plant can be very costly. “It’s like trying to remodel your home into a mansion,” a coal-plant manager told me in Beijing. “It’s more expensive, and it’s never quite right.” Apart from research projects, only two relatively small coal-fired power plants now operate in America with post-combustion capture.

Designing a capture system into a plant from the start is cheaper than doing refits. But even then the “parasitic load” of energy required to treat, compress, and otherwise handle the separated stream of carbon dioxide can come to 30 percent or more of the total output of a coal-fired power plant—so even more coal must be burned (and mined and shipped) to produce the same supply of electricity. Without mandatory emission limits or carbon prices, burning coal more cleanly is inevitably more expensive than simply burning coal the old way. “When people like me look for funding for carbon capture, the financial community asks, ‘Why should we do that now?’” an executive of a major American electric utility told me. “If there were a price on carbon”—a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions—“you could plug in, say, a loss of $30 to $50 per ton, and build a business case.”

“Pre-combustion” systems are fundamentally more efficient. In them, the coal is treated chemically to produce a flammable gas with lower carbon content than untreated coal. This means less carbon dioxide going up the smokestack to be separated and stored.

Either way, pre- or post-, the final step in dealing with carbon is “sequestration”—doing something with the carbon dioxide that has been isolated at such cost and effort, so it doesn’t just escape into the air. Carbon dioxide has a surprisingly large number of small-scale commercial uses, starting with adding the sparkle to carbonated soft drinks. (This is not a big help on the climate front, since the carbon dioxide is “sequestered” only until you pop open the bottle’s top.) All larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely. In the right geological circumstances, the captured carbon dioxide can even be used for “enhanced oil recovery,” forcing oil out of the porous rock into which it is introduced and up into wells.

These efforts are in one way completely different from “advanced research and development” as we often conceive of it, and in another way very much the same. They are different in that the scientists and entrepreneurs involved do not seem to count on, or even hope for, the large breakthroughs we have come to assume in biological sciences and info-tech. Consistent with two centuries of incremental improvement in power systems since the time of James Watt, practical refinements and ever-improving efficiency are the goal. They are similar in the operational advantage conferred by doing. Because Google indexes more data and handles more queries than any competitor, it can more quickly determine which innovations are succeeding (News, Translate, Earth, Maps) and which are failing (Wave), and exactly how the promising products still need to be improved. The first million copies of each new chip that Intel produces help it debug the production process, so that subsequent millions are cheaper and increasingly defect-free. “Whenever you scale something up, there are always differences from what you planned,” an engineer from a major American technology company told me. “It’s never quite the same. China is building plants like mad, so they can afford to experiment. We are not.”

In the search for “progress on coal,” like other forms of energy research and development, China is now the Google, the Intel, the General Motors and Ford of their heyday—the place where the doing occurs, and thus the learning by doing as well. “They are doing so much so fast that their learning curve is at an inflection that simply could not be matched in the United States,” David Mohler of Duke Energy told me.

“In America, it takes a decade to get a permit for a plant,” a U.S. government official who works in China said. “Here, they build the whole thing in 21 months. To me, it’s all about accelerating our way to the right technologies, which will be much slower without the Chinese.

“You can think of China as a huge laboratory for deploying technology,” the official added. “The energy demand is going like this”—his hand mimicked an airplane taking off—“and they need to build new capacity all the time. They can go from concept to deployment in half the time we can, sometimes a third. We have some advanced ideas. They have the capability to deploy it very quickly. That is where the partnership works.”

The good aspects of this partnership have unfolded at a quickening pace over the past decade, through a surprisingly subtle and complex web of connections among private, governmental, and academic institutions in both countries. Perhaps I should say unsurprisingly, since the relationships among American and Chinese organizations in the energy field in some ways resemble the manufacturing supply chains that connect factories in China with designers, inventors, and customers in the United States and elsewhere. The difference in this case is how much faster the strategic advantage seems to be shifting to the Chinese side.

In the normal manufacturing supply chain—Apple creating computers, Walmart outsourcing clothes and toys—the United States provides branding, design, and a major market for products, while China supplies labor, machines, and the ability to turn concepts into products at very high speed. In the quest for cleaner coal, America’s contribution is mainly “soft power”—advice, coordination, prodding, and expertise—in hopes of influencing what Chinese organizations do.

Ten years ago, at the end of the Clinton administration, the Chinese and American governments signed a “Fossil Energy Protocol,” to coordinate research on better use of coal and oil. Political leaders have come and gone since then, but the cast of technicians, civil servants, and business officials on each side has been relatively stable and has gotten used to working together. After taking office as secretary of energy last year, Steven Chu—a celebrity in China because of his Chinese heritage and his Nobel Prize—gave a new push to these efforts, hiring additional staff members for the U.S.-China office and committing $75 million to a joint Clean Energy Research Center.

The efforts of two scientists we’ve already met, Julio Friedmann and Ming Sung, illustrate what Americans can and cannot do to shape what happens in China—and the mounting advantages on China’s side relative to America’s.

Friedmann, who is in his mid-40s, has become one of the world’s experts on sequestration: how and where carbon dioxide can safely be stored underground. He was trained in geology at MIT and the University of Southern California and initially went to work for ExxonMobil. But by the early 2000s he had become fascinated with the emerging science of underground carbon-dioxide storage. “At that point, it was clear that nearly all of the really cool work was being done in the national labs,” he told me. In 2004 he and his family moved from Maryland to California, where he joined Lawrence Livermore. He is now the head of the Carbon Management Program there and the technical leader of a government-university-business consortium that this summer won a Department of Energy competition to help develop carbon-sequestration projects in China. To give an idea of the consortium’s range, it includes three universities, three national laboratories, two scientific nongovernmental organizations, and six large corporations, among them General Electric, Duke Energy, and AEP.

After talking with Friedmann many times in China, I finally asked about the ethnic derivation of his name. His grandparents were Ashkenazim from Poland and Hungary who left for Latin America in the 1930s; his parents, raised in Colombia and Venezuela, met on an arranged date at Grossinger’s in the Catskills. Although Friedmann bikes to work through the bucolic Northern California setting of the Lawrence Livermore lab—a setting punctuated by the watchtowers and electrified fencing that surround the plutonium stockpile for the lab’s weapons-research center—he comes across as a fast-talking, high-pressure East Coast urban type.

In many meetings in America and China in the past two years, I have seen him turn that intensity to one great question: how quickly geologists from America and elsewhere can work with their counterparts in China to improve systems for pumping carbon dioxide underground, and to identify the right rock formations where it can safely be stored. On a typical trip to China, he will spend half his time in Beijing or Shanghai, meeting with government and corporate officials—and the other half in Xi’an or the Inner Mongolian wilderness, where many of the most promising storage locations are found. What he and his team have to offer, from the American part of the supply chain, is expertise on geological formations, on computer models for how the “plume” of liquefied carbon dioxide will settle into porous rock, and on other benefits of America’s decades of experience in petroleum geology. He can also put Chinese plant managers, scientists, and bureaucrats in touch with overseas counterparts they would otherwise never meet. “Projects like these are sort of like the school dance,” he told me. “You’re not getting married, but you’re figuring out how to interact. We need to start the process in a way that gives people the confidence to do it again, and again, and again. The confidence is the product.” The more often Chinese and foreign officials work together, the more easily they continue to work together. This might sound trivial, but I’ve become convinced that the steady expansion of these contacts will make a major difference in how an ever more powerful China deals with the rest of the world. What does Friedmann, or the United States, get from the process? “More tons sequestered, rather than emitted, in China,” he told me. But also something unavailable in America: a chance to see new technology in new plants and learn how it works. “In the U.S. today, there is not a single demonstration of capturing CO2 from a coal-fired plant at large scale,” he said. “The technologies have been a little too expensive to actually implement. That’s why we started looking at China.” They can afford to build, and Americans can hope to watch and learn.

Ming Sung’s role illustrates a similar balance of influence and knowledge between the United States and China. Sung, who is in his early 60s, was born in Shanghai and raised there and in Hong Kong, where his family fled in 1958. Ten years later he came to the United States for college and graduate studies in geology. He became a U.S. citizen, worked in the newly formed Department of Energy during the Carter administration, and then left for a 25-year career around the world as an executive with Shell Oil. After he retired from Shell and founded a software company, he and his wife decided to move back to China. He now works in Beijing for a Boston-based nonprofit environmental group called the Clean Air Task Force. (Disclosure: my sister is on the board.)

In the early 2000s the task force, originally a conventional anti-air-pollution group, embraced the necessity of cleaning up coal. In Beijing, Sung gave me a copy of its latest working paper, in both Chinese and English, called “Coal Without Carbon.”

The group has sponsored research on sequestration, on post-combustion capture, and on the “cleanest” of the emerging pre-combustion coal technologies—“underground coal gasification.” In this process, jets of air (or pure oxygen), sometimes with steam or various chemicals, are blasted into coal seams deep underground. They interact chemically with the coal to produce a gas that flows back up a pipe and can be burned. It leaves in the ground much of the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and other elements that create greenhouse gases and other pollutants when coal is burned.

“And this can be very cheap,” Sung told me. “You don’t have to mine the coal. You don’t have to send men underground or haul coal around or dispose of ash. All the dirty stuff stays buried.” Because of these and other savings, he said, coal used this way could match or beat the price of today’s standard dirty power plant.

But in advocating the whole range of “clean coal” technologies, Sung and his team have the same problem Julio Friedmann has with carbon sequestration: it’s not happening in the United States. There’s one significant exception: the Texas Clean Energy Project, a plant being built outside Odessa, which will apply underground-gasification technology to capture 90 percent of its carbon, more than any other commercial plant in the world. It received a $450 million federal award, just over half from the Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative and the rest from the American Recovery and Reinvestment stimulus program (toward the $2.1 billion total capital cost). If it works as promised, this facility will be an advance over any coal-fired plant operating anywhere: it will gasify coal underground, eliminating the cost and damage of mining; it will sell urea (for fertilizer) and other chemical by-products of the underground gasification; and it will use the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery in the nearby Permian Basin oil fields—all in addition to generating power. [Correction: The decarbonization and other cleanup steps that make this plant distinctive are done above rather than underground. For full details, seetexascleanenergyproject.com/about-tcep.] But otherwise, to see new technology in action and to influence the next dozen coal plants being built in the world, Ming Sung had to go back to China.

“For the last 30 years, we have not been able to build a coal-to-gas conversion plant in this country,” a U.S. coal-company official told me. “China has done many. That is what we need to learn from them, all that production and operating experience.” And in exchange? “We do have safety and environmental information that we can definitely provide.”

Ten years ago, the United States and many other countries set joint targets of building a series of experimental low- emissions, high-efficiency coal-fired power plants: FutureGen in America, ZeroGen in Australia, various European efforts without a “Gen” name, and GreenGen in China. America’s FutureGen was proposed early, and China’s GreenGen was proposed late. Now—surprise!—GreenGen is closest to being completed, with its scheduled opening moved up from 2015 to 2013, and FutureGen has only recently begun to move beyond the congressional-wrangling stage.

What Sung takes from the interaction is both operational knowledge and the chance to influence China’s decisions in some way. What he has provided is another sort of connection, between Chinese organizations and the private businesses that mine coal and generate electricity in the United States. “That is the reason we are here—to get companies together,” Sung said. “It is taking too long for governments to agree on policies, so we believe in B-to-B connections.” At a crucial point, he arranged a meeting in Beijing between the CEO of Duke Energy, Jim Rogers, and Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, essentially China’s director of industrial policy. “After the meeting, Zhang said, ‘I fully support this collaboration,’” Sung told me. “With that sentence, what more could you ask for?”

Duke got serious about China only two and a half years ago, after Rogers, the CEO, took his grandson on a trip there in the summer of 2008 as a high-school graduation present. The elder Rogers, like so many first-time visitors, was stunned by the scale and dynamism of what he saw. He immediately urged his senior management team to learn about and visit China. “There is something you can’t sense from your office in America,” the director of Duke’s China operations, a 30-year-old woman named River Lu, told me. She grew up in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong. “Here you feel the pollution, you feel the growth, you feel the energy.” (Her Chinese name is Lu Yun; she chose the English name “River” in her teens. The creativity and often beauty of these chosen names is a dependable pleasure of meeting young English-speaking Chinese.) Although she did not leave China until her mid-20s, for graduate work at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, she has a native-American accent, which she says comes from watching Friends and Ally McBeal on Hong Kong TV.

David Mohler, Duke’s chief technology officer, was one of the first visitors and most frequent return travelers. “We learned that China is preparing, by 2025, for 350 million people to live in cities that don’t exist now,” he told me. “They have to build the equivalent of the U.S. electrical system”—that is, almost as much added capacity as the entire U.S. grid—“by 2025. It took us 120 years.” Rogers, Mohler, and the company as a whole moved quickly from being impressed or frightened by Chinese growth to determining how they could work with it.

“We realized there was no way we could duplicate their speed, the scale, or the constancy of energy policy within the United States,” Mohler said. “So we wondered if we could find Chinese partners to work with in applying these clean technologies, so we could bring the benefits of their speed and scale back to the United States.” In his speeches and interviews, Rogers frequently emphasizes that by 2050, Duke will need to replace or rebuild every one of its existing power plants in the United States, except for its hydroelectric facilities. Some, because of age; the rest, to meet what Duke considers to be inevitably tightening clean-energy standards. “We will have a huge need for capital,” Mohler said. Duke’s capital budget for the next three years is $18 billion, and only in China can the company find that plus the operational experience of seeing cleaner-coal technologies as they are deployed. Duke Energy supported the Obama administration’s now-abandoned climate bill, because it would have added predictability to the future standards the company will have to meet. With or without a bill, it is looking to China for future financing.

Within months of Rogers’s first visit, Duke had opened an office in China, headed by River Lu. Within a year of the visit, in the summer of 2009, Duke signed an agreement for joint research with China’s largest energy company, Huaneng, and with the government’s Thermal Power Research Institute. Within the clean-energy world, the institute’s director of technology, Xu Shisen, is a celebrity known for his advocacy of clean-coal projects. Huaneng has bought a share in a new low-emissions Duke plant in Edwardsport, Indiana. [Correction: The Memorandum of Understanding between Duke and Huaneng, which involves employees of each company visiting the other’s plants and sharing information and research, does not include direct investment by Huaneng. Duke has a joint-venture understanding with another Chinese company, the ENN group, toward developing merchant solar panel plants in the United States.]

“As China meets its capacity, it is likely that the best technologies will be commercialized and applied here faster than anywhere else,” River Lu said. “We want to be involved in that process.”

CHINA’S COOPERATION WITH the United States on coal is good news for the world. If the two countries had decided to make this another arena for demonstrating their respective toughness—if, as at the failed Copenhagen talks last winter, they had mainly exchanged accusations about who was more to blame for emissions problems—they would have guaranteed that the problems could not be solved. If that cooperation breaks down, Julio Friedmann said, “we’ll end up paying twice as much to get the same learnings—and delaying the technology on both sides by another decade.” Both sides seem to have looked for ways to keep the cooperation going. They have not been in the newspapers, but they deserve recognition for attempting to do the world’s work.

But China’s very effectiveness and dynamism, beneficial as they may be in this case, highlight an American failure—a failure that seems not transient or incidental but deep and hard to correct.

The manifestation of the failure is that China is where the world’s “doing” now goes on, in this industry and many others. If you want to learn how the power plants of the future will work, you must go to Tianjin—or Shanghai, or Chengdu—to find out. Power companies from America, Europe, and Japan are fortunate to have a place to learn. Young engineers and managers and entrepreneurs in China are fortunate that the companies teaching the rest of the world will be Chinese.

The deeper problem is the revealed difference in national capacity, in seriousness and ability to deliver. The Chinese government can decide to transform the country’s energy system in 10 years, and no one doubts that it will. An incoming U.S. administration can promise to create a clean-energy revolution, but only naïfs believe that it will.

“The most impressive aspect of the Chinese performance is their determination to do what is needed,” Julio Friedmann told me. “To be the first, to be the biggest, to have the best export technology for cleaning up coal.” America obviously is not displaying comparable determination—and the saddest aspect of the U.S. performance, he said, is that it seems not deliberate but passive and accidental, the product of modern America’s inability to focus public effort on public problems.

“No one in the U.S. government could ever imagine a 10-year plan to ensure U.S. leadership in solar power or batteries or anything else,” Joseph Romm, a former Department of Energy official who now writes the blog Climate Progress, told me. “It’s just not possible, so nobody even bothers to propose it.”

The Chinese system as a whole has great weaknesses as well as great strengths. Its challenges, as I have reported so often in these pages, make the threats facing America look trivial by comparison. But its response to the energy challenge—including its commitment to dealing with the dirty, unavoidable reality of coal—reveals a seriousness about facing big problems that America now appears to lack.

James Fallows is an Atlantic national correspondent; his blog is at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com

Coal A

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JAMES FALLOWS

James Fallows is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic. A 25-year veteran of the magazine and former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, he is also an instrument-rated pilot and a onetime program designer at Microsoft.

Dirty Coal, Clean Future

To environmentalists, “clean coal” is an insulting oxymoron. But for now, the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal—dirty, sooty, toxic coal—in more-sustainable ways. The good news is that new technologies are making this possible. China is now the leader in this area, the Google and Intel of the energy world. If we are serious about global warming, America needs to work with China to build a greener future on a foundation of coal. Otherwise, the clean-energy revolution will leave us behind, with grave costs for the world’s climate and our economy.

THROUGH THE PAST four years I’ve often suggested that China’s vaunted achievements are less impressive, or at least more complicated, seen up close. Yes, Chinese factories make nearly all of the world’s consumer electronic equipment. But the brand names, designs, and most of the profits usually belong to companies and people outside China. Yes, China’s accumulated trade surpluses have made it the creditor for America and much of the world. But the huge share of its own wealth that China has sunk into foreign economies ties its fate to theirs. Yes, more and more Chinese people are very rich. But hundreds of millions of Chinese people are still very poor. Yes, Chinese factories lead the world in output of windmills and solar-power panels. But China’s environmental situation is still so dire as to pose the main threat not just to the country’s public health and political stability but also to its own economic expansion.

This report will have a different tone. I have been learning about an area of Chinese achievement that is objectively good for the world as a whole, including the United States. Surprising enough! And China’s achievement dramatically highlights a structural advantage of its approach and a weakness of America’s. It involves the shared global effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, of which China and the United States are respectively the No. 1 and No. 2 producers, together creating more than 40 percent of the world’s total output. That shared effort is real, and important. The significant Chinese developments involve more than the “clean tech” boom that Americans have already heard so much about. Instead a different, less publicized, and much less appealing-sounding effort may matter even more in determining whether the United States and China can cooperate to reduce emissions. This involves not clean tech but the dirtiest of today’s main energy sources—coal.

VIDEO: James Fallows flies his plane over coal country with TheAtlantic.com's Technology Editor Alexis Madrigal as copilot.

Mining coal is notoriously dangerous, the remnants of those mines disfigure the Earth, and the by-products of coal’s combustion fill the air not simply with soot, smoke, and carbon dioxide but also with toxic heavy metals like mercury and lead, plus corrosive oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, among other pollutants. When I visited coal towns in China’s Shandong and Shanxi provinces, my face, arms, and hands would be rimed in black by the end of each day—even when I hadn’t gone near a mine. People in those towns, like their predecessors in industrial-age Europe and America, have the same black coating on their throats and lungs, of course. When I have traveled at low altitude in small airplanes above America’s active coal-mining regions—West Virginia and Kentucky in the East, Wyoming and its neighbors in the Great Basin region of the West—I’ve seen the huge scars left by “mountain-top removal” and open-pit mining for coal, which are usually invisible from the road and harder to identify from six miles up in an airliner. Compared with most other fossil-fuel sources of energy, coal is inherently worse from a carbon-footprint perspective, since its hydrogen atoms come bound with more carbon atoms, meaning that coal starts with a higher carbon-to-hydrogen ratio than oil, natural gas, or other hydrocarbons.

The proposition that coal could constitute any kind of “hope” or solution, or that a major environmentalist action plan could be called “Coal Without Carbon,” as one I will describe is indeed named—this goes beyond seeming interestingly contrarian to seeming simply wrong. For the coal industry, the term “clean coal” is an advertising slogan; for many in the environmental movement, it is an insulting oxymoron. But two ideas that underlie the term are taken with complete seriousness by businesses, scientists, and government officials in China and America, and are the basis of the most extensive cooperation now under way between the countries on climate issues. One is that coal can be used in less damaging, more sustainable ways than it is now. The other is that it must be used in those ways, because there is no plausible other way to meet what will be, absent an economic or social cataclysm, the world’s unavoidable energy demands.

This is not an argument against all-out effort on all other fronts, from conservation and efficiency to improved battery technology to wind- and solar-power systems to improved nuclear facilities. Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has argued for years that designing buildings and transportation systems to waste less energy from the start is by far the cheapest way to reduce damaging emissions (a position reinforced by influential studies from McKinsey & Company). “Good ideas about climate change are not in competition with one another,” Roger Aines, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told me when I visited this summer. “We need every possible solution, and then we need more.”

This is an argument for recognizing that China has faced reality, in launching an all-out effort to “decarbonize” coal—and for recognizing America’s difficulty in doing the same.

37 Billion Tons

Let’s review the basics. This material will be elementary for some readers and controversial for a few others, but laying it out helps clarify the problem to be solved and the real options from which to choose. Also, the quantities and numbers involved here are so vast—the standard unit in discussing carbon-dioxide emissions is the gigaton, or 1 billion metric tons—that it helps to have some indicators of scale.

All human activity together puts roughly 37 billion tons (37 gigatons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That number has been rising, as the world’s population grows and the number of cars, factories, and power plants increases. Twenty years ago, it was less than 25 billion tons. Twenty years from now, it could well be 50 billion tons. Carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas—that is, a substance that affects the atmosphere’s ability to absorb and emit heat, so that a growing portion of the sun’s energy is trapped to warm the planet rather than radiating back into space. Methane, nitrous oxide, aerosols, and other emissions play a major role, and ton per ton can be more powerful in greenhouse effect. But the focus is on carbon dioxide because we produce so much of it, and because its effects are so long-lasting.

Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere persists for many decades, even centuries—unlike methane, which can disperse within a single decade. This means that when more carbon dioxide is emitted than natural systems absorb, the concentration in the atmosphere continually goes up. Before James Watt invented the steam engine in the late 1700s—that is, before human societies had much incentive to burn coal and later oil in large quantities—the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million, or ppm (meaning 280 carbon-dioxide molecules per million molecules of “dried air,” or air with the water removed). It is thought to have fluctuated between about 180 and 280 ppm through the previous 800,000 years. By 1900, as Europe and North America were industrializing, it had reached about 300 ppm.

Now the carbon-dioxide concentration is at or above 390 ppm, which is probably the highest level in many millions of years. “We know that the last time CO2 was sustained at this level, much of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets were not there,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, told me. Because of the 37 billion annual tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level continues to go up by about two ppm a year. For perspective: by the time today’s sixth-graders finish high school, the world carbon-dioxide level will probably have passed 400 ppm, and by the time most of them are starting families, it will have entered the 420s.

Have we so far come across anything that is “controversial”? No: such political controversy as exists mainly concerns the exact connection between rising carbon-dioxide levels and future climate change, and how harmful (and to whom) that change would be. That the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level is rapidly going up, and that recent years have been on average the warmest in recorded history, no one bothers to dispute. And in any case, all parties to the negotiations I’m describing, including the heads of the major coal-mining and electric-power utilities in the United States and China, accept as settled fact that greenhouse-gas emissions are an emergency they must confront, because of the likely disruptive effects on the world’s climate. At a U.S.-China environmental conference this summer in San Francisco, I heard one utility-company official after another testify, confession-meeting style, about the vast extent of their current emissions and their need to reform.

The main uncertainties involve what might happen as carbon-dioxide levels reach 450 ppm and above. In particular, the question is how and when “positive feedback” loops would kick in, so that the hotter things get, the faster they will get even hotter. The main way this would happen would be through melting of the polar ice sheets, which would mean less white ice surface to reflect the sun’s heat, and more blue water surface to absorb it. Similarly, the vast Arctic permafrost areas could have a positive-feedback effect as they thaw. They are essentially frozen peat bogs, which contain huge amounts of methane. As they began to melt, they would release their methane, which in turn could trigger even faster melting and more methane release.

“The reality of it is that in many cases, there may not be any fixed threshold for ‘irreversible’ change,” Michael Mann told me. “What we have with rising CO2 levels in general is a dramatically increasing probability of serious and deleterious change in our climate.” He went down the list: more frequent, severe, and sustained heat waves, like those that affected Russia and the United States this summer; more frequent and destructive hurricanes and floods; more frequent droughts, like the “thousand-year drought” that has devastated Australian agriculture; and altered patterns of the El Niño phenomenon, which will change rainfall patterns in the Americas. In other cases, he said, there could be important thresholds. For example, the possibility of dramatic rises in ocean levels, which could affect the habitability of New York, London, Shanghai, Miami, the entire Netherlands, and many other modern conurbations, along with coastal areas in India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. “It would be nice to know where such thresholds are so we can avoid crossing them,” Mann said. “We can’t know that. What we do know for certain is that with each fraction of a degree of warming, the probability of such potentially catastrophic outcomes goes up.”

Dirty Coal, Clean Future - Magazine - The Atlantic

2010-11-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

Dirty Coal, Clean Future - Magazine - The Atlantic

The Inevitability of Coal

That’s the big picture. Now come the parts of the background that are somewhat less familiar but bear on the argument that the only real salvation must involve coal.
Recall the 37 billion tons of worldwide annual carbon-dioxide emissions. On a per capita basis, that would mean about six tons for each of the planet’s 6-billion-plus people. But of course it doesn’t work that way. For the United States, emissions are about 25 tons per person. For Europe as a whole, they’re about 11 tons. (The difference is smaller houses, smaller cars, fewer sprawling suburbs, and in the case of France, much heavier reliance on nuclear power to generate electricity. Nuclear plants are expensive and obviously create waste-disposal problems, but they emit practically no greenhouse gases.) Japan’s level is slightly below Europe’s. For China, the emission level is about eight tons per person. Overall, China’s economy is more energy-intensive than America’s or Europe’s—its bias toward construction and heavy manufacturing, plus its on-average shoddy standard of building insulation, mean that it takes more fuel, electricity, and raw energy to produce a dollar’s worth of output in China than in the U.S. But overall living standards are still so much lower in China that per capita emissions there are barely one-third the U.S. level. India’s per capita emission level is about three tons per year, less than half of China’s (because India has so many fewer factories). For Kenya and other barely industrialized countries, it’s about one ton per person per year.
The range of these figures suggests the technical challenges ahead. As one climate scientist put it to me, “To stabilize the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the whole world on average would need to get down to the Kenya level”—a 96 percent reduction for the United States. The figures also suggest the diplomatic challenges for American negotiators in recommending that other countries, including those with hundreds of millions in poverty, forgo the energy-intensive path toward wealth that the United States has traveled for so many years.
Indeed, in comparisons between the United States and China, the emissions figures probably understate the real gap in per capita energy use. David Mohler is the chief technology officer for Duke Energy Company, which is based in Charlotte and is a leading electricity and natural-gas provider in the Carolinas and parts of the Midwest. He travels frequently to China, and he took me through a comparison of electricity use in the two countries, as a proxy for overall energy use and emissions. At face value, he said, there was about a 5-to-1 difference between U.S. and Chinese per capita electricity-use levels. Each American is on average responsible for about 13.6 megawatt-hours of electricity use per year, counting residential heating and lighting, a pro-rated share of industrial and commercial demand, and so on. For each Chinese, the average is about 2.6. “But around half of that Chinese electricity consumption was for manufactured products for export,” Mohler said. That is, China’s surge in electric capacity has disproportionately gone toward its factory- export boom, rather than toward home air-conditioning and lighting, elevators, TVs and computers, electric cars, or any other in-China use by Chinese people (though to see a blazingly lit Chinese city at night is to recognize that plenty of power is already being used). “So in a sense, their ‘real’ per capita use is only about 1.5 megawatt-hours,” Mohler said, “and ours, counting what went into the products we import, could be 10 times that much.”
Mohler’s point was less about abstract equity than practical reality. People in rural China, in my experience, don’t really care that people somewhere else—Los Angeles or Houston, even Shanghai or Tianjin—are using more electricity and gasoline than they are. They just want to use more themselves! I assume the same to be true of their counterparts from Nigeria to India to North Korea. “You go in the countryside in China, and people don’t have any power to pump their water,” Mohler said. “Of course they’re going to want those powered pumps. Anyone would.” And hot water for their baths, and refrigerators for their kitchens, and air-conditioners for their bedrooms—and cars.
Thus the bind. The atmosphere needs to absorb dramatically less carbon dioxide, while people around the world are certain to want dramatically more of the products and comforts whose creation and operation send carbon dioxide and other gases into the sky.
Isn’t “clean energy” the answer? Of course—because everything is the answer. The people I spoke with and reports I read differed in emphasis, sometimes significantly. Some urged greater stress on efficiency and conservation; some, a faster move toward nuclear power or natural gas; some, an all-out push for solar power and other renewable sources; others, immediate preparation for “geo-engineering” or “abatement” projects to offset the effects of climate disruption once they occur. But in a sense they were all in harmony, because everything on all the lists works toward the same end.
The best-known illustration of the need for an all-fronts approach is the “carbon wedge” analysis from the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton. Its premise is that to keep the carbon-dioxide level from going into the 500s, or twice its pre-industrial-age level, over the next 50 years, the world collectively will need to reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by a total of about 26 billion tons per year.

. (Technically, CMI measures its goals in billions of tons of carbon contained within the carbon dioxide. For clarity, I’ve converted the figures.) To reach that total, CMI proposes seven “stabilization wedges” of a little less than 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide each. A 4-billion-ton “wedge” through efficiency efforts of all kinds; another wedge of that size through renewable power; another through avoiding deforestation and changing agricultural practices. Eventually it adds up. “There are many good options,” Julio Friedmann, a geologist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told me soon after I first met him in Beijing two years ago. “But there are no unlimitedoptions. Each is limited by cost, limited by scale, limited by physics and chemistry, limited by thermodynamics. For example, there’s nothing wrong with switchgrass as a biofuel”—one of George W. Bush’s novel proposals—“but there’s not a lot of energy in it.”
We’ll hear from Friedmann again. This emphasis on limits is what begins pointing us back to coal.
“Emotionally, we would all like to think that wind, solar, and conservation will solve the problem for us,” David Mohler of Duke Energy told me. “Nothing will change, our comfort and convenience will be the same, and we can avoid that nasty coal. Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work that way.”
The math he has in mind starts with the role that coal now plays around the world, and especially for the two biggest energy consumers, America and China. Overall, coal-burning power plants provide nearly half (about 46 percent this year) of the electricity consumed in the United States. For the record: natural gas supplies another 23 percent, nuclear power about 20 percent, hydroelectric power about 7 percent, and everything else the remaining 4 or 5 percent. The small size of the “everything else” total is worth noting; even if it doubles or triples, the solutions we often hear the most about won’t come close to meeting total demand. In China, coal-fired plants supply an even larger share of much faster-growing total electric demand: at least 70 percent, with the Three Gorges Dam and similar hydroelectric projects providing about 20 percent, and (in order) natural gas, nuclear power, wind, and solar energy making up the small remainder. For the world as a whole, coal-fired plants provide about half the total electric supply. On average, every American uses the electricity produced by 7,500 pounds of coal each year.
Precisely because coal already plays such a major role in world power supplies, basic math means that it will inescapably do so for a very long time. For instance: through the past decade, the United States has talked about, passed regulations in favor of, and made technological breakthroughs in all fields of renewable energy. Between 1995 and 2008, the amount of electricity coming from solar power rose by two-thirds in the United States, and wind-generated electricity went up more than 15-fold. Yet over those same years, the amount of electricity generated by coal went up much faster, in absolute terms, than electricity generated from any other source. The journalist Robert Bryce has drawn on U.S. government figures to show that between 1995 and 2008, “the absolute increase in total electricity produced by coal was about 5.8 times as great as the increase from wind and 823 times as great as the increase from solar”—and this during the dawn of the green-energy era in America. Power generated by the wind and sun increased significantly in America last year; but power generated by coal increased more than seven times as much. As Americans have read many times, Chinese companies are the world’s leaders in manufacturing solar panels, often using technology originally developed in the United States. Many of the panels are used inside China for its own rapidly growing solar-power system; still, solar energy accounts for about 1 percent of its total power supply. In his book PowerHungry, Bryce describes a visit to a single coal mine, the Cardinal Mine in western Kentucky, whose daily output supports three-quarters as much electricity generation as all the solar and wind facilities in the United States combined. David MacKay, of the physics department at Cambridge University in England, has compiled an encyclopedia of such energy-related comparisons, which is available for free download (under the misleadingly lowbrow title Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air). For instance: he calculates that if the windiest 10 percent of the entire British landmass were completely covered with wind turbines, they would produce power roughly equivalent to half of what Britons expend merely by driving each day.
Similar patterns apply even more starkly in China. Other sources of power are growing faster in relative terms, but year by year the most dramatic increase is in China’s use of coal. “Coal simply is going to be with us for decades,” a technical adviser to China’s energy ministry told me this summer in Beijing. “We hope someday to have 15 percent of our power from renewable sources. Even so, the percentage of power generated by coal will not drop by more than a few points, and the absolute amount will quickly grow.” Another government energy expert in Beijing said that the only serious limit on how fast Chinese power companies can increase their use of coal is the capacity of the country’s transportation system. “It’s kind of an existential question, whether they can handle the physical volumes they are planning to consume,” he said. “Right now railroads are at capacity, you have entire highways being blocked with coal trucks, and the problems cascade.” Part of the reason China has committed some $80 billion over the next decade to build light-rail networks across the country is to get human passengers off the main rail lines, opening up more capacity to move coal.
“People without a technical background think, ‘Coal is dirty! It’s bad,’” I was told in Beijing by Ming Sung, a geologist and energy expert who was born in Shanghai, worked for decades in America and became a citizen, and has now returned to China. “But will you turn off your refrigerator for 30 years while we work on renewables? Turn off the computer? Or ask people in China to do that? Unless you will, you can’t get rid of coal for decades. As [U.S. Energy Secretary] Steven Chu has said, we have to face the nightmare of coal for a while.”
Coal will be with us because it is abundant: any projected “peak coal” stage would come many decades after the world reaches “peak oil.” It will be with us because of where it’s located: the top four coal-reserve countries are the United States, Russia, China, and India, which together have about 40 percent of the world’s population and more than 60 percent of its coal. It will be with us because its direct costs are in most circumstances far lower than those of the alternatives—that’s why so much is used. (Prices vary widely from place to place and company to company, but one utility executive said that the lowest-price coal plant might generate electricity for 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, while the same amount of power from a new wind farm in the same area might cost 20 cents.) It will be with us because its indirect costs, in miner deaths, environmental destruction, and carbon burden on the atmosphere are unregulated and “externalized.” Power companies that answer to shareholders or ratepayers have a hard time justifying a more expensive choice. “Coal is so cheap because its dirtiness still doesn’t count against it,” an air-pollution expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council told The Wall Street Journal 10 years ago. In the absence of climate legislation in the United States and international agreements to reduce emissions, the dirtiness still doesn’t count. Coal will be with us because changing a power infrastructure—like building a new transportation system or extending cable or fiber-optic connections through an entire country—is the very opposite of a “virtual” process, and takes many years to complete.
And it will be with us because of a surprising constraint: after a century in which medical diagnosis and treatment, computer and communications systems, aerospace and nanotech industries, and nearly every other form of technology have routinely achieved the magical, energy production is essentially what it was in the time of James Watt. With the main exception of nuclear-power plants and the hoped-for future exception of practical nuclear-fusion systems, we mostly create electricity by burning something that was once underground—coal, oil, natural gas—to boil water and turn turbines with the steam. (Windmills use the wind’s force, and hydropower systems use falling water, to turn turbines directly.) The computer of 10 years from now will be unrecognizably more powerful than today’s, and its predictably increased capability will make medical, navigation, and other systems better, too. If the power plant of 10 years from now is even slightly more efficient than today’s, that will be a major achievement. The most advanced of today’s “ultra-supercritical” coal-fired plants, which operate at very high temperatures and pressures to maximize the efficiency of combustion, convert up to 48 percent of the coal’s potential energy to electric power; the rest is lost as heat. “Subcritical” plants typically have efficiencies in the mid-30s. The costliest and most advanced technology is an improvement—but not a breakthrough. A breakthrough is what it would take to move beyond reliance on coal.
“I know this is a theological issue for some people,” Julio Friedmann of Lawrence Livermore said. “Solar and wind power are going to be important, but it is really hard to get them beyond 10 percent of total power supply.” He pointed out the huge engineering achievement it has taken to raise the efficiency of solar photovoltaic cells from about 25 percent to about 30 percent; whereas “to make them useful, you would need improvements of two- or threefold in cost,” say from about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour to 6 cents. He recited a skeptic’s line used about the Carter administration’s clean-energy programs—“You’re not going to run a steel plant with solar panels”—and then made a point that summarized the outlook of those who have decided they can best wage the climate fight by working on dirty, destructive coal.
“It is very hard to go around the world and think you can make any difference in carbon-loading the atmosphere without some plan for how people can continue to use coal,” Friedmann said. “It is by far the most prevalent and efficient way to generate electricity. People are going to use it. There is no story of climate progress without a story for coal. In particular, U.S.-China progress on coal.”

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