The “Silver Lining in High Gas Prices”: A Boost for Telecommuting

When I worked in Mayor Bradley’s office in the 1990s, I was part of a task force designed to increase city workers’ telecommuting.  At that time, oil was cheap, but traffic was horrible and air quality still (then as now) the worst in the nation.

We were mindful of the 1984 Olympics traffic experience, when just an 8 percent drop in the amount of cars on the road resulted in traffic that flowed like midnight.  Small changes can have a big impact on the traffic.  Less traffic idling was another anti-smog strategy.  So, we thought it should be possible for City Hall to set an example for the business community.

How silly.  When it comes to management, Los Angeles’ city government will never “lead the way” on anything.

Both management and labor perceived telecommuting as a threat.  Department heads didn’t want anyone out of their sightlines for any longer than was absolutely necessary.  They assumed the worst of their employees.  The unions demanded that telecommuting become a bargaining issue.  Typical of how city unions work, the labor appointee to our task force missed the first two meetings, then came late to the third and asked to speak with me privately.  She said, “We’re not sure if telecommuting is a way for managers to unfairly reward or unfairly punish our members, but either way, we’re going to oppose it.”  Then she sat at the table with the rest of the task force, repeating a few platitudes, knowing she’d killed the idea.

What emerged instead were 9/80 and 4/40 schemes to give some city employees the option of two to four weekdays off per month in return for a longer workday.  What it meant in practice was employees would work the same eight hours worth of tasks, stretched into nine- or ten-hour days, except with an extra day off every week or two.  It was nice for them, but chaotic when it was time to schedule meetings.  Most workers chose Friday to stay home, so Fridays went dead.  Add to that the introduction of casual Fridays — which started after I left the mayor’s office — and the end of each week became a world where Charles Bukowski would have fit right in:  Hardly anyone there, and those who did show up wearing sweats, old T-shirts and shoes you might use for wading into flooded basement.

I don’t know if that’s still the case over there; I haven’t been in City Hall for over four years.  But I digress.

In Southern California, every weekday there are tens of thousands of commuters who drive epic distances to get to work centers in LA and Orange counties.  In the 1990s, the Inland Empire land boom was just beginning.  My last commute was about 30 miles each way and that seemed painful and expensive enough.  Now gas prices have doubled since 2004, and many people are driving west from places like Temecula.   Temecula is almost 90 miles from downtown LA, and more than 65 miles from Santa Ana. Do the math.  If your car gets 20 miles per gallon, pretty good for a beep-n-creep voyage on crowded freeways, it’s costing you nine gallons per day to go back and forth from work = $36 per day just for gas.

I can’t imagine that at least some of those people, and the merciful among their bosses would want to alleviate that.  So, all of a sudden, telecommuting looks less scary, maybe necessary, and perhaps something that will be embraced in a rush.  That’s what Computerworld’s blogger Mike Elgan thinks:

One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with “casual Friday” — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, “extreme telecommuting” — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?

The last remaining barrier to the general acceptance of “extreme telecommuting” is purely cultural — it’s our irrational clinging to obsolete rules for how we work. As the cultural barriers fall, more of us will be freed to work from wherever we please, something which mobile technology and Internet communication already enables.

To me, that’s the silver lining in high gas prices.

Seth Godin, writing about the higher standards business meetings and conferences must meet to make it worth the (increasingly expensive) trip puts the onus on managers to make going to the office a value-added experience, or else:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

I’ve worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my least effective days. It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!

How long before companies in Los Angeles, where the distance of commutes is among the most acute in the nation, adopt this kind of thinking?  I’m not sure they have a choice.

There’s probably money to be made in telling managers how to manage a virtual workforce, because a lot of companies will need to make this shift soon or they’ll lose valuable employees.

(A different version of this post appears on the blog I write for Dolan Media, From 50,000 Feet.)

Sorry To Be So Quiet Lately

About a week ago, I came down with the flu, despite which I did a lot of work, including a business trip to Minneapolis that was exciting but didn’t do much for my health. So it’s been hard to keep up with the minimum of what was required of me, and this blog has become an off-hours project.

In fact, pretty soon, it’ll go into a suspended state. For a good reason. But more about that later.

In the meantime, I’ll try to give this blog a bit more of a pulse. So here’s something that struck me as interesting:

Should We Wave the White Flag on Wind Power?

Sometimes I wonder whether all the people who profess to believe global warming is a crisis are just posturing for either political gain or social acceptability. The signs that we aren’t really serious about it are everywhere.

Or maybe the problem goes deeper. We are now shamelessly hypocritical; demanding sacrifice from others that we defiantly refuse to make ourselves. John Edwards wins the fall-down-laughing award for this tendency, telling a labor group that Americans should give up their SUVs, despite owning several of them himself, and openly using one during campaign stops.

Edwards is obviously pathological. He believes his lifestyle and his campaign are of such surpassing importance to the future of the world that we all would trust him that SUVs, private jets and other smoggy luxuries are essential to his divine mission. What the rest of us do is relatively unimportant, so our sacrifice should be easy.

So Edwards isn’t really the problem. He’s an egotistical buffoon; good material for right-wing bloggers and late-night comedians, embarrassing for the rest of us. He’ll be back in private life in a few short months.

But this column, from the NY Times’ TimesSelect (i.e. $$) service, strikes me as more insidious precisely because it sounds so reasonable. Stanley Fish, an author and law professor, can be eloquent and thought-provoking on a range of topics. That he doesn’t recognize the hypocrisy of his position suggests that millions of intelligent people will also not recognize it:

For five months of the year, I live in the very small town of Andes, N.Y. Each year has its signature event — floods, drought, road construction, caterpillars. And 2006 to 2007 has been the year of the wind turbines.

Like many of the other towns targeted by the wind turbine industry, Andes is a rural community that over the years has lost its economic base. At one time the hills and valleys were home to many small dairy farms, but most of them are no longer in operation, and no industry, light or heavy, has taken their place. Now the area relies for its revenue on retirees and second home owners who are educated, relatively well off and tend to be teachers therapists, lawyers, artists and social workers. In short, liberals. They are all soldiers in Al Gore’s army, into organic foods, hybrid cars, clean air, clean water, the whole bit.

They are also against wind power.

Their reasons are the ones always given by those who wake up to find the wind interests at their door. Even if large wind farms were in place throughout the country, the electricity produced would be a very small percentage of the electricity we use. Because the turbines are huge, 400 feet or more, installing them involves tearing up the ridges on which they are placed. Once in operation, they cast shadows and produce noise. Their blades cause a “flicker” effect, kill birds and interfere with migration. The outsized towers ruin scenic views and depress real-estate values.

These last two reasons are seized on by wind proponents who say that a few elite newcomers are putting their aesthetic preferences ahead of both the community’s welfare and the national effort to shift to green energy as a way of slowing down global warming.

It’s a nice line, but it won’t fly. The wind companies may advertise themselves as environmentalists, but they are really developers, which means that they do things with other peoples’ money — yours. Wind farms are attractive as an investment because the combination of tax credits, tax shelters and accelerated depreciation rates means that investors reap large profits in a few years. Meanwhile, those in the community pay twice for their electricity; once when their taxes go to subsidize the wind interests and a second time when the monthly bill arrives. And that bill will likely be larger than it would have been had the turbines never been erected.

It’s a “nice line?”

Well, if Fish’s arguments mean wind power won’t fly in Andes, N.Y., it won’t fly anywhere. In fact, if his position is widely adopted, you can forget about alternative energy, period.

Nantucket NIMBYs* Mocked On “The Daily Show”

Ra-ther!

Haven’t you been warned?

Now, this is “The Daily Show,” and their satire is relatively benign.  It makes fun of the rich, some of whom happen to be environmentalists or Kennedys.  But what it only glancingly hits is the destructive hypocrisy on display.  Why should a farming community or a rural town put up with the admitted blight of a wind farm if the these people won’t put up with the minimal intrusion of Cape Wind?

Are we serious about global warming or not?  Seems like too many advocates are more focused on trying to convince the bitter-enders that the phenomenon is real (see this week’s Newsweek cover), and not focused enough on pushing past the special-interest opposition to getting vital projects like Cape Wind built.

*NIMBY = Not In My Back Yard

Maybe It’s Time for Some Good News

Like, how about a biodiesel motorcycle!?

Here’s a video link.

When I was a reporter, my AP Stylebook said Diesel should always be capitalized — because  Diesel was his name-o.  Shouldn’t we call it bioDiesel now?

Checking in on CNG: Accidents Will Happen

According to the Daily Breeze, the owner-driver of a SuperShuttle van was killed while refueling at a CNG (compressed natural gas) station in Carson yesterday. Bob Mancuso, 61, was thrown 30 feet by the powerful explosion. There’s no photo to illustrate the story, but the writer describes the back of the van as “twisted out of shape” and the fueling station as littered with “shards of metal and plastic.” It sounds lucky that more people weren’t killed or hurt.

Why did this happen?

Sheriff’s investigators do not know the cause of the 10 a.m. incident, but Mancuso’s wife, Dianne, said her husband had been rear-ended by a drunken driver earlier in the month and had just gotten the vehicle back from the repair shop the night before.

“He got the van back last night and was told everything was OK,” she said.

“It’s not something anybody would ever expect,” she said a few hours after the blast.

Gulp.

Digging around the web for information on CNG, I was a little surprised at the circumstances of this accident. The potential for a deadly accident if a CNG tank is punctured is well-known. I’d be curious what procedures SuperShuttle follows after one of its franchisees is rear-ended to ensure that the fuel tank is not compromised. Does SuperShuttle have an authorized repair shop? Since the franchisee owns and operates his or her vehicle, there’s no revenue coming in if the van’s in the shop. Does that create a perverse incentive to turn around repairs too rapidly?

In the story, Mancuso does not come off as a careless man.

Although a smoker, Mancuso would never hold a lit cigarette while filling the tank, his wife said.

“He had the highest respect for that fuel,” she said. “My husband is stubborn, but he had a lot of respect. That is something you don’t play around with.”

CNG is one of the alternative fuels that began to gain acceptance in the late 1980s as a cleaner alternative to gasoline and diesel. I seem to recall SuperShuttle making a lot of noise about its switch to CNG here locally, but the company’s current website makes no environmental boasts.

The firm was purchased by Veolia Transportation in a deal announced last October. Veolia, which was previously known at Connex, also runs the Metrolink rail service in LA. It’s a subsidiary of the France-based Veolia Environment, which itself was a spin-off from Vivendi. Veolia Environment’s tagline is “The Industry of the Environment.” They’re involved in a number of environmental concerns around the world, but I couldn’t find any specific reference to CNG.

I did look up “CNG accidents” however, and found this horrific story from India, where many of the buses run on CNG:

Ahmedabad, May 15 (PTI): The number of dead in yesterday’s collision between a CNG-run state transport bus and a chemical tanker in Anand district rose to 29 today, police said here.

A total of 29 bodies have been recovered so far and police have been able to identify six of them. They include four women and drivers of the bus and the tanker.

Fourteen people were injured in the accident.

Most of the victims were charred beyond recognition, police said.

The mishap occurred when the bus which was headed towards Vadodara on national highway number eight in Anand district hit the chemical tanker while trying to overtake.

This might be a good time for whatever companies market CNG, CNG fuel tanks, and CNG-powered vehicles to take a look at whether they’re doing all they can to safeguard the public. Are the operators of CNG vehicles properly educated for safety? Are the repair requirements sufficiently stringent? Are the tanks as safe as they can be, given the catastrophic result if they are breached?

CNG is a cleaner-burning, domestically available fuel that will probably get renewed attention as all the presidential candidates campaign for U.S. energy independence and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. When the spotlight hits, the CNG business might want to be ready for questions.

Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street: Lining Up to Run America

Joel Kotkin sees a new power elite and a new political paradigm emerging from behind the ruins of George W. Bush’s failed administration.   The whole essay is worth reading. Here’s a taste:

How much things have changed in the past few decades! Hollywood once split its loyalties carefully among the parties; its only president came from its right. Now, as much as 80 percent of its largesse flows to the Democrats. The schism between Obama supporter David Geffen and those hanging tough with Clinton is important, not only because of how it reflects Hollywood’s endemic pettiness, but because much of the party, instead of regarding these wealthy prima donnas as deluded minstrels, now treats them as enlightened policy gurus.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley was a bastion of middle-of-the-road Republicans like former Congressman Ed Zschau. But as power once vested in industrial firms like Hewlett Packard has shifted to software and internet-based companies, high-tech politics have shifted both left and dark green. The rising powers of the 21st Century Valley, firms like Google and eBay, generally don’t worry about trifles like groundwater regulations or factory emissions since they don’t manufacture anything. Nor do they worry much about labor laws, because their own employees tend to be young, well-educated and well-compensated. This makes it easier to curry favor with enviro-friendly, left-leaning politicians like former Vice President Al Gore.

Perhaps most important of all have been the changes on Wall Street, whose power extends deeply into both Hollywood and Silicon Valley and which now stands as one of the predominant sources of funds for federal office-seekers and related political action committees. Long the bastion of the old Republican establishment and a backer of Bush in his two presidential runs, Wall Street in 2006 gave more money to the Democrats, and that trend seems to be accelerating along with the implosion of the Republicans.

(snip)

How did this corporate power shift occur so quickly and dramatically? To a large extent, the answer lies in the utter failure of George W. Bush and his administration. Bush came to office with the support of a Sun Belt elite that drew its wealth and power from the great economic surge west and south after World War II and for nearly a quarter-century dominated American political life

Donors from this group of businesses propelled the careers of such substantial figures as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, and California’s Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Arguably, their final triumph, helped by the demographic shift to the South and West, lay with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 congressional takeover.

Back in the late 1970s, founding fathers of the Sun Belt power grab, such as oilman Henry Salvatori and Litton Industries founder Tex Thornton, shared with me their conviction that the old Eastern establishment lacked the power and conviction to lead the country. They felt America needed to be guided by more vital, more clear-headed leaders. Economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter years, as well as the perception of America’s weakness both against the Soviet Union and terrorist states such as Iran, lent credibility to these beliefs among a large part of the public.

Like most successful elites, these leaders possessed a relatively coherent agenda. It centered on gaining a free hand over the nation’s natural resources, a low-tax economic policy and support for a strong national defense. The divisive moral agenda, particularly helpful in wooing working-class and Southern voters, was grafted on later but was never widely embraced by the right’s corporate funders.

Bush’s disastrous tenure has pretty much destroyed his backers’ credibility on all three issues. High energy prices and shifting climate-change politics have decimated the traditional agenda of oil and gas companies. An uneven and poorly shared economic expansion has convinced many middle-class erstwhile conservatives that Bush’s low tax, pro-business policies do not really work for them. Finally, the catastrophe in Iraq has undermined support for the overt, aggressive national defense policy long supported by Sun Belt conservatives and their defense industry allies.

(snip)

Once they recover from their post-Bush euphoria, however, traditional liberals should realize that the ongoing power shift does not necessarily signify the rise of a populist agenda. The wealthiest fifth of Americans are now equally likely to be Democrats or Republicans, a shocking shift from the nearly 70 percent Republican cast of this same quintile just two decades ago. The “party of the people” increasingly now must appeal as much to the affluent as the working-class voter.

I’ve been struggling for a “big picture” that explains the changes in politics in the past couple of years that goes beyond the tactical novelties like the netroots and YouTube.  Kotkin’s is pretty coherent. 

A possible flaw, however, is that his analysis completely omits 9/11, the jihad against the West, the “war on terror.”  Or, is he implying that 9/11 is no longer pertinent, the war on terror is quiescent, and that whole policy arena doesn’t cut politically anymore?  That would come as a huge, rude surprise to the blogospheric right, who think the war on terror is the only issue.  But maybe that’s the case.

We’ve Got Global Warming Right Where We Want It

First, former Vice President Al Gore goes to Congress, winning converts to the cause of reversing man-made global warming, and support for his proposal to cap U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide at current levels, and begin cutting them back by 90 percent over the next 43 years.  The political trend gets noticed:

As Gore concedes, he is more salesman than scientist. But most scientists acknowledge that he is absolutely right on the fundamentals: Humans are artificially warming the world, the risks of inaction are great, the time frame for action is growing short and meaningful cuts in emissions will happen only if the United States takes the lead. An increasing number of business leaders and politicians outside Washington are moving his way.

Congress is paying attention to this shift. Representative Henry Waxman of California has signed up 127 co-sponsors for a very tough bill he proposed last week that seeks to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by midcentury, which is close to what Gore wants. When you consider that Gore and President Bill Clinton could not find five senators willing to ratify the far more modest 1997 Kyoto treaty – which called for a mere 7 percent reduction below 1990 levels, with no further reductions scheduled after 2012 – you get some idea of how far the debate has come.

But then, project-by-project, in states across the country, viable ways to actually achieve these kinds of cuts get blocked.  From today’s LA Times:

In a blustery stretch of desert two hours east of Los Angeles, where many of the world’s first power-producing windmills were built, a plan for more turbines has triggered a backlash that echoes a national debate over the merits of wind energy.

A proposal to build about 50 windmills next to Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument has aroused passions in a region already dotted with 3,000 windmills, with opponents charging that the wind energy industry has neither delivered the promised power nor spared the environment.

The industry, which was born in California, now has projects in 40 states and $8 billion in investments over the last two years, according to the American Wind Energy Assn.

Supporters say wind power has come of age and will help slow global warming, while critics contend that it has delivered only a quarter of its promised energy, proved lethal to wildlife and, in the view of many residents, blighted the landscape.

Around the country, Internet blogs and anti-wind energy websites hum with angry postings about projects on picturesque ridgelines, seascapes and farmlands from New England to Texas.

Politicians and celebrities have weighed in. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and his Nantucket Island neighbors have so far successfully fought installation of offshore turbines.

Their opposition, in turn, has prompted criticism that rich liberals are all for alternative power providing it doesn’t mar their views.

So, are we serious about global warming or not?  Wind power is not perfect. But locations like San Gorgonio Pass, where the wind blows constantly, are inherently scarce.  We don’t have the luxury of ruling these sites off-limits, even when there is some other environmental impact.  Local politics should not drive how the pros and cons are weighed.

If we were serious about global warming, there would be a national policy to encourage development of wind projects in locations where there is the highest potential to exploit it for baseline power. Perhaps we should require environmental impact reports for each site — with the burden of proof being shifted to advocates of the no-build option.

I know that Gore and Waxman probably see the coming battles to be about conservation, green industries, solar power incentives, etc.   And certainly that’s going to be part of it.  But a properly located wind energy site is one of the few alternative-energy methods now available that is even close to being cost-competitive with burning fossil fuels.  Shouldn’t we be looking there first? 

Also, why isn’t there more discussion of hydro power?  According to this site, there are 80,000 dams in the U.S.  Only 2,400 of them generate electricity.  Wikipedia’s entry on hydroelectricity articulate the case against the energy source.  But what about installing turbines in existing dams?  If the dams are already built, what’s the incremental environmental damage from doing that?

Gore needs to shift his salesmanship toward selling solutions. Rep. Waxman is following the old Clean Air Act model of setting high standards and forcing local areas to meet them or else face lawsuits and federal sanctions.  That’s great if your purpose is to grandstand against enemies of the environment.  But I’d prefer we try to depoliticize this issue, acknowledge (which Gore does) that it won’t be easy, and stop creating binds for ourselves by simultaneously pursuing two competing environmental goals.  In San Gorgonio, in Cape Cod and elsewhere, we need to make tough choices.

If’ we’re really serious.  

Green Topsy Turvy

You will find this post from Treehugger.com startling, especially in light of the fresh round of attacks on Al Gore’s lifestyle. 

(Didn’t I warn people that the disconnect between Gore’s preachings and Gore’s sense of entitlement might blow up? Now environmentalists who live nothing like Gore are defending his energy gluttony with the same craven language that Communist sympathizers used 40 years ago to justify the palaces of the nomenklatura.) 

Anyway, back to Treehugger, a site about “mak(ing) sustainability mainstream”…

…is it possible that George Bush is a secret Green? Evidently his Crawford Winter White House has 25,000 gallons of rainwater storage, gray water collection from sinks and showers for irrigation, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling.

And you will find the comments a riot of invective coming from both sides.  Like this one here:

Oh come on PEOPLE!!! What, do you think GWB chose the stone, geothermal system, rainwater harvesting system, and insisted on the southern orientation of the main windows? PUHLEASE!!! He happened to have a halfway enlightened architect who designed a house that pleased him aesthetically and happened to also have these features as a side note. This is what celebs and people of stature do: hire those who can make them look good in one way or another.

GWB doesn’t have a friggin clue, other than he can tell his friends how green ONE of his homes is.

Followed by this one:

Why does he need a clue? He hired someone who did. That counts too.

All I can say is, bring on more news like this!  (Or like this!)  

The left-right blogosphere divide is so 2006.  I want everyone who believes all that is good resides on their side and all that is evil and dishonest on the other to experience sudden and repeated attacks of vertigo that call their worldview into question. Today’s as good a day to start as any.

Environmentalists shouldn’t worry about any of this.  It’s a sign, maybe, that more people are taking environmentalism and global warming seriously.  Americans are not ideologues by nature.  They are questioners.  The embrace of environmental consciousness will mean many smart people of good faith will come to different conclusions as to what constitutes sustainability or good policy.  It won’t be dictated from above.

What’s So Funny ‘Bout Lightbulbs and Global Warming…?*

A year ago, I called attention to a British environmental activist’s campaign to ban the incandescent light bulb.  “Ban the Bulb” had a simplicity and elegance to it that appealed to this exiled PR man’s sense of how to communicate the imperatives of global warming. 

I’m not into finger-wagging on climate change, or attaching blame.  I’m into solutions, the less bothersome the better.  Getting people to switch to a source of lighting that uses dramatically less energy and thus is much cheaper over its lifespan makes more sense to me than 1,000 Al Gore “Inconvenient Truth” spinoffs or Arianna Huffington autograph sessions.

Just as I expected, a U.S. political leader has embraced the idea, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a Californian, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine.  From the press release on his website:

“Incandescent light bulbs were first developed almost 125 years ago, and since that time they have undergone no major modifications,” Assemblymember Levine said. “Meanwhile, they remain incredibly inefficient, converting only about five percent of the energy they receive into light. It’s time to take a step forward – energy-efficient bulbs are easy to use, require less electricity to do the same job, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and save consumers money.”

According to the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a nonprofit organization that focuses on energy policy, replacing a 75-watt incandescent light bulb with a 20-watt compact fluorescent would result in the same amount of light but would save 1,300 pounds of carbon dioxide and save customers $55 over the life of the bulb (while the life of one 75-watt incandescent bulb is roughly 750 hours, the life of a compact fluorescent is a whopping 10,000 hours). Meanwhile, incandescent bulbs use 750 kWh over 10,000 hours, while compact fluorescents use only 180 kWh.

Well, I hope Assemblyman Levine didn’t count on getting a lot of support for this idea based on my advocacy.  This idea is getting the California nuts and flakes treatment from some quarters.  Ann Althouse:

This is a California idea. If I lived there and faced this ban, I’d buy my lightbulbs in another state. It’s just too horrible to live in such an ugly glare. People who have no aesthetic sense don’t understand how a limit like this affects people. I’d be happy to make up for it by turning off more lights or using dimmers.

Why don’t you ban air conditioning?

Glenn Reynolds:

I’m quite interested in compact fluorescents — I’ve installed quite a few in my house, and I’ve been experimenting to see which ones suck (most of them) and which ones are okay. But banning incandescents? That’s just silly.

Now a ban on private jets? Much less intrusive, and there’s lots of reason to think that this sort of thing has gotten out of hand. Flying commercial — you can even fly First Class if you want — is a small sacrifice for our business and political and entertainment leaders to pay in order to fight the scourge of global warming. Plus, who knows, if the “jet set” starts flying commercial again, maybe commercial flying will get better . . . .

Certainly, Reynolds has a point about private jets — I’ve made the same point.  And, I get it that some compact-fluorescents are ugly, or flicker like office flourescents, and for some people can trigger migraines.  But let’s chill out here. Levine’s talking about 2012. If, as Reynolds says, there are some that are “okay,” why is it so hard to imagine further developments in the next five years to give consumers more good choices? It simply beggars common sense that the only alternative to a 125-year-old wasteful technology is an “ugly glare.”

Besides, the likelihood of Levine’s proposal becoming law anytime soon is nonexistent.  It’s a publicity stunt — the good kind of publicity stunt, one that educates people and stimulates a more informed debate.  Maybe it will sell more energy-saving bulbs.  Maybe it will cause people to turn off lights when they aren’t using them.  Maybe we’ll figure out a tax incentive to accomplish the same thing.  The debate has to start somewhere.  

Right now, I hate all the rhetoric about global warming. It’s so apocalyptic, on both sides.  Let’s get down to the nitty gritty.  Assume there is at least a good chance there is man-made climate change.  Assume there is an opportunity to mitigate it through a reduction in pollution from greenhouse gases.  Look for the most cost-effective, least economically damaging ways to attain those reductions. Push the technology, fund the research.  Make things happen. 

Maybe the seas will rise.  Or maybe future scientists will conclude the panic was silly.  We can’t know the future.  But we can make changes.  Levine’s proposal is a practical contribution, and I’d like to see more of them.  

*Update:  Just noticed that Glenn Reynolds has a new post up about compact flourescents. As he finds more bulbs that give off a satisfactory glow, his tone shifts.  Given his huge readership and his reputation as a small-l libertarian, he’s doing a lot of good.  Obviously, a guy like him will never endorse a bill that mandates a change in the market — he calls regulatory intervention the “hair-shirt approach.”  But Glenn’s talking as if Levine’s bill has a prayer.  It doesn’t. 

Reynolds and Levine, together, are educating people based on their respective positions in the intellectual firmament.  I’m sure Levine’s proposal got a lot of liberals and environmentalists to say, oops, why haven’t I made the switch?  If they’re interested in a non-tree-hugging consumer’s evaluation, they can turn to Reynolds.  Blogecology at its finest.

Wal-Mart’s Compact-Flourescent Push

This story, and the new Wal-Mart policy concerning energy conservation it describes, undoubtedly has heads exploding all over Washington, D.C.  On the one hand, good for Wal-Mart to set an ambitous goal to overcome public resistance to a proven technology that will cut energy used for lighting by 75 percent.  On the other hand, this is Wal-Mart, and they do good things the same way they do bad things — like a two-ton gorilla:

In September 2005, (CEO H. Lee Scott Jr.) and Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart’s vice president for strategy and sustainability, drove 6,000 feet to the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire with Steve Hamburg, an environmental studies professor at Brown University, and Fred Krupp, the president of the advocacy group Environmental Defense.

At the summit, where scientists measure climate change 24 hours a day, the men discussed global warming, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer and what Wal-Mart could do about them.

“You need to look at what is being sold on the shelf,” Mr. Hamburg recalled telling Mr. Scott over a dinner of turkey and mashed potatoes. He began talking excitedly about compact fluorescent bulbs. “Very few products,” he said, “are such a clear winner” for consumers and the environment.

Soon after returning from the trip, Wal-Mart publicly embraced the bulbs with the zealotry of a convert. In meetings with suppliers, buyers for the chain laid out their plans: lower prices, expanding the shelf space dedicated to them and heavily promoting the technology.

Light-bulb manufacturers, who sell millions of incandescent lights at Wal-Mart, immediately expressed reservations. In a December 2005 meeting with executives from General Electric, Wal-Mart’s largest bulb supplier, “the message from G.E. was, ‘Don’t go too fast. We have all these plants that produce traditional bulbs,’ ” said one person involved with the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of an agreement not to speak publicly about the negotiations.

The response from the Wal-Mart buyer was blunt, this person said. “We are going there,” the buyer said. “You decide if you are coming with us.”

In the end, as Wal-Mart suppliers generally do, the bulb makers decided to come with the company.

Philips, despite protests from packaging designers, agreed to change the name of its compact fluorescent bulbs from “Marathon” to “energy saver.” To keep up with swelling orders from the chain, Osram Sylvania took to flying entire planeloads of compact fluorescent bulbs from Asia to the United States.

“When Wal-Mart sets its mind to something with a narrow objective like that, they are going to make it happen,” said Jim Jubb, vice president for consumer product sales at Sylvania.

Last February, I wrote this post about “Ban the Bulb,” founded by Dr. Matt Prescott, who asked, sensibly:

If we cannot deny ourselves incandescent light bulbs, which would require minimal sacrifice, how are we ever going to do the really difficult things such as cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, buying smaller cars or reducing our use of finite natural resources?

“Ban the Bulb” seems to approve of Wal-Mart’s policies, but bemoans the fact that the giant discounter dismissed the idea of supporting a ban on energy-wasting incandescent bulbs as “too radical.”

Even if Wal Mart doesn’t want to be too radical, perhaps it could consider the implementation of programme which would allow it to phase out the sale of incandescents over the next 10 years…

This would clearly be a lot easier than tackling the carbon emissions associated with its supply chains, stores, shoppers and distribution network, and would allow the barriers to beneficial change to be seriously tackled.

An Inconvenient Truth…but a Very Convenient Travel Schedule

What is it about the most prominent environmental activists? Especially those who speak out on climate change? Why do they need private planes? And so much air conditioning?

I realize this op-ed was written by someone who is hostile to liberals, so it’s fine to take it with a grain of sea salt. Maybe everything he says about Al Gore is a pack of lies, although I’ve yet to hear anyone refute it:

For someone who says the sky is falling, (Gore) does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film’s distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore’s office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Eco-celebrities’ use of private planes was chided a bit more gently in this editorial in today’s LA Times:

In Hollywood, carbon offsets are the successor to the Prius: the hippest way for stars to flaunt their conspicuous non-consumption. Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters offset tour emissions by protecting forests. Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt invested in trees too. The producers of “Syriana” got into the act. This year’s Super Bowl was “carbon-neutral” — and so was the World Cup.

But why let the famous people have all the fun? Regular folks can buy carbon offsets too, using any of a number of Internet-based calculators to measure their own carbon footprints and purchase affordable mini-offsets, which might run anywhere from $30 to a few hundred dollars. Some websites will even send a decal or sticker suitable for the bumper of a Prius. Or Hummer, as the case may be.

It’s a nice idea, as far as it goes — a little consciousness-raising can be a good thing, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to get more windmills spinning on the grid. But as some environmentalists have noted, this kind of do-gooder consumerism doesn’t necessarily achieve an overall net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (which is, after all, the ultimate goal).

That will take regulatory oversight and global coordination. Not to mention a dose of real sacrifice from all of us — including those of us who live in 15,000-square-foot estates in Beverly Hills and travel in private jets.

Unless you are travelling to extremely remote places, private planes are utterly dispensible. If you’re doing a PR tour to launch a movie in major metropolitan markets, you can probably get there on a commercial flight.

It seems bizarre to have to explain this, but in case Arianna Huffington, Al Gore or Cameron Diaz are reading: Commercial flights are like mass transit, except in the air. The idea is, for the same amount of fuel (and pollution) that your private plane uses to get you, your make-up artist, your flack and other members of your entourage from LAX to JFK, a commercial carrier can take hundreds of people!

“B-b-but what about carbon offsets? I’m cool if I use those, right?”

Well, as the LA Times says, yeah, I suppose, technically. But how about this idea? Calculate how much carbon offset you would have to buy if you took your private plane, and go buy it. Then, take a commercial flight anyway. That way, you haven’t just evened the score — you’ve actually made a difference.

More importantly, global warming skeptics won’t be able to dismiss your cause by pointing out what a big hypocrite you are.

Hear me now and believe me later: Celebrities who claim environmental leadership but take private planes hurt the environment. They hurt it. I’ll say it again: You’re hurting the environment. You might as well just vote for Republicans. You might as well be in a secret meeting with Dick Cheney. You might as well be BP, spending millions on the “beyond petroleum” PR campaign while skimping on Alaska pipeline inspections. You make the real environmentalists, the men and women who work for grassroots organizations for low wages, look foolish.

If you just have to take private planes, if First Class just isn’t first-class enough for you, that’s okay. There are plenty of other good causes to choose from. But stay away from the environment.

Now don’t get me started on the stars with multiple residences who keep all of them air conditioned like meat lockers….

Wind Energy at Sea

A German company, SkySails, has developed an intriguing application for wind energy: Powering ships at sea; from yachts to, eventually, the giant freighters that fill our Wal-Marts and Home Depots with stuff to buy, and our air with contaminants and greenhouse gases, in particular sulfur dioxide.

Beluga Shipping of Bremen announced it would be the first shipping company to use SkySails’ huge mechanized kites. By next year SkySails will have installed a 1,500-square foot nylon kite on a 12,000-ton Beluga vessel, which will run routes between Europe and the Americas.

A kite? Think about what happens when you fly a kite. Even though you don’t want the kite to pull you, its force suggests that maybe it could. Your wrist and hands make subtle adjustments to catch the most wind so you can keep your kite aloft and your line tight. By dipping or circling the kite, you can generate more force. Same thing happens with a SkySail, only the steering of the kite is done by an autopilot that constantly feeds wind information to a computer on board the ship.

This Popular Science article (which the SkySails site links to) discusses several wind energy ideas for shipping vessels, including polyurethane-coated sails attached to masts designed to mimic the bone structure of a bat’s wings, and blimp-like kites that would act like aerial tugboats. The pitch to the notably conservative and highly cost sensitive shipping industry: Reducing fuel costs, which are the largest single cost borne by freighters.

I don’t know if the International Maritime Organization is studying kites and sails for its members, but last week they did announce a review of its emission standards. Local officials in port cities like Los Angeles and Long Beach have despaired for years about their limited ability to control pollution from shipping as the traffic (and its importance to the economy) grows. Even the U.S. EPA has been pretty much helpless, they say, in controlling an amorphous industry whose ships will change flags at the drop of a hat.

But, according to the LA Times, the IMO’s new look at air pollution “is the result of pressure from European nations.” It certainly was my observation over the years that U.S. officials tended to shrug at the complexity of regulating the shipping industry, and that individual ports feared offending customers who might bolt to another port that wouldn’t hassle them.

The idea of having a kite help pull a freighter is a quantum leap beyond the discussion of marginal reductions of sulfur in fuel. But it would certainly make shipping cool for the first time in a long while.

P.S. Thanks, Todd, for the tip!

Global Temperatures, Political Temperaments

The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson is getting slagged all over the blogosphere for saying this:

From 2003 to 2050, the world’s population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that’s too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world’s poor to their present poverty — and freeze everyone else’s living standards — we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: Improve energy efficiency, or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).

The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent — and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do “renewables” (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.

Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.

…and for concluding this:

The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it’s really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don’t solve the engineering problem, we’re helpless.

Among the many responses to Samuelson’s argument, there was this from Charlie Cray on Huffington Post:

If Global Warming teaches us anything, it is that as a public policy tool we need a new type of economic way of thinking. Otherwise economics will become increasingly irrelevant to the facts as they exist. Key to this is the economists’ blind devotion to growth: Just as growth at all costs was the culture of corporations like Enron, so in living systems it is the ideology of the cancer cell. In a world of limits, it is a destructive paradigm.

Therefore, pretending that global warming is merely an “engineering problem” is to ignore the failure of economics to address the systemic causes in the structure of the economy. I agree with Samuelson’s that we have to address global warming as an engineering problem, but it’s much more than that. The problem is unlikely to be solved merely by a series of drop-in technologies, like Thorium-powered nukes. That’s just a convenient excuse to dodge these dicier political questions about the structure of our economy and the significant consequences of its failure to account for the common good.

So I ask myself, of two possible solutions to global warming, which is more likely to actually occur? A solution to “an engineering problem?” Or addressing “these dicier political questions about the structure of our economy?” Cray goes on:

Global Warming is the great challenge to this generation of Americans, just as the challenge for the last one was the defeat of communism. Our ability to develop a renewed sense of collective security — a security that is almost fractal — i.e. replicable at the local and global levels — will require us to toss out the old ideas of unity around national purpose at the expense of local health and global citizenship — i.e. the enterprise of war.

This is a big challenge. One that we have yet to even define very well. And one that will require all of us — economists as well as everyone else — to be courageous enough to take strong action and stretch our imaginations much further than we have so far.

I would have to agree with Cray that “we” have yet to “define very well” what he’s proposing. The comparison with the “defeat of communism” suggests he’s looking for an overthrow of the current economic system. Here’s the difference: When communism was overthrown, there was another model ready to be plugged in — the economic philosophy of the victorious side in the Cold War, democratic capitalism. Looking ahead, if — in the name of preventing a global environmental catastrophe — we overthrow the “old ideas” about the necessity of economic growth without knowing how we’ll replace them, how can we be sure the next system will work any better at limiting CO2 emissions?

I don’t see why an intelligent person can’t embrace both Al Gore’s sense of mission to wake up Americans and the world to the dire potential consequences of global warming, and Robert Samuelson’s search for technological answers. Why must we take on the additional mega-challenge of developing an entirely new economic system, especially when no one can tell us what it will look like? This is a test that intellectual, political and economic elites have failed in the past, and there are lots of reasons to lack confidence in those who occupy elite positions now.

One of Cray’s commenters, “runninute,” hits the nail on the head. (He’s a better thinker than speller):

China and India are not part of Kyoto. That doesn’t mean they haven’t signed up yet (they have) it means that Kyoto places no restrictions on their emission of greenhouse gases. How can expect to reverse greenhouse effects if the two largest populated nations with fast-growing economies do not have to participate in reversing the effects of man? It is for this major oversight that the US , Russia, and Britain refused to sign the Kyoto treaty. If China and India had been covered, the US government pledged to follow the guidelines. Wouldn’t that be fair?

Should we ignore Kytoto and other nations (third world or otherwise) and take independent action while we lobby others to join us? Yes. And we are doing this. However, we have a large group of environmentalists that oppose US initiatives at every turn. They files lawsuits to halt construction of wind farms, solar farms, nuclearl power plants, geothermal power plants, hydro-electric power plants and tidal power generation. They halt construction of plants that produce materials for use in “alternative energy” (such as solar cell plants which can’t be built in the US because of environmental protection laws and so must be built overseas).

Where is Al Gore on alternative energy? He has opposed nuclear energy, but he hugs Kennedy who shut down wind farms off Nantucket. Al kisses up to the environmental groups who shut down wind farms in California and Nebraska. Al makes speeches to groups who closed hydro-electric power plants and who opposed new plants. So what alternative energy are we to use?

Don’t tell me fuel cells or electric cars (EV1). Those technologies require generation of electricity to make them operate (you need electricity to get hydrogen and you need electricity for your EV1). We have to construct power plants in order to use those “emmission-free” technologies. Problem is, the electrical generation plants that make the technologies possible burn fossil fuels and there is a net energy loss due to entropy and the law of thermodynamics (ask a physicist).

Can we conserve more? Yes. Can we use less? Yes. All of these require increased costs and less public choice. We can say “you can’t have an SUV and all cars must get 80 mpg and carry only 2 people”, but is that the decision we want to make? Do we want to restrict choice in that manner? We could all live in “honycomb” houses (large high-rises that recirculate energy and are build out of materials that are energy efficient) which would save energy. We could restrict floor space to 300 sq ft per person. But do we want to place such limits on ourselves and limit choice to that degree? We could turn out street lights and advertising after 10 PM and put curfews of 11 PM on people to conserve energy, but are we willing to restrict individual decision-making to that degree?

Bureaucrats at Kyoto came up with a politically unsustainable solution to global warming. Environmental groups take internally contradictory positions that both push and retard the growth of alternative energy. There is a romantic element to all political elites, right and left, who think the answer to everything can be found in the beauty of their philosophy. The flip side of that romanticism is that “compromise” becomes a dirty word.

The attraction of Robert Samuelson-style “engineering solutions” is they are ideology-neutral. Go ahead, Charlie Cray, work up a blueprint of a new economic system, and then we can put it up for a vote. But in the meantime, Al Gore and others say we can’t delay acting on global warming. Is your new economic system going to be ready first, or will a new technological/engineering fix?

My bet is on technology. That doesn’t make me the enemy of the planet.

Solar Power Meets Nanotechnology at Caltech

Cal-Tech and BP Solar will collaborate on a project to deploy nanotechnology to provide cheaper and more efficient solar energy. From a joint press release:

For an initial five-year period, researchers at Caltech and BP will explore a method of growing silicon by creating arrays of nanorods rather than by casting ingots and cutting wafers, which is the current conventional way of producing silicon for solar cells. Nanorods are small cylinders of silicon that can be 100 times smaller than a human hair and would be tightly packed in an array like bristles in a brush.

A solar cell made up of an array of nanorods will be able to efficiently absorb light along the length of the rods while also collecting the electricity generated by sunlight more efficiently than a conventional solar cell.

The Caltech solar nanorod program will be directed by Nate Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry, and Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor and professor of applied physics and materials science. In addition, eight postdoctoral researchers and graduate students will work on the project.

“Nanotechnology can offer new and unique ways to make solar-cell materials that are cheaper yet could perform nearly as well as conventional materials,” says Lewis, an expert in surface chemistry and photochemistry.

Lewis’s group will investigate uses of nanotechnology to create designer solar-cell materials, from nanorods to nanowires, in order to change the conventional paradigm for solar-cell materials.

“Using nanorods as the active elements opens up very new approaches to design and low-cost fabrication of high-performance solar cells,” adds Atwater, an expert in electronic and optoelectronic materials and devices.

I’ve been joking with friends lately that the solutions to global warming are going to come from nanotechnology. But it looks like I might’ve been right!

Just on an intuitive level, look at it this way. All energy systems operate inefficiently to some degree. Some of that inefficiency translates into pollution. Inefficiency also stands in the way of conservation.

Nanotechnology, in particular molecular manufacturing, has the potential to produce products at a minuscule fraction of the energy required to make those products today. (Look at this video for a sense of what the molecular manufacturing gurus think is coming in the next 20 years or so.) Or, assuming we continue to rely on fossil fuels, nanotechnology could be used to filter out greenhouse gases at power plants, trapping them for disposal. It can also be used to greatly reduce the inefficiency of transferring energy from its natural source into its end use — by changing, say, the molecular structure of what we use to transmit energy.

Some potential exists, perhaps, for nanotechnology to be applied directly to reducing the existing, dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Many scientists believe we are already “past the point of no return” to avoid the dramatic effects of global warming — that in fact we are already seeing them.

If so, it won’t be enough to cut future emissions, even at dramatic levels, although it is no less vital that we do so. The logical consequences of such a view is that we need to focus more attention on getting carbon dioxide that is in the air now, stripped out of the air. Nanotechnology would surely play a role in this admittedly outlandish idea, because of the large amounts of energy required. But wouldn’t it be just too elegant if the Caltech/BP research project resulted in an applicable solar solution to the energy needs of an air-stripping project?

I don’t want to sound like P.T. Barnum or Jimmy Swaggert about all this. Nanotechnology sounds many alarm bells, even among its advocates. For all its potential to shift our economy away from its reliance on high-energy manufacturing, this magic genie poses a host of other environmental, economic and global security threats. But it often surprises me how low on the news media’s radar screen the march of nanotechnology appears.

For example, the story at the start of this post about Caltech, a major local university, and BP, the successor-by-acquisition to LA’s own Arco? Big news here, here, here, and here. But in Caltech’s hometown media? This story in the LA Times, buried on the bottom of page 2 of the Business section. Nothing in the Daily News. Nothing in the Pasadena Star News.  Nothing in the San Diego Union Tribune, in the city where the announcement was made.  From what I can tell, both Caltech and BP Solar put out a news release on this yesterday, and paid PR Newswire to distribute it. The editors saw it and said “ehh.”

But there was lots and lots of room for this. Nothing like Hooters, puppies and an outbreak of prudish hypocrisy to distract our media from what we used to call news. Maybe Caltech should talk to Hooters about setting up a foundation for global warming research.

(I’ll run a pilot program right here. I’ll tag this post “Hooters” (along with the more appropriate tags) and see how many extra hits I get.)

They Call it Issue Advertising. We Call it Boob Bait.

If you live in Washington D.C., you might want to check in on the Competitive Enterprise Institute. They've been saying some strange things lately. Maybe someone up there took the wrong medication.

The CEI has started a new issue advertising campaign to counter former Vice President Gore's global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." I'm not opposed to the energy industry or the business community having its say on global warming. The scientific consensus that the earth is getting warmer doesn't answer all, or even most, of the policy questions this "inconvenient truth" poses. We need a robust, informed conversation about it.

Based on the CEI's ad campaign, however, I have to assume industry fears this conversation and wants only to derail it.

"Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life," has to be the most embarassing tagline I've seen since the "Join the Coffee Achievers" campaign celebrating caffeine overdose.

The two ads carrying the CEI slogan, which you can see here, attempt to bolster their challenge to the science of global warming by saying, essentially, that carbon dioxide should not be considered a pollutant, since we breathe it.

Out. We breathe it out. For us and our fellow animals, carbon dioxide is a waste product. Using the CEI's logic, we're wasting an awful lot of money on sewer systems, since the stuff that runs through those things is also, uh, natural. Plants use carbon dioxide. Plants use poop, too. But that doesn't mean we should all go s***ting in the forest like we used to.

Anyway, the theory of global warming doesn't equate carbon dioxide with smog. It's all about how earth's climate — which geological history shows to be inherently unstable already — is being transformed by the heat-trapping effect of excessive carbon dioxide.

Who are these ads for? Until now, I always thought of CEI as a conservative, free-market think tank, a respectable vehicle for scholars of that persuasion. No more. These disgraceful ads are "boob bait for the bubbas" of the right.

Zero Tolerance for Anti-Wind Energy NIMBYism

Has it only been a couple of years since environmental groups wrestled states and public utilities into making commitments to significant boosts in renewable power?

When notoriously conservative utilities said yes, it was largely because their experts were telling them that wind-energy was becoming viable and cost-competitive. Now, the environmental community is very excited about wind power projects — excited about killing them off, I mean.

From Anne Applebaum's column in Wednesday's Washington Post:

Already, activists and real estate developers have stalled projects across Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. In Western Maryland, a proposal to build wind turbines alongside a coal mine, on a heavily logged mountaintop next to a transmission line, has just been nixed by state officials who called it too environmentally damaging. Along the coast of Nantucket, Mass. — the only sufficiently shallow spot on the New England coast — a coalition of anti-wind groups and summer homeowners, among them the Kennedy family, also seems set to block Cape Wind, a planned offshore wind farm. Their well-funded lobbying last month won them the attentions of Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), who, though normally an advocate of a state's right to its own resources, has made an exception for Massachusetts and helped pass an amendment designed to kill the project altogether.

The brand-name environmental groups seem fearful of taking on well-funded local anti-wind energy organizations that are systematically destroying the potential of an energy source that is the very definition of renewable. The environmental community needs to change course. Their credibility is at stake. The environmental community earned its way to the adults' table in making energy policy, but there's still a high-chair open at the baby table; and that's where they're headed if this nonsense doesn't stop.

Capturing energy from renewable sources will be land-intensive. There are a limited number of suitable areas. Wind power needs to be harvested where it's windy. Solar power needs access to the sun. Geothermal power is here and there, but not everywhere. To secure and distribute enough of this energy to replace fossil fuels at the percentages contemplated in Renewable Portfolio Standards will require building structures that most would deem less attractive than, say, a rustic old bridge or a weeping willow tree.

But if you want to seriously tackle the oil economy and make a dent in global warming — get over it, and let them build windmills.

Talk About Zen P.R.!**

I know I was going to shut up for most of April, but this is too interesting to overlook:

At first glance, the video looks like a typical 30-second car commercial: a shiny sport utility vehicle careers down a country road lined with sunflower fields, jaunty music playing in the background.

Then, white lettering appears on the screen: "$70 to fill up the tank, which will last less than 400 miles. Chevy Tahoe."

The commercial is the product of one of the advertising industry's latest trends: user-generated advertising. On March 13, Chevrolet introduced a Web site allowing visitors to take existing video clips and music, insert their own words and create a customized 30-second commercial for the 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe.

In theory, the company was hoping that visitors to its Web site would e-mail their own videos around the Web, generating interest for the Tahoe through what is known as viral marketing. By the measure of Chevrolet Tahoe videos circulating the blogosphere and the video-hosting Web sites like YouTube, that goal was achieved. But the videos that were circulated most widely like the commercial that attacked the S.U.V. for its gas mileage, may not be what Chevrolet had in mind.

Nor was the ad using a sweeping view of the Tahoe driving through a desert. "Our planet's oil is almost gone," it said. "You don't need G.P.S. to see where this road leads."

Youtube.com is full of examples of these user-generated Chevy Tahoe ads that attack the whole idea of Chevy Tahoes as responsible for global warming or imminent oil shortages. But they're not all environmental lectures. This one takes a Freudian perspective on the whole notion of conspicuous consumption, as does this one, albeit more crudely.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the potential for a Maybelline cosmetics site to be hijacked by those who hated the product. It appeared to me that the Maybelline people had probably accounted for that possibility, and figured that since negative comments were going to be made anyway, why hide from them? Chevrolet's advertisers have apparently come to the same conclusion, according to the New York Times:

A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Melisa Tezanos, said the company did not plan to shut down the anti-S.U.V. ads.

"We anticipated that there would be critical submissions," Ms. Tezanos said. "You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space."

Drew Neisser, the president and chief executive at Renegade Marketing, a New York agency specializing in nontraditional marketing that is part of Dentsu, said companies had such a strong desire for user-generated advertising that they were willing to accept the risks. "There's this gold rush fever about consumer-generated content," he said. "Everybody wants to have consumer-generated content, and Chevy Tahoe doesn't want to be left behind."

Is it just that they're "willing to accept the risks?" Or are marketers finally deciding to participate in the real conversations about their products, the ones that say "yes, but…?"

Wouldn't it be great if political ads were opened up this way? Where, instead of shoving a message down your throat, a candidate would allow voters to express themselves about their platforms? And why are only advertisers of consumer products taking this alleged "risk?" Wouldn't a smart PR campaign also make room for critics and for, y'know, reality?*

I'm confident the people at Chevrolet are aware that some consumers will never buy an SUV strictly due to environmental concerns, and that others are conflicted and would appreciate some respect being given to their hesitancy. Letting customers joke about it shows the company is in touch. Going a step further would be to say, "We hear you" and respond in a way that treats these concerns thoughfully.

*(The best example is, of course, Amazon. If you put your product on Amazon, customers can review it. Many people, before buying a product, will check to see if it's on Amazon — not only to buy it there, but to see what other consumers think. Consumer reviews on Amazon have been decisive in many purchases I have made, both positively and negatively. Marketers obviously think it's worth "the risks" of having their products trashed in exchange for having them sold through Amazon. So why shouldn't you take the next step, and let consumers have their say on your own site…and then get into a conversation with them?)

**A few additions and edits made on 4/5/06.

Out With the Old, In With the New

In the coverage I saw about the Los Angeles’ new deal with BFI’s Sunshine Canyon and Councilman Greig Smith’s plan to guide the city to “zero waste,” in part through converting trash to energy, one word I missed was: LANCER. Am I the only person in LA who remembers LANCER?

When I joined Mayor Bradley’s office in 1986, the City Council was in the process of authorizing the project, a plant at 41st and Alameda that would burn trash at high temperatures and convert it into electricity. Bradley’s appointees to Public Works were championing the project, the late Councilman Gil Lindsey wanted it in his district, and it seemed as if the mayor was behind it, too. (Although, at a later point, he reminded me that he’d hadn’t taken a position on it yet. He was canny that way.)

When I got reassigned in early 1987 from his press office to the position of Senior Advisor for environmental policy, LANCER was one of the issues I had to figure out. The mayor was coming off a landslide defeat in his second try for governor, and some of George Deukmejian’s surrogates had made hay with the city’s leaky wastewater system spilling raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay. This not only hurt Bradley’s chances to rally the Democratic troops against the incumbent, but it also created an opening for Bradley to be challenged in 1989 from the left, by a candidate who would promise a more environmental administration. That candidate looked to be then-Councilman, now-Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

My new assignment led to a Charlie Brown moment. I was playing softball at Will Rogers Park with a group that included a bunch of local Democratic operatives and activists. I didn’t know all of them. When a friend introduced me as “the guy whose job is to make Tom Bradley look like a good environmentalist,” the team’s reaction was: Haaa-haaaa-haaaa-haaaa!

That can get a guy motivated. After the game, I went home and started reading EIRs. What is this environment thing? How does it work? And, I delved deeply into LANCER. The mainstream environmental groups were quiet about it. The Sierra Club, more influential locally then than now, was officially neutral. But one outlier group, Citizens for a Better Environment (now Communities for a Better Environment) and a then-new group, Concerned Citizens of South-Central Los Angeles, had gotten organized and were starting to raise the issue of how a trash-burning plant in South-Central would affect the health of nearby residents. They pointed out that no one was talking about building a plant like this in West LA or the Valley. Why should South-Central take anyone’s word that LANCER was safe if the rest of the city didn’t want it in their backyard?

The fight against LANCER was one of the first “environmental justice” campaigns. Concerned Citizens was an outstanding example of grassroots organizing. It was led by three of the most dynamic people I met during my City Hall years: Juanita Tate, and the Cannon sisters, Robin and Sheila. Juanita Tate passed away in July 2004, too young at 66, having developed Concerned Citizens into a powerful force not only for activism, but economic development. I loved meeting with Juanita. She was fierce but never angry, and she greeted everyone like a friend, even her foes. She reminded me of Tip O’Neill, except with longer fingernails.

It was so long ago, I can’t remember the precise sequence of events — the loud protests, the quiet meetings, the disasterous public hearings — but in the end, my conclusion was the Mayor should oppose LANCER and in its place call for a citywide recycling program. At that time, the only curbside recycling going on in LA was a pilot program in Pacific Palisades that seemed designed to prove only that recycling was expensive. Until Los Angeles was recycling as much as it could, I believed the public would halt every other waste disposal idea — whether it was waste-to-energy or new landfills. I also didn’t see how the city would be able to follow through on the plan of building a dozen waste-to-energy plants because of the cumulative air emissions. But building only one didn’t make sense, because its impact on trash diversion would be so minimal.

Bradley did not want to simply kill the LANCER project without announcing recycling as an alternative, so I needed to get the Bureau of Sanitation to agree that a citywide recycling program was feasible, or at least to agree not to shoot it down. At first they resisted, and tried to “educate” me out of citywide recycling. But to give credit where it’s due, after they realized recycling was their future, they embraced it, and over the next few years established the largest municipal curbside recycling program in the nation. It was Del Biagi, the bureau’s director, who said, “Why don’t we commit to recycling 50 percent of our waste?” And that became our goal. AB 939, the state law that mandated 50 percent recycling statewide, came later, its authors clearly empowered by Los Angeles’ ambitious target.

Things have moved quickly. Councilman’s Smith’s RENEW LA plan sets a goal of 100 percent recycling — zero waste. But it also talks about “harnessing the energy potential of ‘waste’ by utilizing new technology to convert the material directly into green fuel, gas and/or electricity.” Of course, that was the fine idea behind LANCER.

Don’t get me wrong. That was then, and this is now. I’ve read over some of Councilman Smith’s plan and it is clearly about as comprehensive as one could hope for. Greig Smith got elected knowing the Sunshine Canyon landfill was his albatross, so he made himself an expert on all the recycling and reuse options out there. And he’s right on the money when he compares the costs of recycling and reuse with the anticipated future cost of the only other option — hauling the trash hundreds of miles away to distant mega-landfills via train or truck. However much waste the City can divert from that expensive, polluting parade, all to the good.

I don’t know anything about the state-of-the-art in waste-to-energy nowadays, but even in 1987, we were told that someday, this technology would come back. The fun will start when they try to decide on the first site.

Blame it on the Asteroid

Another good post on Science Blog, which I just stumbled across today: A report on a controversial new theory to account for global warming.

On June 30, 1908, there was a cataclysmic event in Siberia that is still not completely understood. According to one eyewitness, a Shanyagir tribesman:

We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, “can you hear all those birds flying overhead?” We were both in the hut, couldn’t see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Me and Chekaren got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!

Me and Chekaren had some difficulty getting under from the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees.

We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled “Look up” and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder.

Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.

This was the “Tunguska event.” The scientific near-consensus is that it was caused by the airburst from a meteorite, comet or asteroid hurtling toward Earth, exploding 6-10 kilometers above the surface. It destroyed, among other things, 60 million trees. But it left no crater, which indicates the object exploded into flaming dust before impact, releasing 10-15 megatons of energy into the air. The skies above Europe glowed at night for several evenings afterward — bright enough to read by.

Vladimir Shaidurov from the Russian Academy of Science now believes this cosmic event might be responsible for the pronounced climate change that began early in the 20th Century– global warming.  According to Shaidurov’s theory, “changes in the amount of ice crystals at high altitude could damage the layer of thin, high altitude clouds found in the mesosphere that reduce the amount of warming solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface.” This effect could be the result of the Tunguska event. From Science Blog’s post:

(T)he most potent greenhouse gas is water, explains Shaidurov and it is this compound on which his study focuses. According to Shaidurov, only small changes in the atmospheric levels of water, in the form of vapour and ice crystals can contribute to significant changes to the temperature of the earth’s surface, which far outweighs the effects of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activities. Just a rise of 1% of water vapour could raise the global average temperature of Earth’s surface more then 4 degrees Celsius.

(snip)

Water vapour levels are even less within our control than CO2 levels. According to Andrew E. Dessler of the Texas A & M University writing in ‘The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change’, “Human activities do not control all greenhouse gases, however. The most powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour, he says, “Human activities have little direct control over its atmospheric abundance, which is controlled instead by the worldwide balance between evaporation from the oceans and precipitation.”

As such, Shaidurov has concluded that only an enormous natural phenomenon, such as an asteroid or comet impact or airburst, could seriously disturb atmospheric water levels, destroying persistent so-called ’silver’, or noctilucent, clouds composed of ice crystals in the high altitude mesosphere (50 to 85km). The Tunguska Event was just such an event, and coincides with the period of time during which global temperatures appear to have been rising the most steadily – the twentieth century.

Shaidurov’s theory, of course, flies in the face of the more widespread view that the Industrial Revolution of the past 200 years, during which human society unleashed tons of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, has triggered the global warming that most scientists believe is underway. Shaidurov says, however, that global temperatures were trending downward prior to a period between 1906-09, a few years before the explosion.

It seems strange to me that an event of this magnitude is mostly known only to science fiction and “X Files” fans. Undoubtedly, this is due purely to the remoteness of this part of the world. If such a thing had landed in Ohio, or Paris, our society would be very different. The memory of such a trauma would reverberate across generations.

Whether or not Tunguska can be blamed for global warming, the event demonstrates that nothing can change history faster than a random chunk of debris from outer space.

I’ll leave to another day the policy impact of Shaidurov’s theory. If this is the cause of global warming, can it be reversed? Will the earth’s upper atmosphere “right” itself, given time? Will Kyoto-type programs help? Geological history certainly suggests that the 5,000 years or so of Earth’s history during which mankind established civilizations and evolved technology has been a period of atypically good weather. Is our luck about to run out? Can our technology help us adjust to what might be an inevitably transformed environment?

Let’s Run “Global Frying” Up the Flagpole…

Back in 1990, when I worked for Mayor Bradley on environmental issues, I attended a Sierra Club press conference where several celebrities introduced public-service announcements in which they would be featured talking about global warming. It was the first TV campaign around the issue, so it was significant — even though I never actually saw any of the PSAs run on the air.

One of the performers was Daniel J. Travanti, star of one of my favorite TV shows, “Hill Street Blues.” He wore a heavy beard, and looked more like Grizzly Adams than Capt. Furillo. He decried the public’s seeming lack of concern about a problem that threatens to make heavily populated parts of the earth uninhabitable. “Maybe we should call it ‘global frying,’” Travanti suggested.

Sixteen years on, here’s out-of-the-box marketing thinker Seth Godin elaborating on the same point:

Global is good.
Warm is good.
Even greenhouses are good places.

How can “global warming” be bad?

I’m not being facetious. If the problem were called “Atmosphere cancer” or “Pollution death” the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.

Environmental educators, scientists and activists have so far failed to overcome the invisibility of the global warming issue to people who “don’t see your coal being burned…(and) don’t live near a glacier,” Godin said. There are universal principles for marketing new ideas that the environmental community should deploy:

Human beings want:
totems and icons
meters (put a real-time mpg or co2 meter in every car and watch what happens)
fashion
stories
and
pictures

95% of the new ideas that don’t spread–even though their founders and fans believe they should–fail because of the list above.

Does this mean future generations will let us off the hook for doing so little about global warming? I’m not sure the lack of persuasive totems and icons will exonerate us.

Great marketing minds and designers ought to pick up Godin’s challenge. Maybe one of the major schools of design could team up with an environmental foundation to sponsor a design competition to make the invisible more visible. Not just more ads; constant reminders designed into our products. Meanwhile, PR people who supposedly know how to tell an arresting story should dig into the scientific literature and find ways to make more vivid the kind of world that global warming will bring us.

But remember: Be credible. No more “Day After Tomorrow” horror shows that only cause backlash. If you can only sell the global warming story through exaggeration, you discredit the whole idea.

Busting Light Bulbs

One of Los Angeles’ most consequential environmental organizations over the past 25 years is Heal the Bay. It’s because of Heal the Bay and its allies that Los Angeles’ coastal waters today are significantly cleaner than they have been in, perhaps, a century.

The pressure the organization could apply was due, in part, to the simple elegance of the organization’s name. Founder Dorothy Green was a communications genius, and that sort of genius sometimes makes a difference. Polluted runoff and under-treated sewage was making the Santa Monica Bay sick. But if you joined up with Dorothy Green, you could help heal it. Who could oppose that?

Dr. Matt Prescott could be Dorothy Green’s heir. The organizer of the Oxford Earth Summit, this Britisher founded Ban the Bulb, which has a simple, elegant mission to, you guessed it, ban all conventional incandescent lightbulbs by a date certain, and replace them with compact-flourescents. In an essay on the BBC’s website, Prescott says,

One quick and simple option for improving energy efficiency would be to make greater use of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Each one of these bulbs produces the same amount of light as an incandescent light bulb whilst being responsible for the emission of 70% less carbon dioxide.

It also saves money; about £7 ($12) per year in the UK, more or less in other countries depending on electricity prices.

So why not just ban incandescent bulbs – why not make them illegal?

They waste so much energy that if they were invented today, it is highly unlikely they would be allowed onto the market.

Nobody would suffer; every energy-saving bulb would save money and help to curb climate change.

It is truly a win-win solution.

Although compact flourescent bulbs save money long-term, at the point of purchase, they are more expensive, as Prescott admits. Prescott thus concludes, “many seem to feel they are entitled to pollute the Earth’s atmosphere without worrying about the consequences.”

If we cannot deny ourselves incandescent light bulbs, which would require minimal sacrifice, how are we ever going to do the really difficult things such as cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, buying smaller cars or reducing our use of finite natural resources?

Pow! This kind of “we have met the enemy and he is us” rhetoric has long gone out of style in American environmental discourse. Shame is, like, too judgemental, dude.

American green groups apparently figured out they can raise more money blaming Dick Cheney for everything. We’ve allowed Arianna Huffington and assorted celebrities with fat wallets to take point on controversial issues, leaving them and the environmental movement open to charges of hypocrisy when their foes find out how many miles Huffington logs on private planes, how much Barbra Streisand pays to air-condition her homes or what a NIMBY Robert Kennedy, Jr. is about a wind energy project on his yachting route.

Anyway –to get off that soapbox and back onto Prescott’s — his idea is that nuclear power and coal production enjoy massive subsidies, and that a fraction of those funds could be directed to offset some of the cost of buying the new bulbs.

It must have been 15 years ago when utilities in Southern California began giving away compact-flourescents. Maybe giveaways weren’t such a great strategy. They conditioned the public to think that using such bulbs was a government program that government was responsible for. If the bulbs weren’t supplied free of charge every time you needed one, it was a signal the program no longer mattered.

Plus, electric utilities have conflicting incentives on efficiency issues. As long as they can get the power, they’d prefer to sell it than conserve it. They’re happy to help you conserve energy in one part of your house, but they’d prefer you shifted your energy consumption to other products. Utilities, both public and private, run on a lot of borrowed money, and they need cash to keep the bondholders comfortable.

Considering all these different factors, I have to say, I think Prescott is onto something. If cheaper bulbs remain available, people will buy them, because the cost in higher utility bills is not sufficiently visible. Taking them off the shelves is what’s needed.

Instead of giving the more expensive compact flourescents away to everybody, one time, as a green-on-my-sleeve PR gesture, utilities could commit to a plan to supply them with regularity to low-income households.

Replacing just three bulbs that burn five hours a day would — according to a study Prescott sites — reduce electricity demand by the equivalent of 11 coal-fired power stations, save $1.8 billion, and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 23 million tons.

P.S. Here’s something celebrities can do. To make films, you need light. Anything on a stage needs light. Will compact flourescents work for entertainment-related illumination needs? Celebrities should demand it.

(Thanks to documentary filmmaker Todd Mason for the tip.)

Update 2/9/06:  I’ve been set straight on movie lighting. After accusing me of goading the “America-hating-Hollywood crowd (into) putting their mouth where their butt is, or something,” which I swear I wasn’t doing, at least not consciously (although I admit I was very tired when I first wrote the post, so it’s possible that a form of automatic writing took over), Todd provided this helpful explanation:

(S)tudio lighting requires the full range of light spectrum that only incandescent light offers. Otherwise, all your favorite movies and TV shows would look like green-tinted, pirated, low resolution crap (flourescent is heavy on the green which is the worst color for film or video light).

After that painful woodshedding, I will now move on to another target for excessive use of energy for lighting.

“We’ve got a coalition of tree huggers, do-gooders, sodbusters, hawks, and evangelicals.”

That’s a quote from former CIA Director James Woolsey describing the population of political lobbyists pushing the government to help boost cellulosic ethanol, made from “everything from prairie switchgrass and wood chips to corn husks and other agricultural waste,” according to this story in Fortune.

Fortunate factors are now working together, aided and abetted by the aforementioned strange bedfellows. Advances in biotech have made it possible to produce the same grade fuel out of materials with no food value at all. The price of oil has risen now to levels where ethanol can be competitive — exactly the circumstances that prompted Brazil to develop its sugar-cane based ethanol infrastructure.One of the biggest boosters of ethanol is a California tech entrepreneur:

There are venture capitalists, and then there’s Vinod Khosla. A co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a partner at Kleiner Perkins, he was an early backer of Juniper Networks, whose technology helped end decades of dominance by traditional telecom manufacturers. A lean, 50-year-old native of India, Khosla says, without a hint of modesty, “I love the challenge of breaking monopolies.”

Frustrated that Kleiner Perkins wasn’t taking enough risks after the dot-com crash, Khosla opted out of Kleiner’s most recent fund and started his own group, Khosla Ventures. He’d been dabbling in environmentalism but never expected to become an investor. Brazil’s success, however, made him wonder about ethanol’s U.S. potential. “I spent two years trying to convince myself that this was never going to be more than another minor alternative fuel,” he says. “What I discovered was that ethanol might completely replace petroleum in this country. And a lot of countries. This was a great shock to me.”

Pretty soon Khosla was surprising plenty of others. He put together a PowerPoint presentation, “Biofuels: Think Outside the Barrel,” which he fires up on a moment’s notice. He has made the pitch on ethanol to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and elsewhere in the White House. He is also behind California’s upcoming ballot initiative to fund a subsidy for gasoline retailers that add E85 fuel pumps. “Getting distribution going is the real problem,” says Khosla. “We need to increase blending and then introduce E85 pumps, and the possible will become the probable.”

His conversion to energy investing is part of a Silicon Valley trend, as VCs seek the rapid growth and giant markets that computers once offered. VantagePoint Venture Partners in San Bruno, for instance, established a fund called New Energy Capital that invests in ethanol, wind power, and other energy projects. Nth Power, a San Francisco energy-investment firm, estimates that $700 million of the $21 billion flowing into venture funds last year were earmarked for “clean technology” startups.

Ethanol has had to overcome the perception that any government policy to promote the fuel was really just a way to pay off the corn processors…and the additional perceptions that the use of corn and sugar cane for fuel would both put a crimp on the world’s food supply, and be vulnerable to price hikes based on food demand. The evolution of cellulosic ethanol should prompt those whose boondoggle alert goes off when the word ethanol is bandied about to reprogram their stress meters.

“Cellulosic ethanol.” Remember that phrase.

Post-Oil, an Alcohol Economy?

As I figured, Bush’s remarks about U.S. oil “addiction” led the coverage of Tuesday’s State of the Union address. The unintended consequences of his new position on energy will, I think, have a far more lasting effect on the nation’s future energy course than the vague policies to which he alluded. That unintended consequence is: Thinkers from across the ideological spectrum will now get much more attention as they conceptualize a post-oil economy.

Whether it’s because the world is running out of oil, or because global climate change leaves us no choice, or because of political explosions in the Middle East, an “oil shock” is coming. This is going to be one generation’s urgent business, sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner.

For years, the energy issue was cast as a morality play: The good environmentalists who favor wind and solar power and drive hybrids, vs. the bad oil industry and their political servants like Dick Cheney. An idea’s quality was seldom judged on its own merits but on its perceived good or bad intentions, or on which side of the political fence it fell. A political correctness had settled over an issue that, in the end, ought to be decided by the results of scientific inquiry and innovative engineering, not the purity of one’s soul.

Political correctness is seldom helpful in solving any societal problem. It usually makes me suspicious. The point of political correctness too frequently is to insulate wobbly ideas from debate. It’s the political version of “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” or “don’t confuse me with the facts.”

With that preamble, here’s a link to an essay in The American Enterprise by engineer and author Robert Zubrin. I’ll quote two chunks. First, here is how Zubrin sees the problem:

Using portions of the hundreds of billions of petrodollars they are annually draining from our economy, Middle Easterners have established training centers for terrorists, paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers, and funded the purchase of weapons and explosives. Oil revenues underwrite new media outlets that propagandize hatefully against the United States and the West. They pay for more than 10,000 radical madrassahs set up around the world to indoctrinate young boys with the idea that the way to paradise is to murder Christians, Jews, and Hindus. It was men energized by oil-revenue resources who killed 3,000 American civilians on September 11, 2001, and who have continued to kill large numbers of Westerners in Iraq and elsewhere. We are thus subsidizing acts of war against ourselves.

And we have not yet reached the culmination of the process. Iran and other states are now using petroleum lucre to underwrite the development of nuclear weapons, and insulate themselves from the economic sanctions that could result. Once produced, these nuclear weapons could be used directly or made available to terrorists to attack U.S., European, or Israeli cities and military forces. This is one of the gravest threats to the next generation—and, again, we are paying for it ourselves with oil revenue.

Our responses to these provocations have been muted and hapless. Why? Because any forceful action on our part against nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia could result in the disruption of oil supplies that the world economy is completely dependent upon. We can’t stand up to our enemies because we rely upon them for the fuel that is our own lifeblood.

And the situation is even worse below the surface. In addition to financing terror directly and indirectly, oil exporters are using their wealth to corrupt our political system. Important Washington, D.C. law firms and lobbying organizations have been put on the payroll of Arab nations to blunt any attempts at retaliation for their promotion of terrorism. Arab investors have made enormous buys in media organizations that could allow them to influence U.S. public opinion.

All this, however, is mere prologue. China and India are rapidly industrializing, and within a decade or two the number of cars in the world will double or triple. If the world remains on the oil standard, the income streams of many noxious oil exporters will soar. We will be impoverished to the same degree they are enriched. The vast sums transferred will not only finance global jihad and dangerous weapons development in the Middle East, but also increase potential for manipulation of the U.S. and Western economies. At currently projected rates of consumption, by the year 2020 over 90 percent of the world’s remaining petroleum reserves will be in the Middle East, controlled by people whose religion obligates them to subjugate us.

In light of these realities, current U.S. energy policy is a scandal.

Zubrin fires invective in every direction. He attacks “environmental absolutists” as well as “the charlatans who are promoting hydrogen as a solution to our energy woes” for “doing the nation an immense disservice.” Wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear power, which get the most focus as energy alternatives are somewhat beside the point because

The key to energy independence, rather, is liquid fuel to power cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes. These vehicles are not mere conveniences; they are the sinews of our economy and the fundamental instruments of our military strength. Our civilization cannot be sustained without efficient liquid fuels, and there is no foreseeable prospect whatsoever of cost effective, large-scale generation of liquid fuels from wind, solar, hydroelectric, or nuclear sources.

To address the need for a new, more sustainable liquid fuel, Zubrin recommends “taking the world off the petroleum standard and putting it on an alcohol standard.”

This may sound like a huge and impossible task, but with gasoline prices well over $2 per gallon, the means to accomplish it are now at hand. Congress could make an enormous step toward American energy independence within a decade or so if it would simply pass a law stating that all new cars sold in the U.S.A. must be flexible-fuel vehicles capable of burning any combination of gasoline and alcohol. The alcohols so employed could be either methanol or ethanol.

The largest producers of both ethanol and methanol are all in the western hemisphere, with the United States having by far the greatest production potential for both. Ethanol is made from agricultural products. Methanol can also be made from biomass, as well as from natural gas or coal. American coal reserves alone are sufficient to power every car in the country on methanol for more than 500 years.

Ethanol can currently be produced for about $1.50 per gallon, and methanol is selling for $0.90 per gallon. With gasoline having roughly doubled in price recently, and with little likelihood of a substantial price retreat in the future, high alcohol-to-gasoline fuel mixtures are suddenly practical. Cars capable of burning such fuel are no futuristic dream. This year, Detroit will offer some two dozen models of standard cars with a flex-fuel option available for purchase. The engineering difference is in one sensor and a computer chip that controls the fuel-air mixture, and the employment of a corrosion-resistant fuel system. The difference in price from standard units ranges from $100 to $800.

I’ve excerpted a lot, but there’s much more; well worth reading the whole thing. His explanation of why hydrogen is such a dead-end will make you wonder why so many hopes were placed in it to begin with.

Methanol twice before has been crowned the fuel of the future. When I was in Mayor Bradley’s administration, I commissioned a report on flexible-fuel and methanol vehicles for the City of LA’s own use, and oversaw some fleet conversion. I don’t know for sure, but there might still be a methanol fuel pump in City Hall. Our primary rationale was to reduce air pollution emissions. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, methanol seemed to fall out of favor, and electric vehicles became the vogue.

We can’t keep running energy and environmental policy on fashion.

Whatever direction is taken to establish the post-oil economy will require a significant public and private investment. If today’s good answer is tomorrow’s embarassment — as too often happens in environmental policymaking — there will be no investment, and things will simply continue as before, unsustainably. The default fuel for American society is oil, because the infrastructure is already in place. If we’re ever going to replace it, the debate over “with what” has to move into a new, decisive phase — without fear or favor.

Energy in the Executive

It sounds like the big line from tonight’s State of the Union address is going to be “America is addicted to oil.”

As profound insights go, this one is pretty elementary. But coming from the oil industry’s best friend in the White House in many years, it will be seen as a dramatic concession. Bush’s rationale is, apparently, that our addiction leads us into some bad neighborhoods in “unstable parts of the world.” True enough.

Some with a more isolationist view would contend the U.S. could’ve avoided the war in Iraq entirely, and perhaps averted 9/11, if our energy needs didn’t force us to be so involved in the affairs of the Muslim world. I’ve always debated this point, because no matter how much fuel independence the U.S. is able to achieve, we would also have to worry about where other countries are getting their energy. If important allies like Japan or Germany can be blackmailed by a radical Iraq or Iran, the U.S.’s insulation from energy blackmail doesn’t count for much.

No, the primary reasons to save energy and start switching to alternatives are environmental and economic.

That’s why we have to watch carefully where Bush intends to take the U.S. in its pursuit of “breaking this addiction.” Right now, according to the AP, he’s proposing something for every side of the aisle to love — and something to hate:

Bush’s primary proposal is to increase federal research into alternative fuels such as ethanol made from weeds or wood chips, instead of corn. He also is to push for construction of new nuclear power plants and increased use of wind, solar and clean-coal technologies.

When we can’t site even one safe disposal site for nuclear waste, I’m not convinced nuclear energy is going to make the big comeback others predict. Weeds and wood chips? Well, we’ve got lots of them, so I’m open to it. Wind and solar? NIMBYism is a big threat to wind power, and the president could propose some kind of federal pre-emption to ensure that appropriate wind sites aren’t blocked by selfish local interests. Solar — great, but I hope he’s prepared to invest what it’s going to take to eventually bring the cost down to marketable levels. Clean-coal? I don’t have time to do the research to back this up, but my recollection is that mining the coal deemed as clean for burning is incredibly destructive of wilderness landscapes in the mountain west. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I guess my reaction to the notion that alternative energy is going to be a major theme of the president’s speech is — cautious elation. This issue has been nowhere on the national agenda since Bush took office; and Clinton wasn’t much of a leader on it either. Big policy fights are ahead, but fights about energy are better than the apathy and neglect of the past 15 years. This doesn’t mean Bush is at all trustworthy on energy, but I’m glad he’s let the genie out of the bottle.