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Squaring the War Circle

Hippies:

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuel.

Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.

What’s next, less wars? I guess there are worse things – the Defense department did build the internet, even if it was just for Al Gore at first. So now they’ll scale up a renewable energy package in record time for the greatest fighting machine the world has ever known. Maybe, in the land hopeful unintended consequences, they’ll realize they/we don’t need to spend that much on armaments after all. That dropping bombs on people continually is not the path to their hearts and minds – well, not in a good way. But will we make the connection of our ways to our means through a transformation of our might?

Reminds me of that Churchill quote.

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I’ll Second That

Atrios on 9/11:

A tragic day which brought out the worst in our country. Not right away, but once evil people saw opportunity to exploit it for their own dreams of destruction.

War, plus/too/and, all things Green got crammed with ‘energy-security’ sugar plums to dance in our heads, meanwhile… bombs. Even the renewables rhetoric had to go militant, presto/macho – we must envision a grand Manhattan Project to wean us off of foreign oil, instead of you know, just doing it.

Down here, the PTB have been talking about a brain-train from our burg to ATL for at least a decade, instead of just buying the rights-of-way and building a high-speed rail fun ride to the airport.

Stupid. Thanks, terrorists.

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Cost vs. Price

Another in a continuing series of the gross misunderestimation of the externalities for the ways we presently produce energy and how these skew the perceptions of renewables. Take it away, Tom:

Let’s start with a recent editorial from the home of “free markets and free people,” the Wall Street Journal. Photovoltaic solar energy, quoth the mavens, is a “speculative and immature technology that costs far more than ordinary power.”

So few words, so many misconceptions. It pains me to say that because, like many business leaders, I grew up on the Wall Street Journal and still depend on it.

But I cannot figure out why people who call themselves “conservatives” would say solar or wind power is “speculative.” Conservatives know that word is usually reserved to criticize free-market activity that is not approved by well, you know who.

Today, around the world, more than a million people work in the wind and solar business. Many more receive their power from solar.

Solar is not a cause; it is a business with real benefits for its customers.

Read all about it. Clueless minions being manipulated by the producers of ‘ordinary energy’. This is all of piece with the Jane Mayer story from last week. Like the politics, the arguments against non-fossil energy sources fall apart if their proponents grant even the most minimal parameters of reality – which is why Al Gore must be fat, and Obama must be a Muslim.

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Where’s It Going to Come From?

Moratoriums, schmoritoriums… the oil has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?

The T-Ridge project is somewhat complicated – a few environmentalists in the Santa Barbara area actually support it – but when asked if an oil spill the likes of what is happening in the Gulf could take place in California, Schwarzenegger said “That will not happen”. Asked why he is withdrawing his support of the project, he said simply, “why would we want to take that risk?”

Why, indeed. The storm continues to build, but do we do, or plan to do, anything differently? Is this massive oil dump just one of those things that happens in the background and meanwhile, we just keep on doing the same things in the same ways? It’s a full-blown catastrophe in just its sixth day and already the States’ Rights Brigade is calling for the Federal government to do something(!). While not exactly hopeful for their redemption, I’m always open to it. But they’ll have to take a moment and reload something other than their fancy store-bought weaponry.

Our energy conundrum is made up of exactly the sort of complexity that the right wing conveniently dismisses. Maybe this is one thing that happens when you ignore implications and complex systems. But still, will they get it? How does it get played on Fox?

This will be more difficult than you might think, especially considering the awful power of an oily coastline to focus the mind. There is a mountain of cognitive dissonance intellectual and ethical incoherence that’s actually a volcano. And it’s rumbling.

Krugman’s column today is a reminder of what it took to bring about the first wave of environmentalism. And this, sadly, might be reminiscent. It’s pathetic that it takes this kind of disaster to allow people to visualize the effects of our crazy, laissez-faire rhetoric. It abets nothing so much as poisoned wells, tainted toys, contaminated foods, financial crises and this is no different.

And if you haven’t read Juan Cole on BP… well, you might want to pour yourself a scotch first.

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Gluttire

There is a good story by Salman Rushdie on Sloth in a recent edition of Granta magazine (Thanks, whoever sends that).

A recent report from researchers at Georgia Tech and Duke turns its attention to gluttony, particularly the energy gluttons also known as the Southern United States. Evidently, no other region uses more and tries less to save energy and stave off the need to build more power plants. For example take Arkansas (no Please… ):

With a population of about 2.8 million people,2 Arkansas represents about 0.9% of U.S. population, 0.7% of the nation’s GDP, and 1.1 % of U.S. energy consumption (Figure 1). Thus, compared to the rest of the nation, Arkansas has a higher-than-average level of energy intensity (i.e., it consumes more energy per dollar of economic activity).

Arkansas’ industrial energy consumption as a percentage of its overall energy consumption exceeds that of the nation and the rest of the South (Figure 2). This is one reason that Arkansas ranks 15th nationally in per capita energy consumption, well above the national average.

But not to pick on them – the story is the same all over the former former confederacy.

Relative to the rest of the country, the South consumes a particularly large share of industrial energy, accounting for 51% of the nation?s total industrial energy use. In addition, the region has a higher-than-average per capita energy consumption for each of the end-use sectors covered in viii

this report: the South consumes 43% of the nation?s electric power, 40% of the energy consumed in residences, and 38% of the energy used in commercial buildings. This energy-intensive lifestyle may be influenced by a range of factors including:

  • the South’s historically low electricity rates
  • the significant heating and cooling loads that characterize many southern states,
  • its relatively weak energy conservation ethic (based on public opinion polls),
  • its low market penetration of energy-efficient products (based on purchase behavior) and
  • its lower than average expenditures on energy-efficiency programs.
So excuse the pun but, by what lights do we ignore the growing pile of evidence that this wasteful nature is more expensive and more unpleasant than it clearly needs to be? Heritage? As the report reports, southern states are ignoring measures that have proven effective in other regions and other countries, basically in favor of nothing at all. And while there’s a certain heedless beauty about having your head in the sand, it’s not something you can put on a license plate or in a mason jar. So what good is it?
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When I see you, I See Red

Sticking with the X theme, and why not. Today’s Pigment of the Day: Madder lake.

So… positive words from Big Oil and their patsies political allies on the heels of efforts by Sens. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman to put together legislation capping global warming pollution. I guess ‘positive’ isn’t quite the right word – it’s kinda like the line in Raising Arizona:

Evelle: [about the balloons he just bought] These blow up into funny shapes and all?
Grocer: Well no… unless round is funny.

Ha. Ha.

Industry officials said they too welcome the discussions of a carbon fee as part of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman effort.

“Clearly it softens the reaction and increases the likelihood that a number of people who’ve been forced to push back will be much more cooperative in the dialogue,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.

Gerard said that the carbon fee approach would yield net environmental benefits, while giving consumers the most transparent signal they can get about what the costs are from the program. Unlike the House bill’s cap-and-trade system, oil companies would pass through the costs with signs at the gas pump letting people know they’re paying more because of U.S. efforts to deal with climate change.

As Grist reports, the energy companies like the fee because they’ll be able to complain about it as a tax ‘Americans cannot afford’. Actually, re-setting a highly mobile bar, they will be decrying the removal of $80 billion in loopholes and oil company subsidies as an “unprecedentled tax.” Dig it.

I mean, drill… or whatever. The oil companies see the handwriting on the wall. We can’t change underwear without taking off our pants – and they know what a zipper sounds like, as much as they will spend spin like crazy to try and tell you it’s bubbling brook.

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Greenface vs. Peacebook

It seems a little much.

Social networking giant Facebook has been taking heat from enviros recently for its decision to site a massive new data center in Prineville, Ore. The issue? Pacific Power, the utility that serves Prineville,gets most of its power from coal, the enemy of the human race. Greenpeace International has started a Facebook group opposing the move.

But as Roberts points out, it’s the movement of the societal norm needle against/away from coal that’s the key here. Coal sucks and is doing some very terrible, long term damage the longer we use it. But we have quite a lot of it and it’s cheap – the perfect storm for planetary self-extortion. We’d like to change but we can’t afford to. We hedge about its effects on the future as a way of making ourselves feel better, but this ploy does absolutely nothing for long term self-preservation. It’s not a ploy in that direction at all, but a psychological ameliorative. Until somebody does something.

Big manufacturers can’t envision a way to replace the trainloads of coal flowing into their plants each day, so they do nothing. The government hasn’t found the courage to begin to discourage coal usage and/or incentivize clean energy on a grand scale. So what to do? One thing: you might begin to castigate, ridicule and generally create negative PR buzz on the coal front for the entities who are effected by such things. It’s weak, I’ll admit. But we already make all kinds of small decisions like this that re-enforce the status quo on energy consumption, and there are and will be that many more that will have to be reckoned with – or ignored on the basis that nothing can be done – to begin to effect change.

If it’s going to happen.

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This Is Not A Plan

This is hope, which everyone seems to agree, is not a plan. So what is hope?

Well, that depends on whether Your Hope is just hoping something happens, or hoping what you are doing will work. Which, again, neither plans, but they do part ways, fundamentally. There’s a difference, one from the other, in tone and tenor.

Research into building a quantum computer, for example. Not much of a plan; hopeful, maybe. Breakthroughs in encryption excites the NSA some people. But I think it is the off-shoot consequences of trying to hit balls into this cup from 90 yards out, day after month after year, that will be the real dividends of this kind of research. Of this kind of hope.

In its way, the same goes for hydrogen storage and electricity storage from wind, sun and wave. In these cases, we’re not hitting around the mark so much as increasing the volume of balls being chipped at the hole.

So, Bill Gates doesn’t care for efficiency, or cap-and-trade, for that matter. Fine. It’s a questionable signal to send, but fine. In a $ green culture, the billionaires get listened to the most. Sigh. You might as well have listened to Warhol about painting. That wasn’t was he was ever talking about – but I’ll save that for another time.

But Gates’ views are no more or less likely to be compromised by conflicted interests than anyone else’s. Just something to keep in mind. Especially of late, when hope is such an easy target for relentless pummeling. Go ahead, take that away and replace it with the best of the best laid plans ever devised.

What would we have?

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‘Eco-Bling’

This might be overstating things.

LONDON—Installing wind turbines and solar panels in people’s homes is “eco-bling” that will not help meet Britain’s targets on cutting carbon emissions, engineers warned Wednesday.

In a new report by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), Professor Doug King said it was better to adapt buildings to make them more energy efficient than try to offset energy use with “on-site renewable energy generation.”

The leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative party, David Cameron, is among those who have installed wind turbines, fixing one onto the roof of his home in the plush west London district of Notting Hill.

“Eco-bling is a term I coined to describe unnecessary renewable energy visibly attached to the outside of poorly designed buildings,” King told the Daily Mail newspaper ahead of the report’s publication.

If we want to talk about little or nothing, there are a lot of places to start – and not all of them small bore. Energy efficiency, gas tax hiking, rail infrastructure. But individuals buying the means to capture wind energy for use on inefficient buildings… eh, I have trouble getting worked up about that. And here’s why.

I was working construction a few years ago… okay, up until about ten years ago. But anyway, I worked on an historic renovation project that took years, literally; we learned a lot, used some interesting materials, had a good time and eventually completed the house – all very reminiscent of my writing at the time. Near the end of the project, there were installed some PV-cell solar panels on the roof, three or four massive panels that were enough to power a small freezer in which you could, I think, fit an already-frozen pizza. And maybe some popsicles.

It was silly, in its way, and not unlike some those gigantic satellite dishes scattered and rusting in yards across America. We/they just didn’t have the technology right yet. And now, we/they know much more about satellite TV technology and we have tiny dishes that fit under your cornice and pick up 582 channels. Those albatrosses were the precursors to something better, more effective, cheaper and more useful.

(Unlike the highly pretentious display windmills at issue, the big PV panels I mentioned were on the back of the house. No one could have seen them from the street; they were an honest attempt at renewable energy.) There will always be a penalty for ostentatious displays of hipness, youth, technical prowess and especially green-ness. Let that penalty be money and let it flow downhill to fund research for the Direct TVs of wind power. Then we can laugh about those rusting windmills in the backyards of houses and how those hippies yuppies protested too much anyway.

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The N-D Conundrum

What turns GREED to GREEN? What turns GREEN to GREED? We all assume a symbiotic relationship – it’s what this whole semantic notion is about. The hope for a magic, transcendental spell check that does the trick for us, changes one to the other (for a fee, of course) might be a nice idea for a conceptual art installation – The Syntax of the Hyper Real or some such – but little else.

In terms of planetary peril, it appears to be a irreconcilable symbol inversion in the alphabet. The Gaia Theory would appear to be promising, except for its implication for ‘we the people’. But we even have to accept this, if we’re willing to be so heedless about using the atmosphere as a free dumping ground. This interview with its originator is compelling in a gallows sort of way. He hates carbon trading and says its a scam, but is there another way to get the D to go N without taxing ourselves, without charging for the free dumping ground? While many understand the reasons why it will be better to transition away from this economic model and move radically toward renewable energy, the fossil fuel endgame remains viable because it is… cheaper. This is a compelling moral argument, though not one we should make or defend intentionally.

It’s unpleasant to think that we will be wont to change our behavior until we are compelled to do so, that we are in some sense the rich who won’t say they hate the poor but are nonetheless able to simply turn their backs on the suffering the poor endure. After all, for people whose primary motivation is green greed grrr, what makes us do anything?