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Commitment over Capacity

Multiplied by area. We’re already getting our asses handed to us on the renewable energy front. Foot-dragging, slow-walking… whatever you want to call it, it all amounts to the same thing.

China’s leaders are investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy. Other countries are equally energetic in their embrace of alternative energy technologies; they are setting targets and investing billions of dollars to spur the development of entirely new markets in wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, energy efficiency, high-speed rail, and other clean and innovative solutions to global warming.

The United States, too, is poised to transform its economy to create millions of new jobs and help create a cleaner, safer planet by investing in a green, renewable-energy based economy. The Obama administration wants to unleash the ingenuity of our private sector to rein in pollution and put millions of Americans back to work. Yet China is spending twice as much as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spends to lay the foundations for a green energy economy, despite the U.S. economy being 1.5 times as large as China’s. And across Europe and Asia, other governments have diversified their energy portfolios and encouraged entrepreneurs to start and expand clean and renewable energy companies.

Nice graphs and pics at the link. But for all the gnashing of teeth about what China and India won’t do about their greenhouse gas emissions, China is seeing the opportunity to pivot as a chance to take at least a couple of steps ahead. The whole anti-Kyoto rationale has been pure canard a l’orange the whole time, doncha know.

And Germany is leaving us in the dust, as per usual. But no… we wouldn’t want that old gummint telling us what to do, with all that fancy talk about energy portfolios and tax incentives. When will we have had enough of bringing up the rear on a brighter day?

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Feed-in Tariff

With a name like that… well it’s on the order of shrouding mammary wonders beneath a barbed-wire bikini. But I’d rather a clunky name for a program that works than another sexy title for a failure. And whoa if there are not some nourishing nipples poking through all that metal.

Why is the renewable energy market in Gainesville booming while it’s collapsing elsewhere in the country? The answer boils down to policy. In early February, the city became the first in the nation to adopt a “feed-in tariff”—a clunky and un-descriptive name for a bold incentive to foster renewable energy. Under this system, the local power company is required to buy renewable energy from independent producers, no matter how small, at rates slightly higher than the average cost of production. This means anyone with a cluster of solar cells on their roof can sell the power they produce at a profit. The costs of the program are passed on to ratepayers, who see a small rise in their electric bills (in Gainesville the annual increase is capped at 1 percent). While rate hikes are seldom popular, the community has rallied behind this policy, because unlike big power plant construction—the costs of which are also passed on to the public—everyone has the opportunity to profit, either by investing themselves or by tapping into the groundswell of economic activity the incentive creates.

Sounds a lot like making a (new) way for the Sunshine State live up to it’s name. I’ve got a friend whose family business is real estate development down in G-ville, and I haven’t heard a word from her about this. I don’t suppose they realize the opportunity this represents, but I’d like to think it won’t take long until they do.

Anyway, this is the kind of incentive that will begin the process of putting the rest of the many required tricks and non-tricks to renewable electricity into place. Emphasis mine in the above.

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A Fool and His Primer

So… mrs. green and I speak often about how newspapers will be able to support themselves going forward, now that their revenue model has gone up in Craig’s List smoke. The supposition is that at some point, through collusion or other such cartel-like agreement, the larger and dependable online sources of actual reporting will have to start charging for content. This allows that some of them will be able to charge for content, with the inferred assumption that this is true as long as they don’t destroy their brand.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A ‘LIGHT-SWITCH TAX’…. In an apparent effort to be an even more shameless hack, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) argues in a Washington Post op-ed today that “all American families will get stuck with a new ‘light-switch tax’ on electricity bills that is in the president’s budget.”

It’s not just Gregg. While President Obama cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans, a standard Republican talking point is that Obama is also raising taxes on everyone who uses electricity. The new GOP catch phrase popped up about a week ago, when the House Republican Conference said in a press release that the administration supports “a light switch tax that would cost every American household $3,128 a year.”

As is too often the case, the difference between Republican rhetoric and reality is overwhelming.

The extent to which established and dependable media sources commit to undermining their brand will have as much effect on their long-term viability as the bad decision-making of the corporate owners.

Also note the tendentious application of tax rhetoric to what is, sad to say, only an imagined attempt to create incentives to influence energy demand. It’s like the ‘death tax’ BS. Republicans can and do choose to see everything through the prism of taxes, but this childlike construct requires a grand gesture at the outset – primarily setting up the government as some separate, antagonistic entity, out to get you and your hard-earned winnings.

In the interest of brevity, a foolish and naive primer: We support the country, literally, by funding the government. It’s patriotic, sure, but also practical. We use it for all kinds of things we can and do disagree about – fighting wars, picking up the trash, putting out fires, educating our youngsters. Yet, through the magic of funding activities like these, we discover the handy ability to encourage or discourage behaviors by charging ourselves more or less for doing or not doing certain things – from littering to using lead paint, for example, but also having children, buying a home.

So despite this ‘light-switch tax’ scare-mongering, and it will get worse, taxing carbon emissions will be the route away from carbon-centric energy sources and toward affordable renewable energy. Whatever the costs, we will create a funding regimen that ultimately rewards sustainability. That’s not optimism – it’s what the system is supposed to do. The country is us – we fund the government.

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Ugly Green Ties to the Past

Not that one, specifically, but not altogether different, either.

I’m as skeptical as anybody about clean coal, but as a fan, of sorts, of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, I’m willing to give him and cc its due when he goes to links to take it seriously. Following routes we ostensibly mistrust, after all, is what open mindedness is about, n’Green pas?

This is all concerns FutureGen, a public-private partnership to build a first-of-its-kind coal-fueled, near-zero emissions power plant.

The article somehow manages to wax agnostic about the merits of living with the contradictions of the above statement.

Stephanie Mueller, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy, issued a statement after Monday’s meeting leaving no doubt about Chu’s interest. “Secretary Chu believes that the FutureGen proposal has real merit,” Mueller said. “In the coming weeks, the department will be working with the Alliance and members of Congress to strengthen the proposal and try to reach agreement on a path forward.”

If the project is revived, it will have plenty of company internationally. Three similar IGCC projects figure among a dozen schemes that European leaders last month deemed eligible to compete for €1 billion in stimulus funds set aside to support commercial-scale application of CCS in coal-fired power plants. Of those projects, six will be selected to receive funding. Meanwhile, a consortium of Chinese power generators has initiated construction of the GreenGen project, which was inspired by FutureGen.

I cringed repeatedly about Obama’s invocation of cc on the campaign trail; it sounded exactly like the dreamy sort of pandering with which his critics have tried to paint him, to little effect thus far. But here comes the administration again, continuing to strike a serious posture with an expensive, non-serious solution.

The idea of outfitting new coal-fired power plants with carbon storage and sequestration technology should be a minimal point of entry into our energy supply; that the coal industry can and does tout this as the next greatest thing speaks to bar height for the industry and the candle power of politicians as much as anything. As we have said, the cheapest power plants are the ones we don’t have to build. Measures to flatten demand should at least accompany gargantuan efforts to make a dirty power clean.

And even on 4/1 this is not a joke.

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Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

What if there was a way to provide a limitless and environmentally friendly source for generating electricity? For a time, a handful of chemists around the world thought there was; it was called ‘cold fusion’ and its arrival turned out to be a lesson in how not to release research results.

But since this week is the twentieth anniversary of that premature announcement and the American Chemical Society is holding a national symposium called “New Energy Technology” complete with fresh results from experiments in re-branded cold fusion (now known as low-energy nuclear reactions), it might a good time to look back, even as we struggle forward.

The first report on “cold fusion,” presented in 1989 by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, was a global scientific sensation. Fusion is the energy source of the sun and the stars. Scientists had been striving for years to tap that power on Earth to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Everyone thought that it would require a sophisticated new genre of nuclear reactors able to withstand temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

Pons and Fleishmann, however, claimed achieving nuclear fusion at comparatively “cold” room temperatures — in a simple tabletop laboratory device termed an electrolytic cell.

But other scientists could not reproduce their results, and the whole field of research declined.

Umm… so close, and yet I guess it’s good to know that some chemists haven’t given up on this elusive solution, quite the contrary. I guess when you spend most of your adult lifetime thinking about something wonderful and it just doesn’t work, no matter how logical it seems, I guess you’re powerless to convince yourself to give up on it.

Okay… if you were not made uncomfortable with the direction of that last statement, I politely suggest that you are spending too much time in front of the screen with the blue glow.

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Have You Seen The Bridge, part XXI

People wonder what is happening. I certainly do, and it’s a natural curiosity. If only we were free to pursue any and everything we wanted, things would be so much better. In more ways than we care to imagine, we remain quite free to do as we please. There are some limits to be acknowledged. But there always were.

This new Gallup poll, via, points up some reluctance to embrace either these limits or to remain free to do as we please, sort of one or the other but not both. It is a squinting sort of acknowledgment where, if you strain or blur yours eyes, everything looks the same. Note the wording of the question:

Even if? That’s quite a hypothetical, knowing what we know. The indulgence to qualify what we might be willing to do in the event that what is going on is actually going on trails off from some deep shallowness, an allowance, a remove, a disconnect, however we want to identify it. The present is not sinking in. Maybe our quintessential optimism had to spring from somewhere – and this abrupt denial of the choices before us, based on the ones we’ve taken off the table, is it.

It brings to mind a conversation with a friend last night, a painter on his way back to his studio in Kansas. He had been in New England and related a dinner conversation there where people, otherwise sympathetic to environmental causes, were lamenting the prospect of wind turbines proposed for the Nantucket Sound. It would ruin their views, he said in disbelief, adding that the sentiment ran much the same in the Flint Hills, where similar proposals were being greeted with similar opposition, based on the same reluctance to deform the spectacular views of rolling hills with those God-awful renewable energy sources.

I personally have a deep affinity for magnificent vistas. Should we wait until they become directly encroached upon by burning coal for power to have a clearer choice, to make a choice that wouldn’t have been so bad after all? The choice doesn’t seem so clear at this point. There’s a time gap in which, one suspects, a belief in the power to return to just before the tipping point prevails. If and when we sufficiently win ourselves over on the wisdom of making the right decisions (and it’s not inevitable), we’ll go back and do just that.

I appreciate this kind of reporting, even if it confirms what we already know, that describes, in fact, the engine which has transported us to this point in the first place. But, in terms of the twin fantasies of time travel and an ability to reconcile ourselves with needed measures, we need to figure out a way to get there from here.

Photograph: Natural Bridge, La Prele Canyon. Converse County, Wyoming, 1870. courtesy USGS

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Two Left Interwebbed Feet

The maelstrom and convulsion we entered some time ago, which we have been so slow to notice even as the  passing scenery has begun to repeat like the same bunch of clouds and mountains, documented in the incredibly shrinking newspaper sense, here. Maybe cartoon language is one of the few we still understand. It’s got to have something to do with that ‘all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten’ sort of thing. If that’s true, good for you. Anyway, that’s an excellent piece above, so thanks, Andy.

You might wonder, and I can only hope you do, why the clockwise newspaper drain swirl, financial melt and eco/energy colossus are all coming of age at the same time. It could make you curious about what we’ve been feeding them. Born mostly at about the same time – say at or near about the time governments began insuring East India companies in their forays into the New World – all of our societal sub-structures are breaking up into mini ice floes, drifting out to Dieu knows where, as we struggle with how to tie them together again. As much as that might be an unfortunate metaphor, it can’t help but seem – even to a kindergartener – like practice for something.

To that end, and pardon the pun, it’s always better take in a geographer-anthropologist matinee:

PAUL SOLMAN: Of all the cultures you’ve studied that have tried to deal with severe economic dislocations, what’s the marker of resiliency?

JARED DIAMOND: It seems to me that one of the predictors of a happy versus an unhappy outcome has to do with the role of the elite or the decision-makers or the politicians or the rich people within the society.

If the society is structured so that the decision-makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they’re motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole society, whereas if the decision-makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society, then they’re likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.

That last bit via the Poorman.

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Ongoing Investigation

So, it’s funny how this oil derrick just looks like an I-beam with a few other chunks of steel welded to it, connected by a hinge to a sort of gallows. If you spend any time at all examining the picture for its constituent parts, it almost begins to break itself down. What other kinds of things might be made with these materials?

Many more pictures here of what happens to a place when a boom goes bust, especially one based on oil production. The sociological connection to everything required for extraction is not far removed from this idea; but neither is the way we shield ourselves and our tender sensibilities from the extraction costs when they include exploding bodies and flag-draped coffins. It’s scandalous how we permitted the government to ban photographs of soldiers returning home in cargo planes. That’s the extent of our honor right there. Look away, indeed. These are the costs of our dependence strategies, the further externalities, if you will, and if we can’t handle them then we should perhaps think twice about tying our liberty and freedom to gassing up.

These are among the cautionary guidelines we should consult in our decision-making. Without them, we’re just walking in front of cartoon scenery. You can’t section off moral hazard as though it’s a completely separate consideration. Unless you’re able to do that. Then, you’re all set!

I hope they’re making this up. According to wikipedia, the derrick device was named for its resemblance to a hangman’s gallows; the derrick-type gallows was itself named for an Elizabethan Era executioner.

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Home Grown Power

Somewhat counter-intuitive take on the new electrical grid that’s been bandied about as an infrastructure project within the stimulus bill(s) set to appear at State House near you.

But there are better — and cheaper — ways to get more clean power flowing to the big cities. Renewable energy resources are found all across the country; they don’t need to be harnessed from just one place. In the Northwest, the largest amount of green power comes from hydroelectricity. In the Northeast, the best source may be the wind over the ocean, because it blows harder and more consistently there than on land. Offshore wind farms have been proposed for Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. In the Southwest, solar energy can be tapped on a large scale. And in the Southeast, biomass from forests may one day be a major source of sustainable power. In each area, developing these power sources would be cheaper than piping in clean energy from thousands of miles away.

As his omniscient narrator, I’ll say this is predicated on using far less power to make any of these suggested power solutions work, as we should begin to stipulate about every single thing. The writer draws a distinction between a smart grid and high-capacity transmission lines, the former distinguishing itself as a locally-deployed system within a multi-dimensional strategy against waste and inefficiency. Which is the only way to really address waste or efficiency. Once we get into what some of these concepts – a smart grid, for instance – mean, they begin to define long-term solutions in the only way in which they can be defined as viable – on a local scale. Ideas can come from anywhere, but they have to make sense there, first. Then a next-step Mandlebrot set in reverse motion can begin – leading the way toward more grander-scale solutions as we pan out. Or, luck be your lady tonight, altering their urgency into something more manageable.

Of course, changing how we think about a big new electrical grid for the country opens up more space to think about trains, SUPER and otherwise. Which is as it should be.