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Existing Technology

Stanford University researchers are on the job, making the case for producing all the world’s energy needs from renewable resources in 20-40 years, using only what we know today:

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters – no more natural gas or coal – and water would be preheated by the sun.

They point out the obvious – that there are no technical barriers to converting the entire world to clean energy production. Only a lack of will. That, and a refusal to count the entirety of actual costs of relying on fossil fuels, which facilitates the lack of will.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

So back off, Kochs. Everybody else, wise up; we’re getting punked on energy and how impossible it is to change. Don’t wait for the commercials. Believe in clean energy now and start expecting it.

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Budget Quiz

It gets propagandized talked about a ton. How much do you know about the Federal Budget? Try this.

I was a dazzling 7 for 12, which I think would be an ‘F’ in common parlance. Humbling.

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Green Culture Wars

Sure, Republican presidential contenders are going to roll out the DADT/Abortion carpet all over Iowa in their quest to be the Rightest of the Wrong. It’s what they do. It’s all they do. And Democrats might welcome their inclination to secure the 27-percenters.

But as this keeps happening over and over again, it might occur to us that the culture war idea is in need of expansion. After all, if the Kochs are going to fund movements and candidates to secure their right to pollute, they’re probably happy to keep people focused on these supposedly ‘values-oriented’ issues – that motivate the base of one side, and use up limited resources on the other – instead of fighting back in the green ground game.

Do you believe global warming is real? Do you support wind and solar energy projects? Should we incentive utilities and reward them for getting us to use less electricity? These are questions worth sparring over. And developing this ‘culture of life’ will probably be funner.

We’re playing catch- up on refocusing the big questions. Abortion? Or stabilizing atmospheric carbon levels? Culture of Life?

Just sayin’.

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Meanwhile, Back at the Front

of the Curve, the Germans (and others) continue to cook, eat and run-off the lunch we presume to deny ourselves.

nu9D7

That’s a tremendous percentage of their power needs and will only increase as they continue to put the infrastructure in place to supplant fossil and nuclear energy. As the price per kWh of solar continues on a kind of Moore’s Law trajectory, the question of how cheap it can get is dwarfed by the one which asks, how long will it take us to begin cooking-lighting-gaming-blogging using this and other (any!) renewable resources? The two questions don’t seem to be informing one another in this country yet, and sure, the scale of the U.S. is prohibitive on this front for a while, just as it once was for paved roads, and remains for high speed broadband – which remains scandalously snail-ish compared to other places, largely thanks to “competition.” Hey, wait a minute…

Anyway, bravo Deutschland.

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Today in Incoherence

So Newscorp declares its global operations to be carbon neutral. The question is, why?

The News Corporation, the media conglomerate and parent company of Fox News Channel, has gone carbon-neutral, fulfilling a goal set four years ago, Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman, announced this week in a companywide memo.

“We have become carbon-neutral across all of our global operations, and we are the first company of our kind to do so,” Mr. Murdoch wrote. “We made a bold commitment in 2007 to embed the values of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability into all of our businesses — for the benefit of our communities and our bottom line.”

Mr. Murdoch added that improving the energy efficiency of the company’s day-to-day operations had not only curbed emissions but also “saved millions of dollars.”

Meanwhile its most visible media properties continue to serve as a refuge for climate change deniers and carbon trading skeptics. Someone is being played here – Newscorp understands that renewable energy and reducing their carb on footprint is smart business, as is publicly trashing environmental concerns – at least for a while longer. My guess is that if you surveyed the most successful multinational corporations, you’d find most of them doing the same thing, even as they continue to support rightwing causes like the Tea Party and the Chamber of Commerce. It’s all good. Business.

Next up: Liberty University to provide same-sex partner benefits.

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Peephole to the Future

An interesting side point:

Consequently, in the short term the demand for oil isn’t very elastic. That means that if you brought oil up to $200 a barrel by raising taxes you’d generate a bunch of revenue that could be offset with lower income taxes or what have you. But if oil goes up to $200 a barrel because of supply constraints, then that entails a rise in America’s net imports and therefore a drag on GDP. In the long run, I’m sure we can adjust to high oil prices the same as we’d adjust to anything else.

Tangential to his larger point there, but in fact you can imagine a future with $200 a barrel oil that people reconcile themselves to and curse the Saudis or Venezuela or whomever our media mavens signal we should divert our rage – and then people would just find a way to deal. But can you see the same price per barrel brought on voluntarily as a pre-emptive step? Not at all. We could never reconcile ourselves that sort of planning, even in the face of a strict inevitability.

So the thing is, peer into the future through this fence and what do you see? Pain and insult or progress? Because finding a way to cope anyway in the face of $8 -$10/gallon gas is an insult to any kind of hopeful future, low-oil or no. It means we are capable, though not amenable, to changes in habits, lifestyle and consumption. We choose to do nothing until we are forced, then we will anyway?

Nothing limits your choices quite like flaunting them.

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Laboring

Whether it’s the right to pollute or the right to exploit workers, our modern oligarchs want it. And they want it for free. Do your kids’ teachers have the right to collective bargaining? Your firefighters? Here’s a map.

bargaining

Hmm… Notice anything?

And here’s a label, one among many, to look for.

fedora hats

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Building (-v.t.)

RSF1.14-199x300

Nice piece in the NYT about the NREL research center in Colorado, especially on the architectural consequences of energy efficiency:

The $64 million Research Support building opened last year as a kind of physical assertion by the Energy Department, the lab’s parent agency, that office space can be driven down to zero net energy use through a combination of on-site energy production (rooftop solar) and fanatical attention to detail everywhere else in how the building saves and sips energy as a workplace for 800 engineers, managers and support staff members.

The resulting mix is meant to inspire builders and architects around the idea that net zero energy use is not only attainable but also affordable and even elegant. And that presents a new palette for architectural criticism.

How, for example, should one assess what seems at first to be an interesting sculpture in the building’s courtyard that in fact turns out to be a cleverly disguised fresh-air intake device for natural cooling of the basement data center? Extra points for form, or for function?

It’s getting to be a really weird thing to see vast new buildings, with square footage north of 100K, that leave these efficiencies on the table. They might use passive solar or have a giant cistern buried on site, but still have enormous shingled roofs that just sit there for decades without doing anything. It’s this expectation that needs ramping up. Instead the fossil dead-enders are looking to let the carrots rot and burn the sticks so as to finance for tax relief for the prosperous. We need to be asking more of architecture than just being structural remedies for various activities; double- and triple-purposing is the order of 2001… so you can, see we’re behind. And I would wager that architects generally would be willing and able… especially if hyper-efficiency came with built-in permission for the ugly buildings many seem to adore. Could be a decent trade (that we’re already making in exchange for bupkis).

But asking architects and engineers to fight clean energy battles against the folks who get elected is, well… probably too innovative.

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Eat It

Tomorrow is another meal. Dr. K, today:

The moral is clear. Republicans don’t have a mandate to cut spending; they have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?

It’s all backwards, all the time; belt-tightening should happen when things are flush; spending sprees (aka stimulus) when prices are up, energy costs are high and people are out of work. The huge surplus that GW Bush inherited way back when from BC? Used to fit the narrative cut taxes immediately. Because the gov’t shouldn’t have extra money. But tell people they should save for rainy day and balance their checkbooks.

Green, I’m telling you.

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The Trains in Spain

Move speedily across the plain, much faster than those in Maine. Or even between Boston and Philly.

TPM has a rather pathetic feature about the future present of High Speed Rail around the world and what several countries have been able to accomplish with some wise investment, imagination and planning. Pathetic in the sense that it makes the US look like chumps, real and actual morons for being lead by our loyalty to outmoded technology and means of transportation. But look Ma, we’ve got all these awesome tanks and bunker-busting bombs! Yes, there is shock, and more than a little awwww… but not the good kind.

Look at the pics they’ve put up and then compare them to this:

amtrak

I took that right before we boarded for a trip to NYC two years ago. It was an all night trip, great experience, priced comparable to flying except for far less hassle both departing and arriving, thus exacting a far lesser human toll. But look at that train. Our National Train System. It was rickety; there was still a space in the wall of the sleeper where a monitor with VCR had been installed, then taken out. But even so, there’s still nothing like seeing the countryside passing by the window next to you. Plus the conversations you get into over twelve hours together. And the Porter was the same vintage as the train car – tons of great stories he didn’t even need to tell you, so clearly were they written into his face and wrinkled hands.

We took the Eurostar with garcon d’verte in 2000 and the TGV many times before and since – the comparison is not the point. Look at the slide show above, it’s like another planet somewhere. They’ve left us far behind and long ago. A guy in the 3rd this summer described to me how they were testing a newer, faster TGV that met some crazy speed for a mere electric train – at nearly 600 km/hour it was outrunning the current that powers it, creating a new array of problems for the engineers, problems that they will solve.

The point is how much of this future present we are deliberately denying ourselves, all for the sake of infinite hegemony for car maker and oil companies. We are powerless before their century-plus of lobbying and propaganda, the individual freedom we believe was immaculately conceived within the sacred chambers of the combustion engine, from which we must not be sundered.

Meanwhile, we munch a Gordita and listen to Beck on the Interstate while a dude in Shanghai is sleeping on the maglev, dreaming of a day or a girl or a boy or a house or a song or a cure or another train, to somewhere. Who’s future is it, again?