The Big Company that Cried, “Green!”

Recently ExxonMobil has taken over the centerfold of the A Section of the New York Times, space they’ve used to trumpet their awareness of and concern about the problem of where future energy supplies will come from and the environmental impact of our use of fossil fuels. Generally, these ads have a personal element, featuring photos of company employees, clean cut and concerned, who are on the case, valiantly working to preserve The American Way of Life.

Truth and Justice? Not so much. Continued consumption? Oh yes! Oh yes!

One ad spotlighted a young, thin, somewhat preppy looking African American man, alongside a slightly older white woman.

Barack? Hilary! What are you two doing here?!

This is of a piece with British Petroleum re-branding itself as Just-Plain-BP and telling us that this stands for “Beyond Petroleum,” with GM telling us that the Chevy Volt is The Answer to our personal transportation problems (and/or to the Toyota Prius), with the nuclear power industry pushing the idea that nukes are a zero (carbon) emission source of electricity.

Working backwards, I am more focused on the fact that: our friendly neighborhood nuke people have long assured us that nuclear power is perfectly safe, although they can’t bear the cost of these accidents that will never happen; and forty or fifty years in, we have no permanent disposal site for nuclear waste (Yucca Mountain? Yucca Mountain?) so we’ve just been keeping it in pools at a-nuke-near-you for decades.

The Chevy Volt (due out in 2010), based on a battery that doesn’t yet exist, is quite appealing, at least as a stopgap, unless one hangs up on (who killed) the EV1. Burn me once. . .

As for BP, I’m a little queasy about relying on the kindness and the credibility of a company whose history includes complicity in the toppling of a democratically elected, if inconvenient, government: In 1953, BP (then the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) conspired with the CIA in Operation Ajax, helping to depose the government of Iran. This brought us the Shah. He brought us the ayatollahs. They brought us the Iranian Revolution. Among other dividends, this brought us Hezbollah.

So. . . like any card carrying cynic, I’ll plead reality here. The energy and transportation industries extant have every reason to plan for a post-carbon business landscape. At the moment, they have the capital—both human and financial—and the infrastructure to begin moving us toward more sustainable modes of energy generation and usage. They say that’s what they are doing. All we have to do is bear with them and keep those subsidies coming.

I don’t believe them.

They want us to clap for Tinkerbell. I keep seeing the Cowardly Lion, eyes closed, chanting to himself, “I do believe in hydrocarbons, I do believe in hydrocarbons. I do, I do, I do believe in hydrocarbons.”

“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” “Don’t get fooled again.”

Republicans Want to Filibuster Energy & Climate Bills?

LET THEM!

A recent article in Rolling Stone Magazine suggested that Democrats in the Senate are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome—their time in the minority has left them even more timid than usual, and more prone (on almost any matter of any importance) to revert to “the Republicans won’t let this go through, and pushing it will just antagonize them. No point in trying really. . .”

And so sank a variety of energy and global climate change related bills that have risen and (quickly) fallen in the past week or so. Whaddaya gonna doo? If you don’t have sixty votes to shut down a filibuster, why bother? Lunch anyone?

In late 1995 and early 1996, Newt Gingrich spearheaded the shutting down of the federal government (14-19 November 1995; 16 December 1995-6 January 1996), a face-off that ended up hurting him and benefiting President Bill Clinton. The lesson some drew from this is that “obstructionism” is politically costly.

Personally, I’m more than ready for some obstructionism. Bizarre that this is a partisan issue (like one party being the Gravity Party and the other being the Anti-Gravity Party), but this is where we are.

The Republicans want to filibuster, among other things: 1. To protect the oil companies from the repeal of the billions of dollars of tax breaks they have long enjoyed; 2. To prevent the passage of an emissions reduction bill (likely through a market-based permitting and cap & trade regime) that would at least begin to address global climate change; 3. To protest the protection (link is to anti-protection, pro-drilling site) of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) from oil drilling.

LET THEM!

The Democrats should show just an uncharacteristic smidge of vertebral integrity and let the Republicans “stand up for what they believe in.”

First and foremost, they should do this because it’s the right thing to do and this is the right fight to fight. But I find it hard to believe that they would not benefit from this politically as well.

Think of the shock value: “Democrats standing up for—!” Well just the “standing up” part would be new and newsworthy.

And the Republicans?

We have seven weeks or so (w/ time out for the 4^th of July) until the Congress breaks for August recess. If the Republicans are committed to gridlocking the Senate for that period in order to stand up for Big Oil and to stare down environmental protection in all its nefarious guises. . .

LET THEM!

Gas Guzzlers & Hybrid Hysteria

The Dawning of the Age of the Hybrid?

We just got a new (used) 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid. In part, this happened because:

@begin(vendetta)

At the end of last December, we left our 1996 non-hybrid Civic at Executive Valet Parking, near Bradley Airport in Connecticut. We had them change the oil while we were gone, which they contracted out to Travelube. A couple of weeks after we got home, the puddle of oil on our driveway clued me in to the fact that Travelube had generously put twice the appropriate amount of oil into our car. Turns out (shockingly!) that when you over-fill a small, hot, high pressure engine and then run it for a thousand miles Bad Things happen. . . end of car.

@end(vendetta)

Couple of interesting aspects to looking for and finding a new hybrid:

1. $4/gallon gas means that looking for a hybrid to buy is no longer a quirky, eco-smug thing to do. It’s more of a contact sport now, really.
2. When a dealer’s web site tells you that they have a hybrid on the lot, new or used, this is invariably untrue.
3. When a dealer tells you, over the phone, that they *still* have that used hybrid on the lot, that’s usually not the case by the time you get to the dealership (perhaps only hours later).

I’ve been driving smaller and smaller cars in the past few years, so my “baseline normal” may be a bit skewed. Same is true regarding price, age, and features; the 2006 Civic is the newest, lowest mileage car I’ve ever owned. So as to the Civic Hybrid, just a few days in: it feels LUXE and LARGE to me.

I don’t mind the luxe part as a philosophical matter, though, of course that impacts price—both up front and regarding the fancy features one may be called upon to repair in the future. The matter of size isn’t entirely subjective and it cuts two ways. I’ve owned Honda Accords that weren’t as big as this Civic. The benefit of the larger size (four doors; full trunk, which the Prius lacks) is that it is a full service car, a car you can take on vacation for example, which is not true for our Insight.

The downside is gas mileage. I don’t know yet what we will be getting. Have to figure out how to drive this car. It’s rated 49/51, City/Highway; but I think the (basically mechanically identical) 2008 model was “adjusted” to 40/45. Not bad for a full-use car. But getting 70+ in the Insight has sorta spoiled me. More info on hybrids (dedicated blog) here.

Still kinda cool that our “family fleet average” is 60+ mpg—just for purposes of teeth-gnashing egregious comparison, the US Energy Independence and Security Act which President Bush signed into law in 2007 mandates that we get to a corporate average fleet efficiency (CAFE) standard of 35 miles per gallon by the year 2020.

Sustainability. . . In (From!) the Desert

A wing of the Rockefeller clan—founding family of the Standard Oil Dynasty that became Esso, that became Exxon, that merged with Mobil—have been agitating to have ExxonMobil focus more attention on renewable energy and a sustainable future. They also recently sponsored a resolution to split the positions of Chairman and CEO, currently held by Rex W. Tillerson who has been stubbornly resisting any move to acknowledge the possibility of a post-fossil fuel economy—that resolution is detailed by its author, Robert A.G. Monks, in the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog.

They failed. And Tillerson has reiterated his commitment to ride hydrocarbons into the rising tides of a warmer future—a fine example of American Can’t Do cantankerousness.

Damn the melting ice sheets, full speed ahead!

Meanwhile, what country has been working on one of the more radical attempts to build a sustainable, post-carbon city, from the ground up?

ABU DHABI!

One of the oil and cash soaked United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with MIT, has recently laid the cornerstone to Masdar City, which they expect to be “the world’s first zero-carbon, zero-waste city” housing nearly 50,000 people by 2016. See David Roberts blog post on the subject.

I think it unlikely that The Emirates are on the cusp of becoming the hub of sustainable energy research. Neighboring Dubai is famous, among other things, for building one of the world’s largest, indoor, year-round skiing facilities in the desert and for building archipelagos of artificial islands—one in the shape of a map of the world and one in the shape of a palm tree—in the Persian Gulf.

Part of the Masdar Plan appears to be just as grandiose, a demonstration of economic and technological muscle. They will do this to show that they can do it, that they can do pretty much anything they want—and not merely in the realm of the previously possible but in the realm of watch us do what no one has ever done before.

That said, this is a pretty good direction in which to focus ego and self-promotion. It’s not a bad advertisement for the benefits of well-funded autocracies either. I am in favor of environmental impact studies, of careful planning and full consultation. But imagine if we tried to build our own Masdar in the Mojave Desert.

We want and need energy; more and more of us favor sustainable energy projects; but the ethic that prevails isn’t just NIMBY—Not in My Backyard!—anymore, it’s BANANA—Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. Treehugger has covered the topic of “how much desert it would take,” basically to fulfill the electricity needs of the entire planet; I don’t think the hurdles are technical as much as they are matters of regulation and. . . imagination.

Texas (and Texans like Tillerson) remains committed to oil; at least some Arabs in the Gulf are beginning to look toward, and plan for, the future.

Good for them; sad for us.

Ironic if they ended up forming OSEC—the Organization of Solar technology Exporting Countries—and we remained beholden to foreign energy sources.

Tillerson and the other fossil fuel fool execs seem to wake every morning and “smell the crude,” an intoxicating and bewitching scent.

They would do better to look up and see the sun.

Personal Energy?

I tend to think of wasted energy in two broad categories:

1. Inefficiencies in the design and use of all of our gadgets.

2. The more personal “spent most of the afternoon running around trying to find or fix—fill-in-thing-you-couldn’t-find-or-fix-last-week. . .” In that latter category, the issue is more time, irritation, some part of the lining of my stomach, and perhaps the heat loss from those little wisps of steam that come off my head both during and after a rollicking afternoon pacing my living room while on the phone with customer service or tech support people who are busily not addressing my issue.

On the one hand, the idea that we should be recapturing energy from our own activity sounds slightly silly and slightly Tom Swift-like. How much energy could you get, how would you get it, and what’s the point? On the other hand, it’s more energy than you think, and we can get some of it back.

Light, Heat, and Motion. . .

The logical place to start, for Homo Electronicus is the welter of portable electronic devices on which many of us have come to rely: laptop, cell phone, PDA, music player, electronic games, GPS, cameras of various kinds, etc. You come home and—if you want things to work tomorrow—you plug in. And if you commit heavy usage on the road (in your car, on a plane, in your off-grid cabin in the woods) you get that sinking feeling and the cartoon wah-wah-wah-waaaaah sound as you watch the display of your favorite device blink out.

Doesn’t seem like those things would cost much energy but they get us in a couple of ways: not least, most of the charging devices we use are vampires, they are leaking small amounts of energy all the time. Adds up. Like the dripping faucet that costs you four bazillion gallons of water over the course of a year.

You can find portable solar re-charging devices to jack into and they are getting cheaper and easier to find. For the lazy environmentalist, however, they require a few too many steps—something else you have to remember to bring with you, then you have to figure out where to position the thing in the sun for a few hours.

More appealing, to me, are the pocket books, backpacks, or even clothing with built in solar cells: charge-on-the-go Geek Chic. More subtle, sophisticated (and doubtless expensive) options that concentrate on harvesting power from body heat and normal movement are being researched by NASA, among others. We are the batteries. . . here comes The Matrix.

Meanwhile back at the ranch. . .

While I’m pacing and fuming, I’d like my shoes to be generating a little power for me and I don’t see why my house can’t be giving back some energy via the floor. And when I’m in my basement, peddling off some frustration on the exercise bike, that ought to be generating electricity too, like Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green.

I understand that for a lot of people most of this sounds something between geeky or pointless. Regarding the latter matter, I would simply point to the Starbucks Equation: $4/day doesn’t feel like much for an elegant cup of coffee, but by the end of the year that adds up to almost $1500.

Have to stop concentrating on the drops and look at the bucket.

Decentralizing Power

On “Sugar Candy Mountain,” (where they use cane-based ethanol rather than corn?) I would have my own windmill on a forty-five foot tower, the southern side of which would support a large photovoltaic array: free electricity in the sunny summer and the windy winter. The system would be grid-tied—which would mean that I would continue to benefit from the “always on” power network. “Net metering” would mean that the power company would be obligated to buy whatever I produced and credit that toward my monthly electric bill. Obviously my plan is to make so much electricity that they’re writing me a monthly check.

The other thing to do with surplus electricity would be to use it to split hydrogen from water, and bank the hydrogen: 1. To fuel my Honda FCX Clarity (what idiocy to generate hydrogen using a fossil fuel like natural gas!), and; 2. To run fuel cells sufficient to give me a week or two of power if the grid failed, the sun went out, and the wind went suddenly still.

So. . . Thing is I don’t happen to have $100 grand to drop on the windmill and the array, the tank, the fuel cells, the grid tie electronics (the car!), don’t have much in the way of southern exposure, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my tower wouldn’t tickle the neighbors that abut my postage stamp sized lot (they might get pissy about my Hindenburgian-sized tank of hydrogen too—go figure).

At bare minimum, there are financial and zoning issues; the viability and reliability of these systems is a fair question, as well.

Working backwards, and taking those last two issues together: this is what’s cool about grid-tied systems and this is why we should begin working on decentralizing and reconfiguring our power networks. We think of (f)utility companies as vendors; they are. What we need instead is something more akin to a credit union that funds a never ending swap meet in which what we are bartering back and forth is energy. The credit union doesn’t own the money supply, lock, stock, and barrel. Mostly, it reallocates our money: you buy a certificate of deposit that becomes my mortgage; someone else gets bridging capital for their business. How much smaller could the Big Grid be if it were more an exchange and a backup? Dunno. A tenth? Less? It should be able to shrink as local/renewable energy sources become both more common and more reliable.

The zoning issue is as much a design question as a legal question. Retrofitting is tough (sometimes impossible), potentially ugly, and often inefficient. We need to design houses, neighborhoods, our cities, our lives, from the ground up, to integrate sustainable technologies.

As to cost. . . 1. Economies of scale should drive costs down; 2. We spend ridiculous amounts of money on “home improvement” that yields virtually no pay back at all—granite countertops may be attractive but they won’t pay your energy bills; 3. If your house is on fire, it makes no sense to say that using water to put out the fire is too expensive; you pay the cost of the water or you don’t have a house anymore.

The Metered Life

From the time I first owned a car, I’ve kept a gas book, a little notebook in which I’ve recorded gas purchases and calculated miles per gallon. Every week or every 300 miles or so, I’d get some information on how I was driving. But mostly that was a kind of gross feedback, tending to show whether I had been doing more highway driving or city driving. During the winter, some warm-up time in the morning might drag the number down; during the summer a/c usage might do it. Given that I’ve always driven fairly old cars, the mileage figure also provides an early heads up about necessary maintenance.

The car I drive now has a dashboard computer that shows MPG all the time and in several ways: Total since the car was new; total since last fill-up (or since one of two trip odometers was last reset); MPG in-the-moment. That last one is like a thermometer in constant motion and runs from zero to 150 MPG; throw the car into neutral while going down a hill and that indicator “pins” at 150—which is such a cool feeling. There are aftermarket products you can get which will do this as well.

Well, okay, so my car is a video game. So what?

It affects my driving. When I can see that, on this particular trip to work, I’m right around 69 MPG, it nudges me in the direction of seeing if I can get just over 70 MPG. When I can see, INSTANTLY, that stomping on the accelerator, made my mileage plummet from 100 MPG to 50 it gives me some incentive to ease off.

So why isn’t my house like that? If I got constant feedback about my heating, cooling, and hot water decisions, that would change my behavior, too. If my air conditioner showed a constant readout in dollars—what it cost per hour/per day/per month at current rate of usage—whenever it was on, that would have a faster effect than end-of-August electric bill sticker shock. Same for heating in the winter. Same, to some degree, with how I adjust my refrigerator or even when I use hot water, to shower, to wash dishes, to wash clothes: it would be nice if these appliances could give me advice, offer to run later when possible. There are already systems like this for large buildings.

We use the bulk of our electricity during the day; there’s a huge amount of slack capacity at night. We would save electricity and use our utilities more efficiently if we worked more on load balancing. In some places the cost of electricity varies, according to time of day, time of year or sometimes even according to current load on the system, to incentivize customers to use less during peak periods and more during off-peak periods. Don’t know if the same is true for the natural gas networks. It would make sense if it were: a more evenly distributed load would make it easier to maintain steady pressure in the system.

Should I need my appliances to give me advice? Shouldn’t I be smarter than my refrigerator? Does this amount to a kind of lazy, techno-outsourcing of my conscience? I shouldn’t; I should; and perhaps it does.

But I’m not looking at things the way they should be, I’m trying to look at things the way they are. If we can embed better signaling into our environment, that might help us change in ways we know we have to.