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1. The future of flight
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2. Even better than vertical farms
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3. California climate skirmish -- a taste of things to come
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4. Lower your electricity bill...by keeping track of it
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5. Old homes get smart
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6. Short-term, yes. Solution, no.
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7. It pulverizes! It crushes! It frappés!
The future of flight
Science & Technology
by Adam Stein
We don’t devote a ton of ink here to environmental technofixes, but there is one area where technofixes are urgently needed: airline travel. Plane flight is both hard on the environment and also really wonderful for people, so let’s hope some of the futuristic fuel-efficient designs featured in National Geographic pan out:
Image by Georgia Tech/Courtesy NASA
The proposed planes come with whizzy features like retractable propellers and electric drive trains for runway taxiing that should cut down on fuel use, reduce noise, and allow for shorter runways.
Image by University of Miami/Courtesy NASA
NatGeo also recently profiled Richard Branson’s new commercial space flight outfit, Virgin Galactic.
Photograph by Stefano Paltera/AP
Branson is (to put it mildly) an interesting guy, deeply engaged on the issue of climate change while also pushing ahead with new energy-hungry business ventures. Two hour flights from New York to Australia? Yes, please. Again, let’s keep our fingers crossed for progress here, because the likely alternative is that flying gets way more expensive, and way less frequent.
Even better than vertical farms
Society
by Adam Stein
Two articles you should read if you’re interested in eating local, growing local, building local, buying local, or any of the other ways that geography, economy, and environment intersect:
- The first is an article from a few weeks ago, detailing the destruction of the domestic catfish industry due to rising prices for oil, corn, soybeans, and other commodities. All meat is getting more expensive, but catfish doesn’t have the advantage of being a dietary staple.
- The second is a long article on the ways in which rising fuel costs have started to unravel some of the global supply chains that were built on the premise of cheap transport. Shipping chicken to China to have it processed before being shipped back to the U.S. for consumption doesn’t make quite as much sense when shipping costs have almost tripled in the past decade.
Both articles provide as good an excuse as any to make an obvious point: prices matter. If you’ve got a problem with a lot of moving parts, price is often the best way to push change through a complex system.
Maybe you think that, say, vertical farms could be a great solution to various environmental problems. But you worry that vertical farms come with their own environmental costs (construction, heating, lighting, etc.), and you also know that other solutions might just be cheaper or more technically feasible.
So rather than trying to figure out how to “fix” the food production system, you should just favor a global carbon price. Then the difficult environmental math will neatly resolve into easy financial math. Like the catfish farmers, furniture makers, appliance manufacturers, and everyone else, growers will figure out the best way to get produce to market, whether by vertical farm, zeppelin, dune buggy, or whatever. (Carbon is not, of course, the only environmental problem, but let’s keep this somewhat simple.)
It’s easy to despair over the sheer complexity of choices in a globally integrated world. Is pasture-raised New Zealand beef better or worse than factory-farmed American burgers? How do locally grown hothouse tomatoes stack up against the field-ripened varieties from farther away? To a decent approximation, carbon pricing really is the universal acid that dissolves these questions away.
California climate skirmish -- a taste of things to come
Politics
by Adam Stein
Regulators have won praise for speed and thoughtfulness with which they have laid the groundwork for implementation of AB 32, the landmark bill that aims to bring California’s greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. But even within a single state, climate change legislation creates winners and losers, and regional tensions are starting to show.
California’s climate plan consists of a slew of new efficiency standards, regulations, and reduction measures — as well as a cap-and-trade system to place a lid on total emissions. It’s the cap-and-trade system that is part of the present pushback.
At issue in particular are the long-term contracts that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) has entered into for coal-based electricity. Although coal has kept LA’s electricity some of the cheapest in the state, the utility will have to pay enormous sums for carbon allowances under the new law.
It’s always instructive to unpack some of the distortions that surround the politics of climate change legislation. Officials from LA seem to be trying out three different angles in their resistance to the bill. The first is that the steep cost of the allowances will divert money away from their own energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.
Officials with the utility, which serves 4 million residents, project it will have to pay $700 million annually in fees for burning coal under the cap-and-trade system being considered. That will divert money it currently spends on expanding energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, said David Nahai, the DWP’s general manager.
“It will certainly affect our customers,” said Nahai, whose agency is lobbying the Schwarzenegger administration to reconsider its strategy.
The implication is that the fines will actually harm the environment by siphoning money from all the great green work DWP is doing. The logic here is flawed in at least three different ways:
- Raising prices for electricity from coal is itself an efficiency program, providing a powerful incentive to DWP’s customers to use less energy.
- And, of course, the hefty fines are a spur to DWP to speed up investments in efficiency or renewables. Any ton of CO2 they can reduce directly for less than the cost of an allowance will be a benefit to their bottom line. For example, maybe DWP can take another look at those smart meters that SoCal Edison is handing out in San Diego.
- Under a cap-and-trade system, that $700 million is going to get paid out to other polluters who can do a better job than DWP at reducing emissions. Even if we take at face value the claim that the fine will reduce funds for DWP’s own efficiency programs, that’s OK. It just means that someone somewhere else has a better efficiency program.
The second line of attack is to pretend that cap-and-trade is a form of accounting trickery that won’t bring about “real” reductions:
“We expected more nuts and bolts on real emission reductions. Instead, the easy way out for everybody, as it has been in Europe, is a cap-and-trade system,” Nunez said. “That’s not really what this is about. The reason you have to mandate reductions is, if you don’t, you don’t force investors to bring technologies into place.”
But of course, a cap is a mandated reduction. The only way “nuts and bolts” proposals for enforcing specific technologies will work out better for DPW is if the regulations result in fewer greenhouse gas reductions than would take place under cap-and-trade (otherwise there’d be no issue — DPW could just choose to implement the technologies to meet its obligations under the cap). Put more simply: this is a roundabout way of asking for a weaker bill.
The third line of attack is basically the equivalent of yelling boo: making vague insinuations about market manipulators, Enron, rolling blackouts, “untested financial schemes,” etc. One has to imagine that this sort of thing is remarkably effective in California.
But hopefully not too effective. California’s experience will be important for the nation as a whole, and regulators are moving swiftly in the right direction.
Lower your electricity bill...by keeping track of it
Reviews
by Pete Davies
We’ve reviewed some of our favorite items from the TerraPass green store ourselves. But increasingly our readers are outdoing us. Tom Harrison published a review of the PowerCost Home Energy Monitor on his blog fivepercent.us. With Tom’s permission, here are some highlights:
The sensor attached to Tom’s digital meter
It also works with older mechanical meters
The display includes cost-per-hour information
[It] installed easily in about 20 minutes. It has a device designed to be strapped around the electric meter, and it actually reads the meter. It can work with most common meters, even the old spinning-dial ones. Instructions were good, and there’s a special book for each different meter kind.
The meter-reader part has a wireless transmitter that sends a signal to the display part that you put inside your house. You set the date and time, and also, using a current electrical bill, enter the amount you pay for a kilowatt-hour of electricity, which is usually right on the bill. That’s all.
It shows your electrical consumption in dollars and cents on a little display you can put where you like. Your electrical use is no longer “out of sight, out of mind”.
And boy does it work!
I bought one and installed it, and, having received our first electricity bill since then, can confidently say that it will pay for itself in less than a year. Maybe a lot faster than that!
When things are mostly quiet, we still use about 5 or 6 cents per hour — a dollar a day. When we’re up and about, it’s usually around $0.12 per hour; lights are on, the refrigerator is running, the computer or TV is on, and so on.
But when I look down and see $1.22 per hour, I know the dryer is on. Holy cow!
Read Tom’s full review, together with some other great tips on saving energy at fivepercent.us.
Old homes get smart
Science & Technology
by Adam Stein
Smart metering is coming. Within a decade, you’ll know exactly how much every flip of a switch or turn of a knob costs in monthly utility charges.
The Times profiles two British seaside towns on the forefront of the low-tech energy efficiency revolution. Take, for example, Hove residents Brenda and Jeffrey Marchant, owners of a typical Victorian house. The Marchants were always energy-thrifty, but instant feedback is a uniquely motivating force.
Turn on a computer and the device — a type of so-called smart meter — goes from 300 watts to 400 watts. Turn off a light and it goes from 299 to 215. At 500, the meter is set to sound an alarm.
“I’ve become like one of Pavlov’s dogs,” Mrs. Marchant said. “Every time it bleeps I think I’m going to take one of those pans off the stove. I’d do anything to make it stop. It helps you change your habits.”
Homeowners are insulating attics and swapping out windows as part of an ambitious effort to drop the city’s emissions 20% by 2012. None of the efficiency measures are particularly exotic, and most pay for themselves. The city provides grants for some of the more expensive items, such as solar water heaters.
The U.S., of course, lags, but already technology providers are working on more sophisticated forms of smart meter that can adjust power consumption automatically by controlling appliances. When woven together into a smart grid, these systems can help reduce peak power demand.
Demand management is good for the environment, and also good for utilities. Southern California Edison plans to distribute smart meters to all 5.3 million customers by 2012. Such a program would have been financially infeasible just a few years ago. With prices on the technology dropping, the utility now expects to at least break even.
And, of course, you early adopters can get a jump start on the electricity savings by installing your own home energy monitor.
Short-term, yes. Solution, no.
Politics
by Adam Stein
From the Times:
Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.
The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases. Both trends are being driven by the high price of gasoline and diesel fuel.
Got that? High gas prices are shifting people from cars into mass transit. The only appropriate response, clearly, is to rob the mass transit account to pay for highway projects.
Since we ran John McCain’s response to our gas tax petition a few weeks ago, it bears mentioning that McCain subsequently re-upped his call for a gas tax holiday. Recall that one of our objections to this meritless proposal was that suspending the gas tax would divert funds from needed road and bridge repairs. Now, even without the holiday, the highway account is predicted to hit zero sometime in the next fiscal year, prompting administration officials to eye that nice, plump mass transit budget.
Of course, the ostensible purpose of the gas tax holiday is to ease the economic burden on drivers, something that a gas tax holiday can’t actually accomplish, but mass transit might.
There is this hopeful bit buried at the bottom of the story:
As for a longer-term solution, Ms. Peters said that on Wednesday she would propose a new arrangement for paying for highways, based in part on private capital financing and use of tolls that vary by time of day.
Mmm, congestion pricing. But isn’t this proposal going to raise the cost of driving? I thought the ne plus ultra of energy policy was cheap gas, now and forever. Perhaps the tide really is turning…
Update: Here’s a bit more on the long-term plan for replacing falling gas tax revenue. Although I’m not in favor of dropping the gas tax, the rest of the package sounds interesting — possibly good for the environment, our infrastructure, and taxpayers alike. It’s hard to say without knowing the details, but higher road tolls and more private investment certainly sounds like an experiment worth conducting.
Via Streetsblog.
It pulverizes! It crushes! It frappés!
Reviews
by Adam Stein
In response to urgent reader inquiry about the ability of the hand-cranked blender to crush ice, we present Friday-afternoon margaritas, TerraPass-style:
Tim gave it his best shot…
With mixed results…
But Peter got the job done…
An unforeseen benefit of the hand-cranked blender: if you’re too drunk to operate it, you know it’s probably time to call it a night. Get yours today!
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