Global Warming - The Final Verdict  

The Guardian reports that the forthcoming IPCC report by the world's leading experts says global warming will happen faster and be more devastating than previously thought.

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

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The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,' said one senior UK climate expert.

Today's "Australian" front page looked almost completely reality based - Rupert's new direction is slowly taking over - a lead article showing the government's popularity is in decline over the Iraq war and another featuring a BHP board member (and former local chairman and CEO of Exxon) saying the time has come to cap and trade carbon emissions - regardless of what the US and China do.

FORMER fossil fuel mogul John Schubert says the nation has reached a "tipping point" on climate change, with overwhelming public acceptance of the problem making it impossible for business and government to ignore it any longer.

The Commonwealth Bank chairman credits the drought, extreme weather disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in the US and Cyclone Larry in northern Queensland, record global temperatures in 2005 and former US President Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth with dispelling any remaining doubts on the threat of climate change.

"I have to say that the Australian community reached a tipping point about September-October, over about a six-week period, when it was just extremely clear that the Australian community bought in that climate change was a real problem," he told The Australian.

The respected company director, who sits on the board of mining and petroleum giant BHP Billiton, has now joined calls for Australia to implement a carbon-trading scheme. His push comes just one day after BHP's great rival, Rio Tinto, said the federal Government should move ahead with emissions trading even if major polluters such as China and the US refused to be involved. ...

Having been made chairman of both the Commonwealth Bank and the reef foundation in 2004, the trained chemical engineer asked the foundation's scientific advisory committee to take him through the evidence for global warming, because he was "not convinced that the science was completely there yet. I was convinced about the threats to the reef, but it was after I became chairman about three years ago that I really thought we needed to get agreement amongst the scientists and those involved as to what were the major threats to the reef," he said.

His scepticism was quickly dispelled. "If there is one piece of fact that I was shown it was probably the ice-core data that shows 650,000 years of both temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and there's just a hugely close correlation between them and it's pretty hard not to come to the conclusion that the carbon dioxide levels are due to fossil fuel burning, largely," he said.

Dr Schubert said awareness of global warming has now reached a critical mass in Australia, as more and more people come to share his conviction. The first sign was when business leaders at the Australian Davos Connection's annual conference on Hayman Island were much more receptive to his presentation on climate change last August than they had been a year earlier. A few months later the rest of the population also caught on, following the October release of the British Government-commissioned Stern Report, which concluded that climate change could cause global economic devastation greater than either of last century's two world wars or the Great Depression.

Bill McKibben has an article in Grist on the "Step It Up" campaign against global warming.

It's happening. The 20-year Washington logjam over global warming is starting to break -- which means that our Step It Up 2007 plans are suddenly more important than ever.

The last few days have seen all kinds of improbable things: a coalition of businesses starting to talk seriously about carbon caps (though tepid and small ones), reports that President Bush will give his first real lip service to global warming (followed, unfortunately, by reports to the contrary), and, maybe most importantly in the long run, the news that House Democrats plan to set up a special committee to consider climate change -- a not very subtle message that Michigan Rep. John Dingell (D) will not be allowed to forever block progress.

None of this would have been imaginable six months ago. And none of it means that there's going to be great progress -- only that there's an opening. Sometime, somehow, in the next couple of years, there's going to be a deal made. If there's a lot of public outcry, there's some chance that deal will actually sting the fossil-fuel industry and in the process do some serious good for the future of the climate.

Which is why, in our little world, the best news is that Step It Up 2007 is going through the roof. As of today, just two weeks after we launched our website, we've scheduled more than 250 rallies -- a number we thought, optimistically, we might hit in a month or two. It's very clear now that this is going to be by far the biggest demonstration against global warming the U.S. has ever seen, and perhaps the world as well. Rallies are being set up all over -- 45 states so far -- and some of them are incredibly creative. ...

Alex and Sarah at WorldChanging have a detailed post on global warming, declaring "The Future is Climate Neutral".

Historians of the future will almost certainly see the current debate on climate change as a classic example of paradigm rift, where people raised to think the world is one thing are unable to act intelligently when they discover it to be another.

The debate on whether climate change is happening is over, of course, but the debate on what we should do to prevent it from growing catastrophically worse is still stuck in a timid realm. Greenhouse action is seen as something akin to recycling or buying girl scout cookies -- morally upright but hardly essential. The reality, of course, is different: creating a climate neutral global economy is now the most pressing item on the international agenda. With the change in composition of our atmosphere has come a change in the reality of our lives few of us have yet grasped.

As the Stern Review has revealed, climate change may well become a disaster not only for biodiversity, polar regions and the vulnerable poor like those in Sub-Saharan Africa, but for the very global economy itself. Climate change is unfolding as not just a threat to the environment, but to civilization itself.

We can't avoid climate change: it's here, and it's gong to get worse, no matter what we do. What we can do, however, is minimize our risk of truly catastrophic climate change by acting decisively now. To do that, many experts say, we need to slash greenhouse gases by at least 70%, as soon as possible. This will require the cooperation of individuals, small businesses, corporations, public institutions and governing bodies. Nobody earns an exemption here, but ideally the increased participation of entities large and small with make it gradually easier to make reductions without making huge sacrifices, financially or otherwise.

A number of companies have realized this. We try to keep tabs on the businesses who are leading the way in early adoption of strict climate policies that can serve as models for those still clinging to regulation-free, high-impact practices. Numerous options exist for companies to start mitigating their carbon output, from carbon trading schemes to taxes and credits. ...

Of course, one of the greatest economic incentives for combatting climate change comes from the ever more compromised ability of insurance companies to assess risks and make reliable predictions about weather events.

Around the world, cities are taking into their own hands the task of reducing climate impacts, from San Francisco to London to Seattle (though Seattle's Green Ribbon Commission plan has proven stronger in vision than action). We even have an even bolder set of initiatives emerging as Ed Mazria pushes forward with his Architecture 2030 agenda.

Education is changing. Simply put, a contemporary education which doesn't involve a primary focus on sustainability, global systems and rapid innovation is of little worth. Luckily, a whole slew of great tools is beginning to emerge, from active instructional aides like school neutral to the 2010 Imperative, which aims, as Sarah reported the other day, to "reconfigure [design school] curriculum starting in 2007 such that it intrinsically factors disengagement from fossil fuel addiction into every design problem a student approaches."

Provinces, states and national governments are jumping forward in their own ways, from California's Carbon Emissions Law to Sweden's plan to go fossil fuel-free by 2020. Indeed, some governments are now seeing tougher regulation as a means to build competitiveness, since carbon limitations are clearly in our future, but doing more with less is economically advantageous now, while, as Japan has shown that ecological limits and economic prosperity can easily go hand-in-hand. ...

Now, not every answer to the crisis we face boils down to "reduce our climate emissions." It is important that we avoid carbon blindness. It is important that we begin to plan to increase the resilience of our essential systems to climate disruption even as we work to limit the extent of that disruption. It is vital that we begin anticipating the effects on natural systems of rising seas and extreme weather shifts (from a shift in ocean currents to runaway melting of the permafrost) and tipping points even as we work to preserve and restore natural functions. We even need to start thinking about how we'll help the hundreds of millions of climate refugees-to-be.

Our responses to all of these challenges are critical. But ultimately, none of them will matter if we don't stop spewing the pollution that's causing the problem in the first place. On a planet which is a couple degrees warmer and where the weather is consistently weird, we may still be able to manage, to fight hard and make it through -- but a planet of heat waves and constant catastrophe will likely overwhelm much of our ability to act. Which of the two we get will be decided largely by what we do over the next decade or two.

It's time to start building a climate neutral world.

One post they reference is Joel Makower's look at the carbon neutral bandwagon that corporations are running to jump on, in which he asks "is carbon neutral good enough ?" and examines the new "carbon offsets" business model (one I'm fairly dubious about - though there are some things, like air travel, you just can't power with renewable energy at the moment). Tom Konrad also has a post on carbon offsets.

The bar on climate change keeps rising, at least among a handful of companies seeking to be leaders in this arena. The announcements have been steady of late, with more and more companies claiming some kind of carbon neutrality. In just the three weeks since New Year's:

* U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer announced a plan that will lead to the company becoming carbon neutral by 2012.
* Salesforce.com introduced Earthforce, an initiative to create a carbon neutral salesforce.com in 2007.
* Dell Computer announced a carbon-neutral initiative that plants trees for customers to offset the carbon impact of electricity used to power their computers.
* Pacific Gas & Electric announced that it would use biodiesel made from soybean oil, along with solar energy and carbon credits, to render Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-inauguration celebration carbon neutral.
* A new exclusively business class British airline, Silverjet, was launched, saying it be the world's first carbon neutral airline, including a mandatory carbon contribution within its fares to offset its emissions.
* Package delivery company DHL announced that it would be the first logistics company to offer carbon-neutral delivery.
* The SXSW music and film festival said that this year's event would be carbon neutral.
* Just today, TerraPass announced the "world’s first carbon balanced retail product."

What, in Al Gore's name, is going on here? Has the whole world gone carbon crazy?

Well, yes . . . and no.

The phrase -- which, as everyone by now knows, was last year's Word of the Year -- is rapidly becoming a minimum expectation of companies, concerts, conferences, celebrations, and other conclaves. That seems like good news, in that climate awareness and action have hit a new level, including recognition by some of the world's largest companies. (January's rush of carbon-neutral news, of course, piles atop the many companies and other organizations that previously had made some kind of commitment.)

But what, exactly, does "carbon neutral" mean? There's no viable definition -- at least none being used by these myriad organizations. In my recent Google News search on the term, I found a wide variety of ways the term was being used, and more than a few questionable claims. (Can one really fly carbon neutral on company jets, even if it's "more affordable than you think"?) Beyond that are questions about how companies are achieving their carbon neutrality -- not all commercial offsets are equal, as I've previously noted.

I'm concerned about all this -- and so should companies that have made, or are thinking of making, some kind of carbon-neutral claim. For starters, as such claims continue to grow in popularity, their value will diminish -- yet another me-too action for all but a handful of companies. At best, carbon neutral will be seen as a de facto requirement, no longer be newsworthy outside the company itself.

That's okay. But beyond that is a bigger concern: that carbon neutrality could be seen as a cover-up for real action. As such, there would be a backlash against companies making carbon-neutral claims without having taken the appropriate precursory steps to maximize their energy efficiency and use the highest percentage possible of energy derived from clean, renewable resources. ...

Tyler at Clean Break comments:

Joel Makower has a great commentary about the whole "carbon neutral" bandwagon and how every corporation wants to jump on. The problem, he says, is we don't really have a standard definition of what the term means, meaning any company can make the stretch by calling themselves or their services carbon neutral. He fears the rush to use the term as a marketing tool will water down the meaning, and at the same time discourage what we really need to do: reduce our energy consumption. Makower has a great anology, comparing a company claiming that a service is carbon neutral to a person who orders a Diet Coke with their Big Mac and Fries. The idea is to reduce calories, not just offset them. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by using claims of carbon neutrality as an excuse for our excess consumption?

An MIT led panel has backed 'heat mining' as key energy source for the US.

A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth's hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.

An 18-member panel led by MIT prepared the 400-plus page study, titled "The Future of Geothermal Energy." Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, it is the first study in some 30 years to take a new look at geothermal, an energy resource that has been largely ignored.

The goal of the study was to assess the feasibility, potential environmental impacts and economic viability of using enhanced geothermal system (EGS) technology to greatly increase the fraction of the U.S. geothermal resource that could be recovered commercially.

Although geothermal energy is produced commercially today and the United States is the world's biggest producer, existing U.S. plants have focused on the high-grade geothermal systems primarily located in isolated regions of the west. This new study takes a more ambitious look at this resource and evaluates its potential for much larger-scale deployment. ...

The new assessment of geothermal energy by energy experts, geologists, drilling specialists and others is important for several key reasons, Tester said.

First, fossil fuels--coal, oil and natural gas--are increasingly expensive and consumed in ever-increasing amounts. Second, oil and gas imports from foreign sources raise concerns over long-term energy security. Third, burning fossil fuels dumps carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Finally, heat mining has the potential to supply a significant amount of the country's electricity currently being generated by conventional fossil fuel, hydroelectric and nuclear plants.

The study shows that drilling several wells to reach hot rock and connecting them to a fractured rock region that has been stimulated to let water flow through it creates a heat-exchanger that can produce large amounts of hot water or steam to run electric generators at the surface. Unlike conventional fossil-fuel power plants that burn coal, natural gas or oil, no fuel would be required. And unlike wind and solar systems, a geothermal plant works night and day, offering a non-interruptible source of electric power. ...

The panel also evaluated the environmental impacts of geothermal development, concluding that these are "markedly lower than conventional fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants."

"This environmental advantage is due to low emissions and the small overall footprint of the entire geothermal system, which results because energy capture and extraction is contained entirely underground, and the surface equipment needed for conversion to electricity is relatively compact," Tester said.

The report also notes that meeting water requirements for geothermal plants may be an issue, particularly in arid regions. Further, the potential for seismic risk needs to be carefully monitored and managed.

According to panel member M. Nafi Toksöz, professor of geophysics at MIT, "geothermal energy could play an important role in our national energy picture as a non-carbon-based energy source. It's a very large resource and has the potential to be a significant contributor to the energy needs of this country." ...

Tyler at Clean Break references the study in "Tremendous untapped potential for geothermal" and notes (as I have several times in the past) that a visit to the Blue Lagoon in iceland is well worth your time if you ever get a chance.

A new MIT-led study on high-temperature geothermal potential in the United States concludes that there's a lot more we should be doing to tap this energy goldmine. What we're talking about here are what MIT calls "enhanced geothermal systems" that capture heat miles under the Earth's surface and turns that thermal energy into electricity. This should not be confused with low-temperature geothermal or "Earth systems" -- another large, untapped energy source -- that use ground-source heat pumps or so-called "geoexchange systems" to provide heating and air conditioning for homes and buildings.

News.com has a summary of the study in this story. One of the research panelists behind the study is the University of Calgary's Michal Moore, who is a former commissioner with the California Energy Commission and a former chief economist with the U.S. government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I've got a call into Dr. Moore and I'm hoping he can tell me if there's anything in this U.S.-focused study that could be extrapolated for Canada.

The study's concluding recommendation is compelling: "Based on growing markets in the United States for clean, base-load capacity, the panel thinks that with a combined public/private investment of about $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period, EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a timescale that would produce more than 100,000 MWe or 100 GWe of new capacity by 2050. This amount is approximately equivalent to the total R&D investment made in the past 30 years to EGS internationally, which is still less than the cost of a single, new-generation clean-coal plant." ...

The beauty with high-temperature geothermal is it provides baseload power, like hydro-electric and nuclear, so unlike solar and wind there's no intermittency issues. Also, the waste heat from electricity generation can be used for district heating and hot water. Another bonus is, like hydro-electric, once the facility is built it lasts for several decades without the need for any fuel. The only company in Canada I know of that's serious about this business is Vancouver, B.C.-based Western Geopower.

It would be so nice if we could develop more of this geothermal in the United States and Canada. I had the opportunity two years ago to visit Iceland for a tour of its geothermal facilities. It was a eye-opening experience, particularly the opportunity to swim in the Blue Lagoon -- basically a lagoon filled with the tolerably hot water that's a byproduct of a facility's operations.

TreeHugger and The Energy Blog have posts on Staples' large solar power installation in Connecticut.

Staples has unveiled the largest solar power installation in New England at its 300,000-square-foot retail distribution center in Killingly, Connecticut. The solar power installation was built at no capital cost to Staples. The 433-kilowatt DC commercial solar photovoltaic system larger that a football field, covering nearly 74,000 square feet of roof space. The solar power system has the capacity to produce enough energy to power 14 percent of the distribution center or 36 homes per year. The project was made possible through the collaborative effort of Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, which provided a $1.7 million grant for the project, and SunEdison, which financed the remaining costs of the project and designed and installed the system.

“The solar power system installed at our Killingly distribution center is part of Staples’ integrated strategy for a seven percent reduction in the company’s U.S. carbon emissions by 2010 on an absolute basis, starting from a base year of 2001,” said Mark Buckley, vice president of environmental affairs, Staples, Inc. Buckley added, “The solar power system is a win-win proposition for Staples and Connecticut. Through our relationship with solar services provider SunEdison, we’re able to purchase solar energy off our rooftop at a rate below or equal to the cost of electricity off the grid. This reduces our operating costs while freeing up more electricity during peak times for use by local homes and businesses.”

WorldChanging has an interesting interview with Bill Gross and Andrew Beebe of Idealab and Energy Innovations on solar power and distributed energy geneation and distribution.

WC: How did each of you get interested in energy and renewables?

BG: In 1973, I was attending high school in southern California when the oil crisis hit. There were gas lines around block and you had to buy gas on odd- or even-numbered days. I read Popular Science magazine and read about all the dreams of people who wanted to go to solar. Based on what I was learning in school, I started to tinker with solar technology, even making small parabolic dishes and Stirling engines in metal shop. I wanted to take world away from fossil fuels.

I started to take out small mail order ads in back of Popular Science to sell these solar devices that I was building and it became a business that I ran it for three years. I think it helped me to get accepted to Caltech. . After I graduated from Caltech, OPEC had flooded the world with cheap oil and dried up all the investment interest in solar.

Then, in 1981, the personal computer was launched and I fell in love with it. I started creating software companies. When the inkling of electricity shortages in California appeared in early 2000, I wanted to see what else had happened in solar in the last 20 years. I found that not much had changed for many reasons. It was exciting because I had been passionate about this issue since I was a teenager but now I had business experience and company formation skills to do some thing about it.

AB: When I first met Bill, I could not believe the length of his commitment. In one of our first meetings, he brought in the issue from Popular Science with the ad of him selling parabolic dishes! [laughing]

For me, when I sold Bigstep, my first company, I wanted to find something big that would have impact on planet. I did full market scan for something huge and immediately impactful. The real "a-ha" moment for me on solar came when I was reading a Moore's Law. If you want to make solar cost effective, one of the ideal ways is to concentrate sunlight. People have dreamed about that for a long time, but microprocessors were too expensive. Now that Moore's Law has been on a march for 40 years, a full fledged microprocessor that can track the sun costs only twenty cents. That is down from $2000 just two decades ago. This already has effected personal electronics as we see in computers and cell phones but until recently had not been brought to energy. ...

WC: Can you explain your relationship with Google.

AB: Google certainly is a major milestone for our company and for the industry. We have the honor of working with them to install the largest commercial installation in US history and we are very excited about this accomplishment. Google is a visionary company with visionary leadership and their efforts fit perfectly in line with their notion of making the world a better place.
We are completing a 1.6 megawatt installation which constitutes three acres of a rooftop covered with solar panels. It consists of about 7500 solar panels, so approximately 50 percent larger than any other corporate campus install in the US. There are a number of one megawatt installs but nothing nearly this large on a corporate site.

It covers about 30 percent of the energy needs of the Mountain View campus and includes a lot of carports so it's mixed types of installations. Google wants to be a leader and not a follower in their adoption of renewables. Everything that they are doing with Energy Innovations reflects this desire. ...

WC: What is role for startups vs big incumbents in this space? How does that dynamic play out? What happens to Big Oil in 25 years?

BG: I do think that the 'Innovators Dilemma' rings as true in this industry as in any. Today, the entire solar business is only $4B. That is a lot in relative terms for the industry and the growth is very strong, but it is very small for an energy or oil company – it's almost a rounding error. As a result, the only ones who care about making highly profitable disruptive business are startups.

Think about in a large energy company how those people make their bonuses, take their vacations, get their promotions - in a company with 50,000 employees, nearly all are bonused on core revenue and profits on main line of business. In light of this situation, I don't think you can unlock the kind of innovation necessary to make a breakthrough in renewables. However, they do have the capability to scale innovations -- Take MySpace and News Corp. It's a good example because it's not clear if MySpace ever would have been created internally by News Corp, but News Corp is the perfect partner to reinvest, scale and catapult MySpace to next level.

AB: I think that there are many parallels between clean energy technology and the evolution of the Internet. In the beginning of the dot com period in early 90s, there were plenty of large technology companies but you have to ask why did they not transform themselves? We see the same situation today with the large energy companies.

Distributed energy is a new paradigm that does not lend itself to the strategic advantage of big companies. Big energy companies are good at harnessing competitive advantage through access management – they own the supply and access to large-scale fuel sources like oil, coal, and natural gas. However, with solar, they obviously cannot control the resource. This is a real shift of power.

They also are good at managing large-scale distribution systems like the grid itself. Just like those companies who had supercomputers or the few T-1 lines that were scattered across the US, these larger players soon will be disintermediated by smaller companies who can sell direct to customers and offer strong benefits at low costs for distributed power generation. That makes a good recipe for startups.

WC: Do you see this trend happening around the world?

BG: The conditions absolutely changed in energy in the last five years and there are powerful disruptive forces at work around the world. Today, the richest person in China is a solar entrepreneur. You have a number of public companies in foreign markets, startup solar companies that are profitable or close to profitable, but valuable for shareholders. Many move into the industry for these reasons, let alone the feel good reasons because it's so impactful. This is why I originally got into the space. The IPO prospects weren't on the horizon. But now the opportunity to make an impact and make a profit is powerful. ...

Dave Roberts at Grist has an excellent interview with Vinod Khosla on his forecast for 2007 - continuing Silicon Valley's war on big oil.

While I'm turning over the microphone to Vinod Khosla, he also sent along his thoughts on the prospects for alternative fuels and clean tech in 2007. Lots of interesting and contestable stuff therein.

1. Ethanol
* Cellulosic plants are real -- at least six in construction
* Tariffs on their way out -- global market for ethanol
* Congress sets much more aggressive RFS for ethanol -- all the 2008 presidential candidates adopt an ethanol friendly policy
* Next generation fuels (like butanol) and energy crops get attention
2. Renewable power
* Photovoltaics and wind continue their march
* Solar thermal technology starts to dispel the myth that coal is the cheapest long term central "utility grade" power source
3. Risks around coal based power generation
* Supply, costs, regulatory risks, carbon costs start to shake investor confidence in new coal power plants
* Calif. AB32 and similar state regulations start to stem the "coal rush"
* Carbon dioxide gets classified as a pollutant by the U.S. Supreme Court
4. Financing
* Venture capital in cleantech goes through the roof
* First cellulosic technology IPO set for 2008
* Private equity and hedge funds starts participating in biofuels
5. Efficiency
* First "high profile" startups in "efficiency"
* Green homes become visible as "real alternatives" at moderate cost
* Startups start in new renewable materials


Q&A - Biggest trend in '07?

There are a few major areas: biofuels to replace oil, replacement of coal with clean coal, wind and solar, new renewable materials, and efficiency. The pace of progress in each of these areas cannot be predicted a priori.

I suspect this will be the year of cellulosic ethanol. Biodiesel is a good product but fundamentally non-scalable unless it can be made form biomass instead of the seed product. Ethanol has had a good start and it will transition quickly to mostly cellulosic based production. But I suspect new fuels like butanol will come along, produced from the same biomass, brewed in the same fermenters, and running in the same flex-fuel engines. I would not be surprised to see bio-gasoline either, made initially from corn and later from biomass.

But 2007, we will see the emergence of cellulosic ethanol as a reality and biofuels moving from their role as an additive to gasoline to a primary fuel for automobiles. At the same time you will see critics, often funded by the petroleum interests, increase their attacks on biofuels through surreptitious PR campaigns, while publicly supporting these renewable fuels. We might even see oil prices manipulated down to thwart this transition which is essential for our planet, for our national security, and probably for increased global harmony. You will see the naïve campaigns of people with fancy names like the Earth Policy Institute which intentionally appear to use bad data or ridiculous assumptions but make good press headlines, move to attacking cellulosic ethanol.

We will soon see the end of tariffs and protectionism, global markets, and aggressive adoption of these new fuels. Why should we tariff biofuels when we don't tariff oil? And despite popular belief, oil gets more subsidies than ethanol! ...

On the technology side, we will see a horse race between clean coal, solar thermal (not photovoltaic), and wind for central utility-grade power generation. I would personally handicap this in favor of solar thermal power because it can be stored easily as heat and is half the cost of solar photovoltaic and is dispatchable by the utility when it is needed, unlike wind power which must be used when the wind blows. Heat is much cheaper to store than electricity and that gives solar thermal technologies (often called CSP for concentrated solar power) a big leg up over wind and photovoltaic.

Contrary to popular belief, I suspect we will find that clean coal plants (often called IGCC plants with carbon capture and sequestration) will prove to be too unreliable and the cost of gasification of coal (the G in IGCC), the separation of carbon dioxide from the waste gases, and compression too high. Liquefaction, handling, and eventually underground storage in large reservoirs will be so expensive that it is likely that solar thermal technologies will win the cost race. The financial risk of building a fifty year lifetime coal plant will become much more visible in 2007, and utilities that are doing it will see their stock suffer as investors recognize this risk fully! You have got to be crazy to build a fifty year asset with the escalating risk of environmental regulations and the certainty of carbon pricing at some point which will triple the effective price of coal. It will be much like all the gas plants built in the last decade that are already uneconomic. Besides, all the renewable portfolio standards (RPS) will make it where you can't produce coal-based electricity and sell it. Already California has a law requiring 33% of the power be renewable by 2020! The eastern states have their own renewable goals. The RPS standards are spreading like wildfire.

On materials and efficiency, I suspect in 2007 we will see new startups with great ambitions. I suspect that story will take a bit longer to become part of the mainstream discussions. I wish this would happen faster. We might see talk of "stored wind," which is key to increasing its use. We will see higher efficiency, new style photovoltaics that don't depend on silicon. They will need to get to mass produced technologies and 30% efficiency to really explode in the marketplace. That is entirely possible with thin film multi-junction approaches. ...

Tom Konrad notes that Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas may be abut to set up shop in Colorado.

It now looks likely that Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer will build a blade manufacturing plant in Nortern Colorado, near Windsor. I’d guess that some of the factors that made Danish Vestas consider locating here are:

1. The proximity to NREL’s Wind Technology Center for turbine testing.
2. Amendment 37, which will require large investments in wind farms in Colorado.
3. The State’s central location, making it easy to ship blades anywhere in North America.
4. Political support for wind, especially from newly elected Bill Ritter and the Democratically controlled state legislature.
5. Colorado’s excellent wind resource.

The 500 high-paying jobs will be ones wind advocates can point to when talking about the benefits of renewable resources over fossil fuels.

Tom also has a post on some paper that bugs bugs.

One of the companies I follow, Domtar has just launched an antimicrobial office paper. A great gift for the germ-phobe writer in your life. Or, more practically, for use in hospitals. I thought it was worth blogging, even if it’s a bit off topic. Anything that can reduce hospital infections is a wonderful idea, since microbes in hospitals are often immune to antibiotics.

Technology Review has an article on "Harnessing the Power of Bacteria", which looks at efforts to study the genetic networks controlling cells in the hope of creating better antibiotics and bioremediation methods (and possibly even energy).

A new method to map all the regulatory interactions in a cell will help scientists better understand the workings of bacteria. Researchers from Boston University tested the method on E. coli, and now they plan to apply it to microorganisms involved in everything from lung infections to bioremediation. The resulting maps could lead to better antibiotics and more-effective ways to contain radioactive waste.

"Say you're interested in producing ethanol and want to optimize that process," says Jim Frederickson, chief scientist in the Department of Energy's (DOE) Genomes to Life Program. "This is one tool that allows you to redesign an organism's metabolism to optimize that process. It has potential for a variety of biotech applications."

Bacteria sense and respond to their environment through an intricate network of genes and proteins that turn other genes on and off. The system is extremely complex because bacteria have to deal with large fluctuations in their surroundings--competition from other bacteria and changes in food sources or in the surfaces they live on. "In E. coli, over 300 proteins are directly involved in the control of genes, each of these controlling from one to hundreds of different genes," says Tim Gardner, a bioengineer at Boston University who led the work. ...

They are also working on a map for Shewanella oneidensis, an electricity-producing bacterium. The bacteria normally produce only tiny amounts of energy, and attempts to manipulate single genes to increase yield have shown little success. "Hopefully, the map will show what knobs we can turn to optimize current production," says Gardner.

At the DOE, Frederickson is studying how Shewanella bacteria use environmental contaminants, such as heavy metals and radioactive waste, in place of oxygen, converting the compounds into forms less likely to spread throughout the area. The findings could ultimately be used to help clean up Superfund and other hazardous-waste sites.

New Scientist has an article on energy storage and flow batteries, using an installation at King Island in the Bass Strait as an example.

SITTING at the western end of Bass Strait between the Australian mainland and Tasmania, King Island might not seem like a beacon to the future. Yet inside a large metal shed close to the island's west coast is an electricity storage system that promises to transform the role of wind energy.

King Island isn't connected to the mainland power grid, and apart from its own small wind farm it relied for a long time on diesel generators for its electricity. That changed in 2003 when the local utility company installed a mammoth rechargeable battery which ensures that as little wind energy as possible goes to waste. When the wind is strong, the wind farm's turbines generate more electricity than the islanders need. The battery is there to soak up the excess and pump it out again on days when the wind fades and the turbines' output falls. The battery installation has almost halved the quantity of fuel burnt by the diesel generators, saving not only money but also at least 2000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

So what's new? For years wind turbines and solar generators have been linked to back-up batteries that store energy in chemical form. In the lead-acid batteries most commonly used, the chemicals that store the energy remain inside the battery. The difference with the installation on King Island is that when wind power is plentiful the energy-rich chemicals are pumped out of the battery and into storage tanks, allowing fresh chemicals in to soak up more charge. To regenerate the electricity the flow is simply reversed.

Flow batteries like this have the advantage that their storage capacity can be expanded easily and cheaply by building larger tanks and adding more chemicals. The technology is already attracting interest from wind farmers, but flow batteries could also replace all sorts of conventional electricity storage systems - from the batteries in electric cars to large-scale hydroelectric pumped storage reservoirs.

Electricity is very different to commodities like coal or oil that can be stored up in summer ready to meet peak winter demand. With electricity, generating companies meet fluctuating demand by adjusting the supply, from day to day and minute to minute. Typically, they spread the load over large distribution grids and use a mix of huge, economical, "base-load" power stations supplemented by smaller, costlier generators that can be switched on and off at short notice.

Matching supply to demand is particularly problematical when it comes to renewable energy sources like the wind and the sun. The wind doesn't always blow when needed, which means that electricity companies must keep conventional power stations standing by so that on calm days, or when electricity demand leaps, people will still be able to turn on the lights. These power sources can also be difficult to slot in and out of the generation mix. An effective way to store electricity on a large scale would give renewable power sources a welcome boost.

There is no shortage of ways to do this. Ideas range from storing energy underground using hot rocks or storing it as electrical charge in "super capacitors" to using off-peak capacity to pump water into reservoirs where it can drive generator turbines when demand peaks. Then there are various kinds of batteries. While each technology has its advantages, flow batteries seem to have the potential to satisfy the broadest variety of needs - from small power systems to large-scale grid storage - at a competitive price.

Flow batteries are more complex than conventional batteries. In a lead-acid battery, the electrical energy that charges it up is stored as chemical energy inside the battery. Flow batteries, in contrast, use two electrolyte solutions, each with a different "redox potential" - a measure of the electrolyte molecules' affinity for electrons. What's more, the electrolytes are stored in tanks outside the battery. When electricity is needed the two electrolytes are pumped into separate halves of a reaction chamber, where they are kept apart by a thin membrane. The difference in the redox potential of the two electrolytes drives electric charges through the dividing membrane, generating a current that can be collected by electrodes. The flow of charge tends to even up the redox potentials of the two electrolytes, so a constant flow of electrolyte is needed to maintain the current. However, the electrolytes can be recharged. A current driven by an outside source will reverse the electrochemical reaction and regenerate the electrolytes, which can be pumped back into the tanks. ...

Sharon at Groovy Green has an excellent summary of where to buy seeds (for North American readers anyway) - and where not to.

If we're to become a nation of farmers, and a nation of people who take home and small scale agriculture seriously, I think it is important to think about our seed sources. After all, without good, safe, reliable sources of seed, there is no agriculture - period.

I'm a big advocate of buying locally, but as I just told a friend, seeds are one thing that I don't always purchase from my local retailer. There are several reasons for this. The first is that my local retailer tends to carry commercial garden center varieties of seed, which come from very far away. There are good reasons to want to buy local seed, from plants that have already adapted to your particular climate. Often the seed I mail order from far away is more local than the seed that I would buy from my neighborhood garden shop. The second reason is that I can often get organically grown seed if I buy by mail - and even though you don't eat the seeds themselves, there are excellent reasons to want to avoid drenching the field your seeds are grown in with pesticides and chemicals. Also, small seed companies often struggle to get along, and they need all the business they can get. Finally, there is so much variety out there in food plants that buying locally simply wouldn't allow me to try as many different things - if I had to rely on local sources there'd be no Glacier Tomatoes coming early, no Stein's Late Flat Dutch Cabbage hanging on in my garden until December.

There has been a heavy consolidation of the seed industry in the last few years, to its detriment.
Quotation There has been a heavy consolidation of the seed industry in the last few years, to its detriment. Quotation
The darkest force here has been the evil Montsanto, the Satan of agricultural corporations (and that's saying something since there are quite a few other dark angels out there), who bought up Seminis a couple of years ago. Now Seminis is the wholesaler that provides much of the seed for the seed trade, including many classic hybrids and nonhybrid varieties. ...

Fedco seeds, for example, out of Maine, was the first catalog I know of to drop all Seminis varieties, and I applaud them for it. I love their catalog, and http://www.fedcoseeds.com/, and they have wonderful prices and quality. Much of their seed is locally grown, a lot is organic, and they are well worth the visit. They do not sell seed year round, so if you are planning a fall garden, order now. They also have one of the best selections of fruit trees out there in their tree division, and I get most of my potatoes from them. They are my source for, among other things, the bulk sweet alyssum I undersow among my cucumbers and melons to attract pollinators and they were the source for my beloved "Benchmark" green beans, sadly discontinued this year. But I'll trust their recommendations that the replacement is even better.

Baker Creek Heirloom seeds www.rareseeds.com is totally out of my region, and I don't know for sure that they don't get any seeds from Seminis, but I doubt it. They have the biggest selection of open pollinated (that is, not hybrid) seeds I've ever seen in a catalog. They were started by a 17 year old boy, who is now a 27 year old married man, and it is run as a family business. One of my first seed orders ever came from them, before knew about local seed, and I get a lot of things from them anyway - I've almost always been happy with their seeds, and they carry many things suitable to my climate. Plus, they have wonderful service and are strongly opposed to GMOs and are interested in the political implications of our seed choices. Black Futsu squash is pretty amazing, as is their huge collection of sweet peas.

High Mowing Seeds http://www.highmowingseeds.com/ is another one I recommend. They grow all their seed locally (to their Vermont area) and while they are expanding their hybrid offerings, offer an alternative to Seminis by growing out many of the classic OP varieties, including Waltham Broccoli and Long Pie Pumpkins. They have good prices, good service and they sent me 25lbs of buckwheat within a week of my order.


Seeds of Change is sort of the Industrial good guy. They have a very polished catalog, and lots of wonderful varieties. They are not local to me (NM), but I like them anyhow. I'm not sure I totally trust anyone who has a line of processed foods, but they also do a lot of neat plant breeding, and have a great book section. Italian White eggplants produce very well for me here in upstate NY, and Golden Giant Amaranth is both beautiful and a delicious and nutritious grain crop. Their prices are high, and their bulk selection isn't great, but they are worth a look. www.seedsofchange.com . ...

Given a choice, my favorites are the catalogs that are in a different category entirely - not only are they good catalogs, but they are noble causes, and any money you spend there will enrich the world.

Bountiful Gardens is a terrific small seed company that is run in part by John Jeavons, the person who has most devoted himself to figuring out how to feed the world in small spaces. Not only do they have great seed, but they are a great cause. They also have a remarkable variety of compost, fiber and other uncommon crops. For those of you in northern CA and the Pacific NW, this is probably the place to buy, but all of us can get some wonderful things from them. http://www.bountifulgardens.org/. I'm going to take another stab at rice this year, from their offerings. Don't forget to look at their books, if you are at all serious about feeding yourself.

Sand Hill Preservation Center, run by the amazing Glenn Downs, is devoted to preserving heirloom breeds of poultry and seed. They are a single family operation, and you have to wait your turn for things. But if you can get things from them, you should. They are well worth your dollar, and virtually everything they offer is produced on farm. While you are picking out seed, don't forget to check out the chickens and ducks - I definitely want some Marans. They do not take internet orders, and they are picky about how things work. But that's ok - they are such a good cause that we just have to get over ourselves and wait politely for this tremendous gift they are giving us. http://www.sandhillpreservation.com/ Don't forget to say "thank you" for keeping our heritage alive and our food more secure.

Finally, and in a class entirely by itself, is Seed Savers Exchange, at www.seedsavers.org. You can buy seed from them directly, and they have a wonderful selection. Even if you don't save seed, you should become a member - the Seed Savers Exchange has been losing members, and more and more people are the only repositories of a particular kind of tomato, or green, or millet or pea. The Irish potato famine and the corn blight of the 1970s should be evidence to us that relying on one particular crop is unbelievably dangerous - we need all the genetic diversity we possibly can get. The people at Seed Savers are keeping our heritage, our history and possibly our food security alive, and they need you at the very least to join up and give them money. But why only do that? Because the very best place to get seed is not from a catalog at all, but from your own garden, or your neighbors. So join seed savers and consider maintaining one or two or 20 varieties of seed yourself. Grow them out year after year, and save a little to trade to others. This is good practice for yourself, and enhances your own security - after all, if you ever couldn't get seed, having some at home is a big thing. But most of all, it is a way of your participating in the provisioning of the earth.

There are great books out there about seed saving - my personal favorite is Suzanne Ashworth's book _Seed to Seed_, and I'm also fond of Carol Deppe's _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_, which is a surprisingly fun read for ordinary gardeners, even if you never plan to breed a thing. Because the amazing thing is that when you grow out a plant and save seed, you *are* breeding. That is, the plant begins to adapt to your region, and after a few generations, you've got a strain of something that is truly your own. It is a magical process, and one I'm still experimenting with. But more people need to do it.

Energy Bulletin points to a introduction to worm farming at Permaculture Reflections. The also have a link to an introduction to bio-intensive growing methods by John Jeavons.

Every household, every cafe, every restaurant, every place where humans are active, produces raw, organic waste.

What happens to this waste, and what does it do when it leaves our front door?

We pay taxes, to have municipal or privately owned trucks drive through our cities and streets every week or more to pick it up and have it sent to either a landfill, or an incinerator.

...We are currently paying money to destroy our environment and make ourselves sick, only to have to spend more money to “clean up” our environment later, and to pay hospitals, doctors and pharmacies in an attempt to make us well.

This is a negative use of our time, money and resources. It’s a never ending negative cycle.

I wish to show you a positive way to use our raw organic waste, to have a positive effect on our environment, our health, and our wallets. We can make our waste work for us instead of against us. We can profit from it, instead of paying to have it hurt us.

MonkeyGrinder has a little rant going on about nuclear power and its fuel - non-renewable uranium.

It was horrifying, horrifying! Richard Daughty, 321gold
So how big is the market for uranium, you ask. Well, now that you mention it, I would like to know, too! And, in sheer coincidence, here is the Money and Markets newsletter to say "In 2005, about 16% of the world's electricity came from 440 nuclear reactors. That required about 77,000 metric tonnes of uranium." That works out to, if I calculated it correctly, 175 tonnes per reactor.
But "mines only supplied about 48,000 tonnes", he says. The rest "came mostly from reprocessed Russian nuclear weapons - a program that's slated to end. Meanwhile, there are 28 reactors under construction around the world and another 62 are being planned. All told, scientists estimate that the world will need about 900 more nuclear power plants by 2050". Twice as many as now! Wow! And how! Maybe these guys are really on to something big with that uranium thing!

Near term investment opportunities aside, it is a big boggle for me consider that the unicorns and rainbows crowd thinks that 900 new nuclear reactors can be stoked with atomic coal.

We aren't doing it now, we're burning through prior (weapons) production, just as we are burning through long past discovered oil reservoirs for our liquid fuel. More damn energy laundering.

How will we dig endless amounts of uranium out of the ground? How will we distill it from the oceans?

Ethanol, I bet.

Weather today calls for periods of cloudiness, followed by a shower of diamonds from the blue sky. This is my personal plan to remove excess carbon in our turgid atmosphere - - yet I find myself blocked by a conspiratorial cabal of diamond merchants, naturally.

Reality has nothing to do with it.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a report on a BBC survey showing how effectively George Bush has destroyed american "soft power" thanks to his oil grab in Iraq and his policy of frustrating action on global warming.

Even from Australia, the US is seen as playing a negative role in world affairs, writes Cynthia Banham.

In total 26,381 citizens in 25 countries were interviewed between November 3 and January 9. Polling was conducted for the BBC World Service by the international polling firm GlobeScan and its research partners in each country. In 10 of the 25 countries, the sample was limited to major urban areas.

Global opinion on American foreign policy and the role of the US in world affairs, especially in the Middle East, has plunged to new lows, with overwhelming condemnation of its handling of the war in Iraq. An authoritative BBC World Service survey of more than 26,000 people from 25 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East shows that nearly three in four people disapprove of how the US has dealt with Iraq over the past 12 months.

Respondents were polled in November and December - before the announcement by the US President, George Bush, of his new surge strategy in Iraq, and his plans to send an extra 21,500 troops into Baghdad to quell the sectarian violence gripping the capital.

The polling also showed global public opinion was against US handling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where David Hicks has been held without trial for more than five years, with 67 per cent of respondents opposed.

The countries whose citizens were most strident in their opposition over Guantanamo Bay were Germany, Egypt, Turkey, Portugal, Italy, France and Lebanon, with 80 per cent or more opposed. Of the Australians polled, 77 per cent disapproved of the US Guantanamo Bay policies, while 76 per cent of Britons and 72 per cent of Indonesians also expressed disapproval.

The poll was conducted by the international polling firm GlobeScan. In only four of the 25 countries surveyed did a majority of respondents believe America's influence in the world was "mainly positive". They were Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines and the US.

The countries most disparaging of the role of the US in global affairs were Germany (74 per cent said it had a "mainly negative" impact) and Indonesia (71 per cent). In Australia, 60 per cent of respondents viewed America's influence as mainly negative.

Opinion on the global influence of the US plunged most dramatically among citizens of its close ally Poland - one of the original coalition of the willing in Iraq - where positive responses fell from 62 per cent a year ago to 38 per cent. Similarly, in the Philippines positive opinion about the US impact on world affairs fell by 13 points to 72 per cent, in India by 14 points to 30 per cent, and in Indonesia by 19 points to 21 per cent.

Respondents were polled on eight topics related to US foreign policy. In addition to Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and its global influence, people were asked about America's role in the Middle East. They were also asked how they thought the US had handled Iran's nuclear program, the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, North Korea's nuclear weapons program and global warming.

Past Peak notes that Bush is almost as unpopular with Americans as he is elsewhere.

The latest Newsweek poll is a doozy.

Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq:
Approve: 24%
Disapprove: 70%

Trust more to make decisions about Iraq:
Bush: 32%
Democratic leaders in Congress: 55%

US making progress in Iraq:
Making progress: 24%
Losing ground: 67%

US troop levels in Iraq:
Increase: 23%
Decrease: 50%
Same: 18%

Bush's "surge" plan:
Favor: 26%
Oppose: 68%

Democrats in Congress block funding for Bush's "surge" plan:
Should: 46%
Should not: 46%

The level of support for blocking funding for the troop "surge" is remarkable, considering that it's a question of withholding funding in the middle of a war.

The Australian reports that John Howard's poll numbers are suffering as well due to the Iraq war and other sundry offences like obstructing action on global warming and David Hicks languishing in Guantanamo Bay for 5 years without trial.

As John Howard prepares to freshen up his ministry, voters have also criticised the Government's handling of the war in Iraq, with more than 70 per cent saying it will influence their vote. The Government's handling of terror suspect David Hicks has also been denounced by voters, according to a Newspoll conducted exclusively for The Australian. ...

Labor would have easily won an election held last weekend, gaining 55 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote to the Coalition's 45 per cent. The party's primary vote dipped slightly, to 44per cent, while the Coalition's remains on 39 per cent.

With climate change emerging as an election issue, support for the Greens has returned to 7 per cent, close to the mark it recorded at the 2004 election. The poll comes as Mr Howard prepares to outline his election-year priorities in a speech to the National Press Club on Thursday.