Happy EarthDay To You  

Grist notes that environmentalism still seems to be alive - at least according to a Gallup poll - as Earth Day rolls around once again.

Just in time for Earth Day, a USA Today/Gallup poll has hit the scene to tell Americans how they feel about the environment. To wit: 60 percent of us believe that global warming is happening now, and even more of us think it will, uh, continue to happen. In true bootstrap form, most U.S. folk believe that they should be taking green actions to help the climate, in the form of CFLs, hybrids, and energy-efficient homes.

Nearly 90 percent of Americans recycle, while 85 percent aim to reduce energy use. OK, so that's great on the individual scale, but what about systemic change? Um ... two-thirds of Americans favor more energy research, and about the same percentage are opposed to government-mandated restrictions on utilities and industries. Sigh. Still, we take heart in the conclusion of one Gallup scholar: "This year's results suggest that pronouncements of the 'death of environmentalism' have been premature." We ain't dead yet!

The Christian Science Monitor notes that global warming is the focus of attention this year.

For years, Earth Day celebrants have hugged trees, dressed up as their favorite endangered species, and extolled the virtues of compost and organic gardening.

This year, April 22, the annual day to tout personal and community greenness, has a new emphasis for many people: global warming and its predicted effects on Mother Earth. Around the country and around the world, a batch of recent opinion surveys show swelling public interest in and concern about climate change.

There is "a significant shift in public attitudes toward the environment and global warming [with] fully 83 percent of Americans now saying global warming is a 'serious' problem, up from 70 percent in 2004," reports the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

"The last six months have been the most rapid period of change in public awareness and attitudes on climate change that I've ever seen," says William Moomaw, a Tufts University climate expert and coauthor of the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-sponsored group of scientists.

Demand for climate-change briefings he's delivered for the past five years have jumped in the past year, says Dr. Moomaw. Audiences who were once polite are now actively engaged. Now, after talks he regularly finds himself surrounded by mobs of questioners eager to learn more.

One of those who has questions about climate change and its possible impact on local weather patterns is Suzy Carpenter, a fourth-generation Arizonan who lives in Mesa. She's noticed a change in what she calls the summer monsoon season there. "When I was little it would pour buckets every single night, and it was that way through the summers until I was probably in my mid-20s," says Ms. Carpenter, speaking of the 1970s. "Now it's cycled down to where we get three or four storms per summer, and we're always short on rainfall now." ...

Grist also unveiled their second annual Earth Day list of the year's goodies, oddities, and inanities (see the original for the full list with links and pretty pictures).

- Most thoroughly debunked premise: "The Death of Environmentalism"
- Amusingest photo op: President Bush in a white lab coat, squinting vacantly at a vial of biofuel-bound liquid
- Most overused headline gimmick: any variant of "inconvenient" or "truth" (just stop it!)
- Goodest riddance: Richard "Dick" Pombo
- Refreshingest return from the dead: congressional oversight
- Driest report we actually read: IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report
- Slogan most likely to sweep the nation: "Coal is the enemy of the human race."
- Company we least expected to beg for carbon caps: ConocoPhillips
- Hottest conservative: David Cameron
- Hottest Canadian: Stephane Dion
- Longest-running federal boneheadedness: Interior Department's failure to collect royalties from oil companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico
- Biggest beneficiary of the corn ethanol boom: Archer Daniels Midland
- Depressingest study in Science: seafood to be wiped out by mid-century
- Second depressingest: Greenland melting fast
- Third depressingest: Melting Siberian permafrost packed with CO2
- Saddest potential species extinction: Tasmanian devil
- Happiest: climate-change skeptics
- Greenest nudie model: Keeley Hazell
- Insect we least thought we'd miss: bees
- Climate convert most likely to give you the heebie-jeebies: Pat Robertson
- Blatantest attempt to exploit the climate crisis: nuclear power industry
- Best alternative to nuclear power: URGE2

- Dirtiest smear on a halo: Obama's support for coal-to-liquids
- Most creative source of biofuel: Ass fat
- Best reason to skip biofuels and go all-electric: Tesla Roadster
- Leakiest pipeline operator: BP
- Scariest factoid: China expects to double its oil use in the next five years
- Eco-hero we'd most like to see body slam Dick Cheney: Mexican wrestler Hijo del Santo
- Biggest danger posed by all the eco-progress made this year: organic-vodka hangovers

One more item from Grist - this one from Dave Roberts on Converts and Heretics - one sentence summary - don't think like losers...

Arnold Schwarzenegger is being offered up as an eco-hero, so naturally some folks in the green movement rush to point out that it's all a big fraud.

Why they do that -- why progressives eat their allies -- I'll never understand.

Let's approach this through a semi-related phenomenon. I had the privilege of meeting Andrew Dessler in person the other day (how'd your talk go, Andrew?), and we discussed, among other things, how several climate change skeptics started off lightly flirting with craziness, before descending over time into full-on Inhofian fruitloopitude.

How does that happen? I speculate it goes something like this: When they first flirt with skeptical notions, they receive instant acclaim from a large horde of skeptics and flattering attention from the "balance"-seeking media. They also receive caustic, dismissive criticism from reality partisans. The praise pleases the ego. The criticism sparks resentment.

The human ego will naturally lean into what praises it and away from what hurts it. It's self-reinforcing. Next thing you know, you've been pulled into the warm, wackadoo bosom of the skeptic community, and you feel, like them, part of a besieged band of outlaws.

Schwarzenegger's case shows that the opposite can happen as well. He knew he was not historically and authentically an environmentalist. He worried aloud that he wouldn't be accepted as one: "I'm environmentally conscious, rather than an environmentalist. It's just too strong." But he pushed the green angle, passed some historic bills, and in return was easily re-elected in a shower of media praise. He became a green celebrity.

Did he start down the road with pure intentions? Who cares? He can't help being affected by the experience. You can see him lately beginning to take ownership of it, really puzzle out how it fits with his temperament, history, and politics. He's working it into his self-definition, showing other Republicans the path.

He'll never be the visionary leader greens want him to be, but he's an extremely powerful force -- an enormous influence on state, national, even international politics. Isn't it better he feel himself our ally, and that we encourage and embrace that alliance?

It's often said that conservatives seek out converts, while progressives seek out heretics. That's too often true of the green community.

Everyone's supposed to pass all these tests of consistency and commitment before they're allowed to speak out. Gore's got a big house. Arnold's got Hummers. Lester Brown probably pees in the shower. We constantly worry about whether people deserve to speak out about the environment, whether impure spokespeople will tarnish the movement, whether offering people too-easy personal solutions will anesthetize or stupefy them, whether passing imperfect legislation will forever exhaust our political capital.

As I've said before, these are the worries and preoccupations of people accustomed to being losers -- people who don't believe their cause is broadly compelling. I quote myself:

It's time to make the mental adjustment and start behaving like gracious winners rather than resentful losers. That means welcoming and encouraging people's efforts, working with them respectfully, without condescension or suspicion, to find more effective ways to continue down the path of sustainability. We've got to stop assuming, at the outset, that everyone's faking it for the cameras. Nobody's trying to give us a wedgie.

There is one thing -- and I doubt there's more than one -- we can learn from Karl Rove: people love a winner. It's reptile-brain psychology. You want people to be attracted to your cause out of desire and not guilt-ridden obligation? Then like Bill McKibben said:


Don't forget to smile! You are involved in an age-old war, waged against the powerful on behalf of the powerless. You're intellectually engaged, socially connected, and civically involved. You are creating a new future. It's a head-trip. It's meaningful. It's exciting. It's fun.

You are so righteous and so joyous that even the powerful, the wealthy, and the famous are pulled into your orbit. They want to join with you in the calling of a generation. Of course Arnold wants to be one of your tribe! Who wouldn't?

Instead of hectoring or tearing down newcomers, you trust that the cause itself will change them. Everyone has their own path, but sooner or later we're all going to be moving in the same direction: healing our breach with the living world we inhabit, becoming more ingenious, more prosperous, and happier in the process. Be confident.

One the downside, apparently Tigers aren't going to be around for much longer - Past Peak points to The Independent.

Hope is fading in the fight to save the tiger in India, the animal's last stronghold, according to Indian conservationists. Resurgent poaching and feeble official protection have combined to put the animal, India's national symbol, on the road to extinction, say the country's leading tiger experts...

Tiger numbers, which officially stand at nearly 4,000, are rapidly falling and may actually have dropped below 1,200, says Valmik Thapar, the conservationist who is the Indian tiger's best known champion. "I think we are living with the last tigers of India," he tells the BBC2 documentary, Battle To Save The Tiger.

The disappearance of India's wild tigers ­— one of the world's most charismatic animal species ­— would mark one of the most sinister milestones yet in the history of the degradation of the earth's environment by people.

Another species that is endangered but will be mourned less is the Loan Wolfowitz.



Joel Makower notes that Yahoo has joined the ranks of the carbon neutral, continuing their competition with neighbours Google in the search for sustainability.

Yahoo! Inc. has just announced that it will become carbon neutral by the end of 2007, yet another big climate commitment from another big company.

But this one arguably carries more weight. In making its announcement -- first, at an "all-hands" meeting of its more than 10,000 employees, then to its roughly half-billion online users and the world at large -- Yahoo! hopes to harness the power of its reach to leverage the impact of its actions.

Yahoo! management says that it has measured its carbon footprint, based on data from October 2005 through September 2006, the most recent data available when it started this process in last fall. From there, the company said,

We'll have a third party validate our carbon footprint with data from all of 2006 to make sure we haven't missed anything. This way we'll be carbon neutral in 2007 based on our full 2006 data. We'll continue to make investments on this timeline -- using the prior year's data to be carbon neutral in a given year.

Why do this? Yahoo!, like many big consumer brands, has been thinking about such matters lately, as climate change increasingly captures the national psyche (or at least that of its media proxies). And Yahoo! has long had an enviable record of environmental concern. In recent years, the company has engaged in a variety of energy-efficiency measures, from installing window film at its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters (saving 5% of energy costs along the way), to buying green power, to utilizing innovative, energy-saving measures to cool its data centers.

Beyond that is a healthy rivalry between Yahoo! and Google, its search-engine neighbor just a few miles down the road (5.3 miles, according to Google Maps, but 5.4 miles, according to Yahoo! Maps).

Google, too, has been waving the green flag of late. The company is nearing completion of its massive rooftop solar installation, one of the largest ever built, and is having its new corporate complex designed by rock-star green architect William McDonough. It boasts a lengthy list of eco-innovations, from its sizeable fleet of biodiesel-powered employee buses to its well-publicized interest in helping bring plug-in hybrid cars to market.

Call it "The Search Engine Wars: Green Edition."

But this is a war whose armies compare notes. In recent months, Yahoo! and Google staff have engaged in conversations about how they might collaborate on climate change, potentially harnessing their respective strengths to have maximum impact. It began last November, at the annual conference of Business for Social Responsibility, where Googlers and Yahooligans found themselves sitting next to each other at various climate change sessions. That fomented a conversation that has continued since, and has involved at least one other big-name consumer Web company. ...

o, what about Google? Will it soon be going carbon neutral? I wouldn't be surprised if it were, but if that's the case, no one's saying. I plied my numerous contacts at the Googleplex, as the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters is known, but turned up empty-handed. The best I could get was the standard corporate line from spokesperson Diana Adair: "We haven't made any public announcements about carbon neutrality and can't talk about our plans publicly until we have something to announce. That's just the nature of the beast."

This was one Google search that yielded no results.

Technology Review has an article on developments in the biodegradable plastic bag world. I'm somewhat ambivalent about the starch based bags they talk about - like corn based ethanol, corn based plastic bags are just another item that will end up pushing up the price of food for everyone - and in the meantime putting more dollars in the pockets of the likes of the unpleasant Archers Daniels Midland.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' vote last month to institute the first ban on polyethylene shopping bags in the United States may reduce the volume of plastic in landfills, but, despite many advocates' hopes, it is unlikely to dramatically reduce dependence on imported oil. That's because most biodegradable plastic bags (which San Francisco officials hope will take polyethylene's place) rely on a petroleum-based form of polyester.

San Francisco's ban will, however, create an important new market for biodegradable plastics that could bring plastics based on renewable feedstocks into the market. The best hope may be Metabolix, based in Cambridge, MA, which last year completed a $95 million initial public offering and signed a joint venture with agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) to develop its corn sugar-based biodegradable polymer.

Standard polyethylene bags have multiplied (San Franciscans alone use 181 million a year) because they are cheap and easy to use. They also produce less pollution in their manufacture than paper bags do. Until recently, biodegradable plastic bags have cost at least three times more and fallen short on performance, but the picture has changed over the past decade. "Today you've got some products that work from a functionality standpoint--the price gap has come way down," says Keith Edwards, biopolymers business manager in North America for German plastics and chemicals giant BASF.

Most biodegradable plastic bags are produced by blending plant starch with petroleum-based polyesters, which improves the bag's strength and processibility with conventional film equipment. Leading producers are BASF and Italian polymers firm Novamont. Edwards estimates that biodegradable bags from these polymers could cost three to four cents more than the one-to-two-cents-per-bag cost of polyethylene. But he's betting that San Francisco consumers will demand them thanks to San Francisco's curbside organic-waste recycling program.

San Francisco's environmental officials are making the same bet. Currently, the program collects about 300 tons of food per day, contributing to a 67 percent recycling rate for its municipal waste overall. But that number must rise significantly if the city is to meet a self-imposed goal to recycle 75 percent of its waste by 2010.

BASF recently boosted capacity for its biodegradable resin from 8,000 metric tons to 14,000 metric tons per year. Overall, the company expects annual production of biodegradable and bio-based polymers to triple or quadruple by 2010 from an estimated 50,000 tons produced worldwide in 2005. Meanwhile, Novamont plans to scale up a process for producing its biodegradable form of polyester from vegetable oils; it could begin within the next two years. ...

The New York Times has a look at the slow progress being made on producing cellulosic ethanol.

The sun shone brightly on the crowd gathered at the rusting old oil refinery here, as company officials showed off diagrams explaining how they planned to turn weeds and agricultural wastes into car fuel. Government officials gave optimistic speeches. In the background, workers prepared a new network of pipes, tanks and conveyor belts.

That was in October 1998, when ethanol from crop wastes seemed to be just around the corner.

It still is. Last February, company officials gathered here once again, to break ground on a plant designed to make ethanol by yet another method. At the time of the first ceremony, the Energy Department was predicting that ethanol produced from cellulosic waste would be in the market by about 2009 in the same volume as ethanol from the conventional source, corn.

But no company has yet been able to produce ethanol from cellulose in mass quantities that are priced competitively with corn-based ethanol. And without the cellulosic ethanol, the national goal for ethanol production will be impossible to reach. “Producing cellulosic ethanol is clearly more difficult than we thought in the 1990s,” said Dan W. Reicher, who was assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the time of the first ceremony and who spoke here then.

To be sure, swarms of innovators, venture capitalists and government officials are optimistic. Over the last year, money has begun to pour in from all corners — government, private foundations, venture capitalists and Wall Street — to sort out the myriad production problems preventing cellulosic ethanol from becoming a reality. And recent advances in gene sequencing have raised hopes for a breakthrough in mass producing the enzymes needed to do the work.

If making the technology work to produce ethanol from cellulose was important in the 1990s, it is even more critical now. Because of growing concerns about oil imports and climate change, Mr. Reicher said, “it is essential that we figure this out, and fast.”

Mounting concerns over excessive demands for corn as both food and fuel only add to the urgency. In January, President Bush set a goal of producing 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels, probably mostly ethanol, by 2017. But the more than six billion gallons of ethanol that will be produced this year have already helped push corn to its highest price in years, raising the cost of everything from tortillas to chicken feed. Poor people in Mexico have protested against the higher prices, and now China and India are starting to suffer from food inflation.

Another news item obscured in the glare of this week's university massacre was a call to reinstate the draft in the US. Personally I think this could have a very positive effect - if every American of military age was at risk of being sent to Iraq (or Iran, or Somalia, or wherever else there is oil), they might start to think a little harder about the cost of oil dependency and how to lessen this (not to mention how to rid themselves of the oil warlords and the pseudo-debate that goes on about the "War on Terror", thus making any intelligent conversation about the issue near-impossible).

The Senate Armed Services Committee heard testimony Tuesday that increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps may not resolve severe and growing personnel problems. There was even talk of returning to the draft to fill the ranks.

“It is better to take a smaller force than to lower your standards,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon personnel official now affiliated with the Center for Defense Information and the Center for American Progress. “The current use of ground forces in Iraq represents a complete misuse of the all-volunteer military,” he said.

The all-volunteer force was never designed for a protracted ground war, but that is exactly what it faces, he said. “If the United States is going to have a significant component of its ground forces in Iraq over the next five, 10, 15 or 30 years, then the responsible course is for the president and those supporting this open-ended and escalated presence in Iraq to call for reinstating the draft.”

Tom Paine has an article on the need to get aggressive on global warming, and the need to take on the root of all evil - Exxon - in order to make progress.

Those who dismiss global warming’s threat have embraced a series of arguments, retreating from one to the next as they’re trumped by reality. The planet isn’t really warming, they say. If it is, it’s due to random fluctuations or sunspots, not human-created greenhouse gases. And even if global warming is real, it will bring more benefits than problems. Wherever I go, people offer up the same rationales. Some even rattle off the names of dissenting scientists, websites, or journal articles. They dismiss the 99 percent unanimity of international climate scientists and scientific associations by saying those sounding the warning are all on the take and probably also personal hypocrites.

“They’re just giving the government funding agencies what they want,” a student in Colorado Springs told me two weeks ago. “If they don’t, they won’t get their grants.” It’s an odd concept of pandering, given the massive challenges faced by any elected leader who takes the scientific message seriously. But the deniers insist that a handful of contrarians whose views are refuted by every major scientific study are somehow more credible than the collective judgment of practically every climate scientist in the world.

These arguments emerge from the standard echo chamber of Hannity, Rush and Fox News. But the spokespeople who articulate them in these venues and others more mainstream have been overwhelmingly sponsored by Exxon. As the Union of concerned Scientists explores in their meticulously detailed report, Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air, and as George Monbiot examines in his powerful global warming book Heat, Exxon’s strategy of using a handful of industry-funded dissenters to cast doubt on an overwhelming scientific consensus was borrowed from the fight over tobacco regulation. In 1992, a major EPA report warned of the medical harm from second hand smoke. In response, Philip Morris hired the PR firm APCO to create a supposedly independent group, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), to promote scientists who’d dispute this harm. Enlisting enough other corporate supporters so the effort didn’t seem just a tobacco industry creation, TASSC’s mission echoed the phrase from a memo of fellow tobacco company Brown and Williamson, "Doubt is our product.”

As part of creating that doubt, APCO’s Steven Milloy founded JunkScience.com, which would later become a key website for global warming denial. Milloy also became associated with other key climate change denial organizations, like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which has called the Kyoto accords “a power grab based on deception and fear”), and later become a columnist for Fox. Major climate denial activist Frederick Seitz also had strong tobacco industry ties, drawing $585,000 from RJ Reynolds between 1979 and 1987 before going on to the George Marshall Institute. Exxon jumped in to support these efforts early on, as part of a more general assault on government regulation and action.

As the scientific consensus around global warming began to solidify, they began funding a series of studies and spokespeople to insist that mainstream scientific opinion was sharply divided. Between 1998 and 2005 the company has invested over $16 million in challenging the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, spreading the resources among at least 43 different institutions to give the appearance of a broad chorus of dissent. Whether the Heartland Institute, Alliance for Climate Strategies, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute and George Marshall Institute, they all got major Exxon support for their role in arguing that no global warming crisis existed. Until recently, the efforts to sow doubt have worked, with the help of a compliant media and the Bush presidency. And though a number of other energy companies also participated, ExxonMobil was the critical initiator, and remained firmly denying the crisis even as other oil companies, like BP Amoco and Shell, acknowledged the gravity of the threat.

Many of us know Exxon’s role in climate change denial, and have avoided buying their gas for that reason. Others have avoided the company because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But we need more than individual actions. In July 2005, major environmental groups launched an international boycott. The coordinating organization, www.exposeexxon.org, has played an important role in getting the word out about the company’s role. Their petition campaign for Exxon to cease funding global warming deniers and join other oil companies in making significant investments in renewable energy has generated over a half million signatures. But their effort has mostly been a media campaign, as opposed to one focusing on grassroots organizing.

Even with this initial pressure, though, the company seemingly begun to backtrack. This January, new CEO Rex Tillerson claimed followed strong criticism of Exxon’s actions by the British Royal Society, US Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, and in the Union of Concerned Scientists report, by announcing that they’d stopped funding “five or six” of the groups that promoted climate change skepticism. But except for the Competitive Enterprise Institute Tillerson refused to name all the individuals and groups Exxon has given money to or specify those they’ve cut off. And he gave no reason for the shift, although an Exxon spokesman did say the adverse publicity was a distraction.

Meanwhile, the company is still paying a handsome salary to former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist and Bush Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney, who Exxon hired after he resigned following media reports of how he edited the reports of climate scientists to render them innocuous. They even sponsor a website aimed at British primary school children, featuring a cute climate skeptic robot that claims the cause of global warming remains uncertain. And ExxonMobil continues to be rated lower environmentally than every other major multinational oil company. While the company’s stated shift may be hopeful, it’s by no means certain that it’s anything but greenwashing.

Solving global warming will be hard enough, even without orchestrated opposition. And of course we need to focus on where we need to go, like StepItUp’s call for an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But if we only do that and ignore the counterattacks, our efforts will continue to get Swift Boated, and it will be far harder to build the necessary political will for them to succeed. Targeting Exxon pressures them and other corporations to stop trying to undermine the scientific consensus and to stop blocking attempts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions—as in a recent Competitive Enterprise Institute ad that proclaimed about CO2, “They call it pollution, we call it life.” It also highlights the roots of why so many Americans have resisted the reality of the crisis—how what many of us think this is just our personal skepticism is product of a deliberate disinformation campaign.

Some questionable companies are hard to boycott—where do you start with Haliburton? But ExxonMobil has a presence in every city in this country. Their gas stations are accessible for rallies and picketing. Every dollar that their stations lose and every bit of adverse press coverage will create further pressure. ...

Byron King has an article continuing the theme of the importance of expanding the transmission capacity of the electric grid - the "corridors of power" - that I like to harp on about.

In the energy delivery industry, and certainly in the electricity and natural gas sectors, the transmission system has become a critical market-enabling mechanism. That is, transmission functions in much the same way as the interstate highway system, if not as those oceangoing freighter ships that bring foreign-made goods to U.S. shores.

Think about that last analogy of the oceangoing ships. What makes a factory in China truly competitive with a factory in the U.S. that can make a similar product? Does a Chinese injection mold operator have a better education than an American injection mold operator? Maybe not, but then again, consider how much TV the American worker has probably watched over the years. Or is it those proverbial "Every Day Low" sweatshop wages that they pay in China? OK, we are getting closer to an answer. Or perhaps it is because the Chinese factory spews a toxic brew into the adjacent air and water, in such a manner that would get the U.S. factory padlocked and its managers frog walked by the bunny cops down to the local jailhouse. Yes, of course, this matters in the broad scheme of things.

These Chinese competitive advantages, and many more that you could recite, do matter to one degree or another. But my view is that what truly makes Chinese factories competitive is the ability to transport the goods so cheaply across the Pacific Ocean, in containers that are then rapidly unloaded and shipped, via "deregulated" rail and truck, almost to the point of sale. Cheap transport effectively puts the factory in China right next to the factory in the U.S.

Transmission and Corridors

It is the same thing with energy transmission as with oceangoing transportation. A well-managed transmission system is the key to enabling robust and competitive energy markets that offer customers choice, savings and related benefits.

Do you recall how we began this article? We looked back to the olden days when the utility company owned the power plant just outside of town. This is probably no longer the case where you live. So do you really know from where comes your electricity?

If you live in California, some of your electricity may come from New Mexico, if not British Columbia. If you live in Ohio, some of your electricity may come from Ontario, or even Quebec. If you live in New Jersey, some of your electricity may come from a plant in western Maryland. Or consider that one of the largest generators of wind-powered electricity in the U.S., for example, is Florida Power and Light, and many of its windmills are located in -- are you ready? -- North Dakota. Last time I looked, Florida is a long way from North Dakota.

What makes this all possible is the creation of long-distance transmission corridors, over which electric power is moved, or "wheeled," from one region to another. No, the North Dakota electricity does not go all the way to Florida. But the North Dakota electricity might go to Illinois, and electricity from Illinois might go to Alabama, and electricity from Alabama might power homes in Florida. How do you calculate the electricity rates for Florida consumers, and who should get paid how much at each step of the way along the transmission corridor? It gets complicated in a hurry.

And why is FPL building windmills in North Dakota? For starters, it is just too hard to build new power plants in Florida, both despite and because of the fast-growing population, which adds more load and demands more and more electricity each year. Think about it. What community in Florida wants a new large power plant with a tall stack and thousands of rail cars passing by, hauling coal to the facility? And what electricity consumers in Florida want to pay what it costs to run a natural gas-fired power turbine just to generate base load electricity? "Not in my backyard," goes the cry.

Or consider what happens to aging power plants, such as the pulverized coal units with the 600-foot-tall smokestacks of the old-fashioned utility company, when these industrial behemoths are ready for retirement. Can anyone, even the local electric utility company, consider replacing an older plant if it is located near an urban or near-suburban core? As a rule, many among the locals cannot wait to hear that some plant operator wants to decommission an old coal-burner near the city. "Goodbye and good riddance" is the typical sentiment. And nobody wants a new power plant to get built nearby, either, so the tendency is for power generators is to construct new generating facilities out in rural areas far from the urban NIMBYs and their lawsuits.

But developing energy facilities far from load centers requires construction of transmission lines over transmission corridors. Whether it is a new, higher-tech version of the old coal-burner or windmills out on the High Plains (or maybe even a new nuclear plant, one of these days), the problem of transmitting that power along a new transmission corridor from generation site to place of load is instantly presented. And just to add another layer of perplexity to the process, which comes first - building the generation or building the transmission? If you thought that building a new power plant in any one location was tough going, just try building a transmission line that crosses many jurisdictions, each filled with its local species of NIMBYs.

In the arena of renewable energy sources, one critical issue for wind farm construction is that installed capacity in some regions is outstripping producers' ability to move the wind power from relatively remote areas to load centers in other areas. This affects market prices in a significant way, because the cost of installing and upgrading transmission lines to deliver the generation must be factored into the final consumer price.

Transmission constraints in West Texas, for example, have negatively impacted operations of numerous wind farms in that area. Thus, wind power generation in that region has been routinely curtailed to prevent overloading the local transmission system. This has resulted in losses of many millions of dollars per year of electric power sales. Texas generators and regulators are addressing the situation by upgrading existing facilities and constructing additional transmission facilities for high-voltage power.

The Nation has an article on the expanding clean energy business - Big Is Beautiful.

Terry Hudgens is a classic oilman: thick drawl, square jaw, engineering degree from the University of Houston, twenty-five years with Texaco in the oil patch, which ended with his running the company's $5 billion-a-year natural gas business.

These days Hudgens lives in Portland, Oregon, epicenter of organic coffee and politically correct unshavenness. To hear him talk, you could think he is wearing Birkenstocks: Instead of the good-old-boy discourse of the petroleum industry, Hudgens now speaks about "the power of the wind" and the future of clean energy.

But this is not the story of a midlife crisis, a businessman gone groovy at age 55. Instead, Hudgens has brought his hard-nosed oil-patch logic to the frontiers of renewable energy. He is now CEO of PPM Energy, a subsidiary of ScottishPower and America's second-largest and possibly fastest-growing wind power company. He got into wind for the same reason he got into oil--it's a good way to make money.

"This is wind power on a grand scale," says Hudgens. He is talking about projects like Maple Ridge Wind Farm, the biggest power plant of any sort built in New York during 2006. The farm's 195 huge white wind turbines, with blades as long as jet wings perched atop tall steel towers, are spread across miles of ridgeline in Tug Hill, New York, catching steady airflow off the Great Lakes. On a good day this farm will produce 321 megawatts of power, as much as a midsize coal- or gas-fired plant.

The green future wasn't supposed to look like this. In the environmental imagination of the 1960s and '70s, the ecological ideal was something quaint, a village where every house had solar panels, a windmill and a vegetable garden where the lawn once soaked up pesticides. E.F. Schumacher told us that "small is beautiful," and to this day many environmentalists see large centralized systems as inherently bad.

But the speed and magnitude of climate change dictate that we begin the transformation away from carbon-based fuels now--and on a very large scale. Only a few decades remain if we are to avoid cataclysmic runaway global warming and its attendant crises. Realistically, a green transformation will have to pivot on electricity and the existing electrical grid. At one end of the grid, zero-emission vehicles can be plugged in, while at the other end zero-emission power plants--most likely owned by large for-profit companies--can feed the system electricity.

Large utility-scale renewable energy offers important economies of scale. In Denmark industrial-scale wind farms already supply 20 percent of the country's power; Germany and other European countries are close behind. The American Council on Renewable Energy estimates that with "consistent public policy" and enough investment, 70 percent of America's energy consumption could be generated from renewable, carbon-free sources by 2025. Another government-supported study estimates that with radical efficiency efforts, renewable energy could supply all US electrical needs by 2030.

So, how have renewable utilities developed thus far? Who are the key players? How do they relate to the rest of the economy? What technologies work best? And what are the real economics of creating a green power grid?

The story of wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy development in the United States is an appalling tale of missed opportunities and willful negligence. The government has refused to use subsidies to jump-start green power, but it lavishes public money on fossil fuels. To the extent that the transition to utility-scale green power has begun--with the emergence of companies like Hudgens's PPM and huge wind farms under construction in California, Texas and the upper Midwest--it is no thanks to government initiative.

Petroleum and coal companies received more than $33 billion in direct subsidies between 1992 and 2002. The 2005 energy bill gave the oil and gas industries $6 billion in subsidies while filthy coal will get about $10 billion over the next five years. This public largesse takes the form of everything from R&D support and loan guarantees to accelerated capital depreciation schedules in the tax code....

Not to mention the cost of global warming and resource wars over oil...

The Nation article talks about the need to improve the grid in the US - and talks about heavy handed government regulation to make this happen (in slightly more direct fashion than Thomas Friedman's "green new deal") - hopefully the business world is smart enough to act before this becomes necessary.

A major problem facing green utilities is the battered condition of our electrical grid. Two decades of radical deregulation have allowed utility companies to cut back on maintenance. Electricity demand has increased by about 25 percent since 1990, but the rate of investment in transmission facilities has decreased by about 30 percent. Companies find it more profitable to simply overload the old grid. The result is congestion, which means rising inefficiency: In 1970 only about 5 percent of electricity was lost during transmission; now the rate is almost double that. It also means large blackouts like the one that hit the Northeast and Midwest in August 2003. A green future--with plug-in vehicles at one end of the wires and renewable energy suppliers at the other end--will lean on the grid even harder.

"Five years out, the electrical grid, the infrastructure, is going to be a serious problem," says Mike Jacobs. "The last time a huge round of transmission lines was built was in the 1970s, in response to big blackouts in the 1960s." This impending crisis of the electrical infrastructure will require robust government action--tough new regulation to force reinvestment rather than profit-taking.

In canvassing the leaders of the green power industry, I was repeatedly struck by their timidity: Their discourse is polite, their vision limited. The wind industry has settled on a goal of supplying 20 percent of US electricity by 2020. Why so little? Why not more, sooner? When I press Hudgens, he says simply, "We're not projecting greater growth. But it's not impossible."

Given the crisis we face as a species, carbon-free electricity ought to be a top priority. Subsidies for fossil fuels should be eliminated and replaced with mercilessly steep carbon taxes. This money, and more, should underwrite clean power generation and a massive overhaul of the national grid. Aggressive state action may also be needed to sweep away NIMBYs who oppose wind farms on aesthetic grounds.

Though it clashes with America's free-market mythology, aggressive state intervention has propelled all the tectonic shifts in our economic history. From granting land rights for plantations, to the creation of the railroads, to the rise of Big Oil and the creation of the aerospace and high-tech industries, government support has always helped the market along. It's time to couple these traditional tools--subsidies and tax incentives--with punitive regulation and tax levies to euthanize fossil fuels and build a green grid.

Science Daily has an article on improvements in plastic solar cell efficiency.

The global search for a sustainable energy supply is making significant strides at Wake Forest University as researchers at the university’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have announced that they have pushed the efficiency of plastic solar cells to more than 6 percent.

In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Wake Forest researchers describe how they have achieved record efficiency for organic or flexible, plastic solar cells by creating “nano-filaments” within light absorbing plastic, similar to the veins in tree leaves. This allows for the use of thicker absorbing layers in the devices, which capture more of the sun’s light.

Efficient plastic solar cells are extremely desirable because they are inexpensive and light weight, especially in comparison to traditional silicon solar panels. Traditional solar panels are heavy and bulky and convert about 12 percent of the light that hits them to useful electrical power. Researchers have worked for years to create flexible, or “conformal,” organic solar cells that can be wrapped around surfaces, rolled up or even painted onto structures.

Three percent was the highest efficiency ever achieved for plastic solar cells until 2005 when David Carroll, director of the Wake Forest nanotechnology center, and his research group announced they had come close to reaching 5 percent efficiency.

Now, a little more than a year later, Carroll said his group has surpassed the 6 percent mark.

"Within only two years we have more than doubled the 3 percent mark,” Carroll said. “I fully expect to see higher numbers within the next two years, which may make plastic devices the photovoltaic of choice.”

In order to be considered a viable technology for commercial use, solar cells must be able to convert about 8 percent of the energy in sunlight to electricity. Wake Forest researchers hope to reach 10 percent in the next year, said Carroll, who is also associate professor of physics at Wake Forest.

The Bering Strait has appeared in the news again (after my recent post on the Russian plan to build an energy superhighway under the straight) - this time via an article on enormous methane hydrate reserves deep under the water there. As always, I'd view efforts to try and exploit this stuff as potentially disastrous - its a large potential energy resource on one hand and a massive potential global warming increase on the other.

The remote Bering Sea seems an unlikely location for a major natural gas province. Yet the region may hold thousands of trillions of cubic feet of gas resources.

At a Jan. 11 meeting of the Geophysical Society of Alaska, U.S. Geological Survey Senior Research Geologist David Scholl described how what appear to be massive methane hydrate bodies pepper the south-central Bering Sea subsurface in a region that straddles the divide between the U.S. and Russian economic zones. The hydrates occur in a flat area of the abyssal plain, comparable in size to Nevada and Utah combined, Scholl said.

The hydrate bodies appear as strange looking features in seismic data collected during the Cold War. “The reason we found these things was because of anti-submarine warfare,” Scholl said. “… We were chasing submarines around and doing acoustic work.”

Trapped methane


Methane hydrate, often referred to as gas hydrate, consists of a crystalline substance in which a lattice of water molecules traps methane molecules (methane is the primary component of natural gas). The hydrate crystals remain stable within a certain range of temperature and pressure, known as the methane hydrate stability zone. If moved outside the stability zone, the hydrate crystals decompose into water and methane gas. When decomposed the crystals yield about 170 times their volume in methane, Scholl said.

Hydrates can occur on the seafloor if the water temperature and pressure falls within the stability zone. Alternatively, the hydrates can occur underground, within rock formations that lie within the stability zone. Within rocks the hydrates may be dispersed in rock pores, or form nodules, layers or massive aggregations, Scholl said. On Alaska’s North Slope there are extensive gas hydrate deposits within underground rock formations around the base of the permafrost zone — a government and industry team is currently engaged in a multi-year project to determine whether it is possible to viably extract natural gas from these hydrates.

Seismic features

The scientists engaged in the Cold War era research observed many strange-looking anomalies in the deep Bering Sea seismic sections. In profile, these anomalies looked like giant mushrooms, with the heads of the mushrooms typically about 1,200 feet below the seafloor and about 3 miles across. The stalks of the mushrooms would extend vertically downwards for several thousand feet to basement rocks that lie underneath the sediments that blanket the seafloor. Typical water depths in the region where the structures were found are around 3,800 meters (12,500 feet). ...

Some simple calculations show that the Bering Sea VAMP structures may contain vast amounts of methane. Assuming that the structures are circular and assuming a minimum gas concentration in the chimneys, a typical vamp might contain anywhere from 0.5 trillion cubic feet to 1 tcf of methane. Multiply that by the potential number of VAMP structures and you arrive at some fairly mind-boggling numbers.

But before anyone gets too excited about developing this spectacular resource they might want to consider that the gas lies many miles from land under more than 12,000 feet of water in one of the world’s harshest marine environments — economic extraction of the gas seems implausible in the foreseeable future.

And scientists would like much more information about the physics of the structures, their geometry and their distribution — among other things, that information would enable much more complete gas resource estimates. “What we want very much to do is to get up and acoustically map both the horizontal and vertical characteristics of a number of VAMPs,” Scholl said. “… No vessel has ever gone out there to take a look at one of these things using modern navigation equipment.”

But, given the cost of vessel-based research, these investigations seem unlikely to occur for a number of years. Meantime the methane hydrate “mushrooms” of the Bering Sea remain a tantalizing feature of the region.

Continuing on another recent thread - the impact of Australia's ongoing drought (remember - the Rodent says this is nothing to do with global warming - nothing) on our major river system and farming areas - this one from The Age considering the possibility of our main river being shut off from the sea. We only just avoided having this happen because we weren't letting enough water through a few years ago - now they are thinking of turning it into a set of half filled pools ? Didn't anyone learn anything from the Aral sea experience ? The SMH has a similarly dismal article about draining key wetlands to let the river have the water. This government is going to go down in Australia's history as its worst by a long margin...

DRASTIC emergency plans are being considered to stop the Murray River and major streams flowing next summer in a bid to reduce evaporation and conserve water for urban use. The plans were revealed as Water Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced into a humiliating backdown after his assertion that the federal takeover of the Murray-Darling Basin could go ahead without Victoria's agreement was contradicted by the Prime Minister.

The unprecedented step of suspending flows in the Murray was outlined in the grim report that prompted Prime Minister John Howard's dire warning this week about the parlous state of the nation's food bowl. The expert report to the PM and premiers said the rapid deterioration in water in the Murray-Darling Basin had been "unprecedented" and the gravity of the situation could not have been predicted.

Suspending the flows next summer was a "last resort" that "would have very serious salinity impacts, particularly in the Lower Murray," it warned. It said water could cease to flow from downstream of Yarrawonga, in Victoria's north, next summer if extreme dry conditions continued, although there would still be water in weir pools and deeper holes at major bends.

Mr Howard warned this week that unless there was significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, there would be no water available for irrigation at the start of the water year on July 1.

And Treasurer Peter Costello warned yesterday that food prices would soar if the Murray-Darling Basin, which accounts for 41 per cent of the nation's agricultural produce, did not receive adequate rain in coming weeks. "When we had cyclone Larry, the price of bananas went up four or five times … now that is what you could be seeing in relation to stone fruit, horticulture, all of these things," he said.

The report said inflows into the Murray since June last year were less than 60 per cent of the previous minimum. Inflows in both February and March this year were the lowest recorded.

The SMH also has some home truths about the Iraq war.

Helen Liddell arrived in Canberra last July as the Blair Labor Government's appointee as British High Commissioner to Australia. She used to be a minister. This week, in a speech to our National Press Club, Liddell had the temerity to tell the inconvenient (if obvious) truth about the invasion of Iraq.

"We have never seen Iraq as part of the war on terrorism," she told her audience on Wednesday, in answer to a question. "Certainly, at the moment, we are engaged in a war on the streets in Afghanistan, in Iraq, against terrorism, but our raison d'etre for our involvement in Iraq has not been about terrorism. We have always said, all along, that you cannot defeat what is going on in some parts of the world today by military might alone …"

Good heavens, woman, go wash your mouth.

Next day, when John Howard emerged in his walled Parliament House courtyard to let loose his latest fear campaign, this time about the dying Murray-Darling rivers system, another inconvenient truth which has been inconvenient for far longer than our Prime Minister wants you to think about, he was asked, in the last question of his press conference before he scuttled back into his office: "Mr Howard, was Helen Liddell wrong when she said that Iraq is not part of the war against terrorism? ...

So no, Helen Liddell was not "quoted out of context". And the British High Commission, without comment, re-released her speech which already had been circulated by the press club. Plain English is plain English. Read it and fulminate, if you will, Prime Minister. But some honesty on Iraq, please, without debauching another Anzac Day.

Here's something else to chew on.

Early this week, The Washington Post published a 4000-word article on an investigation into some shootings in Baghdad nine months ago. Our Prime Minister might read it in the context of the "war on terror" he and his ministers parrot, however tabloid the phrase, and the inconvenient truth of just who it is that helps feed this war in the travesty that has become Iraq in the four years since Howard committed to its invasion for base political motives.

The Post article began: "On the afternoon of July 8, 2006, four private security guards rolled out of Baghdad's green zone in an armoured security vehicle. The team leader, Jacob C. Washbourne, rode in the front passenger seat. He seemed in a good mood. His vacation was to start the next day.

"I want to kill somebody today," Washbourne said, according to the three other men in the vehicle. Before the day was over, the guards had been involved in three shooting incidents. In one, Washbourne allegedly fired into the windshield of a taxi for amusement.

"The full story may never be known. But an investigation by the Post provides a rare look into the world of private security contractors, who fight a largely hidden war in Iraq. Many come for big money and operate outside most of the laws that govern US forces. The US military has brought charges against dozens of soldiers and marines in Iraq, including 64 servicemen linked to murders. Not a single case has been brought against a security contractor."

The four guards were employed by Triple Canopy, a company founded by retired US special forces officers. It fired three of the guards, including Washbourne, who earned $US600 ($720) a day as a "team leader". Nobody was charged with anything.

Triple Canopy's contract was to provide security for "executives of KBR Inc, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation", which has multibillion-dollar US Government contracts in Iraq. Australians might remember KBR as the former Dick Cheney company that built the Darwin to Alice Springs railway for the Howard Government and the former Olsen Liberal government in South Australia.

Then there is Blackwater USA.

The weekly magazine The Nation was founded in 1865 and describes itself as "America's oldest and most widely read weekly journal of progressive political and cultural views, opinion and analysis". Ten of its 14 editorial executives are women, including the editor and publisher.

The magazine's April 2 issue ran a 5000-word extract, headlined "Bush's Shadow Army", from a new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. The article makes the Post investigation of last July's shooting incidents in Baghdad look like child's play.

The author of the book is Jeremy Scahill "who reports on the Bush Administration's growing dependence on private security forces, such as Blackwater USA, and efforts in Congress to reign them in."

According to Scahill, when the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned last December, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors in Iraq.

Scahill writes: "Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the Government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration in turn have shielded contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. 'We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq, and half of them aren't being counted,' says the Democrats' Dennis Kucinich, a leading congressional critic of war contracting."

Of the "shadowy mercenary company, Blackwater USA", Scahill writes: "Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US military apparatus. This company's success represents the realisation of the life's work of the conservative officials, including Rumsfeld, who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team. While initial inquiries have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration's praetorian guard.

"Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince, the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, its vision was 'to fulfil the anticipated demand for government outsourcing in firearms and related security training.' In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into the Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.

"Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. In just a decade Prince has expanded his headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina, to 7000 acres [2800 hectares], making it the world's largest private military base, with 2300 personnel in nine countries and 20,000 other contractors at the ready …"

Gets Australia's political pygmies with their "war on terror" into perspective.