A Musing Environment

I’ve been hearing from both pro- and anti-nuclear power people, NO!! to coal or natural gas with carbon capture and storage. They see a fossil fuel free world.

So why are all major policy analysts including CCS as important means of reducing greenhouse gases? Here are some answers, in no particular order:

• retrofit all the fossil fuel plants in the world (I’ve read the goal is to close all that can’t be retrofitted, by 2030?)
• capture and store industry-produced CO2 not related to electricity, it’s a lot
• fossil fuel plants, even coal, can be ramped up and down faster than nuclear for wind and solar backup. Yes, some utilities use coal to backup wind.
• nuclear buildup will necessarily be slow because it requires ability and i dotting and t crossing. Once sufficient testing of CCS has been done, anyone can make and lay pipes
• CCS with biopower is GHG negative. Today, more or less, whatever CO2 plants take out of the atmosphere while growing is returned when plants are burned (well, except for overhead for farming and transporting the fuel). With CCS, much of the CO2 absorbed during growing can go into long term storage. It is clear we need to rid the atmosphere of significant amounts of GHG.

Testing has to be done, laws made (eg, what liability does a company have?) Someone asked that question in a lecture, and we were told that originally people were thinking of a Price-Anderson type act, because that makes industry responsible, but that act is SOOO misinterpreted among members of the public that people are trying to find another solution. Translation: environmentalists have been pushing the idea that Price-Anderson is a nuclear subsidy, even though government has never shelled out a cent.

CCS

Guest writer: Kiran Varanasi is a research student in computer science, 26 years old. He was born and brought up in the south of India near the delta region of the Godavari river, and lives currently in Grenoble, in the French Alps. Kiran raises a concern I rarely address, from a perspective I don’t have.

Nowadays, environmentalists have to speak about global warming. The general public is slowly getting aware of the dangers of climate change, though most people appear unaware of both the nature and scale of the problem. As acknowledged by everyone, this is the mother of all problems. Pictures of poor polar bears stranded on floating sheets of ice have become part of our pop-culture. Spinning windmills have become part of political advertising, magically boosting the candidate’s green credentials. Which bottle of wine has lower CO2 emissions? Which feminine products are greener? All these have become important questions to worry about. This funny cartoon is a case in point. Hidden underneath these images however, is the real challenge of green activism: fresh water crisis.

Water conservation and prevention of water pollution were one of the earliest battles of environmentalists – much before climate change was ever heard of. Though they have become the green equivalent of 80s fashion, these battles are as relevant today as it was ever. In fact, fresh water is the most important battle in the war against global warming.

Fresh water is the elixir of life. The entire bio eco-system is based on this. Any minor disturbances on the supply of fresh water will have catastrophic impacts on biodiversity. The scariest effects of climate change are not rising sea levels or massive tornadoes, as exemplified by films such as The Day after Tomorrow. Scary though they might be, there are scarier problems: desertification of rainforests, severe droughts, drying river beds due to melting glaciers. In this post, I would like to write on the complex water cycle, and how sensitive it is to climate disturbances.

The first thing to note is that not all places are equal with respect to the availability of fresh water. This makes fresh water a very “local” problem. For example, the polar ice caps account for 60% of our fresh water reserves. These regions will not be facing any shortage of fresh water anytime soon. But not many life-forms inhabit the polar region to share this joyful information. For most of the life-forms, the news is rather unjoyful.

Spaceship Earth is 12,800 km in diameter, but most life forms are concentrated in very tiny pockets on its surface. The terrestrial biodiversity is mostly concentrated on the thin belt of the region that surrounds the equator. The marine biodiversity, similarly, is restricted to narrow bands of subcontinental shelves. Rising sea water temperatures and increasing acidity of the sea pose serious threats to this marine life. But in this post, I will take a distinctly terrestrial viewpoint and explain the threats to terrestrial life. As it looks from above the ground, the biggest threat to life is depletion of fresh water.

Western Ghats is a biodiversity hotspot.

The biggest treasures of biodiversity on earth are to be found in narrow river plains and delta regions – most of them around the equator. These are known as biodiversity hotspots. A quick, but incomplete, list includes the Indonesian rainforest, the Amazonian rain forest, and the great forests of Africa and India. The biggest reasons why life flourished in these pockets of land is abundant fresh water and sunshine. Now, the fresh water part of the equation is under threat. This threat is due to two factors (a) overpopulation of the human species, which denies fresh water to other life forms, and (b) global climate change which makes things even worse. Firstly, let’s discuss

The human animal
The biggest impact of humans happened with the discovery of agriculture. Rainforest was burnt down, and the land was cleared for cultivation. The animals which earlier lived in those regions suffered the loss of niche habitats. Clearly, it was not land that was in short supply, but land with abundant fresh water. Thus, humans began their long journey of monopolization of this scarce resource. Similar to other life forms, humans thrived in regions with abundant fresh water and sunlight. Such regions offer the best avenues for the cultivation of food grains.

For example, India looks like a tiny piece of land, but this country possesses the largest arable land in the world (558,080 sq-km). This is achieved by a criss-crossing network of rivers which are fed by Himalayan glaciers and monsoon rains, making a magical 48% of the surface suitable for cultivation. For this reason, this tiny piece of land has throughout history housed 1/5th of humanity. The same can be said for China (545,960 sq-km). An apt comparison would be with Russia, the largest country in the world, which has just 46,000 sq-km of arable land.

Due to our monopoly of the fresh water resource, we humans have multiplied in large numbers. Further advances in medicine and public health have made the population problem more acute. But what has not changed in the story is this: agriculture continues to be the biggest consumer of fresh water. It is precisely this occupation that is denying fresh water to the other denizens of this planet. Most of the forest covers in India, Europe and North America has long disappeared. In today’s world, the battlefront has moved to the Amazon river basin, African hinterland and the Indonesian rainforest. Painful deforestation happens every passing minute, and the reason is always the same: monopolization of fresh water by agriculture. This agriculture can take several forms – subsistence agriculture to nourish the poorest of the poor (assisted by logging, the source of firewood – their only energy source), soybean farms to grow as cattle-feed, direct cattle rearing ranches, cultivation of palm trees for biodiesel and so on.

As an environmentalist, I deeply support equitable distribution of fresh water to all life forms on this planet. But as a human, I also worry about the availability of fresh water to my own species.

We human beings need 1700 cubic-metres of fresh water per person per year. This caters to our needs for drinking, sanitation, industries, and above all, agriculture—the king of this demand. Any shortage of fresh water will directly hit food production. When we think of a fresh water crisis, we should not think of thirst, but of hunger and famine. Earlier, people used to think of land as the limiting resource for human population growth. In retrospect, this was not correct. The limiting resource is the availability of fresh water: civilizations have tumbled when rivers changed course. Now fresh water is ready to exercise its limiting factors on human numbers once more: India currently houses 1.1 billion people. This huge population, still has more water than is barely sufficient: 1800 cubic-metres of fresh water per person. This miracle is a testimony of how that land is blessed by rivers. But, the population of India is bound to still increase to 1.5 billions, and stabilize at this level at mid-century. This results in an acute 30% shortage of fresh water to its citizens – resulting in water wars (food wars) and destabilization of the region. The same story has its echoes in Africa, middle east, China and so on.

This is good news neither for humans nor other life forms. Humans will always monopolize fresh water. A fresh water crisis means more rainforest will be burnt, more land will be cleared for agriculture. and more plants and animals will go extinct.

Global climate change
Now we move on to the second reason for the fresh water crisis. Climate change makes much worse, everything we have learnt before. Several glaciers (pdf) are already receding rapidly in the light of increasing global temperatures. This will devastate the sources of all the major rivers on this planet. Several rivers are facing immediate prospects of drying up, or significantly lower amounts of water. For example, Ganges in India is bound to go dry part of the year, and this is not one of the changes that we can prevent!

Ganges will go dry

The glacier feeding it is retreating.

Melting Gangrotri

Climate change also brings in erratic rainfall patterns, which also destabilize the course of the river. Flooding will increasingly become common, and so will be drying up of rivers.

When a river dries up, it is not a simple fact of less availability of H2O. Rivers bring in alluvium, when they flood the plains. Lacking these deposits, most of the agricultural land in the world will become barren. In fact, the water cycle of each river is a very complicated and non-linear system with several factors at play. A minor disturbance can alter the course of a river, and leave a desert in its wake. Ancient civilizations such as the Indus-valley civilization and the Mesopotamian civilization have tumbled because of these reasons. We discover the artifacts of these great civilizations in what are now desert regions, but what used to be fertile river plains.

And it is not just humans who are affected by this amplification of the fresh water crisis. I grew up in India, where newspapers routinely report deaths of peacocks, pelicans and other birds in the summer season, due to drying up water holes. Wild animals such as deer, bears and leopards are forced to migrate to human inhabited regions due to lack of water in the forests. Mass animal migrations on the African savannah have been sighted recently. As humans have already monopolized the fresh water regions on the planet, these animals have not much place to go.

Melting glaciers and drying up river beds accentuate deforestation. Reduced forest cover means more CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. This is a very important feedback loop for climate change. This is the reason why I have mentioned earlier: the fresh water crisis is the Waterloo battle in the war against climate change.

What can we do?
By this point, I hope you are convinced that ensuring fresh water to every single place on the planet is a noble task for each of us global citizens, wherever we live. We are not protected by geological isolation: the implications of deforestation, desertification, food crisis and biodiversity extinction are too horrible to contemplate.

There is no shortage of fresh water, on this planet, per se. As I mentioned earlier, this problem is a very “local” problem by its nature. Our first task is to redistribute the pangs of the fresh water crisis across the globe, to lessen their impact. This is not as easy as it seems.

The concept of virtual water tells us the demand of fresh water for several types of products: food, clothing, consumer goods etc. Regions which are facing fresh water crisis should reduce the production of food/stuff which are heavily dependent on fresh water, for example, rice, coffee, and meat. We should preferably import these items from other places in the world.

As we observed, agriculture is the most intensive consumer of fresh water. But, rearing livestock is dependent on top of this agriculture for its feed, so it is much worse. A kilogram of beef requires 4100 gallons of fresh water. Reduced consumption of meat will alleviate the pangs of fresh water crisis.

Green water, or underground water resources, should be more expediently used. Rainwater should be explicitly harvested, and used for groundwater recharge.

Geological water acquifiers, or fossil water, should be used in the most careful fashion, for only the most pressing needs.

Distribution of water through canals has to be done expediently. Sealed water pipes should be used wherever possible. No drop of water should be wasted either to sunlight, or to the sea. Drip irrigation should be employed in places with water shortage.

Industrial waste should be monitored so that it does not pollute rivers and waterways. A lot of usable fresh water is lost due to these types of pollution.

Bio-fuels and bio-mass directly compete for fresh water. So it is imperative to have a strong oversight that they are not stealing it from something more valuable: like agriculture, or god forbid, rain forests.

Linking rivers through minor canals might help. These projects should be undertaken, but only after the complex dynamics of the water cycle are thoroughly studied and their environmental impacts are taken into account.

We should encourage better seed varieties which are less dependent on water and produce more yields. Sometimes, this means we should encourage genetically modified seed varieties.

In the end, we might have no option but use intensive water desalination projects. These demand a lot of energy. We should be careful that only renewable or nuclear energy is used in this effort. Solar energy can be particularly useful for desalination, because we are not much bothered by intermittent availability. Fossil fuels should be avoided by all means; they will make the problem only worse due to their amplification of climate change.

[See more in the March 20, 2008 issue of Nature, which covered extensively on the fresh water crisis, and has a wealth of information on the topic]

I’ve updated this for clarity.

I heard a small group tell how they spent time in discernment on climate policy, in order to work with others. Their discernment, in the manner of Friends, involved meditation, prayer, and seasoning ideas with others present, as well as reference to popular media sources. It did not include reference to peer-reviewed scientific literature, which might have brought them up against ideas they would find difficult to accept without giving up long-held beliefs.

The group’s use of the word discernment confused me, because despite the care taken to engage in discernment, God apparently took the group and plopped them down with none of their preconceptions changed; their choice of solutions remained remarkably similar to what they went in with.

Climate policy is of momentous importance to each of us, and to the world. We are challenged both in how we live, and in our ideas as to which policies work. We are challenged because we lack not only an easy path, but perhaps any path to keeping atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas low. We certainly lack easy hope. Those of us who work on climate change usually manage to find some hope, but we do not see a world in 2050 as biologically spectacular as today’s, nor as nurturing to humans and other species. Given the intellectual, emotional and spiritual challenges, it’s hard to imagine that all the ideas on climate change we bring could survive unchanged after serious discernment.

My experience of discernment is different. The effects of true discernment can be much like what happens in the movie Wizard of Oz. Dorothy is living her life when a tornado sweeps her to a country of never-imagined dangers, of beauty and vivid colors and new friends. She returns home, but is forever changed.

Similarly, I heard someone describe the changes effected in him when he stopped using cars and airplanes for political reasons. He began to lose his sense of entitlement, as he lost his ability to go wherever whenever he wanted. Paradoxically, he now finds life more joyful, not more deprived.

I went through the same experience. When I considered whether to replace my car when it broke in 1991, the environment was on the list of what I thought about, but much higher were cost and my need for more exercise. It was only in the mid-90s, when I began to read about climate change, that environment began to feel like an important reason to me. The sense of entitlement represented a challenge I was not even aware of until later, even more so after I stopped flying as well. Inadvertently, I found I had moved into a less entitled lifestyle. For both of us, the benefits to giving up driving and flying were more than we expected. We changed our lives for external reasons, but found internal reasons to be glad.

In 1995, together with a number of Friends, I began conscious discernment on energy policy, in particular the contest between coal and nuclear as energy sources. Following up on a puzzling discovery made in a writing class, I found myself on a totally different path from where I had always been. I counted myself less tolerant of fossil fuel use than other Friends at the time, in part because I had given up driving, and with it decreased my dependence on oil. And as someone who grew up poor, I identified with the toll taken by coal-mining accidents. On the other hand, I also initially reflected the common doubts about nuclear power, and thought it was probably about as dangerous as coal. It took two months or more to turn my beliefs around, let myself be tossed up and land in a different place. By the time I was done with this process, I had come to the realization that nuclear power was not as destructive to human health and the environment as coal, not even a “necessary evil”, but actually a benign, even attractive, energy source that could help decrease our use of far more damaging fossil fuels.

It became clear to me that I had not understood what is true, what is important, what is mine to do. There was a tornado—I had discovered that I and most of the people around me were terribly wrong in our received ideas about the relative dangers of nuclear energy and fossil fuels. In the process, I became aware that pro-nuclear scientists were much more worried about climate change than any of the dangers usually cited for coal. These realizations dropped me into a new world—a beautiful planet and its peoples suddenly more fragile and endangered than I had imagined.

There was much to learn about climate change, and there was also God’s hand pushing me onto another path, guiding. This description overstates the clarity of the way forward, but it was quite clear that I should not be doing what I had been doing, and should begin working with Friends on energy issues. The Call was unmistakable, my dedication unwavering, but my path was not immediately apparent. At the time I was dealing with loss of hearing and communication challenges greater than I had ever known. I had to become a different kind of teacher from my years in the classroom, which meant I would have to become an ever more conscientious student. And I was not alone in needing to know more than seemed to be known about the best way forward. Many others were then, as now, baffled and frustrated by the challenges of getting people to respond to the dangers already overtaking us.

My new calling resulted in a total reorientation of my life, its goals and purposes, and required whole new sets of skills and new knowledge. But I could no more have turned back than Dorothy could go home until her adventure had brought her the wisdom she needed.

There were a few things I was going to have to learn, including how to meet fierce opposition and personal attacks, how to open the eyes of those afraid to see, and how to keep my own energy and hope as I listened to new reports of growing dangers. I often felt that I was trying to “get home,” that is get reconciled with my community of Friends by sharing my awareness. Instead, I found myself often in deep and dangerous forests with a tiny company of friends to help me meet the requirements of my task. More than once I cried out, “God, do I have to do this?” This period taught me that an essential part of discernment is solitary even when friends (and Friends) are present.

Dore’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel

One common image during the year+, beginning in 1995, was the burning bush of Moses. I kept pointing out the burning bush to others: “Climate change y’all!! Y’all, yoo-hoo, climate change!” I realized after a while that the burning bush Moses saw wasn’t in the desert, but on his equivalent of Market St., where so many walk by pretending not to see. Like Moses, some of us don’t have that option. I also shared Moses’ challenges in communication—I continued to lose hearing, and was a terrible writer. But I felt that I couldn’t just keep walking and ignoring climate change.

During that period, I also pondered the image of Jacob’s wrestling with the Angel, because I was wrestling with the Angel myself: what was I called to do? All Jacob got out of the night was a dislocated hip (in my case, the ego was seriously dislocated—I had not understood the issues, not understood which sources we can trust, had not even articulated the questions). But the process of wrestling with the angel changes one forever. Jacob’s name was changed to Israel to reflect the inner changes.

Thomas Kelly in Holy Obedience describes the joy of self-renunciation and of sensitive listening as breathtaking.

The life that intends to be wholly obedient, wholly submissive, wholly listening, is astonishing in its completeness. Its joys are ravishing, its peace profound, its humility the deepest, its power world-shaking, its love enveloping, its simplicity that of a trusting child.

Yet another fruit is entrance into suffering.

The heart is stretched through suffering, and enlarged. But O the agony of this enlarging of the heart, that one may be prepared to enter into the anguish of others! Yet the way of holy obedience leads out from the heart of God and extends through the Valley of the Shadow.

Discernment is not always such a profound act for me. Yet I am always changed, even if I decide to keep to the same path. I will have new reasons, new resolve, new clarity and focus, new energy and dedication because I am no longer divided in myself. I have tested my ideas and purposes against doubts and questions I allowed myself to hear and answer.

When I am not changed, as I labor over a question, I am not confident discernment has taken place—perhaps I have just reinforced what I already I new or believed.

One of the great dangers inherent in teaching and activism is an unconscious resistance to such change. I’d prefer to believe I have been right than to be right. Discernment works best when the goal, “to have been right,” is not primary.

Now more than ever before, what the world needs are people willing to have been wrong along the way, many times over, people who are continually discerning what is true now, what is important now, and what is mine to do.

I hope to post more detailed information on some of these after the weekend, meanwhile, what’s the news on the climate at the recent American Geophysical Union conference, and elsewhere?

Check out Eureka Alert (atmosphere):

Abrupt Climate Shifts May Come Sooner, Not Later
MIT finds climate change could dramatically affect water supplies

and more

Eureka Alert posts oodles of articles on a wide variety of subjects.

President elect Obama announced his choices for Secretary of Energy (Steven Chu), head of Environmental Protection Agency (Lisa Jackson), Council on Environmental Quality (Nancy Sutley), and energy (Carol Browner). I know more about Chu as he is local, famous in physics even before his Nobel Prize, and frequent speaker, eg, in Science in the Theater programs. Like just about everyone else, I am thrilled that someone who is dedicated to addressing climate change and very interested in getting the facts right will have an important position.

Chu heads Lawrence Berkeley Labs. It has an Environmental Energy Technologies Division:

Advanced Energy Technologies
Research on batteries, fuel cells, cleaner combustion, and physical and chemical applications.

Atmospheric Sciences
Links to research on climate, regional and urban air quality, and modeling studies.

Buildings Energy Efficiency
Find out more about EETD’s work on energy-efficient lighting, windows, roofs, software, and building systems.

Energy Analysis
EETD conducts research on both U.S. and international energy issues—policy, efficient purchasing, electricity markets, energy use of buildings, industry, and transportation.

Indoor & Outdoor Environmental Quality
Ventilation, indoor air quality, assessing pollutant exposures and risk, and reducing the chemical and biological attack threat to buildings.

The Energy Analysis program and others includes working with China and other governments.

The Helios Project is also there, working on new technology photovoltaics (solar cells) and cellulosic biofuels.

Now a blog at the American Association for the Advancement of Science site predicts that the highly respected John Holdren, recently president of AAAS, head of Woods Hole Research Center, will be named science adviser.

Search on this blog, to find more of what John Holdren says.

To get some idea what Holdren sees as important for scientists to focus on, go to his plenary address to the AAAS meeting in San Francisco in 2007.

It looks like President elect Obama is serious about addressing climate change.

This year I’ve been considering what climate change work I want to do, what to focus on, what new projects to take on.

That introspection is not the only reason I stopped posting. This year, many I know died, from some I barely knew, to those I knew well, and loved. Some deaths were expected, or not unexpected, while a couple were a shock.

Here’s to Pat and Alex, Monte and Norval, Carol and Carla, Jeanne and Bob, Bernie and Ros, and all the rest.

The October 2008 Friends Journal focuses on Energy, Climate, and Building Community, and includes my article, A Friend’s Path to Nuclear Power. The footnotes were too many and too long for the print article, so we are posting the article here. Comments on this or other articles in this issue?

Update: The Nuclear Energy Debate Among Friends: Another Round is the response to the responses to this article.

Another UC, Berkeley Forefront magazine article discusses Green Future: Engineers Forge Novel Technologies For A Sustainable World.

Environmental Footprints: Sustainability by the Numbers

When given a choice—paper or plastic, cloth diapers or disposables, garbage can or recycling bin—most of us do what we think is greenest. The problem is, we’re often wrong.

“We make emotional decisions, but often there’s no scientific proof to back things up,” says Arpad Horvath, professor of civil and environmental engineering. For several years Horvath has focused on developing systematic methods to assess the environmental impact of our industrial processes, consumer goods and services and beyond…

In a 2004 study, for example, Horvath’s assessment revealed that reading the New York Times wirelessly on a PDA instead of having the paper delivered to your door requires consumption of about 140 times less carbon dioxide and 26 to 67 times less water. Now he is bringing his research to bear on the building industry, examining a building’s sustainability in the context of the entire supply chain behind its construction, operation, maintenance and end of life.

“Besides transportation and electricity generation, buildings are the single greatest consumers of energy and other resources,” he says. “And nearly every sector of our economy—mining, manufacturing and services—supplies to the building industry.”

Tiny Generators: Recapturing Waste Heat

Almost all the world’s power, roughly 10 trillion watts, is produced by burning fossil fuels and running engines based on heat. For every watt of power generated, one and a half watts are dumped as waste heat. It’s a law of thermodynamics.

“Can we extract some of the juice from that waste heat?” asks mechanical engineering professor Arun Majumdar. He and his colleagues are working at the nanoscale to build super-efficient devices that directly convert heat into electricity. Their research could some day lead to hybrid automobiles that generate electricity from the radiator to charge their batteries, or homes powered by extracting energy from their walls or the ground they stand on.

“When you generate 10 trillion watts of power, you’re wasting a staggering 15 trillion watts,” Majumdar says. “Extracting even a fraction of that would amount to huge fuel savings and reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.”

See the article for more on thermoelectricity.

Thermoelectric generator

Curb Your Car: Transforming Public Transit

The next time you’re stuck in rush-hour gridlock, try to imagine traffic in China, where automobile ownership is growing at the astounding rate of 80 percent annually. In just three years, China will have more cars on its roads than the United States. To help keep that growth sustainable, researchers at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) are designing an urban transportation system that could curb the need for cars in Chengdu, China, and similar developing cities without sophisticated mass transit systems.

“The Chinese government is concerned with two issues: air quality as impacted by vehicle emissions and energy consumption,” says Samer Madanat, Xenel Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and ITS director. “China wants to depend as little as possible on foreign energy sources.”

Lee Schipper of EMBARQ also works on transit, first and third world.

Nuclear Renaissance: Reviving Greenhouse-Gas-Neutral Power

A coal-fired power plant capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electricity burns at least 7.3 million kilograms of coal and releases upwards of 24 million kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per day. The equivalent nuclear fission plant consumes just 3.2 kilograms of uranium per day and emits no carbon dioxide….

The newest designs [worked on by Vujic and colleagues], called “nuclear batteries” or small-footprint nuclear reactors, are self-contained power plants that can be installed in remote locations and crank out 100 to 300 megawatts for 15 to 20 years without refueling. Some serve as their own shipping crates for return to the factory, where the fuel is reprocessed for another battery.

“These would be especially useful in developing regions without a central electricity grid or advanced infrastructure, where we could provide cheap nuclear energy but also limit access to the fissile fuel,” Vujic says.

Nuclear battery See text for more information.

Get Smart: New Thermostat For Comfort And Savings

“Wouldn’t it be great if your meter could receive information about when the price is lowest to run your appliances and air conditioning?” asks mechanical engineering professor Paul Wright, acting director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). To increase home energy efficiency and cut the cost of keeping cool,Wright and colleagues are bringing electronic brains into our home’s electrical systems, the next generation of “smart” meters and thermostats.

The approach, known as demand–response technology, uses the smart dust sensors…to monitor temperatures in various rooms of your home or apartment and relay data to a networked thermostat. Sensors coupled to electrical circuits in breaker boxes monitor power consumed by other appliances and indicate the cost of running, say, the washing machine at 2 p.m. on a sweltering day, when energy is most expensive. As energy prices shift, they are transmitted wirelessly from the utility company to the home’s smart meter.

The resident will simply program temperature preferences on a user-friendly thermostat. Employing control algorithms, the system then sets the air conditioner to match the desired profile as temperatures shift throughout the day…

The [California Energy Commission’s] goal is to equip every California home with new meters within 10 years, and the researchers hope their technology will be inside those devices. According to an Electric Power Research Institute report, the technology could eliminate the state’s need for five to ten new power plants over the next decade.

Updated September 7, 2008

Amid widespread concerns about how rapidly and radically greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced, discussions of geoengineering have become more common.

David Keith, eg, Engineering the Planet, describes geoengineering as

intentional, large-scale manipulation of the environment. Both scale and intent are important.

So most changes to land and the atmosphere, such as landscaping and pollution, are excluded.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere are warming the Earth. The increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide shift plant balance, for example, favoring C3 over C4 plants; C4 plants have more efficient uptake of carbon dioxide, but this becomes less important as carbon dioxide levels increase. Even worse, the ocean becomes more acidic as it absorbs much of the excess carbon dioxide added each year, with especially serious consequences for shelled organisms.

Geoengineering schemes that cool the Earth do nothing to protect ocean and land ecosystems from increased carbon dioxide.

Stratosphere

One method would imitate volcanoes, and inject aerosols into the stratosphere.

Injecting sulfates

Temperature change from sulfate injection

Unfortunately, this plan has problems: it would extend the repair of the ozone hole over Antarctica for decades, and create an ozone hole over the Arctic during particularly cold winters.

Additionally, instead of ridding the Earth of more infrared energy, sulfate aerosols block visible light, with small effects on everything from photosynthesis to solar energy. More dramatically, evaporation depends more on visible light than IR, and evaporation would decrease even if the temperature stayed constant. Decreases in rainfall are expected to be substantial in the northern tropics, particularly the Sahel and the monsoonal belts.

Policy people like David Keith see geoengineering not as a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions rapidly, but an additional tool if, for example, the temperature increase for a given atmospheric level of greenhouse gas is not in the middle of the expected increase, but in the far extreme:

Projected surface temperature changes for the early and late 21st century relative to the period 1980 to 1999. Notice that uncertainty (on the left) is much greater for larger increases.

Update See also the Nature blog Climate Feedback, Geoengineering: Preparing for the Worst.

It links to a special issue of the Royal Society, Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change, and a review by Stephen Schneider in that issue. He ends the review this way:

In short, my personal prescription for climate policies can be summarized in five sequenced steps.

i. Adaptation is essential now to assist those who will likely be harmed by ‘ in the pipeline’ climate change. Actions that simultaneously enhance ‘ sustainable development’ would seem the most attractive options.
ii. Performance standards required of buildings, appliances, machines and vehicles to wring the maximum potential for cost-effective engineering energy efficiency need to be mandatory and widespread.
iii. A ‘ learning-by-doing feeding frenzy’ needs to emerge, where we set up public– private partnerships to fashion incentives to help us ‘ invent our way out’ of the problem of high-emitting technological and social systems.
iv. A shadow price on carbon has to be established to ensure that the full costs of any energy production or end use system is part of the price of doing business. Cap and trade and carbon taxes are the prime examples of such schemes to internalize external risks from business-as-usual emissions, but these schemes must recognize the special problems they may pose for certain groups: poor people and coal miners or SUV workers. So, in addition to internalizing these externalities to protect the environmental commons, we need to consider side payments or other compensation schemes to be fair to the losers of the mitigation policies and to provide a transition for them to a softer economic landing, so to speak.
v. Finally, my last policy category in the sequence is to consider deploying geoengineering schemes. However, as has been said by all in this issue, and as I fully agree, R&D is needed and should be an early part of the climate policy investment sequencing, even if deployment is the last resort.

More powerful computers are describing what will happen in our various neighborhoods this century. Earlier reports divided the continental US into west, central, and east. The 15 August Science, Climate Change Hot Spots Mapped Across the United States (subscription needed) discusses the newest results.

The US Southwest and northern Mexico are currently and will continue to be the most responsive to climate change. The big difference is not warmer weather, or changes in precipitation (either up or down), but in variability.

The coastal portion of the southeast is predicted to be least responsive, less variable weather, but this doesn’t make it “‘safe’ or ‘immune'” from climate change–more severe weather is a major risk.

The southwest is drying. There is a 50% chance that Lake Mead will go dry by 2021, and a 50% chance that by 2017, there will be too little water for hydroelectric power.

UC, Berkeley’s Forefront magazine has an article on Pollutants on the fly: Connecting the dots between pollutant sources and us.

William Nazaroff studies air pollution, including characterization and control of pollutants.

Intake fraction refers to the fraction of pollutant that is actually inhaled.

“Only a fraction of emissions from each source is inhaled,” says Nazaroff, who has studied the physical and chemical processes that control human exposure to air pollutants for more than two decades. “We’re trying to understand what controls that fraction, then explore how knowing it changes the way we think about the importance of different pollution sources.”

Both the amount of pollutant produced, and where people are relative to that pollution, will determine how dangerous it is.

Nazaroff’s focus has been

on three issues: transportation emissions and their effect on human health, electricity and newly emerging distributed generators, and modeling spatial relationships between people and pollutant sources to help inform public policy.

So what does concentrating people along an efficient transportation corridor do to public health? No answer provided.

A second focus was distributed generators (DGs), which are cheap and efficient and give greater control for the user. In California, about 7% of power generation is lost through the transmission and distribution. In some locations, this will be more, and DGs may make more sense there. But how does pollution compare?

A relatively novel power source, DGs are making their way into our lives. While they can be designed to run on diesel fuel, natural gas, even solar and wind power, it’s those that run on natural gas that are proliferating most quickly. While natural gas is cleaner than most other fuels, some researchers are concerned that even natural gas DGs may harm our health more than large power plants because they pollute air right where we are — at home or at work.

“They are being placed in neighborhoods all over the country in close proximity to people, unlike more traditional, large power plants, which were routinely located far from urban centers,” says Garvin Heath, who is pursuing dual master’s degrees in civil and environmental engineering (CEE) and ERG.

Power generation has been a hot button issue since the summer of 2001, when rolling blackouts threatened Californians and the price of electricity skyrocketed from $30 per megawatt to $330. Traditional power plants — nuclear, coal, or natural gas-burning plants — are tremendously expensive and time consuming to build. Deregulated in 1996, the power industry has not built a new major power plant in 15 years, despite growing demand.

To help alleviate that demand, industry turned to small, quick-to-build distributed generators. The California Air Research Board estimates that there are 11,000 distributed generators in California. There are 40 on the Berkeley campus alone.

In contrast to more traditional ambient air quality monitoring, intake fraction stresses the proximity of pollution sources to people. Garvin Heath (left) and Abby Hoats are using intake fraction to investigate human exposures to pollution.

“Distributed generators are largely unregulated,” says Heath, “and there is no clear understanding of their impact on public health. With the intake fraction approach, we hope to clarify key issues and gain a better understanding of the health risks.”

Using the Los Angeles air basin, Heath compared a small DG power source to a central station plant and found a dramatic difference in the proportion of emitted pollution that is inhaled.

“Per unit of electricity delivered, the DG unit increased the amount of pollutants inhaled by nearby residents by an order of magnitude,” says Heath. These small generators let out their exhaust just five meters from the ground. In contrast, large centralized power station stacks spew their exhaust sky high.

Heath and Hoats

An order of magnitude. This means that DGs lead to about 10 times as much pollution inhaled.

A third focus is on public policy: where you live compared to large fixed sources of pollution. Studying the flow of pollutants, and quantifying the intake fraction, will hopefully lead to better public policy so that some groups don’t suffer disproportionately.

Does it make sense to install a mpg gauge in all new cars?

MPG Meter

(Or a gallons per 100 miles meter?)

Would people drive more efficiently with instant feedback? Have early warning of maintenance problems? Always drive the car that uses less gas when there is a passenger? Disable it as soon as possible?

What reason do you have to use/reject a mandatory mpg meter?

Judith Warner has some ideas for the Futility Vehicle:

I haven’t actually made a formal study of the Land Rover’s gas mileage. I’ve simply stopped driving the car to anywhere other than our metro stop (1.5 miles; about a quarter tank of gas) or the supermarket (.88 miles, maybe an eighth of a tank of gas) or the gas station. Last Sunday, needing to transport a camp trunk, we drove it to Virginia, which was costly (96 miles, perhaps 1,800 tanks of gas), but highly worthwhile, because the driveway leading up to the camp’s welcome area was gravelly and steep.

“She loves this terrain,” Max said, patting the dashboard.

But there are so many places where driving an SUV is fuelish, so what do do? Judith has some ideas.

Thanks to Bob Seeley for the recommendation.

This is a question I’ve been asking of groups recently. While pretty much everyone is comfortable with mandates on car safety and high efficiency bulbs (though one person felt we should be educated on the issues and then allowed to select), I’m running into fewer who advocate a return to the old 55 mph days (er, they weren’t that long ago) and pretty much no one who likes lifetime limits on flying or a large tax on same. But we have to find ways to restrict driving and flying and such.

OK, which limitations on behavior would you accept? Reject?

I have been taking Greyhound home from Philadelphia (a great city for walking and public transit, at least from where I slept to where I visited) with stops in Iowa City and Boulder.

I really like pedestrian malls.

Here’s a picture from Boulder, from another time of the year, but also crowded:

and from Iowa City a portion mostly occupied by younger people

Iowa City kids

and others

When I was looking for pictures to link to, none showed how crowded the malls are, lots of people, lots to do.

My town, Berkeley, is pedestrian-friendly, but to get that wonderful mall feeling other cities have, we’d have to what? Divert traffic on Telegraph south of the university? Divert traffic on Shattuck both south and north of University Ave?

The most recent report from Working Group 3 of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change accepted 177 analyses from economists on mitigating climate change. 6 attempted to keep temperature increase below 2.4°C, none tried to keep temperature increase below 2°C. The goal I’ve heard most often from the climate community is for the latter, with some including James Hansen arguing for even lower increases.

Key Impacts from IPCC. By the time temperature increase reaches 2°C, hundreds of millions are expected to experience increased water stress, most/all coral will bleach, cereal productivity will increas in high latitude and decrease in low latitude (and decrease everywhere by 3.5°C or higher), millions more could experience coastal flooding each year (if ice sheet melt becomes important at this level, this number will be higher), and health burden will increase.

Burning Embers from Stern Review Click here to enlarge. Changes at 2°C may include onset of irreversible melting of Greenland ice sheet, large fraction of ecosystems unable to maintain current form, risk of weakening of natural carbon absorption and possible increasing natural methane releases.

A report from International Energy Agency too recent to be included in the IPCC report, Energy Technology Perspectives, 2008, looks at what is needed for the 2.4°C goal.

First, the warning: the best estimate of the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas levels by 2050 could eventually raise world temperatures by 6°C or more.

From ETP 2008, Executive Summary, bullets added:

• A global revolution is needed in ways that energy is supplied and used. Far greater energy efficiency is a core requirement. Renewables, nuclear power, and CO2 capture and storage (CCS) must be deployed on a massive scale, and carbon-free transport developed.
• A dramatic shift is needed in government policies, notably creating a higher level of long-term policy certainty over future demand for low carbon technologies, upon which industry’s decision makers can rely.
• Unprecedented levels of co-operation among all major economies will also be crucial, bearing in mind that less than one-third of “business-as-usual” global emissions in 2050 are expected to stem from OECD countries.
• [T]he global energy economy will need to be transformed over the coming decades.

The IEA report focuses on carbon dioxide from energy, ignoring other greenhouse gases. Currently, the world produce 28 gigatonnes (billion metric tons) of CO2 each year. Since business as usual is expected to get us to 62 GtCO2, cutting by 50% to 14 Gt will require us to cut back 48 Gt.

More details later.

“There is absolutely no reason”, one of the Californians at the Johnstown, PA Friends General Conference said, “why a living human body needs to be cooled to below 70° F.” I love Iowa City, having missed the storms twice in the last 4 visits, but for the first time in my visit to air conditioning country, do not regret leaving my winter clothes at home.

Though the buses are a wee bit nippy.

From Science 20 June 2008 (subscription needed)

When asked which improvement in fuel economy will reduce gas usage most, Americans using miles per gallon make more mistakes than those given the same numbers in gallons per hundred miles, GPM. (Europeans already use liters per hundred km.)

In one test, one of two cars, each driven 10,000 miles per year, will be replaced. Does it make sense to replace the 15 mpg car with a 19 mpg model, or upgrade the 34 mpg car to a 44 mpg version? (Yes, it makes most sense to upgrade the 15 mpg model to 44 mpg, or to drive the car with worse fuel economy less.) Three quarters recommended upgrading the 34 mpg car.

When also given the gallons per hundred miles figure (upgrade from 6.67 to 5.26 GPM? or from 2.94 to 2.27 GPM?), 64% chose the first upgrade.

Since that saves more than 140 gallons/year, while the second upgrade saves less than 70 gallons/year, it appears that shifting to GPM terminology helps make the discussion more understandable to Americans.

A more dramatic example: upgrading from 12 mpg (8.33 gpm) to 14 mpg (7.14 gpm) reduces gas consumption more than upgrading from 28 mpg (3.57 gpm) to 40 mpg (2.5 gpm).

Friends discerning?

Friends’ (Quakers) testimonies are the ways our lives testify to our faith. William Braithwaite (1862-1922) said,

The Friend had a life within him to wait on and to obey, not chiefly a creed to believe; and it was this life which developed in the Quaker groups a common body of truths to which they sought to bear unflinching witness. Accordingly they accumulated ‘testimonies’ rather than Articles of Faith.

In Pacific Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, we think about testimonies in six categories: integrity, unity, equality, simplicity, peace, and community.

We are not consistent however. Our Faith and Practice (each Yearly Meeting describes every few years the current Faith and Practice of Friends in their YM) says about integrity:

When lives are centered in the Spirit, beliefs and actions are congruent, and words are dependable.

It seems to me that we do most poorly around issues where there are strong emotions and where we have not yet engaged in collective discernment. Two environmental examples, there are more:
• nuclear power (Friends often display anger in our discussions, though much less today than a decade ago. And some Friends don’t participate in the discussion “because we’re not going to reach unity anyway”.)
• discussions of how we live, and how we want to live, are rare. Many Friends worry that such discussions will be about guilt. (I would hope that they are mostly about choosing how to live and love.)

In the discussion leading up to the 2001 Faith and Practice, some advocated strongly that the F&P revision (discipline) committee describe the environment as a testimony, that is, we should consider the environment to be important. This is backwards, as testimonies are described in writing after they exist in our lives. The committee described it instead as an emerging concern. I wrote members of the committee to ask why they decided against the testimony description, and received four responses:

• we do not live as if the environment were of major importance,
• we have not labored together to understand its importance,
• we do not talk honestly together about our beliefs and about the hard issues, and
• we do not challenge each other on our beliefs and on our manner of living.

Now the environment committee of Berkeley Friends Meeting has announced a series to ask what would be required of Friends for the environment to be considered a testimony, and to see where Friends are today.

In a minute approved by the Yearly Meeting in 2007, we agreed to a variety of actions, including:

Reducing meeting-wide, personal greenhouse gases at least 10% in the coming year through decreased driving, flying, and home energy use, and using efficient alternatives, for those able to do so

This will be the basis of the first in the series, time still tbd: How have our greenhouse gas emissions changed over the last year?

We have great hopes for the series. Besides testing whether and how the environment is a testimony, we hope as well to determine what small steps we can make, so ultimately our lives do testify to the importance of the environment.

A new report (pdf) from the US Dept. of Energy, based on research by National Renewable Laboratory and others, presents the encouraging conclusion that (if we get our act together immediately) 20% of 2030 US electricity could come from wind power, from about 1% of a lesser amount of electricity today.

The modeling done for this report estimates that wind power installations with capacities of more than 300 gigawatts (GW) would be needed for the 20% wind in 2030 scenario. Increasing U.S. wind power to this level from today’s 11.6 GW level would require significant changes in transmission, manufacturing and markets. This report presents an analysis of one specific scenario for reaching the 20% level and contrasts it to a scenario of no wind growth beyond the level in 2006. Major assumptions in the analysis have been highlighted throughout the document and have been summarized in the appendices. These assumptions may be considered optimistic…..

To successfully address energy security and environmental issues, the nation needs to pursue a portfolio of energy options. None of these options by itself can fully address these issues; there is no “silver bullet.” This technical report examines one potential scenario in which wind power serves as a significant element in the portfolio. However, the 20% Wind Scenario is not a prediction of the future. Instead, it paints a picture of what a particular 20% Wind Scenario could mean for the nation.

Currently US wind capacity is closer to 17 GW (1 GW = 1,000 MW), with a capacity factor over 30%–numbers are changing fast!

The increase in wind power would, according to this scenario, decrease natural gas use for electricity in 2030 by 50% (national total demand by 11%), and coal by 18%. Liquefied natural gas imports from Iran, Qatar, and Russia would decrease over the low-wind scenario.

Assumptions:

wind technology development is projected to continue based on a history of performance improvements. The national transmission system is assumed to evolve in ways favorable to wind energy development by shifting toward large regional markets. In addition, future environmental study and permit requirements are not expected to add significant costs to wind technology.

That is, there will be “significant changes in transmission systems”, the cost of integrating wind into the grid on a large scale includes transmitting wind long distance, and only half of the cost of the transmission lines is put into wind’s column. Does anyone know if this is a reasonable prediction? New transmission lines are expensive, $1,600/megawatt-mile.

Example: A 1,000 MW wind farm 100 miles from the city it services will cost about $160 million, and 100 miles is an optimistic assumption, as wind will be transported a thousand miles or more. The current costs of the windmills would be $1.75 billion. So the 100 miles of transmission lines add about 10% to that cost. The report assumes that new capacity will add 50 miles per MW within regions, and 178 miles across regions.

Assumption: cost could be 6 – 10 cent/kWh for wholesale price including new transmissions lines. The extra cost over the low-wind scenario would be $43 billion between now and 2030, about 0.06 cent/kWh.

Current wind resources and transmission lines

More assumptions: Much of the 2030 wind would be offshore, 18%, though installation won’t begin for a decade.

Offshore wind

New fossil fuel kWh prices are expected to increase, with the use of combined cycle gas and integrated gasification combined cycle coal.

Turbine technology will continue to improve (improved reliabilitiy, and BIGGER).

Capacity factor increases from 30% to 45%. This comes from improving windmills and siting them in areas with wind resource power class 5 or higher, or shallow offshore sites of class 4 or greater (reduced wind turbulence over oceans).

Land will be needed:

Altogether, new land-based installations would require approximately 50,000 square kilometers (km2) of land, yet the actual footprint of land-based turbines and related infrastructure would require only about 1,000 to 2,500 km2 of dedicated land—slightly less than the area of Rhode Island.

[To compare: the continental US is 8 x 10^6 km2. 50,000 km2 is twice the size of Maryland or half the size of Virginia.]

Major advantages: essentially no GHG emissions, no air pollution.
The particular scenario they look at would lower emissions in 2030 by 825 million metric tonnes and have a cumulative effect by 2030 of 7,600 million metric tonnes. [So keeping atmospheric levels of CO2 3.5 ppm lower.]

20% Wind Scenario: Major Challenges
• Investment in the nation’s transmission system so the power generated is delivered to urban centers that need the increased supply;
• Larger electric load balancing areas, in tandem with better regional planning, so that regions can depend on a diversity of generation sources, including wind power;
• Continued reduction in wind capital cost and improvement in turbine performance through technology advancement and improved manufacturing capabilities; and
• Addressing potential concerns about local siting, wildlife, and environmental issues within the context of generating electricity.