Bill Moore, editor of EVWorld.com has written a splendid article on the failure of certain of the early electric vehicle companies, in which he points out:

Breaking into the automotive business can be relatively easy; making a success of it is pretty damned near impossible, regardless of what type of propulsion system you favor: ICE-age or otherwise; and it’s especially tough if you decide to go electric. Beyond this, the reasons for individual failures are myriad and multiple: right product, wrong time, wrong product; wrong time, etc. Management missteps, unrealistic investor expectations and impatience, government responsiveness, inept marketing, unanticipated technical setbacks, product shortcomings, public resistance to change: the list is long.

I don’t dispute any of this, but let’s look at the subject from a “big picture” perspective. As a country, we’re still married to fossil fuels, and we’re doing essentially nothing about it In particular, we have no energy policy. Hell, we’re about to build an oil pipeline, the Keystone XL, right through the middle of the continent, one that may be unnecessary and that even some oil companies think is overpriced.

At the same time, we don’t have an iota of horsepower in Congress examining the big ideas. If I (or you) were there, we’d be saying:

Here’s a list of major reasons (I’ve left out the minor ones) to phase out fossil fuels aggressively:

• National security / terrorism

• Health / lung disease

• Global climate change, ocean acidification and other ecological disasters

• Skyrocketing / crippling debt

• War which we can’t afford, and leave countless dead and wounded

• Peak oil, coupled with burgeoning urban/consumer populations globally

You can argue about the relative importance of each of these, but for my money, we’ve spent enough time arguing about this garbage already. Now the time has come for action, and we’re going to take it, regardless of what the oil companies say. We have a responsibility at this time and place in history, and by God, we’re going to live up to it.

Gullible guy that I am, I still believe that someone in a position of power will ask me to draft a plan that phases fossil fuels out forcibly over the next 25 years, and eliminates them completely by 2050. As always, I’ll be happy to serve.

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A regional cap-and-trade program launched in the northeastern U.S. three years ago has saved customers nearly $1.1 billion on electricity bills, helped create 16,000 jobs, and has retained more than $765 million in local economies by reducing the demand for fossil fuels, according to a new analysis.

While the future of the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) remains in jeopardy — with New Jersey planning to drop out and other states also considering leaving — the study by the Boston-based Analysis Group finds that the project has had real benefits for the ten participating states.

The program requires major power plants to buy allowances at auction for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. From mid-2008 to September, plant owners have spent about $912 million to buy those allowances, generating funds that were used to improve energy efficiency, train workers, and undertake local renewable energy projects.

“We tracked the dollars spent, and RGGI generates greater economic growth in every one of the 10 states that participate in RGGI than would occur without a carbon price,” said Susan Tierney, one of the authors of the study, which will be published in The Electricity Journal. RGGI’s participants include the six New England states, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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There is nothing magic about the number 7 billion, which, according to the United Nations, became the population of planet Earth sometime earlier this week. The resources available to feed, clothe, house and transport the world’s people aren’t stretched far thinner today than they were yesterday. But it’s good to have milestones like this to cause us to think about where we’re going.

As discussed in this NPR segment, the critical pinch points of a growing population are not so much associated with running out of room, but running out of stuff. The populations that are growing fastest, those in India and Africa, are going to want to live like we do here in the US, i.e., as mega-consumers.

So what’s the big deal? Well, it’s that delivering on that promise of lots of stuff requires vast amounts of energy that currently can come only from fossil fuels and nuclear, all of which come with significant costs to the health and safety of our environment – as well as to us personally.

As physicist Dan Kammen, head of an energy laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley notes, “What’s needed is renewable energy that’s cheap and won’t run out. But by essentially every measure, we’re not moving fast enough.”

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The European Union says crude oil extracted from Alberta’s tar sands should be ranked as a dirtier fuel source than oil tapped from conventional oil wells, a move that could effectively ban the import of the controversial oil.

The European Commission endorsed a measure that would essentially rate fossil fuels based on the CO2 emitted during extraction, refining, and combustion. The EU has proposed that tar sands oil be ascribed a greenhouse gas value of 107 grams per megajoule of fuel, compared with 87.5 grams for ordinary crude oil.

“With this measure, we are sending a clear signal to fossil fuel suppliers,” said Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s climate change commissioner. “As fossil fuels will be a reality in the foreseeable future, it’s important to give them the right value.”

Such a ratings system may eventually be applied to natural gas extracted from shale oil formations. The exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands has generated increasing protest from environmental groups. In addition to destroying large swaths of forest, the extraction and processing of the sludgy bituminous material typically requires more energy and water than conventional production. Canadian officials and petroleum industry leaders vowed to fight the measure, calling it a “stigmatization” of a fuel source found only in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: hidden side

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Well, maybe “backs” is too strong a word. Let’s just say that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is not openly critical of the Obama administration’s hard look at the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would bring oil from the tar sands in northern Alberta across the border and deep into the United States.

Chu, who has been an ardent and vocal supporter of electric cars, advanced batteries and other more sustainable modes of transportation that will ween us off fossil fuels, recently called the Obama administration’s backing of the controversial pipeline a “tradeoff,” delicately addressing the topic in an interview with energyNOW! (see video below).

“Well, I think it’s one of those decisions where… you’re going to have to trade off a reliable supply,” Secreatary Chu said. Noting that while the companies working to extract oil from the tar sands have made important strides in cleaning up their operations, Chu said, “it’s not perfect, but it’s a trade-off.”

The proposed project, which has come under sharp fire from environmentalists, is not under the regulatory purview of the Energy Department. Instead, the project is awaiting final word from the State Department, which has the decision-making authority on the international pipeline. The State Department has already given the project a positive environmental impact statement and is now in the midst of a 90-day period to review whether the pipeline is in the nation’s best interest.

So what will Secretary Chu do as his colleague Secretary of State Hillary Clinton takes the lead in this important energy decision?

He says he’s sticking with his bread and butter by focusing on batteries for electric vehicles, biofuels, energy efficiency.

Article by Timothy Hurst, appearing courtesy ecopolitology.

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Last week the French government was the first to enact a law forbidding hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking”

This technology enables to recover shale gas via the use of massive amounts of water and chemicals. The former remaining afterward polluted, hence the controversy.

The law had been discussed by both the lower and upper chambers since March before being finally enacted on June 30th by the Senate with 176 votes in favor and 151 against.

It is noteworthy that the senators who voted against the law believed it wasn’t going far enough. Indeed, as Scientific American notes, the vote doesn’t not ban other methods to recover shale gas.

As you can surely imagine, large energy companies like the French oil giant Total are “deploring” this. Indeed, as the website Natural Gas for Europe notes :

” French shale oil and gas fields are potentially some of the most promising in Europe but remain “largely” unknown due to a lack of exploration, and the potential commercial viability of the fields is also unknown because of a lack of tests. “

—

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, New Jersey took a similar decision. The vote there was massively against as the Senate voted 33 against and only one for.

This occurs as the State of New York in the United States is preparing to lift a moratorium on the same method.

To conclude, I would like to give my personal opinion as I believe all countries should follow the lead.

Indeed, finding more oil and gas is only pursuing the headlong rush, and postponing the inevitable. We need to get out of oil, gas and coal, not finding more sources. Fossil fuels are already massively polluting, finding new ways to extract them will be even more polluting. It is high time we work on energy efficiency and low carbon energy sources…

Image credit : Flickr, animoore

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“A gradual contraction into more sustainable patterns of resource use is not the norm for a society that is exploiting the environment. The norm is a last-ditch effort to maintain outward displays of power, and then a sudden, and dramatic, collapse.” That’s one of the foreboding statements with which Steve Hallett and John Wright punctuate their preview of past civilizations in the opening section of their book Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future.

They consider we are at the peak of oil production and that we’re not facing that reality. There are late flurries to extend the discovery of further oil. Deep sea drilling, the exploitation of the Alberta tar sands and oil shale extraction are among them, the latter two causing horrendous environmental damage. But all they will produce is a temporary delay of the decline. The authors judge that around 2015 oil production will show a clear and convincing decline, and the world will be at the beginning of the end of what they call the petroleum interval. It’s an interval that will have occupied a couple of centuries in the long history of humanity. Oil has enabled the construction of a monumental global civilization in which we have become dependent on the increased productivity and efficiencies of scale it can provide. As it diminishes and disappears we require an energy transition which the book considers we are not geared to make in good time. We therefore face a long global economic contraction as the price of oil escalates, a sequence of economic slumps which will continue until fundamental problems of energy availability, food production, water supply and population control are sufficiently well corrected.

The book recognizes that we have paid only a miniscule part of the cost of fossil fuels, and the result is a huge ecological debt of which climate change is the result. Global climate change is already in full swing, with worse impacts yet to come, complicating and worsening our struggles with the end of the petroleum era. Although the book’s focus is on the end of oil it includes a clear understanding of the causes and long-lasting consequences of human-caused climate change.

The new energy future which the depletion of fossil fuels will force upon us is of course the same energy future which the mitigation of climate change demands. The book is not optimistic about our capacity to make the transition in time to meet the strains which costly oil will impose on our economies, let alone, though it doesn’t make the observation, in time to counter the mounting greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Indeed it concludes that renewable sources cannot possibly fill the oil void and sees nuclear power as the potential dominant energy source with hydrogen eventually used for transport. As a reader whose major concern is the mitigation of climate change I found little reassurance from this aspect of the book. The authors don’t deny the need for mitigation, but they seem to think it unlikely that we will stop using fossil fuels before they are exhausted. If that proves to be the case then coming generations will be coping with problems a good deal larger than the replacement of energy sources.

The move to new energy sources is admittedly a major one and only time will tell whether human societies will mobilize to make it at the pace required. But I thought the book’s judgment that we simply can’t find the energy we need from renewable sources was somewhat cursory alongside such careful investigations as those made by Al Gore in his book Our Choice or Lester Brown in World on the Edge or the recent WWF Energy Report.

The deep and long-lasting economic recession which the authors see ahead is premised on our economies’ deep fossil fuel dependency. Environmentalists who take comfort from the thought that running out of oil might finally reduce carbon emissions underestimate the consequences, say the writers. Oil and other fossil fuels pervade not only our transport systems but also many other aspects of the economy from plastics to computers to fertilizers. Asset inertia will delay transitions from oil to energy alternatives, and the book’s view is that alternatives will come online only when they are not alternatives at all, but the only option. The message of deeply troubled economies ahead is hammered home by a survey of many countries and areas of the world with accompanying explanations of why most of them are facing retraction. Again I found myself wondering whether the authors allow sufficiently for the possibility of renewed vibrancy in economies which rapidly embrace green energy and put adequate resources into advancing it.

But maybe I just prefer optimism and the authors are the realists. They’re not ultimately pessimists though. They look beyond the global collapse to the shape of more adequate future societies. Hallett is a botanist and ecology is the book’s key to an economic system which will recognize our interconnectedness with the natural world, curtail unsustainable resource extraction and limit damage to the environment. The protection of farmland must be a priority. Industrialized agriculture must give way to sustainable farming, undertaken without inorganic fertilizer. The rebuilding of soils and the re-diversification of the rural landscape are essential to restore farming as a true support for human societies. The place taken by oil and natural gas in current industrial farming practice can be filled by hard work and deep thinking. It’s our divorce from nature which has blinded us to the reality that we are part of nature and must respect the laws of ecology if we wish to avoid collapse.

The book’s discussion is wide-ranging, lively and interesting. The combination of scientist and journalist in the writing team works very well for the reader. The opening survey of the collapse of past civilisations following the depletion of resources and ecological damage is a haunting reminder of how easily successful human societies excuse themselves from the need to treat with respect the natural provision on which their wealth depends. The concluding argument that ecology is the proper foundation for economics is a sure delineation of any hopeful future the human race may have.

The writers have done their best to combine the anxieties of oil depletion with those of climate change. But it is difficult to fully integrate the two. The mitigation of climate change demands that we cut back drastically on the use of fossil fuels. It is not the prospect of their ultimate depletion that alarms, but the prospect of their continuing use until that time. The book gently chides environmentalists who would welcome an early end to oil, on the grounds that they don’t give full weight to the disastrous consequences. But in the matter of disastrous consequences climate change seems to me to far outweigh even the serious economic disruption the authors foresee accompanying the decline of oil. However both concerns can, and in this book do, converge in the urging of an economic system which understands and respects the natural environment which sustains human society.

Article by Bryan Walker, appearing courtesy Celsias.

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During a slow period at the Electric Drive Transportation Association conference this afternoon, I walked a couple of miles across town to interview spokespeople for the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) – Senior Attorneys Jay Predergrass and Lisa Goldman. We talked largely about the subsidies that our US federal government provides to energy companies, insofar as ELI recently completed a comprehensive, independent study on the subject. “This is by far the most widely distributed report we’ve ever created,” Jay told me. “It’s been downloaded over 18,000 times.”

ELI painstakingly pulled together information on every form of expenditure or forbearance (e.g., a tax break) that is given to fossil fuels, carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol, and what it calls “traditional renewables” like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal.

The results are in the report linked above: fossil fuels get about $5.50 for every $1 going to renewables.

My main question, of course, is why our government is doing this. The role of subsidies is to promote things that are in the public interest. All the $70.2 billion doing to traditional fossil fuels is accomplishing is creating “a transfer of wealth from the public to the shareholders of oil, coal, and gas companies,” as Jay explained. Here’s $70 billion that could (should??) be going to promote things that actually are in the public interest: an end to our addiction to oil, to our empowering our enemies, to our poisoning our planet and everything living on it.

Interesting discussion, to be sure.

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New research suggests that woodlands, forests and other terrestrial ecosystems are able to sequester up to 40% of the US’s carbon emissions that is caused by burning fossil fuels. The study, which was carried out in the 48 lower states provides evidence that these ecosystems can absorb far more carbon than first thought as long as these regions are not subjected to droughts or other factors such as deforestation.

The research, which was carried out by Dr. Jingfeng Xiao, a research assistant professor at the Complex Systems Research Center, Institute Study for Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire and Dr. Beverley Law who works with the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University and holds a science team chair at the AmeriFlux network concluded that droughts as seen in 2002 and 2006 can have a dramatic impact on how much carbon terrestrial ecosystems can sequestrate. The results carried out by scientists from 35 different institutions showed that during these drought years the capacity of ecosystems to sequestrate carbon was cut by 20%. The National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy also agreed with the research teams findings.

“With this data it appears that our forests and other vegetation can sequester as much as 40 percent of the carbon emissions in the lower 48 states,” said co-author of the study, Beverly Law.”That’s substantially higher than some previous estimates, which indicated these ecosystems could take up the equivalent of only about 30 percent of emissions or less. There’s still some uncertainty in the data, but it does appear that the terrestrial carbon sink is higher than believed in earlier studies,” Laws added.

Laws admitted that more extreme weather conditions in the future could have a serious impact on the amount of carbon that terrestrial ecosystems could absorb. The co-author also highlighted the impact that extreme weather patterns had and the effect this had on the ability of ecosystems to absorb carbon, pointing to events such as Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and the Biscuit Fire in Oregon in 2002. This showed that forests could not sequestrate the same amount as seen in years where there were not as many serious natural impacts like drought, wildfires or hurricanes.

“With climate change, we may get more extreme or frequent weather events in the future than we had before. About half of the United States was affected by the major droughts in 2002 and 2006, which were unusually severe in their spatial extent and severity. And we’re now learning that this can have significant effects on the amount of carbon sequestered in a given year,” Laws said.

The research was published in the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology and the researchers behind the study believe that it provides the most accurate assessment of the US’s carbon basin to date. “Our results show that U.S. ecosystems play an important role in slowing down the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The dominant sources of the recent interannual variation included extreme climate events (e.g., drought) and disturbances (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes),” the report concluded.

Article by Ciaran Hogg, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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I got a call shortly after dinner last night from a radio host in Denver, explaining that due to a last-minute cancellation, he had an hour-long opening on his show. He asked if he could call me for the interview – at 1 AM!

I agreed, stayed up late, reading, checking out Jay Leno, and fighting off the yawns.

The highlight of the show for me was a caller attacking clean energy based on the fact that the government subsidizes it. When I pointed out that fossil fuels get 12 times the amount of subsidies as clean energy, he responded that since clean energy is only 2% of the total grid-mix, the subsidies it receives represent four times those of fossil fuels per installed megawatt.

I’m not sure how to argue this. Of course, if you don’t believe in government subsidies for anything at any time, that’s one thing. But if you’re not in that camp, the caller’s position strikes me as considerably shortsighted, which I told him. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t have built the Internet in the 1990s because there were a only few people online; his point is really no better than that.

And here, I mentioned, we’re talking about a subject that transcends convenience and the (few) niceties of our modern age. Whether your concern is environmentalism, national security, lung disease, the ballooning national debt (just take your choice), we need to be concerned about real dangers here that government, I believe, is duty-bound to address.

I also note that the subsidies for oil have been in place for 80 – 90 years. Washington is so completely bought off by the oil industry and its 7000 lobbyists that it simply does have the integrity to bring this sad state of affairs to a close; this is corruption in its purest and most obvious form. By contrast, you’ll have a hell of a hard time finding an advocate of clean energy who thinks the industry should be subsidized until the year 2190.

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