Tag: energy efficiency

Brownlee’s energy strategy: dig and burn

The newly released Draft NZ Energy Strategy (PDF, web) is a winding back of the clock from the substantial statement released under the previous government only three years ago. When announcing early in his term as Minister that a new strategy was required Gerry Brownlee complained of the old one:

“You need only read the foreword of the NZES. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” are mentioned thirteen times, “greenhouse gas” is mentioned four times, and “climate change” is mentioned three times. That is all very good, but security of supply rates only one mention. Affordability is not touched on at all. Nor is economic growth.”

Continue reading “Brownlee’s energy strategy: dig and burn”

Straight Up

“I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to face unpleasant facts.” So writes Joseph Romm of blogging, in his new book Straight Up, a themed selection from the thousands of posts on his widely respected blog ClimateProgress.org. It’s as direct, lively and unequivocal as its title suggests. Romm, an admirer of George Orwell, knows how to express himself with admirable clarity and to satisfy what he describes as “a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk”.

The “status quo media” receive a drubbing. Romm is critical of their giving the same credence to a handful of US scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, as they give to hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists. Senior political reporters are writing more and more pieces as the issue becomes political; most know little about global warming and haven’t bothered to educate themselves. They stick with the “horse-race perspective”, measuring only who is up and who is down. In one post he criticises even Andy Revkin of the New York Times for suggesting that catastrophe is a marginal possibility and that campaigners for carbon dioxide curbs are suppressing the uncertainty in their picture. Revkin, says Romm, should know that catastrophe is not at the edge of the debate. The Washington Post he accuses of publishing unmitigated tabloid nonsense on climate change.

On the science Romm considers that the IPCC 2007 summary report underestimated likely climate impacts by not giving sufficient weight to positive feedbacks that accelerate warming and by assuming there would be aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The book includes a stunning post written in March 2009, where he reports on more recent scientific literature. Under five headings he relentlessly lists the evidence that points to catastrophic impacts this century under business-as-usual conditions — temperature rise of 5-7 degrees, sea level rise of 5 feet or more, dust-bowlification in the Southwest US, high loss of species on land and sea, and likely further unexpected impacts difficult to foresee. So we must stabilise at 450 ppm or below, or risk humanity’s self-destruction. The cost of action is maybe 0.12 percent of GDP per year or a little higher if we aim for 350 ppm. This is the reality that the scientific community and environmentalists and progressives need to start articulating cogently.

The solution is clean energy, a strong focus of Romm’s blogging. For a number of years in the mid-1990s he worked in the Department of Energy on energy efficiency and renewable energy. He considers that the US has all the clean energy technology it needs to start reducing emissions aggressively and cost effectively now. Deployment is the key. Electricity efficiency is high on his list. He points to McKinsey’s estimate that one third of the US greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 could come from electricity efficiency and be achieved at negative marginal costs. California is a model: if all America adopted their energy efficiency policies the country would never have to build another polluting power plant. Concentrated solar power is the technology on which Romm places most hope, because it generates primary energy in the form of heat which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity –and with far greater efficiency. If all the renewable technologies that are commercial or nearly commercial today are deployed they will be enough to see the US through to 2050. He emphasises the steadily declining cost curve, due to economies of scale and the manufacturing learning curve.

As peak oil approaches it’s crucial that we avoid the strategy preferred by most in the oil industry of ramping up unconventional oil. Oil from tar sands and shale will make global warming worse. Coal to diesel will be catastrophic. The way forward for vehicle transport is better fuel economy standards and a move to plug-in hybrids which he discusses in some detail.

Romm has two key questions for the US. Will they voluntarily give up fossil fuels before they are forced to do so after it is too late to stop the catastrophe? When they do give them up will they be a global leader in the new technologies, or will they have been overtaken by other countries, especially China?

Romm was an advocate of the “flawed” Waxman-Markey climate bill which finally made it through the House of Representatives in June 2009. How can his climate politics realism be reconciled with his climate science realism? He replies that the bill was the only game in town and its passing a staggering achievement. It didn’t do enough, but it began a process and established a framework that can be strengthened over time as the science warrants. His political realism is also on view in his optimistic take on the result of Copenhagen. High level negotiations by the senior leaders of the big emitters seems to him a more likely way forward than the consensus process of the UN.

In right-wing US circles politics and climate disinformation have become entangled. Romm sees the conservative think tanks, media pundits and politicians as driving the disinformation campaign. He observes that while they can stop the country from taking the necessary action to avert catastrophe, they can’t actually stop the climate from changing. And some of the congressional conservatives are pushing policies that will lead to unimaginable planetary horror. Why? A post on a Krauthammer article in the Washington Post finds the heart of US conservatives’ hatred of climate science in the fact that it requires action by government, which is the same as socialism (except when it comes to government action on behalf of the nuclear and fossil fuel industries).

Misinformation has had a field day in the US. In part this is due to the organised campaign and the repeated broadcast of its messages by conservative pundits and politicians like George Will and Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe. The “balanced” presentation favoured by the media hasn’t helped. But there are messaging failures from progressives in general and scientists in particular. Romm strongly opposes the notion that the impacts of global warming should be downplayed in communication to the public. Doing that would amount to unilateral disarmament in the battle to have the public understand what will happen if we continue on the path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions. People need to know the truth.  However he considers that some of the simple rules of rhetoric need to be better used in getting the message across. He identifies three of them as simple language, frequent repetition, and skilful use of figures of speech, especially metaphor and irony. The posts discussing better techniques of communicating the science are well worth attention and clearly underly his own practice.

Romm’s industry as a blogger is phenomenal, as anyone who follows Climate Progress will know. The selection of posts that he has chosen for this book testify that quantity doesn’t rule out quality. They have translated well to the printed page. Many of them repay close reader attention and together they serve to highlight the major themes which guide his work. The urgency displayed in his 2007 book Hell and High Water is undiminished.

[Available from Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK)]

Plan B (not from outer space)

Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

I hadn’t expected to be doing a Hot Topic review of Lester Brown’s book Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, since he writes about a variety of sustainability issues. However the 90 pages or so he devotes to climate change were irresistible for their sensible optimism and I report them here.

The Plan B books have been appearing in updated form since 2003. They are no light undertaking. Intended to influence, they have translators into 22 languages and achieve worldwide circulation. Several thousand individuals purchase five or more copies for distribution to friends, colleagues and opinion leaders. Ted Turner does so on a large scale, distributing copies of each Plan B to heads of state and their key cabinet ministers, the Fortune 500 CEOs, and members of Congress. A film version of Plan B 4.0 is in progress.

Brown is a generalist. His work is to pull together scattered information and communicate it to the public. The results are scary on the reality of the problems and upbeat on the solutions. On climate change he is unflinching. He reports recent studies projecting a sea level rise of up to two metres by the end of the century. Up to a third of all plant and animal species could be lost. The chorus of urgency from the scientific community intensifies by the year. Higher temperatures diminish crop yields, increase the severity of storms, flooding, drought and wildfires, and alter eco-systems everywhere. The effects of melting glaciers on irrigation is a massive threat to food production.

Selecting items like this doesn’t do justice to the overall organisation of the chapter in which he sets out the threat. In 20 pages he presents a valuable summary reminder of what a continuance of anthropogenic global warming will result in for human life. It’s chapter 3 of the book, which by the way is available for free download here on the Earth Policy Institute website. The chapter can be recommended for anyone who wants to know in short compass what it all adds up to and why it matters supremely.

Always positive in the face of threat, Brown sets out his Plan B response. He stands with James Hansen and others on the necessity to reduce CO2 levels to 350 parts per million concentration. Plan B envisages cutting emissions 80 percent by 2020 in order to keep levels from exceeding 400 ppm before starting to reduce them. This will be challenging, “but how can we face the next generation if we do not try?” And it’s feasible.

Two steps are needed. The first is an energy efficiency revolution, the beginnings of which are already under way. The revolution in lighting technology is a good start, and one which many countries are joining (while New Zealand is pulling back by decision of our benighted Minister of Energy). Compact fluorescents (CFLs), using 75 percent less electricity than incandescents are the first step. The light-emitting diode (LED), using up to 85 percent less is the ultimate. Lighting is not a small matter. It currently uses 19 percent of the world share of electricity. This would be cut to 7 percent with a move to CFLs in homes, advanced linear fluorescents in offices, shops and factories, and LEDs in traffic lights.  The lighting efficiency gains would be even greater if LEDs reduce in cost and can be used more widely.

Energy-efficient appliances are already lowering considerably their electricity requirement. A worldwide set of appliance efficiency standards keyed to the most efficient models on the market would offer as much or more than the 12 percent of world electricity savings from more efficient lighting.

Low energy use buildings are already being built in some countries.  There is enormous potential for reducing energy use in buildings. Even energy retrofits on older inefficient buildings can cut usage by 20-50 percent.  Brown discusses the LEED certification offered by the US Green Building Council in interesting detail. New buildings can easily be designed with half the energy requirements of existing ones.

The overall electrification of transport will mean much greater energy efficiency, especially as the power comes increasingly from renewable sources. New technologies have opened the way for hybrid plug-ins and all-electric cars and all major car makers have plans, as Brown details, to bring them to market. The future of intercity travel lies with high-speed trains, which under Plan B will be powered almost entirely by renewable electricity. Japan has set the standard, but many countries are now participating. Public transport has a significant role to play; shifting public funds from highway construction to public transport would reduce the number of cars needed. (A point lost on our Transport Minister, who shares the Energy Minister’s preference for outdated practice.)

A striking section on metal recycling demonstrates that it requires only a fraction of the energy needed to produce the metals from virgin ore. Design of products so that they can be easily disassembled for reuse or recycling carries economic benefit, as do reusable containers. Waste reduction is central. In summary, there is a vast worldwide potential for cutting carbon emissions by reducing materials use, and beginnings have been made.

There follows an illuminating account of what a smart grid combined with smart meters can add to energy efficiency and how moves in that direction are already under way in various parts of the world. He concludes the chapter (4) by expressing his confidence that the energy-saving measures identified and proposed will more than offset the nearly 30 percent growth in global energy demand projected by the IEA between 2006 and 2020.

The second major step is the shift to renewable energy.

“…this energy transition [to wind, solar and geothermal energy] is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even two years ago. And it is a worldwide phenomenon.”

He instances Texas which is looking to have 53,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity, which will more than satisfy the state’s residential needs and enable it to export electricity, just as it has long exported oil.  Some 70 countries are now using wind power. A Stanford University study concluded that harnessing one fifth of the world’s available wind energy would provide seven times as much electricity as the world currently uses. Plan B involves a crash programme to develop 3000 gigawatts (3 million megawatts) of wind generating capacity by 2020, enough to satisfy 40 percent of world electricity needs. That’s 1.5 million 2-megawatt wind turbines over the period. Intimidating? Compare it with 70 million cars per year.

Solar energy is the second source undergoing dramatic expansion. Photovoltaic installations are increasing rapidly, by 45 percent annually, and production costs are falling fast. Solar thermal electricity, which uses reflectors to concentrate sunlight on a closed vessel containing water or some other liquid, is on the move, with big plans mooted for the southwest US and Algeria and the Indian Desert. Solar water heating, now seen in many countries, is another obvious benefit.

There is more. Geothermal energy in a variety of forms is a barely tapped source, with very large  potential.  Hydro power from the movement of tides and waves is starting to be developed. Biomass offers a small but worthwhile contribution. Brown doesn’t rule out nuclear, but thinks it is expensive by comparison and unlikely to reach a level of new development which would do much more than replace current aging plants.  Carbon capture and storage doesn’t figure, at least at this stage, for reasons of expense and lack of investor interest.

The chapter (5) is full of facts and figures to support his sense that movement on renewable energy is strongly under way and that the resource is more than adequate to our need to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2020. It won’t just happen. Strategic government intervention is needed to put a price on carbon, to offer appropriate assistance to desirable developments, sometimes to mandate changes. He frequently turns to the analogy of wartime mobilisation. But he clearly looks to the vigour of enterprise and innovation in business and industry to see the job through. Indeed there is a strong sense of that vigour already present and poised like a wave ready to be caught. If we do catch it it will take us safely to shore.

[Dexys Midnight Runners]

Fab four: ways to meet the climate challenge

Climatechallenge Yet another pre-Copenhagen report has been released, this time  jointly from the influential Center for American Progress, the progressive think tank headed by John Podesta, President Clinton’s former chief of staff,  and the United Nations Foundation, the body founded with Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift in 1998 to support UN causes and activities.

Meeting the Climate Challenge (PDF) is brief and as punchy as such reports can be. It identifies and focuses on four core elements which it believes can deliver the most immediate effective response to climate change. Importantly, they are attractive in their own right and can be undertaken without delay. The first three, energy efficiency, renewable energy, forest conservation and sustainable land use, between them can achieve up to 75 percent of needed emissions reductions in 2020. And far from being costly the measures would deliver a net savings of $14 billion!  The report’s source is a Project Catalyst analysis. Renewable energy costs are estimated at $34 billion per year, forest conservation and land use at $51 billion; but energy efficiency measures save a staggering $98 billion per year. Net saving is the result.

Continue reading “Fab four: ways to meet the climate challenge”

Treating a Fever

Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change

William Calvin, emeritus professor in medicine of the University of Washington in Seattle, has written many books for the lay reader in the course of his career, most of them concerned with the human brain. But for a quarter of a century he has been following climate science literature closely, talking with its practitioners and writing articles for the public. Now he has produced a book on the subject: Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. He likens himself to a GP reporting on the results of the tests and analysis of the specialists and helping the patient understand the treatment options.

He is keen on analogy and quotes a memorable passage from poet Robert Frost on the metaphorical nature of thinking.  Overheated frogs, things going pop, slippery slopes, creeps and leaps, domino effects, feedback loops, vicious cycles are some of the metaphors pressed into service in the major concern of the book – how one thing leads to another in climate change.

The book does not attempt a systematic account of modern climate science, the broad findings of which are taken as fully established.  Rather it focuses on trying to explain what Calvin calls the principles of acceleration which are at work in climate change – the “how” of things, the underlying mechanisms. Feedback loops alter the normal cause and effect sequences, leading to reactions out of all proportion to the stimulus.  Neurophysiologists (Calvin’s profession) study nerve and muscle cells with positive feedback mechanisms that help things to happpen very quickly.  So climate change is often not, in the manner of a dimmer switch, proportional to the provocation. It is more like the ordinary switch where a little more pressure will bring sudden change. Gradual warming is an inadequate metaphor.  Surprises are involved.

In a chapter on drought he shows how feedbacks are naturally a part of the process – for example over a tropical forest about half the rainfall comes from what recently evaporated from the leaves upwind. No evaporation means less rain. Things get worse. Drought is part of the normal instability of climate, but in the US most models agree in predicting that the dryness of the 1930s Dust Bowl will return to the American Southwest by midcentury – and for a very long time. He has some vivid pictures of the dust storms of the 1930s.

Another chapter discusses the climate creep whereby higher global temperatures lead to a widening of the tropic’s Hadley Cell movement of air which means dryer air for a further degree or two of latitude in the areas where deserts already exist.  Major cities become vulnerable to spreading desertification — San Diego, Los Angeles, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Perth and Sydney. This isn’t just gradual warming for the places concerned, but a massive change.

In discussing ice he looks at the way it is not only melting but moving on Greenland, and points out that collapse, not melt, is the operative concept. We would have centuries up our sleeves if Greenland melted simply from surface run-off.  It is one of the seriously incomplete aspects of the IPCC report that its estimate of sea-level rise depended mostly on melt run-off and thermal expansion of the ocean.

These are but a few of the matters Calvin discusses in his explanations of why and how we’re in trouble. Along the way he offers a very good short explanation of climate models and also of the comprehensive processes by which IPCC reports are prepared. His chapters are short and nuggety, not attempting to be comprehensive, not always strong on continuity, but packed with suggestions for better understanding the phenomena of climate change. His early pre-college experience in journalism and photography is reflected in the many pictures, diagrams and maps which accompany his discussions. Quotations from a wide variety of scientists and writers stud the text and give a good sense of the large community of people working in the climate science field.

When he’s finished with explaining how things are going wrong he turns his attention to what we need to do to turn things around by no later than 2020, his latest date for stopping the growth in emissions.  In spite of his awareness of how rapidly things can worsen in climate terms he is an optimist.  He considers that, once we understand what’s what, progress in addressing it can be rapid.  When tempted by pessimism he recalls the progress he’s seen in medical science in his lifetime.  He also pins hope on religious leaders coming to see that climate change is a serious failure of stewardship and our present use of fossil fuel as a deeply immoral imposition on other people and unborn generations. Their arguments will trump the objections of the vested interests, just as they did when slavery was ended in the 19th century.  And the developed nations already have the technology to achieve within ten years a substantial reduction in their fossil fuel uses.  He allows for a wide range of possibilities here, but selects three as the most likely to produce rapid turnaround – energy efficiency, hot rock energy and nuclear generation. Hot rock energy, for those who haven’t encountered it, takes advantage of hot and dry granite below the sedimentary rocks. It can be drilled, and the further down the hotter it gets. Water is injected, returns as steam for a turbine, and is subsequently recirculated. In recommending nuclear power generation he refers to improvements in safety and efficiency since the industry first started, and also looks ahead to the fourth generation reactors which will increase efficiency enormously. Finally, along with carbon-free generation we also need continent-wide low-loss DC transmission lines.

Different writers have different proposals for the best technologies, and the array can appear bewildering.  But it also means that there are plenty of options and most of them can at least contribute towards the solution.  Calvin is mainly concerned that we act quickly, and he turns to analogy again, the same one that we now hear from many quarters – arming as for a great war, doing what must be done regardless of cost and convenience.

 

Appendix:  The passage Calvin quotes from Robert Frost is very striking.  Worth pondering:

[All] thinking is metaphorical, except mathematical thinking. What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weaknesses. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.