Environmental Defense Fund's Top ten clean energy stories of 2011.
Let's make 2012 even better.
Not out of science fiction
The President of the Maldives is establishing "a sovereign wealth fund, drawn from its tourist revenue, to be used to buy land overseas and finance the relocation of the country's population of 350,000," reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
SMH reports:
THE President of what could be the first country in the world lost to climate change has urged Australia to prepare for a mass wave of climate refugees seeking a new place to live. The Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, said his government was considering Australia as a possible new home if the tiny archipelago disappears beneath rising seas.
''It is increasingly becoming difficult to sustain the islands, in the natural manner that these islands have been,'' he told the Herald in an interview ... ''If nations won't do good for themselves, they really must do good for everyone around, simply in your self-interest as well ... I think it's really quite necessary for Australians and for every rich country to understand that this is unlike any other thing that's happened before.''
Science fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson, described a fictional low-lying nation to permanently relocate to Washington DC in his global warming trilogy. Only now, it's becoming a real possibility for the Maldives and other low-lying areas in the global south.
Via Tree Hugger.
Mathew L. Wald, NY Times:
If solar energy is eventually going to matter — that is, generate a significant portion of the nation’s electricity — the industry must overcome a major stumbling block, experts say: finding a way to store it for use when the sun isn’t shining (italics added).
Very true.
How extreme weather will transform cities
"Urban green spaces are going to be more critical than (they have) ever been."
At this point though, the suburbs are part of urban condition. We need a better way to think about the suburb/central city dichotomy.
Russian scientists have discovered hundreds of plumes of methane gas, some 1,000 meters in diameter, bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean. Scientists are concerned that as the Arctic Shelf recedes, the unprecedented levels of gas released could greatly accelerate global climate change.
Great.
Times Are Changing
Anecdotal: both High Schools in Chico have solar arrays covering their parking lots, Butte Community College is one of the first colleges to be grid positive, a farm in rural Butte county has four wind turbines and a solar roof, and a farm along side I-5 in Northern California is deploying a solar array on some of its farmland. Couple this with David Roberts post on Grist last week showing the above maps, and renewables are appearing more and more in daily life. First one 1970, second one 2011.
Apple's New Headquarters Will Have the Largest Solar Roof in US
Seth Weintraub:
Today’s updated Apple Headquarters Spaceship campus plans include a roof made almost entirely out of solar cells, according to details released today. With a building as large as Apple’s, that puts it in the top corporate solar installations in the world and the biggest in the US. The current title holder is the 4.26 MW system in Edison New Jersey and another being built by ToysRus in sunny NJ is rated 5.38W
Clearly, this won’t be enough power to power all of operations, but as Steve Jobs mentioned in his case to the Cupertino City council, Apple will be able to generate a lot of its own power and will run from an on-site power facility.
(Via The Loop)
On the Impracticality of the Cheeseburger
Waldo Jaquith:
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.
Great quote. Good article describing his quest to make his own cheeseburger from scratch, all of it from scratch.
Humans have been unintentionally geoengineering the earth for thousands of years. Intintional geoengineering aimed at reversing global climate change is an increasingly talked about idea. However, it's fraught with controversy as well as many many unknowns (unknowables?).
Arthur Max (AP):
They could be physical — unintentionally changing weather patterns and rainfall. Even more difficult, it could be political — spurring conflict among nations unable to agree on how such intervention, or geoengineering, will be controlled.
As Plan A (reducing CO2 emissions through international cooperation) begins to lapse and fail, will once wild ideas like geoengineering seem so crazy and dangerous in the next 100 years?
California's high-speed rail project set to go amidst harsh criticism that it will end up a boondoggle, a giant waste of money. Is this the kind of politics that built extensive high-speed rail in Europe, Japan, and now China?
Adam Nagourney:
But for many Californians, struggling through a bleak era that has led some people to wonder if the state’s golden days are behind it, this project goes to the heart of the state’s pioneering spirit, recalling grand public investments in universities, water systems, roads and parks that once defined California as the leading edge of the nation.
Sign of the times for the US: crumbling 19th and 20th century infrastructure. Not good, and little evidence that we can make these projects work.
Environmental historian Richard White:
What they are hoping is that this will be to high-speed rail what Vietnam was to foreign policy: that once you’re in there, you have to get in deeper. The most logical outcome to me is we are going to have a white elephant in the San Joaquin Valley.
Renewables: Growing Fast but Still a Rounding Error
Great article by David Roberts on GRIST. Roberts breaks down the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 2010 Renewable Energy Data Book. Great graphics to go with his report.
Non-hydro renewables remain a small part of the U.S. energy story. More to the point, the sexy renewables -- solar, wind, and geothermal -- are a rounding error. Of the total energy consumed in the U.S. in 2010, solar was 0.1 percent and wind was 0.9 percent. Even with biomass, hydropower, and nuclear thrown in, low-carbon energy amounts to just 17 percent of energy consumed in the U.S.
And yet!
Seen from another angle, growth in renewables has been crazy-fast. From 2000 to 2010 in the U.S., non-hydro renewables have grown at a compounded annual average of almost 14 percent, even faster recently.
You can find the original report here.
R&D Is Good, Deployment Is Even Better
Google Phases Out Clean Energy R&D in Favor of Deployment
Buried at the bottom of an innocuous “spring cleaning” post on Google’s blog yesterday, the internet giant made a very important announcement: it will stop funding its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative.
But that’s not the whole story. And if you believe the headlines — “Google Abandons Renewable Energy Push”or “Are Google’s Green Days Over?” — you might think this is a negative development. But if you look at the details, it’s a story about how the company is adapting to a changing market and actually increasing investments in renewables.
Interesting article by Stephen Lacey on thinkprogress.org that clarifies Google's announcement that it is shutting down it's renewable R&D initiative. Google is not getting out of renewables but is instead shifting focus to deployment. R&D is good, deployment is even better.
Windwashing or energy revolution?
WindMade is the first global consumer label
identifying organisations and products that use wind power
in their operations or production
We need an energy revolution not a new branding campaign that replicates Fair Trade Coffee by adding value to a product in a niche market. We are not trying to make renewable energy the Fair Trade Coffee of energy production (value added niche market); we're trying to make it the coffee that hundreds of millions of people drink everyday.
Like the organic label and the Fair Trade label this looks likely to only further product differentiation rather than changing the relationship of mass market production/consumption of energy.
IPCC: Linking Extreme Weather and Climate Change
James Bradbury and Kelly Levin at WRIInsights.org provide a good summary of the five take home points of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest special report on extreme weather and climate change.
1. Extreme weather on the rise
2. Climate disasters are deadly and expensive
3. Warming world = more extreme world
4. Greenhouse gas likely causing some of these trends (italics added)
5. Adaptation and risk management needs to consider differentiated vulnerability and exposure
We need some caution on point 4: causation. IPCC authors give it "medium confidence" that global warming is behind some of the changes in extreme weather. Beware using this for headlines and political slogans at this point.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball takes down Malcolm Gladwell's formulaic analysis of Jobs as the "tweaker" (no, not that kind of tweaker). Jobs didn't tweak invovation, he democratized inovation. Gruber nails what typically bugs me about Gladwell's formula.
Interesting article discussing long-term unemployment and its relationship to technicological labor. Computers, the internet, and machines are increasingly displacing some forms of labor, thus making some jobs obsolete.
i.e., new forms of relative surplus-value.
Also, see this interview on Techcrunch
Eco-inspiration of the Week
The Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition
These folks are doing amazing work building a diverse coalition AND presenting a development vision that came out of a participatory and collaborative design process within the community.
Time Lapse Video of Earth from Space
Urban civilization. Cities, cities, cities.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Via The Loop
Solyndra might be making the headlines (on page A10 by now) but the overlooked larger story: the solar industry is booming.
There are a few emerging conversations:
1. Should the government be subsidizing the industry?
2. Can US solar manufacturers compete with Chinese ones?
3. Can the US link production and consumption of solar technology, or will we import cheaper Chinese panels for construction of mega solar facilities for domestic consumption?
4. Should we focus on large-scale solar "plants" or should we take Germany's lead (and Jeremy Rifkin's) and push for lateral power, small scale deployment on homes, neighborhoods, and businesses and scale that way?
These centralized, large-scale projects tend to favor the big established corporations, which has the potential to undermine any sort of democratization of energy production, and replicate the energy hierarchies we've known for centuries. The billions in subsidies will go to the big guys, same as with coal and oil.
Lateral deployment seems the way to go.