EcoIssues

Pogo Got it Right: The Enemy is US!

By Eleanor Haas

Global warming can be changed, says Rob Watson, CEO of EcoTech International and the founding father of the LEED standard for buildings but only if we change how we think.  For one thing, we need to focus on the real danger of “irreversible damage” to humankind if we don’t do something about CO2 concentration.  “The planet is fine and can take care of itself,” he comments.  “It’s humanity that’s in danger.”  What danger?  150 years of Katrina on a global scale.

As part of this, we need to move beyond what Watson calls egonomics – politics and the habit of thinking we’re the center of the universe.  Egonomics assumes that the impact of economics transactions can be separate from the transactions themselves.  In this view, efficiency and renewable energy require some sort of payback. Watson calls this an 18^th century prescription that is no longer a useful framework for the 21^st century.

When what’s green is new, it can be more expensive, but that’s because it’s new, not because it’s green. Once green is mandatory, the price will come down over time.  The biggest cost of green is inexperience.  You can’t do LEED except before you do the drawing. 

Carbon caps, trade and taxation also represent egonomics in Watson’s view.  His prescription?   “We have to do the right thing every day.  Energy demand is choice, not fate.”  We know what to do.  We have the technical and design knowledge.  We have the solutions.  Can we get them into place?  Maybe not.

What we can do specifically::

1. Stop designing buildings, industries and cars to be inefficient.  Use technologies we already have effectively.  Buildings represent the largest single source of environmental problems – almost 50 percent of all CO2 emissions – twice as many as all cars and trucks combined.
2.  Integrate market and mandatory mechanisms as California is doing, rewarding early adopters.

3.      Establish regulatory certainty.  Incentives need to be ongoing, not just for a year or two.

4.      Build the case for nonbelievers by creating value around the product.  Set your goal and budget and stick to them; adopt new thinking.  .  “Your competitors are doing it.  They’ll kick your ass!  WalMart started doing it as a defensive posture.  Then they found it made more money!  The leaders are out ahead of you and will eat your lunch!”

5.      Move from a centralized energy grid to one that’s distributed to cut the high cost of moving energy around in order to make it available.

My thanks to the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York for this opportunity to hear and talk with Rob Watson face to face.  Much more can be found at www.greenerbuildings.com.

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Corn Ethanol - Panacea or Pariah?

By Eleanor Haas

It sounds increasingly as if some current efforts to mitigate climate change may do more harm than good – and do harm to even more than the environment.

Corn ethanol fuel, a highly touted biofuel alternative to gasoline, is easy to manufacture, easy to process and can be made from common materials – including corn and sugar cane. It’s already widely used to power automobiles in Brazil. It’s already a gasoline additive for some U.S.vehicles and has the potential to replace gasoline entirely.

The promise has been reduced dependence on foreign oil, fewer greenhouse gases and a way to support the farm economy.

Now, after about a year of riding high, ethanol has come under serious attack. By increasing demand for corn, it’s pushing up prices for corn, which is a problem for livestock farmers who use it for feed and food companies that produce grain products. As was to have been expected, oil companies don’t like it either. Worse yet, environmentalists are unhappy about the way ethanol demand increases the use of water and fertilizer to grow corn, and the American Lung Association has raised a red flag about air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline.

Foreign opposition has also emerged – from Mexico, where it’s believed to help cause corn-based tortilla prices to rise; Quebec, where the government concluded the environmental costs were too high, and from China, Malaysia, Cuba and Venezuela.

The U.S.ethanol industry, which plays a key role in President’s Bush’s program to reduce dependence on foreign oil, has some powerful U.S.government protection: Oil refiners get an excise tax credit for every gallon of ethanol they blend into gasoline, and imported ethanol is taxed at 54 cents per gallon. It’s also supported by investors, who’ve enabled construction of more and more new and larger ethanol plants.

Pending legislation would increase the amount of renewable fuels to be blended with gasoline by 2022, about 15 of 36 gallons to be corn ethanol, with the balance other fuels, including celluosic ethanol, still an embryonic industry.

Sounds like it’s time to stop the music. Benefits of ethanol have been challenged, and damaging side effects appear likely. How do we call a time-out with so many vested interests in entrenched positions? How can we get better public understanding of the complex technical issues at stake here? Better yet, how can we get informed discussion of superior alternatives?

Intel Positions Its New Chip as Eco-Responsible

By Eleanor Haas

“Eco-friendly” comes first in Intel’s description of its new 45 nanometer processors – “eco-friendly, faster and `cooler’” is the phrase. That’s good news for environmentally conscious customers and good business for Intel.

On technical achievement alone, the new processors are impressive enough for Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore to call this the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years. Breakthroughs in manufacturing and materials boost performance, lower power consumption and open the door to future products that are even smaller and more cost-effective.

What makes the new chips faster is Intel’s new manufacturing process, which makes it easier to squeeze increasing numbers of electronic brains on a chip by shrinking circuitry dimensions to 45 manometers from 65 manometers – a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The new processors are said to have nearly twice the transistor density of previous chips built on the company’s 65 nm technology. This brings the number of transistors up to 820 million for quad-core processors that use the new formula.

What makes the new chips `cooler’ and therefore more eco-friendly is Intel’s all-new transistor formula, which reduces electricity leakage – something that has become an increasingly serious issue as parts of tiny switches have become smaller and smaller.

Increasing energy efficiency has become key to IT product design not only because of the environmental benefits but because of cost savings for users. In addition, environmental friendliness has been mandated by regulatory bodies around the world.

Whatever the motivation, it’s good to see environmental considerations the No. 1 selling point.

Radical Ideas for Combating Climate Change: Geo-engineering

Reflections growing out of the first TED Salon in September 2007 (www.ted.com)

By Eleanor Haas

The radical idea: Use geo-engineering to reduce the effects of pollutants. The concept is to send sulphate particles into the stratosphere to produce a cooling effect in specific geographic areas. Professor David Keith, of the University of Calgary, talked at the TED Salon about focusing on the North and South Poles. It’s very cheap and could act as a form of risk control that takes the edge off environmental heat while we work to reduce emissions and concentrations of pollutants.

The scientist: David Keith (www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/) - Earth Sciences, University of Calgary - Director, ISEEE Energy and Environmental Systems Group.- Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment., Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and Department of Economics.- Adjunct Professor Department of EPP at Carnegie Mellon.

BUT how will this affect the ozone layer? If we do serious research and make this technique a reality, will that weaken motivation to reduce emissions? How can we best avoid this “moral challenge”? What about nations’ ownership of their air rights. Will we need treaties?

We heard David Keith speak at the first TED Salon, where he was one of five eminent scientists who spoke. TED, best known for its annual Monterey conference, exists to spread great ideas, and its NYC salon was literally mind-expanding.

Our thought on geo-engineering is that the climate change crisis is such a serious threat to life on earth and growing at such an alarming rate that every possible solution should be explored, including this one. It may never be THE solution, but how likely is it that any one solution could achieve all that’s needed in whatever time we have left? It seems to us it deserves to be explored and the findings of research thoroughly discussed at each stage.

Where can you find out more? Here’s what Professor Keith said when we asked him: “There is not too much out there on the topic that is not over hyped. There is a discussion on realclimate.org. You can look at my review papers, #26 at www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/Geoengineering.html is the one to read. There are the results of the NASA Ames workshop. Dan Schrag and I are running a high level forum at Harvard in November, I will prepare an annotated bibliography from that which should help.