Picking Green Tech's Winners and Losers

Stanford Social Innovation Review.

"The challenge is not in changing consumer behavior, but in changing the job that consumers are trying to accomplish."

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NETG Movie Night: Gasland

This Thursday, February 3 at 5:30 pm in Cook Hall room 2058, NETG will be showing Gasland. Pizza will be served: RSVP

Gasland documents the watershed impacts of hydraulic fracturing. Natural gas is a clean-burning and low-carbon alternative to coal, but like any energy resource, it presents a unique set of environmental challenges. Please join us to learn one filmmaker's perspective on this important issue:

"The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of 'fracking' or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a 'Saudia Arabia of natural gas' just beneath us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND. Part verite travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown, part showdown."

We hope you can come and share your expertise and opinions.

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A refreshing dose of honesty

A junior senator from Washington state, Maria Cantwell, is is pushing a simpler, more voter-friendly version of cap-and-trade, called “cap-and-dividend.”

Although, like in cap-and-trade, carbon credits are auctioned off and traded, which results in an increase in cost for products made with energy (which is to say, just about everything), under this interesting twist on the old idea, American taxpayers are issued payments from the government as compensation. To quote this article in the Economist, which calls the idea “honest” for its transparency and simplicity (the bill is a mere 40 pages long), “To discourage the use of dirty energy, [the bill] says, it has to be more expensive. To make up for that, here’s a thousand bucks.” This way there is an inherent consumer-driven incentive to purchase less energy-intensive goods, which would translate to an incentive to produce them on the industrial scale. Here is a link to Senator Cantwell's page in which The Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal (CLEAR) Act is introduced.

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Candidate Forum 2010

Citizens for a Greener Evanston asked candidates for the 18th legislative district of the Illinois House of Representatives (election to be held next Tuesday, February 2nd) to respond to the following three energy- and sustainability-related questions:


1. What bills are currently pending in the state legislature that would support significant improvements in energy efficiency in residential and commercial buildings and would increase the production of renewable energy in Illinois in a major way?

2. How would you as state representative work to provide assistance to Evanston in its efforts to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in our community?

3. Indicate how your past work as advocates for various programs bears on the goal of achieving sustainability in Evanston.

Follow the title link of this post to read their responses.

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Christopher Steiner: $20 Per Gallon gasoline

Forbes magazine senior staff writer and Evanston resident Christopher Steiner addressed Citizens for a Greener Evanston at the Fireside Grill tonight to discuss his new book “$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better.” The main message of the talk (and, I assume, the book) was similar to that of a number of other pundits addressing the same issue: peak oil is coming, and it will change how we do everything.

His prognosis of how we’ll deal with high energy prices appears to be a bit rosier than those of some of his contemporaries (e.g. James Howard Kunstler, Matt Simmons), due to his belief that energy price increases will be gradual enough for us to respond to in an organized and constructive way. In his own words, “…many people's lives… will be improved across a panoply of facets. We will get more exercise, breathe fewer toxins, eat better food, and make a smaller impact on our earth. Giant businesses will rise as entrepreneurs' intrepid minds elegantly solve our society's mounting challenges.”

In Mr. Steiner’s view, Evanston is well positioned for these changes due to our proximity to a major economic center, a well-developed and well-used mass transit system, mixed use zoning, and the possibility of a burgeoning high-speed rail system, of which Chicago would likely be a hub. He noted the beginnings of a trend toward a devaluation of auto-dependant development (far-flung suburbs) relative to areas with human-scale transportation options (city centers and neighborhoods). This, I believe, raises concerns about displacement of low-income residents due to gentrification as cities become fashionable places to live again. He advocates the implementation of an increased federal gasoline tax, pegged, for example, to inflation, at a level high enough to affect behavioral change. The logic, he claims, is that since we will be soon enough paying high prices for gasoline from foreign shores due to market forces, we may as well do so voluntarily today and retain some of the money domestically in our government coffers. This way the money could be put to good use at home, perhaps in making infrastructure changes to anticipate the coming paradigm shift.

Among the attendees at tonight’s event was Jeff Smith, an NU alum and Evanston-area resident, who is an independent Democratic candidate for state representative from the 18th Representative District of the Illinois General Assembly (the election is next Tuesday, February 2nd). He has a strong platform related to energy and environmental issues, which may be of interest.

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Take the Energy Star Pledge

Join the millions of people across the nation who have taken the Energy Star Pledge.

Please visit the City of Evanston website to find out more and to take the pledge.

When you take the pledge, please be sure to list "City of Evanston" as the organization that asked you to take the pledge.

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Letting Nature levy taxes

This interesting idea ties the rate of carbon taxation to the temperature of the troposphere: if the Earth continues warming, the tax increases.

If global warming is not really happening, and the warming trend proves to be a temporary fluctuation unrelated to man-made carbon emissions, then the tax would decrease or disappear. This approach has appeal in that the tax is self-correcting, but there are some reasons to proceed with caution as well, not the least of which is the politicization of scientific research. Another benefit I can imagine is that we would find out rather quickly "what the market believes" is really happening, as investments should favor either companies that are planning for a low-carbon future, or companies that are betting on a fossil-based model.

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Is email spam as bad for the environment as they say?

A news story broke a few weeks ago (courtesy of a study by McAfee, the virus protection software company) pertaining to the global energy costs of email spam. The study outlined a very thorough breakdown of the life-cycle of spam, from creation and dissemination to filtering and viewing. The energy usage per year for each step was analyzed for each major country and also generalized over the global scale. The conclusion: over 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh) of electricity are used globally each year as a result of spam. According to McAfee’s numbers, this is equivalent to the electricity usage of 2.4 million homes in the U.S., and equals the GHG emissions of 3.1 million passenger cars. Not a small amount.

This story reflects a burgeoning trend by companies to spin their products in a way that shines favorably on the environment. We probably never thought about the impact of spam on CO2 emissions, but thanks to McAfee, we can now feel good about buying their product. This is all well and good, and simply reflects the very positive cultural and societal movement towards cleaner and more efficient energy production and usage in order to reduce our environmental imprint. However, as with all science, it is necessary to analyze studies like this in detail, and to be cognizant of any conflicts of interest that may exist. In the case of corporate advertising, the vested interest of the company in producing data which leads to more sales is glaring.

The most interesting part of the McAfee study is that about 80% of the energy associated with spam comes from the user end: viewing and deleting spam, manually filtering, and searching for false positives (scanning the spam folder for valuable emails accidentally filtered from the inbox). The energy associated with each of these categories is defined as “user hours,” calculated by multiplying the time spent for these acts by the average power required by the computer.

It is in the application of these “user hours” that McAfee confuses and distorts the issue, and inflates the environmentally deleterious impact of spam presumably for its own economic benefit. The energy associated with user hours is only a factor if, in lieu of viewing and filtering spam, the computer would have been off. It is the difference in energy between normal non-spam behavior and behavior with spam, the opportunity cost (to use a business term), that should be used in the analysis. The only scenario where the McAfee analysis is correct would be where the computer is on an extra amount of time due to the user time spent dealing with spam. If you spend 15 minutes a day dealing with spam, do you stay an extra 15 minutes at work, or at home on the computer, AND do you turn your computer on and off each time you use it? It is safe to say that most people’s computing behavior does not follow this pattern.

Here is another way to look at the issue. Most people take time during the work day to go to the bathroom or to take a coffee break. This on average would be about 15 minutes away from your computer. Do you turn your computer off when you go to the bathroom? I know I don’t. Using the same analysis and logic as McAfee, the global energy and CO2 footprint of people simply going to the bathroom would be just as large (maybe I just inadvertently proposed the new advertising campaign for the antidiarrheal industry). The point is, by treating user time as added energy, McAfee has greatly inflated their numbers to their benefit.

I commend McAfee for its efforts to analyze the energy associated with an industry. These types of studies are very useful and often shed light on existing inefficiencies. The references it used and the data it collected were both excellent. However, its representation of the final data fell short. Despite this, they were successful in highlighting a much broader and more important related issue: how much energy is wasted by computers that are on and not being used. I’m turning mine off after I write this.

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Green IT at NU

Check out the latest edition of NUIT's quarterly newsletter - eCommunicator - to find out more about how IT played a role in this year's Green Cup competition. They also include a few great tips on some energy best practices such as:

* Turn off your monitor when you’re away
* Unplug your chargers, printers, and other peripherals when not in use
* Eliminate screen savers and enable power management settings instead
* Use print preview, and set your printer to always print on both sides
* Purchase ENERGY STAR products
* Remember to eCycle when your machine is ready to retire

You can also catch the podcast with one of the Green Cup co-chairs embedded at the end of this post. More information about the Green Cup competition that encourages energy and water conservation in the residence halls is also available at their website.

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Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet

This article under this provocative title (follow the link) has as its central argument something called the Kuznets curve. This is a plot of an environmental damage index versus affluence of a society. It is shaped like an upside-down U, meaning that it has a maximum- and for a level of affluence greater than that maximum the environmental damage done by a group begins to decrease. The reason for the shape of the curve is that over a certain level of affluence, people can begin to afford to clean up their act, and offer themselves clean air and drinking water, use carbon-light fuels (coal -> natural gas -> nuclear), and with their more efficient agricultural methods, allow re-forestation since fewer acres are under cultivation. Something like a conclusion is drawn that the best thing we can do for the environment and the atmosphere in particular is to keep our hands off the energy market and let it work its own magic.

My principal criticisms of this way of thinking are as follows:

-The experimental outcome of the American energy policy and the European one disagree with the policy-won't-work approach. Europeans, who have a similar standard of living to us, consume much less energy than we do per-capita, and per $GDP, because unlike us they made conscious and effective decisions about taxing energy in a way that discourage to a degree its overuse. This fact is a direct contradiction of the author's point that “Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don’t suddenly morph into something different." In fact, France, of which he makes an example as being just past the maximum of a Kuznets curve, made a very deliberate choice a few decades ago to be less reliant on foreign energy. Their nuclear program represents a dramatic and sudden morphing of their energy system through government policy and not in any way from market forces. In a domestic example, wind energy now accounts for a large fraction of our newly built electricity production capacity- made possible by a federal credit to make it competitive with fossil energy. Another policy-driven decarburization the market doesn't yet support.

-The next step our energy system is supposedly poised to make to further decarburize requires technological developments- sometimes evolutionary, but just as often revolutionary. There, is in the latter cases, little market force driving the basic scientific research this requires- much of it is done in national labs or in university labs funded by government agencies (DOE, NSF). The rate of advancement depends to a large degree on availability of government funding, and who is in charge (and whether or not they are pushing for a "green revolution") makes an enormous difference, in contrast to the author's claim. To put it another way, to slide down the Kuznets curve toward a less harmful way of living, we need development of technologies that the market can not provide, because currently there is no market for them.

-There are plenty of externalities (environmental and otherwise) that I think the K-curve analysis neglects. Take for instance the example of reforestation due to more land-efficient agriculture. Sure, fewer acres are necessary, ok, and that's a good thing by this one measure. But how are the ecosystems in the Chesapeak bay doing, a thousand miles from the "environmentally friendly" low-acreage-per-bushel-of-corn farms that drain into it? Is there any bioactivity in the soil, or has it been chemically scorched with fertilizers and pesticides in the name of increased efficiency?

-Finally, I'll wager that the West is benefiting significantly from having priced ourselves out of the manufacturing game for many of our common every-day products. Our affluence coupled with globalization of product streams has resulted in a massive shift in manufacturing capacity from the West to Asia, and with that capacity went the emissions it produces. It is easy to pat ourselves on the back for cleaning up our air and water, but one result has been that some of the burden of that pollution has been transferred to China.

It's an interesting article, and does contain some lessons worth keeping in mind when crafting energy policy, but I think that the call to "Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet" is simplistic, and discourages necessary action.

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A car-free German suburb

A suburb of Freiburg, Germany turns a WWII-era army barracks into a very nearly car-free community of over 5,000. Car ownership rates are low, and often communal. Other areas of the world express a similar vision: a "car-reduced" community is planned in California, and new development in Britain must be served by transit. Check out the link for more details.

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Why Isn’t the Brain Green?

Here is an interesting -- albeit a bit lengthy -- commentary of a study on the apparent disconnect between the importance of addressing climate change and the relatively apathetic public attitude on it.

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