The American Clean Energy Party

Earlier this month, Eban Goodstein shared an idea to create the American Clean Energy party - ACE - in this article on grist.org.

The entire article is worth the read, as it's a compelling idea.  Goodstein lays out 3 main components that the ACE party would be built around:

1) The American Permanent Fund: Every year, each American family receives a check for $1,000, and rising. The source? A fee on big polluters

2) Clean energy leadership: Thirty billion a year to capture global leadership in the clean energy technologies that will rewire the world.

3) Green collar jobs, today: A large-scale loan guarantee program to finance energy efficiency retrofits of state, city, and federal buildings -- putting millions of Americans to work.

The aim of the party would be to run ACE-endorsed candidates in the primaries of both major parties, with the intention of shifting the debate to the most critical issue of our time - the climate crisis.

I like the concept for a lot of reasons - it will work to engage more people in the political process; it would be built around a positive vision for an energy-independent, safe, secure, clean-energy future; and it holds promise to provide the common ground needed to move past the counter-productive, divisive, partisan stalemates that are so common in our political culture these days.

ACE isn't a party yet - just an idea.  But it is an idea that has legs.  So stay tuned, and share the idea --hopefully, the right people with the necessary resources will come together to make something like ACE a reality soon.

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Clean Energy & a Price on Carbon

Below is a new video from Repower America about boosting wind turbine manufacturing in the US.  With the debate in the Senate on climate legislation about to kick into full gear, now is the time to get to work.

Without strong legislation this year, there's a good chance we won't get it for a while - and we know to have any chance at avoiding really destructive climate disruption, we need global carbon emissions to peak by 2015.

That's not going to happen without leadership from the US in the form of meaningful correction to the price signals.  We can continue to keep the price of fossil fuels artificially low, but as we continue to find out in so many ways, we end up paying the true cost eventually, and it is much much higher, in the forms of oil spills, wars, Katrinas, droughts, floods, crop failures, and so on - all of which have huge real financial costs and unfathomable moral costs.

Here in the Commonwealth we're looking to Scott Brown to step up and take advantage of what amounts to a huge leadership opportunity to champion a bi-partisian bill, rise above the nonsense that this is a economy-destroying conspiracy, and make the case that this is a market-correction that needs to happen to ensure American competitiveness, create jobs, boost national defense, and most importantly give us half a chance at ensuring a livable planet for our children and grandchildren.  Sign Repower America's petition and give your Senators a call today.

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Define Our Decade - the gift of climate disruption

We're already starting to feel the impact of greenhouse gases emitted decades ago. In the meantime, we've continued to increase the annual rate of emissions year over year.

In other words, not only has the faucet been turned on, filling the bathtub (i.e. the atmosphere) more and more each year, we've been turning the tap so we're filling more and more each year, and faster and faster each year. Play around with Climate Interactive's C-Learn Freeware Online Simulator for a little while to see how hard that makes it for us to get the level of the bathtub back down to a safe level of 350 parts per million.

The human brain has trouble dealing with the concept of time. Decades seem like forever, until they fly by. That's why we need to Define Our Decade, set out the visions of the future we want to create, and then continuously work to make those visions a reality.

In November I attended the Society for Organizational Learning's Leading and Learning for Sustainability workshop, where Peter Senge referred to what he called "The Gift of Climate Disruption." I interpreted that to mean that because climate disruption represents such a massive threat to civilization, to all people on the planet, it also represents a great opportunity to put aside our differences, to better understand each other, and to work together to create better systems, which don't have negative unintended side-effects like climate disruption.

Climate disruption itself is just a symptom of more systemic, underlying forces at play, that taken together represent "unsustainability." Just solving that problem won't create a sustainable society. For example, if we create a miracle solution of cheap, clean energy, that could in many ways make a lot of other problems worse - it's likely we would take that solution and simply ramp up a lot of other activities that are devastating to social and ecological systems.

However, climate disruption does force us to think systemically, and to acknowledge our role in the system. Nearly every aspect of our modern economy and daily lives are dependent on fossil fuels, so we are all implicated in this problem, and all presented with the opportunity to develop better systems. As Adam Kahane has said "if you're not part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution."

So my vision for the next decade is for us all to come together and agree that we want to implement the smart, effective, safe solutions that already exist and create a prosperous, thriving, and sustainable future.

We will disagree on many of the details of how to get there, but if we can agree that we all want to do everything we can to affirm life and keep this human experiment going, and if we can work together in good faith towards the goal of sustainability, we will get there.

For me, elements of a vision of a sustainable society that I think are absolutely achievable by 2020 include:

• thriving communities increase people's capacity to meet their needs
• smart city design reduces transportation demand by 60%
• renovating 75% of the existing building stock to reduce demand by 75%
• all new construction is net-zero
• 100% renewable electricity smart grid
• 90% of all food travels less than 100 miles (eating habits shift and improve nutrition, urban and vertical farming abounds, permaculture design becomes the norm)
• every job is a green job
• global trade is fair

That's not a comprehensive vision of course... but some of the key elements of I think we can actually do in the next 10 years. Many may look at that list and think it's absurdly ambitious - even impossible. But we certainly won't even come close if we don't try, if we don't stretch, and keep the indirect implications of every decision we make as front-of-mind as possible. And I really do think it's possible. Particularly if we all slow down a bit and take the time to reflect on what is really important in this life, and how we relate to and affect other people - from our immediate family, to our neighbors, our nation, and those we may never meet, on the other side of the world and on the other side of Our Decade.

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One Wish

Bill Gates gave a TED Talk last week about how if he could have just one wish it would be to get to zero carbon. Even with all of his understanding, passion and work on the issues of health, poverty, sanitation, disease and so many of the world's urgent and interrelated problems - his wish, if he only had one, would be to get the big innovation breakthroughs that will make clean, carbon neutral energy affordable and safe. This is because climate disruption is the problem we face today that will make all of the other problems so much worse.

It is incredibly exciting to see the country's colleges and universities leading the way on this push to zero. With 667 institutions committed to publicly reporting on their progress through the ACUPCC, and many more taking very similar steps, they are driving the innovation needed, educating the leaders who can make the breakthroughs, and serving as role-models to show that we can do this in ways that make good business sense.

In the talk, Gates lays out a simple equation: CO2 = P * S * E * C

Where P = population; S = services per person; E = energy per service; and C = carbon dioxide per energy. He points out P is going up to 9 billion, maybe a bit smaller with big efforts in vaccines, education and reproductive health. S is going up, and for most of the world's population, where meeting the basic need of subsistence is a challenge, that's a great thing (in the developed world we have plenty of opportunity to bring that down while improving quality of life). Energy per service is going down, another good thing (although I personally believe it can go down a lot further than he suggests, if we improve the design of just about everything we do). Regardless, the only one that we can really go to zero is carbon per energy (of course the closer E gets to zero, the less zero-carbon energy we'll need).

He also identifies four necessary steps in getting to zero:

1. Basic Research Funding
2. Market Incentives to Reduce CO2 (i.e. price on carbon)
3. Entrepreneurial Opportunity
4. Rational Regulatory Framework

We all have a critical role to play in ensuring that all four of these steps are taken in a timely fashion.

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Solve Climate blog highlights absurd fossil fuel subsidies

Solar Could Generate 15% of Power by 2020, If US Ends Fossil Fuel Subsidies

The Result: 882,000 New Jobs, 10% Drop in Emissions

by Stacy Feldman - Dec 29th, 2009

in

• Clean Energy
• Clean Tech Sector
• emissions
• Environmentalists
• Governors
• Investors
• Solar
• Subsidies

Solar power technologies could generate 15 percent of America's power in 10 years, but only if Washington levels the playing field on subsidies, a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) says.

That means either rolling back fossil fuel subsidies, as President Obamaproposed earlier this year, or increasing subsidies for clean energy, the association says.

Fossil fuels received $72 billion in total federal subsidies from 2002 to 2008, keeping prices artificially low, according to figures from the Environmental Law Institute (ELI). About 98 percent of that went to conventional energy sources, namely coal and oil, leading to more emissions. The rest, $2.3 billion, was pumped into a new technology to trap and store carbon dioxide spewed by coal plants.

During that same period, solar got less than $1 billion, according to the SEIA, a trade group representing 1,100 solar companies across the nation...Read the rest at Solve Climate...

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Biochar & Synergistic Solutions

When dealing in complex systems, and working to create solutions to tough problems, it’s rarely useful to look for a “silver bullet” – one single answer that can solve all the problems. We hear this with regard to the climate crisis quite a bit – we can’t eliminate our net emissions with just one activity or technology. It’s not just efficiency, or better design, or biofuels, or solar, or wind, or geothermal, or changing lifestyles, or new laws that will do it – it’s some combination of all them, plus many more exciting solutions we will create.

However, in complex systems we can (and should) look for synergistic solutions – positive activities that also generate more positive side-effects. We’ve been talking about this with regard to Village Corps, and the possibility of helping to generate some economic activity through animal husbandry, which could provide food and income, and could help the chances of reopening a processing plant which would create jobs, and the animal waste could be used in an anaerobic digester to generate methane for cooking fuel, which is cleaner burning and more healthy than wood fires, and would help stem deforestation in the area, which would help stop erosion and improve agriculture, which would provide more food and jobs, etc. etc.

Well, a similar kind of synergistic solution with tremendously exciting global potential is biochar – essentially charcoal derived from any kind of biomass that acts as a carbon sink for thousands of years. It is essentially a way to lower the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (currently at 387 parts per million) back down to what more and more scientists are sighting as a safe level – 350 ppm. The process of creating it generates carbon neutral electricity (displacing the current common sources like coal, that has a whole host of other negative side effects) and the char itself provides a powerful organic soil amendment (displacing the current common sources of chemical based options that deplete soils over time and pollute oceans and water tables). While the reasons are fully understood (because the complex world of soil science isn’t fully understood), the biochar provides a great habitat, essentially, for the diverse array of soil microorganisms that create healthy, fertile soils.

This article from the Financial Times last month provides a great overview on how this technique was “rediscovered” by studying patches of fertile soil left by ancient peoples of the Amazon: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/67843ec0-020b-11de-8199-000077b07658.html.

There is lots of exciting research and development going on around the world. Our colleague Scott Grierson in Australia has been doing research on the potential of algae feedstocks for biochar. Universities in the US are looking into as well, including Cornell, UGA, and Iowa State.

And there are some young companies looking to commercialize this process and bring it to scale, including Best Energies and Eprida (who we had a chance to see present at Bioneers last year – very exciting results). The International Biochar Initiative is keeping track of the developments in this rapidly growing area and has a lot of great information.

It’s no silver bullet, but estimates for how much CO2 this process could remove from the atmosphere each year range from 2-4 Gigatonnes –that’s a billion tonnes – and a significant percentage of the approximately 8.8 GTs humans emit annually. And with all of the positive ‘side effects’ – like clean renewable energy, and healthy, productive soil gives biochar great potential as a synergistic solution on the path to sustainability.

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CSM - Colleges wean off fossil fuels

Some great coverage of the campus sustainability movement in the Christian Science Monitor last week that shows what just a couple of schools from around the country are doing:

http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/03/06/colleges-wean-off-fossil-fuels/

The piece includes some positive mention of the ACUPCC, and the work we've been doing at Second Nature to support it, as well as a cool 5-minute video that walks you through Middlebury's new biomass co-generation plant:



It's very similar to the one we toured in Karlskrona in grad school that left us scratching our heads, asking "why aren't we building these in the states??" - very exciting to see that we finally are, and the growth in these trends is so strong. Stay going!

Renewable Electricity for the Commonwealth

Just a quick post, with a quick "just do it" tip for our fellow Massachusetts residents: Often the challenges seem overwhelming and it's tough to know what one person can do to really make a difference. The differences we make will in large part be the result of many seemingly small (when viewed in isolation) actions. Of course these add up - in terms of each of our individual impacts, and our collective impacts, which eventually tip the system into a new state of being - hopefully one that is sustainable.

So here's an easy one: start buying renewable electricity. National Grid has the GreenUp Program, which gives a few options for ways to buy electricity produced from renewable sources. We went with New England Green Start 100% from Mass Energy (the "content label" link shows the exact breakdown -mostly small hydro, some biomass and a little solar and wind). It adds 2.4 cents per kwh - which is modest considering what you get, and totally worth it, and at the same time something we're constantly working to offset through cost-savings from demand-reduction (with energy efficient lighting and applicances, and lots of behavioral stuff - air drying clothes, powerstrips swithced off, lights off, etc. - on the efficient lighting check out these two recent blog posts on LEDs from Aedi Construction and Planet Blue Solutions - they're not just for stand-by lights anymore).

Most of us are generally familiar with the benefits by this point - avoiding the bad: GHG emissions, dependence on foriegn fossil fuels, the many problems with domestic fossil fuels (mountain top removal and fly ash slurry spills from coal, for example), volatile fossil fuel prices, finite supplies, health problems, etc... And promoting the good: living off abudant solar gain (in the form of solar electricity, solar thermal, wind, hydro, biomass), promoting local, resilient energy systems (which support healthy, resilient, local economies), stablizing costs, and driving down costs through scale.

That little little added cost per month is still there, of course - and aside from a fulfilling sense of doing the right thing, and the ability to reduce your carbon footprint, you don't see much direct benefit. But it's that's much more incentive to reduce your demand - and by sending a powerful message to the market, you'll be helping to shift the whole grid system to a clean future - answering the 10-year challenge to Repower America, and tackling a big piece of global SP1 violations. And as a final kicker, a portion of the extra cost is tax-deductible.

So sign up today! (and if you're not in mass, check out your utility company - most have these kinds of programs going - and if they don't you can buy some RECs, and help tighten the supply in those markets to push the development of more renewable generation facilities). Stay going.

Biofuel Links

National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition

Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial

Journey to Forever

Veggiepower

Biodiesel Homebrew Guide

Kitchen Biodiesel

Biodiesel Now

Biodiesel Basics Yahoo Group