Of course, if you're a technological optimist you'll hope that increasing efficiency can stem GHG emissions just long enough for that alternative energy silver bullet--and it may indeed come--but I prefer to leave deus ex machina to the movies.

I'm inclined to go with Sachs on this one: an expanding global economy (read: an economic system that requires infinite growth) is going to run into loads of trouble with current technology, even if we exploit every significant opportunity for efficiency.

How many other technologies are blocked by those same regulations, that are ready for prime-time today?  

And the regulations are plenty perverse in other sectors as well.  Hybrid electric vehicles are great in city traffic... but the reason we have so many cars in stop-and-go traffic is because we've preferentially directed social spending towards highways instead of public transit.  Was that regulatory decision optimal?  Should we put all our technological eggs in a single basket that is constrained by those regulatory decisions?

Etc., etc.  My problem is as much political as philosophical though.  As long as we frame the carbon issue as one of technological development, it gives many an excuse to put off real action until the technologies are out (and worse, to score political points by throwing a few bucks at sexy R&D while simultaneously throwing thousands of bucks at those beneficiaries of the status quo regulatory model)  By contrast, once we confront the fact that our regulatory model is a massive obstacle to GHG reduction, we compel regulators to act.

When all is said and done, after all, there is only the weakest of links between primary energy use and GDP growth.  The strong link is between delivered, useful energy and GDP growth. And the relationship between primary and delivered energy is the efficiency with which we convert primary energy into useful energy.  For the US right now, that conversion factor is a paltry 6%.  We can do massively better.  (Denmark is approaching 20%, for comparison).  That ought to be the first priority of any system.  Because even if we use 100% renewables, we still benefit from efficiency.  

If we had spent the last 100 years bashing ourselves on the head with bricks, we could have a debate about whether our best course of action was to stop bashing ourselves on the head or to invest in helmet technology.  I'm come down pretty strongly on the side of anti-bashing, myself.

As far as the cult of lending and interest rates have been around for a long time sounds like someone has a case of "it's all the Illuminati fault"

http://frepubtra.blogspot.com

.

I've posted a blog on this that some might find thought provoking if not reasonable.


George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

No one advocates waiting for the new technologies, we need to make changes today, rapid and radical changes. But what can be accomplished with today's technologies is not enough. Sachs gives examples: the need for carbon capture and storage (both for new construction and for retrofitting today's coal and natural gas power plants, here and elsewhere) and plug-in hybrids.

Do you oppose increasing energy research?

A Musing Environment

Karen Street

Since 2002, when I first met Jeff Sachs at the Earth Summit on Sustainable Development in Jo'burg, S. A., I have often disagreed with him. Even so, in this instance I do completely support what looks to me like a surprising realistic perspective from him.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

If the problem were merely one of getting the US's GHG emissions down, there's probably enough efficiency headroom for us to flatline our emissions for decades while continuing to grow in basically the same paradigm we have been using.  Unfortunately, the problem is much bigger than that, because the third world is developing and wants our standard of living.  (Or perhaps it is fortunate that we have that problem, because the alternative would be billions locked in poverty.  But it still presents a problem.)

Sachs is right on two counts: Economic growth cannot continue indefinitely (even just in the US) while decreasing GHG emissions -- we will run out of efficiency opportunities.  On a global scale, the problem is more immediate.  Western-style energy and transportation infrastructure in the developing world is generally even less efficient where it exists at all.  But even if it were deployed maximally efficiently, it still represents an absolute increase in the total global GHG emissions.  Efficiency opportunities in western economies run out of steam rapidly in the face of that.

However, Sachs is still wrong.  Next generation technologies can perhaps provide more energy per GHG emission, or can access energy sources not currently available (e.g. methane hydrates).  But within the context of our current paradigm of growth, all this does is push the same problem further into the future.  You still have finite resources trying to meet a demand that grows endlessly.

The only way -- the ONLY way -- out of this bind is to change the way that economic growth occurs and is measured.  As I see it, there are two aspects to this:

1) We must decouple economic growth from increasing consumption of resources.  Ultimately, we must learn to live and do everything we want within the constraints of current solar income and the dividends of natural capital.  This is achievable, and is a technical problem.  But the need is not only for new technology, but also new design philosophies and expectations.  If we accept that we MUST design within these constraints, then we can get down to the problem of figuring out how to do so.  Until we do, we're just spinning our wheels trying to figure out how to be less bad.

This, incidentally, is where efficiency comes in.  And this is why radical efficiency (e.g. 60-90% reduction in resource use) is fundamentally different than incremental efficiency (e.g. 5-30% reductions).  Incremental efficiency just pushes the problem away into the future, because you still have to rely on rather than from fossil solar energy and the liquidation of natural capital to meet your needs.  Radical efficiency opens up the possibility of meeting the remaining resource need from the dividends of natural capital and/or current solar income.

We also have to get away from the religion of the "time value of money" and the discount rate, at least as they apply to physical and energetic resources.  The concept of the discount rate is predicated on the idea that we will have more of X next year than we do this year.  When X is energy or raw materials, this is NOT a valid assumption, so decisions driving by this concept will be invalid.

2) The developed countries need to come up with new ways to measure growth of value.  We have to ask ourselves "What do we want to grow?".  The current metrics like GDP measure economic activity, but they don't measure the quality of that activity or the impact that it has on the lives of the citizenry.  The goal of a democratic nation is, presumably, quality of life for its citizenry.  Once basic needs are provided for, increasing material resources correlate very poorly with actual perceived quality of life.  We have to measure and make policy on that basis.

I focus this second point on the developed countries because, I think, the traditional metrics for economic development correlate fairly well to quality of life in the developing world, although they can be distorted by e.g. gross income disparities.  But when adequate food and water are the biggest problems most of your citizens face, then deploying more resources is generally going to be beneficial.  When your citizen's biggest problems are ennui, depression, boredom, or "what's the meaning of all this?", throwing more resources at the problem doesn't get you very far.

1. My specific objection to Sachs is the comment that "our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy".  This statement, on its face is false.  I take your point that infinite growth is not sustainable, but that's not what he said.  He implied that our next move, absent technology change is to choose between growth vs. CO2 reduction.  And that simply isn't true.  Moreover, the meme it represents is ubiquitous, and costs the environmental community every time the Dick Cheneys of the world characterize us as being ascetics who are trying to force everyone back into low-energy-intensivity caves.

2. I cannot stress my earlier point strongly enough: we convert 6% of our primary energy into useful stuff.  OK, we can't do better than 100%, but I think we could do 20%.  Hell, I think we can even get to 30%.  Which means that we could support 5x our current GDP with the same energy use.  Or, to put that another way, we could support any number less than 5X the current GDP with both lower carbon intensivity and economic growth.  And any framing of the issue that puts economic growth in direct, marginal competition with CO2 reduction is implicitly assuming that there is no potential to increase our overall energy efficiency.

3. A final point that sounds nitpicky, but is a big deal.  You wrote that purely technological problems are faster and easier to solve than regulatory ones.  I think this is exactly wrong.  Yes, it is hard to get political support for regulatory reform (and having personally been trying to change our electricity policy for the last decade, I can attest that the pace of that change is anything but fast).  However, once the politics support change, the incremental change is blindingly fast.  When we decided to (barely) deregulate power markets in 1992 with that year's energy bill, the result was 200 GW of gas-fired generation in just 5 years.  There has never been anywhere close to that level of new generation deployed in the history of our country.  (And interestingly, this was the first time that combined cycle gas turbines started to be deployed in any significant number, driving down our primary energy use per Btu of useful energy.)  It was far from perfect deregulation, but one cannot avoid the reality that but for those 200 GW, we'd be facing pretty significant power shortages today.  Compare that to the technology changes.  In 1910, the power industry was twice as efficient as today.  The technologies the industry used then didn't stop working - they just stopped being deployed.  Indeed, every time I drive into Chicago from my house I pass a coal-fired power plant on one side of the highway, rich with cooling towers and a big manufacturing plant on the other side of the road, rich with the stacks from steam boilers.  The world is not waiting for the magical technology of steam pipery. It is simply waiting for the regulatory reform to allow the coal plant to make money by not pissing away its waste energy (and instead running their heat across the highway to shutdown a couple steam boilers).  And has been for the past 80 years.  Yes, technology is good - but we have to confront the fact that our regulatory model consistently keeps good technologies from being deployed.  And absent change, will continue to, no matter how neato the next generation of energy technologies may be.  (And worse, "I love new technology" is a great way for a politician to sound like they're doing good things while dodging the more substantive regulatory issue.)

Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy
 Mathis Wackernagel*,, Niels B. Schulz, Diana Deumling*, Alejandro Callejas Linares§, Martin Jenkins¶, Valerie Kapos¶, Chad Monfreda*, Jonathan Loh, Norman Myers**, Richard Norgaard, and Jørgen Rander

Abstract
Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.(emphasis mine)

The rest of you are flat delusional; at least from over here in the doomer corner. The  opinion that the human race has well exceeded overshoot of the planet's carrying capacity is unpleasant but gaining ground.

Jim Hansen, who should know, has pointed out that it might be a good idea to keep CO2 levels in the atmosphere at 350 ppm or less. Hey, too bad we've already shot past that at 385 and climbing fast, it's not like the weather affects our food supply or anything.

Has anybody noticed the trend in grain prices lately? If a 350% increase in the price of wheat means nothing to you I can tell you for a surety it means a hell of a lot to the people of Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria and any other place where grain is the majority of the diet. The UN doesn't have enough money to buy emergency relief grains and people will die if they don't get them.

Does anybody like sushi? You better go get that last sushi meal because the oceans are looking to give up on feeding humans. My local salmon fishery just vanished this summer; gone. They're not extinct but only just. Ocean acidification isn't going to do the remaining ecosystem any favors either but as longs as atmospheric CO2 levels are above the buffering capacity of the worlds oceans that's the direction is heading in. Pick up those last cans of tuna, sardines and anchovies while you're at it.

Desertification; ditto. Deforestation; ditto. Aquifer depletion; ditto. Soils; ditto. Multiple drug resistant TB, malaria, AIDS and staph; ditto. Invasive species, loss of diversity in food systems, extinction of "keystone" species in multiple ecosystems, ubiquitous mercury contamination and coral bleaching; ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto.

Your technofixes will not replace the biological diversity of a single acre of coral reefs. They can't restore the overdrawn Ogalla aquifer or replace the dwindling glaciers of the Himalayas. They can't put the cod back in the ocean or restore the relationship between the passenger pigeon and the American chestnut. They aren't going to take the mercury out of the forests of the western US so that it isn't a major threat when we have one of the many forest fires we are facing. Most of all they aren't going to give us that fat grain crop if it doesn't rain when and where we've become used to it.

Because, since we haven't noticed, the freaking economy grinds to a halt in whatever region nature decides to stomp the hell out of on any given Tuesday. Oh, and there have been a LOT of angry Tuesdays lately.

Now if you count the growth in the economy as the growth in the exchange of those electronic tokens that we call "money," yeah sure, the economy can grow as long as there are two laptops operating. We can launch two of them on a deep space probe and they can exchange trillions of dollars every day between themselves using their SecondLife accounts. If you count the economy as increasing well-being for the majority of humans now living?  We're smack-outta-luck bubba because we ran the planet like a trailer park in tornado country. The human race is going to lose a few (billion) of it's many parts and it's going to hurt.

Put the Carbon Back

What are these techologies?  Are they the ones we use now in the same proportions'  Mainly coal, nuclear, gas, and oil?  With a tiny percentage of wind, solar, water, geo heat exchange, primitive grid load timing, and so forth.

Is he claiming that going forward in this same mode in the same proportions, with no progress, cannot support both growth and climate cure?

This is a tautological statement, and as such says nothing useful about the real world.  It is true by the defiinition of the terms used.

By  shifting the current techology mix over the next 20 years to renewables and conservation, growth in quality of life and GHG reduction can occur.  that is even without breakthroughs in renewable and conservation energy technology.  Which undoubtedly will continue.

Overcomplication of these issues is a big problem.   Economists tend to obscure the way forward with a lot of theory laden terminology.  It's contagious.

So we end up with diversion into areas no one can really fathom.  We can pretend we understand how markets work and how to design perfect ways to make them solve these problems.  But if anyone of us really understood how markets and the economy works we would be richer and more powerful than the oracle of omaha himself.  

We aren't.  And I bet the man himself, the most successful investor in human history, would not claim to understand how markets work.

So quit acting like big shots and embrace simple solutions.  And try to avoid getting tangled up by silly sylogisms like the one that started this thread.  They don't address reality.

These people, on the other hand, seem to be addressing the reality of the serious crisis we are in.  Check out the list of their projects.

http://www.nativeenergy.com/pages/our_projects/14.php  

Simple solutions, wind, solar, farm biogas.  On a small scale yes.  So increase the scale, put it on a smart grid.  That's simple.

Don't get lost in important sounding nonsense.  that no one really understands, especially the economists themselves.


http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

And if I rant a bit, it's only because we have fought so many regulations and habits of mind getting those projects installed, in spite of their compelling economics and environmental benefit.  Many of those projects actually required us to change a law in order to get them installed, or to spend time and $ convincing regulators that cheap, non-utility power was in the public interest.  

It is important, but it's not nonsense or a silly syllogism - it's 3 decades of experience that has convinced us pretty well that anyone who claims that our only way forward is to develop new technology doesn't understand what the critical path looks like.

Further developing technology that is not new is the way forward.  And of course breakthroughs will help.  But wind, solar, biogas, solid oxide fuel cell/turbine power plants, plugin hybrid technology, geo heat exchange, is all ready right now.

Is it better to spend money on wind, solar, and biogas, than cogeneration applied to an existing fossil power plant?  I think it is.

Unfortunately incremental improvements in efficiency of old sources tends to justify the status quo.  And the present grid technology.  Smart grids with real renewable sources are needed and quick.

I think you ought to temper your approach with some more radical projects.  Even with the limited market share you address, that could be a great example.

Stonyfield has a great opportunity, working with farmers to integrate power and profit sources to make organic dairying profitable with ag and energy policy combined.  Now where is a utility to work on the smart grid part of the solution?

Excel is working on it in Colorado.  Maybe coordination with a local utility is something that you could do?  Your company is coming at it more from the corporate side, they will listen to you before they listen to NativeEnergy or organic farmers.

It is still pretty goofy to argue about stuff no one really has a handle on, like economics, when real world, simple solutions, like direct subsidy diversion can have all the effects you're looking for with complex cap and trade schemes.  Without the danger of enabling yet another hedge fund bubble in other areas, like electric power costs.

We went through that with enron didn't we?  Was nothing learned there?  Or in the mortgage crisis, or the new corn/ethanol farm land bubble just inflating?

What scares me about your company is the promise to investors of better returns, sounds too much like hedge fund come ons.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Our government has never been put to a test like this. We are presently subsidizing coal, oil, and biofuels, all topped off with regulations that thwart energy efficiency. Let's not even mention the war or the economy.

Pangolin,

It is healthy to have some reality rubbed in our faces once in a while. We should keep trying anyway because you never know for sure. Predicting the future often changes it.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

Two responses:

1. Traditional cogen is almost always a new source, because large central plants are too big and too remote to economically recover their heat.

2. We like traditional cogen because it gets more useful energy out of a finite fuel source.  This is a good idea no matter what your fuel source (be in coal, biomass or wind).  But we like waste energy recovery even more, like the deal we just signed to make 40 MW literally out of thin air, capturing waste heat from the exhaust of a silicon furnace to make electricity.  That has an impact that is identical to 40 MW worth of solar (0 marginal fuel combustion, 40 MW of marginal power generation), but it way more economic.  It's what a rational market ought to deploy first.  (Worth noting that the biggest growth market for the silicon industry is photovoltaics, so this project also has the side benefit of lowering the cost of one of the inputs to solar panels.)

Quite the opposite, actually.  The status quo rewards a commercial model that builds inefficient, central plants.  Increasing efficiency of power gen is, at core, incompatible with the status quo, and fixing this barrier is the single most important thing we can do to quickly and meaningfully lower GHG emissions.  They also don't require the grid, since they serve behind the fence loads.  (One of the problems with much of the CW about distributed generation is that it presumes that good, distributed generation is small.  Not true.  Good, distributed generation is local.  40 MW of waste heat recovery connected to a 120 MW industrial load, providing internal consumption delivers the same environmental, economic and societal benefits (and subverts the current grid model) in the same way as 20,000 2 kW residential solar panels.)

> Maybe coordination with a local utility is something that you could do?

The local utility is generally hostile to these ideas, because they make their money in the current status quo.  (This is not precisely true for municipal and cooperative utilities, but those are small potatoes, comparatively - about 75% of our nation's power comes from investor owned utilities who lose money everytime we do a project, and have no way to fix that short of a change in the regulation which they are loth to request.)  My proof of this is the scars on my back...

> What scares me about your company is the promise to investors of better returns

Huh?  Since when is it bad to make money doing something good?  Should Stonyfield farm lose money on their yogurt?  Trust me - if I can't deliver better returns, I will personally lose a lot of money, and I haven't told investors anything that I don't personally believe.  (And for what it's worth, hedge fund managers have lost more money from the subprime meltdown than you and I will ever have.  Yes, they lost other people money as well, but they were pretty well exposed to their risks.)  But if you're arguing that the only true environmentalist is the ascetic with no car, no fuel and no money to send their kids to college, then we have a pretty fundamental disagreement.  My personal belief is that the scale of the challenge we face is far too big for one, two or even a thousand people to solve based on their individual actions.  We need to leverage our efforts, get lots of people involved and rowing in the same direction.  And I know of no better way to leverage activities than to prove you can make money by lowering GHG emissions.  Bring on the competition - we need them.  But they're not going to follow us in any meaningful desgree if all we have to offer is inner peace.

Quite the opposite, actually.  The status quo rewards a commercial model that builds inefficient, central plants.  Increasing efficiency of power gen is, at core, incompatible with the status quo, and fixing this barrier is the single most important thing we can do to quickly and meaningfully lower GHG emissions.

How true! But how do we change it? Do we have the social and political power to take on the utilities and the fossil fuel lobbyists? And what do we change to?

Why not work with the 25% of local utilities that are not investor-owned and open to carbon reduction (like our own Seattle City Light which is now carbon neutral)? Why not work to encourage a movement towards local publicly owned utilities that have other priorities than just making money?

Incidentally, Sean's quote reminds me of the analysis of Dr. Hermann Ott. Here he sketches out a future possible scenario that he calls "structurally conservative" and leads to climate chaos:

Both governments and companies flinch at the dimension of the structural changes needed... The technical structures that are the basis of dominance by large energy companies are also maintained in this scenario. In most European countries these are for instance represented by the old and centralised electricity grids, not suitable for the challenges posed by the feed-in of diverse and decentralised renewable energy sources

We're going to bail like hell even though it looks useless. There's really nothing else to do and it might just bjy the whole ship a crucial few minutes while some other guys rig powerd pumps or a rescue vessel has a chance to pull alongside.

Just because you're sinking with no help in sight is no excuse to stop bailing.

Put the Carbon Back

1. Privately, both regulators and utility executives will concede that our present model incentivizes them to do the wrong thing.

2. Publicly, neither trusts the other.  Utility execs have learned that if they tell a regulator that they have identified ways to save $100 million in operating costs, they will suddenly find themselves having to put those into a $100 million rate reduction.  With no upside, they quickly learn not to look for cost-reductions (which, in the utility world, equals fuel reduction).  Meanwhile, utility regulators are understaffed, underpaid and frequently work under state statutes that give them very narrow time windows within which they must respond to utility rate requests.  They - quite reasonably - tend to assume that they're getting gamed every time they turn around by utilities in this model, and end up writing rules of the "give 'em an inch, and they'll take a yard" variety.  

Edison plans a massive installation of photovoltaic cells on rooftops, and FPL Energy proposes a 250-megawatt plant.
By Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 27, 2008
Solar energy is getting a big boost in Southern California with the unveiling of two projects that will be capable of generating a total of 500 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve more than 300,000 homes.

1. Big, central, expensive power fits very well into the utility model.  (This is why wind has been such a fast growing renewable.  It's remote, needs transmission, needs someone to dispatch and is green.)  This isn't to dismiss those projects, but merely top point out that the tension within the utility paradigm is not between dirty and clean power per se, but between expensive, remote power and cheap, local power.  The central solar power plant you link to would seem to fit this same model, and so there is no utility chasm to cross.

2. Smaller solar has, to date, largely gotten a free pass from utilities, for a couple reasons, neither of which are particularly good.  One, it's too small for them to care.  Two, it's great PR.  Putting 1000 1 kW solar panels on rooftops throughout a utility territory costs a utility as much in kWh sales as a single 200 kW industrial cogen facility (assuming 20% solar load factor).  And this is a tiny cogen facility.  But 1000 rooftops is sexy and visible - this has allowed utilities to "greenwash" themselves by embracing solar as a technology without actually giving up any significant revenue.  This has created a real problem within the green community, as it creates a schism and an awful lot of friendly fire.  I personally fought a rate case against NSTAR several years ago, in which NSTAR wanted to charge customers who installed on-site power for the revenue NSTAR would lose once the on-site power was installed.  (Cute, huh?)  Remarkably, the good guys lost that case and NSTAR got their rate - but a part of the way they did it was by exempting solar from the structure, which allowed them to sell it as a "green rate", with the endorsement of the green community - or at least a fraction thereof.  This is pretty typical, unfortunately - and while I don't know if it factored into the projects you cite, I'd be surprised if it didn't play a role.