I read an article recently that got me thinking about how society tends to deal with “controversial” scientific theories like climate change, evolution, or the idea that cigarettes are dangerous.

The article talked about how a school board in Federal Way, Washington (outside of Seattle) imposed a moritorium on showings of An Inconvenient Truth in school unless teachers ensure that a “credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented.”

My guess is that the Federal Way school board isn’t a partisan organization trying to push an anti-climate change agenda. Instead, my guess is that the Federal Way school board just wants this issue to go away. The school showed a movie. A parent complained. The school board really doesn’t want to get involved in any complex decisions so they come up with a compromise. Problem solved. Right?

But what exactly is the meaning of a “credible, legitimate opposing view” to an issue that has broad acceptance in the scientific community?

Here are just a few examples showing the state of the scientific community.

• The National Academy of Scientist’s report starts off with the sentence, “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.” This is basically the definition of “global warming”.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a their Climate Change 2001 report stating that “Human activities have increased the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols since the pre-industrial era” and “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”
• An analysis in Science magazine stated that “all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members’ expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements” to the IPCC.
• The same article in Science magazine was the basis for the following statement in An Inconvenient Truth: “There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer reviewed article written on global warming in the last ten years. They took a big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we’re causing global warming and that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero.”

With this sort of support, what is a “credible” and “legitimate” opposing view?

Is a single article written by a lobbyist for the energy industry and not subjected to any form of scientific peer review “credible” or “legitimate”?

Which aspect of the school board’s requirement is more important? The “credible” and “legitimate” part? Or the “opposing view” part?

Unfortunately, I think that the school board wanted to wash their hands of this problem and the simplest way to do that was to create the appearance of a debate.

The root of the problem here is that people are constantly looking for “balanced” arguments even when balance isn’t necessarily appropriate. For every issue, we want their to be two equal sides. And we want to give each side the same amount of time to make their case; thus, creating the perception of a balanced debate.

This reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould appearing on TV to debunk “skeptics” making unsubstaniated claims about evolution.

You would have a news program that wanted to do a “tough analysis” on a controversial topic like evolution. On one side, you would have Steven Jay Gould representing the views of thousands of scientists, and decades of research. On the other side, you have someone with an opinion.

Then they would battle it out for a few minutes.

“Nuh uh.” “Uh huh.” “Nuh uh.” “Uh huh.”

Ta da, the news program has performed its civic duty of creating an informed populace.

Just like the school board, the TV program could contend that they did not take any overt position on this “controversial issue”; they presented “both sides” of the issue and left it up to you to decide.

I think the real problem in both of these cases is that is creates a false perception that there are two equal sides in the debate.

In fact, I think in both cases it is a public disservice to present the two sides as equal.

For example, if the school had decided to show Race to the Moon would the school board contend that someone would need to present the opposing view from the fine folks at Moonhoax.com?  Of course I am being absurd here, but isn’t that the point?  What is the difference between the two topics?
Is it really the job of a school to present both sides and let the students make a decision? We’re not talking about what people “feel” or how they react to a topic. We are talking about a matter of science.

I’m not trying to get all “science is truth” on you. But there is a scientific process for having debate, processing competing ideas, and coming to conclusions.

I’m completely willing to support truly “legitimate, credible opposing views”, but don’t let some schmuck who has an opinion enter the debate on the same level as researched, peer-reviewed scientific literature.

I think it would be a really interesting question to ask the Federal Way school board what they would consider to be a “credible, legitimate opposing view.” Just have them come up with one or two examples. Unfortunately, I bet they don’t really care what the answer is. Just go away and let them get back to their real work which doesn’t have to do with deciding what to teach students.

More Reading:

• Seattle Times Editorial on the Federal Way school board decision
• Seattle Times Guest Column from the vice president of the Federal Way School Board

Last year, I was talking to a friend of mine and he said that he and his wife were going to “wine country” for the weekend.

I said, “Oh, you are going to Napa?”.

He said, “No, we’re going to the vineyards near Santa Barbara.”

I know that Sideways was a popular movie, but, come on, everybody who lives in America knows that “wine country” means Napa Valley. (The French would probably disagree that Napa has sole claim to this title.)

Napa has practically become synonymous with wine in the way that Maine is associated with lobsters, Idaho with potatoes, Vermont with maple syrup, and Wisconsin with cheese.

So, try for a moment to imagine for a moment Napa without wine.

Crazy?

Not according to an article in last week’s Contra Costa Times.

The article suggests that the climate changes over the next 50 years could have a devastating impact on California wines:

A small bump up in the average growing season temperature, even just 1 degree, could push Napa into questionable territory for chardonnay.

Of course, this same small bump in temperature would nudge the valley closer to the ideal climate for zinfandel grapes. But a few more degrees could be a disaster for Napa. And some of the state’s warmer wine-growing regions, such as Santa Barbara and Paso Robles, might be lost altogether.

…

Most of the remaining top-quality acreage will shift northward to the Pacific Northwest. California will retain and possibly gain a little bit of territory along the coast, but the inland vineyards, including those in Napa Valley and Sonoma County, will be lost.

In fact, the article says that the possible damage wouldn’t be limited to just wine:

Many of the state’s signature crops — avocados, oranges, almonds — will face serious declines in yield by midcentury, according to computer models that project climate changes.

So, when you think about the long term impacts of climate change, you might think about the prospect of sipping a great Oregon wine.

An An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore talked about two canaries in the coal mine: the melting ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic. The changes happening in these two locations foreshadowed much deeper threats, he explained.

I’d like to suggest that we are seeing another canary in the coal mine, but of a very different sort. In fact, an encouraging sign of changes to come. (Can the “canary in the coal mine” analogy really be used for positive signs? The canary might not think so, but I am going to run with it.)

You see, earlier this week, Environmental Defense, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Resources Institute joined together to create the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP).

In of itself, this should come as no surprise. These are all like-minded organizations focused on environmental issues (”tree huggers” as my grandmother would say).

What may come as a surprise is that these organizations were joined by some of the largest energy and manufacturing companies in the country including: Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, DuPont, Florida Power & Light, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, Pacific Gas & Electric, and PNM Resources.

This isn’t a group of people that you’d generally call environmentally friendly.

What may come as an even greater surprise is to hear what this band of companies is saying.

The organization put out a report called A Call for Action in which they put forth a set of design principals and recommendations.

The report starts off with the following summary:

Each year we delay action to control emissions increases the risk of unavoidable consequences that could necessitate even steeper reductions in the future, at potentially greater economic cost and social disruption. Action sooner rather than later preserves valuable response options, narrows the uncertainties associated with changes to the climate, and should lower the costs of mitigation and adaptation.

The report then goes on to say:

For these reasons, we, the members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) have joined together to recommend the prompt enactment of national legislation in the United States to slow, stop and reverse the growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the shortest period of time reasonably achievable.

To be very clear here they want regulation. Specifically, they are asking congress to pass a nationwide cap and trade system for greenhouse gases (for more information on “cap and trade” systems see this previous article).

Let me just say that again. Several of the nation’s largest energy companies want Congress to pass regulation on greenhouse gases.

Further, they defend this saying:

“Action is not only justified, it’s critical — greenhouse-gas emissions are rising at an unprecedented rate,” said Peter Darbee, CEO of San Francisco-based PG&E, which provides energy to 5 percent of the U.S. market.

What could they possibly be thinking? Isn’t this exactly what they are supposed to oppose? Aren’t the big energy companies supposed to be the ones who are denying that climate change exists, that humans have any role in it, and that there is nothing we can do to stop it?

What the heck is going on to make these folks actually argue for regulation?

And here is that canary in the coal mine.

You see, these companies have realized that regulation is inevitable. And to these companies, the biggest fear is not regulation but, unpredictible, inconsistent, state-by-state regulation. You already have states like California setting targets for greenhouse gas emissions and groups of states trying to form broader solutions.

This can lead to a disasterous situation for energy companies who have to deal with different regulations in different states. More importantly, there is not predictability here — what is acceptable today might not be acceptable tommorow. This makes it terribly difficult to plan for the future.

PG & E’s CEO discussed this on on last night’s edition of All Things Considered, and said, “A number of businesses want to know what the rules will be.”

He went on to say, “If we are dragging our heels and opposing people who that are trying to deal with this issue, then they are not going to give us a seat at the table. But, if we are constructive and we help them, then we gain credibility and we have a way of developing the most practical and pragmatic solutions possible.”

There is no doubt that there will be disagreement about the rate and magnitude of the changes here, but I think it is a very good sign that some of these companies are realizing that change is inevitable and it is better for them to get ahead of the curve and participate in the change than to get run over by it.

Hopefully this is a leading indicator of where things are going in days and years to come.

I think the really critical question is which is going to happen faster — the melting of the ice caps or the melting of the resistance to change.

For months now, I have been trying to figure out what to make of the big push by American auto manufacturers toward “flex-fuel” vehicles that can run on normal gasoline or E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline.

The poster child of this push has been General Motors with its “Live Green, Go Yellow” campaign. GM has been plastering magazines with two page spreads touting how they have produced millions of “flex-fuel” vehicles that are ready for the wave of ethanol-based fuel.

While GM has been the leader here, Ford has been close behind.

My first reaction when I saw these campaigns was that this was a cute ploy to try to compete with the success of the Japanese hybrids.

I then decided to investigate a little further.

The next thing I found was that it costs a car company close to nothing to design their cars to accept E85 fuel. So, this wasn’t just a “cute” ploy, it was a cheap cute ploy.

You also have all sorts of good arguments about whether ethanol is even a viable solution to our problems.

Then of course, you have the elephant in the room that there are virtually no E85 fueling stations across the country. According to the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition’s website there is exactly one E85 fuel station within one hundred miles of where I live.

But despite of all of this, I still wanted to believe that there was some good here. I mean, at least they are trying to do something, right? It’s the thought that counts, right? While ethanol may not be the bees knees, it is better than burning gas, isn’t it?

Then today, I just stumbled on the dirty little secret that explains the American car manufacturer’s love affair with flex-fuel vehicles and I’ll give you a hint — it doesn’t have a bit to do with saving the planet.

In order to understand the secret, you first have to understand the Corporate Average Fuel Effeciency (CAFE) standards. I explained this in a previous post called “20 Years Later, It’s Time for a Change”, but as a summary, the CAFE standards force auto manufacturers to maintain a certain fuel efficiency across all of the cars they sell.

In theory, if you sell on Hummer, you need to sell several fuel efficient cars so the average across your fleet meets certain minimums. (Of course, even this example is flawed since Hummers don’t count toward CAFE standards.)

But, it turns out that the heart of GM’s love for flex-fuel vehicles is a nice little loophole in the CAFE standards.

You see, in 1988, Congress passed the Alternative Motor Fuels Act (AMFA) to promote the use of alternative fuels like methanol, ethanol, and natural gas.

In order to incent auto manufacturers to build cars capable of running on these alternative fuels, Congress inflated the fuel efficiency ratings of these cars by 6.6x.

So, an purely ethanol powered car that got 20 mpg in real life would count toward the CAFE standards as if it got 133 mpg.

For a flex-fuel cars, Congress allowed the auto manufaturers to assume that 50% of the time the car would be running on gasoline and 50% of the time it would be running on the alternative fuel.

This last sentence gave auto manufacturers every motivation they needed to love flex-fuel.

In order to understand this, let’s take a real world example.

Let’s start with a Chevy Tahoe. According to the US Department of Energy, the Tahoe gets a combined fuel average of 16 mpg using gasoline and 12 mpg using ethanol.

Through the magic of math, Chevy has gone from a 16 mpg car to a 26 mpg car according to the CAFE standards.

So, through the power of this loophole, Chevy can produce a gas guzzler, but get credit for a much more fuel efficient car without spending much additional money and, on top of it all, they get to claim that they are doing it all for the love of the planet.

And I believed that there were some good intentions here.  Shame on me.

Reference
The following sites had great information on this topic:

• http://www.hybridcars.com/ethanol/e85-vehicles.html
• http://www.nhtsa.gov/cars/rules/rulings/CAFE/alternativefuels/background.htm
• http://www.terrapass.com/terrablog/posts/000257.html

Its official.

The Academy just published the nominees for the 79th Annual Academy Awards and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature.

Now we just need to wait 33 days and see if it wins the big award.

There has been a lot of speculation recently that one of the major themes of tonight’s State of the Union address will be energy policy. It was only a year ago that President Bush used the State of the Union to declare that America is “addicted to oil.”

But, in the intervening 12-months, virtually no progress has been made at the national level on this issue.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, new is said tonight and if anything real comes out of it.
One topic that you can probably bet will come up tonight is Ethanol.

There has been a lot of conversation on the blog recently about the pro’s and con’s of Ethanol and its role as part of our future energy plan.

As Josh recently pointed out in one of his comments, Ethanol is an easy policital issue to be in support of since it brings lots of money to the heartland, even if it isn’t a wise solution.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that the ethanol industry is getting more attention than ever.

It will be interesting to see how much air time energy policy gets tonight.

In a quick post last week I announced that Deval Patrick had officially agreed to have Massachussetts to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

As you know from my previous post, Who is Reggie and Why is he so Important, this news shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Patrick had endorsed RGGI during his candidacy and has been a constant advocate of joining RGGI.

So, if the act of joining isn’t news, is there anything newsworth here?

In fact, there is.

One of the key components of RGGI is that each state gets to determine, on its own, how it wants to distribute a portion of the the emissions permits (the index cards from my other article) to the power plants. RGGI states that at least 25% of the permits would be “sold” to the power plants. But, it is up to each state to figure out how to distribute the other 75% of the permits.

A simple solution would be to simply give the power plants the emissions credits based on their overall size. This would still have the intended long term effect of capping overall emissions.

However, Marc Breslow from the Massachussetts Climate Action Network (MCAN) has long been a proponent of a much more aggressive approach. In his paper Why Emissions Permits Under the Northeast’s Global Warming Plan Should Be Sold to Generators and Used to Benefit Consumers, Breslow argued that a larger percentage of the permits should be sold, rather than given, to the power plants.

Probably the one big question coming out of the gubernatorial election was where Patrick would come down on this issue.

So, the real news coming out last week was that Patrick agreed that 100% of the permits should be sold to the power plants via an auction.

What does this mean?

• This means that power plants will have to pay for every single pound of carbon dioxide emissions that they produce.
• As the caps kick in and supply and demand does its job, the costs for the permits are likely to increase meaning that it will be more and more costly for power plants to continue to emit at their current rates.
• All of this money will be available to the state for clean-energy related purposes (e.g., promoting energy efficiency, funding new clean energy, etc.)

More importantly, this also sets a pretty high bar for other states to follow. Patrick could have “taken the easy way out” and just gone with 25% and made it easy for other states to follow his lead. By sticking to the 100% threshold, it keeps the pressure on states like New York to set a similar threshold. (New York’s new governor Eliot Spitzer has been a proponent of selling 100% of the permits.)

So, with Patrick’s announcement, the table is now set, the pieces can go in motion, and we can watch to see how things play out.

Disclaimer: The Sudbury Earth Decade Committee is a chapter of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network (MCAN), of which Marc Breslow is the Director.

I know that this blog is focused on environmental issues, but I have decided to not write an entry today out of respect for James Alenson, a freshman at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School who was killed today.

The climate crisis will still be around tommorow and I’ll resume the normal entries then.

Until then, a virtual moment of silence.

In another interesting piece of news related to Massachusetts, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is reportedly looking to set up a new committee specifically focused on global warming and will ask Massachusetts representative Ed Markey to head the committee.

I’m sure there will be more news soon.

What an interesting day for Massachusetts and the environment.

In a previous post, I explained everything you never wanted to know about “Reggie” and said that you’d probably be hearing more about it soon.

Well, turns out soon is now.

Deval Patrick held a press conference today and announced that Massachusetts has joined RGGI.

There hasn’t been much detail on this yet, but presumably there will be articles showing up in the Boston Globe and other sources within the next 24-hours.

I’ll post more as I learn more.

Dell recently announced a program to help offset the emissions resulting from computer usage.

Under the program, consumers can contribute $2 for a new laptop they are buying or $6 for a new desktop they are buying. This money will be donated to the Conservation Foundation and CarbonFund.org who will plant trees.

This contribution is intended to offset the emissions created by approximately three years of using the computer.

This expands on Dell’s previous green commitments including free-recycling of Dell products, green design of product pacakaging, and a focus on energy efficient computers.

One of the themes there has been a lot of discussion about on this blog is how to encourage green behavior, what the role of the govenment is, and how green behavior can also mean smart business behavior.

I think Dell’s behavior here is a great example of all of the above.

Is Dell doing these things because they want to meet European regulations so they can sell into Europe?

Are they doing these things because IT buyers know that one of the biggest concerns with a data center is heat and that one of their biggest costs is air conditioning? So, energy efficient computers make happy IT buyers?

Are they doing these things because reduced packaging means reduced costs both of production and shipping? And reduced costs means they can compete better?

Are they doing these things because a little bit of green can get good publicity and consumers might vote with their dollars and reward companies that appear to be green?

Or are they doing these things out of a sense of civic responsibility and a concern for the planet?

Obviously, I don’t think there is any single answer here and the answer is likely yes to all of these things.

I think the most important thing is that one of the most successful companies in the U.S. has found a way to not only embrace green ideas but to use them as a competitive leverage.

You might even be able to argue that the civic-minded option is almost the least important.  If a company makes the determination that “being green is good for business”, does it really matter if they care about the core issue of the environment?
What would be great is to have other companies follow in their footsteps simply to get the same benefits that Dell gets from these actions. Then we all win.

Last week, I read an interesting article in Home Power Magazine called “Making PV Pay: It’s Just Good Business Sense.”

The article talked about the return on investment of installing a photovolatic solar system on your house.

It was all the standard stuff about the federal tax credits, local incentives, the money generated from the electricity, etc. All the normal stuff you’d expect to see.

The grand result of the analysis was that as an individual installing solar panels on their house, the predicted ROI was about 10 years with a 4% annual rate of return over that timeframe.

Given that we all have 20-30 year mortgages and the life of a solar panel is expected to be about 25 years, this is probably a fine investment to make — from year 10 on, you are purely making money from this investment. But it just isn’t exciting. Nothing to write home to mom about. (Hi Mom.)

But then the article took a twist. The article threw in the idea of a home-based business installing PV on the same house to provide energy and things took a big turn.

Because businesses get a tax write off for the depreciation of capital equipment, all of a sudden this went from a 10 year ROI to a 1 year ROI; within 1 year of installing the panels, the business was able to recoup all of its costs and start generating profits. Over the course of the same 10 year period, the business had a 23% internal rate of return.

Whoa! Now that’s something that is compelling. So compelling that I thought that maybe you could create a business model around this.

Let’s say that as a business you could basically “buy the rights” to installing solar on people’s houses. You install the solar panels, you get all of the tax breaks, you sell some portion of the energy back to the owner, and then, maybe at the end of the period you give the panels to the owner so they get the full benefits from that time forward.

Under this sort of model, would it be possible to build a profitable business while also driving widespread adoption of solar by basically taking all the risk and cost out of it for the home owner?

In particular, could you imagine a scenario where there was a business who made its profits by getting people to allow them to install solar panels on their roofs and basically becoming a distributed energy supplier?

Initially it seemed a bit crazy, but I wondered if there was something here.

Then, yesterday, a colleague sent me an article about a product called Citizenrē REnU.

Here’s a company that will install and maintain solar panels on your house at virtually no cost to you. They then sell the generated electricity from the panels back to you. From the consumer’s perspective, they are basically buying their energy from a new supplier that just happens to have their power plant located on their roof. The consumer isn’t bothered with the up front costs to install the panels nor the ongoing costs of maintenance, upgrades, etc.

The idea seemed so novel that I scoured through their site trying to figure out what they are really up to. Ultimately I found my way to their corporate website where they describe themselves as “a pure-play renewable energy provider. We are positioned to deliver renewable energy to the marketplace on a cost competitive basis.”

Put simply — they are an energy company. But they aren’t your normal energy company; they are an energy company who is looking to flip the current energy system upside down.

Normally, when you think of the electric system, you think of big power plants (coal fired plants, nuclear reactors, dams, etc.) that generate electricity. That electricity then gets mixed together and distributed out to all of the households.

But, that isn’t the only way the system can work. There is a concept called “net metering” which basically says that if you are connected to the electric grid and you are generating more electricity than you use, then your electric company has to buy that energy back from you at “retail rates” (e.g., the same rate you would have paid for that electricity).

This is normally used on a very small scale since very few solar installations power 100% of the electricity usage for a house. But there are peak times when the panels may generate more electricity than is being used right then, and this allows you to get value from this excess energy.

But just imagine what happens when you have thousands or tens of thousands of houses with solar panels, each trickling a little energy back into the grid — you really have started to turn the system upside down.

In some not too theoretical way, every one of these houses has become a little mini power plant as real and as connected to the grid as a coal fired plant or nuclear reactor.
I have no idea whether their specific business model is viable or whether this is the next Enron developing before our eyes, but I have to say I’m very intrigued.

I also have no idea whether this is a good idea for the consumer. The real key would be to understand the price they charge for the energy generated from the solar panels; in general solar panels aren’t yet to the point where they can generate electricity at a competitive rate to other sources. So, the “gotcha” here could be that the consumer winds up paying a lot more for their energy under this model.

It would be really interesting to look under the covers at their business model because it is quite possible that they are taking advantage of the same incentives described in the article mentioned above. If so, I wonder if they are using all of these tax incentives to bring down the costs of the solar energy and also make this profitable from day one.

At the same time, I think I’d be a very skeptical investor in the company since they would be at the mercy of the government to not change those incentives — a single change in those incentives could pull the carpet out from under them and destroy their entire business model.

At the end of the day, I think this is something very interesting to watch. If they have figured out a “magic potion” to bring solar power to the masses then and create a lot of money for themselves along the way, then I say bravo.

I’d love to find out more if anyone know more about them.

Not to be upstaged by the GM’s recent announcement of the Volt (see Is it a hybrid or an electric vehicle), Ford just announced its own “futuristic” energy-efficient car: the Airstream.

While it seems like this car is very “snazzy”, it also seems like it is much more of a concept car than the Volt for no other reason than it uses a hydrogen fuel cell.

I have yet to figure out whether hydrogen fuel cells really are the “way of the future” as some would have you believe or a distraction intended to divert our discussion away from practical, near-term solutions.

Either way, I think everyone will agree that fuel cell technology simply isn’t going to be viable anytime soon.

So, on that count alone, I think the Volt is a much more realistic short-term solution. GM already has experience producing a plug-in electric vehicle that can travel for approximately 50 miles on a charge, so the Volt isn’t relying on some “yet-to-be-invented” technology.

Now, it may very well be that the Volt is relying on some technology improvements in order to make the car cost effective or able to be mass produced, but that’s fundamentally different than relying on a technology that is wholly unproven (and a distribution system for hydrogen fuel that doesn’t exist!)

I feel like the auto industry often tries to distract us from the real issues at hand by diverting our attention with answers about things like hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol, E85, etc. I compare it to the technique you can use to distract children asking you tough questions:

• “Mommy, is Santa Claus real?”
• “Johnny, look at the new race car that Bobby just got!”
• “Ohhhhh… Shiny.”
• Conversation over.

In our case, the conversation goes like this:

• “Mr. Auto Manufacturer, what are you doing to reduce the emissions from your cars?”
• “Look! Check out this car that has a blogging station in the passenger seat! It can run on hydrogen. You know what hydrogen is, right? Its in water. So, its kinda like saying that this car can run on water. Isn’t that neat? Did I mention that the car has mirrors on the outside?”
• “Ohhhhh… Shiny….”

I’m not saying that Ford shouldn’t have a vision that includes hydrogen fuel cell cars — it may very well be that this is the way of the future. Similarly I don’t think it is a bad idea that GM has focused so much of its attention on touting its flex fuel cars (cars that can run on both normal gasoline and E85 — fuel that is 85% ethanol).

But, at the same time, we need to recognize that these are only partial solutions or they are distracting us from the hard work needed to make these solutions real.

For example, both hydrogen fuel cells and E85 will require massive changes to our infrastructure for delivering fuel to have any hope of going mainstream.

How far is it from your house to the closest gas station? Probably a matter of minutes. How far is it from your house to the closest hydrogen fuel station? Probably hundreds or thousands of miles. (Those folks in California are closer than everyone else as I think there are some prototypes in California.)

Similarly, there are serious doubts about the practicality of both hydrogen fuel cells and ethanol.

Is it really energy efficient to create the hydrogen for fuel cells? How do we store hydrogen in a safe manner?

Can we grow enough corn to produce enough ethanol to solve our problem? Or is there simply not enough land on the planet to produce the corn that we’d need to provide enough energy?
Again, I don’t want to come across like a curmudgeon saying that hydrogen fuel cells and ethanol are bad ideas. Quite to the contrary, both have a lot of promise to them and, years from now, could be a very important part of our solution.

Ethanol also has a very important part to play in diversifying our risk. Getting a portion fo our fuel from domestically grown corn is a heck of a lot better than getting that same fuel from imported oil.

Just don’t let people convince you that the problem is solved just because Ford has put a drawing on the table showing a theoretical car that might be produced sometime in the future.

Even if it is shiny.

While the last post focused on the ability for government agencies to create innovation and jobs by promoting renewable energy, there is a second major benefit of these types of plan: energy independence and security.

In today’s tumultuous landscape, any country that relies heavily on imports of oil is putting itself at risk both politically and economically.

In Europe’s case, the report states that “EU’s energy import dependence will jump from 50% of total EU energy consumption today to 65% in 2030″. The report then goes on to quote the International Energy Agency saying, “the ability and willingness of major oil and gas producers to step up investment in order to meet rising global demand are particularly uncertain.”

This combination of increased reliance on external sources and decreased reliability in those sources has got to make any leader nervous about their long term stability.

What leader wants to have the fate of their country resting in the ability and willingness of other countries to provide one of the most fundamental ingredients for economic growth?

To understand the way that energy policy can cripple a country, just look at what is happening between the U.S. and Iran:

• The U.S. believes (rightly or wrongly) that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is a threat to the safety of the U.S.
• Iran has the world’s second largest reserves of conventional crude oil and 20% of the world’s oil supplies flow through Iran’s Straight of Hormuz
• Iran has threatened retaliation, possibly including cutting off its oil exports or shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, if the UN issues sanctions against it.
• Even though the U.S. does not import directly from Iran, there is no question that an Iranian oil shutdown would dramatically impact the global price of oil.

Ta da. You now have a fun situation where the UN member nations are having to weigh issues of national security against economic issues.

Barack Obama made this point very clearly in his speech entitled “Energy Security is National Security”.

I think he put it very clearly when he said, “Our enemies are fully aware that they can use oil as a weapon against America. And if we don’t take this threat as seriously as the bombs they build or the guns they buy, we will be fighting the War on Terror for a long long time.”

The best way out of this situation is to go after the root of the problem and make it a non-issue. The primary power that Iran has, in this case, is the world’s reliance on its product — oil. If countries can reduce their need for this import, all of a sudden it takes the power away from these other countries.

This is one of the reasons I believe that renewable energy will eventually stop being considered a liberal, left-wing, tree hugger issue and will have to be something that conservatives who focus on national security are worried about too. We simply can’t allow countries (especially potentially hostile and unpredictable ones) to have this sort of power over our decision making abilities.

In response to a recent post, one reader said:

“One idea that I like is using the government’s purchasing power. … all federal buildings must get 35% of their electricity from solar power by 2015, all buildings built after that, must get 85%. In 2020, the laws could be re-evaluated to take into consideration improvements in technology.

I don’t necessarily think that such regulations would save the government money — maybe even the opposite, since we all know the way contractors bilk governments. So what? The real point would be that to meet government demand, the car and building companies would have to increase dramatically their reliance on electric vehicles and solar power, respectively, and that would introduce economies of scale, which would help consumers.”

I doubt that the president of the European Union reads this blog, but interestingly, the European Commission just proposed an Energy Policy for Europe to continue their fight against climate change that relies heavily on this type of approach (Press Release).

One of the key elements of this proposal is setting a binding target that 20% of the European Union’s energy would come from renewable sources. (For reference, approximately 7% of the European Union’s current energy comes from renewable sources.)

As the reader suggested, the real benefits of this plan are not simply in the long term energy benefits, they are in many of the ancillary benefits that would come from such a program.

The plan specifically states that while this change will cost a lot of money, it will also “transform Europe into a highly energy efficient and low CO2 energy economy, catalysing a new industrial revolution” that will “create many jobs in Europe and develop new, technology driven European companies.”

I am sure there will be arguments about whether the EU is doing enough, but compared to the complete lack of action happening at the Federal level in the U.S., their actions are really a breath of fresh air (no pun intended).

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article called 20 Years Later, It’s Time for a Change where I talked about the possibility of raising the CAFE standards for cars.

In it, I quoted from an open article written by General Motor’s vice chairman Bob Lutz where he argued against increasing the fuel efficiency standards. One of the things that Mr. Lutz said (that I didn’t previously quote) was:

“There is no technological bag of tricks that enables much better fuel economy than we have today. … Despite what alarmists may think, we don’t have any magic 100-mpg carburetor that we’re holding back because we’re in bed with the oil companies.”

I’m not sure what to make of that quote given that GM announced a new car design called the Chevrolet Volt that could advance “green” car design in the same way that the Toyota Prius did.

In my mind, the revolution that could be created by the Volt is not really a technological revolution — it is more a revolution in terms of how people think about cars.

In order to understand the real power of the Volt, we need to first ask the question, “When does a hybrid become an electric vehicle?”.

As odd as it sounds, the answer to this question isn’t necessarily obvious.

What is a hybrid car?

When people talk about hybrid gas-electric cars, most people tend to think of the Toyota Prius; it has become the poster child for hybrid technology.

All hybrid vehicles, like the Prius, have two engines — a normal gas-powered combustion engine and a battery-powered electric engine.

As you are driving, the car is constantly flipping between these two engines deciding which engine is right for the current driving conditions.

Sometimes you are driving solely on the gas-powered engine.

Sometimes you are driving solely on the electric engine. (For example, when a Prius is going in reverse or a speeds less than 10 mph, it is exclusively using the electric engine.)

Sometimes you are using both the gas-powered engine and the electric engine to give some extra power. (In fact, if you look at how Honda markets the Honda Accord Hybrid, they tend to tout the added power that the electric engine provides over the gas mileage of the hybrid.)

The main point here is that, as their name implies, hybrids combine together both the benefits of a normal combustion engine and the benefits of an electric vehicle. And, the more the car can use can use the electric engine, the less you burn gas.

In fact, there are people who have made all sorts of modifications to their Priuses to increase the utilization of the electric engine. For example, Solatec LLC manufactures solar panels that can be mounted on a Prius to recharge the internal battery and increase the use of the electric engine. Other groups have replaced the batteries in the Prius with bigger batteries and added plug-in outlets for recharging to increase the power and range of the electric engine.

What is an electric vehicle?

Most people probably have seen or ridden in electric vehicles even if they don’t think they have.

For example, golf carts, bumper cars, ride on toy vehicles, and the Segway Personal Transports are all example of electric vehicles.

Of course, none of these are cars that you would use to drive around town, but the concept is the same. The key here is that electric vehicles run purely off electricity and do not have a gas-powered engine.

The most notable production electric car was the General Motors EV1 which was documented in the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?.
The fascinating thing about electric vehicles is that they have no oil, no gas, and as a result, no emissions.
In addition, while people may think that electric vehicles are not very powerful, the reality is that an electric engine can produce much more torque when stopped than a gas-powered engine — a fact that the folks at Tesla Motors are taking advantage of to create a high-powered electric sports car.

The primary downside of an electric vehicle is that it needs to be recharged somehow. For example, the EV1 allowed you to plug the car into a standard outlet to recharge the battery at night.

Electric vehicle folks will explain that the average person drives less than 50 miles / day and, thus, you could drive the car during the day and recharge it at night.

While this is generally true, most people tend to focus on the exception cases rather than the normal case — what if I am on a long road-trip and need to recharge?

Because of this, many people find electric vehicles impractical. Do I really need to have one car for my weekday commute and another car for my weekend road trips? It just seems impractical.

Enter the Volt

I think what is so revolutionary about the Volt is that they took the concept of a pure-electric vehicle, but then took away the biggest concerns for users.

Specifically, the Volt is an 100% electric vehicle until the batteries run out. Then, once the batteries run out, the gas engine kicks in.

Better yet, the Volt has a sizeable gas tank (12 gallons) meaning that once the battery runs out, you can drive for another 500+ miles.

What is brilliant about this model is that it really plays to the strengths of the electric vehicle while working around its weaknesses.

For people who really do drive less than 50 miles / day, they won’t use an ounce of gas. But, if they all of a sudden want to take a long weekend trip, they don’t have to worry recharging or anything like that. They use the same car and drive it just like before and it will do exactly what they want.
It is almost like having two cars in one — the eco-friendly electric vehicle for your regular travelling and a normal gas-powered car for long hauls.

I think it is a brilliant strategy and hopefully could push all of the car manufacturers to think this way.

For More Information

GM’s chairman Rick Wagner gave an interesting interview about the Volt on yesterday’s edition of All Things Considered.

As an interesting side-effect of the warmer temperatures we have been seeing in the past couple of years, the National Arbor Day Foundation has released a revised Hardiness Zone Map.

According to their website, “The Plant Hardiness Zones divide the United States and Canada into 11 areas based on a 10 degree Fahrenheit difference in the average annual minimum temperature.”

The National Arbor Day Foundation has then mapped various trees into these zones. When you are looking to buy a tree, you can look to find which zones the tree can live in to understand whether it is suited for your area.

Over the last 16 years, the climate has been changing enough that this map is changing.

For example, in 1990, the vast majority of Massachusetts was in Zone 5 — this means that the average minimum temperature is between -20 and -10 degrees Fahrenheit.

With the revised maps, nearly all of Massachusetts is now in Zone 6 where the average minimum temperature is between -10 and zero degrees Fahrenheit.

They have a really great animation online that shows the changes in the zones from 1990 to 2006.

Ultimately, this means that some set of plants that used to be able to grow here probably can’t anymore. For example, the American Mountainash is suggested for zones 2-5.

Where this gets really interesting is if you tie this in with the report from the Union of Concerned Scientists on climate change in New England.

According to that report, if we do not make significant changes in our emissions, by 2100 the climate of Massachusetts may come to approximate the weather in South Carolina today.

This would mean that Massachusetts would change from being in Zone 6 to being in Zone 8; in a period of about 100 years, Massachusetts could go from a Zone 5 climate to a Zone 8 climate.

As you can imagine, this could have an enormous impact on the plant life that can thrive here.