This guest post from eOz derived from a response to something that I wrote commenting about how the fires in Colorado and heat records falling across the country seemed to have people thinking climate change. eOz’s thoughts merits a posting of its own.
I also work with a variety of clients, many of whom buy into the corporate-sponsored push-back against global climate change out of fear of economic boondoggles, as they see carbon taxes and other measures. But the tide of opinion coming in and going out has left a kernal of doubt in their minds. If we can localize the effects, like the [speaker] noting to his mom that a phenomenon in her back yard is tied to the concept, we are moving with the tide as it comes back in in a way the monied interests cannot deflect. [Read more →]
Have humanity driven the climate system beyond the tipping point beyond which preventing catastrophic climate chaos is no longer a viable option?
Have emergent catastrophic climate chaos, as evidenced in US wildfires and high temperature records falling like bowling pins, created a tipping point in American public opinion that might enable a movement toward actual government action toward change?
Consider those in reading this guest post from JamesS.
Gladwell defines a tipping point as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”[1] The book seeks to explain and describe the “mysterious” sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.”[2]
Many Americans had previously seen climate change as a “nebulous concept” removed from them in time and geography, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationchief Jane Lubchenco.“Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events,” Lubchenco told a university forum in the Australian capital of Canberra.
Englander tried to structure his presentation as “non-partisan”, stating that his book aimed to reach people who might be ‘turned off’ by Gore (my term/summary of comments).
Englander stated that there ways that the film Inconvenient Truth creating paths that could (or did) mislead people (even as he emphasized that, in looking at the body of his work and speaking, the Vice President seeks to remain fidel to honest discussion of the science). Englander spoke specifically about how the rising sea level charts around Manhattan and Florida were such a case.
Because the structure of the film suggested that Gore was stating this (9 meter sea level rise) would occur this century (even though, as Englander stated, this is not what the film / the Vice-President said); and
Sea level rise is a global, inexorable thing driven by global warming that has some tremendous differentiation when examined locally.
Re Manhattan & Miami, Englander discussed:
Manhattan is built on impermeable, granite-type rock and has essentially zero subsidence. And, Englander asserted, it would be possible to build a sea wall to protect Manhattan infrastructure from sea level rise for 50+ years.
Miami is built on porous (limestone) and has subsidence. Thus, (a) it is not just sea level rise and (b) a sea wall couldn’t protect infrastructure as the water would rise up behind the wall due to the porous stone.
This led Englander to draw in ACCO Executive Director Daniel Kreeger. Kreeger had spent the previous week in Florida at the first Sea Level Rise Summit and he opened the ACCO conference speaking about that meeting. Englander, however, did not ask Kreeger to speak about the Summit but to relate a Kreeger-family story related to the conference’s subject matter.
Kreeger’s story (paraphrased):
In Fall 2010, I was home in Miami and there was several inches of sitting water in my parent’s neighborhood on Miami Beach.
I said “Wow, you must have gotten a ton of rain this week.”
My mother responded, “Nope, just full moon and high tide.”
My parents bought that house in 1972, so I was born and raised there. I don’t remember that happening when I was a kid other than tropical storms and hurricanes. So, I asked: “Mom, was there flooding in the neighborhood when I was a kid from high tide?”
She responded “not that I remember.”
I then asked her if she understood why it was happening … in response to which she shook her head. So I said, “that’s climate change and sea level rise. That’s what your son does for a living.”
Here I am the head of a climate-change non-profit and my own mother wasn’t connecting the dots. Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about an unintelligent or unaccomplished woman. My mother is a retired judge and is currently one of the State department’s delegates on international treaty talks involving abducted children.
Global Warming … Peak Oil … Financial meltdown … these all threaten our future prospects, our ability to see a positive future reality for ourselves and descendents.
George Herbert Walker Bush lies at the core of a driving motivation in my life.
President Bush was facing a reelection battle against Bill Clinton, and so advisers persuaded him to attend the world environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, possibly the most optiistic moment in recent history. Before he went, however, he told a press conference that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.” If that’s true, if we can’t imagine living any differently, then all else is mere commentary.
One thing that unites the progressive blogosphere is the drive to imagine a different life, a different world, a better one, a better path forward … and we all, in our own ways, fight to achieve those visions.
Twenty years ago, the first President Bush stated that “the American Way of Life is not up for negotiation”, showing an inability to imagine catastrophe from non-negotiation and an inability to see something better. Without imagination to see a better future and the power to achieve it, we will not progress out of catastrophe to prosperous sustainability.
As seen starting at 30 seconds into the video below, Shell’s replica oil drilling rig had a spectacular ‘blow out’ that they couldn’t get under control until it had already caused serious damage.
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Unlike an alcohol drenching of a blouse, an oil rig blowout in the Arctic Ocean (think of the benign circumstances of this happening amid a winter storm of 20+ degrees below zero, winds at 40+ miles per hour, and ice floes crashing into the rig) won’t be solved by a simple trip to the dry cleaners.
Historians have a joke about American history. Anything that has already happened is history, anything more than 15 minutes old is ancient history. In this context, with consideration of Shell’s (and too many others’) fossil-foolish plans to drill in the Arctic, how do we classify the now over two year-old Deepwater Horizon events: pre-history?
June 1st, 2012 · Comments Off on Taking time for a survey …
There are so many studies out there, so many surveys … most of the time, I don’t take them but here is one that is worth the time. Researchers at the University of Western Australia want people who visit sites like this to take a quick survey (about 10 min.). The survey focuses on interconnections between science knowledge and policy beliefs … anything more will, perhaps, give away too much. This anonymous survey will support academic research likely to make it into the peer-reviewed literature. Enjoy.
Comments Off on Taking time for a survey …Tags:research · science
June 1st, 2012 · Comments Off on Master Meters: Who pays? And, why pay?
Guest Blogger J. Siegel has been doing a series of pieces on this blog (list below … latest here) on her work within her own master-metered condominium and, beyond that, on working to develop a community of master-metered communities to share lessons and seek leverage for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs to help them foster a cleaner energy future for themselves and their neighbors.
Two of the greatest conundrums, when it comes to Energy Smart practices, are
Who pays?
Why pay?
Why it comes to mastered-metered communities, every single person (owner, tenant, or otherwise) pays for the energy use in a communal process where everyone pays the same (whether by unit, by square foot, or otherwise) and has this ‘payment’ buried from visibility (whether by inclusion within the rent or within a monthly condo fee). Thus, “who pays” is clear (“everyone”) even as it often isn’t clear to specific tenant owners or renters that they pay or how. Actually, J Siegel has a story of an economist friend who, when challenged to be more energy efficient in his condo, responded: “why, I don’t pay for energy. That then turns us to the other question …
We then turn to a ‘why pay’ conundrum.
Let’s say you live in a 200 unit building, why should an individual owner spend more on energy efficiency lighting, dishwashers, showers, windows, toilets, or otherwise. After all, even if the ‘real’ payback were measured in weeks, sharing that investment with 200 friends and neighbors transfers the payback into hundreds (or thousands) of weeks. And, well, who spends a $ as an investment to get back $0.001 per year? Thus, there is a serious inherent obstacle to energy efficient behaviors and investments by individuals located within mastered meter communities (whether residential, commercial, or industrial). If you’re not “paying”, directly, the bill, and sharing, equally, in any savings, the rational economic person asks ‘why do this’? This drives something: mastered metered communities (like the vast majority of multi-unit buildings that are 20+ years old) and businesses (like the large number of office buildings that don’t have meters for every tenant) have a serious incentive to invest significantly in energy efficiency. Sadly, too many of them do not know how seriously fast they could achieve savings and that those savings could add up quickly. Investing in 1000 CFLs, for example, to simply give out to residents could save a typical condo association $10,00o+ per year. Hmmm … how many condo owners think that they have $10,000 to throw away … year after year after year.
In the larger societal sense, as to ‘who pays’, there is that basic little question of ‘who pays’ for those pesky little externalities like poisoned water, increased cancer rates, destroyed eco-systems, and that oh-by-the-way little problem of Global Warming. Just the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) easily mounts, with a decent calculation, nearly to $100 per ton (or roughly 5 cents for every kilowatt hour produced by coal) without considering the mercury poisoning, coal ash pond pollution, etc … However, while a very real cost on society, how does an individual (or individual condo building or business) calculate benefits to themselves from their efforts to reduce carbon pollution? Goodwill only goes so far.
And, energy efficiency and renewable energy investments don’t ‘only’ reduce pollution, they provide other very real and tangible benefits on a larger scale. Investing in energy efficiency, on a large scale, is far cheaper than building new capacity. Renewable Energy systems protect against fuel price fluctuations and also offer the chance to foster distributed energy systems that, combined with energy efficiency, would offer greater resiliency in the face of natural or man-made disruption to the electricity grid.
When we think about ‘why pay’, when a government has a program to foster energy efficiency, it can easily be seen and portrayed as some sort of ‘unwarranted subsidy’ open for political attack by those intent on remaining within a stove-piped vision of the world. Why should, for example, a homeowner who is doing their own energy-efficiency investments (because of the payback via reduced bills) suffer with the government helping a condo association do the same thing? This, however, is an extremely stove-piped perspective which loses sight of a simple fact: we all (oops, except for those intent on earning as much as possible through selling as much energy as possible) gain through an ever more energy efficient and cleaner energy economy.
We need to think return on investment rather than cost. The benefits, for those not living in these communities, from fostering Energy Smart practices and capital investments in master-metered communities far outweigh the required investments that the larger society will have to make. Fostering energy efficiency is simply one of the best investments that we can make.
In 2008, Governor Martin O’Malley signed the EmPower Maryland Act in 2008. The EmPower Maryland program partners Maryland’s Public Service Commission (PSC) and utility companies in an effort to lower utility usage. The target is a 15% reduction, from a 2007 baseline, by 2014. EmPower Maryland’s goal is to reduce per capital energy consumption and per capita peak demand by 2014, based on 2007 baseline data. Strategies include commercial and residential energy saving programs that include grants, loans and rebates for retrofits, code compliance, efficient appliances, renewable energy projects and other energy saving activities.
Where do I come in? Leveraging these programs to improve energy efficiency and improve energy understanding in my high-rise multi-metered community in North Bethesda, Maryland. And, leveraging these substantive achievements to assist other multi-metered communities achieve similar benefits.
May 22nd, 2012 · Comments Off on On refusing to be rounded out of existence
This guest post comes from James Wells who eloquently and passionately is outlining the detrimental implications of short-term thinking embrace of coal exports.
The phrase, arriving in the middle of a deeply technical presentation, stood out for everything it said in just one sentence.
“They’re just going to be rounded out of existence, because they are a small percent of the population.”
Dr. Frank James was providing information about adverse health effects from big carbon operations, in this case a coal export terminal in Alaska, and was answering a question about impacts on native American populations near such a terminal. The problem is that the native Americans are relatively small in number in the area of the terminal, so their specific health issues might not be considered to be “significant” in the eyes of regulators or policymakers. This is a huge issue in the eyes of Dr. James.
So wait!
Did I understand that correctly?!?!?!?
Beyond Human Scale
Yes, that’s right. When considering a proposed mega carbon project such as any of the six coal export schemes targeting the northwest, a concern will only be evaluated if it is “significant” in the eyes of the agency, measured in terms like a large number of people severely affected.Have we, as people, shrank so much? Or have the mega-projects just grown so grotesquely large that human-scale concerns no longer show up on the scales of the deciders?
The ever-growing scale of big carbon projects has been presented as the new normal. A necessity. Just business as usual. Who could be against “continuing” to meet the energy needs of the world?
Except it’s not “continuing”. The inherent desperation of the wave of huge new carbon projects is captured in the aptly titled “The Race for What’s Left” by Michael Klare (new in Spring 2012). Let’s be completely clear – the game has changed. Big carbon exploitation is going to the ends of the Earth to squeeze and scrape energy and other resources out of the ground, at ever-increasing cost. That’s cost as measured in many different ways.
April 27th, 2012 · Comments Off on Did ACEEE diss the power of feedback?
Understanding how feedback impacts people and institutions (whether in sports, school, militaryoperations, or …) in learning and change (hopefully, improvement) is a complex and fascinatingworld. Data collection and feedback systems, as a tool for providing building/system operators the ability to make more informed decisions about energy use, are a critical pathway toward more effective (generally, more efficient) energy use. There is a reason that the U.S. Navy invested significant portions of its energy-related stimulus funding in smart meters and that the Department of Defense’s Operational Energy program has put data collection as a critical front-piece of activities: if you don’t know where you are, how can you make intelligent decisions about how to getto where you want to go?
Okay, a savings is there — across “large-scale studies” but it doesn’t seem to be all that much. In2010, the average U.S. household used just short of 11.5 megawatt hours / year (11,496kWh/year). Projecting such a 3.8% savings would result in 437 kilowatt hours of reducedelectricity demand or about $45/year at average electricity costs. Something but, well, short of $4 /month for the average household isn’t an indication of major impact.
The report concluded that “the cost of providing real-time feedback remains high”. Looking at the table as to the most common cost, per household, to the utility of being around $500, the “moderate savings” started to seem even worse: a 10 year payback for utility costs wouldmean a 10+ year payback of costs, on a straight line basis, without even discussing utility profits nor savings to the household.
As a real ‘feedback enthusiast,’ my first glance at this report created a rather dismal mood.
A second look, however, suggests that perhaps the ‘dismal’ thoughts are misplaced. The devil, ofcourse, is typically found in the detail:
The 3.8% savings figure excludes an outlier study which showed nearly 20 percent savings. That “large-scale study”, in fact, is an examination of a 20+ year experience in Northern Ireland which not only has more than five times the longevity of the second-longest study in the report but also had about five times as many people as all the rest of the studies combined. In a simplistic, but illuminating way to consider the situation, the ACEEE meta-study excluded from its conclusion a study with more than 25 times the people months of experience of all the other studies combined. If a more accurate reflection of end results, this would suggest annuals savings more in the $200+/year or about $18/month range, which is far more interesting to most households than $40/year.
The $500 figure actually misrepresents actual program costs. With the exception of the Northern Ireland experience, all of these were experimental programs. The “costs” are simply dividing the total program costs (equipment, labor, administration, analysis, …) by the number of involved people. Clearly, ‘experiments’ almost always cost more per involved person than real-world business activities. The Northern Ireland program, which involved over 45,000 people (the second largest involved 5,550), had average costs of $99-$113 rather than $500 because it was an actual deployment of technologies and business processes rather than a research experiment.
Okay, if we take these figures: perhaps $400/year in savings and $100 for program costs, the payback is measured in a few months rather than ten years (and that, of course, isn’t counting the value of reduced peak demand). This gives plenty of space for sharing electricity savings value streams between the provider and consumer in a win-win space which also provides for a more efficient and less polluting household energy use.
To be clear, I have a lot of respect for the ACEEE and their research teams. The report, Results from Recent Real-Time Feedback Studies, has a lot of interesting and valuable material within it. The issues raised above about potential savings and costs to achieve those savings are illuminated simply by reading through the report. However, it is too easy for someone to walk away from the report thinking that feedback systems have very marginal impact at a high cost due to the exclusion of the Northern Ireland experience from ‘average savings’ and the use of test program costs as a surrogate for actual program costs. Thus, the title of this post: it does seem odd that the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy would skew report results to understate the impacts of technology to foster energy-efficient behavior.
I have to say that I strongly agree with a key ACEEE report conclusion:
More and different kinds of research are required to better understand the actions and investments that households may be making in response to real-time feedback.
More knowledge and information about energy use are not enough to solve our energy challenges but they are key to fostering an Energy Smart society.
NOTE: I will be returning to do more analysis of this and other studies re feedback devices (such as this, this, or this). As an example of another study, this 2011 RAND report (pdf) comments that
studies have shown that providing different types of electricity usage feedback can reduce usage by around 20 percent and can help shift up to 40 percent of peak demand to off-peak hours.
That is quite a different conclusion than what is seen in the ACEEE study (which doesn’t include the RAND work in its bibliography). E.g., I am intrigued by the differences between the studies and plan to learn more — and share that learning here.
Leveraging these programs to improve energy efficiency and improve energy understanding in 