Top 10 TED Talks - 6 - Getting Real About Renewable Energy

Number 6 in my Top 10 Sustainability related TED Talks, we have a serious and sobering look at what it would actually mean to produce all of our energy from renewable sources by THeoretical Physicist and generally brilliant person David MacKay (asside from physics, he has a Ph.D in Computation and Neural Systems).

MacKay uses some very rough and simple calculations in this presentation to show that there are some very serious constraints to renewable energy technology available today, and even assuming that we can improve the technology significantly some of those constraints will never go away.  For example: potential energy per unit area is drastically lower for renewables than nuclear, or coal.



I enjoy MacKay's candid, hard nosed look at what the options really are, and the practical return to what is really important: understanding how we use energy and trying to use less.  Only then are renewable energy sources even viable as a replacement for fossil fuels.

Top 10 TED Talks 4 - The Dirtiest Oil in the World

Top 10 TED Talks Number 4 (again, in no particular order): Garth Lenz tells us about the dirtiest oil in the world - the Alberta Tar Sands. Lenz begins by extolling the beauty and value of the ecosystems that are being carelessly turned over to get at the oil rich sand fields underneath, to give context to what is happening.

The Tar Sands of Canada are a very difficult subject, because while they produce the dirtiest, highest carbon fuel in the world, they are also the economic salvation of the Alberta Province, and currently one of the primary economic engines of the Canadian economy as a whole.  Before these Tar Sands were being exploited, Canada was one of the most progressive countries in the nation when it came to environmental issues, today it is one of the least.



Lenz is passionate and articulate, and his story is both personal and global - a difficult balance that he handles deftly.  This video is also rather timely, as the issue of the Keystone pipeline is once again up for grabs in the next election.

Top 10 TED Talks - 3 - Learning the Limits

Limits are frequently the theme of Sustainability conversations, and my third Top 10 TED Talk is precisely about the limits of environmental stability.  Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, discusses his work identifying exactly what the environmental limits are, and where we are in relation to those limits.  Rockstrom lead a group of researches in developing 9 "planetary life support systems" that are being stressed by human activity, and the limits of how much we can stress them before they collapse.  The good news is, we've only crossed three of those limits!  I think you can infer the bad news.

Rockstrom is both informative and persuasive, and uses some theatrical tropes and props to help get his points across.  It is a very effective description of what exactly is meant by existing within the limits of a healthy planet.

To Dream of Less Energy - Quality of Life and Energy Consumption

Energy consumption makes all things possible.  It allows us to extend our lives into the nighttime hours, it allows us to keep our homes warm or cool, it allows us to freeze food for preservation, or get it piping hot it in about a minute.  Energy, in all its forms, is the foundation of our civilization.  If an era is defined by the predominant technology (the stone age, the bronze age, the information age), then we are living, and have been for about a century, in the age of fossil energy: coal for electricity, oil for transportation.  Information Technology itself would be impossible without abundant energy, and right now the only technology we have that can provide the amount of energy needed with the consistency required is mostly coal (there is a smattering of other: hydro-electric, nuclear, natural gas, but all of them together are less than a third of coal).

There are two primary problems with this system: resource and waste.  The inputs, the raw materials, the oil pumped form the ground and coal dug out of mountains, are limited.  They are finite resources that we will one day run out of.  You can argue about when, about how much time we have left to keep burning through those resources, but you cannot argue about the fact that one day the wells will all be dry, the last heap of dirt will be devoid of useful coal.

The second problem, waste, is manifold.  When these fuels are extracted, the process often involves polluting massive amounts of water and damaging land in a way that will not be repaired for generations.  When the fuels give up their energy in combustion, they release several compounds that are degrading to the environment.  CO2, Nitrogen- and Sulfur-Oxide compounds, and particulates take their toll on air quality, and various partially combusted hydro-carbons foul our streams and water-ways.

It is almost inconceivable that we could live up to our current standards without energy, and equally inconceivable, given current technology, that we could produce enough renewable energy to replace all of the fossil energy we use.  That is why I am dreaming of less.

Technology holds many answer to a future of less energy, but human behavior is equally, if not more important. I dream of a culture that values the energy it uses in an emotional way, not just in price per kWh; where daylighting and passive cooling are as valuable to a home buyer as granite counter tops once were.

I dream of a society in which people care where their power comes from, how it got to them, and what happens in between and afterward.  Where people see a light bulb burning and think, even just once in a while, about what it means that they can run their homes into the night, keep their produce cold 24-7, turn the thermostat up or down on a whim. Where people care not just about having energy, but the kind of energy they have.

A revolution in our energy production is still a long, long way off, but a cultural revolution, or at least a cultural shift in the way we perceive energy is already under foot.  What was once a vanguard is edging into the mainstream, and today more than ever people care about energy.  Not just that they have it, but where it comes from too.  We are still a long way from a culture where everyone cares about energy, and is concerned with reducing energy consumption, but a change in the culture that uses the energy can be much, much quicker than a change in the infrastructure that delivers it.

Electic Vehicles: the Pros and Cons and Pros and Cons...

Image via Wikipedia

Re-Posted From the iPinion Syndicate

It’s  complicated.  Cars are complicated.  First, we want to stop burning fossil fuels, and for most of us the gasoline going into our tank is the only fuel that we actually come into contact with directly.  You can look at a light bulb glowing and think abstractly about coal burning in a far off plant, but when you refuel your car you can smell it.  So most of us have a visceral feeling about how our cars use fossil fuels which is somewhat disproportional to the actual carbon emissions they generate.  Cars get vilified more than A/C units, even though cooling big office buildings generates much more pollution.  Not to downplay the carbon emissions from cars; transportation (as a whole) is still among the top 3 sources of green house gasses.  The result, however, is that we tend to feel worse about our cars than anything else.


Still, most of us can’t get around without a car.  In other words, we want to be better but we feel like we can’t.  Enter the electric vehicle; drive all you want and never deal with gasoline again.  The trouble is, you haven’t actually solved the problem.  Now your car is just one more light bulb; you plug it in and it juices itself up, but you are really just burning the fuel somewhere else.  All you have done is stopped smelling it.


So we’re back to feeling like there is nothing we can do, right?  Well... maybe.  There is one thing that electric cars can do which conventional cars cannot, and never will.  They can get their energy from anywhere.  Most places in the US coal is the only option for energy generation, so that point can seem moot, but it isn’t.  Where I live in the Pacific North West for example, a substantial percentage of the power comes from hydroelectric plants, so driving an electric car up here is really vastly more sustainable than an internal combustion vehicle.


In many states like California, the legislature has made a commitment (and appears to be keeping it against all odds) to steadily increase the percentage of energy production from renewable sources.  So if you buy an EV in CA, it will get greener every year.  That is a really big deal when you think about the fact that the sustainability movement is gaining steam.  If more states commit to green energy, then EVs are suddenly a really great alternative.


However, when you really think about it, why does transportation require any energy at all?  Sure, it is just about impossible to imagine getting across the country without burning fuel, but why is it that most of us can’t imagine getting to the grocery store and back without driving a car?  Or to work?  Or just out to a restaurant?  Have we forgotten how to walk?  Does anyone own a bike anymore and use it to get places, not just to exercise?  Have middle class white people forgotten how to ride buses?  It certainly seems so.

Image via Wikipedia

Of course this is not true.  Some of us still use the bus.  Some of us bike.  Some of us, even in LA, walk (I did when I lived there).  Some people do it just because it is convenient, or they even enjoy it.  Some people walk into town without even thinking about the fact that they are saving the planet, maybe without even believing in global warming.  The fact is, once you get out of your car, you realize that life is more fun when you’re not driving.  Every time you walk instead of driving, you are choosing not to burn that fuel at all, which is much better than burning it somewhere else.  In other words, the simplest solution is avoiding cars and the complications that they bring entirely.

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• Grid sets electric cars' green standard (sfgate.com)

Indoor Air Quality, Allergies and Air Purifiers

Although Los Angeles is not exactly known for its fantastic air quality (read: LA air sucks), the move to a colder climate and relocation to the Willamette Valley (which is known for it's many species of face itching sneeze making grasses) has somewhat inflamed the allergies of my wife and I.  That being said, we have been very active recently trying to minimize our exposure to allergens and keep our indoor air as clean as humanly possible.

Indoor Air Quality is a section of green building that is often overlooked by most people (though architects and building professionals are likely to spend a good deal of time thinking about it).  It is not as flashy an issue as global warming, habitat destruction, etc.  But it is very important to our health and well being, and our ability to be productive and happy.  As an allergy sufferer I can tell you, if you are not breathing properly when you sleep you feel like a zombie the following day, and all productivity and hope of happiness goes out the window.  All you can do is shuffle along and think about biting anyone who gets close to you.  In our research, we were somewhat surprised to discover that the air purifier we had been using was not actually doing anything useful.

HEPA filters are extremely efficient at arresting tiny particles in the air, measuring only micrometers in diameter.  It is illegal for filters to be advertised as HEPA if they are not capable of arresting those tiny particles.  However, for some unfathomable reason, cheaper filters which do not arrest any allergen particles at all can be called "HEPA Type," "99% HEPA," or "HEPA like."  The Hunter purifier which Courtney bought many years ago was just such a product.  So, we concluded that we needed a new one, with a "true HEPA" filter this time.  Although I generally advocate getting stuff used as often as possible, when it comes to an issue of personal health you get the best product available.

In researching air purifiers before making a purchase, we were shocked to discover that the Ionic Air Cleaner types were basically worse than useless for allergy sufferers.  They mask odors and make the air smell fresher by producing Ozone (O3).  Now, while Ozone is a great thing in the upper atmosphere, where it filters UV light from the sun, here in the atmosphere that we breath Ozone is a very, very bad thing.  It is toxic to pretty much all living things, including plants, animals and us.  And while a little Ozone won't kill you, it will irritate your lungs and sinuses, exacerbating any symptoms of respiratory tract infection or allergic reactions.  So in other words, they make your allergies and your indoor air quality worse.  As if that wasn't bad enough, Ozone in the troposphere (where we live) is a green house gas, and unlike CO2 and other green house gasses, it can react with other pollutants to generate more Ozone in a cyclical reaction.  In case you didn't get the message, do not purchase Ionic Air Purifiers or Air Cleaners, they are all but evil.

In summation: if you want an air purifier, get a true HEPA filter sized to the room that it will be in.  Courtney and I got a Honeywell 50250 Round Air Purifier for the living room, and a smaller, quieter Honeywell 17000 HEPA QuietCare Air Purifier for the bedroom.  Both came with permanent true HEPA filters.  We have been sleeping much easier since.  I really cannot overemphasize how awesome these things are.  Since we purchased ours, we can't smell the cats litter box except for two seconds right after an "event," we don't have to dust as often, and I wake up feeling like a real human being, even when I forget to take my Aller-tec.

Aside from the air purifiers, we have a Dyson Ball vacuum with a HEPA filter, several house plants that filter specific VOCs out of the air (see this website), and do everything we can to reduce the amount of dust and other allergens in our home.  It is a constant battle, but for now one we are winning quite decisively.  Unfortunately, running two fans 24-7 means more energy consumption, but since our local utility (SUB) generates 80% of its energy from hydro-electric, I don't feel quite so bad about it.

Editing this, I realize that there are a lot of ads in this post, but learning how to control my allergies was a struggle for me, and I think that promoting the products that I found most useful in controlling my symptoms is an important thing to do.  So I am unashamed about all the ads in this post, in other words.  And no, I don't work for Honeywell (though if they wanted to pay me for the plugs I wouldn't complain).

Urban Gardens and Homesteads: efficient, local healthy food

I saw this post on Treehugger about rooftop greenhouses on new affordable housing units, and I was a little surprised by some of the comments.  While I was not at all surprised by the conservative comment about tax dollars going to "people who are unable or unwilling to work" (right or wrong, a blog about sustainability is not the right forum),  the general doubts about the value and efficiency of these fairly simple fixtures was puzzling to me.

There should be no doubt about the value of producing food in the middle of the city, where most of the food has to be trucked in from very far away.  Intensive urban gardening improves air quality, reduces heat island effects, and provides fresh local produce to urban dwellers.  It is also easier to grow organic in a greenhouse, because the environment is more controlled and there is less need for herbicides and pesticides.

What is not quite as obvious, however, is that a green house attached to a residential space can be, if managed correctly, extremely energy efficient as well.  Greenhouses naturally absorb heat all day long from sunlight, and that heat is trapped in the air inside the greenhouse.  That is why a green house can grow plants through the cold seasons in most climates.  That heat can also be used, however, to augment the heating system in an attached residential space during the cold months (a process called isolated gain), and can be an important part of a general passive heating system.  In the summer, when there is waste heat in the residential spaces, they can be vented to the rooftop greenhouse for some passive cooling as a result of the passive-stack effect.  In short, rooftop greenhouses can have a huge positive impact on building efficiency.

While the gains in energy efficiency can be significant, the issue of food production in urban centers is just as important.  For as long as cities have existed we have had problems with getting enough food to city dwellers (think of the Roman Empire shipping in tons of grain from Egypt).  In the latter half of this century we thought we had solved those problems for good by cultivating produce that transports well and shipping food all over the world with cheap fuel.  Now that we know about global warming and pollution, we have realized that our solution to the problem of 'enough' has generated a number of new problems related to 'how.'  Urban homesteads help mitigate this issue, whether in a greenhouse, a backyard, or in planter boxes on a 20th story balcony.  If even a percentage of produce can be home grown instead of trucked in, the reduction in fuel consumption is directly related to the reduction in demand for transported goods.

Some would argue that home grown vegetables, especially heirloom varieties preserved by seed bankers (many seed bankers will give you a few seeds for the cost of postage, just to keep their favorite varieties in wide circulation), can greatly improve your quality of life as well.  The taste of freshly picked vegetables is distinctly different, and many people will tell you (though I don't know enough about it to unequivocally agree) that they are much more nutritious.  Whether or not the health benefits are true, keeping a vegetable patch is worth it just for the flavor.  And while maintaining a quarter acre lot requires a large amount of work, keeping a little patch inside or on your porch requires very little maintenance.

A while back I made a sauce from different heirloom tomatoes for a braised oxtail, and reserved two slices from each one for a caprese appetizer.  Both the sauce and the caprese were delicious.  The sauce was much more complex for the variety of tomatoes, and the Caprese really highlighted the unique and different flavor of each variety.  It was one of the more amazing culinary evenings at Chez Cross.

Oxtail braising in Heirloom Tomato Sauce

Heirloom Tomato Caprese

The Failure of Zero Sum Carbon Credit Markets

In light of the recent scandals of scammers ripping off companies for millions of dollars worth of carbon credits, I thought it would be good timing to drag up this notion from a paper I wrote while in college.

Carbon Credit Markets don't actually do anything.  Before you grab your pitchfork, hear me out.  Businesses and governments rave about CCMs and the great good they are doing.  They talk about how much they have accomplished with these markets, and how much they have reduced carbon emissions.  However, a common sense analysis shows that the markets don't do anything at all, and in some ways could actually be slowing things down.

First of all, the Carbon Credit Market does not exist naturally.  A CCM only exists when there is a mandatory government regulation on emissions.  The government says that all companies have to reduce carbon emissions by x% by this date.  So, it is the regulation that results in the carbon gas reductions, not the market.  Then what does the market do?  Well some companies aren't going to make the required reduction by that deadline, and others will surpass it.  The CCM allows manufacturers who cannot meet the mandated reductions to purchase offsets against their failures to avoid paying fines.  And who do they purchase these credits from?  From people who exceed the required reductions.

This market may create an incentive for innovators to exceed the reductions, but guarantees that these innovations will not have a net positive effect at the same time, because exceeding the reductions is only incentivized to the extent that the overall mandated reduction is not met.  In other words: good companies only do better than expected to the extent that bad companies don't play along.  Therefore it is a zero sum market with no tangible positive result.

One of the reasons that this whole scam is so well loved by businesses, by the way, is that the value of  a carbon credit must be lower than the cost of paying the equivalent in fines.  Otherwise the company would just pay the fine instead.  This has two results: the financial penalty for companies that don't meet the reductions is softened (which is bad), and that financial penalty is sent to the shareholders of the good companies instead of a dedicated government fund (which is bad if you are a socialist and good if you are a conservative capitalist).

Personally, I think that the companies that don't meet required reductions should just be fined, and the fines should be earmarked for specific green projects.  You could still encourage exceeding mandated reductions with tax incentives.  But ultimately, it just rubs me the wrong way when people claim that the Carbon Credit Markets are doing so much good in the fight against global warming, when it is the mandated reduction that is doing all the heavy lifting.  The CCM is just a PR trick, because our culture prefers the word 'market' to the word 'mandate.'

Homegrown Electric Vehicles

So, yesterday I went to a little social event for greenies at Davis' Restaurant in downtown Eugene (I would have put a link to their website, but they have not one). It was hosted by Helios Resource Network, and co-hosted by Arcimoto, and the CEO (who I kind of hate for being successful at 23) gave a brief speech about their company.

Arcimoto is a start up producing electric vehicles, and they are doing it a little bit differently. They are working with technology that has been around for long enough to be cost effective to produce an affordable car, one that you can plug in to a conventional wall socket for all of its juice needs (they claim it charges fully in 6 hours), and they are making it look pretty spiffy too. While most electric cars have specially designed engines and crazy battery technology in order to move the weight of a full sized vehicle, Arcimoto is solving the problem by making a much smaller car!

This is a really simple, elegant and in hindsight obvious solution to the problem of engineering an electric vehicle. They went with a three wheel chassis (the car registers as a motorcycle, technically), and made a body just big enough to fit two comfortably. The result is a much lighter car that can be moved by a much smaller motor, and powered with a much more simple battery.

Now for the next part, which is possibly even cooler: they plan to manufacture and sell the cars locally. You may wonder (as I often have) why there aren't already electric cars everywhere, if it's so easy to make them. The answer is really stupid: big car companies can't figure out how to make a profit off of them. Currently most of the money in the car business is in service, and electric cars don't need any much service at all (a DC motor may need the brushes replaced once every seven years, and other than that it is good to go). Conventional autos need tons of service, so the car companies are willing to deal with marginal profits on the vehicles with a guarantee of years of necessary repairs (this is a gross over simplification, but it captures the basic idea).

So the Arcimoto solution: side step the existing auto industry entirely. Figure out the local market, set the price point for a decent profit, and let the consumer drive maintenance free for 7 years. Ford and the others are so locked into their current (lack of) profit models that they can't imagine doing anything like this (which is why they love hybrids so much: call it green without actually changing much).

The Arcimoto Pulse is not exactly perfect, a brushless motor would be better and the lead acid battery has its own ecological issues, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of an internal combustion vehicle in the sustainability department. Especially when the whole local production thing is taken into account. So I give the Pulse a huge thumbs up. If every city a company like this, generating electric cars locally, we would see a lot of innovation, a much more interesting market, and better air quality. Now if we could just stop getting our electricity from burning coal...

I'm back! (where was I?)

Sorry to my many followers (that is, my family and a few old friends) for failing to post for so long. Lets face it, if there isn't money on the table it's hard to be reliable. So where was I for so long? Aside from the many illegitimate excuses for not blogging, there were a few good reasons (still trying to decide if being really sick was an excuse or a reason). Among them, I have been devouring the new LEED 2009 reference guide: "Green Building Design and Construction." I don't think I could explain it without boring the bejesus out of anyone who is not a LEED AP, but there are a lot of really good and important improvements in the new system.

That being said, I was very saddened today by a post on Boing Boing (the most read blog) about ClimateCounts, a dubiously motivated non-profit that rates fortune 500 companies on their 'greenness.' What saddened me was not the post, but the absolutely defeatist comments from the BB readers:

• "The very idea of "green" capitalism is a logical fallacy, and most of these companies have historically atrocious records of polluting the globe and abusing human rights. Those scores are useless, completely and uncompromisingly so."
• "The bottom line is that most of what we do to assuage our own environmental damage is pointless unless we are living off the grid in the woods growing our own food organically and wearing animal skins."

This pessimism about environmental issues is not serving anyone. It is probably true that these companies have a history of being environmental monsters, but does that mean change is impossible? Of course not. They may be reluctant, but many are making changes, and even incremental changes have a positive effect. And while I would agree that the fisrt marriage of capitalism and 'green' was nothing but pure marketing hogwash, I would not agree that green capitalism is a logical fallacy (and just to be a jerk, which logical fallacy would that be? post hoc? slipperty slope? hmmm...).

Capitalism is about economics, the green movement is about sustainability. Their goals might seem contradictory at times, but in reality they are two completely different fields which can be made to work together. The absurdity of the above argument is clear if you replace capitalism with other economic regimes: the statements 'green socialism is a fallacy,' and 'green mutualism is a fallacy' just don't make any sense. Economics and sustainability are not mutually exclusive in any way.

I am also a little tired of the concept that in order to be green you have to live in the wilderness, off the grid, and make clothes from the skin of dead animals (I wonder if that poster was imagining skins of domesticated food stock or hunting for those skins, either way not necessarily more sustainable than cotton fiber). Quite frankly, there isn't room in the wilderness for every person alive to have their own acre of farmable land, and there isn't enough natural groundwater to support that many farms indefinitely.

For better or worse, over half of the world's population are now city people, and that is why cities have become the focus of most green movements. We need a lot of infrastructure to support our current population, and spreading people out into the woods would mean more of that infrastructure, and all of it less efficient. That is why focusing on green development, renewable resources and sustainable energy is so important, and why this defeatist claptrap about it all being pointless is so damaging.

I admit that things look pretty bleak when you get down to it: CO2 has a long life in the atmosphere (exact numbers are difficult to come by) so even if we stopped burning anything right now, we would not reach stability for at least 50 years. Mercury has a much, much longer life in the oceans (it can cycle through the food chain many, many times before anything like safe deposition). But how could it possibly help to throw in the towel? So the solution isn't simple, isn't easy, and won't happen overnight. All the more reason to roll up our sleeves and get started.

MPG = N/A

I am sure you have heard people talk about biking and how great it is for the environment before, and most of you have likely thought, for some reason or another, that it would never work for you. I went through a similar process, living in Los Angeles, and I have to say, I was surprised at how easy it was.

When I started biking, I had a 7 mile commute, and I had my doubts that it would be possible. I was out of shape, having worked a desk job for about a year and half prior, and I had no idea how long it would take to bike seven miles, how fast I could expect to go, and whether or not I would be able to breath when I got to work. In short, I had drastically underestimated how easy it is to ride a bike.

Pretty much the first day I got on the bike I was averaging 10 miles per hour, and that is including traffic lights. The first week, after no working out for almost two years, I was a little winded after 7 miles, but the slight adrenaline rush and extra energy of a morning work out made up for it. It wasn't until a month of biking to work every day that I realized, driving in the city had slowly and quietly been ruining my life.

Everyone complains about driving in Los Angeles, and they are all right. It is stressful, and as most doctors will tell you, stress can lead to all sorts of health problems. Also, when you drive everywhere in Los Angeles, everywhere you go you arrive in a really bad mood. Biking, on the other hand, is really fun! Every time I get on a bike, for the first few minutes I feel like I am 15 again (only without all the social awkwardness, insecurity and acne).

On the green front, the only way to be more green than riding a bike is walking, and that is truly not a viable option for most people. More people biking, even part of the time, is a trifecta for LA: reduce emissions and improve air quality, reduce congestion on the roads, and improve your health both mentally and physically.

Los Angeles, despite what you may have heard, is a great city for biking, especially if you commute during rush hour. You might be surprised how easy a 10, or even 15 mile commute can be, and at the peak of rush hour, you might get to your destination faster on a bike than you ever could in a car. If you live in LA, I would get down to Orange 20 Bikes right away, and find out what it would take to commute by bike. While you're there, get lunch at Pure Luck (who knew vegan food could so, so, so, SO delicious), and then check out Scoops (not really green, but mmmmm).

DISCLAIMER: My wife and I used to live around the corner from Orange 20, and I just need to pay back that awesome little community for the many good meals and deals they have given us over the years we lived there.

Ironically, since deciding to become a green consultant, I have found it increasing difficult to avoid driving. My schedule is totally up in the air, and sometimes I need to get across town on short notice in the middle of the day. In that situation, riding is not really an option. For that reason, I have come up with the crazy plan of building an electric motorcycle (or more realistically converting an old motorcycle to electric), but that is the subject of another post.