Top 10 TED Talks - 10 - The Future of Enegy

For the last talk in my Top 10 sustainability related TED Talks list, we have Amory Lovins with "A 40-Year Plan for Energy."  Lovins is the chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a consultant, a physicist, and widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the subject of energy and how we use it.

In this 27 minute talk (unusually long for TED) he lays out in plain English how we can fundamentally change the way we use and generate energy.  The recipe is really quite simple: efficiency first so we are using much less, and then the transition to renewables is much easier.



As Lovins says in this talk, "our energy future is not fate, but choice."  Here (and in many presentations like this one) he lays out a clear and simple road map for how to make the right choices.

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.

A Day with the Nissan Leaf - Electric Transportation Land

With my in-laws coming in via train for Courtney's graduation, they decided to rent a Nissan Leaf, one of the few fully electric cars on the market right now, to get themselves around town while they're down.  For various logistical reasons, I had to pick up the Leaf a day early, and had 24 hours to use it as my primary mode of transportation.

While I am not exactly "in the market" for a fully electric car (my goals are more oriented towards driving as little as possible and living in a walkable, bikable neighborhood), I recognize that they will play an essential role in an overall shift in private transit if we ever want to kick fossil and foreign oil-based fuels.  Also, I am a bit of a technocrat, and I just love new things.

There are a number of fun features on the leaf, many of them designed specifically to give you good feelings while driving it.  From the cute sounds it makes to let you know it is on (there is no engine noise while idling, and hardly any while driving) to the little trees that "grow" on your dashboard display when you drive efficiently, the car is made to make you feel good about yourself for driving it.  And it works, a little.  Until it backfires.

When I picked up the car, the dashboard display informed me that I had about 89 miles of potential charge on the battery.  It comes up with this estimate based on the car's individual driving history, which is personalized to you if you own it but for a rental car is all over the map.  As I started to drive I was intentionally being as efficient as I possibly could, and I watched as the potential miles crept up as I drove.  From the starting point at 89 miles, I got over a hundred within 6 minutes.  But then I made a terrible, unforgivable mistake.  I was brash and foolish enough to drive over a hill.  The Leaf handled the hill just fine, acceleration and responsiveness were great, but the potential miles plummeted as I ascended.  As I climbed the hill, I had a sinking, anxious feeling that I would get to the other side and not have enough charge on the battery to get back!

That panic was unwarranted, as it turned out, the car had plenty of charge to get me where I needed to go for the full 24 hours, but in about 1 quarter mile of steep incline I used up 30 miles of potential in the battery.  As I was born and raised in a town that is all hills, with only one moderately flat street, it struck me that electric vehicles would be impractical for entire cities such as Laguna Beach, San Francisco, or any other topographically challenged locale.

Also, the  eighty to one hundred miles of potential on a full charge is more than enough for the average commute plus jaunt around town (unless you live in a sprawling mega-city like Los Angeles), but it is extremely limiting once you start thinking about traveling, or work that requires a lot of driving (sales jobs, couriers, or taxis e.g.).  So in the end, the Leaf can be an excellent commuter, if you live in a moderately sized city with no hills, but it does not provide the all around one stop shopping silver bullet to all of your transportation needs that internal combustion does.

But there never is a silver bullet is there?  The Leaf is a cool car, and fun to drive, but if we are serious about kicking foreign oil and fossil fuels, we still need better public transit, design for walkable and bikable cities, more programs like flex cars, and some internal combustion run on bio-fuels, methane, or some as yet undiscovered other renewable energy.  In other words, the solution will be a patchwork, involving all of the technologies that have been presented as silver bullets.  As it has been said by many others (Grist, Wired, to name a few) silver buckshot is the solution, and the Leaf is one attractive little pellet in that mix.

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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One Important Lesson to Learn from the Gulf Oil Spill

 May 24th, the Oil Slick has clearly hit ground in the

Mississippi River Delta, and an arm reaches towards the Gulf Stream

There are many lessons to learn from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, some of them technical, some of them philosophical, but there is one lesson which I have not heard mentioned nearly enough.  It is voiced occasionally, and sometimes in high profile media like the New Yorker, where it was recently mentioned in their "Talk of the Town" section.  That lesson, which is perhaps the most important, is simply stated: oil ain't what it used to be.

In a recent post I talked about peak oil and what it means for the future of our society.  In a nutshell, the oil that we can get out of the earth is finite, and at some point production will take a very sharp downward curve.  What I did not mention, however, is that on the downside the oil is more expensive to find, harder to get to, much harder to get without significant ecological impact, more difficult (and energy intensive) to process and refine, and more difficult to transport.  So as reserves are diminished, supply will decline even faster unless discoveries are ramped up even more, hastening the end of oil (assuming demand remains constant).

The first oil wells were drilled on dry land, but off shore drilling has a long history as well.  First in lakes and shortly after in very shallow coastal waters, rigs were built to drill oil below bodies of water.  However, up until about 1947 the deepest water that we could drill under was about 20 feet.  But necessity drove us further and further out to sea, and into deeper and deeper waters.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig on Fire, Shortly Before Sinking

As long as the history of drilling for oil is the history of accidents in drilling oil.  Beginning on land, explosions and fires claimed many lives in early years.  By now most of the safety issues have been worked out for drilling on land, but most of the operations in this country today are offshore, and every time we push the limits of what our technology is capable of we increase the risk of a devastating spill.  In fact, all of the largest oil spills in the history of drilling have occurred since 1969, when an oil rig drilling under 188 feet of water had a blow out resulting in 80,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel.

The current disaster happened on a rig drilling at a depth of 5000 ft below the ocean surface, which is just under 1 mile.  Drilling at that depth is difficult and complicated by many factors such as high pressure.  Although we theoretically have the technology to drill safely at that depth, and deeper, the recent disaster highlights the fact that the margin for error is so slim as to make it effectively unsafe.

In short, we have drilled and burned much of the oil that is easy to get, near the surface, and can be drilled with relative safety.  As long as we continue to burn oil for fuel, another spill is not only possible, it is probable.  I don't harbor any illusion that we could flip a switch and all suddenly be driving electric cars, or using bio-diesel instead of gasoline, but I do think that it is incumbent upon each of us to think long and hard about how we use oil and how much we want to be using oil.  Change is not easy, nor immediate, but in this case it is important that we affect it as soon as possible.