Sustainability Thought and Deed

Thermal efficiency of a "Jimmy Carter" solar panel

2012-02-02T17:44:00.000-08:00

For our Energy and Energy Efficiency class lab today we pulled some of the college's famous "Jimmy Carter" solar panels out of storage for cleaning and testing.

I'd often wondered what the thermal efficiency of these older flat plate collectors would be, if properly measured. There's just such a large weight of materials in them, it seemed likely that there would be large losses due to heating up that mass.

The largest thermal efficiency score among the three groups was 24%.

(That was the group that blocked off all the air holes assiduously.)

This compares to efficiencies of modern solar collectors, both flat plate and evacuated tube, in advance of 60%.

Without a pyranometer there isn't a great amount of accuracy to these calculations, but it's good practice in using conversion factors to do them anyway.

"The Limits to Growth" was 40 years old yesterday

2012-02-02T01:35:00.000-08:00

I dusted off my own copy of this iconic work yesterday, as I do every other year when teaching the sustainability economics class at Unity College.

As always, I'm reminded that one of the original authors, Bill Behrens, lives in our community and in fact employs a good number of our former students in the solar energy business.

The Guardian had a good write-up by Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation. Enjoy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/01/limits-to-economic-growth

Solution is community energy

2012-02-02T01:29:00.000-08:00

This according to an article in my Guardian this morning.

Excerpt:

"Community-owned green energy projects present the best chance of converting the UK to a low-carbon economy and should receive more government support, civil society groups representing 12 million people said on Wednesday.

Giving local people a stake in energy generation often overcomes planning objections to structures such as wind and solar farms, and dozens of communities across the UK have seized the opportunity to create their own power. But the move has not been fast enough, according to the coalition of community groups, which adds that many places are missing out on the chance to produce their own low-carbon and low-cost energy, supported by government subsidies.

The civil society groups include some of the leading non-governmental organisations in the UK, including the Co-operative, the National Trust, the Church of England and the National Federation of Women's Institutes."

Discussed in class today

2012-02-01T07:57:00.000-08:00

Two movies to illustrate the power of environmental economic thought in previous American generations:

Walter Cronkite on the first Earth Day: be sure to catch the social cost statement:

Gifford Pinchot: The actor gives a great speech from Pinchot's own thought about half-way into the movie. This is a very succinct statement of the Progressive creed.

Job or no job?

2012-01-25T02:15:00.000-08:00

An interesting article by Michele Singletory relating college major choice and the value of internships to the recent report on unemployment by major.

Read it and weep. Unless you're Sustech (with a good internship).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/not-all-college-majors-are-created-equal/2012/01/12/gIQAfz4XzP_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop

Why I admire Jim Hansen

2012-01-22T23:24:00.000-08:00

Commenting on his testimony given to the UK public inquiry into denied FOIA requests for the names of funders of a denialist "think tank":

"Our children and grandchildren will judge those who have misled the public, allowing fossil fuel emissions to continue almost unfettered, as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature. But the eventual conviction of these people in the court of public opinion will do little to ease the burdens that will have been created for today's young people and future generations."

"The science is clear. Unless we restore the planet's energy balance and stabilise climate, by rapidly reducing fossil fuel emissions, we will leave today's young people a rapidly deteriorating climate system with consequences that will out of their control. If successful, the FOI request may, by exposing one link in a devious manipulation of public opinion, start a process that allows the public to be aware of what is happening, what is at stake, and where the public interest lies."

Amen.

Our Nation's Capital

2012-01-19T03:04:00.000-08:00

We're in Washington, DC, with students at the National Council for Science and Environment Conference, which this year is on Energy and Security.

These are students Rae, Katrina, and Matt outside the Botanical Gardens on the National Mall, where there are now two wind turbines, a Windspire and a Skystream.

I'm interested in Windspires, although the simple physics indicates that they're probably not cost effective in any but the strongest winds. Our calculations show that Skystreams need nine meters/second to be cost effective in Maine, which only exists on our highest peaks. I expect Windspires are about the same.

But they are architecturally interesting, adding intrigue to the landscape, like a sculpture.

The other great thing I saw was NASA's new climate model visualizer, essentially a collection of giant monitors several feet wide and tall, showing the second by second results of a climate model.

Very cool.

Finally, the obligatory shot of Congress, which all the conference speakers agree is in total gridlock on Energy and Security.

Never mind. This too shall pass.

While science and education march on.

Job

2012-01-13T13:25:00.001-08:00

From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathon W. Schramm [schram25@MSU.EDU]
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2012 10:36 AM
To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU
Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Job Opportunity: Bioenergy Education and Outreach (WI)

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC, www.glbrc.org) has posted
an opening for an "Education and Outreach Specialist." This person will be
based at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Details on this position
are available on-line at http://www.ohr.wisc.edu/pvl/pv_072405.html

This position is built around collaboration with numerous researchers and
educators working on the frontiers of second-generation bioenergy sources
and sustainability.

McKibben calls for constitutional amendment: details TBA?

2012-01-13T02:28:00.000-08:00

Bill McKibben is a regular visitor to Unity College, and seems to enjoy our students down-to-earth attitude. Many are members of his 350.org campaign.

I had been wondering what his response would be to the continued pipeline fiasco, which is starting to have some of the makings of another Teapot Dome scandal.

I got a partial answer today from an article in my Guardian: McKibben seems to be announcing a bid for a constitutional amendment for public financing of political campaigns.

I say seems: no details are given, only a pointer to another event later this year: the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision, which McKibben says will be a good opportunity for organizing.

This is also one area on which Occupy Wall Street and the grassroots base of the Tea Party would agree. Of course, the various financiers of the Tea Party would not. Indeed, it would be very ironic if any combination of this sort were to occur.

There are two pathways to a Constitutional amendment. One takes you through Congress, whereby Congress proposes and the various state legislatures dispose, requiring a two-thirds vote. All amendments so far have followed this line. I doubt McKibben or any grass-roots movement can succeed in this, but the attempt, if even moderately noticeable within the political "echo chamber," would necessarily separate the actual libertarians from the various corporate hacks in Congress, and split the Tea Party down the middle.

The other pathway, never yet used successfully, is for two thirds of the state legislatures to propose an amendment to Congress. At this point in time, I would think there aren't that many state legislatures that could whether a concerted campaign to force them to back an amendment, if such a campaign were to gather both steam and cross-party support.

All depends on the intent and wording of the amendment. I think "public financing" is not a tenable phrase on which to base this effort at this point in time. Too many people will confuse it with other public programs and the opposition will label it as "socialism.

"Frozen Planet" will air in the US, but Attenborough criticized by Lawson

2012-01-04T02:45:00.000-08:00

For a while there, rumors (rumours?) were circulating that the excellent BBC series on arctic ecology, Frozen Planet, would be censored in the US.

(Deep background -- I hate censorship with a vengeance, and despise those who practice it. There's nothing so ruinous to democracy, freedom, and even the environmental movement than the urge to censor. Former Supreme Court Justice Renquist once wrote a book call All the Laws but One, a good read, discussing the idea that, of all the freedoms we enjoy in the constitutional and Common Law tradition, habeus corpus and the freedom from unjust imprisonment that it represents was the most foundational, and so democracy might survive without every other law or constitutional right but this one. That's a good theoretical debate and one that would be enjoyable in any serious college class, but I tend to think freedom of expression is actually the more foundational. Just look at the events of last year in the middle east, the so-called Arab Spring, which ran and runs on the new-found freedom of repressed peoples to express themselves using social media. No surprise there: look at our own history: Ben Franklin was a printer and pamphleteer, a master of the social network technology of his day. And where would we be without Tom Paine or the great abolitionists and feminist pamphleteers? Academics everywhere, real academics who care about ideas, must uphold freedom of expression first and foremost.)

Anyway, back to the main thread.

Apparently the Discovery Channel was worried about the backlash that might occur in the US after airing the seventh episode, in which David Attenborough, the godfather of TV biology, explains how climate change is affecting the arctic and makes a plea for action.

All this was of course happening in slow motion by British standards as the series has come and gone on the BBC. I've seen it, and it is absolutely excellent. If anything, the last episode is a masterpiece of understated argument. The notion that Discovery might censor it was very disturbing.

This Guardian article settles the question by announcing in the background that the show will run in its entirety this March, but then publicizes former Chancellor Nigel Lawson's criticism of Attenborough.

Honestly, how could anyone criticize David Attenborough? That's a bit like criticizing Mother Teresa. Or Leonardo Da Vinci. The man's a national treasure. He should be preserved in the Tower, with the Crown Jewels.

But he was forced to defend himself and does so in the article.

If anything, this episode begins to show how the climate change idea has survived everything that the denialists could throw at it, and is coming back up. Their attempt to control the national discussion has failed, and from here on out we should begin to see recovery and, eventually, policy.

Which, if you think about it, is a great victory for freedom of expression.

Great new emissions calculator

2011-12-29T02:09:00.000-08:00

This one, an official UK Government project, was produced under the supervision of David McKay, whose excellent e-book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air we use in class.

Both book and calculator are recommended. Both are free.

http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/pathways/1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111/primary_energy_chart

La Nina

2011-12-18T03:25:00.001-08:00

For those of you tracking this winter's "double-dip" La Nina, NOAA has a great article on last springs Missouri River flooding headlining on its Climate Portal.

There's also an article on this fall's resumption of ENSO-negative conditions.

Finally, when you want to understand Maine's winter weather under ENSO influence, there's nothing like the Jet Stream tracker map at http://www.weatherimages.org/data/imag192.html

Great NYT article on the "methane timebomb"

2011-12-17T03:34:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/science/earth/warming-arctic-permafrost-fuels-climate-change-worries.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

"Takings" issues with fracking wells too

2011-12-17T02:58:00.000-08:00

Last month I heard about a bill that may (or may not) yet appear for debate in our Maine legislature limiting the amount of value in land property that can be reduced by state and presumably local environmental regulation to 50%. This constitutional "takings" measure would dramatically affect all our state's many local restrictive ordinances on wind turbines.

It seems a similar question has arisen in areas where shale gas development has taken place or been threatened.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/us/towns-fighting-to-stand-ground-against-gas-drillers.html?ref=energy-environment

You might expect me to be in favor of a bill that would allow more rapid development of Maine's wind power resources, but I'm not. The "takings" bill opens a Pandora's box of environmental regulatory questions, and if it passes will require reconsideration of every hard-won environmental protection from shoreline zoning to water and air quality regulation.

It might have been better had the anti-wind activists who passed these local ordinances thought through the measures properly, instead of passing suspect "boilerplate" from town to town, badgering the various planning boards to accept these flawed texts, and then passing the ordinances in special town meetings at which only a minority of townsfolk ever show up. Some of these ordinances require sound limits for wind turbines that are actually below the ambient sound level of ordinary Maine woods. Others require setbacks that are impossible to achieve anywhere in the town.

Impossible to measure, impossible to regulate. And, as we have begun to see with this takings bill, likely to stimulate an almost-as-irrational backlash.

Now we have that very backlash in the "Takings" bill, with conservative activists using the constitution as a massive wrecking bar to undo not only the anti-wind ordinances, but also our many other environmental protections.

An interesting dialectic, isn't it. And entirely predictable.

Interesting too, that our difficulty with siting energy facilities extends in much the same way to natural gas wells on the Marcellus shale.

Everybody wants energy. Few wish for intrusive energy developments in their own back yard.

But some kind of energy facility has to go somewhere.

You pays your money, and you takes your choice:

Wind turbines in Maine....
Hydropower plants in Quebec
Fracking in PA, NY, and ND
Mountaintop removal coal mines in KN and WV
Nuclear plants in NY and elsewhere
Albertan tar sands
Solar power plants in the western desert

Each has its own, very effective protest movement.

The Durban Platform

2011-12-12T02:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/11/global-climate-change-treaty-durban

Rooting for Unity

2011-12-10T07:07:00.001-08:00

Here's Adjunct Professor Jim Merkel (in red) and his class of students, who built this fine root cellar for the college and the Unity Food Pantry to use to store food that we grow here on campus.

UC President Stephen Mulkey is helping to cut the "ribbon" -- appropriately a dried bean string.

There was some speechifying, including a very heartfelt thank you from the head of the food pantry board.

All very cool.

Well done to Jim and the students.

Awarded

2011-12-09T03:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I collected an award, including a nice plaque, for our wind research project from Maine Rural Partners.

I say "I collected" for "our project" because in reality a major part of the work wasn't done by me at all. We have numerous employees and students and external partners involved.

Here's a short list of those that deserve credit for this award:

All the student Wind Crew members over the years, including (off the top of my head), Jason Reynolds, Kiera Shepherd, Peter Knipper, Jake McGinley, Jennifer McClain, Cody Floyd, Dale Pitre, Ari Leach, Chris Froehly, Steve Swartz, Amanda DeBais, Jamie Nemecek, Heidi Kowalski, Rachel Mestas, Mary Bowers, Jay Pendleton, and probably quite a few others whose names have escaped me.

One the UC side, we couldn't function without the help of Doug Fox, Jan McInnes, Jennifer Whelan, the entire Maintenance Crew, the Business Office, especially Kathryn Hickson, and Human Resources.

And of course, the funding came from Efficiency Maine, the federal Departments of Energy and Agriculture, while expert help has come from NRG Systems and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Then there are the several wind power companies that have supplied equipment, especially NRG Systems, Competitive Energy Services, and RA Wind Power Inc.

Last but not least, there's my partner anemometer loan operator, Paul Villeneuve of UMaine School of Engineering Technology, without whose data the wind shear part of the project would not have been possible.

So thanks, Maine Rural Partners, for the award, but thanks also to all the folks who made the award possible.

It's been a privilege working with you.

Mick

PS: For those new readers, or those who haven't yet heard about the wind survey, here's the movie Jacob and Rachel made earlier this year. Click once to start and then click on the screen again, to see the full screen.

Buffet goes solar

2011-12-08T00:51:00.000-08:00

Warren Buffet, the "sage of Omaha," whose previous renewable energy acquisitions have been wind-related, has bought into a major solar PV power plant in California.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/07/warren-buffett-invests-in-solar-energy

NCSE conference in DC, Jan 17th to 22nd

2011-12-02T06:31:00.001-08:00

Dear students:

With the generous support of the President’s and VPAA’s offices, Unity College is offering a conference field trip to Washington DC for up to six students in early January 2012, 17th to 22nd.

The purpose is to attend and participate in the National Council for Science and Environment’s 2012 conference “Energy and Security.”

http://www.environmentandsecurity.org/

Read on for application instructions. (Applications that do not conform to the instructions will not be considered.)

Why would you want to go to this conference? Well, because you’re a serious student of environmental issues and concerns. Read on:

The National Council for Science and Environment (motto: “Improving the scientific basis for environmental decision-making”) is a non-profit environmental organization representing scientists and students of the environment in Washington, DC. It advises the federal government and engages in lobbying and advocacy work for science solutions to environmental problems. Unity College is an affiliate organization, and we are regular participants in several NCSE activities, including programs in curriculum design for climate and sustainability, as well as a program of support for college leaders in climate and sustainability education (CEDD)

http://ncseonline.org/

Every year there’s a national conference. NCSE conferences are very hands-on in the sense that students are participants, not mere audience members. At NCSE conferences you get to talk, present, make points, and influence the final proceedings, which are widely circulated (in full glossy format) to policy makers and scientists around the country. Past highlights have included a Unity College student asking a pointed question of former Science magazine editor Dr. Donald Kennedy, in full plenary session, at the microphone, with an packed auditorium of roughly 400 scientists and policy makers, a private, conference-room held discussion with the World Bank’s Environment staff in the World Bank building itself (one of DC’s modernist architectural wonders), a night out with dinner and conversation (partially) en le français de Belgique in a DC mansion on “Embassy Row” and so on, in addition to the routine (for NCSE) student participation in break-out and workshop sessions with everyone from congresswomen and men to senior federal agency managers. Unity students have met and shaken hands with environmental science greats such as E.O. Wilson, Herman Daly, Peter Raven, and so on.

An important tradition for this field trip is the final Museum Day, in which students get a full day in, as Forest Gump so memorably stated, “Our Nation’s Capitol,” with free time to explore museums and monuments and/or the National Zoo (which some feel is at its best in winter when tourists are absent). At least one fiendishly hot ethnic dinner is also on the cards, de rigueur, no pepper wimps allowed, a rite of passage.

Routinely this college provides one of the largest and most visible undergraduate student delegations. Student visibility like this, when combined with obvious high academic ability, improves the value of each and every Unity College degree by helping make our name as a college where finding smart solutions to difficult 21st century environmental problems is the curriculum.

Obviously, we’re looking for good intellectual ambassadors for the college.

Students will stay with the two conference faculty (Dr’s Ongley and Womersley) in the Capital Hill Presbyterian Church seminar center, which is youth-hostel style accommodation, men’s and women’s separate dorms and bathrooms, a sitting room, and a catering kitchen. We will partly self-cater, primarily breakfasts and some dinners. A sleeping bag is required, as is suitable clothing for a professional conference. You will also need, at minimum, a few tens of dollars of pocket money. The Presidents Office and the conference faculty will work to get you out of class for that period so you may freely attend. A required pre-trip meeting will be arranged if possible, before the end of this semester, to answer any further questions you may have.

There is a student fee of $50. All other expenses of several hundred dollars per student will be met by the college. We seek student volunteers to be “lent” to the conference to act as staff for short shifts, to help keep our expenses down.

The dates for the trip are as follows:

Tuesday January 17th Leave campus early (7am!), drive to DC, arriving late at night at the Capital Hill Presbyterian Church seminar center
Wednesday January 18th: Moderately slow start, recover, conference registration, attend opening keynote Session (by sustainable energy guru Amory Lovins)
Thursday, Friday, attend conference
Saturday: Museum Day
Sunday: Return to Unity College, arriving back late at night.

To apply, send a paragraph addressing the following prompt to longley@unity.edu and mwomersley@unity.edu

Go to the conference agenda page http://www.environmentandsecurity.org/topics/view/73357/
View the choices for Symposia “A” and “B” and the Thursday afternoon “Breakout Workshops”
Choose which of the many Symposia A and B sessions and which Breakout Workshop Session you wish to attend (three choices total)
Write a short application essay (one to three paragraphs) explaining why these choices are interesting to you. You may also include why any particular plenary sessions are interesting. (Hint: Be specific, or Lois and I may think you just want a field trip to DC, or are looking for a way to get out of class for a week.)
Submit by email to longley@unity.edu and mwomersley@unity.edu

If accepted, you will be required to pay the $50 conference deposit at the Business Office before that office closes on the last day of Fall Term (December 16th, 2011)

Mick

Dr. Michael W. “Mick” Womersley
Professor
Center for Global Change and Sustainability
Sustainable Energy Management Program
Unity College
90 Quaker Hill Road,
Unity, Maine 04988

207 948 3131 ext 259
http://ucsustainability.blogspot.com/

Phew. Thanks Pew

2011-12-02T01:08:00.000-08:00

Major news on the climate communications front: Pew says the numbers are now growing again, a serious failure for the "Merchants of Doubt."

Why?

Texas and tornadoes, is my immediate guess.

Here in Maine, we just had the warmest November on record.

Yellowstone wolves and climate

2011-12-02T01:03:00.000-08:00

An interesting article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/01/climate-change-scientists-wolves

The trouble with oil and one near-term solution to LIHEAP worries

2011-11-28T01:53:00.000-08:00

Here's a very sobering article from the NYT about the cuts to LIHEAP, the program that provides heat oil assistance to thousands of Mainers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/us/federal-cuts-give-maine-a-chill-as-winter-approaches.html?hp

This is the problem with all those sources of unconventional oil we've been studying in class, the Bakken shale and the Albertan tar sands, and so on. Although these sources reduce North America's dependence on oil from "petrostates" like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Russia, they don't reduce price. High cost heat oil will be with us for years to come, as long as demand from developing nations continues to increase, and as long as the new sources we rely on are as expensive as they are to extract.

What should Mainers do?

Insulate, weatherize, and/or switch to a cheaper-per-btu fuel, such as home-grown hardwood pellet or firewood. Those are the only realistic choices in the short term, absent some Big New Idea in Maine energy.

The sooner we realize this, the better.

The Governor's Office of Energy Independence is promoting increasing natural gas supplies as one solution. I believe this is a useful measure in the medium to long run, but I'm not sure what we think it's going to do for us this winter.

I'm sorry, Mr. LePage and Mr. Fletcher, but I don't understand how natural gas, admittedly cheap right now, can be an immediate substitute for high cost heat oil when we only have a very small amount of city gas supply infrastructure in Maine to begin. We have to lay new pipe to get that new gas to new consumers. The current crisis that results from the lack of LIHEAP and the high cost of heat oil can't last very long. People, even those on low incomes, will adjust to the loss of LIHEAP over time, two or three or four winters, by making investments in home weatherization, insulation, and switching to pellet or firewood fuel at the margin. The state's efficiency and weatherization programs, increasingly efficient themselves (5,000 homes were weatherized last year, a record), will help cut the time taken to bridge to warmer, weatherized Maine homes down a tad, but much of the interim will be a good deal colder, at the margin, for a larger number of Mainers than before.

By the time that gas pipe has been laid, much of the current heat oil crisis will be past, and much of the suffering will be over. The new infrastructure will be nice to have, in five or ten years time. But it isn't going to help next week and next month, this winter and next winter, which is when we'll need the help.

There's another way to think about this: Natural gas, which is very cheap now, can be a good substitute for coal in electricity production, however, reducing climate emissions and costs, and electricity in general can be much more easily easily gotten to consumers as a heat source than gas using existing infrastructure. We could buy more natural gas instead of oil tomorrow, if we wished, if we were to use that gas as electricity.

(Before anyone write to complain, let me state a disclaimer: Yes, I do know the Second Law. Very well, thank you. I know that we'll use overall more energy this way. But this is about economics and the time-taken-to-deploy technology, as well as physics. You need to know a bit about all three, in my business.)

Maybe what we should do for this year, instead of imagining we're going to magically lay all that pipe in the frozen months, is create some kind of lower cost, off-peak electricity scheme, and help folk access the cheaper price of gas through off-peak electricity, by allowing them to heat their homes with small, cheap, and relatively safe electric resistance heaters using off-peak power.

Ceramic storage heaters are particularly useful because they can be run off low cost, off-peak power and the energy stored up will last for several hours.

(The url above links to just one manufacturer. No endorsement is intended. Indeed, this technology is so simple, these heaters could be manufactured right here in Maine if we wished, a true job-creator.)

One closely associated idea that has (possibly) begun to circulate in the legislature is for a community energy bill that would allow towns and municipalities to create or to buy into power production projects, such as wind or small scale hydro or biomass plants, and to sell that energy at discount to themselves, and possibly taxpayers through some kind of smart grid accounting system. Introduced by Kevin Raye, and reported, as far as I can tell, only in the Quoddy Times, "An Act to Increase Energy Options" is a durn good idea, if you ask me.

It would be an even better idea if it included this Smart-Grid, off-peak discount-sales-to-LIHEAP recipients and local taxpayers option I'm suggesting. Without that, well, it's still a decent idea, just not a really timely one at this particular juncture in Maine energy history.

Unfortunately, I was unable to secure any details of this act despite writing to my State Senator Mike Thibodeau, whose utilities regulation committee it has been assigned to.

I'll keep working on it.

Green Deal vs. Maine PACE?

2011-11-24T01:25:00.001-08:00

The UK government's housing energy retrofit scheme, long awaited, was unveiled today, and the Guardian has three separate articles, here, here, and here. This is a home loan scheme in which the retrofits are supposed to be audited and managed so that the cost of the retrofit loan is less than the current cost of utility bills. This is doable anywhere, given the high prices of heating fuels, but is probably a tad easier in the UK than the US because of higher natural gas prices.

Job creation, in other words, for Sustainable Energy Management students.

Here in Maine we have a similar scheme in place called PACE, which stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy, and there are others in the US.

The possibility for a serious case comparison will therefore shortly come into being. I already have way too many degrees, but a good case comparison of these two countries' approaches to PACE-type loans would make a great master's or PhD thesis.

The obvious role of a scheme like this as Keynesian stimulus, assuming the proper scale of uptake, would also make an interesting study. The British are notorious homebodies, and as a general rule dislike having strangers in their home, especially repairmen, and so there may be some rather non-linear and threshold effects in the demand curve for take-up.

One interesting factor, post-Thatcher, is that the dearth of proper apprentice and community-college schemes for training the required electricians, plumbers and builders, combined with the general fall in favor of working with one's hands, has meant that in recent years the UK has imported tradesmen wholesale from eastern Europe.

This wave of handy immigrants has slowed recently as the economy has also slowed in Britain, and some have already made their grubstake and returned home to Lublin or Danzig, presumably to enjoy a happy retirement, with the proper amounts of pickled herring and sausage.

(So much for Solidarność.)

One obvious result, if the new scheme hits the proper scale, will be to reopen the floodgates. But fixing a tap doesn't necessarily require one to perform a full-on energy audit, use a computer, fill out complicated government forms, essentially negotiating a mortgage for the householder with the government, and so on, all in a foreign language. And these post-Soviet volumes of available handymen were likely just that -- a one-time only endowment of trained repairmen left over from the command-and-control era, now aging and stiffening. Have younger eastern Europeans abandoned the trades in the same way that young Britons and Americans have? A good question, to which I don't know the answer, but on which the success of this scheme may rest.

Even if they haven't, there are obviously huge barriers in language and training to be overcome here, to reduce the market friction and speed the uptake.

I do hope that the coalition has begun to lose its distaste for building government. This is one job that needs doing, but it needs to be done well, and there are obvious needs in education and training, as well as in bureaucracy and oversight.

David Crane interview on Yale 360

2011-11-21T12:27:00.001-08:00

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/solar_power_nrg_president_crane_ties_future_to_renewable_energy/2462/

Coal too expensive for Asian markets? Thank heavens for that!

2011-11-20T03:09:00.000-08:00

Just yesterday I commented, as I often do, on one of Andy Revkin's NYT blog articles on the Australian climate bill. Andy was concerned about the large amount of coal exports from Australia to China and other Asian "tiger" economies, exports unaffected by the otherwise strong new legislation.

Also in response to the blog article, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club posted an excellent update on Chinese coal markets, well worth the read not only for its excellent content, but also for its economic and technological competence. It was too long for Andy's comment section so was re-posted on Crocodoc:

http://crocodoc.com/oxdbl2R

This was particularly helpful as it came along at a moment when I was (once again) beginning to feel that most environmentalists had lost the plot, technologically speaking.

This feeling overcomes me regularly when confronted with Maine's anti-wind power activists movement, and indeed with anti-energy NIMBY-ism of all kinds. I guess it's just part of the angst of our times.

Talking about angst of the times, I was remembering the early nineteen-eighties in Britain on one of my blog posts just recently, and then came across this excellent Channel Four documentary on the undeclared civil war that was fought in Britain's northern and western mining communities in 1984 and 1985. This was the conflict that, along with the Greenham Common Peace Camps, forced me out of the Royal Air Force.

Not only is it an excellent film, it also has a great eighties soundtrack.

It made me quite nostalgic.

You'll need to rent it on DVD, or buy a VPN membership.

On art and the 99 %

2011-11-20T02:36:00.000-08:00

I've never understood very much about non-representative art. Call me a philistine, but it seems to me that at least some wealthy art patrons are getting sneakily ripped off by at least some supposedly avant-garde artists. As a kind of "Robin Hood tax," this makes sense to me. Consider it an example of the "trickle-down" approach to welfare, if you will.

I was less amused by this article here. Although the idea of the Teamsters picketing Sotheby's swankiest auctions with an inflatable rat sculpture does lend itself to a chuckle or two.

That must be a form of art too, right? Protest art?

On industrial decline, or the actual situation

2011-11-17T00:52:00.000-08:00

This is an important and thoughtful article from Aditya Chakrabortty, obviously a very well-rounded thinker. It's well worth the read, and touches on some of the themes in my side bar below titled "Selected Posts." I've been going on about issues of industrial decline, particularly where they relate to green technology, for years now.

I was lucky enough to have had one of those superb technical educations in my youth, the kind that no longer exists, where I was taught to do pretty much anything in the engineering fitter/fabricator's pantheon.

This wasn't trivial. My high school gave all of us two whole years of classes in each of Metalwork, Woodwork, and, just to make sure we were up-to-date, Plasticwork. The young men (this was back in the days of sex discrimination in education) had to take Technical Drawing (the women took Needlework, but then, thanks to the then-burgeoning women's movement, we all took Home Economics).

Then I won a place in the Royal Air Force's vaunted aircraft technician pipeline at RAF Halton. Eight hours a day, for a whole year, of everything you ever wanted to know about, and do with, aircraft engine technology -- hands-on. We literally took apart whole airplanes and put them back together, all day long. I'll never regret that time.

(Except for the daily drill and parades and PT three times a week, just to remind we were still in the military. And oh, how those drill sergeants and corporals hated us baby techies -- they could lord it over us for the length of the course, while we were mere LACs, but almost as soon as we graduated, we went right over their heads on the pay scale.)

But then came Thatcher.

Britain was supposed to wake up and smell the post-industrial coffee, give up on three hundred years of engineering technology predominance, which in Thatcherite terms was fatally and permanently associated with socialism, and step boldly into the post-modern world. Britain was no longer to be run by grumpy northern and western working class industrialists like Nye Bevan or Ernie Bevin, but instead suave smooth suburbanites from the home counties, preferably with aristocratic connections sufficient to woo the Iron Lady (who in my view had a rotten inner core of inferiority complex), would lead us into the bold new future.

The unemployment of the Thatcher years would end, we were told, when all the market distortions were wrung out of the economy, and then we'd all have well-paid roles in the Service Sector and the Information Age.

Spin.

We took three hundred years of technological supremacy, in which analysis and data and destructive testing could tell you, with effort, what was true or not. And we discarded it. We threw the baby of technology out with the bathwater of socialism, and instead swallowed the Newspeak of spin as our new Authorised Version.

It's a pity George Orwell was dead by 1984. He would have worked with wondrous satire on Thatcher and her spinmongers.

What followed was the Stalin-esque purging of whole northern and western British communities. If you want to see what this looked like, the film Billy Elliot is a good way to do so. Just watch what's going on in the background, instead of the ballet in the foreground.

Oh. And enjoy The Clash on London Calling, permanently part of the soundtrack of my youth. They don't make 'em like that anymore, either.

My own personal discombobulation at this wholesale change in national ideology, which was admittedly only partly-thought out at that point, led me out of the RAF and even out of the country, never to return. Twelve years of a superb American liberal arts education, and ten years research into renewable energy technology and climate change mitigation policy, and I'm just about beginning to understand it all.

Meanwhile, the world turned, and the general lack of internal western agreement on industrial policy has made it so we've invented whole industries since then, industries by the bucket load, and turned them over to the Chinese.

And now we have ten per cent unemployment. Again.

So what's the solution?

This may be where I part company with Chackrabortty. He seems to think, although he doesn't quite come out and say so, that those manufacturing jobs can somehow be clawed back from the Chinese.

This is a conceptual error. We need a more nuanced view of what has actually happened, and then we'll realize that this isn't likely or even possible. Sure, we've given the Chinese, and continue to give them, the technological information, and even the specialized equipment needed to create vast new industries. They're building massive new cities of millions of people around the factories that now house our older industries.

But we didn't give them what they really should have wanted, which was the robotics, and the code, and the builders of robotics and code, and then the engineering and materials science and chemical and biological design, that they would need to build any truly modern industry.

There are no legions of workers in a modern factory. There are legions of computers, connected to laser cutters, robots, and computerized assembly lines. Someone has to design and build all this stuff, of course, often from scratch, which is one reason that those few of the old fitters and tool-and-die makers that learned how to use the new machines are so highly paid. But that's not very many people. A team of a few hundred up-to-date western technologists, Germans or Brits or Americans, armed with millions of gigabytes of ROM, can design and build a factory that can make enough solar panels for a small city in a year, and then go on to build another factory, and another.

But these are factories that have virtually no workers.

Check out this Nanosolar video here to see what this really looks like.

All those miners in Billy Elliot? There aren't jobs for them in a Nanosolar world.

It isn't that the west's ability to imagine things and build them has declined. It's actually been enhanced and refined by the addition of cybernetics and nano-engineering and biology, whole new electronic and materials technologies invented wholesale in our universities and industrial laboratories.

And we didn't give that stuff to the Chinese. We couldn't give it to them, even if we were foolish enough to want to do so.

That kind of truly modern technological supremacy comes from the one thing the Chinese don't have, which is the freedom of speech and thought represented by our democracy, still standing despite the attacks from Citizens United and the Koch brothers; and the intellectual freedom represented by our glorious and still supreme higher educational system, still standing despite all the dumbing-down that No Child Left Behind and our ridiculous commercial media can throw at it.

And it's that freedom and that educational system that ultimately leads to these technologies.

As long as China is a closed society with a closed political system, all they will get will be our secondhand technology, not the good stuff.

Because no-one that smart wants to live someplace where your vote doesn't count.

Now the Indians, however, are another story. They do have an open society, and they are easily capable of learning to do what we do, once they've figured out how to end the corruption in their political system.

But they're on our side. I don't fear the Indians. They're not a threat to freedom and democracy. Despite their burgeoning revolutionary movement led by Gandhi, two and a half million Indians volunteered to fight for Britain during the Second World War. Indian people are thoroughly integrated into both British and American society. We'll go forward together.

None of this is helpful for the nine or ten per cent of Americans and Britons that are currently unemployed.

Even with our technological and yes, manufacturing prowess, there aren't, and won't be, well-paid jobs for badly trained or untrained workers who can't read, write, think, figure, understand science and technology, use a computer, and most importantly of all, imagine.

And the really well-paid jobs will be for people who can do all these things at a very high level of intellectual ability.

We have to figure out what to do with these other people, the folks who don't or can't think.

But in the absence of the mass industrial employment of old, figuring out what to do with the New American and British lumpenproletariat is no longer a manufacturing problem.

It's a social problem. A huge social problem.

It's not that there aren't useful things for them to do. There's plenty of useful, undone work in our society for people who can't or won't learn technology and science: in health care and non-science education and the environment and social work.

It's instead that we seem to think we would rather have unemployed, untrained people crowding our capital parks and demonstrating, or worse, in the unemployed and drug-infested underclass, than to simply raise our upper-income bracket taxes a little to pay them to do some of this useful work that the commercial market can't or won't do.

Do the Koch brothers and their ilk really think that they will enjoy living in a society where so many people are so permanently unemployed and not provided for?

NYC and sea level rise

2011-11-17T00:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/16/climate-change-report-new-york-city

Hakek vs. Keynes, for macro

2011-11-15T14:06:00.000-08:00

Time waster, for class

2011-11-14T02:15:00.001-08:00

We're supposed to be talking about nuclear power, but how could anything this beautiful be a waste of time?

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Mulkey on leaving well enough alone

2011-11-13T02:29:00.000-08:00

This food-for-thought piece, written by our new college president Stephen Mulkey, is copied from the UC Sustainability Monitor, also a recommended read.

The case for leaving the carbon in the ground

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Stephen Mulkey

Jim Hansen has used the phrase “essentially game over” when referring to the greenhouse gas emissions that would ensue from the use of Tar Sands oil as an energy source. To be sure, there is one heck of a lot of carbon in this one source, and Bill McKibben has referred to the proposed pipeline as the “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” As discussed over at RealClimate by Ray Pierrehumbert, the amount of carbon in this single source is equivalent to almost half of the future emissions needed to push us above 2 degrees C average warming, which is the point at which the biosphere will become a net source of CO2 as processes such as respiration and burning exceed the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. The Canadian Tar Sands oil reserves are six times the size of Saudi Arabia’s. Is it any wonder that TransCanada is fighting tooth and nail to deliver this oil to consumers? Obviously, the profits to be made from this single source of oil are immense. Moreover, we must consider the life cycle carbon emissions associated with mining and transporting the Tar Sands oil. Assuming in situ extraction, we must add 23% -41% to the carbon footprint necessary for conventional petroleum, thus making this arguably the dirtiest oil on the planet.

The article at RealClimate makes the valid point that not all of the estimated 230 gigatonnes of carbon in the Canadian Tar Sands would be mined. Assuming full production, I would guess that somewhat less than half will be delivered to market over the lifetime of extraction from this single source. In combination with the other sources of coal and oil on the planet, it is clear that even this more modest amount would result in massive pollution. Similarly, it has been argued that this should be viewed as a transitional source of oil to be used while we decarbonize our economy. Perhaps this would be a reasonable argument if there were any evidence whatsoever that the US is moving in the direction of reducing carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Ray Pierrehumbert draws the obvious parallel to the alcoholic who puts the vodka in the cupboard while promising to drink only a little bit.

What is most troubling about this discussion is the assumption that our estimate of the additional warming from this carbon is based on a partial understanding of only first-order feedbacks. The initial radiative forcing from CO2 added to the atmosphere is only a portion of its warming potential. To this must be added the near term, or first-order, feedbacks of clouds, disappearing sea ice, and a myriad of other relatively short-acting factors such as black carbon (enhances warming) and aerosols. Aerosols are complex, but their overall global effect in the form of pollution from smoke stacks and tail pipes has been one of cooling because they reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. This masks the warming potential of the greenhouse gases. Indeed, part of the reason for a hiatus in warming for the last few years may have been increased pollution from China. Using only these first order feedbacks, it is deceptively comforting to think that we will not cross the 2 degree threshold for possibly several decades while emitting up to 500 gigatonnes of carbon from coal and oil.

This is a considerable overestimate of our remaining latitude for emissions. There is ample evidence that the second-order, longterm feedbacks on climate are emerging much faster than previously thought. Specifically, the timeline for permafrost thaw seems to be quite short. A recent paper from the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimates that the tundra will become a net source of CO2 by roughly 2025, a date uncomfortably soon. This estimate ignores the amplification of warming from methane and first-order warming from new CO2 emitted as the tundra progressively thaws. Similarly, the Amazon has experienced two droughts of 100-year severity within five years, inducing widespread tree death. The scale of carbon loss from tree death and burning from these droughts will effectively negate the carbon uptake potential of the Amazon basin for an entire year. Note that the Amazon basin is so large that it could hold most of Western Europe and the UK with room to spare. Finally, recent research has found that there is widespread forest dieback in progress. While the cause of this is complex and only partially related to climate change, it nonetheless adds to the greenhouse gas burden of the atmosphere. It has now been confirmed that for most forest types dead trees really do burn more frequently than living ones. Overall, I see no processes or factors that might slow warming during the coming decades. Thus, I think that we will cross the 2 degree C threshold much sooner than previously estimated, and I would argue, almost certainly before 2050.

I know that I share a sense of urgency with many other scientists who have studied climate change over recent decades. During our recent trip to DC to circle the White House, Tim Godaire asked me if I was afraid. In all honesty, the answer is yes. From my study of the literature, I believe that our emissions must peak no later than 2020, with strong mitigation thereafter if we are to retain any certainty of avoiding significant and dangerous climate change during coming decades. A recent report by the National Research Council shows that peak warming is approximately linearly proportional to the cumulative carbon emitted, and that this warming will persist for the next thousand years before beginning a slow decline over the next ten thousand years. Yes, you read that correctly: The emissions we produce today will have their effect over a millennium and beyond. I daresay that this gives new meaning to the concept of seven-generations sustainability. Once the biosphere becomes a net emissions source, we effectively lose leverage to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations through our efforts at mitigation. That is not to say that mitigation after that point is useless. Quite the opposite is true in that our efforts will need to be all the more strenuous to avoid catastrophic climate change.

It has been suggested to me that my active messaging on the science of climate change is inappropriate for someone in my role as a college president. I find this quite odd, because I thought that my job was to do everything in my power to ensure the future for our students. I urge all of us to take this science very seriously and to act in every acceptable way to influence our policy makers to begin massive mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. To the greatest extent possible, we simply must leave the carbon in the ground. The good news is that conversion to a green economy will be a source of millions of jobs and economic renewal. The bad news is that the dinosaur economy will be hard to kill.

Keystone on hold, State to find new route

2011-11-11T01:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/10/keystone-xl-nebraska-passion-land

Not exactly the clear cut victory folks were hoping for, but a victory nonetheless.

Monbiot hits the spot

2011-11-08T00:07:00.000-08:00

Sometimes Britain's George Monbiot is pointy-headed. That's making no bones about it, I know, but it's true. There are time when the material he comes out with is laughable in the extreme.

But I enjoyed his editorial today. It may be the reference to the Putney Debates -- as someone steeped in the heritage and traditions of Quakers and Levelers, the dissenting churches, Fabianism, and so on, even the American descendants of these, I always like it when a commentator is literate in this history.

The other part I liked was the bit about the "three B's."

Enjoy.

Three cheers for Ms. Gillard

2011-11-07T23:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/08/australia-senate-passes-carbon-tax

It was a hard slog, but worth it. Not bad for a girl from Barry, Old South Wales.

If she can do it, why can't we?

Smart grid in Washington state

2011-11-06T02:47:00.000-08:00

I was pleased when the Fox Islands Electrical Coop organized its smart grid experiment using electric storage heaters to soak up excess wind power and use it to heat island homes, offsetting expensive heat oil use. I had hoped for such a scheme to be extended to other Maine homes via CMP or Bangor Hydro.

Actually, what I really wanted was my own grid-tied Vestas V-15 wind power plant. The V-15 is a second-hand turbine widely available from refurbishers. I would have used much of the power it could produce behind the meter in a dump-load mode, feeding it into my own home heat and possibly an electric car. But that will have to wait for the repeal of the Jackson wind turbine ordinance.

(I tend to see it as inevitable that Mainers eventually realize that wind power is cheaper than oil for heating homes and running cars, and repeal all the restrictive ordinances that have recently been passed. In most cases only a minority of townsfolk voted for the ordinances, because special town meetings were always used. Everyone knows that only the folk that are interested in a measure show up to special town meetings to vote. Eventually, the folks that were left out of the decision will realize how much was left on the table in the form of new tax dollars and cheaper heat and transportation, and we'll begin to repeal these ordinance or modify them.)

In the meantime, here's another state that has figured out that wind power is great for heating homes.

More sheep mowers

2011-11-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

The Womerlippi farmers mow lawns and clear brush with a small flock of sheep, and have long been advocates for this system: using woolly critters instead of gas- and diesel-guzzling, polluting, climate-change causing lawn mowers.

We've even tried, with very little success so far, to introduce the idea to Unity College, which has what seems like a good square mile of lawn.

You can lead a sheep to water...

But if we're about anything here on the farm, it's perseverance. I'm sure the Unity College sheep herd, and shepherds, will have their day.

And the Unity College sheepdogs. They should have their day too.

Every dog has his day.

Here's another article, one of many I've read in the last few years, about urban shepherds and mowing lawns with sheep.

Airborne wind turbines to be tested in Limestone

2011-11-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

By Jen Lynds, BDN Staff

Bangor Daily News

Posted Sept. 26, 2011, at 4:56 p.m.

LIMESTONE, Maine — The skies around the Loring Commerce Centre will look a bit different this fall now that a Massachusetts-based business has secured the rights to test its airborne wind turbines at the former air force base.

Carl Flora, president and CEO of the Loring Development Authority, said that Altaeros Energies is preparing to test its helium filled floating turbines, which are being developed to turn high-altitude winds into electricity.

“This project is in the development stage,” Flora said late last week. “Their product is a helium filled cylinder approximately 30 feet across. It is light enough to float and it is tethered to the ground with a cable.”

The company is led by alumni of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Company officials could not be reached for comment Monday. But according to the firm’s website, www.altaerosenergies.com, the airborne balloon, which is designed to hold a wind turbine in its hollow center, can produce abundant, low-cost renewable energy and can operate at higher heights where winds are much stronger and more consistent than on the ground.

It can ascend to an altitude of 500 feet or more and the generated electricity is transmitted to the ground and into the power grid through the tether cable.

Flora said that Altaeros will be operating out of Loring’s arch hanger for several months while the testing program is under way.

The testing could last up to three months.

Presently, Science Applications International Corporation is leasing part of the arch hanger. They will allow Altaeros employees to share the building’s unused space.

“Altaeros will be a subtenant in the building,” said Flora.

He added that while nothing is set in stone, this could turn into a long-term partnership between the center and Altaeros.

“It is possible that they would return to do additional testing or other work,” he said.

The Loring Commerce Center, located on the former Loring Air Force Base, is a commercial, industrial and aviation park that houses more than 20 employers, including Loring Job Corps and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

Corridors and the Cabinets

2011-10-31T02:37:00.000-07:00

Map and panorama of the Cabinet Mountains wilderness. Map is USFS, photo is from Wikipedia. Click on either to enlarge.

A long time ago, indeed a very long time ago, it sometimes seems, I was both a USFS volunteer wilderness ranger and an outdoor activity instructor in Montana's Cabinet Mountain Wilderness, north of Thompson Falls, MT. This was just a few years after getting out of the British military. I helped patrol the wilderness on summer weekends, hiking in with the paid seasonal ranger to dismantle fire pits and pack out trash, and then the rest of the time I would go to work at the troubled youth camp, hiking back in to the same mountains or the Little Bitterroot range across the Clarks Fork River for weeks at a time with bands of troubled teenagers and packs of rice and lentils.

I also loved to hike in by myself when I could, to fish the high mountain lakes for cut-throat trout and wander the high ridges alone.

Those were great days for a leggy kid from Yorkshire who liked to hike the high peaks. I had the place entirely to myself most of the time. No doubt a lot of my current students would love to have that life, despite the fact that I was paid only $1,500 per 21-day backpacking trip.

Later, after I realized I needed a college education to break into some more remunerative wilderness-based work, and began a biology degree at the University of Montana, I volunteered to help with the Cabinet Mountains Fisher Reintroduction Project, an Endangered Species Act-driven project to boost fisher numbers by releasing wild-caught individuals from Minnesota. We hiked in on snowshoes, or snowmobiled in, to "soft-release" our fishers in the deep cedar groves of the west slopes of the Cabinets. The lead biologist on that project was Kevin Roy, who was later killed in an air crash over Wyoming while tracking grizzlies. It took four years to find his plane.

That was big country out there.

But not the Cabinets. The Cabinets were and are a tiny sliver of wilderness, preserved under the 1964 Wilderness Act. At the narrowest point, Rock Creek, the protected area is less than a mile, east to west. They are a natural corridor.

Anyway, long story short, here's a great Yale 360 article on the Cabinet Mountain's role in working out some ideas in conservation biology related to climate change, particularly the need for wildlife corridors.

A grid storage beta test

2011-10-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/science/earth/batteries-on-a-wind-farm-help-control-power-output.html?hp

Just putting it out there...

2011-10-29T03:31:00.000-07:00

A thought that just came to mind following the Long report from CA, below.

Why tie climate policy schemes only to carbon, and thus internalize concerns about attribution, as well as prolong the denier-warmer debate?

Why can't we tie a Coasian climate policy instead to carbon volume via the actual climate change itself, using some reasonable central indicator such as global AAT increase? It's true that we have imperfect measures of the impact of each unit of carbon on AAT, but the models that approximate this, GCMs and the Lean and Rind multiple regression, and so on, give us workable correlation coefficients. If we just picked one, however arbitrary, we would abstract away from this issue, while abstracting towards actual solutions.

One option that satisfies this concept would be to make the fee per unit of fossil energy use in one time period a function of the AAT change during the previous period, after correcting for ENSO, the solar cycle, and volcanic aerosols.

That way investors would have to strategize using more complex thoughts about the mix of carbon and carbon free technologies, going forward.

Let the Koch brothers and their ilk bet against climate change if they wish. But make the consequences of such a bet direct and natural.

Deniers shouldn't complain about such a policy, since they believe that climate change is not a result of all that carbon. If you tie carbon fees to both carbon and ATT, if the deniers are right, the fee would be minimal. Which is just what they believe should happen. If they're wrong, they get left holding a whole bunch of worthless investments.

We could call it the "Put your money where your mouth is" climate policy.

Whereas right now, the cheapest route for the Kochs, et al, is to fund the denial movement!

I don't have time to take this idea very far myself, but someone else in the mitigation business might.

So I'm just putting it out there.

An important article

2011-10-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

Jane C Long, of the Lawrence Livermore Lab, has published a column summarizing a very important new analysis of energy approaches in Nature.

The analysis itself is also available online.

The upshot: There needs to be a 50-year strategic energy policy, not a piecemeal approach. There are important considerations that result from interaction between green power sources during the roll-out or deployment period.

Those of us in the energy education business now need to absorb this, and think about it, and teach something a little different.

Importantly, the interactive effects are different for different regions. So, because California has little coal-powered electricity, each unit deployment of wind power may add some emissions from a corresponding unit deployment of base load natural gas. In a mid-western state, the natural gas would naturally reduce emissions, from the coal fired plants that currently provide the base load.

I think the difficulty that results from this is that the result is a negation of the carbon tax and/or cap and trade approaches. Those are essentially Coasian economic approaches that allow free reign in terms of technology. What this report is telling us is that there are important coordination issues between technologies in any green energy roll-out strategy. Since free market economics is essentially technology-neutral, we got ourselves a problem, Houston.

Arguably, free-but-Coasian energy markets can take care of this problem too, if investors and planners have enough knowledge of future carbon penalties. Capital depreciation is an important consideration. Wind turbines are good for 20-25 years before a major refurbishment is called for, not the forty or fifty years of this analysis. They might be deployed in one region for 25 years, then taken down, refurbished and redeployed elsewhere, an efficiency even within the confines of the strategic vision outlined by this plan.

Since it remains to be seen whether or not the US will opt for any carbon reduction mechanism, all of this is speculative. It's only in states like California that are ahead of the game, where problems like this are being worked out, that this is even a reasonable kind of thinking at this point. The rest of us need to think as much about adaptation as mitigation, especially those of us that teach.

I'd give us a fifty-fifty chance of figuring it all out in time.

CAT on video

2011-10-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

A great short clip about the Centre for Alternative Technology on Wales, where a dozen or so Unity students and I visited in 2010.

NYT special on energy trends

2011-10-28T01:04:00.000-07:00

Just-in-time, as we switched from discussing climate change to discussing energy and land use solutions to climate change, the NYT has a special on energy trends. It's quite good, as these kinds of things go, and well worth your attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/businessspecial2/index.html

Useful graphic on income inequality

2011-10-26T03:25:00.001-07:00

For Intro. to Econ. class.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/26/nyregion/the-new-gilded-age.html

Nature Conservancy Climate Wizard

2011-10-23T12:55:00.001-07:00

http://www.climatewizard.org/

Jane Long on geo-engineering

2011-10-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

A quote below from a Jane Long interview in Yale Env. 360, which happens to underline some of the ideas discussed with our recent classroom discussion of mitigation versus geo-engineering options. The emphasis is mine.

Read the full article here.

"...the best way to solve a problem is not to have it. The best way to solve this problem is to mitigate as fast as we can manage. We should be talking about how we can get to a zero emission energy system as fast as possible. That’s what the climate science tells you the context should be. The discussion about saying, “Well we’re going to reduce by 10 percent or 20 percent”— it doesn’t really jibe with what the problem is. The problem is how fast can we go to zero and then probably below zero. Believe me, I know how hard it’s going to be. Even if we had the will tomorrow to do it, it would not be easy. So the next arrow in the quiver is we know some areas are going to flood, we know we are going to have more forest fires, we know we’re going to have more droughts. And how are you going to better manage these phenomena? And the last and the scariest is we’re going to intentionally manage the planet so that climate change doesn’t destroy us."

New report on global carbon sources

2011-10-22T00:38:00.001-07:00

A useful new online device for teaching some aspects of carbon mitigation is an interactive web page called The Supply Chain of CO2 Emissions, by Davis, Peters and Caldeira, also published as a short report in PNAS.

Enjoy.

Muller report is out

2011-10-21T03:33:00.000-07:00

http://gu.com/p/32nvq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/20/global-warming-study-climate-sceptics

Green collar jobs and the missing workers

2011-10-16T02:01:00.000-07:00

I found this article interesting, particularly as it illustrates the fact that even with 9% unemployment, there are still jobs to be had, and even jobs left unfilled. Mostly, it seems, the missing workers are engineering jobs at the technician or journeyman level -- the kind of jobs I held for much of the ten or so years I spent in the workforce before I became an academic.

These are the jobs that, as Matthew Crawford pointed out, can't easily be exported to China. And the absence of adequate workforce must be holding up the recovery, since the toolrooms and assembly lines that make our stuff, however robotically, are still put together by humans: fitters, machinists, welders, and process engineers.

In the green economy, the primary missing ingredient is energy modeling and cost analysis -- there are literally thousands of dollars of energy efficiency measures to be found in almost every large institution and even in most family homes.

You'd think we would get on it, considering what's at stake, for the climate and the economy.

"Get it sorted," as we say in the yUKe.

But even here in Maine one of our most technically proficient and largest green contractors has felt the need to have its own job fair (to which our Sustainable Energy Management degree students got a special invite).

Imagine, needing to have an expensive event like this in the middle of a jobs recession!

Here's the invite, the flyer, and a neat letter that accompanied it all:

From Nicole Collins at the Unity College Career Center:

Evergreen Home Performance, a Rockland-based energy audit and contracting company, is holding a Career Exploration Open House on Tuesday, October 18. They are hoping to see some Unity students there!

The information is attached. Please contact Elise Brown, Development Manager, with any questions. Her contact info is elise@evergreenyourhome.com , 594-2244 x711.

Career Exploration Open House – Tuesday, October 18, 5-7 pm

Ham Niles can’t quite remember when he first set his sights on a job with Evergreen Home Performance. He’d worked with the energy-efficiency contracting company on his own home and found that “an hour or so with them revolutionized my whole agenda and the framework on which it was based,” so he paid attention when friends mentioned a Career Exploration Open House last spring. Evergreen’s next Open House is Tuesday, October 18, from 5-7 pm, at 15 Tillson Avenue in Rockland.

It was clear that Evergreen wasn’t a regular contracting company. Everything from its mission to make homes more comfortable, healthy, and energy-efficient to its culture (family-friendly with health insurance for all full-time employees) intrigued him, so Niles applied for Evergreen’s free, six-week, 24-hour class in building science.

The course is part of Evergreen’s long-term workplace development process, explained Development Manager Elise Brown. Regular open houses and building science courses have proved an effective hiring tool. “Instead of waiting till we’re desperate for new advisors and technicians, we’ve created a longer period of time to explore the relationship with potential employees,” said Brown. “Applicants get the change to learn about the field and prove their commitment, and we get to assess their skills and enthusiasm.”

At the October 18 Open House, Energy Advisor Cree Hale Krull will explain how the training process prepared him to figure out what’s wrong with a house, explain problems and solutions to customers, write reports, and make sales. Project Manager Svea Tullberg will talk about the hands-on work she and the other technicians do to improve homes, including adding insulation and drainage systems.

Niles – who started as an Energy Advisor this month – recommends the Open House to “anyone who has a desire to more fully understand how houses work and make the leap from theory to practice.” Those who share his interest in working with “smart people who do dirty jobs with dignity and an eye for the details that count” can apply for the next building science course. Evergreen has already hired four of the students from last spring’s class, and anticipates another round of hiring soon.

Katla

2011-10-14T00:53:00.000-07:00

An interesting question: Does the 1918 eruption mentioned in the article below appear in the L & R 2008 base data, graphed above and in the table below?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/13/icelands-katla-volcano-eruption-imminent

Answer is a pretty unequivocal no. The values for optical depth (of sulfate aerosol-caused UV light scattering -- VOLC in the data set below) do not exceed typical low/background values. Something like a value of 0.05 would have been required to register.

Katla does not appear to historically have been a high-sulfate aerosol type volcano.

Which is good for humanity in general, although it may yet disrupt air travel.

And although it would have been a nice test of L & R 2009 and other models, had Katla erupted as predicted, and had there been sulfate in the stratosphere as a result.

But I found this a valuable short exercise. The value of this kind of thought experiment is in providing students with the kind of mastery over the facts and math of climate knowledge that will be needed to provide mitigation and adaptation needs in the next few decades.

A special version of what philosopher Matthew Crawford has called, in another context, "mastery over one's own stuff."

A shortage of java? Not necessarily.

2011-10-14T00:12:00.000-07:00

Starbucks execs are warning that the humble Arabica bean may shortly go into short supply, as a result of climate shifts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/13/starbucks-coffee-climate-change-threat

What do I think about this? Moi, who drinks probably a good half-gallon of the strongest possible brew per day, and is a most-favored customer at all branches of the Seattle-based chain within forty miles of Unity, Maine?

Well, I think I know far less about coffee cultivation than I would need to know to comment.

But I know enough about genotype, phenotype, climatic zone and climate change to know how to think about it. It's not rocket science. It's just good old fashioned ag sci

With a twist.

The slight difference is that your climate zones, or hardiness zones, or whatever you want to call them, may shift faster than your cultivation and cultivar might.

Not something your average aggie has had to contend with, historically speaking. And your average aggie does have a rep for being, ummm, well, a bit of a plodder.

(A cruel and foul canard -- you try getting your head around all that juju. Especially when the guys from Monsanto, et al, come in with their Wall Street lawyers.)

And so what I think is that there's a small fortune to be made here by the company or individual or even national government of a small semi-tropical nation that can most quickly match current or future variety to future climate zone, essentially put the ag sci alongside the climate sci, and thus identify where the next great coffee growing region of the world will be, where the most cost-effective agricultural land resources will be within that region, what variety of bean to grow there, and, inestimably, how to grow it without large fossil fuel subsidies required.

Job creation, albeit of a somewhat unusual kind (that will get far too usual as time goes on).

Because I may be willing to do without oil heat, incandescent light bulbs, and even gasoline-powered cars to help save the planet, but I'm not sure I physically can help save the planet without me regular cup of joe beside me! And I know I'm not the only one.

Maybe it's time for me to review this obvious addiction.

BTW, I'm not sure how many agricultural scientists there are that get this training elsewhere, but I work with about five or six of them each Tuesday/Thursday.

And that exact kind of problem, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are talking about. That kind of thing.

It's called adaptation.

Solar hot water "better than predicted"

2011-10-13T02:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/13/solar-heating-household-hot-water

From Jerry Cinnamon

2011-10-11T04:44:00.000-07:00

(Recently retired UC Geology professor)

I thought that you might be interested in this presentation. It's both
stunning and informative.

Jerry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15216875

Ap for L & R 2009

2011-10-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

For Environmental Sustainability class:

I built a Google Docs spreadsheet ap embodying the regression model obtained by Judith Lean and David Rind in their 2009 paper, How will Earth's climate change in future decades, which we have been studying.

Instructions are here.

The calculator is here.

(Note, there are no margins of error given in this simple ap. To see the margins of error, which are important, you would have to get the basic data and replicate the model in a stats program such as .JMP or Smith's Statistical Package (a free download). I will give extra credit to any student who replicates this analysis on their own using the software package of their choice. See me for the data.)

Enjoy

Extensive McKibben

2011-10-07T02:11:00.000-07:00

An interview, at the Guardian

Andy Burt comes to visit

2011-10-05T01:57:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite local organizers came to visit college yesterday. "Andy" Burt is a Quaker, a long-time member of Mid-Coast Friends Meeting (where I met Aimee, many years ago now), and was for many years the key organizer in Maine Interfaith Power and Light, the religious environmental organization that spurred creation of the renewable electricity market here in Maine.

Andy now organizes the Green Sneakers Project, a door-to-door canvas working on local energy advocacy.

http://www.coolmaine.org/green-sneakers.html

I think this is a great project for Maine, primarily because of its ability to reach out to people suffering what is currently great hardship each winter because of high energy prices and actually help reduce the hardship by making homes tighter, warmer, and more efficient.

Andy was also arrested at the Keystone XL protests in DC.

Deep background to forest dieback article

2011-10-04T02:20:00.000-07:00

On the NYT's Green blog:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/dying-forests-how-bad-is-it-really/#more-116347

McKibben hammers Obama on pipeline

2011-10-04T01:17:00.000-07:00

In today's paper.

Of course, Bill doesn't have to win re-election.

What the Obama administration are thinking, and why they are thinking it, is probably less to do with cronies and more to do with the calculation of 2012 votes, and the timing of the decision.

Obama's team probably wishes it could drag out the discussion until after next November.

Think about it:

If the administration nixes the pipeline directly, the climate wins a short-term battle, but then the Koch brothers and less rabid oil interests pour money into the election, and get their pipeline anyway.

If the administration supports the pipeline directly, they lose all negotiating power with moderate oil interests. No point in giving it away.

But if the administration is seen to be thinking of supporting the pipeline, asking, even begging for moderate oil interests to show some support, jeez, buddy, spare a dime for a poor embattled most-powerful-man-in-the-world, then the Obamites get a new angle on the election, something they're going to need if they continue to abandon their base, and a wedge is driven between the radical conservatives such as the Koch brothers, and more moderate oil interests.

The notion that somewhere in Canada there are two trillion barrels is itself enough to take the edge off the bull market in oil which will take the edge off the bear market in general. I'm not a practicing econometrist but I was well trained by some very good ones, and can read the numbers well enough to know that there may be two percentage points of employment numbers for Obama, if the edge can be taken off the oil price.

I'm not saying it's good, or that I like it, or that Bill should back off. As Jim Hansen has intimated, the CO2 from two trillion barrels of Canadian crude is probably enough to send us back to the paleocene.

I'm just saying, it is what it is.

By the way, if the jobs numbers will be the primary determinant of 2012, and if oil interests like the Koch brothers want so badly to see Obama gone, do you think they might find a way to send the NYMEX crude numbers up again at some opportune point?

I would bet on it, myself.

You'd think that those conservative types clever enough to work this kind of stuff out would be clever enough to read a few science papers and realize that, no, scientists actually aren't kidding, nor a liberal conspiracy, and that the possibility of going back to the paleocene is real.

You'd think.

In the same paper, an article about new support for geoengineering, and a good discussion of the risks of the Keystone XL.

Forests and climate change

2011-10-01T03:12:00.000-07:00

An excellent article in the NYT, featuring woolly algedids, the Harvard Forest, and the work of the Running lab at UMT, among other things we teach in Environmental Sustainability and at Unity College in general.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/science/earth/01forest.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

UK up to ten per cent renewable electricity

2011-10-01T02:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/29/renewable-energy-record-high

What will it be like?

2011-09-30T02:16:00.000-07:00

Graph of the four primary climate change factors from Lean and Rind 2009 (paper linked in the menu to the left). The right hand part of the curve is the L & R projection for future decades.

One of the responsibilities of teaching young people about climate change is that at some point you will be required to be to be able to describe, as accurately as you can, what will most likely happen. Students, quite rightly, want to know what their futures will be like, and will ask you to tell them. More than anything they will be seeking reassurance, some straw to grasp that things are not as bad as they seem. This is only human. If it's in your power to give some reassurance, you should. No young person deserves to spend their early years worried about some horrible event that may or may not come to pass. But you must also balance this with a realistic assessment of the facts, and some careful set of warnings so that they are prepared.

This important obligation is complicated by the fact that what will happen in climate change is simultaneously as much an economic and social problem as it is a problem for natural scientists. Few thinkers have a good grounding in all of these disparate areas, and so their expertise, and comfort level, begins to peter out as they approach disciplinary boundaries.

And the honest truth should always be, well, we don't quite know exactly what will happen. The future is full of uncertainty and subject to the influence of random events. In the case of climate change, the primary uncertainty is whether or not various currently hypothetical "feedback loops" will tip the system over some "threshold" to an entirely different equilibrium -- an entirely different planetary climate resulting in the dislocation of billions of people and their support systems. I'm not going to deal with feedbacks in this article, except to say that they may exist, may kick in, and have all the power they need to change the planetary reality beyond current comprehension. (This is one reason our class focuses on dynamic systems models -- so students can begin to understand feedback loops and how they can create exponential effects.)

Instead I will try to answer the easier question, "What will most likely happen if what has been happening for the past few decades continues to happen for a few more decades and there are no tipping points or fast feedbacks in that time-frame?"

I'm no world-class expert, but I have been puzzling over these social and natural science interactions in the sustainability arena for some twenty years now. Interdisciplinary problems like these were the focus of both my MS and PhD theses, particularly the PhD which focused directly on questions of social change with regard to climate change in American society. It was a similar concern that forced me out of my first (military) career with a crisis of conscience many years ago. I guess I would say that my main qualification would be that, yes, for better or for worse, this is actually a lot of what I think about, and have been thinking about for a few decades now. In addition to the expected books about climate science and renewable energy, my bookshelves are full of books on the history of great social upheavals, from the American revolution to the end of the Cold War.

It helps that I teach climate and sustainability classes each academic year and each semester. That keeps me in practice, and the students' interest gives me a reason to keep thinking.

Each year and indeed each semester I must therefore take a good stab at trying to describe for my students what I think will most likely happen, based on the most recent data and events. I always tell them that this is my best guess, based on the most recent data publicly available, and subject to change, perhaps dramatic change, as things unfold.

This is a responsibility I take seriously.

I use a two- to five-decade time horizon, and focus on the important periods in students' futures one to two decades out when they will be forming a career and a family and therefore need a reasonable economic situation, and then later, four or five decades out, when they will be thinking about their retirement, and therefore need society to be organized enough to support them.

Most recently, since it became available, I've used the 2009 Lean and Rind study "How will Earth’s surface temperature change in future decades?," which is linked to the side of this post, and which directly addresses this decadal problem. It also happens to use a statistical method that most third-year students have been taught already, and which can be easily replicated in class. I extrapolate the L & R projection based on the table of climate effects given on page 8 of the 2007 IPCC report Summary for Policymakers. (The "FAR SMP")

This seems to me to be a conservative set of starting points based on the low p-values in L & R, the high R-squared, and the consensus nature of the FAR.

Let's start with what will most likely happen with the planetary, North American and Maine climates, in that order.

There are four major factors to consider. Three major stochastic or cyclical natural factors, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, volcanic effects, and the cyclical variance in total solar energy reaching the planet, compete to mask the combined anthropogenic effects of greenhouse gas emissions, land use changes, and black carbon pollution. (For the statistical exposition of their workings, see L & R 2009 posted to the right.)

The underlying temperature trend is, however, upwards, and this slope is correlated with the combined anthropogenic effects and statistically very significant, allowing us to rule out other hypotheses as to the cause (p < 0.01 for all four variables).

The coefficient of correlation in the L & R model is 76%, meaning that we have a good ability to predict what will happen to global temperature, if we know or can guess the future status of the four variables.

The 24% unexplained variation is definitely unsettling, but society routinely has to predict public and private policy based on far more unsettling uncertainties, for instance, the uncertainty of what the oil markets will do next week, or whether North Korea will use one of its nuclear bombs. The notion that we shouldn't do anything about climate change because we don't know how enough, with enough certainty, is nonsense, and mostly just a rhetorical tactic used by climate policy opponents who have some personal monetary stake in the outcome. We know plenty enough to act now.

(This is a slimy business, this climate denialism, and the people who practice it seem more and more reprehensible to me as time goes along. But, what goes around will come around. In particular, should the people that have been attacking climate scientists ad hominem expect any mercy when the public realizes just how utterly evil they have been, and how much they have been playing fast and loose with other people's lives and futures? But this is a matter for another discussion.)

So what will happen if, as seems very likely if not almost certain, the anthropogenic effects in L & R continue to increase?

More or less obviously, the planet will continue to warm as it has done for several decades. The recent flat spot in the five-year average warming was just that, a flat spot at the top of a long uphill incline, most probably due to a recent sunspot minima and the persistent presence of small amounts of volcanic aerosols, and the temperature trend will continue on up as soon as the eleven-year solar cycle picks itself up again and the skies clear of aerosols.

(Correction: I just received an email from Judith Lean, in which she cites persistent La Nina conditions as responsible, along with the solar cycle, for the recent sub-decadal moderation of the climb in global AAT.)

The result would be a year like 1998, only worse, because of the increase in the anthropogenic variable. L & R project such a year (labeled "B") in the right hand side of the graph. (They don't really know which year this might be, of course.)

The next decades warming may not be as abrupt as we had thought it would be five or six years ago, based on the recent projections for solar cycle 25. This seems to me a kind of Godsend of sorts. However, if at any time the sunspots return, the warming will accelerate.

The anthropogenic effects will continue to climb, even if the sunspots hesitate, and so the planet will continue to warm, just at a slower rate than was thought in, say, 2004. But the trend may also accelerate. Back then we were able to "look forward" to depleting oil supplies reducing pressure on the atmosphere, but with recent developments in domestic non-conventional supply this "hope" has evaporated.

(My quotes are deliberate. I understand perfectly well how bad oil depletion would have been, and how great it is that we now have better domestic supply. I'm relieved and even willing to celebrate that the new supplies allow us to get some of our (US and the west's) geopolitical power back with regard to the various petrostate dictators, especially China, Russia and the middle east. I just think that climate change is likely going to be worse for us than oil depletion would have been.)

The general addition of energy to the atmosphere, with the evaporation and churning that results, will mean increased extreme weather -- what Tom Friedman has called global "weirding" -- all over the planet, more droughts and desertification, more heavy monsoons and more ten, hundred- and even thousand-year flooding. Atlantic hurricanes may become more intense, but they may also become less frequent, or at least it may appear so because they may veer away from the eastern seaboard more easily. All this and more is provided on page eight of the FAR SPM or other references such as Kerry Emmanuel's work on hurricane intensity or frequency.

In La Nina years, according to L & R and the various expositions of ENSO effects given by NOAA, regional warming won't appear too strongly in Maine and other northern tier states, but the American south will be badly affected much as it has this year. In El Nino years, the entire continent will be much warmer and Maine will generally have a warm wet winter. There's usually quite a bit of snow with an El Nino Maine winter, or at least it seems that way to me after having lived through a few of them now, but the air temperature is warmer. If, as happened during this last winter (a strong La Nina), a strong southerly loop of the jet stream sets up for a good portion, the winter weather in Maine can become very changeable, as cool northerly and warm southerly air masses either side of the jet stream alternate overhead, and as the great storms that cause nor'easters run up from the southern waters, along the edge of jet-stream-following cold fronts.

A good volcanic eruption with significant cooling aerosols is enough to give us a much cooler year world-wide. Volcanoes are, or at least appear to be, random within this decadal viewpoint.

The general take-home message for the next few decades is gradual warming of one to two degrees Celsius, most likely just one degree before 2050 (this warming is less marked in predictions based on L & R 2009 than in the IPCC FAR because of the effect of the solar cycles), with random El Nino warmings and volcanic coolings from time to time along the way. But this is quite rapid warming from an ecosystem point of view. In the continental US under an L & R scenario, changes will most likely be gradual but climate zones will move steadily north "over" the tops of ecosystems, leaving those systems subject to high disease- and weather-related mortality, particularly of those native plants and animals that were at the edge of their range. An example is the dramatic pine beetle infestation in the western US. Invasive plants and animals will move in to replace natives. The people that live in these ecosystems, particularly farmers and gardeners and fishermen, will be required to work out new ways to live in relationship with the ecosystem. In the high arctic change will be more rapid.

It seems reasonable to me to expect that extreme weather events will worsen as the energy in the atmosphere increases. It seems unreasonable to expect different, especially after this year.

Understanding how all this impacts the economy and thus society requires a slightly different way of thinking. Economists understand that economic change occurs at the margin, because economic events such as recessions or booms in the business cycle or in specific sectors are the aggregate of thousands of small decisions made by individual consumers and suppliers.

Thus the aggregate demand for petroleum created the current North Dakota and Canadian oil booms. What was a shortage and high prices just about everywhere else, and a factor in the recession, created an economic boom and even an investment bubble and over-employment in the Albertan and North Dakotan oil patches.

At the margin, climate change will have impacts on the economy as some sectors and products are badly affected, while other sectors and products boom. I think Texas agriculture is in for a hard time, while Maine agriculture seems to be experiencing if not a boom, at least a partial resurgence of sorts, and the development of new crops and new markets. Likewise, continued high price even for the new oil supply means that Maine hardwood pellets are in demand, as are the stoves that burn them.

So, ceteris paribus (all things being equal), if we expect marginal change and if climate change continues much as it has done for the last few decades and as predicted in L & R 2009, an economic viewpoint will predict some proportion of Texan farms and ranches to lose output and go out of business one by one as time goes by, while some proportion of Maine farms will increase in output and a few more will come into business or increase the scale of their business every year.

Likewise, Maine maple businesses will go out of business one-by-one, while farm businesses in Maine that are experimenting with new crops, such as our new small vineyards and wineries will come into business one-by-on.

This is the inherent nature of marginal change.

It's only when a community is actually badly damaged by extreme weather events to the effect that civilization has to be rebuilt locally that this balancing economic effect is reduced. Otherwise, one community's economic problem tends to be another community's economic gain, and Maine, as Stephen Mulkey mentioned in last night's lecture, is a refugia of sorts for many climate related concerns, but particularly rain-fed agriculture.

There will be more extreme weather. And we can't easily predict where it will hit. Too much of this kind of impact will, however, predictably contribute to another recession or depression, or will affect our ability to pull out of the current recession. It's also possible, as happened in the 14th Century in Europe (detailed in a book by Barbara Tuchman titled "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century" (1978)), for climate change effects to create a breeding ground for war and revolution. It seems that high food prices exacerbated by climate change did contribute to something like this in this year's "Arab Spring."

When will Americans change their minds and demand political action on climate?

"When they realize how bad things can get," seems to be the best answer I can give and indeed the one I gave in my PhD dissertation conclusion. In other words, after things get worse, and, given the increasing power of climate denialism, possibly much worse.

Right now the combined impacts are bad but not bad enough, and as mentioned the Lean and Rind study shows only relatively slow change. This slow change is enough to create huge problems, but we could adapt to the new climate reality, perhaps without even recognizing it as climate change.

Most likely the change will be large enough that most ordinary people will realize climate change is occurring, which is itself a blessing of sorts. It will help us get something done before feedbacks kick in.

If we are lucky, that is.

But with the various fast feedbacks possible in the global climate system, they may easily get bad enough soon enough, certainly in my remaining lifetime. It's eminently possible that some threshold will be crossed in the next few years.

Remember, the extreme weather events we are currently experiencing result from only roughly one degree Celsius of average global warming since measurements began around 1850. L & R's model predicts between one and two before 2050, but extrapolation of a regression model this far out is statistically unreasonable, meaning L & R is best used for the next two or at most three decades, after which we must return to GCMs to work out scenarios.

There are at least two and possibly eight more degrees in the pipeline this century, if we don't slow the burning of oil and stop burning coal, according to the IPCC FAR, based on multiple GCM outputs.

Two degrees over the course of the century, we can probably deal with. More than three or four is a lot, and will be very difficult to deal with.

Here I tend to look at other great American changes-of-mind such as the fight over slavery that ended in the Civil War, or the Civil Rights Movement, or importantly for me as a Briton, the period of isolationism leading up to World War II.

Americans, it seems, change their minds only slowly, but generally do so in the end. A practical people, concerned mostly for their own well-being and that of their families and communities, Americans require a good deal of very obvious evidence before they are willing to change their ideas and mental models of how the world and society work. Hurricane Katrina, and even the numerous weather disasters of 2010-2011 were not that sufficient a Pearl Harbor.

But as Churchill said, perhaps somewhat in exasperation as German bombs were literally falling around British heads,

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."

New Unity College President gives Climate Misconceptions lecture

2011-09-29T02:17:00.000-07:00

Our new college president, Dr. Stephen Mulkey, gave a lecture on climate change to the assembled third year class last night, about 65 or 70 students in all, plus a few staff and faculty and other students who were interested.

Mulkey, a tropical forest ecologist, was keen to dispel misconceptions that the general public has about climate change.

(The slideshow is available online here, and hopefully the audio lecture will also soon be available.)

Here is the list of misconceptions he worked on, one by one, plus my summary of his rebuttals.

Each misconception was dispelled by a series of slides containing the rebuttal, generally using real data.

• Misconception: Weather is climate - Local weather events are taken as evidence for or against global climate change.

(Rebuttal: Climate records are much longer -- thirty years of consistent data are usually required to demonstrate a climate change. Also, weather watchers may not be capable of distinguishing when mean and variance change together.)

• Misconception: Natural variation is the cause - Climate has always varied over the history of the earth, and the observed changes are part of that natural variation.

(Rebuttal: Yes it has, but the climate record shows current change is unprecedented in its speed. Modeling experiments demonstrate that humans must be the cause of 60-70 percent of the current changes.)

• Misconception: Models don't work - Climate models are unreliable and cannot predict future climate.

(Rebuttal: Models are increasingly reliable. Scientists are still tinkering with models to decrease the small amount of remaining uncertainty, but we can now predict what will happen with a good deal of confidence.)

• Misconception: It s the sun - The earth is warming, but it is caused by the sun not by human activities.

(Rebuttal: Modeling and empirical studies agree that, although solar cycles are involved in the overall system, they are not large enough in magnitude to be driving the current changes.)

• Misconception: Global greening CO2 is good for plants - Global warming may be a good thing because higher CO2 will benefit humankind through enhanced plant growth.

(Rebuttal: Plants do grow faster in higher CO2 concentrations, true, but this is more than cancelled out by the degradation of ecosystems, particularly rainforests and arctic soils, which are already adding CO2 and methane to the atmosphere.)

• Misconception: Global warming is trivial. We will be able to adapt because climate change will not have significant impacts on the Earth’s ecology and human economy.

(Rebuttal: Global warming is already non-trivial. People are already suffering and dying, in far-away places such as sub-Saharan Africa, but also here in the US as a result of extreme weather events. And it will get worse, perhaps much worse. The economic impacts of the extreme weather events in the US in just the last year added up to $42 billion, never mind the economic multiplier events of slowed growth as a result of the disaster. (The $42 billion was just in direct losses and disaster relief.))

Mulkey concluded his talk by asking why students were not "in the streets" already, and describing the tension between his duties as Unity College president, and his willingness to make a strong statement and join the ranks of those already arrested in protest (Hansen, McKibben, and Speth, to name just three that come to mind.)

(I for one would prefer he stay out of jail and help us get this college moving yet faster in the right direction to really begin to help solve this problem. But if he really wants to spend a night or two of experiential learning in the DC city jail, that shouldn't slow us down too much.)

What was most gratifying to me about the talk was the rather large number of students that stayed to ask questions.

I was instrumental, along with some of my colleagues, in making climate change and sustainability a general education requirement for all majors at Unity College several years ago, making us an early adopter of this important step which is now recommended by the ACUPCC and ASSHE.

But I wouldn't say that this was then, nor has it been since, popular among students. Even some other faculty have complained. It was a fairly radical step at the time, and many thought we were forcing the subject on students.

I think time and hard experience will show that we were right to do so, but in the meantime it was obvious from the reception to last night's talk that some of the heavier hostility has now waned, and it's certainly good to see the going get a little easier. I've really been enjoying my two sections of the required class this year, primarily because of the strong student interest in the subject matter.

It doesn't hurt that the administration seems to "have my back."

Last night only a small handful of students were dismissive or bored, and twenty or so hung around to ask questions and learn more.

Next week's lecture by Dr. Mulkey will take the discussion to the next level.

Meanwhile, back in class, we will begin to unpack a few of the assertions Stephen made and take a longer look at the evidence in each case, trying to answer students' more in-depth questions.

Tune in for the next exciting episode!

More on the Bakken for class today

2011-09-27T02:35:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/business/energy-environment/in-north-dakota-wasted-natural-gas-flickers-against-the-sky.html?hpw

Principled administration

2011-09-27T02:31:00.001-07:00

Reminded me of someone I know well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/nyregion/the-secrets-of-a-good-principal.html?src=me&ref=general

All the fun of the fair

2011-09-26T09:49:00.001-07:00

The thirty-somethingth annual MOFGA Common Ground Fair was this weekend and Unity College had a number of activities, including the organization of a giant number 350 made of real fair-going humans.

We also had a booth in the Energy and Shelter area. here at students Kelly, Rebecca and Elizabeth on duty Sunday afternoon.

The wall in the background is supposed to be a demonstration of failed insulation. It worked well for most folks, but we did get a handful who would come right up and say "That's not the right way to do it!" without waiting for the explanation or reading the sign that titled "Little Wall of Horrors."

Well, no, we do know that's not the way.... promise...

Thanks to Jesse, Anthony, Jake, Joey, Sandra, Amy, Rebbecca, Elizabeth, Kelly, Melora, Tom, Cheryl, Sierra, Aliza, Roland, Teneel, Sam, Jonah, Amanda, Randy, and Laura for the help with the booth.

NPR on oil boom, for class

2011-09-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/25/140784004/new-boom-reshapes-oil-world-rocks-north-dakota

Hoofs and dags and Captives

2011-09-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the first of two field trips each academic year in which Aimee and I host first year students from Unity College's Captive Wildlife Care and Education program at our farm.

This program, called "Captive" for short among students, trains applied biologists for careers in zoo=keeping and other animal care work at a professional or managerial level. Students may also go into veterinary careers.

It's a very popular program with young women, but there are a handful of young men too. The students are characterized by a particular fondness for animals.

Aimee and I enjoy having the students to the farm because a) it takes away some of the very back-breaking work of sheep care, and b) it's fun to watch the students literally come to grips with the sheep. The professors who run the program, Sarah Cunningham and Cheryl Frederick, are routinely delighted with the arrangement too, because of the great experience for their students at a crucial time in their education.

It's a good trade for all concerned, but especially the students, who like all students need to learn some important lessons.

Sheep are cute and fuzzy, especially our little lambs, but they're also wild and woolly, and will struggle mightily to get out of the shepherds hands.

They also smell.

A lot.

They smell a lot. And it's not a good smell.

I'm not sure how many "Captive" students question their career choices when, often for the first time in their lives, they are told to grab on to their damp, stinky, heavy, powerful, struggling animal and make her assume the proper control position for hoof care or medicine, or whatever peculiar and seemingly perverted task is called for, but if they do, well, that's a good lesson, isn't it?

One that had better be learned sooner rather than later in the college career. If you don't like handling sheep at this point in your career, you aren't going to like giraffe or hippopotami or grizzlum bear very much later, either, and so it may be time to go off and get yourself a communications degree, or join some other less contact-oriented line of work.

Today's task was FAMACHA® care, as well as the ubiquitous dung tags or "dags" for short, and a little hoof trimming. Nothing too difficult, but, as always, animals need to be immobilized and properly handled to manage all this, and it's probably the handling part that is the main lesson.

It's certainly the main emotional lesson. As we routinely tell the students, sheep care is a bit like rugby, and indeed it's no surprise that the regions of the world that produce the most domestic sheep, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and of course my own homeland of northern England, also produce the best rugby players.

There are no half-way measures in rugby and sheep handling.

You just have to get "stuck in" and grab your sheep. This kind of gumption is not that easy to learn quickly, especially if you're a fashionable young lady from suburban America who has just left her teenage years.

There are other good lessons. FAMACHA care provides one. The main point of this routine is the control of the barber-pole worm, Haemonchus contortous. Infestation by this parasite is exhibited by the symptom of anemia, which itself is exhibited by lack of red blood cells in the blood vessels of the eyelid.

If the eyelid is white or creamy colored and almost devoid of red blood cells, then you treat for worms using a broad spectrum anti-helmintic such as Ivormec.

Notice the scientific language. The lesson is less about FAMACHA or worms, and more about science and its practical uses. First year students fresh out of high school in the first four weeks of their college career are apt to cherry-pick the lessons they like and the lessons they don't like. Routinely, the lessons they like are the ones with warm fuzzy animals, and the lessons they don't like have long words, math, and lots of complicated science reasoning.

This is understandable. One necessary character trait for a good college teacher is empathy for the student. It's a long time ago now, but I still remember well enough being an seventeen-year old RAF aeronautical engineering trainee, and being fascinated by fast fighter jets and less interested in the math, science, and engineering of flight.

But an empathetic student, faced with a sad wormy sheep, being taught by an empathetic professor, can begin to grasp that the proper care of this animal depends on her properly learning the science of worm management, and thus the science of biology, particularly cell biology and evolutionary ecology, is required.

And thus, dear readers, another applied biological scientist is born, and the world, or worm, turns once more.

Two sheep needed to be wormed, which was occasion for another big word : "intubate." Lacking a proper drenching tool, the Womerlippi Farmers get Ivormec into a sheep's stomach and importantly, not into a sheep's lungs, with an intubation kit that was originally designed for hypothermic new-born lambs. It's a little awkward but works.

The sheep had been out on good pasture all summer, so their hooves were nice and didn't need much trimming.

They didn't even have too many dags, which was in some ways a pity because dagging is a disgusting job and at this point in a college career a Captive students badly needs to have to do some truly disgusting animal care job or another.

They did fight a bit, but the proper holds and positions take care of that. A sheep can't move at all if held properly in any one of half a dozen holds. The students learn quickly to get the animal into the proper position and keep him there. Only one lamb escaped treatment, by scrambling rather athletically over a gate we thought was too tall to scramble over.

You never learn not to be surprised at what animals may do.

Three groups of students were handled in this way, nearly fifty students in all, but only ten sheep, counting the one that escaped. Three or four sheep per group.

Still, everyone got to get their hands on a sheep. And a good day was had by all, except possibly the sheep.

There was also a bit of talking involved, as we explained scientific care routines and bits and pieces of sheep medicine, and a little farming, all by reference to science. It's relatively easy to actually get lessons into the student's brain, once you've got his or her attention using the hands-on or haptic teaching method, wet wooly animals optional.

We call this approach praxis at Unity College. It's a relatively unique feature of our pedagogy. And it works.

Which saves an awful lot of effort and money. You'd be surprised how much expensive education is out there that doesn't work nearly as well.

You'd think folks would catch on, but they don't.

Aimee has pictures here. Enjoy.

Piscataquis Village Project

2011-09-25T00:30:00.000-07:00

In a very argumentative paper published in a book called "Smart Growth and Climate Change,"(ed, Matthias Ruth from the Maryland Policy School) a few years ago, I argued that so-called "smart growth" planning regulations would not "save" climate emissions.

And they won't. I stand by that claim.

Smart growth is not restriction on growth. It is growth, only (arguably) smarter. It adds emissions. To actually reduce emissions takes shrinkage, not growth, unless of course you retire old sources of emissions at the same time.

Think about it.

But while you're thinking about, understand that I'm not arguing against well-planned development. Better planning is something we badly need, especially when performed voluntarily.

Here's a recent letter from a developer:

Hello Mick-
I stumbled across your "teaching, research and service" website this morning. Tons of interesting stuff. I wonder if you know about or may be interested in a project we are working on in Piscataquis County. We have a way to go yet, but we are off to a reasonable start with $250,000 in contingent investment. If you have a chance, take a look. I'd be interested in any comments you may have. Link below.
Sincerely-
Tracy Gayton

www.facebook.com/villageproject

Tripoli University

2011-09-22T00:18:00.000-07:00

A fake university becomes a real one. If they can do it, so can we. Let's replace all the fake education with real education.

From the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/21/libyas-main-university-prepares-new-term

The best excerpt:

"For the first time in 42 years the university has the chance to be a normal academic institution. "Until now we had the form of a university but not the function," says Sami Khaskusha, a political scientist. "We fed young people garbage. [Muammar] Gaddafi just used this place to boost his cult of personality and bolster the regime. It did nothing for Libyan society."

Can you model?

2011-09-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

A rash of energy related articles in my morning paper today.

1) A debate on the future of US green energy in specific and solar power in particular

2) Bud McFarlane gives us strategic advice on petroleum

3) An update on the new oil fields being developed in the western hemisphere

Enough to spoil a perfectly good cup of coffee. Especially the American Enterprise guy going on about solar power.

Here's the rub: We're at 390 plus PPM of carbon dioxide. More than 400 and Texas the state becomes Texas the desert -- and not in too many years, if this year is anything to go by. Maine gets the climate of Virginia or Georgia by 2090.

And the second rub, which combines with the first in a double whammy of super-geo-strategic proportions: Extrapolate 85 million barrels per day, or 32 giga-barrels a year, by roughly two thirds of your favorite global economic growth rate between now and 2050.

If you like six percent, use four percent.

If you like four percent, use two-point-five percent.

It doesn't matter, actually, which one you use. Two percent is enough to do the job just fine.

Just be sure to get the exponent right.

(If you don't know how to do that, please stop talking about oil and climate change.)

For extra credit, take your new, very hypothetical, global oil demand number, and convert it to annual carbon dioxide contribution to the atmosphere.

For extra, extra credit, spell "impossibility theorem."

Krugman v Minkiw

2011-09-18T02:01:00.000-07:00

Last time our introductory economics class was taught, we used Professor Gregory Mankiw's book.

We'd have kept using it if it hadn't been so expensive. Most of our students work at least part-time, and any money they get from parents or loans or GI Bill tends to have to go for food or rent, not textbooks.

They certainly can't afford $200 textbooks when $20 ones are available that cover the same material.

Another, by Professor Paul Krugman, that covered the same material was available, and there were plenty of secondhand copies on the Amazon resale market. This semester's students were able to get their books for less than $20.

Is it ironic that last year's expensive book was by the professor who is advising the party that thinks millionaires should pay less in taxes than the middle class, while this year's cheap book is by the professor who is arguing for a yet-greater jobs program?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/us/politics/obama-tax-plan-would-ask-more-of-millionaires.html?_r=1&hp

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Buried treasure

2011-09-17T03:52:00.000-07:00

An excellent and delightful article on a family's experience with an innovative Russian school. There are probably dozens of lessons on pedagogy embedded within.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/my-familys-experiment-in-extreme-schooling.html?src=me&ref=general

Here's another one, a little more obvious to me, although not, I suspect to those who occupy smiley-face planet.

Take home: grit is important to success in academics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me&adxnnlx=1316257230-NUg7uokGWtnjXoj/ZeRH8w

Krugman and Colbert

2011-09-16T02:57:00.001-07:00

For Econ class -- to show that macro-economic debate can be entertaining.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/396583/september-13-2011/paul-krugman

Corporate carbon counting

2011-09-15T01:46:00.000-07:00

The Guardian reports that many if not most major multinationals have begun to think directly about climate change in their business strategy.

This could be good, or bad, if like Exxon Mobil or BP the business strategy they have chosen is to take advantage of climate change, as in these companies' decisions to drill for oil and gas in the high arctic.

But at least many of the corporations are interested in saving energy.

"...59% of companies reported that the cost of schemes to reduce emissions such as energy saving projects in buildings, installing low-carbon power and changing the behaviour of staff, were recouped within three years.

Almost three-quarters of businesses (74%) who responded to the survey now have emissions reductions targets, up from two-thirds (65%) in 2010.

Utilities companies have the best average climate change performance while energy companies lag behind other sectors, with fewer setting targets, taking action or disclosing information."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/14/worlds-largest-firms-climate-change

Another La Niña winter?

2011-09-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

Good, if it happens, because I'm not sure we're ready for the first El Nino of sunspot cycle 25.

Lucky too, we may not get sunspot cycle 25, or it may be too weak to notice.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html

Website for class

2011-09-13T02:14:00.001-07:00

http://climatecommunication.org/

Why neoliberalism will lead to Chinese domination

2011-09-13T01:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/12/how-china-dominates-solar-power?intcmp=122

Meanwhile, the US and UK governments have available the lowest-cost finance of any governments in living memory, and our multinationals are sitting on mountains of cash.

How much difference do you think we could make to the balance of foreign trade for energy if some of that money was invested in home-produced renewable energy?

Or are we just betting that the Chinese will suffer more from climate change than we will?

I wish we were looking that far forward, but we're not.

"Sleeper" technologies

2011-09-12T01:23:00.001-07:00

I have a list of these potential game-changers that I monitor from time to time.

Thorium reactors.

Solid oxide fuel cells

Grid scale energy storage

Sheffield pride

2011-09-12T00:57:00.000-07:00

My home town, Sheffield, in northern England is a gritty industrial city of notoriously laconic and plan-spoken inhabitants, surrounded by green countryside and wild moorland. It has long been famous for edge tools, silverware and silver plate; and these days, manufacturing of the special steels used in jet engines and gas turbines and the like.

The latest news is that Sheffield is now top of the league table for the UK government's solar power installation scheme.

The ancient Britons and Romans made iron in Sheffield. The town essentially invented modern steel making, including Benjamin Huntsman's famous crucible steel and the Bessemer process which was commercially perfected in a Sheffield works.

Solar PV manufacturing and testing was established in Sheffield only recently, but it seems that the town has embraced the new technology.

Still relevant after 2,000 years of industrial innovation.

Gus Speth was in jail

2011-09-10T04:40:00.001-07:00

I haven't been doing too well keeping up with the Keystone protests, what with the start of the semester and all. But when Andrew Revkin wrote an article suggesting that the pipeline wasn't quite the problem it's cracked up to be, I knew there'd be quite a lot of blow back from leading environmentalists.

Revkin, to his credit, published the entire roster of responses. You have to give the guy credit for consistently supporting rigorous debate.

I read the whole thing. It's worth a read.

You sort of expect Bill McKibben to court arrest at a protest, but when I read that Gus Speth was also in jail, that got my attention.

Terra Haus on Treehugger, etc, etc

2011-09-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

A bunch of eco-hip web sites picked up on the Terra Haus blog (run by Doug Fox.

Very cool.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/09/unity-college-terrahaus.php

http://www.jetsongreen.com/

http://www.mnn.com/your-home/remodeling-design/blogs/unity-colleges-deep-green-student-hausing

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/green-building-news/unity-college-s-terrahaus-debut

Farm and food production videos for class

2011-09-07T06:37:00.000-07:00

There are five sections of the BBC video "A Farm for the Future" that we'll watch, as well as the new Maine Farmland Trust series "Meet your Farmer."

Here's A Farm for the Future part 1. You can find parts 2-5 on the pull-down menu to the right when the You Tube page launches.

A year of extreme weather events

2011-09-06T00:06:00.000-07:00

Useful but hard-to-face list published today in the Guardian:

A year of US disasters – 2011 so far

• Hurricane Irene, August 20-29. Over $7bn and around 50 deaths.

• Upper Midwest flooding. The Missouri and Souris rivers overflowed in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri. Damages: $2bn.

• Mississippi river flooding, spring and summer. Damages neared $4bn.

• Drought and heatwave in Texas, Oklahoma. Over $5bn.

• Tornadoes in midwest and south-east in May kill 177 and cost more than $7bn in losses.

• Tornadoes in the Ohio Valley, south-east and midwest on April devastate the city of Tuscaloosa, kill 32 and cause more than $9bn in damages.

• Tornadoes hit from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania 14–16 April. Toll: $2bn in damages.

• 59 tornadoes in midwest and north-east April 8-11. Damages: $2.2bn.

• 46 tornadoes in central and southern states 4 and 5 April. Toll: $2.3bn in damages.

• Blizzard late January paralyse cities from Chicago to the north-east. Toll: 36 deaths and more than $2bn in damages.

Of course, all this was carefully predicted. See the table on page eight of the 2007 IPPC FAR Summary for Policymakers.

www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf

And the 2006 Stern Review stated that we should invest about 1% of GDP per annum now in measures to control emissions to avoid much larger GDP reductions of 5 to 20 percent per annum later in the century.

How much longer before we all come to our senses?

Taking the fleece to the mill and touring the research sites

2011-09-03T03:58:00.000-07:00

Photo: Unity College anemometer tower site in Dexter, Maine.

I took a nice long field trip yesterday.

The primary spur for the field trip was the recent tropical storm, Irene, which necessitated site visits to all my wind anemometer towers to check guy lines and make sure the towers were still safe. The towers are measuring the wind to help determine where Maine's wind power systems should and shouldn't be located. I'm responsible to the state and the landowners for the safety of the towers.

If I was going to visit the sites, then I'd have to pull the data too. It's always good to pull data when you can, and make multiple copies of the data files, in case something goes wrong with the equipment later.

This is enormously valuable data -- there have been five billion dollars of internal investment already in Maine's wind power industry, as well as many millions of dollars and years of labor spent in compensation, litigation, and out-of-court settlements for noise nuisance created by wind farms, and our survey, a joint project with the University of Maine School of Engineering Technology, is the one of very few systematic programs in the state that show much promise to reduce some of these costs. It's the only program that is working with hard wind data. The state needs these data very badly. It's my job to secure it.

If I was going to drive around the three sites where we have stand-alone anemometer towers (there are three other sites where we have sensors placed on buildings or cell towers), then I might as well drop off the fleece from the Womerlippi Farm sheep at the woolen mill, which is on the way, and pick up my store credit slip in return. Our small and very unprofitable farm needs all the income it can get.

The first site, the W. R. Sherburne and Sons dairy farm in Dexter, Maine, is one of the state's largest and most successful organic dairy farms. This is a very successful and vigorous enterprise, and it just happens to be located on top of a hill, the northern side of which the Department of Energy's 50 meter wind map says is a Wind Power Density Class (WPC) 2 resource area. Class 2 is not adequate for any kind of commercial turbine, but there is good scientific reason to think that the map is inaccurate, particularly when it comes to northern exposures, and there is good scientific evidence to suggest that the winds at higher elevations, at the 60-100 meter range of modern turbines, are greater than Class 2.

We've already demonstrated that the wind power density class of a site not far from this one is WPC 4, when the map says that it's WPC 2.

I was able to pull the truck right up to the tower. I examined the guy lines, then pulled the data chip and copied the file to my computer.

Here's the computer logger, an NRG Symphonie. This is a state-of-the-art device that can log two years of data from over a dozen different kinds of weather sensors without requiring so much as a battery change. (Although in practice, I tend to check the batteries quarterly along with the towers -- you may as well do so.)

The next stop on my field trip was the Bartlett Yarns woolen mill in Harmony, Maine. Earlier, I had loaded about 150 pounds of fleece in black contractor bags in the back of my truck.

The Bartlett Yarns mill makes high quality woolen yarns and other woolen products, materials for hand spinners such as roving, as well as woolen clothing and bags and such. The yarn is cleaned, carded and spun on site using the original nineteenth century equipment.

A hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, Maine was packed with small scale industrial enterprises like this one. Maine also had a lot more sheep then. In fact, in my home town of Jackson, Maine and the neighboring town of Dixmont, sheep husbandry was the primary agricultural system.

Here's the mill building and the Womerlippi Farm truck offloading the fleece.

Other than selling directly to the customer, which requires patience and marketing skills I don't have, small scale wool producers have two options for selling their fleece in Maine. You can sell to the annual Maine Sheep Breeder's Association Wool Pool for ¢50/pound. Or you can get store credit at Bartlett Yarns.

Store credit allows you to purchase Bartlett Yarns products -- carded and washed wool, roving, and yarn -- at a price less than wholesale. Our price works out to roughly $3.50 a skein. We can sell the yarn on in small quantities at $7/skein, and could probably do better yet online, so the wool business is at least potentially a source of farm income.

Up to this point the Womerlippi Farm management (just Aimee and I!) has not, however, made much money selling yarn. We're working on it slowly, in much the same way we're working on making money on eggs, livestock, and meat products. Every year we make one or two improvements to the system and close the gap between costs and income a little bit more.

Bartlett Yarns itself is a wondrous place, like stepping back in time, but it's also a profitable business selling a premium product at what seems to me to be a very affordable price. Look online and you can quickly find similar yarn for sale for twice, or three times the price. It's not unheard of for hand knitters to pay $20/skein for hand-dyed yarn. Bartlett Yarn's product is not hand-dyed, but it costs much less. Four or five or six skeins make a decent sized woolly sweater, and you might pay $30 for that much yarn at this venerable and very useful business.

Have I mentioned I like woolen sweaters? I keep trying to figure out how to make them on my own knitting machine with our own yarn. I haven't made one I like yet, but I'm having fun trying.

Here's some of the Victorian machinery at Bartlett Yarns, and some of their quite beautiful product.

I use slideshows of machinery like this whenever I talk about the Industrial Revolution in class.

Back in the day, a lot of child labor would have been used, but in this day and age, there's no exploitation at the woolen mill, just a team of ordinary Mainers trying to make a decent product, a decent living, and to make sense out of one of our otherwise under-utilized and even wasted agricultural resources.

From Harmony I drove west to Mercer, Maine, where another anemometer tower resides atop a hill that is home to one of Maine's most successful sheep farms. Blue Ribbon Farm in Mercer produces premium breed stock and high quality commercial hay.

A good long and somewhat overdue chat with the owner was the first order of business. The results from the first year of data collection at this site raised more questions than answers because of a very high, almost suspect wind shear factor number. The wind shear is the term in the Power Law equation that corrects for increased wind at higher elevation above ground level. You derive the wind shear factor empirically by having a lower and a higher anemometer on your anemometer tower, and reversing the Power Law equation to derive the wind shear as the unknown. You may then more accurately correct for wind speeds at different elevations. The higher the wind shear, the higher the wind speed above the topmost anemometer on your tower, and the lower the wind speed below the topmost anemometer.

The measured wind shear at this sites, and at a lot of our sites in Maine, is very high, much higher than expected. Until DoE and NREL came out with a paper earlier this year that suggests similar results for the midwest, I was unable to explain these results. I'm still at a loss, but am beginning to know what to do. The first thing I need to do is get more data from my high wind shear sites, which means I'd like to leave my tower on this particular hayfield for another year. The landowners have to give up some hay to make this possible, so this required me to explain myself properly as to why we needed to do this, and what potential benefits and pitfalls might ensue.

Here's the tower the day it was finished last year, with the wind crew members Amanda and Steve that helped me put it up.

And that, other than the drive back to college and an hour or so of less pleasant paperwork, was my big day out last week, the first week of term.

One idea that occurs to me, now I've finished this blog post, is that the folks at Bartlett Yarns, the Womerlippi Farmers, the dairy farmers at Dexter and the sheep farmers at Mercer hosting our anemometer towers all have something in common -- we're all trying to make economic sense out of good farming and good husbandry and rural, small-scale renewable energy in Maine.

That doesn't make us necessarily better people, but it does mean that we are at least trying to be more self-reliant, and at least trying to figure out a way to live within the planet's means.

One very under utilized resource is the educational uses to which field work like this can be put in helping students learn to live within the planet's means.

One of the things I like about my life is that I get the chance to combine my work as an educator and researcher with my hobby and second job as a small farmer. Students enjoy coming to the farm and learning about sustainable husbandry, and I enjoy teaching them. We have a series of such field trips scheduled, and I'm looking forward to them. I also enjoy having students work on the various research and demonstration projects I have ongoing at any given time, and using the lessons that arise, spontaneously or planned, to more effectively deliver lessons.

Unfortunately, because of the college schedule, it's hard to get the much longer periods of time that would be needed to take students through some of the more interesting processes and to more interesting sites. This is one of the factors behind my perennial complaint about the so called fifty-minute college class -- an oxymoron if ever there was one, that a routinely unsuccessful pedagogy prevents our use of a routinely successful one. Regular readers will be familiar with this particular meme so I won't repeat it. But yesterday was a case in point. A superb field trip in agriculture and renewable energy went to waste for lack of students.

Where were the students? In fifty minute classes, carefully distributed throughout their day in such a way as to prevent their participation in an all-day field trip.

I can, however, post the details of the expedition here, with photographs, and that will have to suffice for now until the college figures out a way for me to get students into these experiences more easily. I'm working on various ideas, such as summer programming and block scheduling.

Nothing much to do with sustainability...

2011-09-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

My old buddy Gary sent me these. He's the tall dark fellow.

Guess which one is me? Click on the image to enlarge.

Just to remind myself that I was once as young as our first years.

Or almost.

Unity College SAR team members please note, the litter handling technique circa 1983. Hasn't changed much.

SPICE up your geoengineering

2011-08-31T23:27:00.001-07:00

This from the Guardian today.

SPICE, apparently, stands for Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering.

New Samsø movie

2011-08-31T02:23:00.000-07:00

This one is a little more reflective. A little less information on renewable energy, a little more information on people's attitudes, particularly on how the local farmers have investments in the energy projects.

The movie will run automatically. Click on the image to go to You Tube, use 'full screen' to enlarge.

The old one is below too, for comparison.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;iFrame&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

On reflection...

2011-08-28T04:42:00.000-07:00

Don't the CERN cloud formation results strongly suggest that empirical models such as Lean and Rind's 2009 multiple regression make better short-term candidates for setting targets in policy formation, at least until we know more?

Note that the high empirical value derived for the cooling effect of sulphate aerosols in L & R 2009 is consistent with the CERN results -- and troubling for those committed to the IPCC consensus ideas on GHG emissions reduction priorities.

Assuming they read it, of course.

One big difference between the policy world and the world of natural scientists is that policy people, especially economic policy people, go on making old arguments long after the empirical evidence has overtaken the argument.

Energy for ME

2011-08-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

Recently, I went to the Energy for ME Summer Institute at Schoodic SERC.

I was asked to give a couple of guest lectures on the future of energy supply in Maine, particularly highlighting the need for STEM skills in middle and high schools so Mainers can understand and control our energy supply better, but also highlighting renewable energy made right here in Maine.

I've uploaded the slideshow I used to the public side of my Google Docs page so you can see it if you'd like to. It's a little difficult to get all my points without the lecture, but you should get the drift of most.

Try the STEM word problem. I made one mistake in drafting the text of this problem. There's a dozen Womerlippi Farm free-range eggs and a package of home-grown bacon (or some more vegan gift) to the Unity College or Maine school student that can find this now-deliberate error.

This was a fun assignment for me. Energy for ME is run by the Island Institute. Which great "think and do" tank , as a very long time fan of Maine and Scottish islands, I am highly supportive of.

I made sure to take lots of books and posters and techy things, anemometers and solar panels and wotnot, for the middle- and high-schoolers and their teachers and parents to look at.

As always I enjoyed the SERC setting and the granite and sea air of the Schoodic peninsula. Fifteen million dollars of ARRA and other recent federal funding has made this place a superb gathering and conference center.*

A big Thumbs Up to the Island Institute and their Energy for ME collaborators and to the staff of SERC. Jolly well done.

*Our own Conservation Law Enforcement program students will be early beneficiaries this fall, as they show up for their new semester program organized by Associate Professor Tim "the Colonel" Peabody and collaborators throughout the federal and state conservation law community.

Quote of the month

2011-08-26T03:16:00.001-07:00

"People who think evolution is just a theory should get last year's flu shot."

(Paraphrased from this editorial here.)

Of course, even though this is a great quote, it's funniness depends on the author's science misconception.

The theory of evolution is "just" a theory.

But so is the theory of gravity.

Keeping up with the Jones's (and several thousand other serious climate researchers)

2011-08-26T00:24:00.000-07:00

One of the things I enjoy about my work in teaching climate change and related problems in energy is how quickly we are developing new information. Climate science has been a serious and well-funded priority for nearly twenty years in the academy, and so there's a fairly large infrastructure, and a large number of participants in the worldwide science process.

This is not to say that we still couldn't answer some important questions faster.

It is to say that there's a lot of new information to sort through, and it's very easy to get left behind. I'm a natural student and always have been. Other than a few odd hobbies (like pig farming and household energy retrofit) there's really not much out there that I enjoy more than reading the science literature and trying to revise my internal mental model of how the climate system works accordingly, so this is fun for me.

If you don't read the literature in this game, you'll be woefully out-of-date in a year or less. I'm always fascinated by how many amateur proponents there are, such as the large number of folks still on the Al Gore circuit, and so on, that don't bother to keep up with this stuff.

This latest study from CERN and collaborators contains some interesting and complicated new material about atmospheric chemistry that will inform and perhaps revise the large scale General Circulation Models (or GCMs) used in climate modeling and prediction.

At this point, the new material doesn't seriously affect the most important policy concern, which is how quickly and in what directions will the regional climates change in the next few decades. What it does mean, if supported by other lines of evidence, is that an entirely new explanation of cloud formation will be needed, and the GCMs will need to be re-parameterized to the new explanation.

Which is all to the good, because a revised explanation of clouds will go someway to reducing the remaining unexplained variation in the GCMs, which will allow us to better hone our policy recommendations to reduce upset in the human economy.

Assuming we can get people to listen, that is.

El Nino and conflict

2011-08-25T02:36:00.000-07:00

One climate phenomenon our students study in some detail is the El Nino/Southern Oscillation or ENSO cycle.

The Earth Institute has a new take on some of the downside ENSO impacts.

Are you sitting down?

2011-08-24T01:26:00.001-07:00

That's what a lawyer said to our new college president Stephen Mulkey last Thursday.

The attorney then went on to tell Stephen that the college would be receiving an anonymous $10 million gift, earmarked for our endowment.

Nothing remotely like this has ever happened to our small college.

When the announcement was made at the start-of-term assembly yesterday, Dr. Mulkey asked for questions.

We were all far too stunned to ask any.

This itself was remarkable, since we at Unity College are not generally so reticent with our questions and comments.

When I think back over what it took to bring the college to the point where we could be the recipients of such confidence, well, there's just been an awful lot of hard work for me and my colleagues. At times it was exhausting and demoralizing. At other times, it seemed like we were getting somewhere.

This year of 2011 was shaping up to be a watershed year for the college even before the anonymous gift. We have completely rebuilt our curriculum, updating it for 21st century sustainability problems. We have revitalized our campus with several new buildings, including our Terra Haus, the first student residence in the US to meet the Passive House standard. We hired a good half-dozen excellent and superbly qualified new faculty colleagues, including Doctors Mulkey and Trumble (President and VPAA respectively). We won two $100,000-plus research grants for summer sustainability field research involving students and a $200,000 Davis Foundation grant to support curriculum reform and accessible technology. Things were looking good.

Money was still tight, as it always is at our small institution, and we still had to think long and hard about every expenditure, a process in which I'm heavily involved as the Faculty Moderator and a member of various key planning committees.

There are always at least a half-dozen completely vital and essential things we could do with every last dollar.

Sometimes I feel like frugality, particularly frugal sustainability, is what this college has that is best in itself, to give to the world.

But we were getting somewhere. I felt buoyant walking around campus, doing my daily business, organizing my research crew, seeing the new, super sustainable buildings, the solar arrays on the Unity House and the Terra House, the huge new fields of productive organic veggies grown for the dining hall and the local food pantry, all thriving in the Maine sunshine.

And then someone, name unknown, gave us ten million dollars on top of all that.

Our budget deliberations will still be difficult. There will still be four or five competing and perfectly vital things we might do with every last dollar. (Down from six!) We will still need to be very frugal.

But I think what this gift has dome more than anything -- and perfect timing at the start of a new term and a new college budget year! -- is to ratify all our hard work.

This gift tells us that we are appreciated, that we've come a long way, and that important people understand that we have a long way to go, but we are going to get there.

Monbiot on economics

2011-08-24T00:47:00.000-07:00

British environmental blogger George Monbiot, has been writing about the economics of Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity without Growth.

This kind of economics was a major focus for my PhD studies. Jackson takes the ecological economics of Herman Daly and Georgescu-Roegen and the members of ISEE to the next step, intellectually speaking.

Unfortunately, and fortunately, nothing very much will happen as a result of Professor Jackson's book or George Monbiot's editorial plug for Professor Jackson's book.

Unfortunately, because without a new economics, we are headed for some very difficult years on planet earth, as the planet's various climate zones shift around, and as our short experiment with fossil-fueled human population and economic growth comes to an end, one way or another.

Fortunately, because untold human misery unfolds every time some academic "scribbler" comes up with a new economic game plan.

Keynes will probably always have the best line on this problem:

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. "

In particular, in today's America, a vast and unpredictable movement of economic conservatism, of which the so-called Tea Party is just the tip of the iceberg, will refuse to participate in any transition to Jackson's kind of economics. It's possible that some portion of this movement might even become violent, were some other group in society to gain political power and attempt to impose a (new) Jacksonian policy.

Monbiot doesn't talk about this, but I tend to think it an important point.

We're a long, long way from any kind of serious implementation of these kinds of ideas. But it would be good to talk about them.

Preferably without revolutionary or counter-revolutionary violence.

Oxytocin implicated in "group think"?

2011-08-21T01:19:00.000-07:00

That's not what the article says. It's my extrapolation, related to yesterday's post on critical thinking. But worth thinking about. All those college cliques...

Critical mass

2011-08-20T03:46:00.000-07:00

College starts next week with the usual faculty work week, during which we get ourselves organized and ready.

Students arrive the following weekend. I'm happy about this, and anticipatory.

I'm teaching three content-oriented classes, two sections of our general education Environmental Sustainability class on food, population energy and climate change, and a section of our introductory economics class, all of which makes me very happy because I enjoy the content and students, especially in the economics class.

But as always I'm thinking a lot about skills, especially critical thinking skills, which are a major outcome for Environmental Sustainability.

I've learned that it's best to start by discussing what constitutes critical thinking with students, both to determine their current level of skill, which varies quite a lot by year and individual, but also to make the outcome visible and explicit, a kind of goal-setting exercise.

"See here, this is what we need to try to do, and if you get good at it, these benefits will follow."

Critical thinking is really the difference between a serious college education and imitations. There are plenty of college programs out there that never really succeed in developing this skill. And huge benefits do follow for the individual and society. I've written at more length about this elsewhere on this blog.

And without the particular kind of environmental criticism that is the environmental movement, we wouldn't have any raison d'être for America's Environmental College.

So it's especially important to our work at Unity College.

Of course, one downside to becoming a powerful critical thinker is a kind of loneliness. Critical thinking requires the questioning of "group think," a very pervasive phenomenon in any primate society.

If you question "group think," necessarily you are set apart from the group. You become a loner.

Even in college this group-think is very visible, even in the classroom, as in when all the student tribes and cliques sit together. Sometimes I find it necessary to have students sound off by numbers into new groups, just to break up these old groups, just to get them thinking differently.

It's so easy for folk to be captured by the social milieu in which they spend their time, and so difficult to develop independence of mind.

I teach mostly upper division classes, and so students come to me having developed the reading, writing, math and speaking skills that enable us to explore difficult problems like climate change critically.

At this point in their educations, it's good to try to get them to set aside the patterns of early youth, particularly the identity-building primate socialization that leads to these patterns.

But this can be very painful for those who are insecure in their identity.

That might be one reason I like this part of my job. Not that I get to inflict pain! But that I get to be the midwife at the birth of a newer, stronger, more resilient identity for the brightest of our young people, the identity of an emerging independent thinker.

Here's the Wikipedia list of critical thinking skills:

....observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and meta-cognition... due consideration to:

Evidence through observation
Context
Relevant criteria for making the judgment well
Applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment
Applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand

In addition to possessing strong critical-thinking skills, one must be disposed to engage problems and decisions using those skills. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, and fairness.

Species movements faster than thought

2011-08-19T03:31:00.000-07:00

This is a interesting article, a summary of some recent findings.

$1.50 a watt "not out of the question."

2011-08-16T03:50:00.000-07:00

I've reported elsewhere on the grid parity achievement in CA.

This latest is a technologically and economically competent journalistic article about solar power -- an extreme rarity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/15/solar-powered-homes-us

Subsidies to go: Ethanol update

2011-08-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/15/us-corn-belt-farmers

Energy saving in schools

2011-08-15T04:03:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/education/15energy.html?hp