NYT Exxon-erates

The Times has a revealing feature article on Exxon today. Titled "Green is for Sissies," it will be read by very few folks in the sustainability field, although all of us have a major stake in what this oil industry leader thinks and does. But while many of my colleagues in the sustainability discipline and movement are capable of serious, disciplined and self-honest analysis, they remain a minority. Wishful thinking, wooly-mindedness, and New-Agey wishy-washyness is the norm. The current version of which seems to be, "Barrack will save us," or "wait until after January 20." This article would suggest to any serious person how much more difficult, controversial, and a consequence of serious analysis, our salvation will actually be.

Or, as the famous general allegedly said, when the going gets tough, they send for the sonsabitches.

Don't get me wrong. I could happily be an Obama ditto-head. I can't wait for a serious federal energy policy, and a cap and trade bill or carbon tax, preferably both.

But at the same time, I want to know what the overall objective trends are, trends that even the sainted Obama almost certainly cannot control. And I'm not talking about the Dow Industrials.

Examples of important trends I like to watch:
Atmospheric methane concentration
Atmospheric CO2
Proven oil reserves
Share of global oil and gas production owned by national governments hostile to US and UK
Mindset of US industry leaders too big to fear the upcoming Democratic majority very much
Advances in renewable technology likely to affect prices of renewable energy
Latest science on sea level rise and stability of major ice sheets

The Exxon feature informs number six on my list. I watch them like a hawk. This huge company almost single-handedly distorted US public opinion on climate change for an entire decade. The average US citizen still has very little information about climate change or climate policy. Despite the fact that the US is the leading nation in the climate science effort, including most of the now-Nobelite authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the average Joe or Jane in this country remains more or less completely ignorant of even the simplest understanding of climate basics. Thanks in large part to Exxon-Mobil.

But Exxon conspicuously bailed out of the climate denial business last year. Not that all is forgiven, but the new fact is that the lingering US ignorance in climate affairs is now mostly a factor of a) the poor education system and general all-round lack of science understanding in this country, b) the scurrilous and superficial media system, and c) general disinterest, especially when 401Ks are plunging all around the nation.

Even though drought, wildfire, extreme weather, and growing seasons are already dramatically affected all around the country, most Americans, it seems, could care less.

So what does Exxon itself currently think about energy and climate? Although there were some welcome fig-leafs to reducing emissions, the real money sentences in the Times article were these:

"According to Exxon’s own outlook, global oil demand is set to reach 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up sharply from 86 million barrels a day today.

Meanwhile, renewable fuels, like solar, wind and biofuels, will grow at a brisk pace but they will account for just 2 percent of the world’s energy supplies by then, according to Exxon, while oil, gas and coal will represent 80 percent of global energy needs by 2030."

In other words, Exxon believes that global demand for oil and gas will a) continue to grow as developing nations develop, and b) be actually capable of being met by pumping and drilling more oil, while c) deployment of renewables will be dwarfed by the continued growth in demand for the convenience embodied in liquid and gaseous fossil fuel.

Oh boy.

While what I think is going to happen over the next two-three decades is that we will either,

a) realize the terribly dangerous path we are on, to a pace of climate change capable, more or less, of ending civilization. In which case we will surely be looking to reduce oil demand and thus consumption quite dramatically. If Obama can help Americans achieve this understanding, he will as far as I'm concerned, be eligible for the sainthood.

Or

b), we won't realize anything of the sort, and toddle merrily off into the abyss.

What's the abyss? There are options:

1) Rapidly accelerating methane is one. We have, essentially, no idea what might happen to us if the northern methane reservoirs represented by Alaskan and Siberian soils and sediments, and undersea gas hydrates, decide to become unstable. Since they clearly are showing such signs, we are teetering on the edge right now, but few of us realize it.

2) Growth of CO2 concentration at or above the current rate of 2.2 ppm per year is another. This is just the more or less mundane climate change the IPCC expects and was set up to deal with. Since we're already on a path to a global AAT rise of around 6 degrees Celsius, this Business As Usual scenario is worrying enough. Perfectly capable of the total destruction of civilization, but more moderately so. A hundred years instead of ten. (This possibility, to me, is actually kind of soothing at this stage in my intellectual and emotional development regarding climate change.)

3) Collapse of the Greenland and/or West Antarctic Ice Sheets, exacerbated by either 1) or 2) above is another. Luckily, at an altitude of 500 feet in the Maine hinterlands, I live on a future island. Does Irving, TX, home of Exxon-Mobil?

Most likely? Number 2). But the possibility of either 1) or 3), or both, increases with each ppm/year of CO2.

What is eerie about the different perspective between my trend-watching and that represented by the NYT article is that presumably the author, and the Exxon analysts whose views he represents, are intelligent people fully capable of grasping what the climate science means. Perhaps they're even aware of it. Possibly they even read the IPCC FAR, or Jim Hansen's recent paper on the proper safe level for CO2 in the atmosphere.

But still they think that 116 million barrels a day is both possible and even desirable, and that it wouldn't matter very much if the best we could achieve for renewables by 2030 is 2%!

I can't for the life of me imagine why, and how, any intelligent person can possibly still think this way. How can my reality, as a more or less middle-class, relatively conformist academic, be so far removed from theirs at this juncture?

Poor day for a wind turbine party

Today was the day our local wind development company held an open house at their new development of Freedom Ridge.

Not the greatest weather. But there was sufficient wind that these GE 1.5 MW turbines were spinning well enough.

The turbines were controversial within the Freedom community, and I wanted to hear how noisy they really were. You could hear them quite clearly at about 200 meters. I imagine that you can hear them from further away. There are definitely houses well within earshot.

The same company wishes to develop a site in my own town of Jackson, which was one reason they held the open house. Generally, the Jackson site is further from housing, although I'd have to see a map of the proposed installation to be sure.

1.5 MW/hour is enough to power about 1500 houses.

That about sums up the trade-offs. But for more, see a few posts back.

Regeneration retrospective

Picture: The head of Glen Alladale. The trees in the snow in the background constitute the most northerly remnant of Caledonian Pine forest in Scotland, and are the subject of a major conservation effort by the Alladale estate.


In 1985 and 1986, on a path to recovering mentally and socially from nearly seven years military service, I lived a year at the Findhorn Community in Scotland, and became involved in the meetings of a start-up forest conservation group called Trees for Life. I soon tired of one or two of the personalities involved and instead reached out to the more pragmatic Reforesting Scotland, which I have to say is probably my favorite all-time conservation group for its ethos of indigneous forest regeneration combined with democratic and affordable rural lifestyles. Many years later, I wrote a history of conservation and sustainable development in the Highlands and Islands for my MS thesis, and was lucky enough to be given financial support from the University of Montana and Japanese industrial sustainability advocate Akira Yamaguchi, to revisit on long research trips. And just recently, Aimee and I were sponsored by Unity College to take another research trip, this time to the Alladale Estate run by eccentric millionaire Paul Lister, another regeneration effort.

All these groups, and several others not mentioned, not least the official government agency the Forestry Commission, are important for their contributions to reforesting the Highland landscape. A Scots pine forest spreading slowly across a heather moorland is a great sight to see, speaking both ecologically and in terms of conservation. I recommend it. But the birch and sessile oak and rowan and other hardwoods deserve attention too.

This new travel article by the Guardian details the remarkable success of Trees for Life in connecting the east and west coasts of the Highland landmass with regeneration.

What an inspiration for others in taking the long view! And what a personal delight to have tracked this effort all these years and watched it grow. All in all, I think I've done a pretty good job of staying in touch with Highland forest conservation and regeneration. I hope to put these contacts and knowledge to good use soon with a spring break trip for Unity students, possibly in 2010. Why not sooner? Aimee has a trip to Nicaragua scheduled for this year, and someone has to feed the sheep!

Finally, land managers paying attention...

... to climate change, that is. A notoriously conservative profession, rangeland and forest managers are finally getting serious and provocative articles on the effects of climate change in their journals. The most recent edition of Wildlife Professional was devoted entirely to the subject, and a particularly well-written and evocative article has appeared in Range Management (reviewed here with links to the original by Revkin of the NYT).

The Society of American Foresters, an organization to which I am entitled to belong by virtue of my forestry school MS, has just held it's annual conference, this year dubbed Forestry in a Climate of Change.

About time. But even at little Unity College, now acknowledged as one of the nation's leading schools in the teaching of climate change and climate mitigation, while bright young liberal studies students virtually inhale science and policy news about climate change, even some of our best land management students still sit sullenly at the back of class with their baseball hats pulled over their faces. Generally they're waiting to jump in their V-8 pick-up trucks and head to the woods.

(It is hunting season after all, so maybe I'm being too harsh.)

So there will need to be quite a bit more work done yet before the profession of land management finally as a whole realizes that, literally, the planet's ecology is shifting under its feet.

Funnily enough, it was at the Forestry School where I got my first introduction to climate science, in the early, heady days of 1994. There was a corner of one floor of the seven-story University of Montana forest science building reserved for a lab funded by NASA, where a tiny team of select, and very geeky, graduate students and professors implemented a recently devised technology in remote sensing by satellites to study what they called Leaf Area Index, an indicator of the changing seasons around the globe, but also correlated with the effectiveness of carbon sinks. I spent a happy-enough semester taking an advanced class there as part of my senior year in biology, before starting the MS.

(Here's a link to an essay by Dr. Steve Running, the leader of the UMT remote sensing program, and my climate science professor that semester, that I found amusing, mostly because I have students in each of his Five Stages of Climate Grief in class right now.)

Of course, the rest of the foresters studiously avoided that corner. For good reason. It was an easy trip to academic, cultural and sex-role humiliation. There were always computers humming, the math was advanced, many of the graduate students were suspiciously foreign or female, and there was only the slightest prospect of a field trip. There were far more of us geeky biologists, and many environmental studies students (who still couldn't do the math needed to finish the class), than there were foresters. The idea that Montana forest science would soon be turned on it's head by this motley crew was barely considered by anyone, especially the Republican, Mormon Dean of the Forestry School himself.

(I told you it was a conservative profession.)

Now Running is, officially, a Nobel Laureate.

And, ironically, part of my job is to find ways to get our eastern state land management students interested in this material so they can begin to be prepared for what will await them in the field at their first stations.

Plus ça change...

Still, the UMT forestry students were more believable outdoors-men than some of our guys. They had cowboy hats, not baseball caps. And they hunted elk, not whitetail.

Ungulate envy.

Wind turbine advice

Grainy picture of local turbines at dawn.

This was a note to a former student involved in the Great Maine Wind Turbine Controversy:

Dear Mick:
Up until now, a bulk of what I've been reading in regards to industrial wind power has been very negative, by and large. Could you recommend to me some websites, journal articles, reports, and other resources that speak of the pros and even un-biased facts about this development? I truly want to be thoroughly educated in all aspects of this topic and do not want to be tempted to take one side or the other without solid knowledge.


Dear XXXX:

Of the various options to provide energy that would reduce climate emissions, wind power is currently the most cost-effective, coming in at between 2 and 6 cents per installed watt, compared to upwards of 20 cents for solar, 10 cents for nuclear, and so on.

There are few renewable energy options that offer as good an economic return for communities and corporations. Because of their good economics, private finance is interested in them, hence the developer's interest, but they also will help keep electricity prices down for ordinary people, compared to other sources of power, assuming fair competition and regulation in power generation.

So they are beneficial to owners of stocks and shares in energy companies, which are, like all stocks, often owned by ordinary people through pension funds, etc, they provide jobs in wind development corporations and maintenance contractors, although these are mostly specialized engineering, development, and finance jobs, and they can help keep electricity prices from rising as fast as other energy prices.

Local jurisdictions can benefit from taxes, and landowners benefit from lease payments.

Wind power also helps meet state and federal goals for energy independence. The current war in Iraq, for instance, which costs taxpayers an awful lot, and requires a lot of death and destruction, is at least partly over oil, and might not be so likely to be repeated if we develop our national wind power resources, as well as other clean, independent energy.

(There are many different kinds of ugliness in the world.)

I can recommend a good book on wind power control and development that covers all of this quite well. I have it in my office, and you can take a look at it when you come.

Then there are the ecological benefits.

Most climate scientists expect that to abate dangerous climate change of 2 or more degrees Celsius in the next 100 years, we need to reduce emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Wind power is one part of the possible mix. Climate change by itself doesn't make a good argument for any specific form of clean energy. There are lots of others to choose from, including efficiency and conservation. But the European countries, who are ahead of us in reducing emissions, have generally found wind power helpful and inexpensive so far.

I have a couple of very up-to-date science books on climate change that make this clear.

The consensus prediction for New England, from the New England Regional Assessment (NERA) which can be googled and downloaded easily enough, is that our our region will experience a 3-6 degree Celsius increase in average annual temperature, giving us roughly the climate of Virginia (3 degrees) or Georgia (6 degrees). This kind of rapid warming will destroy forest ecology, make farming initially quite difficult, force wildlife to migrate, and generally overturn most efforts at conservation. That's without taking the likelihood of damage to houses and other infrastructure from increased extreme weather such as floods, hurricanes and windstorms into account, or sea level rise.

Like I said, this resource (the NERA) is available on line, as is the IPCC 2007 report. Both are scientifically moderate documents, and well supported by the evidence.

So generally although a lot of people find them ugly, and think of them as damaging to wildlife, many people do benefit from wind turbines, and scientists who keep up with climate change news see them as one possible form of energy generation that would help mitigate and thus avoid climate change.

(There are plenty of scientists, and conservationists, who don't really understand how severe the climate change worries are. Those, like me who have up to date training, tend to see stopping climate change as an overriding priority for all conservation.)

On the down side, there are documented effects on birds. I have a copy of a book with some of the latest research, which again you can study when you come. Bats may actually suffer more than birds, according to new research in Europe. And there are effects on humans. They can be noisy, they can create discomfort through noise or reverberation at very low frequency, and they are considered unsightly by many, although not all. I also can help connect you with the deliberations and documentation of the federal-level USFWS Wind Advisory Taskforce, which is quite relevant as other communities are experiencing similar qualms.

Wind turbines are also new to Maine and we don't know how to best control their development, or how to tax them for the benefit of local jurisdictions. The experience of locals in Freedom, for instance, seems from my vantage point to have been largely negative. The turbines used may have been noisier than promised, the company doesn't seem to have done a great job of education or outreach, to say the least, there were accusations of unfair dealing, and the town itself may not quite have known how to cope well with the strong feelings that developed.

A more rational approach, it seems to me, would emphasize stricter performance standards and deeper setbacks to houses and abutting properties, would anticipate skyline and viewshed effects carefully, specify public disclosures needed from corporations wishing to develop sites, such as the specific equipment to be used and its specified noise and other characteristics, would allow for a stronger say by the community and by abutting landowners, would look for a much more structured and deliberative process in town meeting, and would plan to tax turbines, output, and site leases carefully (not just the capital value of the equipment). Writing town ordinances to do all this that would survive court and even constitutional challenge is a specialized business.

Turbines can also be owned by communities instead of for-profit corporations. That is what we're aiming for with our Mt View High School project, in which, if we're successful, the school will benefit from much cheaper energy, freeing money from the budget for education. there will also be a turbine available for high school and vo-tech education purposes, making it more likely that local people get hired to do installations and maintenance of future turbines.

So, I apologize if this all seems too even-handed and rational. (But this is exactly the sort of thing that a policy PhD is likely to suggest -- it's what we do.)

But a balanced approach is really the only one available. As I believe XXXX has already realized, even were a group to try some kind of more aggressive action, say a blanket ban, they would be unlikely to succeed in any case, largely because the property rights are all on the side of the landowners and development companies. Development restrictions for any kind of development (think how widespread are suburbs and sprawl) are problematic in the courts.

Mick

Mini nukes: Blink and you'd miss it

One of the strange consequences of teaching climate change and energy at the general education level is how much time and attention it takes to keep up with the latest climate science and energy tech. I've already commented elsewhere in this blog about how policy ideas in climate change mitigation and abatement are rapidly made obsolete by either new climate science, or new energy technology. This article, a bit of a teaser, is a prime example. It suggests that prefabricated small scale nuclear power plants will soon be mass-produced and available for delivery to firms and communities all over the world. Presumably the service "package" also includes waste processing and treatment, although, because few details are provided, I'm going to have to do some digging to find out what the government researchers, and the commercial firm that is getting the technology, has in mind.

Most environmentalists would run a mile before embracing any kind of nuclear technology, so this is going to be a hard sell. But for those of us who have looked the potential horrors of abrupt climate change right in the face, this might be a partial solution to some hard "techy" questions about providing the right energy mix. In particular, although renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, wave, and biomass seem very likely to be cheaper and less polluting than fossil fuels, there's still the "base load" problem to solve.

Take wind turbines, for instance. These are more reliable than you would guess. Most people don't know that a good wind power site can produce electricity 70-90% of the time. But there are still lulls, calm periods in which no power can be generated. This is a problem because electrical power demand is regular and diurnal, with a daily double peak in the mornings and evenings, and a constant base. Redundant wind capacity is only a partial solution. Some suggest that, particularly with the new giant 500m and 700m super-turbines in more or less permanently windy offshore sites, we can get upwards of 30% of our power from the wind. The Danish island of Samso is generally held up as an example of the feasibility of this. But more likely, we will be held to a more conservative theoretical maximum supply projection of 20% wind power. That leaves 80% to be provided by some other form of electricity generation.

Likewise, solar power only works when the sun is shining. Some applications, like electrical lighting, are needed when the sun is definitely not shining. In off-grid installations, lead acid batteries are used, an ancient and potentially polluting technology, to store power overnight. Battery cost is prohibitive, large scale use within grid tie systems as decentralized storage would require a massive increase in industrial scale battery production and recycling, as well as a lot of regular maintenance at the house, and so most solar power installers recommend grid-tie systems instead of batteries. In the event of large scale adoption of household solar, or indeed any kind of renewable household energy production, this lack of storage contributes to the base load problem in designing and managing local and regional grids, making it worse, not better, in most cases, and is one reason why power companies such as Central Maine Power are not really looking forward to the day when solar panels, or household-scale wind turbines, become cheaply and mass-produced for household installation.

It would also be nice if we could make the grid itself more resilient and secure on a regional basis, avoiding disasters such as the massive supra-regional power blackout of a few years ago that caused so many problems and recriminations. Any "hardening" of power generation in case of attack or natural disaster would also be a boon.

Right now, base load for our part of the world is primarily coal from southern New England states with our own Maine hydropower, waste incineration, and biomass. Peak load "topping off" is provided by oil, or small to medium scale natural gas, or hydro. Natural gas is actually a nice peak load technology because of the speed with which a natural gas plant can be fired up and on-line. Hydropower can be used for either peak or base, although peak load usage requires more substantial reliance on storage than in-stream flow, and thus requires more changing of reservoir levels. Coal-fired power production, currently the favorite, and cheapest base load technology, is probably the largest single contributer to climate change.

So any technology that is capable of providing decentralized base load power relatively cleanly is interesting as a necessary complement to clean household-scale energy generation. A local or regional base-load system such as the small nuclear plants suggested in this article would actually make current household solar and wind power technology more viable. It would also make offshore wind more viable.

I don't expect very many environmentalists would see things quite this way, though!

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

£13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry

Jon Vidal and Nick Rosen, for The Observer

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. 'We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.'

The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. 'They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,' said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. 'We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.'

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

'You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,' said Deal. 'You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.'

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.

From change.gov

Below is an excerpt from the Office of the President-Elect web page, detailing what is to be part of the education policy. Presumably this service program in the case of colleges will be linked to financial aid, otherwise I don't see how it can be enforced.

This is actually a suggestion I made in a policy paper several years ago, although I don't know whether or not my ideas have anything to do with the proposed policy. I do know that Bill Galston of Brookings, one of two correspondents I debated in the original paper, is influential in Democratic and possibly therefore Obamite education policy circles.

Even if it isn't my sole or original idea, it's nice to see it up there so quickly.

Here's the paper: www.publicpolicy.umd.edu/IPPP/reports/vol23fall03/vol23fall03.pdf

And here's the President-elect's web-page statement:

America Serves

"When you choose to serve -- whether it's your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood -- you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That's why it's called the American dream."

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.