The College Garden Controversy: Your Comments

Famous Unity College Head Chef and manager of the Student center Charlie Krause, who apart from being Maine's Best Cook, is also a master organic gardener in his own right, recently discovered that the garlic bulbs we were saving to use for seed in the community garden had been allowed to freeze. Charlie wrote to UCVoices, the college's email op-ed/discussion service, to complain.

This started a typical UCVoices controversy. Oy.

Now, there will be some at the college who probably think I should be more circumspect before airing our UC sustainability dirty laundry on a web page where the whole world could see it. After all, I'm supposed to be a professional person with years of experience and dirty laundry is typically not aired in public.

But this kind of controversy is actually a strength of the UC system, so why not air it? We are very responsive to student concerns at UC, and we always allow discussion. We have public Community Meetings, organized by student government, to discuss the biggest concerns. Students can get access to the President or other officials pretty much anytime they need, they can write anything they want to UCVoices, and in the sturdy Anglo-American free speech tradition, even rude or otherwise uncongenial writing is never deleted or otherwise censored. And students have a vote and a voice on the Board of Trustees. Anytime the Student Government Association President wants to, he or she can take an issue directly to the Board. The Board will always perk up and pay very close attention to students concerns.

So, it's not a democracy, and can't be, because someone (the BOT, the President and the college officials) has to be legally responsible under Maine and US law, but it's durned close, and certainly the most open college system I've ever seen.

Why go to all this trouble just to run a college? Because this is what a college is for, training leaders for society. Students can't be properly trained to become agents of change unless they can be shown ways to make changes. No brainer.

We should be proud to show the world how well we know how to be a caring, engaged, service-oriented community with students who are actively becoming leaders in scoiety.

And, to boot: If this is the worst we have, well, we're doing pretty good. I can find a much larger pile of dirty sustainability laundry of any other college or university ten minutes after visiting their campus. Big, empty brick and concrete buildings, lousy windows and door, no insulation, energy leaking into the sky, incandescent bulbs everywhere, fume hoods left open in labs, twenty, thirty times more heated square footage per student than is actually needed, unresponsive, uneducated administrators, and students who have to resort to protest or direct action to get anyone to listen to them.

And five or ten times the climate emissions.

Anyway, here is the thread. feel free to chime in.

Wind charger, or wind pump?

These turbines (there are two) are outside the Shenandoah Farmer's Market in Harrisonburg VA. (Aimee and I just got back from visiting the in-laws.) This is a Mennonite business, where you can buy canned goods, including Yoder's famous canned meats, as well as books on Amish, Mennonite, Church of the Brethren and other German-American Anabaptist culture. It's a Peace Church cultural center of sorts, as well as a place to get a great pulled pork sandwich and more kinds of jelly and other preserves than you ever thought could be possible. I recommend the rhubarb pie filling, but the jalapeno jelly is an acquired taste.

Anyway, these "gate guardians" sit astride the parking lot. Although I've looked at them many times, I just noticed they appear to have a generator, or some other machine in a cowling or nacelle behind the vanes, and reduction gears, as well as the fact that they are considerably larger and taller than most traditional family farm wind pumps.

Does anyone know exactly what they are? I know that wind chargers provided electricity to farms in remote areas before the Rural Electrification Authority era. Is that what these are?

Jared Diamond op-ed for the NYT

Op-Ed Contributor
What’s Your Consumption Factor?
By JARED DIAMOND
Published: January 2, 2008 [NYT}

Los Angeles

TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

$100/BBL: Happy New Year!

Sweet light crude oil, for a few minutes on the NYMEX yesterday, could not be bought for less than $100/barrel. This long-awaited moment has a kind of psychological "point of no return" feeling to it. I hope. because we really need to stop using this stuff.

It's hard, gosh knows, hard, but you can do it. And it's getting easier by the day to switch out from oil-based energy. You can buy 100% renewable power through the grid, you can first insulate, then switch your home to firewood or some other other biofuel, or get a heat pump, and in more and more places you can buy a liquid biofuel suitable for for your existing car. Exciting new technologies such as Nanosolar film or Tesla cars, featured below, are rapidly accelerating research and moving towards full scale production. Unity students have, of course, preempted the commercial biofuel craze by making their own biodiesel, or making grease cars whose fuel comes for free. And generally doing all kinds of crazy engineering and lifestyle stuff to avoid using oil.

The other thing ALL Unity students get is a small but important dose of sustainability theory. They all learn the Bruntland definition, and the Daly throughput model, as well as the Daly input-output rules. They also learn how to build simple feedback models to understand and even solve environmental problems where feedback is a factor, like climate change, or, as it turns out, oil depletion. Teaching feedback is a recommended outcome for introductory environmental science curriculum, one of several recommendations from the National Council for Science and Environment CEDD curriculum research program.

How would we know if we were running out of oil? Would the market know? Most market analysts see oil depletion as a supply-demand problem, which it most clearly is. But supply-demand theory assumes that supply is infinite, but that there may be increasing costs to scale, which is why supply curves slope uphill. The higher the price, the more producers will enter the market, the more supply is available. this is true for oil, as higher prices drive exploration and development of close substitutes, such as Alberta's tar sands.

But what if total conventional crude oil supply is actually finite, as it most assuredly is? That the planet may have certain resources whose supply is finite is not factored in to normal market analysis. They consider a shorter time span. A finite oil supply is actually best modeled using feedback loops, involving exponential (asymptotic) decay caused by the links between oil price and consumption. There are other feedbacks, including the effect of price or economic growth, which affects consumption, price of exploration, which affects new oil discovery, which however, is finite, and so on.

All Unity juniors learn to construct simple feedback models in their third year Environmental Sustainability class. This is good math to learn, since it's the math of lots of important things in the world, like climate change, population growth, or even, and we use this example to drive home the importance of the math, student loan payback periods.

You can use a spreadsheet program to do this, you can construct difference tables, you can use calculus and differential equations, or, as in the first picture above, you can find a graphics-based computer modeling program like Stella® from ISEE Systems. We do a bit of all of these.

One experiment we do in class is to construct a basic model of oil feedback loop affects, and then do thought experiments by changing the parameters. Students divide themselves into interest groups and come up with the following hypothetical parameters based on their (shamelessly stereotypical) assumed interests.

1) The quantity of known reserves. Is it high, 2500 giga-barrels, as stated by the USGS, or low, 700 giga-barrels or less, as is believed by pessimists like Dr. Colin Campbell?

2) The amount of oil waiting to be discovered. High or low? You can factor tar sands and shales in here and model those too.

3) The price elasticity -- how quickly will consumers switch to other fuels as price rises? A steep demand curve is price inelastic demand, consumers can't or won't buy less of a product as price changes. A shallow demand curve is price elastic demand, as price rises, consumers buy much less and vice-versa. A key concept, as you'll see below.

4) The rate of economic growth: How quickly will the total scale of the economy grow, and thus oil demand, grow. This has to be qualified by the estimate of price elasticity.

Typically, students, who are give free rein to dream up schemes, come up with three or four of those shamelessly stereotypical interest group categories. Apologies to those who belong to one or more of these groups. No-one gets off lightly at un-PC UC, so beware!

a) The "Rush Limbaughs," who want high economic growth, are super optimistic, and thus assume high available undiscovered oil reserves. High assumed known and undiscovered reserves, high economic growth, steep price elasticity

b) The "soccer moms," who want to keep putting gas in their relatively inefficient family vans and have a very steep price elasticity -- they just cannot switch out of oil easily, because changing lifestyles is hard, and what would we do if we couldn't go to the mall? But even soccer moms are more cautious than Rush about reserves and prefer a steady growth - not an overheated economy that causes rapid social and suburban change, with all the difficulty that means for schools and neighborhoods. High assumed known and undiscovered reserves, high economic growth, steep price elasticity


c) The UC "Bunny hunters": back-to-the-lander, grease car-driving, totally organic, totally crunchy types who want the oil economy to end quickly and all its minions to go back to the dark side where they presumably came from. Very low assumed known and undiscovered reserves, shallow price elasticity.

Of course, and this is the lesson here, when you crunch the numbers, no-one quite gets what they expect or want when ecological feedback is involved:


Soccer mom (first graph) has medium reserves and growth and steep price elasticity, so she actually makes life less stable by burning up the oil fast. Should have put the kids in a Prius.

Rush (the second graph above) is surprised by how quickly he burns up even 7,000 GB of hydrocarbons. Oil shale, tar sands, throw it all in, economic growth of five to ten percent will burn it up more quickly. And the endgame might be unpleasant, as that steep price elasticity makes depletion effects more dominant than conservation effects towards the end of the oil era. Oops.

Bunny hugger does the opposite of what she wants -- she extends the lifespan of the oil economy. That shallow price elasticity is what does this. Everyone saving energy, riding bikes, taking mass transit. All those oil imps stick around for another 100 years.

Go figure. What of this is actually realistic? Very little. These are just teaching tools. And the daily ups and downs of oil price, which ARE determined by supply and demand in a short time span, being based largely on complicated international oil news that changes daily, make predictions much more complicated than these simple models.

(But I have a private version of the model that I keep to myself that tracks the oil price very well.)

Note from a parent: Guaranteed Perfomance

UC father Michael M., whose son is a very famous character around campus (and loves nothing better than to go camping in hurricanes), just wrote me to offer his services. Michael, an energy engineer, used to work for the State O' Maine's energy program, but recently took a job with Siemans USA, a leading full service energy manufacturer and green energy company. Siemans offered to come do an energy audit and provide us with a guaranteed performance contract.

These contracts, where a company changes you a fixed cost for power, and then comes in and makes a profit managing consumption down, make sense for institutions that don't have their own engineers and energy economists working for them, as it takes some analysis to figure out how to get energy costs down. At UC, we have myself and Roger Duval, and a history of saving energy that dates back to the first oil crisis, so the pickin's will be slim.

If you're an UC student, energy geek or campus sustainability person and want to read the whole text of this exchange, which is too detailed for the main page, you can find it at the back-up page here.

Guaranteed performance. Now there's an idea. For students' coursework, that is!

Tesla asks for power information

In an attempt to "virtually beta-test," if such a thing is possible, the availability of electrical power charging capacity for battery-electric (and, necessarily, plug-in hybrid) car charging, Tesla founder Martin Eberhard posted an Excel electrical survey on his blog for members of the general public to fill out.

This is a good example, and an interesting application, of a general household electrical consumption cycle analysis, and what energy geek could resist? I think I will assign it in class next semester. The college's "Killawatt" devices will be useful for this. In the meantime, if anyone is interested, here's the link.

BTW, the same information, detailed household electrical consumption cycle data, would be helpful to power companies who will one day soon have to learn how to aggregate and sell solar PV power from decentralized sources, such as household rooftop arrays. See my Nanosolar article for more details, below. And in general, Martin will need rooftop solar and other renewable power supply to be beefed up, in order to make sure his customers don't run their green cars on electricity from coal-fired and other non-renewable power plants.

Unity Campus Sustainability

EJ Hulverson (a good Yorkshire or other scandahoovian name if ever there was one), grad student of WU, wrote and asked me to fill out a questionnaire on campus climate emssions planning. I posted my answer for students, faculty, and staff to read at our "How to save the planet" page, since it has a good deal of detail on UC emissions plans and thus kind of belongs on that page. Go here to read my full answer to EJ's questions.

BTW, EJ, I just noticed, that would be Doctor Womersley. Hah!

No worries, mate.

-----Original Message-----
From: E.J. Hullverson [mailto:ehullverson@mac.com]
Sent: Tue 1/1/2008 7:36 PM
To: Mick Womersley
Subject: AASHE Best Practices Guide for Campus Climate Planning

Dear Mr. Womersley,

I am a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis writing
on behalf of the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in
Higher Education to ask for your contribution to our best practices
guide on campus climate planning.

This booklet will facilitate better climate planning among ACUPCC and
non-ACUPCC signatories alike. Your expertise, in conjunction with
academic research, will form the backbone of its recommendations.

Attached is a 10-point questionnaire that covers three areas of campus
climate planning: strategy, action, and evaluation. I appreciate your
participation in this survey and will credit your contributions in the
final product. Additionally, AASHE and I would like to include actual
work in the appendix of this document. Any samples you can provide of
case studies, reports, RFPs, budgets, action plans, etc. will serve as
excellent reference material. Please contact me directly with any
questions.

Have a wonderful New Year. I look forward to hearing from you soon and
thank you for your time.

Best Regards,


EJ Hullverson

>>>Dear EJ:

Attached my reply, and our actual analysis, with the data in our own format (sheet 1) and the format required for submission to our State O' Maine climate accounting system (sheets 4 and 5). In general, I would advise KISS: keep it simple, use basic throughput analysis, and avoid double counting.

Some advice on how to avoid fads and bandwagon-jumping would also be helpful. I see a lot of silly decisions made in campus sustainability programs.

And watch out for the new international climate accounting system that will come out of the Davos process soon.

Enjoy,

Mick