The use of renewable sources of energy in Europe continues to grow at a brisk pace and energy efficiency also is improving, significantly reducing reliance on coal and natural gas, according to a new report. In
2009, renewable energy accounted for 18.4 percent of the European Union’s primary energy production, an increase of 8.3 percent from 2008, according to a report by Eurostat.

Renewable energy sources now account for nearly as much electricity production as natural gas, which supplies 19.3 percent of the continent’s electricity. The report said that natural gas usage was down 10 percent in 2009 and that use of hard coal decreased by 9 percent. For the sixth consecutive year, “energy intensity� — a measure of how much energy is used to produce a unit of economic input — dropped while GDP continued to increase over the same period.

The shift to cleaner sources of energy has been particularly swift in some nations, including Portugal, which now gets almost 45 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Meanwhile, energy consumption across the continent fell 5.5 percent in 2009, in part because of the economic recession.

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Nine vehicles remain in competition for the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, which is seeking to spur development of commercially viable cars that average 100 miles-per-gallon. The competition, the brainchild of Peter Diamandis X Prize Foundation, began 15 months ago with 136 entries and will end on Sept. 16 in Washington D.C. with the announcement of a winner. The final nine vehicles vying for the prize have emerged after a week of performance, safety, and efficiency testing at the Michigan International Speedway.

Finalists were asked to demonstrate a minimum efficiency of 90 miles-per-gallon at this stage (or equivalent for an electric vehicle), along with passing tests for carbon emissions, acceleration (0-60 mph), braking (60 mph), driving range, weight, and more. Several leading teams have emerged, including Virginia-based Edison2, with a combustion, 4-passenger car; X-Tracer, a Swiss team with an electric vehicle that has achieved 197 miles-per-gallon-equivalent in some tests; and Raceabout, a Finnish team with an electric car that has achieved 143 miles-per-gallon-equivalent. The U.S. Department of Energy has contributed more than $9 million towards the competition since its inception.

China has overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest consumer of energy, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The agency reported that in 2009 China consumed 2,252 million metric tons of oil equivalent in the form of crude oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable sources, surpassing the 2,170 million tons used by the United States. Just eight years ago, the U.S. consumed twice as much energy as China, but China’s booming economy has now made it not only the leading emitter of greenhouse gases beginning in 2007 but also the world’s leading energy consumer, the IEA says.

China’s oil imports grew 48 percent last year and have almost doubled since 2005. The U.S. remains the largest oil consumer using 843 million tons in 2009 compared to China’s 405 million tonsbut China burned 1,537 million tons of coal last year, triple the amount of coal used in the United States. Zhou Xian, head of China’s National Energy Administration, said the IEA’s data were not very credible and accused the agency of overstating China’s energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: Hector Garcia’

If the world’s major nations fail to enact significant changes in energy and climate policies, global carbon dioxide emissions will increase 43 percent by 2035, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA). In its annual long-term energy outlook, the EIA projected that global emissions from burning fossil fuels would grow from 29 billion tons in 2007 to 42 billion tons in 2035. The EIA said that most of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions will come from developing economies such as China, India, and Brazil, whose energy consumption is expected to nearly double in the next 25 years. The agency, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, presents a skeptical outlook for clean energy technologies, except for hydroelectric power and wind. “Except for those two sources,” the EIA report said, “most new renewable generation technologies are not economically competitive with fossil fuels over the projection period.” Clean energy advocates sharply criticized the EIA projection, saying it did not give sufficient weight to renewable energy technologies like solar power.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: tracyyxx

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The widespread adoption of energy efficient light bulbs, fans, refrigerators, air conditioners, and irrigation pumps can overcome India’s electricity shortage by 2013 and significantly reduce the country’s rapidly growing carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new report. The study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said such simple energy efficiency measures could add $608 billion to India’s gross domestic product by 2020 because they would eliminate the chronic energy shortages that frequently force businesses and factories to reduce production. In addition, introducing energy-efficient appliances and electric motors could avoid the production of 333 million tons of CO2 by 2020, according to the study by the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Indian agencies, with some investment from the U.S. government, plan to use market mechanisms to foster the production and adaptation of more efficient appliances. Although roughly half of India’s 1 billion people lack electricity, the other half is using electricity at a record pace, with demand expected to double or triple in the next 20 years.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360

photo: voobie

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Environmentalist David Orr says the easy part of helping the United States live within its ecological limits may be passing laws, such as one that puts a price on carbon. The hard part, he maintains in an interview with Yale Environment 360, is changing a culture of consumption that causes extensive environmental damage — and unhappiness.

Long before buzzwords like “carbon footprint” entered the general lexicon, David W. Orr was working on ways to help humanity lighten its impact on the natural world. A professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College and the author of six books, including Ecological Literacy, Orr has focused on how to best educate students about using the Earth’s resources prudently. He also has been a leading proponent of sustainable design on the country’s college campuses, and was the driving force behind building Oberlin’s $7 million Environmental Studies Center, considered a model of green architecture in the U.S.

Most recently, in his book Down to the Wire, Orr tackled the problem of global warming, which he refers to as “planetary destabilization.” The solution, he writes, will require that as the developing world raises its standards of living, the industrialized world must curtail the runaway materialism that has exacted a heavy toll on the natural world.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Orr talked about the current battle over climate and energy legislation, President Obama’s missed opportunity to use his “bully pulpit” to educate the public about global warming, and what he calls the right wing’s “unconscionable misuse” of the airwaves to spread lies and misinformation about climate change.

Orr says that for America and the industrialized world to move onto a truly sustainable footing, society must awaken to what he calls the “profoundly disquieting” effects of the “frantic search for more money and more stuff.” He sees signs of this awakening in the local food movement, the new urbanism pulling people back to cities, and a growing environmental awareness among the younger generation. Much of the shift from “hyper individualism” and rampant consumerism to a greener, more community-oriented lifestyle, says Orr, “will not only be possible and not only be painless, but in fact will help us create higher levels of happiness and satisfaction.”

Yale Environment 360: This has been a very rough [few] months for people interested in the threat of global warming. There was the relative lack of action in Copenhagen, the controversy over the hacked e-mails, the stalled action on the climate bill in the U.S. Congress, and polls showing that Americans, at least, are in fact becoming more skeptical about climate change and perhaps weary of the subject.

David Orr: The good news is that climate science survived intact. The hacked emails didn’t show anything much more than professional chatter you get in the teacher’s lounge or the wash-up room outside a surgery theater in a hospital. There was nothing that impugned the science. And the one mistake that was apparently found in the IPCC Fourth Report didn’t amount to much — the Himalayan glaciers disappearing in 35 years, that was also corrected elsewhere in that report. On the public attitudes and opinions, the issues were compounded by recession on one side and people’s attention automatically sways over to economic and bread and butter issues when times are hard.

On the politics of climate, I’m actually fairly optimistic that there will be climate legislation passed. I think that there is, strangely enough, a kind of emerging consensus in some parts of the Republican Party that they can’t stonewall on this issue forever. I think the logic of the situation, the vast weight of the science, and the prospect of continually destabilizing weather patterns is kind of an inexorable force pushing us toward some kind of response to these issues… The political response so far at the national and international levels has been clearly inadequate. But I think the weight of all of this has got to change that at some point.

e360: You think some sort of legislation would be passed, in the form of cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax?

Orr: The difference is not necessarily in the mechanism, it’s the will to make the mechanism work. The best designed cap-and-trade system you can imagine, without the political will to actually execute, would be disastrous, and the same would be true of taxation… But I think either of those, or both of them in combination, would be a smart policy. The way the bill came out of the house, the Waxman-Markey bill, it was way too complicated. Way too many concessions to fossil fuel industries. I would prefer if you’ll have cap-and-trade, an auction system with the proceeds then sent back to the public, or put into public investment or some combination of the two.

If you get climate and energy right, you get a whole lot of other things right, as well.”

e360: But the American public just doesn’t yet seem convinced of [global warming]. What’s it going to take?

Orr: Gallup polls show the American public is the least informed and most confused about the issue of any public in developed nations. It is part of the problem. Now why are they confused? There are several obvious components to an answer. One is that the educational system turns out people who really don’t understand science and how the Earth works as a physical system. And the other is, frankly, the continual flow of bad information, misinformation, outright lies, and distortion that come through the media system. So the fact that 91 percent of talk radio, according to Center for American Progress, is extreme right wing, where you’re not going to hear anything about climate change and what they do is going to be mostly wrong… This is an unconscionable misuse of the public commons to confuse the public about an issue on which there is virtually unanimity amongst scientists who study climate for a living. It doesn’t mean, however, that there are no unknowns on this issue. There are unknowns.

e360: If something is going to be done before it is too late, how do you leap that hurdle?

Orr: In the president’s Climate Action Project, which was aimed at the first 100 days of the Obama administration, we proposed the president go to the American public, right out of the starting box, and give the climate equivalent of the Day of Infamy speech. And walk the public through the science. Use what Teddy Roosevelt called the bully pulpit, as a chief educator of the public. And walk us through why this is a critical issue. So I think a good bit of what has to happen falls under the title of leadership.

e360: So clearly President Obama did not give that equivalent of the Day of Infamy speech. How disappointed are you that that didn’t happen?

Orr: Well, I think it was a mistake not to put that issue first. But that’s second guessing, and I’m just a professor in Ohio, and he’s president of the United States. But I think it should have been first for a couple of reasons. One is it is the most pressing issue. Let’s say we’ve gotten the perfect health care bill through, but the health of the planet is failing, that health bill doesn’t amount to much. Secondly, in terms of strategy, the climate and energy issue is much more clearly, to most people, an economic issue. That is jobs and economic stimulation. Third reason is if you get climate and energy right, you get a lot of other things right as well. You lessen severe problems of security, balance of payments, pollution, unemployment, and you begin to take advantage of what Americans have typically done very well, and that’s technology. We’ve been historically very good at innovating and bringing in new kinds of technologies. That would have been in hindsight, from my perspective, a much smarter course than putting a health care bill first. But it also would have meant that the president needed to go to the public early and take an active role in driving climate legislation through Congress. I don’t think it was appropriate simply to sit back and let them hash it out.

Many people who live with a lot of consumption find life anything but sweet.”

e360: How would you judge the president’s overall performance on energy and the environment?

Orr: President Obama was given a very deep hole to climb out of. The economy was collapsing, we were fighting and losing two wars, the political environment of the country was just awful. And so he was given probably as tough a challenge as any president. On many things, the president has done I think extraordinarily well. Steven Chu, secretary of energy, is terrific. John Holdren, the [White House] science advisor, and Jane Lubchenco at NOAA — he’s appointed really good people. The stimulus package had a lot of money for wind power and development. What we don’t have is a framework for overall climate legislation. And I think that’s a huge problem. But he has done, to his credit, a great deal more than any other previous president to move us toward efficiency and renewable energy. But you always measure these things relative to the magnitude of the thing they’re trying to fix. And relative to climatic destabilization, that’s an interesting start, but it is not nearly enough at this point.

e360: You write that to really tackle this problem, countries like the U.S. have got to slash carbon emissions in the next 40 years about 90 percent, and that the average American’s production of carbon dioxide has got to go from about 22 tons a year to one or two tons. How do we get from here to there? How do you reduce the emissions of a public that’s living a pretty sweet life right now based on fossil fuels?

Orr: Well, a couple of comments. At the global level, this is being called, among other things, contraction and convergence. So developed economies like the United States have got to begin to contract, and other economies will begin to converge on some number that allows us to stabilize climate. That’s the background of the picture. The foreground is, how do we actually get there? And I think there are a couple different answers to that. One is, we do need a price on carbon. And we do need clear signals to the public that when you buy a house, appliances, cars, anything that uses energy, you buy efficiency.

The frantic search for more stuff, and more money to buy more stuff, is profoundly disquieting.”

And secondly, we need public policies that make it easy to deploy renewable technologies. And so the Europeans have used feed-in tariffs, or in this country sometimes most states have now net-metering provisions, that you’re a small scale power producer you can net-meter, and the utility will buy back the power. Those things need to be streamlined. Public policy needs to be aligned with those long-term goals. And it is not now. You can look at any number of institutional, financial, and regulatory barriers that block any movement in that direction.

I think there’s another kind of answer, however, and that is that you say we live pretty sweet lives. But many of us don’t. And many people who live with a lot of consumption find life anything but sweet. But obviously GNP continued to rise so you’ve got to explain a gap between the amount of stuff that we make and we have and throw away, and the level of happiness or satisfaction that you’ve got. And that’s a big gap. And I think, in lots of ways, the growth economy created more junk than you needed, more expectations than it could meet, more waste than the environment could absorb, and more trouble generally than we needed to create. And the literature on happiness shows that, not surprisingly, happiness is a function of a much simpler calculation. Beyond some fairly minimal level of comfort, we find satisfaction in our friendships and social relationships. It’s what brings us together that makes us really happy and makes life satisfying. And to a great extent, the amount of stuff that we have, the frantic search for more stuff and more money to buy more stuff is profoundly disquieting… And I think the transition town movement, and the voluntary simplicity movement, and the slow food movement, and the slow money movement, are all driven by people who recognize we were defrauded. That system never worked as it was purported to work. And so I think there is a good bit of the quote “contraction” that will not only be possible and not only be painless, but in fact will help us create higher levels of happiness and satisfaction.

And I think the logic of higher fuel costs and climate change and terrorism — all these combined threats are the silver lining that there’s a better life for us that is a different way to think about society. It’s more self-contained towns. We found that when the real estate market collapsed, that the suburbs not only were lonely places fostering a lot of fossil fuel use, they were financially completely unsustainable. But they also weren’t that nice to live in sometimes. It was too much traffic. Too many hours spent in cars and freeways. The new urbanism, fairly tightly-contained places where you’ve got walking access or biking access to shops, stores, schools, employment, parks, recreation, nice downtowns — that’s now the pattern emerging in development. And it doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s a convergence between human psychology and the need for sociability… And so we know that we can create that kind of development here. So could we make that transition? Yes. And I think that we’re moving in that direction. Fast enough? No. But there is movement in that direction.

In making land use decisions, we need to escape from hyper individualism.”

And the logic of higher energy costs mean that the centrifugal pressures on urban development, which we call sprawl, will probably reverse and become much more centripetal, pulling people back into a coherent downtown area…

The changes are also going to have to be in public policy, the way what we tax, where we build infrastructure, if you build roads, wires, pipes — development tends to follow that. And what Portland, Oregon did years ago was to put a growth boundary around the city, which deflected investment into the city, and then secondly created a light rail system that made it very easy to move around in that system. So you go to Portland right now, it’s not Nirvana, but it’s a very nice city. There’s a recognizable downtown, it’s a 24/7 kind of place for the most part.

The larger issue to me is where politics and markets work together. Markets are where you and I say, “I.” And politics, where we conduct the public business, are where you and I say, “We.” Both within a generation, and then the “we” that also connects us to our grandchildren and the long-term future. And so I think there’s a larger political issue here that in making land use decisions and decisions about urban development, we need to escape from hyper individualism, that whatever I want, I can have, and into a very different view of the public good.

e360: You’re talking about what almost amounts to heresy in the United States, which is no more perpetual growth.

Orr: There’s a long literature on growth that shows unimpeachably that beyond some point, growth becomes ill wealth. It means you just compound your problems. The benefits begin to diminish relative to the problems it creates. And we all kind of know that. That’s no great revelation — that the idea that we can’t afford to build, let’s say, high-speed rail systems and light rail systems is nonsense. We subsidize cars. We do it indirectly. We subsidize road building, gasoline, all the military force we have to maintain to guarantee our access to cheap fuels. So we pay for these things whether we get them or not. And the assumption is we can’t afford environmental quality or sustainability, but in fact we’re paying for it. And you pay for a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and the reality is that it costs us a good bit more than that. And if you factor in costs of healthcare, asthma, lung disease, and the 20,000 to 50,000 people who die prematurely every year from breathing small particle pollution from coal-fired power plants that generate half of our electricity, all of a sudden the costs become prohibitively high. And so what appeared to be cheap energy wasn’t really cheap at all. It’s just that you didn’t account for it. You paid for it in health cost, and lost lives, and lost productivity, and land degradation, and water pollution, and so forth, but those were not tacked on to the electric bill that you got every month.

What appeared to be cheap energy wasn’t really cheap at all; you just didn’t account for it.”

e360: On this issue of high-speed rail and light rail, do you think our sense of international competitiveness or national pride may work to the benefit of moving in the direction of more sustainable transportation, in that China is now building all these regional rail systems where they’re zipping around at 250, 300 miles an hour? Don’t you think that at some point Americans are going to go, “Hey, you know this whole green revolution, we’ve got to get on board here. We’re just lagging terribly behind Europe, behind China.”

Orr: The public [needs] to wake up and say, why doesn’t the Acela get 200 miles an hour? Why can’t we figure that out? The Chinese have done it. The Europeans have done it. Are we that dumb? And the answer is, until we decide not to be dumb, as Tom Friedman put it, “We can be as dumb as we want to be.” And we decided for the time being, that we’re going to be dumb. And it’s not an IQ problem, it’s frankly a political and communications problem.

And that’s our choice also. If the opposition party says, “We are going to throw sand in the gears and we’re not going to let us move on this.” You go back and you think, 1969, we created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, Wilderness Act. We did all that, and I think there were only three or four negative votes against even the Endangered Species Act. It was Republicans and Democrats coming together.

We’ve done it in the past; there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it in the future. Except that the opposition party in this case now decides, “No, we’re not gonna play ball with you. Whatever it is, however good it is for the country, we’re not gonna play ball with you.” Now I don’t know what words you put that on. You can’t imagine — no terrorist has done that much damage to us. The Republican Party has decided, and I consider myself to be a somewhat conservative person, but this is no longer conservatism of the sort that Edmund Burke would have recognized. This is something else.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360

Photo: Fe Ilya, David Orr

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Flying dwarfs any other individual activity in terms of carbon emissions, yet more and more people are traveling by air. With no quick technological fix on the horizon, what alternatives — from high-speed trains to advanced video conferencing — can cut back the amount we fly?

In most departments I have excellent green credibility, and my carbon footprint is small. I have not owned a car in more than 20 years and commute to work by subway. I walk to the market and generally no longer buy produce flown in from far away. I recycle. I have an air-conditioner, but use it only on the hottest of days. I have gone paperless with all my bills.

But my good acts of responsible environmental stewardship are undercut by one persistent habit that will be hard to break, if it is possible at all: I am a frequent flyer, Platinum Card. Last year, I traveled nearly 100,000 miles of mostly long-haul travel. And that figure puts me in the minor leagues compared to legions of business consultants, international lawyers, UN functionaries — and even climate scientists — who certainly travel much more.

The number of aviation hours will grow an average of 2.5 percent a year through 2030.

Flying, particularly on long-haul flights, is so highly emitting that it dwarfs everything else on an individual carbon budget. Many climate groups have calculated that in a sustainable world each person would have a carbon allowance of two to four tons of carbon emissions annually. Any single long-haul flight nearly “instantly uses that up,” said Christian Jardine, a senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.

Despite the fact that most governments have vowed to reduce carbon emissions by a significant chunk by 2020, most of us are flying more and more. So while emissions from most other sectors are falling, they are relentlessly rising for aviation and will continue to do so.

According to various estimates, emissions from aviation currently represent 2 to 3 percent of CO2 emissions and are likely to double or triple by 2050. The United States’ Federal Aviation Administration projects that even after the air travel slowdowns caused by 9/11 and the recent economic collapse and the rise in fuel prices and the bankruptcy of several major carriers in the past few years, the number of general aviation hours will grow an average 2.5 percent a year through 2030, according to the latest projection.

While jobs and housing and car sales are only slowly recovering from the economic crisis of 2008-9, airline travel has rebounded with a vengeance: In March, international air travel, measured in paid passenger miles, was 10.3 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the International Air Transport Association. Airfreight, measured by the weight of goods flown, was 28.1 percent higher. In fact, current levels of air travel and freight are only 1 percent below their early 2008 highs. Can the stock market replicate that?

When do we really need to fly on an airplane, and can or should we change that?

The current vogue of canceling out the emissions effect of plane travel by purchasing carbon offsets to support activities like tree-planting in Africa has come under fire as a feel-good illusion and, anyway, cannot be scaled up to cover the amount of flying going on. Although the airline industry is working hard to improve efficiency with more direct routes and less idling time on the runway, it acknowledges such activities yield limited, one-time gains. There is no quick technological fix, like fully renewable airline fuel, on the horizon.

Given the math, it is easy to feel all is lost. George Monbiot concludes in his book, Heat, that to meet current environmental targets set by the British government for 2050, almost all flying will have to stop and the current fleet of planes grounded. “I recognize this will not be a popular message,” he writes.

Many of us by now have adjusted our land transportation habits — buying hybrid cars, revisiting public transportation, or biking to work, for example. But few have addressed what I call the “flyers’ dilemma”: When do we really need to fly on an airplane, and can or should we change that? With business and life so dependent on air travel, it is hard to even imagine how to do with less. In 2005, Allianz employees flew 490 million kilometers a year — 12.5 thousand times around the world, according to the company’s filing with the Carbon Disclosure Project, whose corporate members agree to report their carbon emissions, with an eye ultimately to reducing them.

‘I’m sure people like you and me will be flying a lot less in 5 to 10 years,’ says one expert.

Anyone who cares about a future with lower emissions and less fossil fuel must face the problem and some, like Paul Dickinson, executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project, say change is inevitable: “I’m absolutely, definitely sure that people like you and me will be flying a lot less in 5 to 10 years.” Last month the European Environment Agency started a series of workshops with representatives from all over Europe assembled in Copenhagen to think about how Europe might function in the future without air travel — or with much less of it. (Participants, ironically, flew in.) But how to reduce or eliminate an activity that has become as reflexive as hopping in the car?

High-speed trains will steal market share from flying — they are already doing so on some short-haul routes in Asia and Europe. Emissions estimates of train versus plane vary tremendously, depending on the how you do the calculation. Christian Jardine notes that estimates for airline travel range from 98.3 to 175.3 grams of CO2 per kilometer for each passenger, depending on things like aircraft type and whether the warming effect of airplane contrails is added in. Reasonable estimates for trains depend a lot on the source of electricity the train is using (coal versus nuclear versus renewable). Jardine says he uses a per-person estimate of 17.7 grams per kilometer for international train rides and 60.2 for British national travel. (Much of Britain’s electricity comes from coal, while France’s is from nuclear.)

Where there is very high-speed rail and the distance is less than 350 miles, such as Barcelona to Madrid, train is a no-brainer, quicker than flying. Once you’ve ridden Spain’s AVE on the 2 ½-hour ride between those cities, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would fly the route.

Some of the reason, perversely, is price: The explosion of low-cost airlines on routes like Barcelona to Madrid and Paris to London means that it is often cheaper to take a flight than a train, regardless of the emissions consequences.

If airline fuel or emissions are ever taxed, ticket prices will rise and travel will decline.

For businesses, Dickinson of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) believes that high-quality video conferencing, like Cisco-AT&T’s Telepresence, will displace a huge amount of flying. (Full disclosure: Dickinson has financial interest in a company that sets up conferences). Video conference? I know. Videophones have been on display for decades at Disney’s EPCOT Center but, in real life, the concept has never quite gelled; it long had the feel of those telephone chats with astronauts floating in the Space Station. But with Broadband it can really be different, with images and sound so clear that it appears that the people you face on a large screen are actually in the room.

Indeed, even though Dickinson has been promoting the idea for several years, he, himself, continued to fly a lot. But when a volcanic ash cloud recently turned London into a no-fly zone, he was forced into a serious road test: On April 18 he was scheduled to interview candidates for the job of CDP’s China director in Beijing. When his flight was canceled, he decided to nonetheless proceed with the interviews, virtually. “I interviewed three candidates and chose one — it was unbelievably good,” he said. “Next time I won’t buy a ticket.”

I think this attitude will spread, and is embedded already in the generation now emerging from universities and graduate schools. While people of my generation feel the need for eye contact to negotiate or a handshake to seal a deal, this new generation is far more comfortable with the reality of virtual presence. My two teenagers happily do group school projects and debate team preparation over Skype, MSN or Google chat. When I (50-something) suggest they should meet up in person, they roll their eyes. What would be the point of schlepping across town for tasks like this? You schlep for fun things, like movies and parties.

Price pressure, too, I think will force us to rethink this flying habit. In 2012, airlines enter Europe’s emissions trading scheme. If airline fuel or emissions are ever taxes or traded — and I’d guess they will be — ticket prices will rise, and travel will decline.

Of course all this won’t be enough to totally solve the aviation emissions problem, and will not be the solution that airlines want. I can’t imagine my job — or many jobs — getting done with one long-haul flight each year. But we could reduce our flying and emissions from air travel an awful lot. Whatever gains can be achieved through behavior, policy, and technical changes in different sectors will be important.

So now a challenge for 2010: Last year more than 40,000 people flew to Copenhagen to attend the United Nations Climate Conference, COP-15. There were scientists, negotiators, students, journalists (myself included), as well as politicians, many with 20-person retinues in tow. They were there because they cared passionately about climate. Perhaps, as COP-16 in Cancun approaches this year, each of us should ask what we add, or take away, by being on site? Do we really need to fly there?

Author Elisabeth Rosenthal has covered international environmental issues for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune for the last three years, traveling extensively to report on environmental projects. Before that, she was a correspondent in the Times’ Beijing bureau for six years.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360

photo: rachel.caiano

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The practice of “commissioning,” in which an engineer monitors the efficiency of a building from its design through its initial operation, just may be the most effective strategy for reducing long-term energy usage, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. So why is it so seldom used?

In a different world, it could be a reality television show — “Buildings On Trial,” with a street-savvy engineer going into skyscrapers, factories, offices and other commercial buildings to find the dumb mistakes that make them waste energy and produce a disproportionate share of the nation’s global warming emissions.

And in almost every case, even new buildings proudly displaying a LEED “green building” plaque by the front door, the engineer would come back out with a list of energy hog culprits: Here’s the ventilation system fan installed backwards, so it blows full force into another fan blowing in the right direction. Here’s the control system set up so heating and cooling systems both work at once, like driving with your feet on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. Here are the stuck dampers that prevent the building from drawing on outside air when the temperature is right.

Such mistakes are commonplace even in the best buildings — and often costly. In one case, says Dave Moser of Portland Energy Conservation, Inc., an Oregon nonprofit, it cost a building owner $5,000 to fix stuck dampers — and cut $50,000 off the annual energy bill. In a case of simultaneous heating and cooling at an 85,000-square-foot academic building, a minor programming fix cost almost nothing and saved $100,000 a year in wasted energy, according to Mark Miller of Strategic Building Solutions, a Connecticut company.

In one study, the energy performance of LEED-certified “green” buildings was worse than conventional buildings.

The business of finding and fixing these mistakes is called “building commissioning,” a term borrowed from the standard naval practice of commissioning a new ship with sea trials to determine whether it’s fit for service. People started doing roughly the same thing with non-residential real estate in the mid-1990s, as buildings with computer-controlled systems became almost as complex as ships at sea. Commissioning frequently involves no more than a few weeks of testing out systems. But in the most complete form, the commissioning agent works with architects in the design stage, to help save money by specifying properly sized energy systems, then follows the building through construction, trains the operating staff, and tracks energy performance in different seasons through the first year of operation. Older buildings now also go through retro-commissioning, in search of improved efficiency.

But if you imagine that real estate developers must be lining up for this service — if only to save money, or determine whether they are getting the building they paid for — you would be mistaken. Even now, well under 5 percent — and probably closer to 1 percent — of new commercial buildings actually go through the process. Projects seeking certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (or LEED) program, managed by the U.S. Green Building Council, can earn extra points by going through “enhanced” commissioning. But they’re only required to do “fundamental” commissioning — a sort of commissioning-lite, potentially performed not by a third party, but by an “independent” employee of the construction manager whose contractors made the mistakes in the first place.

And yet building commissioning is “arguably the single-most cost-effective strategy for reducing energy, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions in buildings today,” according to a 2009 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If applied to the nation’s entire non-residential building stock, including retro-commissioning of older buildings, it would yield $30 billion in potential energy savings every year by 2030, the study projects, and avoid 340 million tons of global warming emissions annually. To put the latter number in perspective, other studies project that the United States is now on a path to increase global warming emissions by more than a third, up to 9.7 billion metric tons a year by 2030. Roughly 35 percent of emissions come from heating, cooling, and providing electric power for buildings and homes, split evenly between commercial and residential. So building commissioning is hardly the only remedy required. But the potential savings ought to make it one of the most attractive.

Why isn’t it more popular? A lot of developers, and even some building efficiency experts, have simply never heard of commissioning. Others have gotten turned off, says Glenn Hansen of Portland Energy Conservation, Inc., by early experiences in which “a fairly junior engineer” would go through a building checking off boxes on a clipboard. In a 2008 study by the New Buildings Institute, the energy performance in many LEED-certified “green” buildings was actually worse than in the average conventional building, probably because inexperienced people doing “fundamental” conditioning had failed to detect problems.

“Just because you have a paper process doesn’t mean you’re going to get the desired result,” says Hansen. As the commissioning industry has matured, he says, it has gotten better at putting together “a team of people who have good in-field experience at shaking buildings out.”

Inexpensive control systems now make it possible to monitor energy usage for the life of a building.

But the main roadblock to building commissioning is that it can seem expensive. And the company that develops a building typically has little incentive to take on that extra upfront burden, since a different company will often end up owning and operating the building. For new buildings, full commissioning typically adds $1.16 on top of construction costs of roughly $230 a square foot, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study. For existing buildings, it costs 30 cents a square foot. That’s not counting the cost of changes recommended as a result of commissioning. But the bottom line still looks good, the study reports: Energy savings from commissioning typically result in a payback time of 4.5 years for new buildings and 1.1 years for existing buildings.

Several new programs attempt to address the problem of one company getting stuck with the upfront costs while another company reaps the benefits from commissioning and other energy efficiency measures. Last year, the city of Berkeley, Calif., issued the nation’s first “property assessed clean energy,” or PACE bonds, which pay the initial costs of such improvements on both commercial and residential properties, then recoup the investment over 20 years through a property tax surcharge that stays with the building even as ownership changes. Sixteen states have already approved enabling legislation for PACE bonds, and at the federal level, the Waxman-Markey climate bill also contains supporting language. On a similar model, an ESCO, or energy service company, will provide efficiency improvements in a building and sometimes guarantee the energy savings that should result; the ESCO makes its money back by pocketing some of the difference between the building’s old energy bill and the new one. About 30 U.S. utility companies also provide rebates or other incentives for commercial customers to undergo building commissioning.

Commissioning of larger commercial properties could eventually be required by building codes. A push for such a requirement recently failed in Oregon. But commissioning is currently under discussion for the 2012 version of the International Energy Conservation Code, which serves as a model for building codes in many jurisdictions.

So-called “monitoring-based commissioning” could also make building owners and operators more comfortable with the idea that the process is actually yielding bottom-line results. Even in the most successful commissionings, says Glenn Hansen, equipment can eventually go out of whack again, or the operating staff can stop paying attention, allowing energy costs to creep back up. But relatively inexpensive control systems now make it possible to monitor usage throughout the life of a building, breaking it down by energy use per degree day, or per square foot, and sending alerts if the chillers, say, start operating inefficiently, or if the whole building misses certain benchmarks.

Given the complexity that makes it prudent for buildings to be commissioned like ships, those kind of monitoring systems can provide critical reassurance. Instead of steering blindly, operators of a building will know hour by hour whether they are in fact heading in the right direction.

Author Richard Conniff is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and a National Magazine Award-winning writer, whose articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic.

photo: roeyahram

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J. Craig Venter, the genome pioneer, has created a “synthetic cell” by synthesizing a complete bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell. Venter’s breakthrough, reported in the online edition of Science, represents a preliminary step toward the goal of creating microbes from scratch in the lab and using them to make biofuels, vaccines, and other products.

Venter’s achievement could one day lead to a technology where, though engineering the genome, individual cells could be turned into their own miniature refineries for harvesting carbon dioxide and generating hydrocarbons.

In 2005, Venter — one of the first people to sequence the human genome, doing it faster and cheaper than government scientists — set up a company, Synthetic Genomics, to create synthetic cells, and the advance reported in Science represents a milestone for the company and for so-called synthetic biology.

Synthetic Genomics has a contract with Exxon to generate biofuels from algae.

Although some experts hailed Venter’s breakthrough, others said his approach is unpromising because it will take years to design new organisms to produce biofuels, while progress toward making biofuels is already being achieved with conventional genetic engineering approaches.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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A NASA-sponsored competition to design futuristic, fuel-efficient airplanes has led to a jet prototype that would burn roughly 70 percent less fuel than current aircraft.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed what they called a D-series “double bubble” jet, which features a wide fuselage composed of two partial cylinders fused together in an aerodynamic shape.

The prototype also has a smaller tail, skinnier wings, and engines mounted on the rear of the fuselage instead of the wings, which allows the engines to suck in slower-moving air and increase efficiency.

These changes and use of lighter materials help the plane burn 70 percent less fuel, the MIT team said. In addition to designing this subsonic model, the MIT team designed a supersonic model, as well, that they said would also sharply cut fuel consumption.

The NASA competition — known as “N+3” to denote three generations beyond today’s commercial fleet — also included designs from Boeing, GE Aviation, and Northrop Grumman. Air traffic is expected to double by 2035, and one MIT engineer said new designs were needed because “aircraft silhouettes have basically remained the same over the past 50 years.”

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: MIT

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