We're leaving money on the table by not improving energy efficiency (image by pfala, CC 2.5 licensed)

Would you spend $520 to save $1,200? That’s the choice McKinsey & Co is offering to the U.S. about energy efficiency. In their new report on energy efficiency, released last week, McKinsey shows how the U.S. can reduce its non-transportation energy use by 23%, eliminate the emissions of 1.1 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually, and save $1,200 billion, for a cost of about $520 billion.

They do recognize that achieving these results requires some new thinking on our parts:

Such energy savings will be possible, however, only if the United States can overcome significant sets of barriers. These barriers are widespread and persistent, and will require an integrated set of solutions to overcome them – including information and education, incentives and financing, codes and standards, and deployment resources well beyond current levels.

The report not only provides the conclusions, but also the steps we can take to address barriers and achieve the desired results. They suggest an overarching strategy, including the key point that “energy efficiency is an important energy resource to help meet future energy needs…” and the need for an integrated portfolio of different approaches to unlock the full potential of energy efficiency.

Link

Playing With Fire (image by charles chan, CC 2.0 license)

An article in Sunday’s Science Daily reports on research showing that more than half of the Earth’s warming since the dawn of the industrial age is due to the heat released from our energy use, not atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect.

While the greenhouse effect is still a significant contributor – and will become more so as GHG levels in the atmosphere rise – simply the heat released when burning fuels is also being stored in the atmosphere, as well as in the earth, sea, and arctic ice.

The researchers have calculated that the heat energy accumulated in the atmosphere corresponds to a mere 6.6% of global warming, while the remaining heat is stored in the ground (31.5%), melting ice (33.4%) and sea water (28.5%). They point out that net heat emissions between the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 correspond to almost three quarters of the accumulated heat, i.e., global warming, during that period.

Their conclusion is that simply capturing our CO2 emissions, will not prevent global warming. We have to actually reduce the amount of heat we are releasing into the world via our energy use – which mostly involves burning things, and therefore generating waste heat.

The good news is that solar photovoltaics, wind power, even solar thermal generate much less, or even negative, waste heat than either conventional energy sources, or nuclear energy. And of course energy efficiency is the cheapest and most cost-effective mitigation we have at our fingertips.

Link

Smokestacks (image by shoothead, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some good news from China this week, and a blueprint for addressing the huge amount of energy used, and GHG’s generated, by the built environment:

• China has become the world leader in building clean coal power plants, although they have a ways to go still, according to this New York Times article.
  

  China’s improvements are starting to have an effect on climate models. In its latest annual report last November, the I.E.A. cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent, in response to technological gains, particularly in the coal sector, even as the agency raised slightly its forecast for Chinese economic growth.

• The World Business Council for Sustainable Development just published a report on the changes needed in the building sector – which uses 40% of our end-use energy, and contributes 40% of the greenhouse gases – to chieve the energy usage rduction goals prescribed by the IPCC. I’ll be blogging more about this report later this week, but for now, here’s the link to the report:
  

  “Energy efficiency is fast becoming one of the defining issues of our times, and buildings are that issue’s ‘elephant in the room’. Buildings use more energy than any other sector and as such are a major contributor to climate change,” said Björn Stigson, president of the WBCSD.

• From Treehugger, a list of twitterers to follow on green building and green architecture:
  

  There are some great people twittering about the latest in eco-friendly architecture and building design. Check out a few of the people we think you should follow to stay updated.

Roundup Time! (image by williac, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some more roundup links. These pages have been hanging around in my browser for weeks, waiting for me to blog about them. As with the links I posted earlier this week, I consider these “go to” articles and sites – continuously interesting and relevant.

• Honestly, the most interesting article I’ve read on the economic crisis, because it suggests the problem is structural and provides a prescription for addressing it. (From the New York Times a few weeks ago.)
  

  Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

• Another take on the same idea as Soddy’s (above), expressed with a bit more verve by Joe Romm of Climate Progress.
  

  Yes, homo “sapiens” sapiens have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations.
  

• Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air, by David JC McKay, is a detailed investigation, with numbers but without hard math, of how Britain can replace all its energy use with renewables. Very thorough, well-researched, and easy to read. The whole book is available on the web as PDF and HTML – you can also buy it from the site.
  

  “For anyone with influence on energy policy, whether in government, business or a campaign group, this book should be compulsory reading.” Tony Juniper Former Executive Director, Friends of the Earth
  

Let me if you have a chance to read any of these pages or sites. I’d love to hear what you think.

The polar bears say "keep the innovations coming - it's getting warm out here!" (image by Just Being Myself, CC 2.0 licensed)

While I agree with Joseph Romm on Climate Progress that we can’t count on a “Manhattan Project”-style endeavour to engineer our way out of the climate crisis in the short term, nonetheless, I think it’s reasonable to have a certain expectation that technology will improve over the right timescale, so we can be ready to take advantage of it.

A few weeks ago Martin Brown had a great post on his Fairsnape blog on Recession Thoughts and Tips. One of his many excellent suggestions was

Stand in the future and observe the industry in 2016/2019 – climate change will not be ‘put on hold’ during the recession – so do you have a route to zero mapped out?

His suggestions apply, of course, not only in a recession, but also if you want to help make big changes happen. In particular, “Standing in the future” is critical for those who are trying to make changes in response to climate change to visualize how things must be (for us to survive) in 2020 or 2030, because only then can we figure out how to get there.

The key challenge for that kind of thing is thinking big enough! Small example: If you’d asked me twenty years ago, or even ten, if it was every going to be possible to watch video on my phone, I’d have said “No, there’s just not going to be enough bandwidth for that to happen. I don’t ever expect that to be something we can do.” Was I ever wrong! And I consider myself open-minded and an outside the box thinker!

It’s very likely that the technologies and practices that get us out of a climate change disaster aren’t invented yet, or at best are in labs somewhere. Those of us – the rest of us – who need to take those inchoate and early ideas and turn them into market realities need a LOT of imagination to forcefully move the world out of its current ruts.

That’s why I often post news about discoveries coming out of labs, or going into the development process. Daniel Nocera’s hydrogen reforming, and nanotechnology breakthroughs, or technologies like or based on them, will be changing our lives in the next 10, 20, or fifty years – whether by mitigating carbon, or helping us store or generate renewable energy, or perhaps in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.

If there are particular technologies you are watching, let me know in the comments – I’ve love to hear about them.

A mythical character (image by Eddi 07, CC 2.0 licensed)

A handful of good articles from the past few weeks, on climate change and sustainable building.

• ‘A “Manhattan project” to develop new breakthrough technologies is not a priority component of the effort to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm.‘
  Climate Progress, the “indispensible blog” according to Tom Friedman, lays down the law on what is and isn’t going to solve the climate change crisis.
• Climate policy myths
  Grist Magazine’s online edition is presenting, and debunking, the top myths related to climate change and the policies needed to address it.
• “Now buildings must evolve again”
  Building Sustainable Design magazine, from the UK, discusses how builders need to start reincorporating passive efficiency elements into their high-rise building designs.
• “Western European architects, engineers, and builders are ahead of us [in the U.S.] in the widespread use of passive design techniques”
  Gerry Yudelson tells us what Europeans already know about sustainable design, but we Americans either don’t know or have forgotten.

I hope you find these as interesting as I did – let me know in the comments.

Clouds (original name: Nuages - image by luc.viatour, CC 2.0 licensed)

In their special issue on Earth 3.0, Scientific American explores the concept of “sustainability” and the myths surrounding it as we face an uncertain future. In Top 10 Myths about Sustainability, they observe:

When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere … it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. “Green” (or, even worse, “going green”) falls squarely into the first category. But “sustainable,” which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second.

The article then goes on to cover a number of myths – many related to disinformation-type campaigns about the environment, global warming, and fossil fuels – like:

• Myth 2: Sustainability is all about the environment.
• Myth 4: It’s all about recycling.
• Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living, and
• Myth 9: Sustainability is ultimately a population problem.

Definitely worth reading, if just for the review (for my well-educated readers) and to get a good, relatively unbiased view of some of the issues and realities of sustainability.

H/T to Texas Sustainability for the link.

Eustace Tilley Considers Electric Cars

I’m a big fan of the New Yorker, and read most issues cover to cover. Their politics usually align with mine, and I always enjoyed Hendrik Hertzberg sticking it to the Cheney administration. But I have to take issue with some of their economic opinions. In particular, David Owen’s Talk of Town, Economy Vs. Environment, in the March 20 issue got me hot and bothered.

Owen’s basic position seems to be that to be sustainable we can’t spend, and if we spend we’re not sustainable. Therefore, the stimulus package and a long term goal for sustainability are incompatible. (With the subtext, apparently, that stimulus is more important.)

I have several issues with Owen’s position. For example, Owens doesn’t say much about spending on sustainability – there $15 billion of that. Much of that, because it’s focused on energy efficiency, will result in improved productivity. It turns out you can get a lot of productivity from sustainability improvements. It’s one of the magic tricks – called the “triple bottom line” – you spend less or the same up front, you save more, and you’re healthier and more productive. In this case sustainability is actually directly improving the economy.

But the bigger issue, it seems to me, is statements like this:

How do we persuade people to drive less—an environmental necessity—while also encouraging them to revive our staggering economy by buying new cars? The popular answer—switch to hybrids—leaves the fundamental problem unaddressed. Increasing the fuel efficiency of a car is mathematically indistinguishable from lowering the price of its fuel; it’s just fiddling with the other side of the equation.”

I agree that the popular answer is – while not wrong – incomplete at best. And of course, as I pointed out the other day, individual action is not going to save us. Instead, we need structural changes, such as incentivizing people to move back cities, where using public transit to get to work is reasonable. Or we need to enable people to telecommute more. If I telecommuted one day a week, it would save me at least $8 out of pocket (gas and tolls), plus over an hour of time in the car. Time people spend commuting, except for those few who can do business by phone while driving, is basically unproductive. So reducing commute times, or eliminating commuting altogether, actually improves the economy’s productivity.

In fact, Owen makes the opposite claim – that more efficiency will actually cause people to drive *more*, offsetting the savings:

Electric cars are not the panacea they are sometimes claimed to be, not only because the electricity they run on has to be generated somewhere but also because making driving less expensive does nothing to discourage people from sprawling across the face of the planet, promoting forms of development that are inherently and catastrophically wasteful.

I will agree that electric cars are not a “panacea,” although I don’t think anyone is saying that’s the case. But are electric cars, or hydrogen cars, or some kind of car that doesn’t run on fossil fuels, a legitimate part of a sustainable solution to both the climate problem and the poor economy?

Well, yes. There are two problems with Owen’s argument against them. One is that a key part of it is wrong. There’s been quite a lot of research on the question of whether higher gas mileage will cause people to drive more. The assertion is called Jevon’s Paradox, and it turns out it’s not really true.

Just as a simple thought experiment, assume my car suddenly got twice the MPG that it does today. Would I start driving twice as far to get to work? Hmmm, don’t think so. When I decide to get away for the weekend, would I decide “Santa Cruz is not good enough, because it’s *too close* – I think I’ll drive to Salinas instead?” Of course not. We drive where we drive because we want to go there, not because we have $X to spend on gas. The same is true of choosing a new place to live. Am I willing to spend an hour each way commuting just because my car gets twice the mileage? Of course not. I may choose to move farther away for other reasons (in the Bay Area it was because that was where the affordable homes were, for example), but being able to keep my gasoline use constant would not be one of them.

But there’s another fallacy in the argument as well, which is that sprawling development is determined by the gas mileage of our cars. This isn’t true. (Some people would say sprawling development is an experiment that didn’t really work.) Sprawl is a structural issue – it’s not caused by one thing or another, but by a combination of decisions, incentives, and disincentives. For example, there’s been a strong disincentive in the U.S. for mixed-use development – such as mixed retail and residential – particularly outside cities. As Nicolai Ouroussoff said in his article “Reinventing American Cities: The Time Is Now” in the March 29 NY Times Sunday Magazine article.

With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.

I was at a new mall in Fremont yesterday, which is all retail and no residential. Of course, to get to this mall, people have to get in their cars. The place is pretty much dead after about 7pm. I suspect that Fremont’s zoning rules actively prevented this mall from being mixed-use, and even if that’s not the case (I’d have to research it) I’m sure they don’t have incentives in place for developers to create mixed use environments. Simply thinking about the possibility of mixed-use puts that mall in stark contrast to what might be.

So, we can use structural means (zoning, incentives, nudges, etc.) to help people drive less over time by making sure they can live near where they work, that they can use public transit, that they can telecommute, and so on. This will have multiple benefits – the famous triple bottom line. People will spend less on driving. There will be less pollution. And people will be more productive, if only because they’re not commuting so long.

But there’s no getting around the fact that people are going to drive sometimes. I still want to go visit Mount Rushmore, or visit my in-laws’ in Southern California. (Note: I already do this in my ordinary car anyway, so it’s not like I’m going to do this *more* necessarily.) This is where the benefits of the electric or hydrogen or biofuel car come in.

So my bottom line: Let’s build more cars, but let’s also change our zoning so that people don’t have to drive as far. No one will mind if the new freeways are less crowded.

The kitchen of one unit in the first Passive House (photo by H.G. Esch)

I just ran across this delightful article about the first Passive House, built in Darmstadt Germany in 1992. The article describes the process the builders went through to model and design it, a four unit residential block, then to build this new type of building, even creating the new highly efficient windows and doors by hand.

The article follows the building through its first 15 years of operation (it’s still occupied). The team led by Dr. Feist instrumented the house thoroughly and did extensive measurements throughout its first fifteen years to validate their models. When Amory Lovins saw the house and the measured results in in 1995, he said:

This is not just a scientific experiment, this is the solution. You just need to redesign the details in order to reduce the additional costs – and I’m convinced that is possible

This was followed by a “working group on Passive Houses” which then went on to bigger pilots, and the now snowballing Passive House movement in Europe, driven by Dr. Feist’s PassivHaus Institut. They did prove “it was possible” to build Passive Houses economically, and the results are there for everyone to see.

It’s a compelling and inspiring story of theory and practice, tied together with instrumentation and measurement, achieving a real breakthrough in buildings – a potentially world-saving breakthrough.

The main problem with lowering the carbon level is down to individuals, to behaviour, to good citizenship and that is the biggest challenge of all… how many times to you see careless behaviours? how do you change that?

I just had to respond. I think this attitude is the best way to make sure that end in the end, nothing good happens. I’m reprinting my comment on the topic below, unedited (even though you all know about passive houses already).

My response

Individual action will not solve the problem. For example, my hobby horse is highly energy efficient buildings such as the Passive House approach. They use 80-90% less energy than a conventional house, at typically 5-10% higher cost to build. Simply building only passive houses and remodeling to the passive house standard for the next ten years would reduce the U.S.’s carbon footprint by at least 20%. In fact, because the energy use is so low, there will be lots of excess solar electricity generated, so our carbon footprint might even go lower due to the compounding effects.

But people won’t build them without a) a large-scale education campaign for both builders and home buyers, b) incentives for builders and owners from cities, counties, and states, and c) a compelling business case for the suppliers of the highly efficient windows and mechanical systems required.

Passive Houses “tunnel through” the efficiency cost barrier to achieve their benefits at a relatively low additional cost. But even though they have a great cost/benefit ratio, they’re not going to take off without those structural changes. That’s why, instead of becoming a builder of passive houses, I’m becoming a lobbyist for passive houses. Builders can make a difference of 2-5 houses a year. As a lobbyist, I can make a difference of 100-1000 houses a year, or more.

Individuals weatherstripping their houses, and taking shorter showers, can slow down CO2 growth a bit, but turning it around takes large structural changes. Yes, those are driven by individuals, but they are not individual changes.

I use passive houses as an example, but there are lots more in other areas. Same is true for car use – it will take structural changes for people to be able to live nearer where they work. Or for food energy use – most people are not going to be able to garden enough to make a difference in the U.S.’s agricultural energy footprint – that’s going to take big changes in commercial ag. Some of those changes are happening, and that’s awesome, but it’s not going to happen by you putting in a garden, no matter how good and useful a step that is.