Which Energy Independence Plan is Better — T. Boone Pickens or Google? Part 2

November 04, 2008

If you think it’s odd that a Texas oilman is proposing a plan to build massive wind farms to wean the U.S. from its dependence upon fossil fuels, consider this: He’s got competition from an even more unlikely player — a company that isn’t even in the energy industry. I’m talking about none other than Google, the search engine, online advertising and video giant that is currently angling to take over the software world with its Google Chrome browser and suite of cloud-computing applications.
(Here’s my previous blog on that subject.)

As it turns out, Google does alternative energy, too. Or rather, it wants to, in a big way. In October, the company unveiled its ambitious, multi-trillion dollar plan for weaning the U.S. away from the burning of coal and oil for electrical power and cutting the use of petroleum to power cars and trucks by nearly 40 percent by 2030. Jeffery Greenblatt the Princeton-trained researcher whom Google recently hired as its climate and energy technology manager, explains:

Google's proposal will benefit the US by increasing energy security, protecting the environment, creating new jobs, and helping to create the conditions for long-term prosperity. Some of the necessary funds will be public, but much of it will come from the private sector — a typical approach for infrastructure and high technology investments.

Here’s how Google would have us do it. In contrast with Pickens’ plan, which relies entirely upon wind power and converting vehicles to natural gas, the Internet behemoth would attack the problem from multiple angles.

Which Energy Independence Plan is Better — T. Boone Pickens, or Google? Part 1

October 27, 2008

T. Boone Pickens has been putting up so many commercials to advertise his energy independence plan that his crinkly, octogenarian visage is becoming nearly as familiar as the GEICO cavemen or Max, the annoying talking Volkswagen Beetle who startles car shoppers in VW commercials. So what is Pickens, who became the 369th richest person on the planet primarily by drilling for oil and taking over other oil companies (or attempting to do so, and driving up the price of his stock holdings), doing promoting wind power as an alternative to oil? Well, let’s let him do the talking.

From his Web site, here’s more detail on his argument for wind power, and the specifics of his plan, which he boasts could turn the U.S. into the “Saudi Arabia of wind power":

Obama’s Plan to Fight Global Warming

October 06, 2008

According to the transcript of the first presidential debate, GOP candidate John McCain was the only one to actually mention global warming as an issue — but he did so only in passing, as an additional justification for his plan to build 45 new nuclear power plants, which we discussed in last week’s blog. As McCain explained,

Nuclear power is not only important as far as eliminating our dependence on foreign oil, but it's also responsibility as far as climate change is concerned and the issue I have been involved in for many, many years and I'm proud of the work of the work that I've done there along with President Clinton.

I have to point out that while nuclear power may make sense as a measure to combat global warming, the argument that it will free us from dependence upon foreign oil is pretty much nonsensical.  According to U.S. Department of Energy data, the U.S. gets only about 50 million megawatt-hours of electricity from burning petroleum — a minuscule amount compared to the more than 2 billion megawatt-hours that are produced by burning coal, the fuel upon which we rely most heavily for electricity generation. Additionally, McCain didn't mention the estimated $315 billion cost, or how it would be funded (a hint: taxpayers may ultimately be on the hook for much of it). Or what he would do about disposing of nuclear waste, though he’s recently looked at shipping it to Siberia.

But I digress. We’re looking at Democratic candidate Barack Obama this week, and his approach to combating global warming.

Obama’s energy plan sets a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a more ambitious cutback than the 50 percent target set by the G-8 major industrial nations, which President Bush agreed to in July. Like McCain, Obama would establish a cap-and-trade system under which the government would set a ceiling on carbon emissions, and then issue permits to emit carbon. That, in turn, would allow companies to make money by reducing their emissions and then selling their permits to others. Unlike McCain, who would initially give away the permits, Obama would auction them off from the get-go, which he argues would ensure that polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release, giving them an even bigger incentive to clean up their act. Obama also would require that utility companies generate at least 10 percent of their electricity from solar, wind and geothermal sources by 2012.

McCain’s Plan for Fighting Global Warming

September 29, 2008

I know that everybody is worked up right now about the Wall Street mortgage crisis and what sort of leadership Barack Obama and John McCain will show regarding the Bush administration’s proposed $700 billion federal bailout, the cost of which will be borne by taxpayers. While that’s a pretty tall stack of deceased presidents, in my view, it’s not the campaign issue with the biggest ultimate consequences, both in terms of economics and impact on our way of life. No, that would be the issue of global warming, and what to do about it. Look at it this way. According to a Natural Resources Defense Council study, if we don’t do something to slow the rate of climate change, by the end of this century the U.S. will be spending $950 billion annually just to cope with water shortages. That’s the equivalent of taxpayers having to bail out Wall Street every single year.

Of course, the U.S. wouldn’t be the only nation to feel the pain. In a 2006 study for the British government, economist Sir Nicholas Stern forecast that in coming decades, the effects of climate change — from flooded cities to withered cropland — could cause the global economy to shrink by an astonishing 20 percent. As Stern wrote:

The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth. Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century. And it will be difficult or impossible to reverse these changes.

Al Gore's Energy Challenge

August 08, 2008

Full disclosure here. While I am indeed extremely concerned about global warming and what we can do to avert a climate catastrophe in the too-near future, there’s an ulterior motive behind this week’s essay as well. I’m hoping, albeit improbably, that my favorite Futurama talking-head-in- a- jar, former Vice-President -turned- Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, will somehow stumble upon this page via Google Alerts and actually deign to post a comment on my blog. As you can see from this picture of his Nashville office, he’s got a few things on his plate right now. But hey, Mr. Vice-President, if you do happen to be reading this, it wouldn’t take too long to pound out a few words of encouragement or wisdom, would it? And while you’re at it, sir, please feel free to weigh in on the recent controversy in this space regarding the relative merits of Survivor vs. Night Ranger when it comes to 1980s Lite Metal mullet-rock. We all could benefit from a statesmanlike resolution of that question.

                     

Floating Cities?

July 18, 2008

If you want to have some disturbing dreams tonight, check out this YouTube video. And I’m not just talking about the Eighties retro theme music by those mullet-coiffed lite-metal gods Night Ranger. 

No, what I’m obsessing about is the potential impact of coastal flooding from rising sea levels due to global warming. (By the way, for the handful of you climate-change skeptics out there who may get the urge to flood my email box with angry, hyper-detailed refutations, please instead refer to blogger Coby Beck’s excellent FAQ on the subject.) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is pretty worried about the effects of rising sea levels on U.S. coastal areas, as this online briefing paper details. But other nations ought to be even more worried. Take a look at this 2007 report with the ominous title, "Ranking Port Cities with High Exposure and Vulnerability to Climate Extremes: Exposure Estimates," by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  Here’s the upshot:

By the 2070s, total population exposed could grow more than threefold to around 150 million people due to the combined effects of climate change (sea-level rise and increased storminess), subsidence, population growth and urbanization. The asset exposure could grow even more dramatically, reaching US $35,000 billion by the 2070s; more than ten times current levels and rising to roughly 9% of projected global GDP in this period. On a global-scale, for both types of exposure, population growth, socio-economic growth and urbanization are the most important drivers of the overall increase in exposure. Climate change and subsidence significantly exacerbate this effect although the relative importance of these factors varies by location. Exposure rises most rapidly in developing countries, as development moves increasingly into areas of high and rising flood risk.

Indeed, the top two coastal metropolises on the endangered list are Calcutta and Mumbai in India, and of the remainder of the top 10, eight are also Asian cities. (Miami, Fla., in the U.S., which ranked ninth, was the only city from a developed nation on the list.)

Test Tube Burgers?

April 25, 2008

I’ll be honest. One of the big reasons that I’m a former vegetarian is that, despite my nagging guilt about eating something with a disturbingly cute face and my concerns about the serious environmental problems caused by raising massive numbers of animals for food, I finally just got sick of a steady diet of tofu burgers. You can slather them in mustard, mayonnaise and/or barbecue sauce, top them with a big juicy slice of vine-ripened tomato, and wash them down with a sip of Fosters’ new environmentally-friendly lager, whose brewing process uses a microbial fuel-cell process to generate energy from the byproducts. But despite all that taste bud obfuscation, when it comes down to it, you’re still chewing on bean curd.

But at last, there may be a near-future solution for those of us who are reluctant carnivores. Instead of raising and slaughtering animals for their flesh, what if the muscle cells that make up meat were cultured and grown in big vats in laboratory-factories?

The idea has been around for quite a while. Back in the late 1980s, the late academic and futurist  Michael Hooker went around giving speeches in which he predicted that in vitro meat would be a staple of the 21st century. The actual science to support the notion came along a decade or so later, when Touro College bioengineer Morris Benjaminson and colleagues successfully took chunks of muscle tissue from a goldfish, immersed them in a vat of nutrient-rich liquid, and succeeded in growing miniature fish fillets. As this 2002 New Scientist article details, the Benjaminson and his research team actually went a bit further to test the artificial food’s palatability:

To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments. "We wanted to make sure it'd pass for something you could buy in the supermarket," he says. The results look promising, on the surface at least. "They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it," says Benjaminson.

Benjaminson envisioned in vitro meat as a potential food source for NASA astronauts on lengthy space voyages, but animal rights activists quickly glommed onto the concept as well. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has offered a $1 million reward to the first scientist who can develop a palatable synthetic meat and sell it to the public by 2012. As part of the contest, PETA proposes holding a taste test, using a cruelty-free fried chicken recipe. 

Others are proposing in vitro meat as the solution for feeding the world’s burgeoning population without further straining the environment. Norway recently hosted the first-ever In Vitro Meat Symposium, at which researchers released a European study projecting that synthetic meat could be produced for a little more than $5,000 a ton, a cost that would make it competitive with meat from animals. Along these lines, Dutch researchers are forging ahead with efforts to grow ersatz pork chops (here’s a Reuters article on that).

In this country, New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization, is working to fund research and development of meat substitutes. (Here’s New Harvest’s FAQ on in vitro meat.) New Harvest co-founder and director, Jason Matheny, thinks that manufactured meat could be in supermarkets within a decade. In an email, he argues that it will be vastly better for us, in a variety of ways:

Cultured meat has the potential to be healthier, safer, less polluting, and more humane than conventional meat. Fat content can be more easily controlled. The incidence of foodborne disease can be significantly reduced, thanks to strict quality control rules that are impossible to introduce in modern animal farms, slaughterhouses, or meat packing plants. Inedible animal structures (bones, respiratory system, digestive system, skin, and the nervous system) need not be grown. As a result, cultured meat production should be more efficient than conventional meat production in its use of energy, land, and water; and it should produce less waste. Since meat production is responsible for even more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector, it's critical that we develop a more efficient alternative.

Perhaps the biggest question: How eager will we all be to pick up a package of synthetic ground sirloin patties and throw them on the grill? Are we willing to eat something that was nurtured in a nutrient-rich solution, rather than on pasture grass? Are we willing to embrace and consume something unnatural, for the sake of the planet? Or does the very idea of synthetic food conjure up unappetizing memories of the late Charlton Heston revealing the actual ingredients of Soylent Green? Express your opinion below.

Should We Replace Oil With Switchgrass?

April 03, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty bummed every time I pull my aging, bumper-sticker laden Saturn sedan up to a gas station pump, and not just because I know that filling the tank is going to eat another chunk out of my bank balance. Since I work out of my home, I don’t drive as much as I used to, but even the 6,000 miles that I put on the odometer each year puts about 2.1 tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, according to this handy dandy carbon footprint travel calculator that I recently found on the Web. Neither do I much like the idea that I’m contributing to the ongoing American orgy of oil consumption that some critics say finances terrorism and/or props up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. (Of course, it should be mentioned that according to the U.S. Department of Energy, our biggest foreign oil source is decidedly non-authoritarian, non-terroristic Canada.) But I’m in a bind. I can’t afford right now to trade in my circa-1997 clunker for one of those spiffy Toyota Prius hybrids and then shell out another $6,000 or so for the aftermarket modification that’ll enable it to run primarily on electricity. By the same token, I don’t want to feel all angst-ridden every time I get the urge to roll over to the local American Apparel store and buy some hip-looking '70s retro tube socks.

Finding an alternative fuel to replace gasoline, one that would work in old-fashioned internal combustion engines like the one my Saturn has, would be the ideal short-term fix. For years, agribusiness and Midwestern politicians have been touting corn ethanol as the panacea for our plight — one that, perhaps not coincidentally, would also jack up the market price of the crop from which it is made. But switching to corn ethanol wouldn’t do that much to reduce our energy consumption, since according to this CNN.com article, the fuel yields only 40 percent more energy than it takes to cultivate and distill it. It wouldn’t help much with greenhouse gas emissions, either, because burning it produces only 10 percent to 15 percent less of those emissions than gasoline. Beyond that, corn-based ethanol in some ways might actually exacerbate global warming, because as this article explains, it causes U.S. farmers to grow corn instead of soybeans, creating an economic incentive for Brazilian farmers to slash and burn down more of the Amazon rain forest so the land can be used for soy cultivation.

But there is another possibility. I’m enthused about a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Net Energy of Cellulosic Ethanol from Switchgrass.” The study focused upon switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), a hardy plant that covered great stretches of the North American landscape in the days before farmers supplanted it with food crops and pastureland, and its potential as raw material to make cellulosic ethanol fuel. After switchgrass was grown at 10 farms over a five-year period, researchers found that the resulting biomass was capable of generating more than five times as much energy as it took to cultivate it. Moreover, when the fuel made from the switchgrass was burned, the estimated greenhouse gas emissions were 94 percent lower than what would have been emitted by an equivalent amount of gasoline. Furthermore, cellulosic ethanol isn’t going to put a dent into food crop production or endanger the rain forest, because the hardy, fast-growing perennial can be grown in the U.S. on land  that’s unsuitable for other types of farming.

One of the reseachers, U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticist Ken Vogel, explained the switchgrass study’s significance to the Omaha World Herald:

"This clearly demonstrates that switchgrass is not only energy efficient, but can be used in a renewable biofuel economy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and enhance rural economies," Vogel said.

So what is the downside? Well, critics have argued that cellulosic ethanol would be too expensive to produce in large enough quantities, because turning it into fuel requires enzymes that first have to be slowly and laboriously extracted from organisms such as the fungus Trichoderma reesei, which, unlike our own stomachs, can digest cellulose. That’s why one of corn ethanol’s congressional champions, House Agriculture Committee chairman Colin Peterson of Minnesota, recently predicted that switchgrass is at least a decade away from being a viable alternative to gasoline. "I'm not sure cellulosic ethanol will ever get off the ground,” Reuters quoted him as saying. (Peterson’s home state, it should be mentioned, grows a lot of corn.)

But it turns out that at least two companies, Illinois-based Coskata and the Alternative Energy Technology Center in Texas, are now saying that they can produce cellulosic ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, which would make it significantly cheaper than corn ethanol, and way cheaper than gasoline. And that’s just the start. As this Wired article details, scientists are racing to find cheaper, more efficient methods, such as a genetically engineered microorganism that  would consume cellulose and excrete ethanol, without an intermediate enzyme-extraction process.

Cellulosic ethanol — combined, of course, with the use of other alternative energy sources and increased conservation — seems to me like the obvious way to go. So obvious, in fact, that these days even the ex-oilman currently occupying the White House is talking enthusiastically about using “stalk grass” and wood chips to power our automobiles. But money speaks more truth about priorities, and the actual amount of federal funding for developing cellulosic ethanol technology in the Department of Energy’s FY 2008 budget request is an underwhelming $179 billion. To put things in perspective, the U.S. spends about twice that much each day to fight the war in Iraq. (That’s according to the Iraq Insider blog.)

So here’s my proposal. Instead of aiming to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next decade, which is the Bush administration’s target, why don’t we aim higher? After all, JFK set a goal of landing on the moon in 10 years, and American ingenuity made it happen in eight. Let’s ratchet up the research budget by a factor of 10 or 20 — or whatever it takes — and set a goal of completely replacing gasoline with cellulosic ethanol by 2018. Then I finally can drive to the store and buy all the tube socks that I desire, sans remorse. Does that seem reasonable? Feel free to express your opinion below.

Should We Build More Nuclear Power Plants?

January 25, 2008

I have to admit that for a long time, I’ve had a lot of qualms about nuclear power as a source of electricity. I was in college in Pennsylvania during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and I remember being downwind as a pretty scary experience.  (The alarmist antinuclear thriller The China Syndrome, which I saw the weekend after the accident, added a bit to my anxiety, especially that line of dialogue about a nuclear meltdown’s potential to render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.)  Fortunately, the partial core meltdown of TMI’s unit 2 reactor was brought under control before a disaster of gigantic proportions could occur. But seven years later, when a reactor suffered a steam explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the then-Soviet Union, the Soviets and their European neighbors weren’t so lucky. The accident spread radiation as far as the UK and Sweden, and a 2005 international report estimated that the area surrounding the stricken reactor will suffer as many as 4,000 additional deaths from cancer. After TMI and Chernobyl, I figured, nuclear power was pretty much dead. The only concerns left, I figured, were the problems of safely maintaining the aging nuclear power plants already in existence, and figuring out what to do with the radioactive waste building up on site at those plants.

But the rapidly developing global warming crisis has forced me — and a lot of other people, I suspect — to at least reconsider my opposition to nuclear power. Seventy percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by power plants that burn fossil fuels, and as a result, we’re pumping ungodly amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And the explosively growing nations of China and India are doing their best to burn even more coal to generate electricity than we do. Energy conservation on a massive global scale is what we really need, but good luck with convincing Americans — and everyone else across the planet who aspires to a blithely affluent U.S. lifestyle — to carpool or turn down their air conditioning in the summer, let alone unplug the appliances and electronic gadgets that turn into energy-wasting  “vampire devices” when they’re idle.

So what do we do? In 2006, one-time Greenpeace International director Patrick Moore wrote a Washington Post opinion piece advocating the building of more nuclear power plants as a way of reducing dependence upon fossil fuels and curbing climate change. Moore argued that nuclear power was a more viable source of greenhouse emissions-free power than other alternative energy sources:

"Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple."

Moore discounted the criticisms that many opponents of nuclear power have raised. Even the horrific accident at Chernobyl, he noted, caused fewer deaths than the 5,000 deaths in coal-mining accidents worldwide each year. And as for the problem of disposing nuclear waste, he wrote that

"Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind."

He’s not the only one who supports building more nuclear power plants. According to this chart compiled by the environmental news and commentary Web site Grist, not only do all the remaining Republican presidential candidates support expanded use of nuclear power, but the two top Democratic contenders are at least lukewarm to the idea. (Sen. Barack Obama, whose home state of Illinois gets 40 percent of its power from nuclear plants, told CNN in November 2007 that while nuclear wasn’t his most favored option, “it has to be part of our energy mix,” while Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York  in August 2007 described herself as “agnostic” about nuclear power. (Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is opposed to building more plants, and congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio wants to dismantle existing ones.)

So what do you think? Should we build more nuclear power plants? Or should we focus harder on energy conservation and developing solar, wind and geothermal technologies instead? Express your opinion below.

Big-Fix for Global Warming?

October 10, 2007

Sure, the simplest way to stave off a potential climate catastrophe from global warming would be to reduce carbon emissions drastically on a worldwide basis. But that would require an international political consensus; substantial investment in replacing coal, oil and other dirty energy sources with alternative sources, such as wind farms; and sacrifices like driving our cars less or unplugging energy-hogging appliances. Here’s a list of 10 non-drastic measures that ordinary people can take.

Unfortunately, that’s all easier said than done.

That’s why some scientists are proposing big-fix geoengineering solutions to global warming. Some scientists, for example, have suggested altering the atmosphere by launching an armada of balloons that would pump microscopic particles into the stratosphere to block some of the sunlight reaching Earth, as volcanic eruptions have occasionally done. Others have advocated deployment of giant orbiting mirrors, or suggested fertilizing ocean waters with iron to stimulate the growth of carbon dioxide-absorbing phytoplankton. But there’s a catch. Some of these solutions would cost enormous amounts of money, while critics argue that such massive geoengineering projects might possibly backfire and wreak even greater havoc upon the planet.

So what do you think? Which technological big-fix seems most doable to you? Would the risks be justified by the benefit? Join in the debate and post your comments below.