Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

Pretty cool! If it turns out to be true, anyhow.

The world’s first zero-net-energy city is being planned for (of all places) the United Arab Emirates, just outside Abu Dhabi.

Solar power, in the form of photovoltaic panels, concentrated solar collectors, and solar thermal tubes will provide 82% of the citys energy needs.

An additional 17% of the citys power will come from burning composted food waste in a highly efficient method that developers say will emit greenhouse gases at a rate 10 times lower than if the food were allowed to decompose in a landfill.

The remaining 1% of the citys energy will come from wind turbines.

This is the same UAE that is on a massive, insane-looking skyscraper binge in Dubai, creating a beautiful modern city but one that is anything but carbon/energy-neutral.

Hmmm!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Politics

The U.S. Senate did two idiotic things regarding energy policy yesterday. In both cases, Democrats were unable to get the 60 votes needed to stop a Republican filibuster.

First, they voted against a windfall oil profit tax that would fund alternative energy. OK, I can understand the logic of rejecting a windfall profit tax on the big oil companies; the argument could be made that this would ultimately lead to higher gas prices and more foreign oil imports. But this time, the oil companies could avoid the profit tax by investing those runaway profits in much-needed renewable energy technology.

But for the life of me, I can’t see the argument against extending tax credits for homeowners installing renewable energy.

According to the New York Times, the Democrats’ energy package (not dead but on hold, currently)

…would require electric utilities to obtain 15 percent of their electricity from wind, solar or biomass energy by 2020.

But the energy bill would make profound changes in other areas as well. It would require car companies to increase the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks to 35 miles a gallon by 2020. It would also require a huge increase in the production of renewable fuels for cars and trucks and require the federal government to set tougher efficiency standards for electric appliances. The measure would also give the government more power to prosecute “price gouging” by oil companies.

This is incredibly shortsighted. It increases dependence on foreign oil, increases demand, and contributes to the myth that our current energy supplies are limitless. And then people wonder why it costs $70 to fill up their SUVs, and why they can’t even sell those SUVs.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

Water is complicated. I recently wrote an article in my Monthly Frugal Fun Tips about why most people drinking bottled water should be switching away.

Of course, there are situations when you need bottled water–such as if your water happens to be toxic.

I found this AlterNet interview with Bottlemania author Elizabeth Royte on the water controversy to be thorough (considering its relative brevity), readable, and understanding of the depths of complexity.

Here’s a brief excerpt, a “taste,” if you’ll pardon the pun.

I just did a story for the New York Times Magazine about Orange County’s toilet-to-tap program, where wastewater is being reclaimed for drinking.

At first I wondered — if people know that they are going to be drinking this water again, it would be nice to think that people would take better care of what they put down the toilet, like would we switch to biodegradable cleaning products, would industry use nontoxic materials, would farmers cut their use of pesticides? Then I realized that is a false hope, because everyone is relying on the technology to clean it up, and it might even have the effect of letting polluters off the hook while we are spending $29 billion a year to run this very high-tech plant, and it gets everything out, so why should we bother. That’s the “faith in technology” problem.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary

General Motors just announced that it’s considering discontinuing the Hummer line.

Quite frankly–I’m delighted.

Out of all the people who buy SUVs in general, I’m guessing somewhere between five and ten percent actually need one:

  • People who live (or have a second home) on bumpy dirt roads
    Border Patrol agents
    Extremely tall people who don’t fit easily into small cars

    • There might be a few other categories but I can’t think of them at the moment.

    Not one of these people actually needs a Hummer!

    Extreme even among SUVs, Hummers get terrible mileage, hog more than their share of natural resources, block other drivers’ view of the road, and are wildly overpriced in my opinion.

    The 2008 Hummer H3, maybe the most fuel-efficient in the brief history of this GMC division, gets 14-15 miles per gallon. Some of the older models get 9.

    I don’t think any responsible person could justify a Hummer.

    By the way, if you’d like to know how it happened that SUVs went from almost a non-category to such major market dominance, read It’s the Crude, Dude, by Linda McQuaig. It wasn’t an accident, but had a lot to do with U.S. government policies that allowed these monsters to bypass fleet-wide passenger car fuel efficiency regulations.

    Also, for a nice piece contrasting the Hummer with, of all things, Prius, here’s a cool article in Slate.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability

    Safe energy vs. nuclear energy is something I know about. When I was a college student in the mid 1970s, I did a school paper on whether nuclear energy was safe. Though I came in with a more-or-less open mind, I was shocked and horrified by what I found. The more I researched, the worse it got.

    Among the hundred or so good reasons NOT to use nukes:

  • Safe storage and disposal of deadly wastes must be maintained for approximately 250,000 years–in our disposable, throwaway society where most items don’t last ten years and almost no human-made objects exist from longer ago than 25,000 or 30,000 years. This is ten times as long!
    Safety of the plants themselves, both during normal operation (radiation releases) and during accidents or terrorist attacks
    Net consumption of energy: counting the entire fuel cycle of mining, milling, transporting, processing, transporting again, use, and waste handling, nukes actually consume more energy than they create–so all those other risks don’t even have a benefit
    Skewed laws such as the Price-Anderson Act, which insulates the nuclear industry from all but a tiny fraction of the potential liability, and massively subsidizes the premiums for even that minuscule level of insurance

    • True energy security involves renewable, nonpolluting, decentralized technologies such as solar wind, small-scale hydro, and geothermal–coupled with innovative engineering that slashes our energy consumption, of the sort Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute have been proposing for 30 years. Even here in cloudy, cold New England, I have both solar hot water and solar electric (photovoltaic) systems on the room of my house, which was built in 1743. If we can do it here…

    So when I got a mailing from the respected environmental group Friends of the Earth saying that the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill is fatally flawed because it opens the door to new nukes, I wanted to share that message with you.

    Tell your Congressional representatives.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Other, People Helping People, Politics

    Fascinating and far-ranging interview with European philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Democracy Now this morning.

    He covered war, energy, US presidential politics, and much more. But the statement that really got to me was:

    A true act creates the conditions of its own possibility. That is to say, it appears impossible, you do it, and the whole field changes: it’s possible.

    He went on to cite President Nixon’s opening US relations with Maoist China, and postulated that if Obama becomes president, he will seize a similar window with Cuba.

    But this concept has reach far beyond international relations. In sports, the 4-minute mile was an unassailable barrier for decades; once Roger Bannister broke it, many people followed quickly. In science, it was unthinkable in 1955 that a human being would walk on the moon before 1970. In energy and the environment, the work of Amory Lovins and others show new ways of reinventing society as a more earth-friendly place (see my article here). And in business ethics, I like to hope that my Business Ethics Pledge campaign will make a similar difference in the consciousness that ethical business is actually more profitable.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability

    Ethical Corporation magazine, a UK offering that’s always interesting, has a wonderful cheery article on how ethical corporations will fare better in a recession.

    This echoes many of the sentiments I discuss in my own award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First–that when you establish customer loyalty based on ethics and sustainability, those customers will give you the benefit of the doubt.

    For those who buy on energy efficiency, the higher prices will not be a deterrent compared to long-term savings. And those who seek out fairly traded goods,

    Jim Hawker, spokesman for green insurance group IBuyEco, goes as far as to say: “Ethical brands are recession-proof – they are perceived as luxury consumer goods, targeted at a niche market that will be less affected by the credit constraints of a recession.”

    In fact, the opportunity is growing, they say–and here’s a conclusion I personally haven’t seen articulated before (and fully support):

    According to research by the Climate Group, consumers not only expect leading brands to have strategies in place to tackle climate change issues, but also expect these brands to help consumers develop their own strategies, via the choice of products and services made available to them.

    For the companies responding to this demand, it is an exercise in brand building.

    I believe this is very much true, and smart companies have been educating their consumers on social issues as they relate to product choices for decades. But I haven’t seen anyone talk about this from a brand-building point of view before, nor have I seen the argument that consumers increasingly rely on these companies to provide that education.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary

    We celebrate a huge victory against special interests this week in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts: a retail development that was waaaay out of scale for the town, and would be illegal under current zoning, has been withdrawn.

    Let me give some background. I’ve had some involvement with land and resource use/planning issues all the way back to 1972, when I was tangentially involved in opposing a nuclear power plant proposed two miles from New York City (where I was living at the time). Two years later, when I researched the safety of nuclear power for a school project, I realized just how dumb an idea that had been. Later, that was the subject of my first book.

    Over time, I’ve been involved in a number of efforts around sensible development, including founding and serving as publicity chair for Save the Mountain, a group that successfully blocked a very inappropriate mountaintop development (bringing it from 40 houses going up the ridgeline to two at the bottom, and getting the remaining land protected forever).

    This project, a Super Wal-Mart, would have added 6000 cars an hour, many of them crossing a very popular bike path with no traffic control. One of the streets is two lanes. The other becomes two lanes about a mile in either direction. And that corner is already facing two other large retail projects plus a large housing development. This in a rural town with a population under 5000 that already has a non-super Wal-Mart just a few hundred yards from the proposed new one–and when that was built in 1998 the company promised it would not be back for a larger one.

    Wal-Mart pulled out because “Hadley [our town] had become too difficult” a place to build.

    I translate that as the citizen opposition group, Hadley Neighbors for Sensible Development (in which I’m a proud participant), made it clear that this project would be opposed at every turn.

    This development is dead, but the actual applicant was not Wal-Mart but Pyramid, a mall developer. It is unclear whether the developer can exercise the remaining four years of its grandfathering under the previous zoning with a different tenant.

    I’m hoping that if Pyramid does come back with a different plan, that it is, in fact, a sensible development, in keeping with the nature of the town.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government

    Lest you think collusion between corrupt government and dubious business interests happens only in the US–read this article on the firing of Linda Keen, until recently the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

    Keen was fired for having the temerity to insist that the 50-year-old Chalk river nuke in Ontario stay closed until safety concerns were fully addressed.

    Now, let me disclose my biases. I’ve been studying about nuclear power going back to a college report I did in 1974–and my first book, in 1980, was an expose of the nuclear power industry. In my mind,

  • there is no such thing as a safe nuke (and a wide swatch of the Ukraine is still uninhabitable, more than two decades after the accident at Chernobyl)
  • waste storage will cause problems for thousands of years
  • counting the entire fuel cycle, nukes are a net consumer of energy–so we’re not actually gaining anything by using them
  • solar, wind, and other nonpolluting, renewable technologies make a lot more sense

    • Why was the plant ordered to stay shut?

    In the inspection process, the CPSC regulators found something at the 50-year-old reactor that was terrifying:

    …the reactor had been operating for 17 months without two cooling pumps hooked up to an additional emergency back-up power system capable of withstanding a severe earthquake.

    And yes, there have been earthquakes in the vicinity. And this plant is only two hours from Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.

    But still…here is a woman who was fired because she didn’t want this ancient and probably crumbling nuke to have an accident! Best of luck, Linda in your wrongful termination court case. And thanks for doing what’s right.

    (my thanks to The Weekly Spin for alerting me to this story).
    Business and government ethics violations that directly put life and property at risk are more than just crooked collusion. They are criminal acts.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability

    Thoughtful article by Mallen Baker in the UK publication Ethical Corporation, discussing a number of specific companies who’ve been called on the carpet for greenwashing: claiming to be more ecological than they really are.

    As one among many examples:

    Shell, which said “we use our waste CO2 to grow flowers”, was in breach of the advertising code because the wording could be seen to imply that all the company’s waste CO2 was so used, not just 0.33 per cent of it.

    The result of this corporate misfeasance is not surprising. As Baker notes,

    According to a recent survey, 80 per cent of Britons now think that companies simply pretend to be ethical in order to sell more products. Widespread cynicism over all the claims has set in, and is hardening with every ill-judged poster or TV ad. Nobody can see an ad with flower petals floating from the exhaust of a motor car and be anything other than cynical.

    Oil companies are often making green claims, which I’ve learned to treat with skepticism. Yet I admit to being fooled occasionally. I once profiled BP as the socially responsible company of the month in my Positive Power of Principled Profit newsletter on the basis of its stated policies and actions on environmental responsibility. Later, I found out that BP still has quite its share of environmental problems, even disasters.

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