The Green Cadet

In a great interview on Climatebiz.com Joel Makower interviews Auden Schendler author of a new book “Getting Green Done”

Schendler speaks about the innumerable and often innance challenges we face getting businesses to agree to embrace eco-solutions in their behaviors. The will to change is difficult to engender and Schendler is emphatic that we have to do all we can to innovate on our own initiative, within our own organizations. However, he argues, there must be equally strong motivation for outside consultants in the eco-solutions industry for us to move at a competitive business pace, let alone meet the challenges of climate change.

Two things in this interview struck me most:

First he does a great job of emphasizing–by omission–the opportunity for new businesses with competitive eco-practices to challenge traditional ones with competitive environmental practices. The competitive business strategy takeaway is that it’s about diversifying the opportunities these guerrilla eco-warriors have to take risks by reducing the consequences and encouraging sucesses. At a macro-level, it’s evident that we must provide places for future guerrilla eco-warriors learn the goodness of the cause and the tactics for identifying appropriate methods.

Secondly, Schendler also makes an interesting, and not-uncontroversial point about climate change when prompted by Makower:

I think climate change is a proxy for business, for government, for religious belief, for parenthood. It’s everything. It’s the everything problem.

I have trouble agreeing with this logic. While it’s self-evidently true, I worry that it beguiles us into believing that climate change is the only measure of a sustainable human existance. This seems to create a harmful understanding among those who don’t have a good grasp of the deeper integration of climate change with the rest of our systems like Schendler does. Furthermore, when he makes statements like this “This is your acid test: Are they talking about climate change or not? If they’re not, they’re not working on environmental issues.” He actually perpetuates the misunderstanding of those who think about climate change solutions only in terms of carbon emission. Carbon, which, while so important to climate change, is only an indicator of the dramatic imbalance our world is witnessing as a result of many many more unsustainable practices than simply carbon consumption.

Solving climate change will, as Schendler points out after further prompting, require much more than just an enhanced carbon focus. This reality needs to be better integrated with our climate change meme as an urgent and necessary update to make sure people understand that solving climate change requires becoming more sustainable at every level. But the first step is to thank Mackower and Schendler for helping us get there.

Tom Konrad of Alt Energy Stocks has an excellent article on why we need smart incentives to encourage the correct type of solar power developments.

Better solar installations will result if we first decide what we want from solar, and then choose the solar incentives we use to match.

He breaks down the types of subsidies needed to make solar power not only viable economically and politically but socially beneficial. We need precise incentives for energy production, net metering, incentives for investment and for carbon reduction. These do not always correlate, but seem to do so often in the minds of politicians and journalists. The example of stranded assets he uses is a good one highlight the difficulties of encouraging blanket solar installation: “placing PV in the areas served by [a] that substation will force the utility to pay back the investment on that substation over a smaller number of kWh, a problem referred to as stranded assets.”

To give myself a better grasp of who is working on smarter subsidies, I tracked down a number of people mentioned in this post and the comment and have provided links below. Lots of people doing some very impressive things.

Jigar Shah is a “futurist focused on promoting practical solutions to meeting 100% of all incremental energy from Renewables by 2012″ (LinkedIn)

James Groelinger- is the Executive Director of the Clean Energy Alliance and has had a long career in the renewables industry.

Ron Binz is the new Public Utilities Commissioner of Colorado and has a neat interview with Rocky Mountain News.

Severin Borenstein is the E.T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. And you can find his recent work on solar subsidies mentioned by the commenter here.

I ran across CA State Assembly Bill AB 212 in a climatebiz.com article on solar power developments and it really caught my attention. The perfect audacity of it. It’s absolutely feasible, absolutely necessary yet so radical and/or seemingly impossible to many.

How can every possible new house be energy self-sufficient, what if it’s on the shady side of a forested mountain? California’s got a lot of mountains and trees! Won’t they be so ugly if we have to put tons of equipment all over to make that work? I don’t want my home to be an energy plant, I want it to be a home.

These objections are completely understandable but just not true. Yes it will be very challenging at first for developers, architects and others involved but it is very possible and it doesn’t take much to build houses far better ascetically than most of California’s recent developments. To understand how just requires a little mind massaging.

Everyone knows the current fossil-fuel-driven, home energy system: electricity comes from the municipal grid into our homes. If we need more power, simple, build more power-plants. Sometimes, if there’s a hurricane, not enough coal or Enron is screwing you, we have power outages, but for the most part this is extent of the household energy picture in people’s minds. This limited but wide-spread understanding serves a role in society very similar to a magician’s misdirection, people are so engrossed with this small sliver of the supply chain that anything dramatically different is simply difficult to comprehend or not worth thinking about.

But this legislation filed by Lori Saldana (D. San Diego) is well thought out. It includes some pragmatic leeway if prices are prohibitive:

“legislation would require new homes to meet zero net energy requirements by Jan. 1, 2020, or when the California Energy Commission determines that use of solar systems is cost-effective, whichever comes later.”

More importantly for our understanding, home-builders often don’t build homes one at a time, they’re often part of planned developments whose developers already face countless existing regulations on land and resource use, environmental impact, municipality services use (police, mail, electricity, etc.) and more. Building at the community level gives developers a great opportunity to take advantage of efficiency gains that larger-than-single-home systems can produce.

One of the key mental shifts we have to make is recognizing the possibility (and necessity) that the whole on-/off- the grid debate is largely mute because building relatively small, grid-connected, energy generation stations for communities provides us the ability to keep operational control, economic benefits and environmental risk management within the same communities without overburdening the individual home owner.

A supporter says as much in what must be a parsed quote,

That homegrown power would probably come from solar panels. But it also could be generated by nearby wind or geothermal plants, said Bernadette Del Chiaro, a clean energy advocate with the group Environment California, which supports the bill.

Now, of course there will be exceptions and objections. But, the final piece of information to ease yourself into is that doing things jut about any other way is unsustainable and bad for our planet. In other words, the “what abouts?” simply have very little to stand on because the circumstances or instances where we cannot build Net-Zero homes, we simply should not build any homes.

So what would developments after 2020 or cost-equivalency look like? A perfect example actually comes from the original Climatebiz.com article I was reading:

A joint agreement announced last week will make the city of Babcock Ranch, Fla., the world’s first fully solar-powered city.

The project will be shepherded by real estate developer Kitson & Partners with Florida Power & Light; the companies will build a 17,000-acre city powered by FPL’s 75 megawatt solar facility, creating as many as 20,000 jobs in the area and serving as a testing ground for both solar technology and smart grid technology.

In the end, the city of Babcock Ranch will include 6 million square feet of retail, commercial, office, civic and light-industrial space, all plugged in to a smart grid, wireless internet and ultra-high-capacity digital pipeline to support the technological growth of the town. The adjacent 73,000 acres will be preserved as the Babcock Ranch Preserve, and city planners are also working to incorporate open space and greenways on more than half of the city’s acreage.

It seems like it’s possible, it seems like it’s reasonable, so what is the Status on CA Assembly Bill AB 212? The bill passed through the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources on April 14 by a 6-3 vote and was referred to the larger Committee on Appropriations, with a hearing was scheduled for May 28. According to the California Chamber of Commerce which listed it as a “job killer” and barrier to affordable housing, the bill is currently stalled due to “Failed Deadline pursuant to Rule 61(a)(5)” I don’t know what that means but if anyone has further information please let me know.

And then we got all confused an moved into the suburbs with cars that burn lots of gas and houses that are so big we can no longer afford them. Reading this older Atlantic article about the status of foreclosures in the US is rather grim and the projections for the future of suburban landscapes is also quite grim

The take away stat for me was this:

“The Boomers themselves are becoming empty-nesters, and many have voiced a preference for urban living. By 2025, the U.S. will contain about as many single-person households as families with children.”

Not only will our housing preferences change, but our commercial and suburban environment are already changing dramatically. The new term “ghostboxes” (AP))exemplifies this shift, describing commercially nonviable, empty ‘big box’ retail stores such as Circuit City, Home Depot and Walmart. Of course these have as much to do with our current recession as with our shifting suburbs, but trends seem to indicate structural transformation is occurring.

As a recent WSJ article, via Fresh Greens indicates, urban population growth has increased over the past few years.

Of course we will all have to wait and see how this plays out but what it says to me is that we’ve got lots of work to do and lots of jujitsu opportunities if you will, to turn this urbanization momentum into healthier, locally-powered, sustainable urban environments.

I recently picked up “The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future” by Hermann Scheer and have been quite impressed. One of the more salient arguments he makes in the early pages is one he borrows from Marx; the exponential increase in production innovation leads to greater and greater levels of specialization. This in turn snowballs into structural unemployment by dramatically reducing the possible employment opportunities for those without the resources of corporations.

“I, Toaster, and Good Luck to You“, a post from MarginalRevolution highlights this neatly. Scroll down to the comments for some similar attempts at building everyday appliances from scratch and some reflections on the brilliance of “the majesty of the distributed supply chain”