About GREEN in Writing and Submitting Proposals

Having just completed the exercise of writing and submitting a somewhat lengthy proposal to an entity that is supposedly committed to fostering the development of sustainable green energy, I have many new insights about how such an organization would do well to alter its practices in furtherance of its goals.

1.Instead of structuring RFPs and procedures legalistically so that they CYA, structure them so that they cover the bases in an efficient way and do not tax respondents.  One example is keeping the format simple, eschewing Microsoft Word which is horribly buggey and unrealiable, and particularly eschewing such sophisticated "features" as text boxes, which are even buggier and more unrealiable.  The funding agency may have expert secretaries who are able to work for days to make Word function successfully for the RFP, but when people who are doers rather than bureaucrats then fill in and edit the documents, one never knows what will happen.  This has extreme risks when the RFP includes an embedded Excel spreadsheet.  Untold hours of burden are added simply trying to get Word to work.  Rather than rely on Word not detroying our overall document, I commanded that the document be broken in pieces, converted into Acrobat documents, then integrated using Adobe Acrobat.  Much more reliable!  But it may have created some unhappiness in the funding organization.  I hope it does not eliminate us from the competition.

2.  Have respondents enter each piece of information only once.  Yes, I understand that the bureaucratic necessity is to have N complete, independent documents with each document presenting the key information for each different type of reader.  But take a lesson from information technology professionals.  Have people enter only once.  To do otherwise is to force errors.

3.  These kinds of extra work requirements take up the time of professionals who are the ones who are supposed to be enabled to implement the green revolution.  They run contrary to the purpose of an organization that is charged with enabling these same people.

4.  Follow the lead of so many other organizations.  Have applicants file electronically.  The Army has had electronic filing of small business proposals for years now.  It is a standard format on a web page.  It has its idiosyncracies, but one files from whereever on is, perhaps in a hotel room at a conference, or overseas, or in one's office, and the deal is done.  Contrast this with the troglodyte way.  The PDF file and the Word file have been created.  Now take a half hour or more, some ink and some paper, to print them out.  Now drive to Staples to copy them and have six of them bound.  Now get them to their destination.  This takes hours of time, and costs $40 plus time versus substantially nothing.  That is a lot of carbon, as well.  No wonder Internet people refer to snail mail.

Concerned Scientists on Environment Legislation

Jean Sideris at Concerned Scientists

BA anthro, MA journalism
Outreach coordinator for the Climate Change program

A source for graphics and information is climatechoices.org

Why New Englanders may not want to see our climate change to that of South Carolina over the next 50-100 years:
Present climate kills off many pests
Fruits etc need a certain number of cold days to bear proper fruit
Winter recreation

MA global warming solutions act
Regional greenhouse gas initiative (RGGI) -- cap and trade (Jan 2009)

House of Rep

American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES)
Emission reduced by 17% by 2020

Science review -- EPA does a review every 4 years, NAS does review of tech every 4 years, then the two do a review and make policy recommendations

20% renewable electivity by 2020

Energy efficiency for new appliances and building codes
Grants for local communities
Transition for industry
Protection from increase in energy costs for lower income

Senate

Clearn energy jobs and American Power Act (Kerry-Boxer EPW)
Similar to ACES
Emissions reduced 20% by 2020
Same science review
More energy material
Lower energy efficiency standard
Not as many appliances as for House
Other committees are coming out with different parts of it

No full senate vote in 2009
3-4 months in 2010 to move this forward.

EPA endangerment finding
CO2 a pollutant so EPA can regulate it.
They are moving forward on this, in part to put pressure on Congress.

Jsideris@ucsusa.org



____________________



Earth Policy Institute
Lester Brown

Detailed policy analysis is available at http://www.ucsusa.org/policy_center.

 360B trees needed to undo CO2 in atmosphere

Joe Ferguson
Roosevelt -- March of Dimes
Need real leadership
We expected Obama to be a real leader
Need to have leadership to encourage kids to each plant a tree each year, or something like that.  Simple things can help.

Even though progress may be slow on the Federal level, the states (and regions) are not waiting.
Western climate initiative
6 states in Midwest also is very early in their process.
RGGI

A question from the audience:
How can US lead if we have no formal policy?

Another question.
How does Copenhagen work?
Tod Stern is national climate envoy.
Part of Obama admin.
Kerry and Hillary will be there. Obama may go himself. If he feels things are moving toward a treaty, he will go there.
Annex 1 is a separate group.
Kyoto in about 1992(?) that the US did not ratify.

Potential issue:  What happens in 2012 if the process runs out?
UN leads the Copenhagen effort.
UN created it.

Opposition
Chamber of Commerce
NAM
Farm Bureau
American Petroleum Institute
and others

Issue used to be whether global warming was real.

Now the issue is COSTs.

European cap and trade was not well designed
RGGI worked better because auction off pollution permits.
Issue is how get the permits. EU gave permits to the companies. Companies took them and raised their energy prices for customers.

RGGI auctioned nearly 100% of them. Gave more incentive for electric companies to make changes faster.

Money from auctioning them allowed investment in clean energy.

EU is not reaching their goals as quickly as they thought they would.

Nine republican congressmen voted for the climate bill.  The reaction from the Right has been quite negative, which again raises the question of why the Right sees this as an issue.  Is it merely that Republicans and the Right Wing are reflexively taking a position opposing anything that Democratic leadership proposes or supports?  Well, it would seem there is a lot of that.  But maybe it just seems that way because there is no strong leadership that is delineating the position in relation to fundamental principles or thinking.  For example, the Right often espouses the avoidance of International governance.  The UN, Kyoto, and Copenhagen are clearcut examples of International governance, or at least international agreement.  Thus these would be things to be fought.  Here is the list of Republicans who voted for Cap and Trade, as reported by a Right-leaning web site.  The commentary is that of the author of the website, not my own.

http://www.proteinwisdom.com/pub/?p=2858

June 27, 2009

Nine Republicans voted FOR Cap and Trade

…which just passed, 219-212. I see only 8 listed. Kick the bums out in 2010.

Republicans voting AYE:

John McHugh, New York 23rd District. From his website…”ninth consecutive term in office.

During this time, Rep. McHugh has been a champion of fiscal responsibility; lower taxes; protecting Social Security and Medicare; providing stronger, better schools; and protecting America’s farmers. He has also been a leader in the country’s policy on national defense.”

Frank A. LoBiondo, New Jersey 2nd District. Ugh. ly. New Jersey, the armpit of America.

Chris Smith, New Jersey 4th District. “Smith has represented the citizens of New Jersey’s Fourth Congressional District since 1981, when he was sworn into office at the age of 27. Throughout his 28 years of service, he has established himself as one of the hardest-working, most compassionate and dedicated members of the House.” He’s been there too long. Time for a boot.

Dave Reichart, Washington (St) 8th District. “Dave is committed to working in a bipartisan fashion with his colleagues in the House of Representatives to find viable solutions based on sound scientific practices that reach a balance between protecting our precious natural resources and providing economic growth in our nation.” Way to go, Dave, you freakin’ idiot. Hope you wind up booted in 2010.

Mark Steven Kirk, Illinois 10th District. “Mark Kirk represents the 10th Congressional District of Illinois located in the suburbs north of Chicago.

Now in his fifth term, Congressman Kirk is a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and is co-chairman of the moderate GOP Tuesday Group and the bipartisan House US-China Working Group.

In Congress, Congressman Kirk works to advance a suburban agenda that is pro-defense, pro-personal responsibility, pro-environment, and pro-science.” Must be too close to the Chicago Machine to dare cross Obama. Horse’s head, maybe?

Mike Castle, Delaware “Mike Castle is currently serving a record ninth term as Delaware’s lone Member in the House of Representatives. Since coming to Congress in 1993, he has worked to bring the common-sense approach of Delaware’s bipartisan legislating to Washington, D.C. He has been building bridges and forming coalitions to find pragmatic, bipartisan solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing the country and believes strongly in returning the Congressional agenda to issues that really matter to the American people.” Well, you certainly have a bipartisan record, Mike. Hope you are thrown out in 2010.

Leonard Lance New Jersey, 7th District. Wait, we already had a NJ Rep, Chris Smith. Are these guys twins? “Congressman Leonard Lance was elected to the United States House of Representatives in November 2008 to represent New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District. The 7th Congressional District includes parts of Hunterdon, Middlesex, Somerset and Union Counties.

Prior to coming to Congress, Lance served as a member of the New Jersey State Senate beginning in 2002, where he represented the 23rd Legislative District. He held the position of Minority Leader of the Senate from 2004 to 2008.

Lance was sworn in as a Member of Congress on January 6, 2009 and was appointed to the House Financial Services Committee, where he will work on a wide range of issues relating to the financial services sector and the American economy. ” A newcomer, who hopefully won’t return.

Mary Bono Mack, California 45th District. Wait…Bono…yep, this turdlet was married to Sonny Bono. Mary didn’t start using the Bono name until after Sonny Bono died. “In 1998, Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack was first elected to serve the people of California's 45th District through a special election held to fill the seat left vacant by her late husband, The Honorable Sonny Bono. Since then, Bono Mack has established herself as a leader on such issues as clean, alternative energy, protecting the environment, improving health care, and protecting consumers.” Protecting which consumers? Maybe the ones who pay taxes should’ve been on your agenda, Mary!

And, California. Who knew?

Indigenous Forests and Carbon Offsetting

The paragraph below summarizes the Public Radio treatment of a conflict in thinking through the use in "cap and trade" of trees/forests as sinks for carbon.  The paragraph and a connection to the radio show is at http://www.hereandnow.org/2009/11/rundown-1110/.  My notes and comments are below.


Buying and Selling Carbon Offsets


As world leaders prepare for next month’s UN Climate Change Conference, we look at what’s known as “avoided deforestation credits”. Mark Schapiro took a look at one use of these credits in Brazil, where General Motors, Chevron and American Electric Power purchased 50,000 acres of Brazilian forests nearly a decade ago. They agreed to preserve the forests, with the understanding that they have the rights to sell carbon offset credits based on how much carbon the forest is storing. Schapiro documents what he found in Mother Jones magazine.

It seems to me that this discussion summarizes one of the struggles in formalizing things into policies, rules, laws, and formal agreements.  On one hand, we need to see incentive structures to reward nations and local people to protect and save their forests.  As a highly-educated man from Borneo noted, his tribe could not have afforded his education without harvesting timber on a large parcel (not a large percentage) of its land.  So there needs to be a way to get cash to such people to enable them to participate in the international sphere if they wish to do so, but without damaging their forests or the ability of those forests to sequester carbon.  On the other hand, simple rules can be gamed by powerful, wealthy stakeholders.  That of itself no too serious a problem, but such gaming can lead to bookkeeping that indicates a net carbon sequestration, while the reality is more carbon in the atmosphere.  The debate is about how to do this right.
 
Here are some of my notes as I listened to the radio program.
 
NPR - Buying and Selling Carbon Offsets -- 091110


Trees are one of the most contentious issues leading into the climate change meetings in December. Companies such as General Motors have invested in such as 50,000 acres of Brazilian forest land to obtain “Avoided Deforestation Credits.” This leads to protected forest areas similar to those of thousands of years ago with rich flora and fauna that often are not seen in forests that are harvested or destroyed. One key issue is how much carbon a tree pulls out of the atmosphere. How do you measure the carbon in a tree? [I know from Geroge Woodwell and the Woods Hole Research Center that researchers regard the amount of carbon sequestered in typical forests of various types to be a known quantity.  However, the issue may revolve around the particulars.]  For example, a researcher walks around with rangers to measure the girth and height of a sample of trees. About 50% of a tree is carbon. By this tally, 50,000 acres is not enough sequestered carbon to offset all that GM produces. But then another issue is that this commoditizes the forests, something that many people, including indigenous people, dislike. The trees can be bought and sold. International body: buying and selling of existing trees is not acceptable for carbon credit. Avoided deforestation is not acceptable. Reasons: ambiguity of the amount of carbon in trees, leakage (move tree harvesting to somewhere else with no net positive effect). Brazil objects strenuously to selling off its forest in this way. Repoerter is Mark Shapiro of Center for Investigative Reporting.

What happens to the indigenous people who live there, that is in or near GM's 50,000 acres? Actually, they do not live on the 50,000 acres.  The outer boundary of the reserve is lined with villages. They are restricted in their use of the land. They basically cannot harvest or hunt. Thus, people end up in cities, unemployed. Some people are pushing for informed consent by indigenous people before such land can be converted like this.

Large companies have established a lobby to push for forest offsets. Nature Conservancy is involved with this on the same size. Some other environmental groups are involved on the opposing side.  Cap and Trade bills allow for this. Emission reduction at home would cost $50B and is much less expensive if companies such as GM can claim carbon offsets by purchasing such land.



EU does not allow forest offsets. Collision course with American approach. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth do not like American approach.



Deforestation contributes to about 20% of the carbon in the atmosphere. Important to restrain this process. This yields carbon in the atmosphere the same way that fossil fuel burning does.



Important to avoid delusion. Some of this may work logically, but it is important not to fall into believing that this way of offsetting is as simple as presented by the current players.

Plastics and Global Warming

Cheryl Holdren gave a presentation about plastics, pollution, and maybe what we can do about it, the sixth in a series, "Stewardship and the Planet," addressing world economic and ecological problems. A little over half of the audience was from my church, which is where I found out about the series.

Cheryl's talk addressed ubiquitous pollution and its impacts, focusing particularly on BPA (bisphenol A) which is common in plastics such as milk containers, water bottles, food packaging. These items often end up not only in landfills, but also in woods and lakes, rivers and streams, and the oceans. They slowly degrade, releasing BPA and other chemicals into the environment. The health impacts have been documented for many years, and are now being piled higher and deeper. In 2008 annual sales of BPA were $6 billion. In April 2008 Canadian health officials began to take steps to declare BPA a toxin and to have it banned from use in baby bottles and tableware for children. In August 2008 the FDA declared BPA to be safe. In October 2008 the FDA's Science Board found that the FDA had ignored hundreds of studies on BPA and advised the organization to re-open its investigation.

Some of the impacts that have been documented are altered behavior due to early childhood exposure, altered neural development in rodents, heart disease, lowered effectiveness in chemotherapy, prostate and neural development in human fetuses. It seemed to me that there was something wrong here with the posture our society takes, requiring the research community to prove that there is a problem with the many new chemicals that are introduced each year, or the chemicals will remain used in the marketplace. This is in direct contradiction with the FDA practice for pharma and medical devices, in which the burden of proof is on the developer and manufacturer to demonstrate safety and efficacy. Cheryl confirmed that the FDA is now looking into regulation and legislation to place such a posture in to place.


I am going to think a little out loud below about the possible positive feedback loops that her talk may have revealed between such pollution and global warming.

1. As the pollutants leach out from plastics, a key one being bisphenol A, they pollute the water. This leads many people to believe that they must be even more reliant on bottled water. This in turn leads to more production of plastic bottles, more transportation of bottles and water, which leads to greater pollution of the water. Further, this production of plastic for the bottles is energy intensive, contributing to global warming.

2. As our culture uses more water, this resource becomes more precious, and it may become more costly (in dollars, in energy, in atmospheric carbon) to produce and deliver to users. An extreme example of this is the historic use of pure drinking water from Navajo acquifers to provide the water for a coal slurry line to an electric power plant in Northern Arizona. Several years ago some MIT students spent a summer on the reservation documenting the sink holes that resulted. As water from this shallower acquifer is overused, there is environmental degradation, and it becomes more costly to obtain water. This in turn leads to the need for more power to obtain that water. In the case of Hull MA and nearby, there is a shortage of potable water. The apparent answer is desalinization. Although the historic technology for this uses electrical energy produced by petrochemical power plants, Hull is working toward desalinization using wind power, and approach which could break the positive feedback loop if it is successful.

3. As global warming continues and more carbon dioxide is absorbed by lakes and oceans, the ocean water becomes more acidic. This increases the leaching of toxic chemicals from plastics already in the waters, again leading people that they must consume bottled water rather than tap water. Cheryl's comment about bottled water is that it may not be any better or even as good as tap water. The caveat in my hypothesis here is that there may be very little increase in leaching for the small pH changes actually occurring in water.

More later.

Plug-In Hybrids

In Toyota: Plug-in Hybrids Will Have Limited Appeal, Jim Motavalli makes the world of the Toyota much more complicated, at least until we look at things a little further. I wondered what the Toyota people had in mind during their presentation. As a Prius driver myself, it seems to me that adding a large battery does not produce a difference in kind that would force a new brake design for example. More like having an extra passenger in the car, and that does not require redesign. Further, the extra weight only means that a driver adjusts his driving style once again. One of the wonderful features of the Prius and the Honda hybrid is that they offer enough instrumented feedback so that one can adapt one's driving patterns to get better mileage. One possibility is that they are trying to dampen some of the exaggerations about mileage. At an MIT symposium on the Smart Grid, I heard one speaker say that plug-in vehicles would get 150 miles per gallon equivalent. I did not believe that, and sought to clarify whether that number includes the inefficiencies inherent in production and distribution of electricity. The consensus in my area of the room was that it does not. Proper treatment of these inefficiencies would yield roughly 50 mpg equivalent, interestingly in alignment with the Toyota numbers. In other words, once again, it is very difficult or impossible to get something for nothing, but it is possible to create the illusion of getting something for nothing. Toyota is to be honored if it is bucking this opportunity.

On a more skeptical note, one may consider that the Prius "crossed the gap" to adoption around 2003. At least, this is how Toyota and the auto industry saw things at the time...although I thought that judgment was a little premature. Recognizing this, one can also hypothesize that Toyota has a vested interest in protecting its offering. Some of the things Toyota people say may therefore be biased by this effort.

More broadly and technically, I see opportunity for better gas mileage with my Prius, but am a little skeptical of simple notions of plugging into the Grid as the source for those increased miles per gallon. Illusory miles per gallon, yes. Real miles per gallon, no. What I recognize is that, as I drive, there are some opportunities for better mileage as a result of a larger battery. At most this would be a 10% improvement, consistent with Toyota's projections. However, if one spends a lot of time in heavy urban driving, then the extra battery capability could be very valuable. Such driving is very draining on the batteries, and they can then be recharged when one gets out of the inner city. I have found the Prius to be better at battery life during such driving than is the Honda, so optimization can be done differently by different manufacturers, and Honda may have more opportunity in this area than does Toyota. Again, this is consistent with what Toyota has stated.

Where this all becomes very interesting is in interaction with the eventual Smart Grid. The vision for the Smart Grid is that car batteries interact with the Grid, calling for electricity when they are recharged during low-demand periods, and providing on-peak electricity when in the parking garage during peak hours during the day. Optimizing this system is not simple, because it is large and fundamentally statistical. We certainly want to avoid demanding more electricity if the amounts and timing will increase the production of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, the vision has a chance of being accurate and is worthy of exploration.

Methane from Cows

For some time now the anti-Green folks have been making a disproportionate issue about the methane issued by cattle breaking wind. The mere fact that methane is created and introduced into the atmosphere by natural means has served as an argument that there should be little or no effort to limit GHGs. Of course, this always was a bogus argument, because the mere fact that animals produce GHGs is of no account. If anything, it presents an argument for birth control, for limiting the populations of human beings and also of other animals. Now there is a lot more. A part of this is to do something about it, rather than using it as a trumped up excuse for doing nothing in any domain.

One approach is to recognize that the methane is a byproduct of somewhat less than efficient use the microbes in the cow's rumen. As with humans, microbes are a key part of the digestive process. No surprise there. It is the microbes that play a key role in converting the grasses indigenous to cow nutrition in to materials that can sustain the cow. In Australia, Dr. Athol Klieve noticed that another herbivore, the kangaroo, doesn't have a methane problem, presumably because it uses different microbes. So why not see if those microbes can be transfered to cows? This research is under way. See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90031367.

Another approach is reported in today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/us/05cows.html?sq=Greening%20the%20Herds&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all. We get back to the question of what the indigenous feed may be for cattle. Well, it isn't corn and soybeans, the feed that has become normal in industrialized farming, and which would also produce gas in human beings. Does it come as a surprise that digestion is inefficient and leads to undesirable gases when the feed is not natural? What is natural is grasses. This article reports that alfalfa and flaxseed are much closer to what dairy cattle naturally consume. Is it surprising that replacing corn and soybeans as feeds with alfalfa and flaxseed yields an 18% reduction in gas?

The magnitude of the issue is summarized by the Times article. 'Frank Mitloehner, a University of California, Davis, professor who places cows in air-tight tent enclosures and measures what he calls their “eruptions,” says the average cow expels — through burps mostly, but some flatulence — 200 to 400 pounds of methane a year. More broadly, with worldwide production of milk and beef expected to double in the next 30 years, the United Nations has called livestock one of the most serious near-term threats to the global climate. In a 2006 report that looked at the environmental impact of cows worldwide, including forest-clearing activity to create pasture land, it estimated that cows might be more dangerous to Earth’s atmosphere than trucks and cars combined.' Here we return to the issue of expectations that the human and animal populations will continue to expand during the next decades. Can this really happen? Will it really happen? If so, there will have to be some serious resolutions to the challenges that we can already identify.

The plot gets even more interesting when one considers that it is the Omega-3 fatty acids in the flaxseed that have been identified as being the significant contributor to this effect. This goes to the refutation of the industrial chemistry approach to foods, holding that all are just chemicals. The shortcoming of this approach is at least that the chemists do not recognize all the chemicals that may be necessary. We already know about such fatty acids, because good medical doctors urge older people in America to take fish oil to get their Omega-3 to help prevent cholesterol problems. Andrew Weil, M.D. writes about this and many other dietary matters in Andrew Weil's 8 Weeks to Optimum Health: A Proven Program for Taking Full Advantage of Your Body's Natural Healing Power. A key phrase in the NYTimes article comes in the third to the last sentence. The analysis of the effectiveness of the approach entails analyzing fatty acids in the cows' milk. If the new regimen leads cows to produce more omega-3 fatty acids in their milk, then milk might even become a significant source of these fatty acids. This would make them better for people.

Clean Water Parallels Global Warming

The approximately twenty years we have to start making significant progress in addressing our pollution of coastal estuaries seems to parallel the urgency of the Global Warming issue. Here is the sobering and detailed treatment done by Frontline on April 21, 2009.



A lot of civilizations have failed because they have essentially drowned under their own pollution. Additional dimensions of our problem as a group of western civilizations seem to keep cropping up. To the extent that we are unaware of the problems, or we do not respond and tackle the problems in time, we would seem to be in danger of a similar fate. A deep issue is that there may be dimensions of which we are unaware that will cause the greatest difficulty.