Green Energy & Global Warming

Here We Go

2011-11-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

Now at last NBC is reporting that climate change is for real. Maybe that should be rephrased to global warming is for real, because one of the researchers has determined that during the past year there were three times as many record warm days as record cold days ... up from the recent norm of 2 to 1. So everything is in the ballpark that I had expected. Part of that is the reality that I had anticipated that people would really begin to "get" it when the situation had already gotten to be very serious. If cattle are dying in Texas and there are major wildfires in TX, October snowstorm in New England, that would seem to me to be very serious.

Here is the link to the NBC program: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/jschmidt/must_watch_nbc_tv_on_climate_c.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+switchboard_all+%28Switchboard%3A+Blogs+from+NRDC%27s+Environmental+Experts%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I hear the refrain from some that government must not regulate and interfere in the affairs of people and businesses. Well here is a locus where we citizens to do something to avoid that. We can take significant voluntary action to reduce our carbon footprints. Consider what happens if we do not do this. As the situation gets worse, there will come a time when we are really threatened by this situation. At that point there will be the need for regulations and enforcement. We will end up with police and other officials having to enforce rules for low carbon footprint. Sort of like many of us now will be penalized if we burn open fires of brush in suburban or urban areas. Thus, Libertarians and Conservatives along with everyone else to the more Liberal side, if we are worth our salt, should be pushing for voluntary action to reduce carbon footprints.

Denier Confirms Global Warming

2011-10-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

Not a lot needs to be said by me about the Richard Muller at Berkeley study results .

Watch here for more humorous and/or verbose treatments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPg6ImD9C34

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL8256C4D14B1F3D0C

Climate Change Begins Maybe to Come Home

2011-03-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

Last evening my wife and I were in the grocery store. I checked the price of iceberg lettuce. Fortunately, I had purchased a head a couple days earlier at BJ's for $1.49, which is higher than we usually pay since we tend to wait for specials. So now I was in Stop and Shop, and the price was $2.49 per head. Highest price I had ever seen for lettuce, although the heads were pretty good sized and firm. Then I noticed a sign about ten feet to the right alerting customers to a shortage of certain items due to weather damage, and therefore higher prices. Not lettuce, but cucumbers, squash, and a few other things. As I went past the iceberg lettuce, I chatted briefly with another customer, who agreed that the lettuce had gotten rather pricey. I pointed out the sign to him. He commented that things were crazy. I commented that it was going to get crazier. I was thinking not just about Climate Change but also about warfare and revolution, as well as world demand for oil beginning to pass world supply.

Now today there is an article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/science/earth/10coffee.html?hp. I thought it was daring of the author and the New York Times to put this on the front page with the following commentary: "Changes linked to global warming have contributed to a shortage of the beans used in specialty coffees." Daring because we who understand Climate Change a little bit are being very careful about ascribing many of these changes to Climate Change. There are a bunch of unethical people who are manipulating data (meaning "making it up") and arguing that Climate Change does not exist. So the up side to that is that we avoid controversy and criticism. The down side is that there are a lot of people who are ignoring the issue of Climate Change, and they need to get with it.

In whatever time I can manage on the side of a busy schedule, I am writing a paper on weather change and Climate Change. Maybe I will save time by simply publishing the results on my blog. Based on my initial data analysis, it would appear that the weather impacts have been building a lot longer than many of us had been thinking. Winter weather in Boston seems to confirm the effect that George Woodwell explained to me one day some years ago: More carbon in the air means that more solar energy is absorbed in the atmosphere. More energy in the air means that that energy must go somewhere. That means more turbulence and storminess. This would well describe the Boston area weather pattern during the past 4-6 months. Lots of fronts moving through with a lot more than the usual action associated with each front. Therefore a lot of precipitation, windiness, and winter thunderstorms.

This is showing up during warmer weather as well. Minneapolis used to be outside the tornado belt, but the belt has been expanding since 1950 (!!). My cousin's child lives north of Minneapolis and refers to that area as "tornado alley." It used to be that the Minneapolis area got an occasional, or should I say rare, tornado. I grew up there until I was 18 and went off to college. There was one tornado in all those years. Clearly the situation has changed.

Winter thunderstorms are a real anomaly that continued this winter and really concern me. I do not know anyone who had experienced a winter thunderstorm until recently when I blogged about it. If there is anyone who experienced a winter thunderstorm out there prior to two years ago, please share about it. If you have experienced a winter thunderstorm more recently, I also want to hear about that.

Thunder and Global Warming? Real Time Perception?

2010-05-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

I am going to start to address a risky, ambiguous matter here: Can we discern climate change in substantially real time? It is risky because in some respects the matter has already been explored in the political landscape, and the answer is a resounding "No." A snowstorm in April in Washington D.C. does not imply global warming. Weird weather may be an aberration, and coupled with a lot of other observations it may suggest global warming, but it does not of itself imply global warming. And that may be the answer to the inquiry I am going to explore here, but let me proceed with my exploration.

I learned some simple logic from George Woodwell. More carbon equivalents in the atmosphere means that more energy is absorbed and retained in the atmosphere. Energy is active. It manifests as change. It can manifest as more, and more intense, storms. It manifests as turmoil in the weather. Now that word turmoil is somewhat carefully chosen, and ambiguous. It needs to be operationalized. I am going to attempt a beginning.

Some members of the Narragansett tribe taught me to sit, to watch and listen very carefully. I was sitting, watching and listening this morning, and I heard thunder that was more intense than what I would expect in a long, light, soaking rain. I have taken some pictures and made some sound recordings. I am interested in others' thoughts and experiences about this.

I heard the kind of thunder that my experience indicates would be associated with a rather dark sky, the kind of sky that betokens a moderate storm, a storm that one does not stay out in comfortably. Not the sharp peals of thunder for a thunder storm, but the deep throated, sometimes loud, 3/4 of the sky kind of thunder that gets your attention anytime you are outside. If you are out playing golf, you immediately tell yourself you are at risk, and you get off the course unless you are foolhardy. If you are on the side of a mountain, you are very worried.

Above there is a picture of the skies to the east taken about 10 a.m. EDT through an oak tree that is emerging in its summer finery. The lightness of the sky matches the light rain. We have lots of these rains during the course of the year, and we like them very much. They are the long soaking rains that are so good for the plants. What seems unusual, maybe a little less unusual than the thunder during snowfalls that I first heard in the past year or two, is the presence of deep thunder matched with this. In the first recording, I hear ambiguous thunder, although it has a deep throated quality that tends to suggest that there may be something more going on than the photo would suggest. In the second recording I hear thunder with a long, deep throated peal that I have heard in storms, not light rains. In the third recording I hear thunder that betokens a larger storm arriving.

Using tools that are available, these observations could in principle be measured, quantified, tested. Short of that, many people can listen and watch carefully, compare notes, and develop a consensus.

Is there extra energy up there in the sky, energy that must be discharged as lightning and thunder? Is it a symptom of some sort of climate change? Or was it merely advanced warning of somewhat darker skies (still not very dark) and heavier (not very heavy or very long) rain that came an hour later?

About GREEN in Writing and Submitting Proposals

2009-11-17T19:12:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

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 Jerseyâ€™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

2009-11-13T14:30:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-07T06:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

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.

MIT Colloquium with Markey, Holdren, Browner

2009-04-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

I am blogging in real time about this event.

MIT to host clean energy policy forum
Markey, Browner, Holdren to make case for new federal rules
April 7, 2009
Proposed federal rules aimed at promoting clean energy, combating climate change and creating new "green-collar" jobs will be the focus of a policy forum on April 13 at MIT featuring several of the key Washington players who are working to get them approved.
The event, "Clean Power: Building a New Clean Energy Economy," will feature remarks by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and the Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee; Carol Browner, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who is now President Barack Obama's assistant for energy and climate change; and John Holdren '65, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The forum comes ahead of what is expected to be a major debate in Congress over energy, global warming and economic policy. Last week, Markey and U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman of California introduced draft legislation in Congress that aims to spur the development of clean energy and reduce global warming emissions by establishing national standards for renewable energy and energy efficiency, and by putting a cap on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions.
In addition to the presentations by Markey, Holdren and Browner, the event will include remarks by MIT President Susan Hockfield, MIT Energy Initiative Director Ernest Moniz and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
The forum, which is sponsored by MIT in cooperation with Markey, runs from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Wong Auditorium. It is free and open to the public, and will also be webcast. The full agenda can be viewed here.
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Susan Hockfield, President of MIT

A PCAT study sponsored by Holdren found that every dollar invested in the green economy will lead to a $40 return.

Green energy will not be something that can be financed without charging for carbon.

At MIT our faculty and students are passionately involved with finding green solutions.

MIT will continue to serve as an honest broken and an innovator.

Introduction of Ed Markey, who has carried the torch for years. Key to acid rain legislation. Standards for vehicles. Champion for Energy Bill in 1997. Chairs Select energy committee and energy subcommittee. Most important leader in the House on energy, environment, and climate at the present time.

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Ed Markey

Albert Einstein said that insanity was doing the same thing many times and expecting that different results will come out. This is what Americans have been doing. How many times do we have to go through an energy crisis before we learn.

Next Tuesday we begin legislative hearings on the Waxman-Markey bill. This will indicate to the workd that America is ready to take a leadership role in energy innovation.

Model for energy legislation will be the telecommunications act Markey spearheaded. When his legis entered law in 1996, no American home had broadband. Change the market dynamics. Same kind of revolution can be unleashed. How do we accomplish that goal? How to surpass obstacles?

Introduction of John Holdren
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Increase in global temp by 2 degree C (=almost 4 degree F) by 2100 under business as usual. Occurring faster than the models indicated. Tipping points happening more rapidly than anticipated.

Options: Mitigation, adaptaion, suffering the adverse impacts.

Mitigation possibilities are abundant. Increase forestation. Modify agricultural processes. Engage in geo-engineering. Scrub greenhouse gases from atmosphere.

Adaptaion: special crop varieties, new water projects, dikes, changing cropping patterns, etc.

There is no feasible amount of mitigation that can stop climate change in its tracks. Therefore must adapt. Therefore adaptation is part of the picture.

If we can keep carbon under 550 ppm Carbon equiv will allow stabilizing at about 3 deg C. For 450 ppm, 2 deg C.

2050 goals: CO2 20-50 million tonnes of carbon willbe reduction

The reductions in carbon to the atmosphere will have to be severe.

McKinsey has identified projects that can be done by 2030 in a cost effective manner in the business as usual scenario.

Policy:
Remove barriers to harvesting the low hanging fruit.
Incentives for reaching higher into the tree.
Supporting or promoting R&D to lower the highest hanging fruit so that it can be reached.

In all of these categories there are measures that will be big wins for our economy.

---------------------
Questions and Answers:

Holdren: Between 1970 and 2005, we cut in half the cost in energy of producing each unit of goods and services. Going to have to succeed at sequestration of carbon dioxide. Better batteries and fuel cells. These are going to create new jobs, new industry.

Need to shrink time until fusion can be done. Was 15 years to commercialization in 1965. Now thought to be 50-65 years.

Obama embracing this kind of thing. Now there will be a permanent tax credit to encourage business.

Q: Isn't it tim to declare war on climate change?

Holdren: President is aware of the seriousness of this issue. Holdren and Chiu have been talking with him about this. He has not taken the option of saying that the economy will supercede our climate situation.

Markey: We have just completed 8 years of denial on this.

Holdren: President is strongly committed to the education part of this as well.

Dan Greenbaum: What about conventional pollutants such as black soot>

Holdren: Cannot ignore these.

Lauri Zimmerman --

Markey: No floor on oil and gas prices, but there is a market. 25% of electricity to come from renewables by 2025. SmartGrid provided for. Shift structure of utility to encourage partnership with homeowners so that is not just a matter of increasing consumption.

d'Arbeloff: Nuclear plants as pillars of mitigation?

Holdren: This not a recommendation, but an example. Actual details will depend on how things unfold. Need to put right framework into place so that the details can play out favorably.

David Bugh of A123: $2B designated for advanced batteries in US. Batteries now work for under 40 miles per day. 80% of US drivers. Cost is the issue. Improved manufacturing is avenue for improving.

Markey: What do you say to people who continue to doubt the science of global warming?

Holdren: I've tried it in various ways and they have all failed. Explaining the science does not work. I ask them if they really think that all the scientific socieities throughout the world could have been fooled. To people who think that the costs of doing this will be too high, I ask them about the costs for not doing it. They are formidable.
-------------------------------------

Dan Yergin

More of an economic perspective. Has revised his book.
We need consistency of policy, consistency of investment, and consistency of commitment to R&D.

Ernie Moniz

Technology is clearly a major part of the solution.
Efficiency agency and carbon free electricity agenda are 4 star important. He mentioned sequestration and nuclear.
Three star: clean transportation and smart grid. Domestically produced natural gas as "carbon lite." Fusion. Water splitting with the sun.
Policy must be in synch with technology.
Need to harness the talents of all of the innovation centers in the US.
Need national policies that foster this.
Need to get these techs to scale very very quickly. Holdren mentioned the gigaton problem.
Need to break the code of how to link R&D to our entrepreneurial community.
Green jobs -- a number of studies show how job intensity of most renewable techs is substantially greater than for fossil fuel technologies. This is also a challenge, because it is mostly in the manufacturing domain, and we need to capture such.
Sec Bowles just came in, and works closely with MIT to advance the New England agenda.

-----------------------------
Q&A:

Yergin: Peak gasoline demand in 2007, and it will go down.

Markey: Can we achieve the needed tech breakthroughs?

Moniz: I am certainly very optimistic. Tech for sequestration is quite adequate for initiating demonstrations. Will need to develop new techs to lower the cost. This can be competitive in transition in the US. But then there is the China test. If we cannot get the price down, then China will not adopt.

Yergen: A lot of the energy issue is between US and China.

Markey: I talk almost weekly with T. Boone Pickens. National security issue.

Yergen: Price shocks in fuel represent the most serious threat to the auto industry.

Jeff Tarbin: We need social innovations as well as technical. Reducing number of vehicles or the distance that they travel. Imp0roved public transit. Can we do this? Second, we need to reduce geographic growth of population. Major driver the quality of urban schools. What can we do beside simply adding money.

Dan is pointing toward Markey who comments: Carol will address some of this. You should be gratified that we have a president who has already announced that he is going to focus on urban schools. In Telecommunications bill, we had an e-rate for the schools. This provided for urban school children. Thusfar, about $25B has been paid out of that for urban schoolkids.

Keenan, President of TIAX: Mitigation might be more cost effective than some other approaches. What emphasis do you anticipate placing on this?

Markey: Depends a lot on India and CHina. Indians are aware of the problem of CO2 impacts on such as the glaciers in the Himalayas. The CO2 are from India and China. Need you to take leadership role.

Moniz: We are in a race to reduce the carbon free tech costs.

Wm Rosenberg, Pres of E2 Gasification Co.: Developing several SNG plants in gulf coast and IL basin. Pretty comfortable that can make these projects work economically with Fed assistance. But there is criticalfactor: making enhanced oil retrieval work. Produce 5M tonnes CO2 per year along with SNG. Start construction in 18 months. Feels that EOR (enhanced oil recovery) is the only solution. [requires long distance piping of CO2]

Moniz: Saline acquifer is the longterm solution. There is a spectrum of short term approaches.

George Mokray of Cambridge: About three years ago, James Hansen said we had 3 years to get to 350 ppm. Bill McKibben will talk here later about that number. Disappointing and intellectually dishonest not to talk about that number. The future of the US depends on the sales acumen and integrity of the building efficiency industry. Need public education. Need motivation and urgency.

Yergin: requires investment.

Moniz: Confirms that Holdren talked about 350 ppm. Confirms importance of buildings. Also some of the advanced technologies will be important retrofits in the future.

Markey: Congress put legislation on President's desk a week after inauguration a bill to increase weatherization budget from $200M to $6B.

Where are we going in next year?

Moniz: Scale and speed. Reducing incremental costs.

Yergin: Scale and time. Consistency. Recognize that it is a pretty big ship we need to turn around.
-----------------------------------------

Markey Intro to Carol Browner

She says she is a policy person rather than a scientist or technical person.

At time of Earth Day there was a bipartison commitment in Congress to protect our environment. In each case there were the same complaints as exist now (too costly, have to choose between healthy environment and healthy economy, too difficult technically, unable to do it, etc.), but American ingenuity came up with solutions in each case.

President says that the first country to make clean energy economically successful will be the country that leads the 21st century.

When I was head of EPA I had the privilege of working with some of the best environmental engineers. But not one of them could reverse the damage that would be done to our drinking water supplies by a rising ocean. If something is not done about global warming our children will face a permanently changed environment.

Markey: What are your goals as you prepare for Copenhagen.

Browner: Re-establish the US as a leader on climate change. During his trip to Europe he spoke on this almost every day. What we can hope to achieve in Copenhagen will depend on what we can do here in the US.

I asked Ian Bowles to think about jobs. This lead to focus on energy efficiency, and certain new technologies, clean energy, renewables, smart grid. Heard from businesses that could not get access to capital. So put $65B in loan guarantees into the package. Put in tax credits. Create stability and predictability. Secured $600M for clean energy job training at DOL. An additional $100M so that people can be trained to be line workers, which people are growing up not wanting to do these days.

Phil McKenna from New Scientist Mag: What if carbon legislation does not get through.

Browner: I am quite confident that the Congress will act, under the leadership of Congressman Markey. We need Comprehensive legislation. Looking at all aspects.

Henrietta Davis, City Counselor of Cambridge: Difficult to get the startup costs for energy conservation in Cambridge. How do we get that first money?

Browner: There are cities that have set up revolving loans. There is a provision for this in Markey's legislation. Maybe can use some of the state efficiency block grant money.

Markey: reiterate how effic is lowest hanging fruit.

Seth Kaplan of Conservation Law: transportation challenge where facing service cutbacks and price hikes. There is funding for capital investment, but not for paying the bus drivers. One approach is to have the allowances apply. How soon and what percent?

Markey: Right off the top cannot option off all of those credits because the steel and other energy intensive industries could be taken advantage of by the Chinese and others. This is a long term goal. Idea re transportation is a very interesting idea that we should talk about more.

???: Fed gas tax is 0.18 per gal while in EU it is $2-3 per gallon. Is there any chance, without political suicide, to talk about raising gas tax in this country.

Markey: legislation I led addressed higher mileage standards rather than increasing the gas tax.

Browner: One of Obamas first actions was an internal memo to DOT about increasing fuel efficiency. 2012 was the first year that this could be implemented.

Greg Yurik of American Superconductor: playing a role in smart grid. AWEA and Solar Industry Asszoc reports about moving electric power. It is going to take a long time to get the 5 GW of power lines permitted. We have superconductor wires that carry much more electricity, so can transmit electricity without large wiring that causes permitting problems.

David Holzman: American communities are too sprawling to have efficient transportation. What are the costs per tonne of CO2 avoided? Sources?

Browner: There are many sources for this.

Markey: We are in the presence of an historic person. She will be the quarterback for this.

Hockfield: Closing.

It's Time to Start a Digital Conservation Movement

2009-04-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

A friend and colleague, Keith Gross, pointed me to this interesting article on greenness in cyber-reality.

http://www.newfangled.com//its_time_to_start_a_digital_conservation_movement

My comments to the author were these:

I think you make many excellent points, in support of the main point. It is not obvious what the answer is about how to proceed, because the business models for such companies as Google call for lots of storage and lots of CPU. Further, some people with whom I have talked seem to feel that the virtualization of information and communications will save us from climate change. Someone needs to do the numbers and see what makes sense. Maybe I will tackle that, but I also have many other things to do, and so perhaps someone else will do it first.

I do want to comment on your comments about digital pictures. This is a somewhat complicated area. Clearly 800 pictures attached to a Facebook site is excessive. As grist for the mill, I would suggest consideration of another scenario. Earlier this week I was on the roof of a building reviewing equipment with my business partner, a licensed professional engineer. We had limited time, and he went directly to key areas to document what we knew we had to have when we left the site. I clicked dozens of additional digital photographs of all the equipment. This made it feasible to retain information that otherwise we would not have retained. Later it turned out during the data analysis stage of the work that this extra information was essential. It was not that we were stupid about our narrow focus. It was that we focused where we had to focus and also captured as much of the periphery as we could. Why? Because, as anyone knows who has done video documentary, if you are filming in real time, and some key event happens, you often discover that part of that event occurs just outside the camera's frame. Thus, all those seemingly un-necessary photos turned out to be critically important. So the digital camera costs something in storage and battery, but it saves time and travel that would otherwise have been required to return to the site for more data. But then, taking it to the next level, the question is what do we do with all that rich extra data once we have finished using it. I again need to do the numbers, but I suspect that archiving it off onto a CD or DVD, labelling well, and storing the media efficiently goes a long way toward keeping it all as green as possible. Further, we fall even more deeply into agreement when I point out that such digital photographs should not be stored on a Google site simply because Google makes all those GBs of storage available for free.

One key lesson stands out for all of us in our time. We all need to restrain ourselves, even if it seems that we are partaking of unlimited resources. Those resources are not really unlimited. And they do have costs.

Fall Zones & the Issue of Consistency

2009-03-26T18:57:00.000-07:00

For obvious reasons, the fall zone for a wind turbine or met tower is an important concern for all stakeholders. The fall zone is defined to approximate the area around the base of the turbine that would likely receive the tower and turbine, or the met tower, if it were to fall. It is often set by local ordinance to be 1 or perhaps 1.25 times the height of the turbine.

Some years ago we were working with Upper Cape Tech Vocational Technical School, discussing the installation of a 660 kW turbine. Unfortunately, the only reasonable location for the turbine placed the fall zone too close to a neighbor's woods. It was OK with the neighbor that the fall zone include part of his woods, but it was not OK with the state funding agency. That was the end of the project.

In the past year this issue was rejoined for a project in Falmouth. The owner was proposing to install a GE 1.5mW turbine that would have a fall zone overlapping a neighbor's property. Again the neighbor was prepared to sign a document granting the right for the turbine to fall on his again unused property. This time the funding was private, so the discussion continued in front of the Zoning Board of Appeals for the town. The Board insisted that the neighbor write a codicil into his deed indicating that the fall zone would include this certain part of his property. The Board also pushed hard that the owner locate the wind turbine closer to his own building and further from the neighboring property, minimizing the overlap onto the neighbor’s property. All parties cooperated and the building permit was granted.

This perhaps demonstrates that some governmental bodies can be more legalistic and bureaucratic than others, and that time and the right circumstances can help in establishing a workable precedent among agreeable parties.

Now consider also that the are no fall zone restrictions for cell towers, per the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (http://www.cell-out.org/TCA704.html). On one hand this would seem to indicate that an unfair hand has been dealt to wind turbine developers. By that I mean to point out that fall zone restrictions represent one of a number of means by which those against change can prevent wind turbine installations in a town.

On the other hand, those against cell towers (for example, (http://www.cell-out.org/) would argue that the Federal government, or perhaps the mis-interpretations commonly given to Federal law, give the cell phone developers an unfair advantage over local people who do not want a cell tower looming over their house or their property. Mike M. at the above address argues that allowing cell tower owners to do this represents a taking of property without proper compensation, a violation of the 5th Amendment.

I do not know enough about law to be able to write a cogent opinion about Mike's arguement. However, I know from experience that it is problematic finding adequate space for a fall zone on densely built-up property in such places as Massachusetts. I also think that consenting parties ought to be allowed to work out reasonable accommodations with each other. (That does not mean that the health and safety of children in a school should be threatened by a neighbor's wind turbine.) It is also important for our country that renewable energy be supported and fostered. Thus, it may be reasonable and desirable that state or national authorities establish restrictions on local fall zone bylaws. The fall zone bylaws for wind turbines, and certainly for meteorological towers, should not be dramatically more strict than for cell towers.

Solar Energy, Small Farming, and Last Snow

2009-03-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I went walking with my camera to capture some pictures that illustrate the relation of terrain and foliage to ambient and ground temperature. In one direction I discovered that I was a day late. I had missed the last snow before it melted. In the other direction I was going to lower ground, and I captured what I wanted.

In the first picture we see snow on the north-facing rise to the south of the tracks. No surprise there. A question that might be asked is why the snow has melted on the other north-facing slopes.

In the second picture we see that there is still a small area of ice adjacent to the stream. You can see the sunlight and shadows playing on the ice, so this spot has not been entirely shaded during the winter and spring. This suggests that the remaining ice is on very low ground, where the cold air falls.

The next picture is of the stream, which typically is covered with ice during the winter. You can see remaining snow to the left, where it is both on low ground (remember cold air is heavier than warm air, and therefore goes to the low ground), partly shaded by evergreens, and on the north-facing side.

Thus there are at least three factors in the temperatures for a particular location. When I was once looking for some land in New Hampshire for a house and field, the realtor showed me a plot with a pitch facing north and sloping down to the north. As would be predicted from solar energy calculations, this was cool during the summer, but was also a poor solar site -- the last area to be ready for planting. I rejected that plot. If I had only been concerned with a cool summer house, I might have made an offer. But I was concerned with raising food as well as warmth during the winter, so I rejected it.

These scenes may appear to be just what they are, but to a physicist there is more. When I get time, maybe I will write about the unseen things in these photos. These include various forms of electromagnetic radiation. Hmmm ... I did not see any birds either. I wonder why. I have seen birds such as geese migrating north, but maybe it is not yet time for the song birds.

Governor Patrick's Transportation and Economic Security Plan

2009-03-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

Some notes on Governor Patrick's Transportation and Economic Security Plan which Reforms Big-Dig Culture, Rebuilds Trust and Transparency to Help Secure the Commonwealth's Economic Future. Fundamentally, I agree with the vast majority of what is mentioned below. That being acknowledged, here are my concerns and disagreements.

We need even a larger gas tax. There are many improvements that are critical to accomplish soon in our public transportation systems. These, like all the other items already in the budget, will cost money, and we must support them. It will also set the price of gas to be what it would have been if there were not Federal subsidies for gas and diesel. This in turn will move our marketplace economy to manifest reality better.
We need to start now to expand the subway and rail systems by establishing mega-stations at the crossing points of the commuter rail lines and Route 128. These stations need much more parking and capacity than was designed into the Alewife station, which was initially so very successful that it was overwhelmed with demand within a few years of its completion.
I do not yet have enough information to know what the impacts will be for the proposed personnel plans. Although many of us pay electronically with transponders for our use of the Massachusetts Turnpike, there continue to be long lines at the manual booths to pay tolls. Is the proposal really to eliminate these manual booths and oblige everyone to pay by transponder? Some will object merely on the basis that they do not use the Pike enough to warrant investing time and perhaps money in a transponder. Others will object to Big Brother being able to track our driving.
My impression is that the MBTA, if it is to serve its purpose, needs to be funded more reliably with more money each year. As a society we need to make a commitment to mass transportation to bring the MBTA to the level of the Montreal and Washington D.C. mass transit systems.
To me a key part of the purpose of the mass transit system is to get people out of their polluting cars. Right now it is apparent that the Boston area automotive system is broken. During the extended rush hours, cars spend 40% of their travel time, sometimes much more, idling while waiting for lights or traffic jams. This is very much not green, and not energy efficient. If we are to tackle the global warming situation, this is a key place to change things. Low hanging fruit.
We need to start projects now, because it takes many years to plan them and execute them. We cannot achieve our carbon goals if we wait to the last minute.
A longstanding issue is the willingness of us suburbanites to fund or pay for infrastructure in the Big City. While we want enough of our money to go to our local communities, we do use Boston facilities, and we want them to be strong. We do not want to break our axles on poorly maintained Boston streets, we would be alarmed to see the Salt and Pepper Shaker Bridge" crumbling, and we do not want public transportation to be unrealiable. We want our money to be used frugally and wisely, and we want an adequate amount used to maintain the infrastructure in Boston.

I asked three public questions of the Governor during the Town Hall Meeting. One was the statement about megastations. One was about the need for enough money to go to Boston. Finally, I posed the question that emerged from my discussion with the conservative blogger sitting immediately to my left. I did this because by happenstance he was not going to get his chance.

So I asked, in my words, whether adequate effort had been made at this point to assure that there was no more fat in the transportation budgets, before we start adding taxes. My conservative colleague squeeled with delight and thanked me for asking the question. When I was back home I shared with my wife that I might have turned to him and said, "That is part of what being Liberal and Christian is about." (This is not to say that many Liberals are not concerned with cost effectiveness and wise use of resources. It is to say that too many on the Right seem to be so concerned with their own causes that they lack empathy for others' concerns and needs, which may well become their own all too soon.) In any case, the Governor was very ready for the question and hit a home run.

From http://youmovemassachusetts.org/reform.html
Governor Patrick has announced a plan to end the "Big Dig" culture and build a long-term, sustainable transportation base to support job growth and economic development in Massachusetts.
The plan includes:
Restructuring and simplifying our transportation bureaucracy, including abolishing the Turnpike Authority
Ending the "23 and out" special perk in the MBTA pension system
Bringing the Turnpike and MBTA employees into the state health care system
Increasing accountability and transparency throughout the transportation system
Making our transportation system more environmentally-responsible
Streamlining operations and eliminating 300 positions
Working to move MassHighway personnel off the capital budget and back onto the regular payroll
Providing a responsible, long-term funding source to fix our roads and bridges, pay down our existing debt, and secure our economic future
The plan is transparent and accountable on the new revenue from a 19-cent increase in the gas tax, accounting for and dedicating each new penny to a specific transportation initiative:
4 cents to roll back the proposed toll increases on the Turnpike
6 cents to preserve current MBTA services and prevent a fare increase
1 cent for Innovative Gas and Toll Solutions
1.5 cents for Regional Transit Authorities
1.5 cents for targeted regional road projects
3 cents for rail projects outside of Boston
2 cents to address the costly practice of paying for personnel with bond funds
The gas tax has not been increased since 1991. The plan embraces all of the Transportation Finance Commission reforms, which they estimated would save $2.5 billion over 20 years.
The TFC stated that "the real cost of this neglect will be felt in our regional economy and in our way of life," and that "business as usual will not suffice."
This plan builds on our existing reforms, including:
Joining 49 other states in using civilian flaggers on construction projects
Streamlining by 40% project delivery time at MassHighway
Saving $47 million at the MBTA by reducing overtime costs and staff levels and increasing employee health care contributions
Saving $31 million at the Turnpike by eliminating middle management and toll takers
With the legislature's support, launching the Accelerated Bridge Repair Program to address the backlog of maintenance projects left by previous administrations

Preparing for the Boston Marathon without a Shirt

2009-02-28T08:05:00.000-08:00

This continues my thread on human thermal response and performance, a topic of interest because it offers flexibility in dealing with thermal inflation, energy use, and global warming. A word of warning as you read this post. The person I interviewed is in outstanding shape and knows exactly what he is doing, having done it for years. If one is going to try it, it makes sense to approach it a little bit at a time, and bring along backup protection. One of the things that prevents me from moving my experiments in this direction is recognition that, even if I might do fine in the first mile, I might have a problem in the second mile, and not be able to get back safely home.

February 28, 2009. On the way riding my bicycle back from the library this morning, I happened to see a man running in runner's shorts and shoes, athletic socks, and gloves. His top and legs were exposed to the elements. After a brief consideration about whether to reach out to him, I caught up to him on the left side of Route 20 going in toward Boston, and rode along with him about a half mile. At first he was a little reluctant to talk because, he said, a lot of people think he is nuts. I did not think he was nuts at all, and the conversation I had with him indicated he was certainly not nuts, unless all marathoners are nuts, which some might argue is true. To me this is further validation of my theory about thermal inflation, a topic about which I posted earlier this year, and have written about since 1979.

He explained that he was out on his "long route," 17 miles, in preparation for the Boston Marathon which is not so many weeks from now. The other striking things about him were his age and the way he bent his knees to cushion his body from the shocks of running on pavement. He explained that he had started his experiment with temperature about 40 years ago. At first he had run during winter in heavy clothing and had sweat profusely. Then he realized that this did not make a lot of sense, so he started experimenting with varying levels of clothing, obviously less and less.

What he had learned was that the body generates a lot of heat, which is a disadvantage in excess, and which is retained more if you do not start sweating. He also learned, as he put it, that the pores in one's skin shut down if the skin is exposed to the cold. Much as I have found in my experiments, he found that one can "fool" oneself about how warm or cold one is, by focusing on the perceived temperature of one's skin. What counts is the internal temperature. So after being something of a wimp about the cold when he was a boy, he had to work his way through his expectations and beliefs about his skin being cold. Those cold sensations are good rather than bad.

Also an important factor is never to sweat, because when the sweating begins the skin temperature and body temperature become regulated in a very different way. This modifies the skin barrier between the elements and the core of the body. He commented that he had learned about a remarkable woman who swam competitively in cold bodies of water such as the English Channel, without a wet suit or grease to provide thermal insulation for her body. Her body had adapted by developing a layer of thick subcutaneous fat that serves as that layer of insulation. Indeed, the human body is able to adapt in all kinds of interesting ways, if we foster its doing so!

Then we got to the gloves. I explained that I live at 45-52 degrees, and that when I start to get cold, the first sign is that my hands get cold. He exclaimed, "Yes," the same thing happens for him. This is the reason that he runs with thick winter gloves on his hands.

More later after I get the chance to interview this insightful man who has been willing to experiment for decades.

Does Algae Plus Wind Power Equal Biofuel

2009-02-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

Use of algae for generating fuel is one of the leading edges of thinking about alternative energy. Some of the benefits and problems have been pointed out in other comments at the New York Times (http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/does-algae-plus-wind-power-equal-biofuel/). I have been on the roof of the MIT co-generation plant, where there is a small-scale pilot algae project for extracting CO2 from exhaust. Because I was there on an overcast wintry day, I saw it at a time when I would be skeptical that production would be very high or that very much CO2 would be extracted. On the other hand, production and extraction should be quite high on a hot summer day when the sun is burning down. One might draw from this that the effectiveness of such approaches would depend on environmental factors, although one might conceive of algae that are very active without much sun. Of course, the warmth can come from the exhaust, but for ocean-based algae will require some other source of heat.

I would be concerned about the fate of these large vats for algae, and possibly for the wind turbine towers to which they are tethered. Those who work with the ocean have universally come to be humbled by its power. It does not take a major storm to destroy ships that are much more seaworthy than any large vat that can be readily designed and built. Their very size makes them very vulnerable. At the same time, indeed, there are better uses for farmland than growing corn for ethanol. Farmers have benefitted financially in important ways from the ethanol initiative. However, there are better ways to offer farmers economic opportunity and fairness in the larger economy. I applaud the willingness of some to invest their private resources to address the challenge and, if it goes to a pilot, will be interested to see how it comes out.

A key bottom line that we approach is one that I have stated to many people over the past two decades. It is fine to live in a world dominated by engineering and science rather than by nature, but we had better know what we are doing. Proposals like this make me nervous that we know enough of what we are doing. At the same time, we need not get too nervous about it, because the ideas have now entered the bright sun of day. Time and effort will determine whether they are realistic.

China and U.S. Foreign Relations

2009-02-21T08:37:00.000-08:00

China poses a key party to coping with the global warming situation. The Obama administration appears to be giving this a significant priority.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/world/asia/22diplo.html?_r=1&hp

Barney Frank On the Stimulus and Bail-Out

2009-02-19T21:18:00.000-08:00

A functional economy is important for the success of green energy and actions to limit emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This is because the economy must be functional if the necessarily resources are to be mobilized in the required direction. Below are my notes of Barney Frank's talk on 2/19/2009. I planned to post some video and audio of the event. It depended on uploading speeds for blogspot, and unfortunately, blogspot flunked all tests for this effort.

7:30 Barney Frank arrives at Scituate High School and walks directly up to a chair and table on the stage, to the strong applause of those assembled. In the notes below, some parts are very detailed because the details were particularly important. Others are not included. For example, there were a lot of lines that led to laughter. Only some are noted.

Intro by Kevin McCarthy, Chair of South Shore Democratic Caucus.

[Two reporters from the Patriot Ledger are present, one whose deadline is at 10 p.m., an hour after the event closes. Captain Lou @ WATD-FM is in favor of the fishermen and does not believe that is a shortage of fish in the fisheries. He is one of three of us in the press section, and he plans to pose his questions to the Congressman after the formal program.]

My notes on the initial speech by Barney Frank:

We are in a period of American history that will be addressed by the history books. Comparable to the New Deal. There are also foreign policy issues, although not of the same magnitude as those that led to World War II.

Partisanship is a good thing as long as it does not become too extreme. Partisanship is means to make the debate more rational. Newt Gingrich tried to change what partisanship is. But Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan were friends in the evening. To Gingrich the opposing party were traitors, corrupt rather than honorable people who disagree. Tom Delay continued this. This notion of partisanship should be done away with but not replaced by mere amorphousness. There are very strong differences between the parties today, particularly in economics. [We need to let the partisanship display the differences between the parties, the way they tackle issues, and their results.]

We set up the bank bailout and were told [by the Bush administration] that we could not place restrictions (see also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/). So we offered them half of the $700B and told them they could not get the other half unless we were satisfied with the way they used the first half. So when it came time for the second half, I told Paulsen that we were not satisfied and that he would not get the second half. Now the Obama administration will be working with the second half, and I think we are going to see the real differences between the parties.

There have been three periods in American history when innovative economic systems have emerged offering a greater degree of efficiency. The problem is that there are no rules to govern such new activity. Late 19th century offered oil, steel. What Roosevelt and Wilson did was to say these were good things, but there need to be rules such as anti-trust. The stock market was the next development and led to the corrections of the New Deal. If there are no rules, the lowest common denominator will win. The next period was “securitization.” This has enabled making bad decisions and then having means to spread it around. In the traditional way, when you get a mortgage, the bank gets its return when you pay it back. And because the bank took all the risk, it frisked you pretty well to make sure you would pay it back. And the banks were regulated, because the government is on the hook if you mess up, and that system has worked pretty well. And then the financial system was working pretty well and there were pools of money available that were not from deposits in banks, so loans became available from other institutions.

And then there was the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977. This affected only banks, not other kinds of institutions. So community banks are justifiably angry when they hear that banks are being blamed, because if only banks had been giving out these loans, we would not have had the subprime crisis, because they didn't make bad loans. Most of the loans that went bad were made by institutions outside the banking system, not covered by the Community Reinvestment Act. So then you ask: What is the point of selling loans to people who can't pay you back? Very simple. You sell the right to be paid back. That is called securitization, which is similar to the stock market. It does a lot of good, but it also does a lot of bad unless you regulate it.

The Conservative view it that it’s the government’s fault. You made the banks loan to poor people. But community banks were not the only ones that had trouble. Most loans that were made to people who could not pay back were from entities not covered by the legislation that called for loans to the poor.

So what is the advantage? You sell the right to be paid back. This is securitization and it spreads risk. If you make a loan and then sell the right to be paid back, then you can make more loans. But you have to be paid back for it to work, so there is also a potential problem here. Most people are much more careful with their own money than with others’ money. So the loan makers were not careful in making loans when they would not have to collect. And then people would sell them and buy them outside the regulated system. This is the problem.

If you think about it, it used to be that advisors would tell you that if you want to be adventurous, you can invest in stock, but if you want to play it safe, you would invest in bonds. But now, it is the reverse because of the new instruments including derivatives.

Securitization is good, but it needs to be regulated. There has been a whole set of activity going on entirely outside of regulation. Democrats believed that you should regulate this area. Alan Greenspan admitted that he had been fundamentally wrong not to regulate when he had the option to do so. In 1994, the last time that the Democrats controlled Congress, we passed legislation that was signed by Bill Clinton. It said that we were concerned about the many mortgages that were being let out by non-bank institutions. Would you please stop these loans from happening. Alan Greenspan said, and it is well established that he did , "No I won't do that. That's regulation and the market knows better than I do." His successor, Ben Bernanke, has issued rules using exactly the same authority and legislation governing his actions.

Then the second thing happened. There was a decision to foster home ownership among many more Americans. My role in this has been asserted, but let's discuss a little. I was one of the few politicians who was saying that helping lower income people to get mortgages is a bad idea, because putting people in a position with homes they cannot manage and loans they cannot pay off is not a good thing. One of the big fights I have had with the Bush Administration is "How do you get lower income people to buy homes." I believe that for many people, decent rental housing is the way to go. I had this argument with the Secretary of HUD for the Bush Administration. He said he was going to cut people off Section 8 for rental assistance after five years. He asked if I would support that, and I said "No." He said, "Why." I said, "What happens to them after five years. I'll support you in cutting them off if you'll support them in not being poor after five years." [extended laughter] So I said "What will happen to these families after five years if we don't help them?" He said, "We will help them become home owners." The problem came in 2004 when the Bush Administration ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase the number of mortgages they bought from people below the median income. Greatly increasing home ownership was going to be their social contribution. When they did that, we became worried, and in 2004-5 a group of us in the House, mostly Democrats but one Republican, frustrated by Alan Greenspan's refusal to use the authority given to him by Congress, tried to pass a law to prevent these subprime mortgages that were being granted. We were in the midst of negotiations when Tom Delay sent word to the chairman of the committee that I served on as a minority member, "Stop it. We're Repubicans. We don't do that." In 2007 when the Democrats won the majority and I became Chairman of the committee, we passed legislation. So the Republicans argue that in 1995 through 2006 when they controlled Congress, I stopped them. [laughter] Unfortunately, after we passed that legislation in the House, the Senate was only 51-49. In summary we had a refusal by the Conservatives to regulate the sub-prime instruments, and then we had a refusal by the Conservatives to regulate the financial instruments which packaged up those instruments and sold them all over the world. We are now in a difficult situation that we hope to get out of. I do believe the Economic Recovery Plan will be helpful. What President Obama did yesterday will be helpful.

We need to do things that make for transparency and foster trust. The person who is elected President in 2012 will be required to check with the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office to find out how much of the $700B has been recovered. If all of it has been recovered, fine. If not, then he is mandated by law to make a proposal to Congress as to how to get the shortfall back by taxes and fees from the financial industry, the industry that benefitted. Unless there are greater changes than I anticipate, I guarantee you that the Congress that is in power in 2013 will not say, "Oh no Mr. President. These nice people don't need to pay that. Let's have the American taxpayers pay that instead."

There are three things the Obama Administration is doing. We know how to make sure this does not happen again. The first is by regulation, sensible regulation. The right kind of regulation is pro-market. Investors bought all this securitized junk. When people touch the hot stove, they refuse to touch it again, and sometimes they refuse also to touch the refrigerator, the sink, the table, and a lot of other things. [laughter] We need to get people back from refusing to touch the stove again after being burned. Prevent loans from being given out to people who should not be getting loans. 2nd, when it comes to securitization, you cannot sell 100% of the right to be paid. Must keep 15% to 20% of the risk. We want these institutions to keep what some people call “skin” in the game. This is like in the insurance industry with respect to reinsurance. 3rd we will regulate the extent to which people can get themselves in debt. It will cover all types of businesses. If you regulate by type of business, pretty soon there will be a new type of business invented that is outside regulation. The idea is to prevent institutions to get so in debt that you could default leading to extensive collateral damage. One example of this is credit default swaps, which are really a form of insurance. I issue a credit default swap to you guaranteeing that your collateralized debt obligation derivative won't default. Usually, by the way, if you want to insure somebody, you have to have an insurable interest. You can't just go out and insure some stranger's life. [laughter] And you have to be able to show the regulator that you have the ability to pay off your insurance claims by some combination of your own capital and reinsurance. In the past the assumption was that these things would never default. It's kind of like you decided to go into the life insurance business issuing policies on vampires [laughter] and then the vampires started dying [more laughter]. That by the way, is why doing something about foreclosure is so important, because as the assets value deteriorates, a lot of people are in position to make payments that they cannot pay. We do want to slow that down. I should add, it was never the case that we should have stopped house prices from dropping in an orderly way. Housing prices had gotten to be too high. It's like, I'd like to lose 20 pounds, but not by Sunday. [laughter]

So we know what to do going forward. It was not deregulation but non-regulation that caused our problems. It is just like to twenties, and then Roosevelt established regulations for stocks.

Don’t be protectionist is what some people say. The average American is justifiably so angry at the unfairness of the way that the economy has worked: during the good times almost all the wealth went to a small handful of people. Trade helps the overall economy, but it does it in an uneven way. People with high end jobs make most of the money when there is trade. Warren Buffet: we have class warfare in America. My class is winning. [laughter] We need to maintain a safety net. What will reduce the resistance to free trade? I'll give you the most important thing. We need a system where people do not lose their healthcare when they loose their jobs. Stop fighting unions, which now turn out to have been a very useful thing. Put money into things like the community college system where people to develop skills for jobs.

And finally, some will ask where do you get the money for all of this? I was in Congress in September 10, 2001. I guarantee you that there was no money in the budget for a war in Iraq. Since that time we have found over $700B for a war in Iraq, and even though Obama is going to wind it down, it will get close to a trillion for now. When it comes time to find the money for better health care, education, and these things, I am going to go to the guy in Congress who found $700B for the War in Iraq, and $700B for the bail-out if he can find some. This is a very rich society. If we set our minds correctly to priorities, we can treat ourselves better than we have been treating ourselves.

Barney Frank talks on February 19, 2009 in constituent town meeting about the bank bailout. It starts with discussion of the actions of Bush's Secretary of the Treasury in giving $350B to large banks, and the reaction to that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsOZuE6s5P0

on banks and non-banks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQ8KNNRi5o

on credit card practices:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WJCpxyqsZU

These three videos provide a pretty good taste of what the event was like. They complement the text above.

Moratorium on Coal Plants?

2009-02-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

From what I understand of James Hansen's work, and the implications as spelled out in earlier posts on this blog, our society and the entire world, must have a moratorium on coal plants starting now. I have not personally taken a position on that question because I recognize that forbearance can be a very important virtue as long as we move efficiently and rapidly toward reducing our overall carbon footprint. But as lawyers sometimes like to say, time is of the essence.

This from the New York Times: This green chorus also includes Al Gore, the former vice president, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, who has called for a moratorium on new coal plants.

Is America Ready to Quit Coal?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/business/15coal.html

Also possibly of interest in the article is the appearance of The Rising Tide, which made an appearance at the Harvard talk given by Steven Leer of Arch Coal. Here is the best picture I captured of that protest demonstration from my vantage point in the middle of the audience. The same New York Times article has this about their protest of Duke Energy's proposed coal-fired power plant:

Last May, protesters took over James E. Rogers’s front lawn in Charlotte, N.C., unfurling banners declaring “No new coal” and erecting a makeshift “green power plant” — which, they said in a press release, was fueled by “the previously unexplored energy source known as hot air, which has been found in large concentrations” at his home. And so it goes for Mr. Rogers, the chief executive of Duke Energy. For three years, environmentalists have been battling to stop his company from building a large coal-fired power plant in southwestern North Carolina.

The interesting things about the Rising Tide demonstrations is that they are in at least two different geographical regions, and that they were both apparently very well planned. (You cannot set up shop on the front lawn of a CEO of a major company and have it witnessed without some skillful preparation.) See Natasha Whitney's article about the event in the Harvard Crimson (http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=526312). See the YouTube entry (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-gaTWBptKE) for the Rising Tide video of the Harvard demonstration. The camera angle is excellent, the result of careful planning. The demonstration triggered during the time that a person from Rising Tide in the audience was asking some challenging questions. As a member of the audience, I was completely suprised when the demonstration suddenly unfolded. And when Dan Schrag of Harvard stood up to interrupt the demonstration and confront the questioner, the demonstrators folded their cards quickly and without dispute. Of course, the real deal is the influence of the YouTube video, and capturing that video is something that the protesters had already achieved. It was captioned and put up on YouTube in significantly less than 24 hours, further evidence of how well planned and executed the protest really was.

Changes in Patent Situation After Some Major Recent Decisions

2009-02-14T18:29:00.000-08:00

The American Bar Association Midyear Meeting has been held February 11-17 in Boston. On Saturday, February 14 2009, afternoon panels led by Phil Swain and Marc Temin of Foley Hoag addressed new developments in the ways that patents can be invalidated. This represents an emerging critical dysfunction in the patent and litigation system. One speaker, Jerry Riedinger, likened recent developments re summary judgement in the case KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. to the explosion of Mt. St. Helen. It was common knowledge that something was brewing, and then the mountain blew, creating a large, ugly hole. (Image from http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/StHelens.html.) The material addressed by this panel is critically important for green-ness because the shift to the new ways will require an immense amount of innovation. It is well known that a lot of the breakthrough innovation comes out of university research and small business. In the best world this grows into large companies or is merged with larger companies, leading to large scale commercialization. For this process to work successfully, it is critical that patent protection be effective. If the patent and courts systems are broken, there will not be a proper incentive for innovators, commercializers, or investors to proceed. Instead the coupon clippers will prevail.

As Randall Davis, MIT computer scientist put it during the first panel, "there is a lot of intellectual thrashing going on. There is a lot to computer software law that the court may not understand. It is time to expand the concept of computers and algorithms, which should not be tied to a physical machine." As Scott Alter put it, the Supreme Court has reached some novel decisions, and the "Circuit Court is reasoning too literally from out of date Supreme Court decisions simply to avoid being overturned." These are not decisions that necessarily have fundamental meaning in the long term. However, that does not mean that real decisions don't have real impacts on the parties involved in patent litigation.

In the following, much of the material is taken from the presentation of Jerry Riedinger of Perkins Cole. Keep in mind that although I have paid a lot of attention to legal matters since about 1984, I am not myself a lawyer, so any mistakes or misrepresentations are probably mine. If you are going to bet part or all of the farm, you should first consult a qualified lawyer.

This material is important because, to the extent that bad patents are reasonably invalidated, the entire system of intellectual property is strengthened, and innovation is encouraged. Further, to the extent that reasonable patents are invalidated using the increasingly strong tools to do so, much of the incentive to innovate for profit is eliminated.

One issue is combination patents in which a number of items of earlier art are assembled into a larger object or process for which the patent is sought. The watershed case in this domain is the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company v. Supermarket Equipment Corp in 1950. The Court imposed the new idea that combinations are patentable "only when the whole in some way exceeds the sum of its parts." Related, "A patent for a combination which only unites old elements with no change in their respective functions ... obviously withdraws what is already known into the field of its monopoly." Now to the lay person, this makes a lot of sense, but it caused havoc in the legal system.

Thus, arguably, Congress passed the 1952 Patent Act, which in part tried to correct this Supreme Court decision. In a succession of additional decisions handed down Congress was essentially overruled by the court system, so that the A&P case continues to hold in modified version to this day. In Graham v. John Deere the courts found that "the revision was not intended by Congress to change the general level of patentable invention." In Anderson's-Black Rock the decision was that "A combination of elements may result in an effect greater than the sum of the several effects taken separately." In Sakraida the courts again found obviousness, because the invention "simply arranges old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform." Part of the problem here is that there is great ambiguity in the courts as to what constitutes an innovation that is sufficiently novel to produce this greater effect.

The political issue that leads to decisions tearing down issued patents is this. When a survey was performed to determine people's satisfaction with issued patents, the response was that 51% of those surveyed rated U.S. patent quality as "poor" or "less than satisfactory." (Of course the glass is also half full, but that is apparently not telling for the courts: 48.8% reported that issued patents were "satisfactory or "more than satisfactory." -- Interestingly, 0% reported that such patents were "outstanding." What does that say?)

My own questions about this would be the following. So what is surprising about half the people thinking that patents are OK and the other half thinking they are not? Half of the concerned people are patent holders, while the other half are in the position of needing a license. Why should what amounts to a perhaps biased interpretation of what is at best an informal survey (grousing and complaints as they are noticed) about an inherently political question lead the courts to tear down patents? Since when should the courts be run by complaints?

The history of cases yields a set of tools for invalidating patents. "Predictability" became a key test for determining whether a combination patent should be patentable. In KSR, "The combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." Further, "If a person of ordinary skill can implement a predictable variation, section 103 likely bars its patentability."

Second, summary judgement which has historically been forbidden in patent litigation, has become accepted. In KSR again, "Where ... the content of the prior art, the scope of the patent claim, and the level of ordinary skill in the art are not in material dispute, and the obviousness of the claim is apparent in light of these factors, summary judgement is appropriate." This shockingly also places into the hands of a judge, who may have no technical skills and who may act alone, whether a patent involves obviousness.

As summarized by Jerry Riedinger of Perkins Cole, there appear to be four points in predicting obviousness:

Is the invention understandable to lay people?

Is the invention visually similar to prior art?

Does a written explanation in the prior art seem to describe the invention?

Do two out of three experts say the invention was predictable?

If the answers to these questions are yes for a lot of patent applications, then there will be a lot thrown out as being obvious.

More may be coming.

Arch Coal at Harvard

2009-02-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

In this post I am going to review some of the presentation of Steven Leer, CEO and Chairman of the Board at Arch Coal in St. Louis. First let me address a question that many have up front in relation to coal and coal mining. In response to a question from the audience, Steven stated that his company no longer does open-pit coal mining on mountains with drag lines in West Virginia, and they have left those old pits looking like rolling fields with grass. A later conversation with a colleague suggested that the hills might be heaps of "glop." The larger point however would be that Arch Coal by this account is quite different from many minerals companies that Jerrod Diamond describes as going bankrupt once they have extracted their riches, and leaving the cleanup to the local communities, the states, and the Federal government.

Although Leer's presentation focused on a justification for coal and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in our modern world, there was one key implicit point -- that it is critical to enable CCS. This might be seen purely as a self-serving argument for a coal company to make, since it would serve to extend the lifetime of coal in a world increasingly threatened by global warming. If I may draw an analogy to bridge, Leer's presentation within its own frame presents a strong argument for our society to continue to embrace coal as a fuel. It is available and cheap, and it is one of many fuel sources, none of which can supply the entire needs of our society. For some time the coal industry has been winning trick after trick within this suit. However, that argument is now being trumped by the limitations imposed by Mother Earth. One strand of thought among members of the audience was that the new trump suit would now take all the tricks, but there is yet another trump suit that may in certain situations trump the environmental limitations suit. That is the behavior of other nations. Internationally, Leer's argument is much stronger. The burgeoning use of coal by China and India itself provides a sufficient argument for giving a priority to CCS R&D. If we in the United States are capable of developing and perfecting CCS, then we can export it to other nations. If we simply allow other nations to implement coal, they will increase their carbon going into the atmosphere much faster than we could counterbalance that through any reductions we make in our carbon emissions ... and the ballgame is quickly over. This of course assumes that funding and research is not a zero-sum game. A possible next level of trumping would be the argument that clean coal is a boondoggle, an oxymoron, a distraction that steals valuable resources and commitments from implementing proven solutions such as wind energy. The next level of trumping, perhaps relevant more for a physicist such as myself than for most others, comes from Niels Bohr. Bohr embraced dilemnas, grinding the horns against each other to develop deeper understanding. In my current level of understanding, setting aside all the other issues,this is still useful in the energy and global warming domain. The nagging question, however, is "How long can we set aside the other issues?"

Now let's look at some of the slides and evaluate the degree to which we can agree with Leer's points. The first slide shows the growth of electrical demand over the past few decades. This is real. It also fits with the commonly accepted theory about the growth of electrical demand with the growth of the GDP. Some people talk as though electrical growth caused or at least enabled economic growth. However, looking at international figures such as those displayed in the second Arch graph, it is apparent that some nations are able to be vastly more efficient in their use of electricity relative to their standard of living. Some of the inefficiency of a nation such as Norway may be related climate or the degree of dispersal of the population. There are hints of it in Graph 1. One can see this in the downturns in electrical demand circa 1976 and circa 1983. The first may be a response to the energy crisis, the second the delayed results in the industrial sector to efficiency efforts. With the Reagan administration began a long period of encouragement of free use of electricity and fuels. The decreases indicate that our culture can make significant decreases in electrical use if we all choose to place our priorities in that direction. While this may seem arcane to policy makers, it is obvious to people who have done value engineering or energy conservation engineering in facilities or who have thought carefully about their own electrical consumption in homes and workplaces.

Thus it is no surprise to most people that electrical demand will be increasing dramatically over the next decades. This is only partly because of rising standards of living. It is also because of industrialization. As one historian commented, where the First Industrial Revolution was based on water power, the Second Industrial Revolution was based on electrical power.

The next figure shows why much of the new electrical generation will be coal fired. Coal is cheap if one does not take consideration of full life cycle costs including emissions that create global warming, if one does not accept that the earth is an increasingly finite system. Coal is also locally available in many key countries, including the United States, Europe, China, and India.

And the resulting increases in CO2 emissions will be dramatic. The only problem is that they cannot be alloowed to happen. If they happen the game is over. Thus, if the world economic system as we know it is not to be simply shut down within a few decades, it is critical that we achieve rapid worldwide adoption of CCS. This may involve giving away the technology to many other countries. Otherwise they will not be able to afford it, and the adoption will happen too slowly for our civilization to survive.

As an addendum, I am going to insert the numbers projected by ISO so that they can be compared with the reserve margins provided by Arch Coal.

Ford Motor Company at Harvard

2009-01-17T17:38:00.000-08:00

Ford Motor Company at Harvard:
Progress and an Urgent Need for Green Leadership
This was actually completed on 7/14/2008. I submitted it to some newspapers for publication, but none took it on. It seems sadly prophetic now.
Copyright, John Carlton-Foss. All rights reserved 2008.

Three years ago I drove my Honda Hybrid up to a gas station and was stunned to see the $80 bill that my predecessor had rung up. My bill was $20. That was before the recent gas price escalator, which would bring that SUV’s bill to well over $100. Yesterday the man in the next bay was aggressively asking me questions about my Prius, what my total bill would be ($26 in this case), and what kind of mileage I get (50-55 mpg in summer, 45-50 mpg in winter for the Prius, and slightly better for the Honda). Honda and Toyota had scooped Detroit once again. Detroit had lost by embracing a business strategy of going to Washington to get special consideration to be other than green. I really hate to say it, but I’ve been telling people that for years. Sometimes it hurts to be right. Rather than adopting a creative portfolio approach, streamlining its organizations, and providing some leadership, Detroit has been left green only with envy. Temporarily happy stockholders during the SUV craze are profoundly not happy now.

At least that is the view I have had about Detroit for about three decades. Might this be changing? Susan Cischke, Senior Vice President at Ford Motor Company, spoke on May 5 in the Future of Energy Series at Harvard. This was much more than a public relations speech. Cischke spoke about Ford’s strategies for addressing energy issues, and about her disagreement with Congressman Markey about the new CAFÉ standards for automotive fleets. (Did she have any inkling that one of his constituents might be in the audience?)

The talk began with the dimensions of “sustainable mobility,” clearly an important topic. For this to be successful, private enterprise and private capital need to play a role, and these require profitability and business viability. Socially, the issues are Energy Security and the rapid growth of mobility in emerging markets such as China and India. “Energy security” seems to include notions ranging from the reliable availability of plentiful energy to the energy self-sufficiency of our country. To a business-as-usual company such as Ford, this would seem to mean the reliable availability of plentiful energy. With the economies of China and India now burgeoning, this is not a realistic a condition of the future. All developed nations need to concern themselves with cutting back on their own excessive carbon emissions so that there is room for China and India to expand. As an auto manufacturer, Ford needs to be concerned about the carbon footprint for producing its products, and the degree of fuel economy and carbon efflux for its cars in use.

According to Ford, there are striking differences between the auto market in Europe and that in the United States. 6% of American cars have manual transmissions versus 80% of European cars. 75% of American cars have 5 cylinders or more, while 89% of European cars have fewer than 5 cylinders. Is this purely the result of user preferences or some other set of factors? Ford seems to think it is user preference. A competent businesswoman, Cischke repeatedly referred to serving users and providing for their choices. She pushed away any suggestion of how Detroit might play a role in forming those preferences.

A key point of the talk was the view that addressing climate change issues will require a collaboration of all stakeholders: auto manufacturers, consumers, government, and fuel producers. Consumers will have to adopt the new technologies, many of which will be more expensive than the conventional technologies until they reach full production. Fuel cells burning hydrogen will have impact in 20-30 years. (Yet Shell already has established a trial set of hydrogen stations north of Washington D.C.) Hybrid powertrains will serve 10-15% of the market. (Perhaps for Ford, but not for Toyota.) Benefits of hybrids are realized [only] in urban driving. (Yet my experience with Honda and Toyota hybrids indicates that benefits extend to all situations. Modern clean diesels will be part of the core approach for the next 40 years. (Yet this does not answer the challenge of carbon in the atmosphere.) Advanced highly efficient gasoline engines will be using existing capital and refueling structures. There is a partnership between Ford and Southern California Edison for cars powered by fuel cells and plug-in electric drive trains, which are especially suited for short trips. In this way Ford passes the responsibility on to electric utilities to put minimal carbon into the atmosphere as they produce electricity.

The picture that emerges is summarized in Ford’s projections for fuel use. In 2008 we will burn slightly under 10 billion gallons of conventional corn-starch based ethanol. This use will level off at about 14 billion gallons by 2015 and be supplemented by 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanols, 5 billion gallons of advanced non-cellulosic ethanols and biodiesels, and 1 billion gallons of biodiesels by 2022. This is good for energy security but not so good for global warming, because burning all of these fuels still puts large quantities of carbon into the atmosphere

Ford identifies its large contribution as its “EcoBoost.” Direct injection will increase fuel economy. Turbocharging will decrease CO2 emissions. Engine downsizing will increase performance. T his last item seems a bit counterintuitive, but Ford has a graph showing a higher and more constant engine torque for a 3.5L V-6 gasoline EcoBoost engine than for a conventional 4.6L V-8 engine. To understand Fords’ thinking, it is necessary to understand the numbers, and therefore the need for Ford to get it right the first time. In Ford’s view the impacts become really favorable when the numbers of cars sold is in the millions.

Other than the avant-garde experiments (a hydrogen fleet, or an electric fleet using green electricity) these are all nice incremental, comfortable changes. They tend to provide answers to challenges of international petroleum shortages. Unfortunately they also assume business substantially as usual. Most people including Detroit seem not to have understood the urgency of the real issue yet. The most urgent issue is carbon. Humanity is already putting vastly too much carbon into the atmosphere, and the yearly injection is increasing. I agree with James Hansen who recently co-authored a paper stating that people need to reduce the atmospheric carbon from present levels now if we are to have hope of continuing in anything like the civilization that we now have. This will require something akin to a Manhattan Project along with major changes in the way people behave.

Detroit has this curious notion of making gradual transitions and of shifting responsibility on to the consumer. To a hybrid owner the transition has indeed been gradual, but transitions have a way of becoming very abrupt for those who do not adapt promptly and creatively to the need for change.. The problem with Detroit’s delays in responding is that the transition is no longer easy or low cost, and for those who wait much longer, it is going to be even more extreme.

Hydrogen is important as a fuel because there is no carbon in hydrogen if it is produced properly. In contrast with a speech at MIT by the president of Shell Oil Company a year ago, Cischke spoke only in passing about her company’s commitment to the hydrogen economy. ) However, Ford has another area in which it can contribute. She spoke of Ford’s knowhow about logistics and Information Technology. She stated that we should look for an announcement in the next few months about Ford doing something in the area of coordinating personal transportation (autos) with busses and public transportation. This is important, and will be even more important if our society is willing to start investing more in public transportation, as it must.

One of her offhand remarks was the idea that CAFÉ standards should be measured on a per person basis rather than on a per vehicle basis. This might mean that an Explorer with its extra seats would have about the same mileage as a Prius with only five seats. It also might mean that an Explorer with only one driver and no passengers would get credit for that same mileage, which of course would be wrong because it would put everything off onto the consumer. I remember how, before I realized that I could buy a hybrid, I almost went for an SUV to carry my daughter and her soccer teammates two or three times per week. I would have been driving solo for more than 200 miles per week as a result of this. I learned that a sedan actually was adequate, and ended up choosing a Prius over a Honda for our second hybrid because of the extra luggage space.

To one trained in psychology it rapidly became apparent as Cischke talked that Ford continues to be committed to its corporate values. At the same time these values are what made it into a great company, and what may lead to its continued decline. Cischke spoke of keeping the cost of cars down, of thinking in terms of millions of vehicles rather than thousands, of worrying immensely about the cost of each component in a vehicle, of a long development time necessary to provide quality, of avoiding big changes and big risks, of aiming for the middle of the market. This sounded as though Ford was a laggard adopter of innovative technology at the same time that our society now needs innovators and leaders. She spoke of Ford’s working on electric vehicles during the 80’s and 90’s in response to a Federal initiative, but not of taking the initiative itself. And so we have what may be an outstanding hypothesis for “Who Killed the Electric Car?” It was the car manufacturers, as perhaps also suggested by the movie. In Ford we see an organization that has done well with its values, continues to be committed to them, and does not understand that it will suffer because times have changed forever.

Cischke did in a way recognize this. She noted that car purchasers had for a long time gotten ambiguous signs from the economy about what kind of car they should drive. When the price of gas was fluctuating and the economy was strong, users could select whatever car they thought they wanted. However the worldwide demand for petroleum now for the first time exceeds the worldwide supply. This represents a fundamental change. With the price of gas continuing to rise, and I might add, the fundamentals of the world economy changing possibly forever, a quarter of car sales (according to the New York Times) are now smaller, fuel efficient cars. Given this, Cischke did note that people are buying more and more fuel efficient cars.

Cischke and Ford apparently suffer from one major disconnect. One way it emerges is that she said that she has talked with our Congressman, Ed Markey, about CAFÉ standards, and disagrees with him. Ford feels that their sales depend on what the customer decides to purchase, and thus argues that it is unfair to hold Ford accountable in its fleet fuel efficiency for the vehicles that its customers select. Of course, this ignores those many commercials that for decades fostered the desire for power vehicles. As one person commented to me after the talk, Ford seems to have an incredibly passive view of its role, and it simply is not believable. In contrast, I think that the Federal view on this is that the auto industry is one of the perfect places to leverage necessary change to deal with overuse of fuel and the excessive buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Another angle into this same issue emerged in questions from the audience. Ford makes and sells European Fords that are much more efficient. Why not sell these in America as well? Cischke responded that Ford will produce whatever people want to buy. In Europe 80% of car sales are for four cylinder engines or smaller. She stated that Ford would bring European Fords to America when there is a demand for them. Many of us would suggest that that demand is present right now. It is for Ford and its competitors to start committing resources to let Americans know that this option is available. Such a competent commitment is conspicuously absent in promoting hybrid cars. She commented that the general population knows about the Toyota hybrid and not the Ford hybrid or the Honda hybrid. This is because Toyota did an exceptional job of making its hybrid distinguishable. Other companies will have to adapt a similar view.

Thirty years ago I started having some conversations with people from Detroit who said that Detroit was actually creating the needed designs in its R&D sections. The problem was that there were many layers of bureaucracy. Each layer required time to sign off on a new product, and each layer trimmed away new features that had been developed. A year ago I had a similar discussion. My informant said simply that the new models were there in R&D. It was just that the financial people and Board emphasized profit for the stockholders and did not accept the innovative proposals that they believed would bring less profit. Combine this with Cischke’s stated view that producing a high quality production version of an innovation requires many years. The result is that the Detroit car companies are going to have to learn agility or continue their slow death spirals. Unfortunately for us, those slow death spirals may mean deep trouble in terms of global warming. Let’s hope they get with the urgency very quickly.

Thermal Inflation and Thermal Deflation

2009-01-17T17:28:00.000-08:00

JCF@SESenergy.com
December 31, 2008

In 1980-1981 I pointed out that the ASHRAE notion of thermal comfort had undergone significant thermal inflation. I also presented a paper that indicated that there were individual differences in people’s environmental temperature requirements, and that these needs varied at least in part with personality. Since then, the Reagan Administration has become history along with the energy crisis and the Emergency Building Temperature Restrictions that they terminated. Now we find ourselves as a world society at the beginning of an energy and environmental crisis. It may be that this is caused by world demand being close to world supply. It may be that this is caused by the restrictions on burning fossil fuels if we are to avoid destructive global warming. It may be for other reasons. Whatever the cause, we know that we must take action. ASHRAE and many other entities are doing so. The issue is how much time we have to get results, and how fast our society can move.

This involves the adoption of new technologies and new ways of living and working. Adoption typically takes at least decades. Firefighters took fifty to sixty years to reach 50% adoption of self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBA) that protect them from death by inhalation. Significant adoption of efficient energy design and technology, “clean” technology, and green technology began only about thirty years ago, and became a political issue in a way that SCBA never did. With this and James Hansen’s statement in his study that we have less than ten years to gain control of carbon entering the atmosphere, it would seem to be likely that adoption will not happen fast enough. One hopes that there is more slack in environmental systems than Hansen suggests, but even if there is, the financial, social and political investment will be staggering to achieve the requisite goals in twenty to thirty years. Given that our society is currently structured around consuming energy, it will require very close to 100% compliance. A question to think about is whether this can be achieved without enforcement efforts that would be unacceptable to participants in a democratic society.

There are two directions that this entry can now go. One is an exploration of rapidly achieving high levels of adoption. I am one of many who is working on this. Congressman Ed Markey, chair of the House Select Committee on Global Warming has stated that establishing the future system of auctioning carbon will have the same high impact as did the system for auctioning electricity. Surely this will help a great deal. But will it be enough? If not, and if our society does not foolishly deny the science, then we will be in for some hard choices. Every ton of carbon into the atmosphere will be important. We will have to consider setting back our thermostats once again.

Can we do it better this time than last time? I think so. We need to start right now to investigate what temperatures are acceptable to people. Not “comfortable,” but “acceptable” and we need to start looking now toward shifting building standards toward acceptability rather than comfort.

What is acceptability? A better term would be “acceptable discomfort.” I suggest that it is a temperature that makes occupants uncomfortable, but uncomfortable to the degree that most of them do not complain, do not shiver, do not leave the occupied space. During the winter the published thermal comfort standard would diagram the resulting acceptable discomfort zone for people wearing sweaters above the waist and pants or equivalent below the waist. The published thermal comfort standard for the summer would diagram the resulting acceptable discomfort zone for people wearing very light clothing and performing sedentary tasks.

In addition to providing immediate reductions in energy consumption, implementing a standard of acceptable discomfort happens to further another agenda, thermal deflation, the adaptation of people in our society to lower temperatures in winter, higher temperatures in summer. For thirty years my wife and I have been experimenting with adaptation to lower winter temperatures. We have chosen to live in quite cool but not overly cold environments. Whatever level of clothing we are wearing, we seek to be “acceptably uncomfortable.” At first we were challenged by living at 65-70. Sixty was painful. By now this has all changed. We have turned on the heat to reduce risk of freezing our water pipes, and to raise the temperature to 55 for my wife. I have yet to turn on the heat where I work in my Boston house. I live at 50, and find 55 to be quite warm. There were two goals in this exploration. One was to demonstrate that it is possible to live in a cellar with no heat, should that ever become necessary. The other was to demonstrate that it is possible to live productively at 55 with considerable clothing, but not so considerable as to significantly restrict motion and activity. We find that we need to fill our tank of oil just twice a year. We have called off the regular deliveries of oil, since their coming out to our house so often was a waste of time and energy for the oil company.

Setting aside my theories and experiments, it is apparent that there is slack in our human systems enabling further quick reductions in heating and cooling without reductions in productivity or acceptability. ASHRAE needs to start soon to foster research to document this area of human requirements. If more purely technical means do not achieve the required goals for insertion of carbon into the atmosphere, then we may need to know what people will require for thermal regimes without significant complaint or anger.

Peak Oil and Tibet at the Statehouse

2008-03-31T21:44:00.000-07:00

I was at the Massachusetts Statehouse for the Peak Oil Hearing. I went as a sceptic, having recently listened to the President of Shell America interviewed by Charlie Rose (more in a subsequent post, when I finish my notes, but I can insert here that he shared that notion that Watts will become conflicted again if there is not a serious increase in availability of gasoline at lower prices), and having spent a lot of time around MIT, where the word is that oil will simply increase in price as it becomes more scarce. I left not as a convert, but as a person who realized that there may be something in the Peak Oil argument. I was particularly intrigued to learn that the Department of Energy has been funding Peak Oil studies, Portland OR has had a committee looking at how to cope with a Peak Oil situation, and that the State of CT has also been looking into the matter. I will be looking into it further, and sharing thoughts and references.

This is the reasoning I find compelling, whether or not it corresponds to a situation approximating Peak Oil: The demand for oil is rising rapidly in China and India as they develop their economies and their people become richer, demanding a higher standard of living that requires more oil. This at a time when demand has already exceeded supply. Simply economics yields a prediction of ever increasing oil prices. Although the Peak Oil people argued that tappable oil reserves are in fact misrepresented on the high side, I agree with the MIT view that the higher the price for oil, the more oil can be tapped from more costly sources, such as tar sands and oil shale. The problem is that we cannot burn any more fossil fuels, and that places a limit on oil consumption. But the further, and possibly more stringent limit at this point may be refinery capacity, which produces as I see it a modified Peak Oil situation. Refineries are not being built, and whenever there is a refinery malfunction or explosion, more capacity is lost, at least for a time. According to a colleague, the timeline for getting new refineries on line is 2-3 years in emergency priority such as existed during WWII, and 12-13 years for just the permitting under today's priorities. This strongly suggests gas and diesel shortages will be normal, and prices will continue to rise. Again, simple economics would indicate that they would rise independent of the refinery situation, because demand exceeds supply.

Meanwhile, this was the scene outside the Statehouse: the Boston area Tibetan community demonstrating about the Chinese violence in Tibet and their desire for a free Tibet.

And this is what was happening a couple hours later at Harvard ... a lecture by a Harvard Professor and the Julliard's first violinist (as the others were stranded in Cleveland due to airline cancellations) interspersed with recorded playing (the consolation prize) by the Julliard String Quartet, all a detailed view of the first movement of Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 59 No. 1. Not nearly the attendance we can expect at the Final Four, but more than attended Ed Markey and Ian Bowle's much more important presentation on Energy Independence and Global Warming, and a lot more than at the Free Tibet demonstration at the Statehouse. (Note that the Tibet demonstrators did get a lot of passerby attention.) Is this skewed priorities? Well, for me it has to do with working very long hours at my profession, and a passionate involvement with music. Because I work evenings and weekends, I feel OK about taking in an occasional special music event, even if it is during the day. The others I spoke with at Harvard are the same way although a little different because most were a lot older than I am. It is very hard to spend all our time and resources addressing the world's challenges. The couple who sat next to me at the concert and shared their score with me were very much worried about global warming. They said that they had heard enough about it, and felt it was time to get into action mode doing something about it.

Broken Ice in Antarctica: New York Times Editorial

2008-03-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

My estimation has for some time been that the climate modeling experts have been too conservative, that the changes are happening faster than they are predicting. The recent beginning breakup of the Wilkins Ice Sheet in Antarctica gives further reason for concern.

Something to think about:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/opinion/28fri3.html?sq=wilkins%20ice%20shelf&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Chinese Modulations at Brandeis University

2008-03-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a lecture and concert of Chinese and Chinese-American music at Brandeis. The theme of Long Yingtai’s lecture was that it is in the nature of the Chinese culture to have change. Thus, the Chinese will adopt an instrument such as the erhu, originally from Central Asia, and then they will modify it again and again. It was finally in 1930 that the design of the instrument was frozen. Confucianism states that only the root, or chi, remains unchanging. Another example that he mentioned after I asked my question was that the Mainland Chinese leadership is changing. So hearing this notion of change, I asked how the Chinese therefore see Western elementary particle physics, which has morphed from the quantum mechanics of Bohr and Heisenberg, to quantum electrodynamics, to the standard model, for example SU(3), and now to string theory. The answer was that all of this is considered to be the changeable part, not the root.

There was a series of works for erhu and yangqin, then for yangqin, then for erhu, yangqin, viola, cello, and percussion, then again for erhu and yangqin. All so outstanding that the audience gave the performers a standing ovation. The man next to me had tracked Jiebing Chen since 1997, and had seized the opportunity to come to the concert when he was up from New York City anyhow. He told me that Chen is the worlds best erhu player. I will not pretend to know very much about this music, which was extraordinary. Instead I will write about other matters.

There were three people on the stage at one time with perfect pitch. You could tell with Yangqin Zhao, because she tuned her 150 yangqin strings straight off with no reference to a tuning fork or any other notes. You would seem to be able to tell with Jiebing Chen because she walked in with an independently tuned instrument, and merely verified that it was still in tune with the yangqin, which it always was. Then she played this instrument with no frets or other reference points for notes, which it is all but inconceivable that a person could play well without having perfect pitch. But I am told that she does not have perfect pitch. Of course cellist Josh Gordon also has perfect pitch. It turned out, when I asked her about it, that the Chinese-American composer/conductor also has perfect pitch. This was actually likely because, as I was explaining to her when she admitted her gift, a very high percentage of Chinese have perfect pitch because they grow up from a very early age listening to pitch in their tonal language. So they use and develop that part of their brains as children, and don’t lose it.

I had a chance to talk with Jiebing Chen after the concert. Vibrato is standard for the Erfu (pronounced “air-foo”). A difference between the traditional playing of the vibrato and Jiebing Chen’s playing is that the traditional way is to create the vibrato by pressing in and out on the string, while she also does vibrato by rolling the finger up and down on the string.

The approach uses a lot of trills. Chen even would trill notes as she rapidly descended the scale, moving up the string.

She said that the early tradition involved not sliding very far up and down on the string, but rather playing notes within the span of the hand. I commented that this would make sense, since the early flute was somewhat similar to an ocharina, and likewise played only a handful of notes. She did not disagree.

She did not have much at all for calluses on her left hand. She attributed this to the lack of a fingerboard on the instrument, explaining that the fingerboard does not give like a string does, and therefore introduces a lot of pressure on the fingers. When I described the large, ugly callus that “serious” cellists develop on their left thumbs, and that she could probably verify this by looking at Josh Gordon’s thumb, she seemed not to have realized this before, and spontaneously turned to where she thought Josh was, almost as if to check his thumb right away.

She is the teacher for the husband of theYu-Hui Chang, who composed the last work before intermission. A cross cultural piece for erhu, yangqin, cello, viola, and percussion, what was extraordinary was that it actually worked and was beautiful, not just modern music. I urged Chang to continue to compose such works when we spoke after the concert. She had already composed a concerto for the erhu, and indicated that she would compose more, for the repertoire is too limited for the erhu.

The evening was altogether an outstanding experience.

Russia and Oil/Gas Control

2008-03-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

I ate lunch today with a couple of people from Europe. They commented on the way Russia now holds Europeans at risk for fuel, and worried that the KGB was taking over Russia.

In the evening I found myself in a conversation with three young men from ByeloRus. So I asked them if the KGB was taking over Russia. They laughed. Then they laughed again as they explained that the KGB had taken over Russia already, when Putin became President. Then they laughed again.

In one dimension, this would seem to underscore how important either some appropriate sort of energy independence is, or sufficient multi-sourcing is. The challenge is for nations to keep their eye on collective effort to avoid damage from global warming rather than succumbing to the temptation to fragment by focusing on international power politics.

In another dimension, this would suggest that it was and remains important how we as the reigning world power treat the Russians. If we gobble up the satellite states in their former empire, as we did, do we create a backlash as they attempt to regain their sense of dignity? (Of course one can easily argue that those satellites wanted to be gobbled up, and that they never wanted to be part of the Soviet Union or the Soviet sphere ... but there are clearly also tradeoffs ...) Should we have learned more from Germany's reaction to defeat and devastation in World War I, and then their nationalistic backlash as they reasserted themselves? Did we do enough of a "Marshall Plan" with the failed Soviet Union, and did we do it wisely, so that the remains of that nation could re-emerge strongly and positively into the world sphere? Could our nation and advisors have made a difference in making it less likely that the vast Soviet resources would simply be given away, creating the plutocracy that led to Putin's rise and intersession as a corrective action? Are there things we can do now to lead to Russia's cooperation with the rest of the world, so that we can focus on dealing with the global warming issue rather than international conflict?

Small Oil Spill with Possibly Big Significance

2008-03-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

Oil spills represent a form of collateral cost for the oil industry. (Those against Cape Wind have raised the issue that the proposed wind turbines will introduce a risk of a small oil spill in the Sound. Interested readers should look to the materials at http://www.mms.org/ for more detail on the government's risk analysis.)

The most recent oil spill to hit the national media occurred in San Franscisco and was reported in media including the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/us/08spill.html?scp=1&sq=Ship%27s+Pilot+is+charged+in+Oil+spill+in+California&st=nyt.

A useful understanding of the reaction to this spill comes from a person who teaches at the Coast Guard Academy. It turns out that prior to 9/11 the Coast Guard would have reacted quickly to the spill and contained it within about two hours. However, after 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security was created and the Coast Guard was placed within it. This changed the chain of command and the priorities. Tradeoffs could have been anticipated, and in fact were abstractly anticipated by myself right away, and more formally by Richard A. Posner in Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11. In this case the Coast Guard reaction was delayed while they sorted out authorization to address the spill. A lot of this can be understood and predicted by reference to organizational theory, the psychology of organizations, and strategy and structure from business school. I understand that the Coast Guard is now challenged to come up with solutions, and that they are working at it.

Bicycles In Every City

2008-03-24T06:05:00.000-07:00

When I was a graduate student, I biked every day from Route 128 to MIT and back. Many would have thought that this would have been not only an arduous chore (sometimes it was!), but also that a graduate student in physics would not have the time to do this kind of thing. Setting aside the issue of my questionable decision to live as a dorm parent in a private school at the time, a time analysis revealed that I was actually saving time. A 45-minute trek by bicycle competed with a 40-minute trek by car and foot from a remote parking lot at MIT to the main building. I used a good rucksack to carry my things. Add into the equation that I took my exercise in the process, and I was way ahead.

Now it appears that there is increasing awareness of the value of bicycling. Here is an article about it from the Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/03/23/world_class_bike_cities_why_not_boston_1206254626?mode=PF). Part of what will be required to make bicycling really feasible is a rapid transit system that allows cyclists to bring their bicycles with them, or that supports a kind of share-a-bike system. Another alternative is shared cars that will accomodate bicycles, or alternatively, bicycles that fold up so they can readily fit in cars, buses and trains. Portland OR has had a good share-a-bike system for decades. Maybe soon lots of people will be able to get back to biking.

Easter: Hidden Mysteries of Life

2008-03-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

May we travel ever deeper into the mysteries of life. There are hidden secrets that emerge out of involvement and commitment. It has been Holy Week. I could write here about religious things, but I won’t. I had a Fundamentalist aunt with whom I made the mistake of talking about Light, so I avoid those kinds of discussions. The Puritans worked hard to understand members’ spiritual experiences. Unlike the Puritans, my aunt thought she could discern in a quick conversation whether one or another person had had a true religious experience, and of course, it was always in the negative, except for members of her immediate congregation. From when I was young, my mother had warned me to avoid such conversations with my aunt. It only took one when I was in graduate school to make me realize that my mother was quite correct about avoiding such discussions.

So I am going to write about music, as I have played cello and have sung such pieces as Mozart’s Requiem. There are so many little secrets that one learns from actually playing or singing music. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony starts on an upbeat. A note in the cello part of the first movement of Beethoven’s Quartet Opus 131 is a B-sharp, which is slightly higher than a C on the non-tempered stringed instrument scale, and in light of the ambiguity about just how to play the note physically, it often is played as an open-string C. This could be significant because Beethoven had perfect pitch and might well have known precisely what he was doing, even if he could no longer hear when he composed the work. Beethoven’s Third Symphony has open string fifths (C-G which would also correspond to a perfect fifth rather than a well-tempered fifth) at two key transition points that would insert a special musical psychology possibly informed by Pythagoras’ notions about perfect fifths. The tuning of the strings for Bach's Fifth Suite for Unaccompanied Cello is, according to a college classmate who sings sacred music, also a special tuning for sacred choral works from circa 200 years before Bach lived.

I listen to J.S. Bach's Morimur (also authored by an academic who recently figured out that several Bach works went together), done by the Hilliard Ensemble with Christoph Poppen playing baroque violin, mostly during Holy Week because I associate it with an experience in which I received Jesus during church a few years ago during Holy Week. So Morimar is too precious to me to listen to just anytime, even though I would like to do so. Morimur is the result of an academic discovering a secret -- that the basso continuo that completes Bach's Partita #5 for Violin basically starts with the chorale Christ Lag im Todesbanden which Bach also embodied as a Cantata, and continues with that and a couple of other religious choral works. Another way of saying this that would probably be eschewed by musicologists is that the partita is a sort of an obligato around and above the sacred music parts that the Hilliard sings. The overall result of combining works that appeared to be separate but written at the same time is profound and even more sacred.

This is going to sound like a contradiction, but I sometimes have played it in my car as I have driven long distances, and sometimes I have sung to it. Toward the end of the combined Deller Consort and violin version on the Track 21 of 22, I sing along in the falsetto, and it matches with one of the voices. I noticed particularly that the tone quality and stresses of my voice matched that of the singer on the CD. (Those who have heard counter-tenors will know that they have a different tone quality than sopranos.) However, even in the falsetto I cannot get up to the counter-tenor part. No surprise, as my falsetto would be that of a counter-baritone, which I figured was one of the parts in the performance of the piece.

Yesterday my wife and I were at her sister’s house while they were preparing to sing in the choir, and the conversation swung around to Morimar. It turned out that Mary had her own copy and also found it entrancing. It also turned out that she had studied briefly at Oxford, where she had come to know Alfred Deller, the great counter-tenor. She said his speaking voice was a normal male voice, and that he had as a boy learned to sing in the falsetto with excellence and complete control. He was neither a genetic freak nor castrated. So this matched with my experience of singing with the CD, and I determined that I would ask the counter-tenors in my church choir whether they also had learned to sing in the falsetto.

We thus go another long step deeper into the mysteries of church music.

Energy/GHG in the Little Decisions

2008-03-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

Rank the walls below in the energy and greenhouse gases required to create them.

Rank the walls below in terms of their maintainability in the year 2108.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Answers:
4,1,2 & 3
#4 has a large cement core with rocks cemented in place. It was made with rock shipped in.
#1 has indigenous rock from an old farmer's fence cemented in place.
#2 and #3 have indigenous rock piled and no cement.
Cement requires very large amounts of energy and the processes send very large amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere.

2&3, 1, 4
When a rock falls down from #2 or #3, someone needs to notice and replace it.
When weathering and frost breaks a cement connection on #1, it the rest of the wall tends to stay in place, and the broken part needs to be cemented back in place. The cement can be for the most part broken free from the stones as preparation for doing the job.
When weathering and frost breaks up the cement core to some degree, as it will within 100 years, it needs to be cemented back in place. If the weathering and breakup become significant enough, then the cement core must be removed and disposed of. When the cement holding the stones in place fails, the stones will fall completely to the ground, exposing the inside of the wall to further weathering. The cement can again be for the most part broken free from the stones as preparation for doing repairs.

Human Factors in Libraries

2008-03-22T15:36:00.000-07:00

Little things seemingly far from the domain of burning fossil fuels can contribute to energy conservation and lowered risk of global warming. This offers case in point, because one would never think that software user interface design and implementation would make that kind of difference.

I was working on references in the Woods Hole library this afternoon, when I began near the end of the day to attempt to find McCullough's book 1776. I had been reading by listening to a CD in my car, and now needed the exact words to use in a blog entry I am developing on Posner's book Surprise Attacks. Since it was not in the Woods Hole Library, I tried to find it in the library catalog prior to driving to the parent Falmouth library to get it.

When I entered the electronic catalog, what I saw was the display in the first picture below. My eyes were draw to the middle, and I quickly realized that I was not likely to find a search screen there for the title of just any book. After some thinking and searching, I clicked "Virtual Catalog" and was presented with a logon screen. I could not get in without my library card information ... something I thought strange for a public library. I entered my card, but Woods Hole and Falmouth were not options for the city entry that was required to log on. At a loss, I discontinued the effort.

When I asked the librarian, she said that there was a a dedicated terminal for such searches. I went there and quickly started the search, which now took 1-2 minutes instead of the few seconds it ought to. This was a high cost in a situation in which I had maybe 5-10 minutes to decide whether to drive to Falmouth. I was then presented with a long screen of listings, and when I clicked on one, I saw the second screen below. Well, it did not do much good since it was not apparent how to limit the search to copies of the book in the Falmouth Library.

Time was up. I could not find the information I needed, and I would not be able to get to Falmouth in time if I futzed around with the system very much longer. Thus I drove almost 9 miles round trip to try to get the book. Happily the book was there. In fact there were three copies. There were only 15 minutes left before the library closed when I arrived, so I asked a librarian for help. She went to the computer catalog (showing me that her version of the user interface was possible to use ... at least if you knew it well) and then right to the books. She then suggested I might be interested in William Martin's historical novel Citizen Washington. I was interested and took it out. Sometimes computers are great; sometimes people are a lot better than computers.

Alternative morals of the tale:

1. People like me need to be more perceptive and intelligent under time pressure.

2. People like me need to live lives that are not under time pressure.

3. User interfaces need to be done more skillfully so that people who have not used them before can readily figure out how to use them.

I have considerable experience designing and coding software and user interfaces, so I tend to believe that #3 is the most important of these three morals.

Since I drive a Prius, the incident had a GHG cost corresponding to burning about 2/11 gallon of gas. For the driver of a more conventional car or SUV, the cost would correspond to about 1/2 gallon or more. But the cost in general is much higher. One can bank on the factoid that many other people this day or this week have driven when maybe they did not have to.

MMS Public Hearing for Cape Wind in Boston

2008-03-15T07:25:00.001-07:00

I attended the Cape Wind hearings again on Thursday, March 13 at the University of Massachusetts, Harbor Campus. The points of argument continued to sharpen. A pleasing development was that Sue Reed of Conservation Law Foundation spoke specifically in rebuttal of some claims of the Save Our Sound group. I think that this development may mark a beginning of people not just talking past each other, which might represent one conceivable means by which to fix the broken process that has been happening. After making my comments about aggressive campaigning at West Yarmouth, I found it interesting that there were signs indicating that people could not bring signs or placards in to the basketball arena where the hearings were being held.

Here is a picture of the proceedings. There was the usual low density of people near the front, and higher densities further back. It was not obvious when I entered about a half hour into the proceedings, but the pro-CapeWind people were on the far side bleachers, and the anti-CapeWind people were on the near side bleachers. In West Yarmouth there were clusters but much more mixing. I counted 230 attendees on the "Pro" side, and 118 on the "Anti" side. I recognized quite a few people on each side who had been at the West Yarmouth public hearing, and I heard at least one speaker refer to having been at the Martha's Vineyard public hearing. It would be interesting to know more about how many people in attendance simply went to most or all of the public hearings.

I am working on a newspaper article about the hearings. This post will get longer but the newspaper article, a business meeting, and tomorrow's session with Congressman Ed Markey have my first priority.

Do Tornadoes Indicate Climate Change?

2008-03-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

The tornado that hit downtown Atlanta yesterday during the Southeast Conference Basketball Tournament was unusual, but is it a sign of increased tornado activity that might be expected by climate theorists: "more heat into the atmosphere leads to more activity and more violent activity in the atmosphere?" The answer is difficult to discern because any changes over a period of decades could be the result of natural trends. Other alternative hypotheses might be that this just happened to be a one-off tornado of no more significance than that it was an aberration, or that, to stretch things a bit, since downtown Atlanta is somewhat near the ocean, it was really a misidentified waterspout or other ocean-based phenomenon. At the same time, the argument might be made that there is a trend occurring that matches up with increased GHG in the atmosphere. A year or more ago I looked at the data on tornadoes in the United States. It was "apparent to the eye" that there was a trend of increasing numbers of tornadoes, that they were occuring in numbers over an expanding geographical area, and that there was an expanding period of months during each year that constituted the "tornado season."

Now we see a tornado in Atlanta GA, well outside "tornado alley," and we wonder. The article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Atlanta-Storm.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin) indicates that it is not the first tornado in the area, but unfortunately, there is no indication as to whether there were tornadoes prior to 1975.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the most
recent tornado to hit a major city's downtown was on Aug. 12, 2004, in
Jacksonville, Fla. Downtown tornadoes have also struck Fort Worth, Texas; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; and Nashville, Tenn., in the past
decade.
If confirmed, the tornado would be the first on record in downtown Atlanta, said Smith, the meteorologist. The last tornado to strike inside the city was in 1975, and it hit the governor's mansion north of
downtown, he said.
I have had the data for more than a year on tornadoes in the United States and will see if I can allocate time to do a statistical analysis to determine whether there is likely to be anything to the climate change theory. If anyone out there would like to participate in the effort, I'd be pleased.

Cape Wind: Demonstrators at West Yarmouth

2008-03-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I commented on my feelings of discomfort with the behavior I witnessed at the Monday hearing in West Yarmouth. In this post I will explore that a little.

The URL below is to a video of the approach to the facility. One can hear the chanting and see activity from a considerable distance, so it does not come as a surprise that I was ready for whatever happened, and had my camera running. Chanting communicated to me that at least one group was actively encouraging attendees to join them in their view of the proceedings, and I strongly approve of such persuasion. It is democracy in action.

http://www.sesenergy.com/Blog/CapeWind_OutsideYarmouthSchool.AVI

What made me feel uncomfortable was having to walk a narrow sidewalk with demonstrators close up on both sides of me. You can see the people in front of me accepting the offered necklaces with banner indicating that they are against the Cape Wind project. I imagine these people felt vastly more comfortable than I did. I was not accepting any literature or banners from either side, and I had a camera out in public to document what was happening. With hands and arms coming into my walking tube, and the owners of those hands and arms aggressively reaching out and proselytizing, I really was a little anxious about how they would take my not embracing their cause. While I clearly did not even hesitate to proceed, this forced me to think a little about escape routes should escape become necessary.

It would have been better if the SOS demonstrators had placed themselves back a little toward the school and in the area to the left of my path. They could then had drawn attendees toward them rather than reaching out into their path.

There was only a single person from the KY coal mines handing out their literature. While this person presented the literature "in your face," one had the choice to move around to the left to gain greater distance ... and it was only a single person, therefore not offering the same potential threat.

I felt that the Cape and the Islands (pro-wind) people had appropriate positioning and activity. They were also smart enough to smile at the anti-wind people in front of me. This may be a matter of their having learned the ropes in terms of successfully encouraging people to move in their direction.

Note the considerable police presence at the very end of the video. I was surprised with the extent of police coverage. Police were everywhere. It gave me considerable comfort that they were present, as the animation of many of the anti-wind people made it an uncertain situation should they react negatively to anyone who did not clearly embrace their position. Only once did it appear that security personnel were needed for a specific action. One of the early anti-wind speakers refused to end his presentation when his 3-minute time allotment was up, repeatedly ignoring the moderator. A very large hired security guard walked over near him, establishing a clear presence and statement that there would be order, and the speaker backed down.

Plastics Manufacturer Looks Into Green Opportunities

2008-03-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

John Gravelle, president of Mar-Lee, an innovative plastics manufacturer in Leominster, MA reported in a public meeting In Worcester MA on March 12 that representatives of his company were in a Florida meeting to learn about likely plastic manufacturing that will be required by the emerging Green Revolution. With many green energy companies developing new products in New England, it is likely that there will be a need for features such as biodegradable plastic in manufactured goods.

Gravelle commented that he had sent some of his lieutenants to the conference to learn about the full gamit of futures in plastics. These representatives would then return and educate him about the likely future opportunities. The company re-invests 10% of its profits each year in new equipment, often in the context of a contract with a client that wishes to push the limits in plastics manufacturing. Examples of already existing products are the special plastic wrappers for tiny medical devices used in torn anterior-cruciate ligament surgery. The medical device delivers a timed drug dose and the plastic packaging dissolves over a period of a year or two. Wrapping such a package in very thin plastic in a standardized manufacturing process increases reliability, decreases risk, and decreases cost. Mar-Lee is embracing the Innovation Economy as a key means for achieving its next target of $50M in yearly revenues.

Cape Wind: MMS Hearings in West Yarmouth

2008-03-10T21:43:00.000-07:00

Today was the first of four days of evening hearings about the Draft Environmental Impact Statement of the Federal Minerals Management Service (MMS). This first event was in West Yarmouth on the Cape. Attendance was significantly higher than at the last event I attended, a hearing for the Cape Cod Commission deliberations. Before the auditorium was pretty full, but this time it was a challenge to find a seat in the main auditorium, and perhaps a hundred people were seating on portable chairs on the basketball court behind the last row in the auditorium. Here is a picture of the auditorium and the gym two hours into the program, after about two hundred people had cleared out.

This was indicative of a hardening of positions for and against, as well as greater vociferousness about those positions. As I entered, a small group of SOS advocates were chanting and handing out necklaces with big SOS signs. Then there were the Cape and Islands people with their placards urging acceptance of the Cape Wind project. Once inside, I sat behind 2-3 rows of people hardened in their position against Cape Wind, and it was quite educational. Repeatedly, when a speaker would state a fact that favored Cape Wind, the people in the row in front of me would shift their bodies, grumble, and then deny the truth of that fact. This made me feel very uneasy, and I found myself comforted by the presence of police. When a speaker said something against Cape Wind, whether fact or opinion, those against the project would applaud and/or cheer, even though the moderator had explicitly asked the audience not to do this kind of thing because it delayed progress through the long list of speakers.

Indeed, it was an event of curious contradictions. On one hand, a recent poll (http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0306-08.htm) indicated that 74% of Cape residents are now in favor of the Cape Wind project. On the other hand, one politician after another expressed strong sentiment against the project. It was if the politicians were listening to the group that was more vehement in its position. Further, a number of community members of committees presented themselves as representing the views of the entire committees when in fact this was readily disputable. In one such dispute a later speaker pointed out that two Yarmouth selectmen had seemed to do this when in fact other Yarmouth selectmen who had not spoken were in favor of the project. In another such dispute, I noted that a community member of a committee for the Barnstable airport at first seemed to be representing his personal views, and then suddenly in his final statement, was seeming to represent the entire committee. Then about twenty speakers later another speaker escalated, refering to such people as "professionals" who were qualified to make judgments that we should all respect. The sense was of an escalating fabricated reality, initiated by people who intentionally supply disinformation, and then augmented: in which a group of people don't really know the facts, don't want to know the facts, and interact with each other as they weave their own group reality out of their misstatements. I found myself sitting there, thinking to myself about how one might approach fixing this fundamentally broken communications system. Here are some of the other problematic statements made by people against implementation of Cape Wind:

A commercial fisherman claimed that striped bass would vacate Horseshoe Shoals once the wind turbines are implemented because they want to avoid obstructions. At the same time, individual fishermen know to look for stripers around such obstructions as docks near the shoreline.
Several people claimed that wind projects cannot be financially successful without Federal and state subsidies...pretending that fossil fuels and nuclear are not heavily subsidized by the government. (This was also a misconception expressed by the New York Times's Andrew C. Revkin on a recent panel at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. I confronted him about it.)
A "green" advocate claimed that his carbon footprint was very low because he heats his living space with "corn oil" ... not acknowledging or perhaps not knowing that petroleum is used at least in producing fertilizer, for tilling the field, and for transporting the corn oil to his burner.
Two or three people claiming that the cost of wind-generated electricity is three times the cost of oil generated electricity ... while the electricity goes into the grid through an auction in competition with other forms of electricity, and Cape Wind has to match those prices or lose money.
A claim that rows of wind turbines in California produce a low rumbling noise, when in fact, I have been there on a mountain filled with turbines packed as tightly as the owners dare, and I can confirm that they don't make such a sound.
A claim that the "as many as 600" bird deaths to be anticipated per year is tragic, eggregious, and unacceptable, while ignoring the more than a billion bird deaths that, according to Audubon, occur in West Virginia as a result of strip mining that cleaves off the tops of mountains.

If I can get some reasonable confirmation of their comments, I will be inserting a paragraph about here addressing the Francis Lowell's comments about tech risk assessment, and Regina of the Wayland [Allston] Conservation Society about potential mammalian impacts and their amelioration. Both of these comment sets seemed new and substantive, but neither seemed to block progress toward implementation.

Speaking of West Virginia, there were at least three speakers who had traveled all the way from there to the Cape to express their support for the project. For me, their presence underscored the important point that environmental impacts may not be merely local, that there are tradeoffs that span considerable geographical reach. In this case, Massachusetts generating more of its own electricity without coal means that less coal may be mined in West Virginia. The argument is that this would allow the West Virginians to move on to salvage their way of living without mines that destroy their water, their people, and their environment. More on that when I return to update this entry.

Doubling Vehicle Fuel Economy by 2035

2008-03-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

A rather interesting energy article appeared in Vol 1 of "Energy Futures, MIT Energy Initiative." I come to this article with a point of view based on personal experience driving energy efficient cars: In 1980 I was driving a Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel, getting 60 mpg at 60 mph. I have read about new European engines that allow 80 miles per gallon and wonder why such engines are perhaps not available or perhaps even common in the United States. (Simple answer: it is political.) My wife and I currently drive a Honda Hybrid and a Prius hybrid, both burning gas at 42-60+ mpg, depending on the season and the circumstances of driving. I have also noted that Toyota made the commitment to hybridize its entire line a couple years ago. So why is there such an issue about it within the United States. It would seem that it is easy to read the writing on the wall and get moving as a sheer matter of competitive survival.

Since some of my comments on this summary of Heywood (et al) will push in the direction of change, I should also comment that I know John Heywood to some degree and have great respect for him. I embrace almost all of what is in the research results. There is some with which I, in a sense, disagree. I think he knows more than I do about how the automotive industry actually works, something that makes his paper excellent. On the other hand, I have some definite notions about how organizations can be designed and managed to be leaner, more efficient, more flexible, more effective. That is the way that I run organizations and parts of organizations. So when my comments differ with those of John's team, it is likely that the differences reflect those views.

The results of this paper are heavily dependent on the quality of AVL's ADVISOR (see http://www.avl.com/ about this software package), which was originally developed by NREL and then handed over to AVL for commercialization. AVL says this about the program:

ADVISOR is designed for rapid analysis of the performance and fuel economy
of conventional and advanced, light and heavy-duty vehicle models as well as
hybrid electric and fuel cell vehicle models. It tests the effect of parameter changes
in vehicle components (such as motors, batteries, catalytic converters, climate
control systems, and alternative fuels) and other modifications that might
affect fuel economy, performance or emissions.
...

Reduces testing time to evaluate various vehicle powertrain alternatives

Estimates the fuel economy of vehicles that have not yet been built

Compares relative tailpipe emissions produced during various drive cycles

Shows how conventional, advanced, light, and heavy vehicles use, and
lose, energy throughout their drivetrains
~

The article mentions human behavior, but only in the sense of a change in what people will buy. There is much more behavior that is relevant. A key area is how people drive. A woman stopped to get directions from me near Central Square near MIT, and we got into a discussion of why she got very ordinary mileage in her Prius. Very quickly the discussion evolved into my explaining to her how to change her driving habits so that the Prius would get outstanding mileage. For example, I almost never accelerate while going uphill. I use cruise control whenever my car is fundamentally traveling on flat ground, because the car's systems are much better at minimizing gas use than my foot and brain are, no matter how I try. However, I never use cruise control when going up even a moderate hill, because it wants to downshift and accelerate in that situation.

There are many additional examples of the importance of psychology and behavior in regard to driving and purchasing vehicles. The above is only a start.

Heywood et al identify changes in powertrains as a key part of the transition to more efficient vehicles in 2035. Using recent adoption rates for powertrains in Europe and the United States, they conclude that 2035 will see 85% conversion in new vehicles to more efficienct powertrains such as hybrid, diesel, and turbocharged gasoline. This is an example of my thesis that normal adoption processes and rates are insufficient for mankind's transition to avoid serious impacts from global warming. We need to achieve substantially 100% of all operable vehicles with innovative powertrains by 2035. Heywood et al also discuss means to achieve weight and size reduction of vehicles. Yet much more can be achieved and sooner than 2035 if there is the will to do so. Amory Lovins (http://www.rmi.org/) last year proposed an extremely lightweight approach based on composites. It may be that the modeling program does not support such extreme weight reduction approaches.

This chart is a very powerful tool. It is worth taking some time to understand it.

It would seem to me that a more aggressive target for mileage and carbon footprint could readily be achieved if we were serious. When we as a society get serious about this kind of thing, the targets will become much more aggressive, and we will attain them much more rapidly that we currently think we can.

Right now, the work that can be done is biased by the ADVISOR model and its assumptions, which is based on recent practice in the automotive industry.

It seems at face value unreasonable to me that the factor of two target will cost manufacturers $50 - $65 billion in the 2035 model alone. Is this Detroit lining up again to block progress and to argue for more government doles, doles that the Japanese manufacturers seem to invest in as a matter of competitive opportunism? This seems more manageable when Heywood characterizes it as a 20% increase over business as usual. It also seems more manageable when one realizes that there are perhaps 5-10 manufacturers, so that the total is distributed over all of them, yielding a cost of $5-$13 billion on average for each, most of that being a normal cost of the evolution of models.

The issue is whether this is based on a business-as-usual model, or rather on a leaner, more directed model. About two years ago I witnessed a business plan presentation by a former manager for one of the auto companies. I was flabbergasted at the expense in his plan. I was flabbergasted at the salaries this particular startup was paying its managers. I recognized that this probably reflected the logic and values of Detroit. I suspect the above cost projections reflect similar logic and values. I suspect they also reflect the costs of a highly complex, bureaucratic organization that has been somewhat dysfunctional for many years. We need to find ways to make our organizations leaner, more efficient, more effective. Thankfully, there are other people who also recognize this. There is a lean manufacturing initiative a MIT addressing these and many other critical questions.

Computers, Watches and Living at Lower Temperatures

2008-03-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

For some time I have been experimenting with living at ever lower temperatures, that is, with use of ever less fossil fuels for heating and cooling. Typically at this point I set my thermostat to 50F, but I actually have the heating system off during the day and much of the night. At the time of this post, it is sunny outdoors and the temperature at my workstation is a balmy 58F. There are impacts that I continue to seek to identify. Most of these are qualitative impacts, such as the fact that my liquid peppermint soap clouds up, and my ViewSonic monitor does not start up if it has been off at low ambient temperatures for a day or so. This posting addresses the impacts on computer clocks, which is a natural concern for many people.

This from Wikipedia on March 2, 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator):

A crystal's frequency characteristic depends on the shape or 'cut' of the crystal. A tuning fork crystal is usually cut such that its frequency over temperature is a parabolic curve centered around 25 °C. This means that a tuning fork crystal oscillator will resonate close to its target frequency at room temperature, but will slow down when the temperature either increases or decreases from room temperature. A common parabolic coefficient for a 32 kHz tuning fork crystal is −0.04 ppm/°C².

In a real application, this means that a clock built using a regular 32 kHz tuning fork crystal will keep good time at room temperature, lose 2 minutes per year at 10 degrees Celsius above (or below) room temperature and lose 8 minutes per year at 20 degrees Celsius above (or below) room temperature.

Thus for ordinary applications in the home and office, there is no significant problem with "clocks" even if one lives at 50F or 100F.

Microsoft and Security

2008-02-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

On Valentine's Day this year, I went to my workstation to discover a polite message from Microsoft that they had, without my knowledge or permission, downloaded a software update to my computer. Not only this, but they had also rebooted my computer, destroying all of the placemarks and work-in-progress that I had left up and running so that I could continue working on it the next morning. Thanks Microsoft!

This issue relates to "green" because the proper functioning of the Internet relates to "green," assuming that the Internet helps us to be "greener." (That the Internet does this has been disputed. However, my experience with the Internet as an expediter of productivity and an alternative to physical transportation indicates to me that almost any detailed calculation of electricity use by computers will be swamped out by these energy saving factors. It is sort of like comparing the green-ness of the New York City subway system to having all of those people driving cars instead. It almost does not matter how inefficient the subway is. Because of economies of scale, it will still be vastly "greener" than a system that requires people to drive in invidual vehicles.)

Microsoft has done something similar at least once before. About six months ago they had what they considered to be another security update, and I had elected not to download and install it. This update would verify [for Microsoft] that my operating system was a legitimate licensed version of the Microsoft XP operating system. Well, I already knew that, many times over. I had purchased my Hewlett-Packard computer from a legitimate store, and it came with the operating system installed. I knew Microsoft had checked it many times over the Internet, whenever I did an update from their website. I also, out of curiosity, had run their internal operating system check to verify that this was a legitimate version. Enough is enough. So I elected for a long time not to download this verification system. Then one day, the option to download it had disappeared. I doubted that it disappeared because Microsoft simply averred in its persistence.

It is time for Microsoft to reduce or drop its paranoia within the boundaries of America. Yes, I can understand their paranoia with respect to China, for the stories are many about piracy there. Such piracy simply does not make a lot of sense when most computers are sold with the Microsoft operating system already installed. I remember some years ago when Microsoft first came out with its inflated figures for how many of their operating system instances they thought had been installed or pirated. My reaction to that was to note the larger number of copies of Microsoft operating systems my businesses and I had disposed of than we were currently using. Many of them I have never registered formally with Microsoft, because it took time and offered little to me. So I figured that MS must be counting all of those unregistered operating systems, and many of those discards as pirated operating systems, even though they clearly were not. If Microsoft were not using statistics like this in a key way, then how else would they be divining the huge numbers they claimed for piracy?

Summary conclusion: Microsoft paranoia and resulting public relations is not adequate justification for their tampering with computers. I now always make a point of physically disconnecting my computers from the Internet when I am away. I am also one large step further along in dropping Microsoft in favor of Linux or Mac. It is not easy given that I am fluent in Microsoft Access and Microsoft Basic, but it will eventually happen.

Detroit Mis-Attitudes

2008-02-24T15:17:00.001-08:00

How can I not comment on General Motors Corp Vice Chairman Bob Lutz's remarking and then backing these remarks? Below is the text of a Reuters article, as well as a pointer to it.

1. Lutz surely understands that what he says as a corporate leader influences at least all those who are under him.

2. Lutz may not be aware of the way his expressed values influence his personal decision making, but they do influence it.

3. One of the problems with filling key positions in major corporations with 40-year-old hotshots is that most of the lack maturity. The shift that is currently underway to enable our society to survive requires that many such corporate leaders have moved on to "generativity" so that they are prepared to take consideration of generations to come.

4. There is longstanding awareness that Detroit (which includes GM) has looked to special consideration from the government instead of getting off the dime about its poor energy and environment performance. Partly this has been made OK by politicians and business advocates who have championed the notion of relying on "market forces" ... as long as those market forces go to their advantage and they still get their special considerations. Advocating reliance on "market forces" can be useful in many circumstances, as long as the advocates are not hypocritical. In Detroit's case hypocrisy has been a loose-loose proposition for all parties concerned. Special consideration as a result of lobbying Washington has led to weaker American auto companies and a weaker America.

4. Lutz was correct about GM's compromised market position. Many of us have been predicting for years that this would happen. Lutz said that it was a mistake to allow Toyota to seize "the mantle of green respectability and technology leadership" with its market-leading Prius hybrid. Lester Brown says that he thinks GM has learned a lesson, that it is really working hard to get the Volt out before Japanese makers get their electric cars into the market. Time will tell.

5. Here is hoping that Detroit learns this time around. I'm sure they can do it if they really want to!

_________________________________________________________________

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN2237297620080222?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews&rpc=22&sp=true
GM exec stands by calling global warming a "crock"
Fri Feb 22, 2008 3:08pm EST
DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Corp Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has defended remarks he made dismissing global warming as a "total crock of s---," saying his views had no bearing on GM's commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles.
Lutz, GM's outspoken product development chief, has been under fire from Internet bloggers since last month when he was quoted as making the remark to reporters in Texas.
In a posting on his GM blog on Thursday, Lutz said those "spewing virtual vitriol" at him for minimizing the threat of climate change were "missing the big picture."
"What they should be doing in earnest is forming opinions, not about me but about GM and what this company is doing that is ... hugely beneficial to the causes they so enthusiastically claim to support," he said in a posting titled, "Talk About a Crock."
GM, the largest U.S. automaker by sales and market share, has been trying to change its image after taking years of heat for relying too much on sales of large sport-utility vehicles like the Hummer and not moving faster on fuel-saving hybrid technology.
"My thoughts on what has or hasn't been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors," he wrote.
Lutz said GM was continuing development of the battery-powered, plug-in Chevy Volt and other alternatives to traditional internal combustion engines.
GM is racing against Toyota Motor Corp to be first to market a plug-in hybrid car that can be recharged at a standard electric outlet.
Lutz has previously said GM made a mistake by allowing Toyota to seize "the mantle of green respectability and technology leadership" with its market-leading Prius hybrid.
A 40-year auto industry veteran who joined GM earlier in the decade with a mandate to shake up its vehicle line-up, Lutz is no stranger to controversy.
As part of a campaign against higher fuel economy standards, Lutz wrote in a 2006 blog posting that forcing automakers to sell smaller cars would be "like trying to address the obesity problem in this country by forcing clothing manufacturers to sell smaller, tighter sizes."
Automakers ended their opposition to higher fuel standards in 2007 when it became clear that proposed changes would become law with or without their support.
In December, President George W. Bush signed a law mandating a 40 percent increase in fleetwide fuel economy by 2020, the first substantial change in three decades.
(Reporting by Kevin Krolicki, editing by Toni Reinhold)

Mort Webster (MIT) on Uncertainties in Models

2008-02-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

Based on his talk at MIT in January. The issue to be drawn from Mort Webster's presentation is whether climate models are maybe a little too conservative, and even more important, whether they are interpreted too conservatively in terms of policy initiatives. Coming soon.

Nobska Point Wind

2008-02-18T06:37:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I called George Woodwell and we spent some time walking around looking at potential sites for a wind turbine. The Nobska Point area is one of the prime Class 6 wind sites in Massachusetts. Wind comes over a vast expanse of ocean right on to Nobska Point. I have had my eye for years on getting a turbine placed on the lighthouse property, and arranged for an introduction to the lighthouse keeper, but everyone agrees that people's visual sensibilities will prevent any such wind turbine placement. I keep pointing out that the radio tower next to the lighthouse is vastly uglier than a wind turbine, or almost anything else for that matter. People did not complain about that ... or maybe it just went in so many years ago that people did not have a chance to complain.

There are lots of sites in the area for 2 kW turbines. Not so many for 100kW turbines ... which is the size we would like to get in place for the neighborhood. Let's start close to home. George and I are both prepared to site a turbine in our back yards, which are contiguous but for a road between them. The road is owned by a third party, so in the best of circumstances, we all must reach an agreement to proceed, and then get the town bylaws changed so that we can agree to allow a fall zone to extend over our property lines. We looked at my backyard, and the turbine would be too close to my house. It is one thing to place a 2 kW turbine with its skinny pole within falling distance of a house. Quite another to place a 100kW turbine there with its climb-through structure that rises at least 100 feet and a payload weight well in excess of a ton. Looking at George's back yard, well, it is shielded from the wind by my house.

Walking over to the neighbors who have homes on the ocean, the situation changes. One neighbor with arguably the best site looks in one direction all the way to Martha's Vineyard, and in another direction all the way to Long Island (if one could see that far). They would not even need a very large tower. The best location would be on the rocky beach on the side of the house from which trees block the view. George and I agreed that the owners would never place a turbine in their line of site to the Vineyard.

I really do not have to go any further to point out the pattern. In so-called desirable locations on the coast (or in fact anywhere), there is typically already a heavy population density. It is difficult to find a turbine placement that is safe. Even if a turbine whispers (and that is about all the industrial scale turbines do) it could be disruptive to sensitive people's sleep during quiet nights if it is literally located in a small back yard. Further, the locations that are otherwise acceptable often compromise precious viewsheds. In other words, it is one thing to have a large turbine out there in the water at a distance of a half mile or more, and quite another thing to have it 100 yards away.

I have seen this in many situations. As full awareness of the energy and environment situation grows, I recognize that there will be wind turbines put into lots of places that, today, people would not think of placing them. The question is how we get from here to a moderated version of there.

Lieberman-Warner and House Select Committee

2008-02-14T07:27:00.000-08:00

Stephanie Herring, PhD , a science policy advisor /ACS fellow for Congressman Ed Markey ,in his capacity as Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming , spoke at the Weston Public Library at 7 p.m. February 13th. Dr. Herring focussed her discussion on the Lieberman-Warner Bill in Washington to address climate change and promote energy independence. This bill has emerged from committee and appears to be the basic structure around which future debates will be centered. Language from other bills will be inserted if and as appropriate. The event was sponsored by the Weston Climate Group. I was originally scheduled to be in Maine for a call-in program about Wind energy, but was recovering from a bout of the flu and could not engage in an 11-hour junket. Two colleagues carried through on the Maine engagement, and freed me to spend two hours on this event.

Part of Stephanie's involvement is identifying the impacts of global warming on people, a topic near and dear to my heart. Trained in the health sciences, Stephanie could be focussing on being a doctor, but one of the biggest public health issues is in fact these impacts. A common attitude is that people will adapt to whatever climate changes occur, but that is not true. If heat waves are a degree or a few degrees hotter, many more people will die. If there are more severe storms, there will be much more property damage and dislocation, and again more people will die. This important work is almost surely not properly considered in Lieberman-Warner. Stephanie's work will help bring it properly in to play.

"Lieberman-Warner" (Senate Bill # 2191) can be found in its latest version http://www.thomas.gov/. A search under 2191 may not yield a hit, so it may be necessary to search under Lieberman or Warner. Its sections are below my comments.

Thomas.gov is the best place to access the most recent versions of bills. It is updated more frequently than individual senators' web sites.

Bingamon-Specter is not out of committee, and probably won't make it out, indicating at this point that it will be used only to extract added language to update Lieberman-Warner.

The Bill charges the EPA with designing and operating systems for implementing management of GreenHouse Gases (GHG). There is to be a Greenhouse Gas Registry with an advisory board. All information is to be public, with electronic reporting and audits for verification. I asked whether this was similar to the Inventories that many corporations are beginning to perform and publish on the web; the answer was "yes." An issue being debated is what entities to regulate in various sectors of the economy. There are also some problems with this provision. The legislation also depends on EPA leadership for implementation. This means that the implementation will be politicized to a certain extent, a concern for those of us who view global warming as a non-political issue that can be made political to the detriment of all. Additionally, there is nothing in Bush's budget for rulemaking, indicating that there is a shortfall of commitment to this legislation.

The Bill proposes what is basically a cap-and-trade system. There is to be a penalty for over-emitting: $200 per ton of CO2 over your allowance. Legislators may consider something like 3 times the vaue of carbon on the market. The legislation aims to curb 85% to 95% of our emissions by focussing on large businesses, but the initial legislation has some holes in it. Perhaps this is reasonable, if not good. Since "small businesses" would be exempt from this legislation, the logic would be that the huge task of setting up a system could be done with a relatively small sample of entities, making it more feasible. Also, small businesses do not have the resources to deal with the set-up process. Once the system is set up, it could be extended to small businesses. Of course a company that has 400-500 people is not what a lot of us would call a small business, so there is a potential or actual hole there. For example, with the fragmentation of the electric power industry, there may be major polluters that generate electricity with coal or oil and yet qualify for the small business exemption. Meanwhile the high employment part of the industry is in distribution, which would have a comparatively low carbon footprint with or without the legislation.

So there is the big question: What holes does this legislation leave open?
Then there is also another question that emerges: What if this legislation does not tackle the challenge aggressively enough? What if we cannot afford those holes? What if the problem is bigger and more pressing that we thought it was? There is already evidence that the researchers and their models are too conservative in their predictions. Additionally, as Stephanie pointed out, when researchers find that they do not know how to include methane from thawed permafrost in their models, they simply ignore it.

Agriculture represents a very challenging and ambiguous area for the legislation because it proves difficult to know what the carbon footprint is for agriculture, forestry and land use. Stephanie was familiar with the recent research out of Princeton that reconsidered the boundaries for evaluating the net carbon footprint for corn-ethanol. This indicates that reliance on such ethanol increases the carbon in the atmosphere. Is this really all that surprising when we consider the complications and demands of large scale agriculture? I found myself itching to tell the story of how agriculture is now heavily dependent upon petro-chemicals. When I visited an ancestral homestead in Minnesota some years ago, I stood next to the gravesite in the corner of the 40 acres. It was at the level of my eyes as I stood at the level of the cultivated land. The message is that the topsoil has been eroded by wind and water; we have mined out the wealth that was in that deep Midwestern topsoil. We need to shed our illusions about argiculture, petroleum, and carbon.

There is to be a Carbon Market Efficiency Board with 5 members of both parties appointed by the sitting President serving for 15 year terms to insulate them from politics. When the price of carbon reaches the point of impacting our economy, this board can adjust the numbers in the system to ameliorate the effect. It is indeed reasonable to have some sort of mechanism like this. Yet it could be abused. I again raised a question. Why are we so worried about a point or two of economic growth when our entire society and way of life are at stake? Because of this, it will be very important to select good people to this Board, and to make sure that they have the tools and the advice necessary to do their job well. It is perhaps a little like the Federal Reserve Bank in its subtle but considerable power. In the present, with a Bush administration that remains largely committed to a high carbon footprint, early passing of this Bill would then enable Bush to subvert the legislation by appointing troglodytes as Advisors.

Allocation addresses who gets to emit the actual carbon that is emitted. The U.S. is attempting to learn from the Europe's debacle that resulted from giving away all the allowances, which were actually worth a great deal. European energy companies had a windfall profit, for which consumers paid higher rates. Instead, the legislation calls for 26.5% of the allowances to be auctioned in 2012. The remainder are to be given away. I cannot comment at this point on the prudency of this approach, but the question does arise: Why not auction off all allowances, and let market forces play out. Isn't this what Conservatives have always argued for in the public forum, but now that they can get a government dole to their advantage, they embrace the dole rather than their own principles?

Fossil fuel fired electric plants are to receive 19% of the free allowances, while 10% go to energy intensive industries such as steel and cement. 5% go to organizations that have already done things to significantly reduce their carbon footprint. And so forth. I raised this question: If the fossil fuel-based industry is already getting $12B in subidies from the Feds, then why should they get another 19% free allowance to keep the cost of fossil-fuel-based electricity down? A penny or two per kiloWatt hour makes the difference between being competitive and not competitive, and thus the difference between building more fossil fuel plants for electric generation, and alternative energy plants for electric generation. This gift creates an immense government bias in favor of the fossil fuels whose consumption we must reduce, and against the wind, solar and alternative energy approaches whose consumption we must foster.

At the end I asked Stephanie the question that, before her talk, I had warned her would come. I discussed my previous blog entry, and work at MIT that looks at the uncertainties in the models. The spread in the models gives a peak of about 4 degrees Centrigrade as the temperature rise as of 2100, but with consideration of uncertainties and data error, that peak could go much higher. With Ravelo's finding that the Pliocene had temperatures 4 to 9 degrees higher than now with similar carbon in the atmosphere, and measured GHG concentrations already higher than predicted by the models, the question might be "How fast will the global temperatures rise to Pliocene levels or higher?" It would seem likely that excessive moderation right now might be a mistake. Yet Lieberman-Warner assumes a middle-of-the-models challenge and seeks to ameliorate that. What if the challenge is much greater than that? Isn't it more prudent to tackle this problem aggressively? Then if we find we have created slack, we can back off in our efforts? Cannot we learn from the McKinsey Report, implement in the right way, grow our economy in a green direction, and profit economically as a society?

Readers may want to check out the select committee's website at http://globalwarming.house.gov/.

S.2191
America's Climate Security Act of 2007 (Introduced in Senate)
Beginning October 18, 2007
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Sec. 1. Short title; table of contents.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
SEC. 3. PURPOSES.
TITLE I--CAPPING GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS Subtitle A--Tracking Emissions
SEC. 1101. PURPOSE.
SEC. 1102. DEFINITIONS.
SEC. 1103. REPORTING REQUIREMENTS.
SEC. 1104. DATA QUALITY AND VERIFICATION.
SEC. 1105. FEDERAL GREENHOUSE GAS REGISTRY.
SEC. 1106. ENFORCEMENT.Subtitle B--Reducing Emissions
SEC. 1201. EMISSION ALLOWANCE ACCOUNT.
SEC. 1202. COMPLIANCE OBLIGATION.
SEC. 1203. PENALTY FOR NONCOMPLIANCE.TITLE II--MANAGING AND CONTAINING COSTS EFFICIENTLY Subtitle A--Trading
SEC. 2101. SALE, EXCHANGE, AND RETIREMENT OF EMISSION ALLOWANCES.
SEC. 2102. NO RESTRICTION ON TRANSACTIONS.
SEC. 2103. ALLOWANCE TRANSFER SYSTEM.
SEC. 2104. ALLOWANCE TRACKING SYSTEM.Subtitle B--Banking
SEC. 2201. INDICATION OF CALENDAR YEAR.
SEC. 2202. EFFECT OF TIME.Subtitle C--Borrowing
SEC. 2301. REGULATIONS.
SEC. 2302. TERM.
SEC. 2303. REPAYMENT WITH INTEREST.Subtitle D--Offsets
SEC. 2401. OUTREACH INITIATIVE ON REVENUE ENHANCEMENT FOR AGRICULTURAL PRODUCERS.
SEC. 2402. ESTABLISHMENT OF DOMESTIC OFFSET PROGRAM.
SEC. 2403. ELIGIBLE AGRICULTURAL AND FORESTRY OFFSET PROJECT TYPES.
SEC. 2404. PROJECT INITIATION AND APPROVAL.
SEC. 2405. OFFSET VERIFICATION AND ISSUANCE OF ALLOWANCES FOR AGRICULTURAL AND FORESTRY PROJECTS.
SEC. 2406. TRACKING OF REVERSALS FOR SEQUESTRATION PROJECTS.
SEC. 2407. EXAMINATIONS.
SEC. 2408. TIMING AND THE PROVISION OF OFFSET ALLOWANCES.
SEC. 2409. OFFSET REGISTRY.
SEC. 2410. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS.
SEC. 2411. PROGRAM REVIEW.Subtitle E--International Credits
SEC. 2501. USE OF INTERNATIONAL ALLOWANCES OR CREDITS.
SEC. 2502. REGULATIONS.
SEC. 2503. FACILITY CERTIFICATION.Subtitle F--Carbon Market Efficiency Board
SEC. 2601. PURPOSES.
SEC. 2602. ESTABLISHMENT OF CARBON MARKET EFFICIENCY BOARD.
SEC. 2603. DUTIES.
SEC. 2604. POWERS.
SEC. 2605. ESTIMATE OF COSTS TO ECONOMY OF LIMITING GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.TITLE III--ALLOCATING AND DISTRIBUTING ALLOWANCES Subtitle A--Early Auctions
SEC. 3101. ALLOCATION FOR EARLY AUCTIONS.Subtitle B--Annual Auctions
SEC. 3201. ALLOCATION FOR ANNUAL AUCTIONS.Subtitle C--Early Action
SEC. 3301. ALLOCATION.
SEC. 3302. DISTRIBUTION.Subtitle D--States
SEC. 3401. ALLOCATION FOR ENERGY SAVINGS.
SEC. 3402. ALLOCATION FOR STATES WITH PROGRAMS THAT EXCEED FEDERAL EMISSION REDUCTION TARGETS.
SEC. 3403. GENERAL ALLOCATION.Subtitle E--Electricity Consumers
SEC. 3501. ALLOCATION.
SEC. 3502. DISTRIBUTION.
SEC. 3503. USE.
SEC. 3504. REPORTING.Subtitle F--Bonus Allowances for Carbon Capture and Geological Sequestration
SEC. 3601. ALLOCATION.
SEC. 3602. QUALIFYING PROJECTS.
SEC. 3603. DISTRIBUTION.
SEC. 3604. 10-YEAR LIMIT.
SEC. 3605. EXHAUSTION OF BONUS ALLOWANCE ACCOUNT.Subtitle G--Domestic Agriculture and Forestry
SEC. 3701. ALLOCATION.
SEC. 3702. AGRICULTURAL AND FORESTRY GREENHOUSE GAS MANAGEMENT RESEARCH.
SEC. 3703. DISTRIBUTION.Subtitle H--International Forest Protection
SEC. 3801. FINDINGS.
SEC. 3802. DEFINITION OF FOREST CARBON ACTIVITIES.
SEC. 3803. ALLOCATION.
SEC. 3804. DEFINITION AND ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS.
SEC. 3805. INTERNATIONAL FOREST CARBON ACTIVITIES.
SEC. 3806. REVIEWS AND DISCOUNT.Subtitle I--Covered Facilities
SEC. 3901. ALLOCATION.
SEC. 3902. DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM.
SEC. 3903. DISTRIBUTING EMISSION ALLOWANCES WITHIN THE ELECTRIC POWER SECTOR.
SEC. 3904. DISTRIBUTING EMISSION ALLOWANCES WITHIN THE INDUSTRIAL SECTOR.TITLE IV--AUCTIONS AND USES OF AUCTION PROCEEDS Subtitle A--Funds
SEC. 4101. ESTABLISHMENT.
SEC. 4102. AMOUNTS IN FUNDS.
SEC. 4103. TRANSFERS TO FUNDS.Subtitle B--Climate Change Credit Corporation
SEC. 4201. ESTABLISHMENT.
SEC. 4202. APPLICABLE LAWS.
SEC. 4203. BOARD OF DIRECTORS.Subtitle C--Auctions
SEC. 4301. EARLY AUCTIONS.
SEC. 4302. ANNUAL AUCTIONS.Subtitle D--Energy Technology Deployment
SEC. 4401. IN GENERAL.
SEC. 4402. ZERO- OR LOW-CARBON ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES DEPLOYMENT.
SEC. 4403. ADVANCED COAL AND SEQUESTRATION TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAM.
SEC. 4404. FUEL FROM CELLULOSIC BIOMASS.
SEC. 4405. ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY VEHICLES MANUFACTURING INCENTIVE PROGRAM.Subtitle E--Energy Consumers
SEC. 4501. PROPORTIONS OF FUNDING AVAILABILITY.
SEC. 4502. RURAL ENERGY ASSISTANCE PROGRAM.Subtitle F--Climate Change Worker Training Program
SEC. 4601. FUNDING.
SEC. 4602. PURPOSES.
SEC. 4603. ESTABLISHMENT.
SEC. 4604. GRANTS TO STATES.
SEC. 4605. TYPES OF ASSISTANCE.Subtitle G--Adaptation Program for Natural Resources in United States and Territories
SEC. 4701. DEFINITIONS.
SEC. 4702. ADAPTATION FUND.Subtitle H--Climate Change and National Security Program
SEC. 4801. INTERAGENCY CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL.
SEC. 4802. FUNDING.Subtitle I--Audits
SEC. 4901. REVIEW AND AUDIT BY COMPTROLLER GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES.TITLE V--ENERGY EFFICIENCY Subtitle A--Appliance Efficiency
SEC. 5101. RESIDENTIAL BOILERS.
SEC. 5102. REGIONAL VARIATIONS IN HEATING OR COOLING STANDARDS.Subtitle B--Building Efficiency
SEC. 5201. UPDATING STATE BUILDING ENERGY EFFICIENCY CODES.
`SEC. 304. UPDATING STATE BUILDING ENERGY EFFICIENCY CODES.
SEC. 5202. CONFORMING AMENDMENT.TITLE VI--GLOBAL EFFORT TO REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
SEC. 6001. DEFINITIONS.
SEC. 6002. PURPOSES.
SEC. 6003. INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS.
SEC. 6004. INTERAGENCY REVIEW.
SEC. 6005. PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATIONS.
SEC. 6006. INTERNATIONAL RESERVE ALLOWANCE PROGRAM.
SEC. 6007. ADJUSTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL RESERVE ALLOWANCE REQUIREMENTS.TITLE VII--REVIEWS
SEC. 7001. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES REVIEW.
SEC. 7002. TRANSPORTATION SECTOR REVIEW.
SEC. 7003. ADAPTATION REVIEW.TITLE VIII--FRAMEWORK FOR GEOLOGICAL SEQUESTRATION OF CARBON DIOXIDE
SEC. 8001. NATIONAL DRINKING WATER REGULATIONS.
SEC. 8002. ASSESSMENT OF GEOLOGICAL STORAGE CAPACITY FOR CARBON DIOXIDE.
SEC. 8003. STUDY OF THE FEASIBILITY RELATING TO CONSTRUCTION OF PIPELINES AND GEOLOGICAL CARBON DIOXIDE SEQUESTRATION ACTIVITIES.
SEC. 8004. LIABILITIES FOR CLOSED GEOLOGICAL STORAGE SITES.TITLE IX--MISCELLANEOUS
SEC. 9001. PARAMOUNT INTEREST WAIVER.
SEC. 9002. CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE OF CLIMATE CHANGE RISKS.
SEC. 9003. ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE AND JUDICIAL REVIEW.
SEC. 9004. RETENTION OF STATE AUTHORITY.
SEC. 9005. TRIBAL AUTHORITY.
SEC. 9006. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.

Pliocene Era and Global Warming

2008-02-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

On February 11, 2008 I attended a presentation by Christina Ravelo of U Cal Santa Cruz to an audience at Harvard and the Radcliffe Institute. She talked in terms of there being two categories of models for climate change. The now traditional model addresses the dynamics of the earth's systems and calculates incremental changes to global temperature. The other looks back millions of years to determine what global conditions were when the earth was warming and the CO2 concentrations comparable to today's. Her argument is that we as a community can perfect today's global models by seeing if we can make them work in relation to the situation in the Pliocene Era (4.5 M to 3.0 M years ago). I agree with that, with the caveat that the oceans may have had a significantly different thermal and chemical structure then as compared to today.

[As you can see from the graph to the left, CO2 is rising rapidly, and even the slope may be increasing. Cause for concern.]

[In the graph to the left, there is a range of uncertainty to the current models. These uncertainties turn out to be very important, as I will be discussing in a later post. Global warming could be greater than is commonly projected for use in government policy decisions.]

In addition there is a more controversial conjecture that I would make. If you look at the analytical climate models of today you see projections of several degrees of temperature rise by 2050 or 2100. If you look at the MIT model (which I will discuss in a later entry), you see that the global temperature is still rising at 2050 or 2100 even if we keep CO2 equivalents down to the present level. This is consistent with a longterm asymptotic temperature shift such as Christina found in the geologic record: 4 to 9 degrees centigrade. This is of course much greater than the temperature change predicted by analytical models. These values could be conservative because of the large amounts of anthropogenic carbon introduced through burning of fossil fuels as well as conversion of biomaterials currently frozen into permafrost to methane. If these asymptotic values are accurate then the big question is the rate at which the asymptotic limits are achieved.

The intriguing pattern that Christina noted was that much of the global warming effect for the U.S. geographical area during the Pliocene was a warming in the northern parts of North America (pretty nice except for the resulting melting of the permafrost) and increased El Nino effects where they are only occasional now in the Southwest. Here is the map of effects:

You see the term El Padre that she has created. She uses that term because it is like El Nino but different in that it can be more usual and the conditions that lead to it can be quite different from what currently creates El Ninos.