Environment

I grill the chief executive of Shell in the fourth of my aggressive interviews with policy makers.

Why good people do bad things

Jubilant environmentalists trade high fives, carbon permits

We tend to see a lot of handwringing over the fact that Europe has a carbon cap in place, yet they’re still adding coal to the mix. But stories like this never seem to get reported the other way. Did you hear the good news? Dynergy scuttled six coal plants because of the U.S. carbon cap:

“The development landscape has changed significantly since we agreed to enter into the development joint venture with LS Power in the fall of 2006,” said Bruce A. Williamson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dynegy Inc. “Today, the development of new generation is increasingly marked by barriers to entry including external credit and regulatory factors that make development much more uncertain. In light of these market circumstances, Dynegy has elected to focus development activities and investments around our own portfolio where we control the option to develop and can manage the costs being incurred more closely.”

“Regulatory factors” refer to a host of potential legal obstacles, but the chief among them is the anticipated passage of a federal cap-and-trade bill sometime in the next several years. Unlike some market observers, energy developers aren’t watching for the price of carbon to pass the magical point at which clean coal or solar or whatever becomes cost-competitive. Rather, they’re looking ahead many years, performing scenario analysis, comparing cash flows, and making investments accordingly.

“External credit factors” refer, in part, to the ongoing financial crisis. But the credit squeeze affects other forms of energy development much as it does coal-fired plants, so Dynergy may also be referring to the fact that banks were tightening lending for projects with massive carbon exposure long before the crisis hit. And again, this tightened credit is a direct result of (as-yet-unwritten) federal cap-and-trade legislation.

Needless to say, many factors may have played into the decision to shut down those coal plants: grassroots pressure, lawsuits (real or threatened), disastrous publicity from the sludge spill, the imminent changing of the guard at the EPA, state-level permitting difficulties, etc. But as long as we’re handing out credit, let’s not forget the most obvious and compelling factor. In a carbon-constrained economy, no one wants to double down on coal.

Adam Stein is a co-founder of TerraPass. He writes on issues related to carbon, climate change, policy, and conservation.

Image by Flickr user DanieVDM.

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(Posted by Adam Stein in Energy at 3:38 PM)

Honda Accord Runs on Trash We’ve got excited about waste gasification before, especially at news of the first US waste gasification facility. We’ve even got excited about

by Jay Walljasper

During the holidays, people gather together with their families (parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends) for food and kinship. These gatherings, especially in the United States, can be a rare chance to witness domesticity expand beyond the narrow circle of the nuclear family: mom, dad and the kids.

It’s interesting to note that this familiar nuclear family has been the organizing principle of Western society only since the Industrial Revolution, and that in many parts of the world today a broader network of extended family and fellow villagers are still the primary social glue. I remember a Brazilian friend, who grew up middle-class in cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, telling me that he was a teenager before he was completely sure which people living in his house were blood relatives.

Margaret Mead, the most famous anthropologist of the 20th Century, once commented that, “Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.”

The evolution of society into these smaller family units offers a freedom and flexibility unknown to our ancestors. Few of us today would want the details of our lives (from the time we awake in the morning to the person we marry) to be managed by a chief, priest or patriarch. Even the extended families that dominated the world of our grandparents or great-grandparents would seem stultifying.

Yet, if we looked deeply into our souls, many of us today might admit there is also something attractive about being an intimate part of a wider tribe. Even with our cherished freedom, there is something a bit lonely about our modern existence of tight little families living isolated in their privatized homes. Few of us know our neighbors in any meaningful way, and the rest of our family usually lives far away. When we encounter problems or simply are in a mood to celebrate, there are surprisingly few people to turn to.

Huge industries or government agencies have arisen to meet the needs once take care of by grandma or the “uncle” next door who was not really related but you’d known him your entire life.

Many people today worry that this institutionalization of many basic human activities, from raising kids and caring for the sick to baking birthday cakes, carry a heavy price. This dependence on professionals cuts us off from the rich web of personal relationships that have long sustained human culture. Indeed, it can be argued that as a species we have been shaped through evolution to live as part of these sort of emotional ecosystems, and that the atomized patterns of modern society is one cause of today’s unprecedented levels of mental illness and senseless crime.

Few of us, however, are in any position to move back in with our grandparents. But a growing number of social pioneers are looking for other ways to enjoy both the stimulating possibilities of the modern world and the comfort of our communal heritage. This can be something as simple as neighbors sharing a potluck meal and an in-depth conversation on a weekly or monthly basis. Many groups, such as home-school families and single-parent or gay and lesbian families, are banding together in new kinds of family networks, sharing time and tasks on a regular basis, and being there for one another in a way that goes beyond the usual parameters of friendship.

Co-housing communities, a clear-eyed updating of the commune movement of the 1960s, represents an even bigger step in forging a new kind of extended family not based on blood. Well-established in Northern Europe and now taking roots in North America, these are communities of people who have chosen to live together and share some elements of their daily lives, recreating in a conscious way what happens naturally in traditional villages as means of survival. There are more than 100 co-housing developments built or under development in 34 states and three Canadian provinces, part of a growing world-wide phenomenon in Europe, England, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

There’s great latitude in how communal these communities want to be, with some that share meals every evening while others that simply have a common space like a clubhouse where neighbors can interact both spontaneously and in regularly scheduled events that offer a satisfying sense of belonging.

All these experiments in creating a new kind of family are important steps toward bringing a greater sense of “we” into modern life. And given the stormy economic forecast, they are also very important for helping people remain healthy, happy and hopeful in the days ahead.

Jay Walljasper, co-editor of OnTheCommons.org and senior fellow of Project for Public Spaces, is author of the Great Neighborhood Book.

This piece originally appeared on the Ode Editor's Blog

Image credit: Ode

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Community at 2:44 PM)

Photo: Flickr The Good Ol' Book is Back in Vogue When green advocates talk about product service systems (PSS), many might be left scratching their heads (if that's you, check out the linked Wikipedia page). Yet we're all familiar with public libraries, a great example, and when times are harder economically, people increasingly turn to these alternatives to owning stuff. Read on for more....

Labels and standards are a touchy and confusing subject. Who sets them? What do they cover? TreeHugger readers have seen companies just calling themselves green, companies inventing their own labels (like SC Johnson), Companies going to third party labels-for-hire to certify what they think is important but may not be, (Like LG Eden and SCS) Labels that cover only one aspect (like Energy Star and Greenguard), and labels that let the manufacturer submit data for cl...

photo: David Silver You may have missed it over the holidays of the past ten days but the BBC ran an interesting piece on the sort of transformation that will be required in the 21st century to feed a projected world population of 9 billion by 2050, without continuing to simply pump more chemicals into fields to replace what has been lost by intensive industrial farming. Professor Tim Lang of the UK government’s Food Council described our current agriculture syste...

Photo: Lotus Evora Lotus Electric Car in the Cards These words were recently spoken by Lotus CEO Michael Kimberley, making us think that being a supplier to Tesla Motors inspired the company to throw its hat in the ring. The concept EV is expected for the Geneva Motor Show in March. Read on for more....

Photo via Flickr

A few weeks before we even rang in the start of 2009, I was already thinking about my New Year's resolutions. And then I started wondering what resolutions other people were making. I heard both the usual: eat better, exercise more...and the unusual: write more thank-you notes, focus on organics, for example. And that last one got me thinking: there are so many people who are still dwelling on the fringe of greener living. What better time to take the plunge than the start ...

photo: Dominic Alves With the honeymoon phase of support for first generation biofuels (those derived from food crops such as corn, soybeans, etc) pretty much over, and research into second generation fuels (cellulosic fuels and those derived from non-food crops) ramping up, you’ll have to forgive me to jumping ahead to what may one day be termed third-generation biofuels: Ones using genetically engineered microbes to produce fuel. Yale Environment ...

From the discovery of intelligent life somewhere else to a web-based revolution in education, certain future milestones seem to hold the power to change everything that happens afterward. The online intellectual forum The Edge recently posted ideas about what those keystone events might be, in our own lifetimes and beyond.

More than 150 thought leaders, including philosophers, writers, archaeologists and scientists, answered the 2009 Edge Question of the Year: "What Will Change Everything?" And, more specifically, "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

Two particularly good answers addressed climate change. As we know, climate change is already impacting the atmosphere, the oceans and the land on Earth. A few months ago, we wrote about how it is beginning to affect our minds. And as we begin to notice how climate change is rapidly reshaping big pieces of our mental and physical worlds, we might also want to take a closer look at how it will affect other aspects of our lives, writes William Calvin, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington and author of Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. Answering this year's Edge question, Calvin writes that climate is changing the practice of science itself:

Climate may well force on us a major change in how science is distilled into major findings. There are many examples of the ponderous nature of big organizations and big projects. While I think that the IPCC deserves every bit of its hemi-Nobel, the emphasis on "certainty" and the time required for a thousand scientists and a hundred countries to reach unanimous agreement probably added up to a considerable delay in public awareness and political action. Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way — and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks.

Calvin writes that climate will not only change the way scientists report their findings, but it might also affect what scientists conduct research on, suggesting that many scientists may soon be called to participate in one of the most concerted problem-solving efforts in history, the likes of which haven’t been seen since World War II.

Although it is already vital that we act quickly, there are a few events that could change how rapidly and forcefully we should take on this challenge. Geoscientists have identified seven “sleeping giants” -- events like the disappearance of the summer ice sheets over the Arctic Ocean -- that, if awoken, could change the way we play the game. The other sleeping giants include an increased melting and glacier flow of the Greenland ice sheet, "unsticking" of the frozen West Antarctic Ice Sheet from its bed; rapid die-back of Amazon forests; disruption of the Indian Monsoon; release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from thawing frozen soils; and a shift to a permanent El Niño-like state.

West Antarctica and Seven Other Sleeping Giants was Laurence C. Smith, professor of Geography and Earth & Space Sciences at UCLA, answer to "What Will Change Everything." Smith suggests that by continuing to pump climate changing greenhouse gases into the air, we are to poking these slumbering giants with big sticks.

Unfortunately, the presence of sleeping giants makes the steady, predictable growth of anthropogenic greenhouse warming more dangerous, not less. Alarm clocks may be set to go off, but we don't what their temperature settings are. The science is too new, and besides we'll never know for sure until it happens. While some economists predicted that rising credit-default swaps and other highly leveraged financial products might eventually bring about an economic collapse, who could have foreseen the exact timing and magnitude of late 2008? Like most threshold phenomena it is extremely difficult to know just how much poking is needed to disturb sleeping giants. Forced to guess, I'd mutter something about decades, or centuries, or never. On the other hand, one might be stirring already: In September 2007, then again in 2008, for the first time in memory nearly 40% of the later-summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean abruptly disappeared.

Although the consequences of waking these giants are terrifying, it’s certainly no time for paralyzing fear and loss of hope. Quite the contrary; this should be a motivating call to devise and mobilize action to decrease our climate changing emissions. We can take this opportunity to be the biggest game changer of them all – human action to greatly reduce our impact on the Earth.

So what do you think will be the biggest game-changing ideas and events? What will change everything?

Image: Planet New York::Hall of Science. Credit: Flickr/Sam Rohn - Location Scout, CC License.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Columns at 10:47 AM)

Want to keep track of what's happening money-wise in clean tech during 2009? A new website called TheFunded.com presents a way to get insider input and reviews on what's shaking in clean tech investing. ...

Background photo via Martin Kingsley Starting with the new year, Oregon and Washington are launching e-cycling programs to help keep electronics out of landfills. As of January 1, it is free to drop off items like computers and TVs at permanent collection sites. Read on to see where these are located, and how to find local sites across the US. ...

Obviously not on an apartment building in the Bronx, but at Logan airport in Boston, this is the sort of wind turbine to be installed by Blue Sea Development. Photo: AeroVironment Though small scale wind turbines certainly have their drawbacks compared to their larger industrial-scale cousins, especially in urban areas (as the New York Times correctly points out), they can be put to good use. Witness an affordable housing project in the...

image: Tidal Energy Ltd It’s safe to say that tidal, wave, and ocean power (all different but similar in that they generate power from moving ocean water) have more competing designs than other methods of generating electricity renewably. TreeHugger has covered most of these before, but here’s yet another contender: The DeltaStream from Welsh company Tidal Energy Limited. While it’s not a radical departure from existing technolo...

Photo via kawanet While we've been hearing about them for awhile now, solid state drives are rapidly growing in popularity, and that means stronger, longer-lasting devices and hopefully much less wasted energy and e-waste in our near future. Read on for when to expect solid state drives to take over our electronics. ...

Mentioning it a while back when she was being interviewed on TreeHugger, in this video Daryl Hannah –– TreeHugger's favorite foxy environmentalist –– explores eco-tourism holidays in Sinai, Egypt. In particular, she nests for a bit at an ancient spot on Mount Sinai, an eco-resort an...

While TVA claims that water quality tests performed after the coal ash spill at the Kingston power plant in Tennessee show that contaminant levels remain below limits for drinking water, preliminary tests performed by

Photo via itchys IBM's Venture Capital Group is keeping an eye on the next big target for the greening of America - and for clean tech investing - and its convinced 2009 will be the year of the smart grid. ...