Green Options

An inter-agency work group headed by the White House Office of Management and Budget is trying to find the real cost of a ton of carbon emitted. It turns out to be a hard number to agree on.

Would our grandchildren really miss Florida if it was under water? How about no more fruit or nuts from California? What about the loss of our breadbasket? Would the end of corn and soy from the Midwest really bother the grandchildren of our children? How much?

Cost/benefit analysis. Economists do it all the time. So, just what is the cost to society of a ton of carbon?  The Institute for Policy Integrity consulted 144 top economists and released the result: (pdf) Economists and Climate Change: Consensus and Open Questions. By sensibly limiting the sample to economists with the most expertise on climate change, the survey was able to avoid the ignorance of economists who have not studied climate change.

84 percent agreed that the environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economies. A near unanimous 98 percent agreed that putting a price on carbon through a tax or cap-and-trade will increase incentives for efficiency and innovation. 55% preferred a tax, and 35% preferred cap-and‐trade.

But they came up with very widely divergent numbers for both the costs and the benefits. The cost estimates ranged from $10 a to $10 million a ton, with a median of $50 a ton. The benefits of prevention also ranged between $383 billion and $5.5 trillion over the next five decades.

Renewable Funding’s PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) solar funding, begun by Cisco DeVries with Berkeley First was a breakthrough in making solar affordable. Now VC high-flyers Draper Fisher Jurvetson, New Cycle Capital, and RWE Ventures have just invested $12.2 million in a first round of financing to make this sober and sensible solar funding available to more homeowners.

Renewable Funding is a business in the Common Good. And it could be big too. There’s potentially a gigaton of greenhouse gas reductions to be made, at no cost to local, state, or federal governments from a $280 billion potential market in PACE solar funding in the US, acording to a UC Berkeley study published in Environment Magazine.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about China’s new policy to focus on buying (almost entirely) “China-grown” wind turbines and wind turbine technologies with Chinese patents. That policy wasn’t a big hit internationally and China is back-tracking.

However, is it changing its stance out of international moral pressure or a major financial incentive (recent deal) in the US? And who is to benefit the most from this shift?

Canadian province Ontario is to introduce green-coloured licence plates, available only to drivers of plug-in hybrids and battery-powered electric vehicles.

Sounds like another gimmick? Well, here’s the deal - vehicles sporting the new green plates will be able to drive in the province’s dedicated carpool lanes until 2015, even if only one person is in the vehicle.

Speaking about the initiative, Transportation Minister Jim Bradley said, “The McGuinty government’s plan is to have one out of every 20 passenger vehicles on Ontario’s roads an electric vehicle by 2020.”

As the Senate version of pending climate legislations, Kerry-Boxer’s CEJAPA, heads for mark-up on Tuesday, voices calling for $15 billion annually for clean energy research and development are starting to gain traction. Earlier this week, Google’s Director of Climate Change and Energy, Dan Reicher joined the ranks of think tanks such as, Brookings Institution, Third Way, and the Breakthrough Institute, not to mention President Barack Obama, when he called on the Senate EPW committee to include this funding in the bill.

According to Reicher’s testimony (emphasis in original):

“Chairman Boxer, it is essential that Congress address this serious energy R&D short-fall by incorporating President Obama’s goal of $15 billion per year in federal energy R&D spending in final climate legislation.”

This testimony followed on the heals of a letter and discussion paper from the nation’s leading universities to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, emphasizing the need for a bottom line investment of $5 billion dollars annually in R&D, significantly more than would be allocated under both House and Senate version of climate and energy legislation.

Renewable energy comprised more than half the energy added this year to the Northeast grid, comprising part of Canada and 6 US states. 17 GW of renewable energy projects in the region will be completed in the next five years.

It is no coincidence that each of these states has a state renewable portfolio standard which requires utilities to add an increasing percent of renewable power to the grid each year. New York’s RPS requires 24% by 2013, Maine:40% by 2017(met), Vermont:20% by 2017, New Hampshire:16% by 2025, Rhode Island:16% by 2019, and Connecticut:27% by 2020 )

The Renewable Portfolio Standard is a sure way to get more homegrown climate-friendly renewable power on the grid and is up for votes yet again this year (in the American Clean Jobs & American Power Act) after multiple previous attempts to pass it.

Earlier this month, Governor Schwarzenegger signed legislation to buy solar power from relatively small private generators for rates above market value. Hawaii is next in line with this European-style tariff — the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission and Governor Lingle just recently set a similar initiative for Hawaii.

Hawaii’s initiative will make it possible for homeowners and businesses to sell power they generate from small to medium-scale renewable energy projects (i.e. solar panels) to Hawaii’s main power producers at higher than market-value rates.

Without pavement and parking lots we would still be traveling cross-country in Conestoga wagons on 6-inch deep ruts and be breathing lungfulls of dust every time a vehicle drove by at the Kwik-E-Mart. Needless to say, pavement is one of the many things that makes modern life possible.

But, like everything else in our modern life, the more advanced we get in our ability to collect and analyze data, the more we realize that the good stuff always seems to have its awful consequences too. It’s the same story with pavement.

A contract has just been signed to deliver 600 gigawatthours a year of solar power between the US division of Spain’s giant Abengoa, and PG&E in California. Abengoa Solar hopes to succeed where BrightSource recently failed to overcome local NIMBY issues and Senator Feinstein, in its plan to site a 250 MW solar thermal plant in the made-for-solar Mojave Desert.

Kids enrolled in Wind for Schools shop classes in six Great Plains states (CO, ID, KS, MT, NE, SD) are learning hands-on to assist in assessment, design, and installation of small wind systems at their schools, with the goal of creating a knowledge base for wind energy within rural elementary and secondary schools through Wind Powering America.

The DOE is looking for proposals from wind companies who want to help out in expanding the program to six more states. You have till November 30 to get your bid in. And if you want to teach any aspects of this new shop class in wind, reach out to schools in these states.

Ocean trash is one of the problems photographed by Christopher Swain on his 1,000-mile ocean advocacy and education journey.

As the Obama Administration’s Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force moves into its sixth public meeting on an interim report in Cleveland this week, one determined ocean advocate is continuing to make his way from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C, in part to dramatize his concern about the state of the seas.

Christopher Swain’s 1000-mile swim, which includes frequent stops along the way to educate students and to do sampling, was born out of a childhood connection to the sea growing up in Massachusetts. He says the journey will take about 200 days of swimming over two years — and will continue off-and-on through the winter.