Marty Hoffert hits the climate nail on the head

The frustration of scientists about how the climate problem is being ignored came out in full relief when Marty Hoffert, an NYU physicist, sent this missive to Andy Revkin in response to a post at dot earth:

However welcome the news may be to market economists — and I’m confident Exxon-Mobil and company are licking their chops over continuing our highly profitable to them fossil fuel energy infrastructure — it’s an unmitigated environmental disaster for climate change: “Game Over,” as Jim Hansen rightly says.

Shale gas, shale oil and tar sands don’t fundamentally change estimates of total fossil fuel resources; but these “unconventional” sources, now more cost-effective to extract as fuel for the bottomless pit of world energy demand, will make disastrous climate shifts from the CO2 greenhouse a near-certainly. Forget solar, wind and nuclear fission. They can’t compete costwise now with coal-fired electricity, and unconventional cheap hydrocarbons could become as cheap as coal on a dollars per Joule of energy basis.

The result will be a hothouse planetary climate as different from today’s as the middle Cretaceous a hundred million years ago was, when sea level was a hundred meters higher and both poles were de-glaciated; when dinosaurs roamed a verdant Antarctic continent. This will happen virtually instantaneously from a geological perspective as fossil fuel resources accumulated over hundreds of millions of years are burned in a hundred years or so and CO2 in the atmosphere rises as much as fourfold over pre-industrial values.

The best analogy I can think of is watching the rise of Hitler from an isolationist USA in the late thirties as the threshold for stopping him early enough to matter is passed and a holocaust of some as yet unknown horror becomes inevitable. Optimists might observe that Homo sapiens survived WWII and the subsequent cold war. But the coming inundation of coastal zones and cities along with massive species extinctions will likely be far worse. We will need to burn even more fossil fuel to “adapt” to this change by building seawalls and air conditioning, an option perhaps for rich countries, or mass migration inland and poleward for everyone else. Moreover, any attempts by our descendants to rebuild high tech civilization will be seriously hampered by the depleted state of both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon fuels. Maybe they, unlike ourselves, will learn to go straight to solar and controlled fusion power, necessity being the mother of invention. More likely is a feudal agricultural economy in high latitude lands still fertile for crops and habitable in climate; or in the worst case scenario, hunter-gathering capable of supporting perhaps a million or so humans worldwide.

Many climate researchers breathed a sight of relief when Jim Lovelock backed off from nightmare scenarios with humans huddled in polar refugia against a greenhouse-induced waterworld. Too many accept the GOP denialist scam claiming human-induced global warming is a hoax to risk being perceived as alarmists, or worse. We didn’t sign on for this. We went into science and engineering, many of us, not only for the thrill of learning new by mastering objective nature, but to avoid the crazy subjectivity of human behavior. Give us labs and computers and some money and let us be geeks. We make mistakes, but we didn’t sign on for abuse. Thank you Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Jim Hansen, Ken Caldeira and all my other climate/energy colleagues for your courage to speak truth to crazy. The truth is that if we burn identified fossil fuel resources, particularly the so-called unconventional ones now making free marketeers dance with joy, it is only a matter of time before a transition to “hothouse Earth” occurs.

A technology optimist, I like to believe that some genetic evolution of the human genome can produce intelligent Homo superior better adapted to living in a high tech world wrought by scientific revolutions. I hope the spark of self-awareness survives, even if our particular experiment by nature doesn’t adapt and survive.

If, as Carl Sagan speculated, technological civilizations are time bombs triggered by the inability of species evolved in technology-free environments to adapt to the technologies they themselves create, then we may be destined for self-destruction. Short lifetimes of technological civilizations is a reason for the absence of intelligent life in our Milky Way galaxy according to the Drake Equation for computing the number of contemporaneous technological civilizations in a galaxy. Too bad, if true, as we have now discovered that extrasolar planets sound other stars are a dime a dozen, and may discover potentially habitable “other Earths” soon with NASA’s Kepler Planet Finder.

This warning is about as clear as can be, and it echoes what I wrote in my post  showing why fossil fuel abundance is an illusion.  It’s time to wake up and acknowledge reality, folks.  We can’t burn it all, and if we keep pretending we can, we’ll just build more infrastructure that will have to be scrapped sooner rather than later, as I pointed out in Cold Cash, Cool Climate.

Two new interviews about entrepreneurs and the climate problem

Kate Gammon at Fast Company and Brenna Donoghue at Ethical Ocean just published interviews with me about entrepreneurs and the climate problem.  The Fast Company article is here, and the Ethical Ocean article is here.

In these interviews I talk about why I chose to focus on entrepreneurs, why ecological entrepreneurship is less common than it needs to be, and why I’m still hopeful we can avert the worst consequences of climate change, in spite of the difficulties before us.

Let me know what you think!

Indirect greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation technologies

Garvin Heath and his colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory last month published analyses of the indirect greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation technologies.  This work was also summarized in a set of articles that appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology (which also includes some additional articles analyzing other energy technologies).  The results are the product of what’s called “life cycle analysis”, where emissions from all parts of the lifecycle of an energy technology, including exploration, production, transportation, use, and decommissioning are carefully tallied.  Such analysis allows consistent comparisons of emissions from the whole system, not just one phase in the life cycle.

The key findings are summarized in two figures, which I reproduce below. The first, which was published in the IPCC Special Report on Renewables, is more comprehensive, and it includes estimates as published, without any adjustments.  The second figure summarizes results that have been harmonized to make the comparison as consistent as possible.

Figure 1:  Comparison of as-published lifecycle greenhouse gas emission estimates for electricity generation technologies. The impacts of the land use change are excluded from this analysis

Figure 2:  Comparison of as-published and harmonized lifecycle greenhouse gas emission estimates for selected electricity generation technologies

What I conclude from both figures is that all non-fossil generation technologies have modest indirect emissions on average compared to fossil fuels, with most of the non-combustion renewables (like wind, concentrating solar, ocean, and hydro) having the lowest uncertainty about their emissions.   The big range for biomass comes from different assumptions about whether the fuel source is harvested sustainably or not, while the range for nuclear power depends on the fuel enrichment process used (some are more electricity intensive than others) and on the source of the electricity for that process.  I think the range for photovoltaics is because of the many different technologies used to generate electricity from sunlight, but I’m not certain, so I’ll ask Garvin to enlighten us and report back.

The other important point about these indirect emissions is (as Saul Griffith points out) that even though they are small for most non-fossil resources, we are under tight time constraints (and a tight carbon budget) for keeping the earth from warming more than 2 Celsius degrees from preindustrial times. Whatever infrastructure we build to meet that challenge will eat up some of the carbon budget, even if we use the source with the lowest indirect emissions, so we really only get one shot at creating a stable climate.  That is an example of path dependence in its purest form, and keeping in mind the importance of life-cycle emissions can help us think more clearly about how to create a more hopeful (and cooler) future.

The journal has made the articles freely downloadable, as a public service.

The Journal of Industrial Ecology is an international peer-reviewed bimonthly journal owned by Yale University and published by Wiley-Blackwell.  It is the official journal of the International Society for Industrial Ecology.

Addendum, June 26, 2012:  Garvin replied to my email with this explanation about the ranges for solar photovoltaics and biomass:

As for the range from PV, it is due to both technology and manufacturing process variation but also solar resource (some estimates considered low solar resource sites) and to some extent the GHG intensity of the source energy mix.

As for biomass, one key variation is whether the feedstock is residue/waste (implying no burdens from feedstock production) or a crop one grows intentionally (which carries the burdens of the production). But the bioenergy system is very complex, so there are a host of other differences – climate, feedstock selection, irrigation requirements, transportation requirements, fertilizer usage, tillage regime, processing requirements (especially drying), etc. NREL has developed a version of our popular System Advisor Model for biopower which allows the user to specify their “system” and returns an estimate of the life cycle GHG emissions: https://sam.nrel.gov/ to download and find documentation.

Another subsidy for coal: Washington Post today on flawed coal auctions in the Powder River basin

The Powder River Basin, one of the biggest sources of coal in the Western US, has a system for leasing mining rights that is deeply flawed, and has cost taxpayers “as much as $28.9 billion over the past 30 years”.  From the article in the Washington Post today:

Powder River Basin coal leasing prompts IG, GAO reviews

By Juliet Eilperin, Sunday, June 24, 5:25 PM

The government’s longtime practice of auctioning coal mining rights to a single bidder may have cost taxpayers as much as $28.9 billion over the past 30 years, according to an analysis to be released Monday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a Cambridge, Mass.-based think tank.

The non-competitive nature of the federal leasing program is being reviewed by the Interior Department’s inspector general and also will be the subject of an audit by the Government Accountability Office, according to officials at the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the leasing program.

As I’ve discussed before, there’s nothing more consistent with economic efficiency (not to mention individual responsibility) than charging people the true costs of their actions, and subsidies like the ones described in this article distort economic choices in a significant way. Time for them to end!

For those interested in the unpaid externalities of coal and other fossil fuels, I refer you to two refereed journal articles from last year:

Muller, Nicholas Z., Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus. 2011. “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy.” American Economic Review vol. 101, no. 5. August. pp. 1649–1675.

Epstein, Paul R., Jonathan J. Buonocore, Kevin Eckerle, Michael Hendryx, Benjamin M. Stout Iii, Richard Heinberg, Richard W. Clapp, Beverly May, Nancy L. Reinhart, Melissa M. Ahern, Samir K. Doshi, and Leslie Glustrom. 2011. “Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. vol. 1219, no. 1. February 17. pp. 73-98.

Addendum, June 25, 2012:  Don’t forget the campaign to #EndFossilFuelSubsidies.

GigaOm today released their list of "10 innovators changing the game for Internet infrastructure"

GigaOm named me one of “10 innovators changing the game for Internet infrastructure”.  The article introducing the list describes the shifts now ongoing in the industry towards infrastructure, platform, and software as a service.  In the past I’ve characterized this trend as “separating physical from virtual servers”.  It is beneficial from a software management perspective but it also allows for resource savings in the underlying hardware, because it allows you to redefine reliability.

For example, in most “in-house” data centers, reliability is defined as keeping a particular piece of software running on a particular server 100% of the time.  But if you design the software properly so it doesn’t depend on any one physical server (as Google does, for example) then the software will route around a server that dies.  That means you no longer need to have two power supplies on each server, which saves electricity and capital costs, and if a server dies you just recycle it, no fuss, no muss.  That’s a pretty good deal!

What is intellectual honesty and why is it important?

This article about the politics of mandating disclosure of campaign contributions got me thinking about what intellectual honesty means and why it’s important.  Someone who is intellectually honest follows the facts where ever they may lead, and does so in spite of discomfort, inconvenience, or self-interest.  That means that someone’s opinions may shift as the facts change, but if there is no change in the situation, then there’s no cause for an intellectually honest person to change positions.

There are at least three recent examples where members of one political party, after previously holding one idea, became diametrically opposed to that same idea within just a few years.  The first is disclosure of campaign contributions, the second is the individual mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the third is the use of cap and trade to address environmental problems.  All three of these ideas were developed by Republicans because they solved particularly thorny public policy problems in ways that seemed to be more conducive to their ideology, but have since been abandoned by most members of that party, for no apparent reason other than political convenience.

In the arguments leading up to the 2010 Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, contribution disclosure was almost always paired with advocacy for unlimited donations, which were seen as an expression of free speech.  There is of course an issue about whether corporations should be treated in the same way as people, but if you put that question aside as not germane to the current discussion, disclosure is a healthy and sensible way to counterbalance the potentially corrupting influence of unlimited contributions.

As Hiatt points out, however, as soon as Citizens United unleashed unlimited contributions, the Republicans abandoned support for disclosure, because it was to their political advantage to do so.  The same thing happened to the individual mandate for health care, as Ezra Klein recently documented and to cap and trade, which was a Republican idea to put market mechanisms to work reducing emissions.   In all three cases, the facts on the ground didn’t change, but the politics did.

On cap and trade, one of the most fervent Republican proponents of the use of such market mechanisms is former Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State George Schultz.  At a recent event at Stanford, Schultz decried the demonization of cap and trade:  "That was our idea, and the environment is our issue!“ he said.  But in today’s Republican party that is at best a minority view.

Intellectual honesty is one way to judge the actions of politicians (or anyone else, for that matter).   An intellectually honest position is one that has a fair chance of actually solving the problem that a policy proposal claims to address, and that is both consistent with the evidence and internally coherent (i.e., not self-contradictory).  While it is not always possible to know in advance if a policy proposal will work, intellectually honest positions always have significant evidence supporting them.

On campaign finance, it is incoherent to argue for unlimited donations without immediate disclosure.  The public policy problem is corruption in elections, and there’s no reasonable basis for believing that donations without disclosure will have anything other than a corrupting influence (any student of history could tell you that)..

For health insurance, if you choose to require private health insurance companies to insure everybody regardless of pre-existing conditions, the only way to preserve the private health insurance system in anything resembling its current form is to have an individual mandate.  It is incoherent (and intellectually dishonest) to argue for universal coverage in such a system without a mandate, because the whole thing will fall apart quickly.  Healthy people will not pay into the pool until they get sick, and then they’ll buy in, driving up costs for everyone.

The same goes for cap and trade for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The use of market mechanisms can substantially reduce the costs of improving environmental quality.  There are certainly legitimate arguments against cap and trade, but most of them point towards a carbon tax, something equally distasteful to most Republicans.  So the question here comes back to the public policy goal.  If the goal is environmental protection, then market mechanisms like taxes and cap and trade can reduce the costs of accomplishing it.

It is possible that the core disagreement relates to the public policy goals, with many Republicans not even acknowledging that these issues (corruption, lack of access to health insurance, and climate) are something to worry about. But it’s not politically safe to disagree with fixing those problems, because they are popularly acknowledged to be important, so perhaps the demonization of financial disclosure, the individual mandate, and cap and trade was solely a political tactic used to slow action on these issues.  If so, that points to the failings of our media (and to the people fighting for solving these problems); neither apparently explained the broader context of these issues in a way that people could understand.  If true, it would also point to the intellectual dishonesty of those advocating such positions solely for political gain.

Now I’m sure there are some examples where members of the Democratic party could stand to be more intellectually honest as well, and I’m eager to hear from readers with additional ideas.  The three examples cited above are so clear and well documented that they are hard to ignore, which is why I highlight them here.  If you have some other proposed examples about intellectual honesty in the political sphere, please email me and I’ll post them.

Addendum, June 19,2012:  Dave Roberts of Grist wrote me an email about the post above (an excerpt of which he’s given me permission to publish below):

I actually disagree with your post a bit. GOP shifts make perfect sense – not in terms of policy put in terms of tactics. Their primary goal is to defeat Democrats. Supporting any major Democratic initiative, even if it is similar in substance to things they’d supported before, does not advance that goal. Intellectual honesty, as you define it, does not advance that goal. But they are perfectly consistent in pursuit of their goal.

Dave and I agree:  the Republicans are pursuing a strategy that they believe will result in victory.  But this just proves my larger point.  The argument above makes it clear that someone who actually cared about solving people’s problems wouldn’t (couldn’t!) change his position on these issues solely for political gain.  It reveals the Republicans as craven opportunists, and if the news media did its job (which is admittedly a lot to expect nowadays), that would be clear for all to see.

Now there are surely some Democrats who are also craven opportunists, but it’s hard to make the argument that Democrats in general don’t care about solving these problems. The fact that they have attempted to pass cap and trade and did actually pass health care reform (flawed though the final product may be) is evidence for this idea.  And this conclusion is an important one that should make its way into the political process.

2nd Addendum, June 19, 2012:  Jonathan Bernstein at the Washington Post takes up this issue, and quite appropriately quotes Monty Python:

Again: some of this is normal; some of it, in fact, is healthy — part of what parties do is provide alternatives, and it’s not at all a bad thing that the out-party reexamines things a bit if they find the president embraces a position they used to hold. But it’s the difference, as the Pythons explained long ago, between an argument and contradiction. What we’re seeing, as Michael Palin explained, is “just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.” And as long as that’s all that Republicans are doing, the political system isn’t going to function very well at all. And the fact that the parties are just not at all the same on this is one of the key things to know if you’re trying to understand American politics right now.

And of course, this issue also reminds me of the famous Groucho Marx song:  I’m against it!.

3rd Addendum, June 24, 2012:  Ezra Klein just yesterday posted this video of his dissection of the Republican switch on the issue of the health insurance mandate.  Over the span of six months or so (during the 2nd half of 2009) the Republicans went from being supporters of this idea to being unanimously opposed, which is further evidence that this change of position has nothing to do with the merits of the argument.  As I indicated to Klein in an email earlier today, the issue is deeper than hypocrisy, it’s about whether Republicans are honest when they say they want to solve problems that the public is concerned about.  The evidence cited above indicates that they are not (I await evidence to the contrary).

4th Addendum, October 17, 2019: I just saw this excellent article from January 2014 summarizing how the Heritage foundation health care plan differed from the Affordable Care Act. The main similarity was the individual mandate, so the discussion above is still valid, but there are key differences between the Heritage plan and the ACA, and it’s important to make those clear in any discussion of these issues.

Our work on long-term trends in the efficiency of computing made InfoWorld's "Green 15" list

InfoWorld and CIO Magazine listed me as one of their “Green 15”, the “2012 Superstars of Sustainable Information Technology”.   I was the only individual human who made the list, but I’m in good company, along with familiar IT names like eBay, Google, and Facebook, and some big IT users like United Airlines and the US State Department.  Infoworld says that those on the list “devised innovative ways to slash waste, save energy, and reduce CO2 emissions.”

It’s nice to have our work highlighted in this way, and it does make a difference, because others who might not have heard of our analysis are then prompted to look it up and get in touch.  You can read more about the work in a recent article I wrote for Technology Review, and in the research article itself.  You can download the research article if you are at a university and have access to refereed journals online–if not, email me and I’ll send you a copy.

A brilliant short summary of the problems with popular media: Balance, controversy, and replication

My friend Alex Zwissler over at the Chabot observatory did a nice post that begins with an experiment you can do at home:

This will be really exciting. …Today we’re going to do a real life SCIENCE experiment! … OK, well sort of.  For those of you nice enough to have read my previous posts, you’ll recall I’ve often woven in the impact of the media on our perceptions of science related issues. Today we’re going to get really sciency and dig way deeper.

So for our experiment we need to set up our “lab”, which will physically reside inside of your mind.  In order to ensure there is no danger of external contamination, turn off the TV and set your digital devices to airplane mode or something (admit it, you never really turn them off when taking off anyway).  Find a quiet place to sit, and close your eyes.

Now I want you to think back to a time when you had the occasion to read or see a news story about a topic or event with which you had personal experience.  You may have been one of the subjects of the story, or your company or family member was, or maybe you were just a firsthand witness to the circumstances that were being reported.  Now, quickly, think about the reporting …were all the facts correct, and perhaps more importantly, were all the facts included?  Was the context and meaning for those facts accurately portrayed?  Again, was anything missing or misrepresented?

According to my precise calculations based on the replication of this experiment many times, I can reliably predict the following…the story that you read or saw got it all wrong.  The journalist left things out, misrepresented the facts, got the context wrong, and just plain blew it.  You questioned the professionalism of that journalist, and perhaps even their intent.  And most importantly, the more you knew about the actual facts, the worse the story was.

So let’s deconstruct this…there are many things going on here at once.  First on the media side (we’ll came back to you later) there are a number of factors at work.  I won’t get into an exhaustive list here, but for me the top three are “balance”, “controversy” and “replication”.

Read more…

Alex’s explanations mirror my own experience and are both evocative and concise, so I heartily recommend his exposition.  I’ve certainly talked with great reporters who do get the story right most of the time, but those are an exception to the general rule.  With the decline of expert journalism, it’s only going to get worse, so it’s important to be a savvy consumer of modern media-don’t take action on important issues based solely on what you read in the news without lots of independent investigation!

Piss-poor prior planning about sea level rise (repost of funny op-ed within)

TMP Muckracker has reported that

“Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are circulating a bill which would limit their state agencies’ ability to calculate sea-rise levels, a proposal that one member of the state’s Coastal Resources Commission science panel has termed “bad science.”

The bill has not yet been introduced, but the language in the version being circulated would make the Division of Coastal Management the only state agency allowed to produce sea-level rise rates, and only at the request of the Coastal Resources Commission, and then only under the following conditions:

These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.

In other words, instead of taking into account global warming to predict higher seas, as expected by most scientists, the bill would have the state rely only on the historical record.”

This is, of course, playing with fire (or water, in this case).  Sea level rise is one of the most well studied of the impacts of climate change, and it’s going to be a serious issue. As I wrote in Cold Cash, Cool Climate

best current estimates MIT no-policy case

The craziness embodied in the North Carolina proposal made me think of an op-ed I wrote with Elizabeth Brown in 2003 to make fun of a ballot initiative that would have prevented the state from collecting data on race and ethnicity for any reason.   It appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on September 18^th, 2003, p.7B.  The article no longer appears on the SJ Merc’s web site—I’ve reposted here so others can have a chuckle.    If someone from the SJ Merc can give me a link, I’ll happily post it here (and shorten the posted op-ed on this site).

Who needs numbers? Not California

Stomp out `facts and figures’ that only hurt sensitive ears

By Jonathan G. Koomey and Elizabeth A. Brown

At a press conference in Los Angeles last month, Arnold Schwarzenegger declared that ``the public doesn’t care about facts and figures.” We think Arnold touched a nerve with this comment, because people are downright sick of reality intruding into public debates. This explains why many support Proposition 54, which will prohibit the state from collecting and reporting data on the racial origins of California residents. It is a first step toward eliminating inconvenient data from California life, but lawmakers could do more to complete the job.

First, California corporations should no longer be required to report their profits, losses and other large numbers to the state. After all, it was just this kind of reporting that caused the downfall of corporations like Enron and Worldcom. Instead, detailed income statements should be replaced by a simplified one-page form that looks like this:

How did your company do last year? (choose one):

a) Well

b) Not so well

Please indicate how much you are willing to contribute to California’s state government this year (choose one):

a) $100

b) $1,000

c) $100,000

d) $1,000,000

e) We prefer to contribute only moral support this year.

California politics would also be simpler with this approach. Voters would no longer have to keep track of, say, whether the state’s deficit is $8 billion or $38 billion, which are numbers too big for most people to grasp anyway.

Second, those food labels that have proliferated in recent years cause all sorts of harm. Listing the amount of carbohydrates, fat and protein right on the food itself effectively discriminates against companies whose products are made with perfectly natural ingredients, like lard. Moreover, these labels encourage worry among health-conscious citizens, providing them and the rest of society with more information than they can handle. To stop these data from wreaking havoc, the California border patrol should dedicate part of its personnel to placing self-adhesive smiley faces over the nutrition labels of all foods entering California. Our citizens are quite sensitive, and there is no need to impose disturbing statistics on them.

Finally, it’s time for California to stop collecting statistics on pollution from industrial facilities. After all, knowing about pollution means that companies might have to spend millions of dollars cleaning it up. Better that this money is spent on political campaigns, where it can do some real good.

We shouldn’t stop there. Our next governor should petition the federal government to omit California statistics from all future U.S. government reports and excise them from previous ones. If we’re going to adopt the core philosophy behind Proposition 54, we should go all the way.

Analysts, number-crunchers and geeks of all kinds will find their employment options somewhat restricted if these measures occur, but that is a price we’re sure the public will be willing to pay.

Proposition 54 is a crucial first step in California’s data reduction campaign. The additional proposals outlined here, while simple in concept, will have dramatic effects. No longer will so-called “problems” rear their ugly heads. Instead, our citizens will be able to make decisions unencumbered by inconvenient facts – and that’s a notion that Californians of unspecified racial origin should be proud to support.

My visit to Makani Power, May 4, 2012

Photo credit:  Jonathan Koomey

I like site visits—there’s nothing like seeing a company’s innovations in person.  In the case of Makani Power, I harbored some core misconceptions about their technology, and the visit set me straight.

Corwin Hardham, CEO and one of the co-founders of Makani, invited me to visit in Fall 2011. An intern of his was taking the class I taught that semester, and he heard me mention the company’s efforts in lecture, so he put Corwin in touch with me.  Things have been so busy that I wasn’t able to arrange a visit until a few weeks ago, but I’m sure glad I stopped by.

When I drove up to Makani’s building, which formerly housed the control tower for the Alameda Naval Air Station, the first thing I saw was three rusted artillery guns.  That was a jarring sight, but the location makes sense.  Corwin explained that this site was the largest available open space in the Bay Area and was perfect for building and testing Makani’s prototypes.

The old Alameda Naval Air Station control tower, repurposed for the 21^st century (Photo credit:  Jonathan Koomey)

Artillery! (Photo credit:  Jonathan Koomey)

Others had told me about Makani’s technology, and the words “kite” and “high altitude” always come up, but these terms are misleading.  When I think of kites, I think of Ben Franklin flying the traditional diamond-shaped kite with a tail.  The Makani turbine is a carbon fiber wing with propellers (see photo), which Ben Franklin wouldn’t have known what to do with.

Photo credit:  Jonathan Koomey

And the words “high altitude” made me think of kites flying in the path of airplanes at 10,000 feet, which isn’t at all right.   Makani’s turbines fly at about 300 m (roughly 1000 feet) above the ground.

Instead, imagine building and operating just the most important part of the wind turbine, the outer part of the turbine blade (which generates most of the power) without the rest of the supporting structure.  In essence, that’s what Makani’s tethered flying wing is—the end of a turbine blade that flies in a circle and generates power.  The initial prototype generates 20 kW— the next version should generate 600 kW, assuming they get the money to build it.

Time lapse photo of Makani’s tethered wing flying in a circle (Photo credit:  Makani Power)

The wing itself (without the generators and propellers) is incredibly light—I could easily pick it up with both hands, even though it’s about 20 feet long.  That’s the beauty of carbon fiber.  Super strong, without much weight for the wing itself.

The wing has four propellers mounted perpendicular to plane of the wing.   Each is attached to a generator that can reverse itself to serve as a motor.  This capability is needed because the wing starts from a cradle on the ground and lifts itself off to achieve the needed altitude, then switches to generator mode once the wing starts its normal circular path.  If the wing needs to come down for maintenance, the process works in reverse (and the wing can go from normal flight to sitting in its cradle in less than 5 minutes, which means that it can safely avoid adverse conditions on the ground.

The full wing in flight here showing the four generators/ propellers (Photo credit:  Makani Power)

Complex computer control technology is critical to the wing’s functioning.  My friend Saul Griffith, one of the cofounders of Makani, told me that the control technology was similar in complexity to that found in missile guidance systems.  It’s sophisticated enough to keep the wing on a path with meter level precision, and that’s awfully good.

Power is sent down the tethers.  Better to move electrons than to worry about mechanical parts in such a complex environment.

Because the wing flies at higher altitudes than a typical wind turbine, and because it can operate at lower wind speeds, the capacity factor for a Makani turbine will be more like 50-60% (instead of 30-40% for new traditional wind turbines in good sites).  And with capital costs typically half of a traditional turbine, the Makani technology should have a significant economic advantage over traditional wind power plants (and competing fossil technologies).

Makani’s technology is yet another example of what I call substituting smarts for parts.  It’s a form of dematerialization that allows us to do more clever things using substantially fewer materials but with better performance than traditional efforts.

Makani’s technology is also a beautiful case study of the power of whole system design.  Focusing on incremental changes in the design of traditional turbines can yield cost reductions, and we’ve seen that occur since the 1970s (with recent increases in the cost per kW attributable to scaling up to larger turbines with higher capacity factors, among other things). But to create game changing innovation, it takes a comprehensive rethinking of the problem starting with a clean sheet redesign, and that’s exactly what Makani’s innovations represent.

I started out as a skeptic about this technology, but my visit, and conversations with Saul and others convinced me that it holds the real promise of revolutionizing the production of electricity from the wind.  My friend Gil Masters, emeritus professor at Stanford and one of the giants in the renewable energy world, wholeheartedly agrees (we just had lunch this week).   The trick now, says Corwin, is to raise the funds to create the 600 kW prototype and show that it works.

And that means real money (like $20M).  Any billionaires with vision out there who want to move the electric power industry to use significantly more renewable power?  Funding further development of the Makani turbine would be a great place to start.

We're still on track for 2 doublings of greenhouse gas concentrations by 2100

Joe Romm at Climate Progress today reported on a new International Energy Agency report showing that carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record in 2011 or 31.6 billion tons (CO2).  The key point that Romm makes is that these emissions increases are consistent with the MIT no-policy case, and that means two doublings of greenhouse gas concentrations by 2100.

Students of climate science know that every doubling will likely yield 3 celsius degrees of warming, so two doublings means committing the earth to 6 celsius degrees of warming.  As Cold Cash, Cool Climate points out, such increases will push the earth well outside the comfortable range in which humanity evolved (the envelope defined by the 2 celsius degree warming limit), and will raise the possibility of nasty positive feedbacks leading to even higher warming (like releasing methane hydrates from the ocean floor, melting permafrost, and burning peat bogs).

At least US carbon dioxide emissions are down 7.7% since 2006, but those improvements were offset by emissions increases in China and other developing countries.  Time to get serious about global emissions reductions!

People believe weird things: Case in point, Federal spending and taxes in the Obama years

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-spending-binge-never-happened-2012-05-22?pagenumber=1

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/federal-deficit-barack-obama-spending-stimulus-budget-historic-trends.php

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/federal-spending-taxes-and-deficits-are-lower-today-than-when-obama-took-office/257256/

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/09/business/economy/20090610-leonhardt-graphic.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/the-big-deficit-lie-every-gop-debt-plan-leaves-us-with-more-debt/253501/

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/government-jobs-bouyed-bushs-economy-and-sunk-obamas-chart.php

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-reality-behind-obama-and-bushs-spending-binge/2012/05/25/gJQAK8ItpU_blog.html?hpid=z3

My first post on CSRwire introducing Cold Cash, Cool Climate is now up

CSRwire just posted the first of 11 short essays that I adapted from material in Cold Cash, Cool Climate:  Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs.  This essay summarizes the main findings from climate science and explains why I chose to write for entrepreneurs and not the usual policy crowd.

The main page that will contain a list of all the posts as they appear is here.

Review of Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Rick Piltz of Climate Science Watch

Rick Piltz of Climate Science Watch today posted a review of Cold Cash, Cool Climate.  Here’s his top line summary:

Jonathan Koomey’s new book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, offers a concise, compelling analysis of why innovative entrepreneurial approaches are needed in order to limit global climate change, and to improve the quality of life while doing so.  Koomey’s analysis has more integrity than those who promote energy alternatives while evading the daunting constraints that follow from climate science, and opens into a creative and integrative way of thinking about paths forward.  Highly recommended.

Rick has asked me four follow-on questions that I’ll address in some upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned.

Update:  On Tuesday, May 22, 2012, Joe Romm reposted the review on Climate Progress.

Yet another example of corporations putting profits ahead of the public interest

Nicholas Kristof wrote a summary article this past Sunday about a series in the Chicago Tribune showing how flame retardants came to be in furniture and other household products.  This is yet another example of corporate interests putting their own profits ahead of the public interest, and it’s no surprise to anyone who has followed the tobacco industry (Brandt 2007) or the deniers’ disinformers’ tactics to derail climate science (Oreskes 2011).

Of course, I don’t object to profits (I love them as well as the next business person) but when companies force costs onto society that are not paid by customers of their products then society as a whole is damaged (even though the perpetrators make out like bandits). It’s both unfair and inefficient, and  if we can avoid it, there’s no legitimate justification for allowing this to happen for climate, consumer products, or anything else.  In addition, such behavior damages people’s faith in the free enterprise system, which is another systemic cost of such bad behavior.  Of course the only way to enforce rules to correct such problems is through government, which is why I talk about “The central problem of governance” and “What kind of government do we want?” in Chapter 7 of Cold Cash, Cool Climate.

References

Brandt, Allan M. 2007. The Cigarette Century:  The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Koomey, Jonathan G. 2011. Cold Cash, Cool Climate:  Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs. Burlingame, CA: Analytics Press.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Eric M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press.