Friday, December 28, 2012

Do we need to know we are killing the Earth before we act?

As a child, I remember watching the Crying Indian commercial and feeling his pain.  At a very basic level, it made sense to me that I/we need to respect nature. Who would stand beside that Indian looking at the trash on the shore and argue it is a good thing or it really didn't matter?  Who could argue that smog choking  the cities was a benefit?

The first Earth Day, April 22nd, 1970 lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the passage of the The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and dealt with some immediate tangible threats.  Thanks to the call to action, people responded and the smog problem was reduced and Lake Erie started a healing process. 

For many people in the seventies, eighties and nineties, 'reduce, reuse, recycle' just seemed a rational thing to do.   It wasn't something needed to prevent global demise.  It just made sense at a basic level.  To others, it didn't seem overly important in their daily lives.  We had activism and apathy.

Now enters the global warming scare with a 'do or die' message and almost no tangible evidence to the common person.  Unlike a dark dome of smog over a city or the massive algae blooms killing Lake Erie, we don't see direct evidence of climate change.  There have always been summers that were unusually hot and winters in the north without much snow.  There have always been strong hurricanes, droughts and floods.  The Earth has gone through ice ages, and tropical rain forests have become deserts.  All of this has happened in the past with no humans around to cause them.  So, we can rationally challenge what we are being told is the evidence for man-made climate change.

On top of the plausible doubt, we have the massive changes needed to curb greenhouse gasses.  Energy will most likely cost more because of regulations on power plants, mining and drilling.  Our massive, fun to drive SUV's will have to be replaced with smaller, more fuel efficient cars.  Mass transit will become more prevalent, limiting us compared to our current freedom of mobility.   If we make a major shift in technology to solar or wind, many people will lose their jobs as the oil industry is declines.  The list of sacrifices is long.

Understandably, there is a lot of resistant to change.  Change is painful.   Now instead of activism and apathy we have extreme polarization:  the tree huggers vs. the deniers.  With polarization comes a war.  With a war comes cognitive dissonance.  With cognitive dissonance comes the end of rationality and the end of collaboration.

But is polarization the only path?  Why do we need to prove man-made climate change is real before we take action to make our world a cleaner better place?  It seems irrelevant.

Is there anything inherently bad about having cars that pollute less or use less natural resources to manufacture?  Is there anything inherently bad about appliances that suck up less electricity to do the same work?  Is there anything inherently bad about moving to sustainable/renewable energy sources.  If we built a cleaner, more efficient world and we're wrong about climate change, would we have done it for nothing? 

Imagine a house with no utility bill.  Imagine driving weeks without filling up your car.  Imagine cities without ozone warnings.  Imagine cheaper goods because shippers don't have huge fuel cost.

If we take climate change seriously and it turns out we were duped by an elaborate hoax, are we worse off?

The path towards sustainability by the average person is not that difficult.  I know I can't afford to put a large solar array on my house or a rain water harvesting system.  I have no choice but to commute to work everyday.  But as a consumer I can make some critical choices.  Collectively consumers  have vast amounts of power to change the direction of industry.  If one of the top questions asked at every auto dealership is, "What is the fuel economy?" and consumers walk away because they don't like the answer, industry will change.  If consumers only buy energy star appliances even if it cost a little extra,  industry will change.  If consumers buy products with less packaging, industry will change.

We don't need to believe the world is ending or wait until there is a tangible, immediate threat to start changing the world.  We don't need to become activist to make a difference. We can do that everyday with simple choices.

Oh, and shut off your lights when you're not using them.



Thursday, December 20, 2012

Why aren't they rich?

I read about many alternative energy companies and I have bought stock in a number of them.  Besides realizing the great need for more intelligence towards our energy choices they seem to have something else in common; they are going broke.  Solyndra made big news with its bankruptcy.  Politically it is a touchy topic and sometimes it appears supporting alternative energy is a negative in a political campaign.

It is to be expected that the road to energy independence and to clean energy will be paved with failures and mistakes.  That is the path forward with any technology.  Oil is a myopic solution but we tend to a a myopic society. 

Here are a couple companies I have followed over the years. 

Beacon Power  

Power plants have a sweet spot where they run the most efficient but that spot is only ever passed through as they power up during the day for peek energy usage and then power down for lower night time loads.  It is intuitive to conclude that the longer the plan can run at peak efficiency the cheaper it is to run the plant and it follows we get cheaper electricity.  It also pollutes less but that point seems to carry less weight for some reason.

The logical solution is to run at peak efficiency one hundred percent of the time by storing excess power during low usage times and then using that power to supplement power needs during peak hours.  Storage is the issue.  Houses which are not connected to the electrical grid use batteries.  Batteries have a draw back due to life span, dangerous chemicals, rare Earth minerals, etc. On a large scale such as a power supply for a city, batteries are impractical.

Beacon Power's solution is exciting.  They are using carbon fiber flywheels.  Modern material science and other technologies are used to build flywheels to turn chemical energy in to kinetic energy.  These carbon fiber flywheels spin up to 16,000 rpm in a vacuum containment chamber.  This is a very efficient way to store energy and reduce CO2 in the process.
 

Energy Conversion Devices

Battery technology is one of the things holding back many alternative energy solutions.  The auto industry has not produced electric cars or hybrid cars until recently because battery technology was not to the point to make it feasible.  Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) was one of the companies pushing the technology forward, getting it to the point it is today to allow us to have hybrids on the road.  They are the company who produced the batteries for GM's EV1.   But that wasn't enough to support a business model and the company is no more.

They also produced a very interesting product, solar shingles.  Most people don't like the look of solar panels on roofs so ECD produce solar shingle which were installed pretty much like conventional shingles, stopped rain like conventional shingles, looked much like conventional shingles but they also produced electricity while acting like shingles. 



These are just a couple companies I have been interested in over the years with marvelous technology yet sadly watched them sink into nothingness.  At the same time I have seen oil companies reporting record profits.  The Solyndra story is fuel for the anti-alternative energy argument and is being used to slow the funding of other such companies.  This is extremely sad because we need companies such as these who are willing to risk failure to drive the technology forward to make it a viable and sustainable solution.