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Window of Opportunity

Posted by wastedenergy on August 17, 2010

If you listen carefully, you can hear something rising above the noise of the traffic.  Beyond the day-to-day ups and downs of the stock market, the oil market, and the job market, something bigger is happening.  I like to call this phenomenon “the winds of change.”

I’ll give you an example of what I mean: a few days ago, the New York Times published an article that, taken to its logical conclusion, ought to make the promoters of the endless growth myth tremble in their boots.  It told the story of a woman who took a daring leap of faith to escape from what she called “the work-spend treadmill,” challenging the widely held, or at least widely followed, belief that a strong relationship exists between the money we earn and spend and the fulfillment we ultimately find in life.  In addition to the anecdotal evidence, the article cited a number of recent scientific studies confirming that, in fact, not only can you not take it with you, a lot of it isn’t even all that helpful here in the first place.  Among the conclusions:

“While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.”

If that doesn’t cut directly to the heart of the Western sell-the-world mentality that seeks to prop up its primacy through backwards thinking on questions of consumption and resources, I don’t know what would.  And that wasn’t the only gem from the Times’ recent portfolio of work.  It turns out scientists have begun to study not just the problem of “can money buy happiness?” (hint: no) but also the question of “is it good to get outside and clear your head a little bit sometimes instead of spending all your time in a little box worrying about the next stage in the tiny hyper-specialized corner of the universe known as ‘your career?’”  As it turns out, yes, it is in fact good for your mental (not to mention physical) state to take in a little natural splendor from time to time and get away from the daily grind.

Not only that, but the paper is finally getting around to talking about the changes we have seen in our climate on the front page. 

About time.

A Mighty Wind

Here is another item that graced the headlines recently, not to be lost in a cascade of sour news about the economy and the damage we have done to the Earth’s climate system.  In case you missed it, we just broke ground on the largest wind farm – ever, by nearly a factor of three and perhaps even more once additional phases of the project are completed.

Who cares if wind power growth stalled from its five-year epic entrance into the big time just a little bit in the first half of 2010?  In case you forgot, just about everything else slowed down too.  The long term outlook for wind power is that it is going to keep growing for a long time to come, and we still have a long way to go.  Of course, the longer we delay and adopt backwards policies that ignore the externalized costs of fossil fuels as well as both the environmental and economic benefits of renewable energy, the more difficult and painful the transition will be.  Is it any wonder that Portugal, Germany and Spain, which is even leading the way in snatching up the market for renewable energy customers over on this side of the pond, are light-years ahead of the United States already in adoption of clean energy technology, from solar to wind to household trash combustion?  They have had the correct policies in place for decades, policies that tax pollution and waste and reward conservation and investment in technologies that deliver over the long run.  Europe even has its own internal cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions.  How are we doing over on this continent?

We seem to have so many skeptics here who think we’ll never be able to get away from fossil fuels (or can only get there by reopening the can of nuclear squirms).  Do these people really think we couldn’t do a whole heck of a lot more to take advantage of the world’s best wind resource, both on- and offshore?  Boy, do they have a lot to learn!

These are not final solutions, unlike what proponents of “clean coal” believe it is and what it still might become if we fail to use this potentially transformational moment wisely.  But the small changes we are seeing today could be the beginning of a systemic shift in our ways of thinking about consumption of energy and resources, ways of thinking about living.  And you’d better believe we need to change our ways and start consuming a lot less, and fast; if you thought living in a $147-a-barrel world was tough cookies, just wait until we arrive in $500-a-barrel country (and don’t think it won’t happen, or something much, much worse).

There may be no hope for business-as-usual, and perhaps there shouldn’t be.  But there is hope for humanity.  From culture to technology, from sea to shining sea, the seeds of change have been planted, and if you look closely, you can even see the first few sprouts coming up.

Amidst the chaotic storm, a glimmer of hope in the sunlight?

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

A Series of Tubes

Posted by wastedenergy on August 12, 2010

In honor of the late Ted Stevens, I’d like to take a brief moment to discuss something the man truly loved.  No, not the Internet, but actual tubes: the ones that carry Alaska’s contribution to our modern world, and also the kind that can keep society moving once those become obsolete. 

While St. Peter may have dropped his charges against Stevens after prosecutorial misconduct, another type of charges, the explosive kind, might have been dropped by Environmentalists in order to invent a problem with another series of tubes in Michigan, at least if you believe Rush Limbaugh’s likely take on events.  In any case, thanks to production declines from its fields and yet another aging pipeline, it looks like Alaska is getting a run for its money as a prime oil supplier from another place you can see from your house if you live there: Canada.  The conventional wisdom tells us that Canada, as a friendly neighbor to the north that doesn’t want us to, as Jim Kunstler so eloquently put it, “eat shit and die” like most of the other places that sell us oil, will be more than happy to hand over all the tar we could possibly want, that is once they get done toasting the remainder of their natural gas supply and more than a few gallons of water in order to separate it from all that sand and get it into a less amorphous-solid-like form that can actually be pumped through tubes.

Look at all the beautiful land still left to wreck.

That is, of course, all assuming that everything goes swimmingly, unlike in Lake Pontchartrain.  It’s looking more and more like the Keystone XL pipeline, an expansion of an existing pipeline system from the tar sands that would extend all the way to Texas and Louisiana and a segment of tube with the potential to monumentally increase America’s use of the dirtiest and most inefficient mode of transportation in existence, won’t ever swim at all.  Even if it does get built, this time around there actually are a whole lot of environmentalists already angry enough about the project that they just might sabotage the pipeline for real this time.  After the Michigan pipeline tear last month dumped a million gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River watershed in what is believed to be the Midwest’s largest-ever oil spill (it’s been a good year for biggest-ever spills, hasn’t it?), the public’s opinion turned just a little sour on the risks of adding yet more pipelines to the vast network that spans the nation already.  And for those who missed it, crude was already not exactly the sweetest thing on the public’s mind these days.

Even assuming the pipeline is completed, that doesn’t mean our tubular troubles are over.  Before the synthetic crude from tar sands, or any other crude, can be burned up taking the kids to soccer practice, it must first be refined, then pumped through another series of smaller tubes to get it to your local Circle K.  OK, our pipelines may be crumbling, but our refineries are still doing OK, right?  No strange things afoot there?

Turns out there was yet another headline that graced Page 22 of your newspaper this week showing that the Deepwater Horizon and the Trans-Alaska pipeline aren’t the only leaky liabilities and ticking time bombs in BP’s portfolio: on April 7, a compressor at BP’s Texas City refinery (yes, that one again) caught fire, resulting of the illegal release of 17,000 pounds of benzene and over 500,000 pounds of undisclosed “other pollutants” into the neighborhood over the next two months.  An investigation by the Texas Attorney General’s office revealed a lack of maintenance as the likely cause of the fire.  You’d think after such an event, BP would have the wisdom to shut down the refining units running off the faulty equipment, right?  Well, it turns out they actually knew about the problem and chose to keep those units running so as to avoid any loss in productivity. I know, truly shocking for a company with such an outstanding reputation for safety and excellent performance.  Call it yet another notch in the company’s belt and add it to the fifteen from the 2005 explosion at the refinery and the shift supervisor who died in another accident at the plant three years later, along with the eleven from the Deepwater Horizon.  Hey, if we can reduce Afghan and Iraqi casualties to mere numbers, why not oil workers as well?  It’s not like they amount to a hill of beans to the company for which they once worked and which treated their lives as just another cost of doing business.

By the way, if you’re not such a big fan of wind turbines or trash-to-energy plants, I’m curious: how might you feel about having one of these monstrosities in your backyard?

Trouble in Texas City: The Intertubular Processing and Storage Node

But suppose the oil makes it through all the tubes without a hitch, all the way to the pumps and ultimately into your vehicle.  Happy motoring, right?

Bill McKibben and a few others have continually pointed out that the disasters that make headlines and business-as-usual habits are, in the end, more or less equally disastrous for the health of our environment and our economy.  A headline from today’s issue of The Onion, in the tradition of the media outlet known for its role as one of the few able to comment seriously on matters of importance, told it like it is: “Millions of Barrels of Oil Safely Reach Port in Major Environmental Catastrophe.”  It is telling that the only psychological method we have to seriously confront our oil crisis is humor: such is the mark of truly intractable problems, like the jokes that emerged from the Jewish ghettos of Europe through centuries of segregation and persecution.  So what are we going to do once, or hopefully before, this party ends, as it surely will (and more likely sooner rather than later)?

The terminal: in the end, the Internet and everything else will all go down the tubes if we don’t figure out something, and fast. 

By jove, I think I might just have the answer!  Unfortunately, it takes a bit of foresight, some dollars, and, if you want it to be sustainable, a simultaneous commitment to renewable energy, all resources that seem to be in short supply right now at all levels of government here in these United States.

Maybe soon we can start talking about trillion-dollar-scale electrified rail projects instead of just a few billion dollars in occasional stimulus money even as ten times as much goes to keep the auto industry on life support. It takes more than just a little seed money to build an industry capable of making a dent in levels of oil consumption that remain mammoth even during periods of chilled demand, like today.  It also takes comprehensive, top-level planning for the long term from visionaries at the highest levels of government.  And that, in turn, requires our political leaders to square their positions with scientific principles and the goal of moving the country forward rather than merely the principle of profitable petroleum for what proportionally is just pennies of campaign funds.  Can anyone doubt that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R – CLIMATE ENEMY NUMBER ONE) will do as much as she can to continue Alaska’s legacy as the fossil state holding back the rest of the country from finally making serious attempts to get beyond oil, and how sad is it that she is willing to sell herself for so little?

We urgently need mass transit and other forms of low-impact transportation not to supplement our driving habits, but to actually replace them at levels that matter.  We should be generating as much as possible of the funds needed to build a transportation network we won’t be embarassed to call our own in the future through taxation of gasoline and other fossil motor fuels, including fair and non-zero valuation of their externalities such as congestion, smog, and climate pollution.  Public transportation infrastructure in this country is crumbling at the same time that we face other key turning points in the history of human energy use: the first stages of a permanent worldwide decline in crude oil supplies and changes in the planetary climate system too obvious for even the most vigorously stubborn Conservapedia readers to deny any longer.  If we don’t do something about fixing our fixation on oil-centric transport, we face serious problems not even just over the horizon but already, as America’s families and its ecosystems come under ever more strain from the rising costs of energy and transportation.

If we do manage to somehow break through the inertia of politics and get it right, our tubes will serve us in the coming world for a long time.  There may even be something already happening in Washington, DC that can give us hope…

.

Tubes done right: if we fix our transportation system, there may be a place in the world for the Internet after all, and all the other wonderful things we call “civilization.”

Posted in Energy Consumption, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Ring of Power

Posted by wastedenergy on June 17, 2010

So it seems things have approached full circle.  The public has long been blind(ed by the powers that be) to the consequences of unfettered subservience to both the power and the constraints of the fuel that had exploded and ignited a growth spree as the world’s population of humans zoomed upward to seven billion, nearly tripling in less than fifty years.  The consequences, though, had recently become too monumental to deny or effectively hide any longer, as BP stock dropped just about as fast as a Wall Street trader’s jaw the day he saw a thousand points evaporate from the Dow thanks to a “computer glitch.”

The fuel to which I am referring, of course, is money.  What, you didn’t think the modern economy was powered by oil or other fossil fuels, did you?  These industries certainly embody considerable force exerted upon the collective choices of humanity, but they are just one part of the game of money in politics that paves the road on which we all travel.  Automobiles are far from alone: if you like self-perpetuating money-powered machines of dominance that demean and destroy humanity, try these guys on for size.  How do you like that spike since the Reagan years got started?  In any case, while there may be a case to be made for the Calorie as humanity’s universal unit of currency, today it is money that talks and buys influence.  Or was all that changing, as it became evident that accumulation of what amounted to a stand-in for real wealth could no longer materialize endlessly more and more for the Earth’s inhabitants to consume out of the ether and caused more than a few problems of its own with its pyramid schemes of money insuring money traded for money backed ultimately by nothing?

You can put me out on the streets, put me out with no shoes on my feet, but put me out, put me out, put me out of misery!

To get back to fossil fuels: it might surprise you to learn that the general lack of support for science in the public interest extends well beyond fossil-fuel-funded payouts to sow doubt about the fundamental workings of climate change and supply depletion, into the Public Interest Research Group itself and the public agency into which it and like-minded organizations feed whose mission is to “balance” the public’s interest against the interests of money in industry’s endless profit game, the U.S. Excusing Polluters Agency (EPA).  But despite what so-called “experts” employed by nonprofits and government agencies might tell you, more than a few “scientists” have signed onto statements endorsing stated political positions and ignored newer and better research or refused to conduct it themselves.  You can thank these Planeteers for the one-size-fits-all Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule, which treats a 100,000 ton-of-CO2 –per-year waste-to-energy plant that generates primarily renewable electricity the same as a 3-million-ton-per-year coal-fired behemoth and imposes the same monitoring requirements and costs on both.  You can also thank them for setting fuel economy standards for automakers that allow, for instance, a sale of a hybrid to cancel out the sale of a gas guzzling pickup truck or sport utility vehicle, or for allowing an E-85-capable light truck that burns only 4 gallons of ethanol per year to count as a low-carbon vehicle.

Fortunately, these guys aren’t the only fools on Planet Gaia with ideas for how to move forward with changes that would actually benefit humans and quite possibly their animal friends as well.  And since these are public agencies, it might be possible for us, the public, to correct them where they are wrong and set the record straight on what science has to say about, for instance, both the causes and (both economically and environmentally) effective ways of mitigating anthropogenic climate change.  Here’s what a few real experts have been saying lately about the real powers that be, and what they might just have in store for us in the coming century, assuming we stop letting politicians get us drunk on ethanol and move on to the real viable technologies that can protect the world from…well, at least the worst parts of the comedown after a fossil fuel binge, if not the whole thing.  First, though, fair warning to those who might fear the influence of money in politics: some of these ideas might yet turn out to be (or already are) quite profitable!

So what are we waiting for?  Let’s get our heads out of the tar sand and come up with some viable alternatives that can help transition us off unsustainable energy sources, shall we?  And I mean to do so without having to transition back to beasts of burden.  I summon the power of…

Earth: Electrified Rail

If you need something hauled over land, whether you are trying to get your own rear across town or move a piece of junk across the country, it’s hard to beat the efficiency of a train.  In the United States, we sorely lack a high-speed passenger rail network for regional travel, something that exists in virtually every other part of the industrialized world.  The U.S. also depends on trucking for long-distance freight hauling far more than Europe or Japan, and the freight rail network in the U.S. is almost entirely diesel-based, while Europe and Japan have connected most of their rail networks to the electric grid and use electricity to power transportation of both people and goods.  The advantage of rail electrification is the same as that of using non-petroleum automotive fuels: it helps to decouple the cost of transportation, and the embedded transportation costs of goods, from the volatile price of oil.  In theory, an electric-powered rail network could almost entirely replace the current petroleum-dependent highway transportation system and would synergize with the replacement of the existing electric generating capacity with renewable energy sources.  Electric rail transit and hauling are also more energy-efficient than trucking and automobile transport, and often cheaper.  While a world with extensive electric rail would likely still depend on trucks for short-haul transportation and automobiles for personal transportation in remote locations, it could also displace the vast majority of fuel consumption (urban commutes, long-distance passenger travel and freight hauling) such that it might even be possible to decouple the rest of the automotive transport sector from petroleum dependency via electrification and use of alternative fuels.

There’s a reason knowledgeable investors like Warren Buffett are getting behind rail transport, and electric rail in particular, as the wave of the future.

No need to use diesel power for freight: there’s room for some junk in that trunk.

Next up, we have…

Water: Upgraded Hydropower

Hydroelectricity already provides some 5-10% of all primary energy to humanity, but it has the potential to provide more, and perhaps more importantly, it provides two important services that few or no other renewable energy sources can, both of which bring reliability to the grid: baseload power and energy storage for load balancing.  Hydroelectric infrastructure is already widely implemented in many parts of the world, and it can provide nearly the entire electric demand for an area with rapid elevation changes and abundant water resources, e.g. South America or the Pacific Northwest.  It is possible to open and close portals and effectively increase or decrease flow to the turbines at any point so long as sufficient head exists in a hydroelectric reservoir.  Much of the global hydroelectric infrastructure today is aged, and significant potential exists for upgrading and retrofitting existing reservoirs to produce more electricity, directly replacing aged coal-fired generating stations for baseload power.  Such upgrades can often be done at minimal cost if the upgrade merely involves adding more turbines and generators to existing infrastructure.  Reservoirs of sufficient capacity can also be built for large-scale energy storage capacity via pumped-storage hydropower, wherein off-peak or excess electricity is purchased and used to pump water upward back into the reservoir.  Such systems can also be built using seawater.

Did someone say “aging critical infrastructure?”

OK, we’ve got earth, water, what’s next…

Wind: …Wind Power?

Here in these United States, we happen to have a lot of wind.  I know this one is going to WHOOSH right over the heads of those who like to make absurdly out-of-context claims about impacts on wildlife and all that jazz, but the facts also say that it is in fact capable of spinning a fan in reverse to generate power, and that it comes pretty cheap these days.  In any case, if you live in the Midwest, a Rocky Mountain state, or along the East Coast, the process goes more or less like so: Step 1 – Build wind turbine.  Step 2 – ???  Step 3 – you know the drill.  Now rinse, and repeat…a LOT.

Do I have to spell it out for you?

Fire: Kicking it Up a Notch

There has been a good deal of hubbub over “biofuels” in the media over the last several years, from observers like Tom Friedman jumping to demonize any and all uses of a tree for energy as a rape of our poor virgin planet, to rightly deserved skepticism of the value of cornstarch ethanol and other conventional biofuels, particularly when one considers the large quantity of land and resources required to be diverted for production of such a small quantity of fuel.  One result of the problems with heavily subsidized, expensive and inefficient “first-generation biofuels” has been a rush for bio-energy developers to issue press releases proclaiming that they hold the key to “next-generation cellulosic biofuels.”  Don’t hold your breath.  One of the unfortunate truths about the U.S. Department of Ethanol (DOE) is that its biomass program has endlessly promoted such fuels and subsidized research for cellulosic ethanol (at a cost of $30 per gallon) while ignoring the simplest and most cost-effective uses of biomass: as a reliable, renewable source of base loading power, and to provide heating power for homes, businesses, and industries.  In combination with energy conservation and uprating hydroelectric power, and especially with a strong commitment to utilizing waste biomass materials as an energy source, it would be feasible to replace a significant portion of our existing coal-fired electric generating capacity, which represents half of all electricity generated in the U.S., with renewable resources.  In combination with wind power’s continued expansion, there might be enough electricity available through renewable resources alone to head off the worst effects of fossil fuel depletion and prevent a total collapse of services essential to survival.

If we are to clear our forests in order to grow energy crops, we might do well to consider the energy value of those forests themselves, and the value in conserving them so that they can be harvested sustainably to continually support our energy needs.  And someone please tell Mr. Friedman: they grow back.

Earth to Congress and DOE: It’s “Burn, Baby, Burn,” not “Distill, Baby, Distill.”

And last but, though diminutive, not least:

Monkey Power: Kicking the Habit

So what can you, yourself, do to finally make good on our (and our politicians’) collective promise to ourselves to get off oil and other fossil fuels?  For one thing, we can use a whole lot less of them.  Over the long run it is probably a good idea to figure out alternatives to virtually all our uses of oil, but in the short run personal transportation is the biggest part of the problem.  But not all people can or will get by without automobiles, and so we need to have something better than the gasoline-powered behemoths we use today (and probably some alternative to asphalt roads) if we are going to keep cars as an important part of our transportation system, particularly in rural areas where fewer rail lines exist and transit services are less available.  So we have the alternative being promoted to replace, or at least begin to phase out, the gasoline powered internal combustion engine: electric vehicles.  Here we have a pair of problems: gasoline is too expensive and polluting to remain reliant on it, but electric vehicles suffer performance deficits or drastically elevated costs compared to conventional automobiles and lack both the charging infrastructure and the renewable energy production to back such a system.

Is there a solution to the above dilemma?  Well, perhaps the first option is to attack the ICE-versus-electric question from the side.  Why not a little bit of both?  Specifically, if electric vehicles are unable to compete with ICE-powered vehicles in today’s market, absent some external cost being imposed on gasoline or the price being raised somehow, but gas prices are still high enough to hit consumers in the part of the wallet where it hurts most (specifically, the price of groceries), why not work to improve upon the low efficiency of conventional automobiles, including trucks?  Between the low conversion efficiency of internal combustion engines, particularly conventional gasoline spark-ignition engines as compared to compression-ignition diesel, and the sheer bulk of most automobiles, some 98% of the heating value of gasoline is wasted moving a single driver in an car.  We can make a good start by (substantially) reducing unnecessary weight from automobiles, using more cars and trucks with energy storage systems to capture lost energy from the wheels in braking or going downhill, and making our vehicles more aerodynamic.

There are all kinds of ways to use fewer fossil fuels that require no sacrifice, save money, and demand nothing more than a little mindfulness, like remembering to turn out the lights when you leave a room.  If we learn to live with less, it will hurt less as peak oil burns holes both in our wallets and in the seafloor.

Eliminating wasted energy: that’s no sacrifice!

I think with all this in place, we might just be OK, for the time being at least.  So with that said, I’ll hand it back over to you, the reader, to see where you fit into this puzzle.  You have to make the choice.  The Environmental Protection Agency won’t protect you.  What will you do next?

The Power Is Yours!

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Ten Things I Hate – And Ten Things I Love – About Washington, DC

Posted by wastedenergy on May 25, 2010

It’s always good to count one’s blessings.  And as we learn from other local blogs like Greater Greater Washington, there are many things for which to be thankful and appreciate about living in the Washington, DC area.  However, as the authors of GGW aptly point out, there are also a number of ways we could make our home even greater too!  So without any further ado:

Ten Things I Hate:

10. Pedestrian walk signals that suddenly drop from 30 seconds of crossing time down to 3 – even when pedestrians are about to enter the crosswalk.  Just one more sign of how traffic engineers believe only cars matter, and pedestrians are nothing but an obstacle…

9. Drivers who don’t watch where they are going, especially those who ignore pedestrian cross signals when they have a green light (or sometimes even a red).  Lots of folks around here seem to be lost in their own little worlds, which is not good when you are driving around two tons of steel…

8. Jumbo Slice.  It might be good for absorbing the kind of swill people love to down late at night in Adams Morgan, or possibly mopping the floor, but not much else (especially the next morning).

7. The Red Line.  Need I say more?

6. Litter all over the gutters and in Rock Creek.

5. People who assume I have money to hand out to them just because I’m white(-looking).

4. Tea Partyists who use our fair city as a stomping ground for their thoughtless protests without seeming to notice our official license plate slogan: Taxation Without Representation!  These sorts really need to pick up a history book sometime and learn what the original Boston Tea Party was about (and maybe a little bit about the cleanup effort afterwards, too).

3. Georgetown types – there was a movement afoot a few years ago for this part of town, which refused a subway line, to secede from the District of Columbia.  Can we bring that back?  Pretty please?

2. Lobbyists, far too many of ‘em (and I mean the oil and gas type).

1. The way we handle our trash.  Or rather, the way we DON’T – we send it to landfills in southern Virginia!  Meanwhile, waste-to-energy plants are humming away in the background doing their thing in Arlington, Fairfax, and Montgomery Counties, while we still use a coal-fired power plant build in 1908 – 1908!!! – to heat and cool the Capitol. 

The power of dinosaurs is alive and well in this town.

But now, it’s best not to get down on everything, so here are Ten Things I Love:

10. It is an eminently walkable and bikeable city (at least until the traffic engineers get their way).  It is quite easy to get from one place to another, and if you need to cover any serious distance – well, that’s why transit was invented!

9. (Most of) our transit system.  For those times when you need to get somewhere but don’t want to deal with the stress and hassle of driving around a car (who does, really?) – you can just relax with a good book!  And even though we might have ghost trains from time to time, it does a pretty good job of getting you from Point A to Point B, and probably faster than if you were sitting in DC traffic.

8. Real farmers markets (check out DuPont Circle on Sunday sometime) and an overall strong – and growing - organic and other “real food” culture.

7. Our awesome buses.  Essentially everything from the past two years is a hybrid, and looks totally baller to boot.

6. Petworth and everything about it, except maybe the shootings, and all the illegal dumping.

5. Awesome free museums, especially Natural History.  Locals often don’t do enough to take advantage of these (not to mention the Library of Congress).

4. You’re never far from a hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran food joint.  Nom nom nom!

3. The dense concentration of smart people in the area, more than you can find almost anyplace else in the world.  You can learn a lot here just from talking with the person sitting next to you (or serving you) at any given bar or coffee shop.

2. Amsterdam Falafel!  Contrary to what some hipsters who love to rag on everything nice might have you believe, it’s not overrated at all: falafel is all about the texture, and this place has the best in town, hands down.

1. Lots of young and hip (and even attractive) folks seem to have materialized out of the ether around here recently.  Some have called this the “Obama Effect,” which I think may be accurate, considering things were definitely different when I first moved here back in 2007!

What are you waiting for – hop on board the Party Bus!

Posted in Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Oyster

Posted by wastedenergy on May 21, 2010

With every crisis comes opportunity.  Essential truths like this one are easy to forget when one feels like a leaf turning at the mercy of the winds.  When the world of abstraction and the conventional narrative of progress dissolve in the cold hard acid rains of reality, when we run up against the all too physical constraints on growth, both personal and as a society, it behooves us to remember that such moments are not dead ends, but forks in the road.  I am reminded of an expression that is also often tossed about lightly in the winds, without much consideration necessarily given to the meaning of the phrase: “the world is your oyster.”

What could illustrate this pearl of wisdom more perfectly than the plumes of oil, the physical embodiment of mammon itself, slathering the oyster beds of the Gulf Coast today?  This event has forced big changes on both the villains of corporate greed responsible for the pollution and on those who have long made a life based upon those oyster beds, whether through fishing, tourism, or any of the other activities that have come to define human life in these parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.  By now most of us have heard the stories and seen the iconic images of fishing folk asking themselves: “This is what I have always done.  What now?”  What may be getting lost here, though, is just how remarkable it is that we humans are able to ask such a question at all.  Perhaps that more than anything else is what separates us from the oysters: our versatility, creativity, and networks of support in the face of crises personal, environmental, and political.  These times may not be easy, they may not be Cake, but you know what?  Like Gloria Gaynor, we WILL survive.

Besides, where is the fun in having it easy?

Peak oil is another crisis that illustrates this point, connected as it is (everything in the world is connected) to the destruction of the oyster beds I mentioned above.  Many observers of the phenomenon feel they are privy to some kind of unique and special knowledge, and that their first duty is to alert the rest of humanity to the impending (or ongoing) crisis.  But what has become increasingly apparent to me over time, particularly in recent days, is how many people already see that something is amiss, and just how few subscribers there really are to the myth dispensed by schools and politicos of infinite growth in a finite world.  People, more and more every day, can see what is happening around them and the connections between political events and the day-to-day concerns of their lives, whether or not they may be able to draw an explicit cause-and-effect relationship.  No longer is it possible to deny the personal stake each of us has in the political issues of our times.

The answer is blowing in the wind – and crashing in the waves. And the times, they ARE a-changing.  What remains to be seen is whether we, or really, enough of us to make a difference and change course, are able to catch these waves, to set our sails in the new winds.  Today is a new day.  So seize the carp, as they say, and make it yours.    The world really is your oyster, but this point matters only if you are prepared to open it and find the pearl, not to mention the meat, inside of it.  Just as an appropriate response when life hands you lemons is to make lemonade (or even plant more lemons – who says they aren’t useful?), when life hands you meat, it makes little sense to refuse to eat it on grounds that you are a vegetarian.

When you come to a fork in the road, and you have no choice but to take it, will you use it to feed yourself, or to stab your fellow (wo)man in the back?

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Bus-ted

Posted by wastedenergy on May 17, 2010

Most of the discussion surrounding peak oil has involved liquid fuel supply issues.  We must have continual growth in oil and other liquid fuel supplies, some say, in order to sustain the global economy.  We can’t live without our cars: what would we do?  How would we get our groceries from the store two blocks away back to our McMansions in the ‘burbs?

It makes me wonder if these people have ever heard of something called “transit.”  You see, here in the District of Columbia, there is no need to own a car.  In fact, the car owner is saddled with more costs and other burdens than anything else: parking, maintenance, traffic, road rage.  Meanwhile, I’m over here walking on sunshine, and don’t it feel good?  But certain distances do become burdensome to walk as well, and even bicycles come with their hazards and nuisances too: carrying around locks and helmets, the strain of long uphills, and the occasional raspberry from falling onto the asphalt or getting one’s leg caught in the chain.  Don’t get me wrong, I think bikes are a lovely way of getting around too, but sometimes it helps to be able to take a motorized vehicle around.  And while trains are lovely too, especially for central urban areas, subway systems can get a bit pricey at times too, and come with their own technical challenges – just look at the water damage to the Woodley Park and Cleveland Park stations on the Red Line, sitting under the Rock Creek watershed.  In fact, some studies have shown that bus rapid transit systems cost as little as one tenth as much as subways and light rail (although to be fair, these may not be including the costs of subsidized roads either).

Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t now…

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Posted in Energy Consumption, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The Slow Drip: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels and the Economy

Posted by wastedenergy on May 2, 2010

Slow Drip: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels and the Economy

What is the definition of “modernity?”  The notion may be best defined in terms of the economy, a monolithic summary of billions of transactions wherein we exchange paper and ink, or electrons, representing value in the form of debt, for “goods and services.”  Economists, who theorize about the functioning of both this monolith and the various cogs in the machines that make it work, have advanced their practice to the point that they hold many positions of authority in the world today.  The reasons are obvious to even a casual observer: the economic engine is what powers the authority of governments, backed by militaries supported by revenues drawn from the tax base that is a product of productive economies.

So modernity depends upon the economy, which depends upon monetized transactions.  So what powers this economy?  Before we get into answering this question, it is worth examining the history of the beast itself, and how exactly it grew into such a behemoth.

The father of modern “free-market” economics was of course Adam Smith, one of the first theorists to point out the the advantages of specialization in achieving efficient economic outcomes.  Under a feudal system like that which preceded the modern economy in Europe, each peasant bears the ultimate responsibility for her own well-being.  The most important question under such a system is whether my manual labor, given the state of the land and environmental conditions such as weather, is capable of harvesting sufficient sunlight to ensure adequate availability of calories to sustain my own existence.  And that is more or less the end of the story.  Smith pointed out that efforts could be economized and well-being improved, at least in theory, through specialization of work.  In other words, farmers farm, coal miners mine coal, and factory overseers oversee factory operations.  And thus the modern economy was born.

The theories laid out by Smith and his followers were perfected in practice by the illustrious Nazi backer Henry Ford and other industrialists hundreds of years later, who, with the help of the fossil fuel and its ever-so-convenient energy content, were able to take the concept of specialization to its logical conclusion, to reduce human labor to its barest components: literally turning the same cog over and over again, becoming one piece of a vast and complex supply chain.  And it worked.  It was efficient.  But there were unanticipated side effects we never quite managed.  For instance: it made us less than human in the process, convincing us that we could achieve salvation, whether from poverty or from the dreariness of a peasant life, only by paying pieces of our time to corporations as indulgences, demanding that we spend the best part of our days slaving to create products for consumption, or today, even just filling a digital database with fake numbers and moving ever more of said numbers into our own columns so that we can consume said products.  Not just a few of us either, but all of us, or at least as many as possible, must dedicate our lives to building and preserving the city on a hill powered by fossils and run by dinosaurs.  Sound about right?

The slow drip: a preferred method of economic vampirism.

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Into the Fire

Posted by wastedenergy on April 29, 2010

So, with all that’s been floating around the news lately, I bet you thought my next entry would be about either the offshore oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico or the brighter side of things offshore, the likely soon-to-be-successful Cape Wind offshore wind energy project. Right?

Wrong! This entry will be about waste-to-energy. In particular, this entry will consist of me repeating points I have already endlessly repeated to many, many people, making myself feel not only like a broken record, but also like it is worth it to be a broken record if it means I occasionally, actually get through to someone. So what are we waiting for? Touch the fire!

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Posted in Air, Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

The Glass Ceiling

Posted by wastedenergy on April 22, 2010

What better way to celebrate Earth Day than with good news about the viability of renewable energy?  For a long time, most renewables have been dismissed by serious observers of the energy markets.  And there was certainly plenty of ammunition for the critics.  After all, until very recently, non-hydroelectric renewables were nothing more than a rounding error in energy production totals.  Yet as of late the skepticism, at least among investors and those who follow energy-related news, seems to be evaporating faster than flash-generated steam in a geothermal power plant.  So why is wind suddenly making the charts and becoming the cheapest new source of utility generation per kilowatt-hour, even lower than fossil fuels?  What makes solar power viable today for peak shaving and domestic power production?  Is enough of the cat really out of the bag that we no longer have to pull rabbits out of hats to create a viable energy future? 

What changed?

In a wordish: EROI.  The amount of energy it takes to extract a barrel of oil, or a cubic foot of methane, or a ton of coal, has steadily increased and the quality of energy returned has steadily declined as lower-quality resources are exploited: tar sand, shale gas, and high-sulfur-and-ash anthracite and lignite coals.  Meanwhile, everything about renewable energy has only gotten better over time: extraneous components and costs are shaved, more lightweight and efficient materials are used, the scale of production and deployment increases and economies of scale are achieved.  And guess what?  We seem to have reached a critical intersection point: wind and other renewables have achieved a higher overall EROI today than fossil fuels.  And both of these trends will only continue, which helps explain why almost half of new generating capacity in the United States today is in wind energy, why waste-to-energy, geothermal, biomass, hydropower and other base loading renewables are gaining serious attention, and why more and more homes and businesses are investing in both passive and active solar energy systems every day. 

But while the technical obstacles to achieving viability for renewables may have been surmounted, other types remain, the most important being political.  The idea that renewable energy can be a serious and cost-competitive contender is very new to a lot of people, and public support for renewable energy development, while certainly strong among a core group of activists, has yet to take a major foothold in the political culture.  NIMBYism is still a significant problem in many cases, not only for waste-to-energy and offshore wind facilities, but even for technologies as innocuous as geothermal.  As I see it, the biggest part of the problem is simply energy illiteracy.  Most people do not think about their use of energy or where it comes from because why would they?  We forget what it means to gather firewood, to build and start a fire (when was the last time you did without a match or lighter?), to construct a wind or watermill or a greenhouse. But it is only very recently that a fundamental understanding of the EROI concept embodied in these activities became unnecessary to the survival of most humans.  I full expect such an understanding to become necessary once more once the fossil interlude concludes, which, rest assured, it will shortly.

Welcome to the new world, where the glass ceiling for renewables has shattered.  Happy Earth Day.

There it was.

Posted in Energy Production, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Rise of the Phoenix

Posted by wastedenergy on March 19, 2010

Waste-to-Energy is making a comeback here in this Amerique du Nord.  And no, I don’t mean the kind where you bury your trash, wait for it to turn into methane gas, then capture and burn bits and pieces of it.  That kind never went away.  The kind I’m talking about is where you actually care how much energy you are getting out of your trash, not just the right to say “we’re making some energy.”  In other words, the kind where you burn the stuff.  It’s coming back.  After a fifteen year hiatus on construction of new plants, which were halted to soothe the false fears of environmentalists at the same time that existing plants were upgrading to meet the most stringent air quality requirements in existence for any type of facility, half a dozen or so cities and counties around the United States and Canada that operate waste-to-energy plants are expanding or have already expanded their facilities.  And a lone phoenix is even rising from the ashes to build the first entirely new clean combustion facility on the Continent since I was but a wee child…

Rise from the ashes!

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Posted in Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

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