Modeshift

David Pimentel, an ecologist who spent all of his career at Cornell University after earning his doctorate in entomology in 1951, is one of the most respected environmental scientists of his generation. He was among the select group of young ecologists who in the 1960s first identified the environmental and public health hazards of farm chemicals, and helped build the scientific case for healthier, more environmentally-sensitive agriculture practices. The fact that organic crops are the fastest growing sector of the American food production system owes a considerable debt to Dr. Pimentel’s scholarship and advocacy. Dr. Pimentel also has spent almost 30 years, ever since he chaired a federal Energy Department advisory committee  in 1979 that looked at the potential of plant-derived ethanol,  as the nation’s most important opponent of turning the might of American agriculture to fuel our cars.

Bruce Dale is a 57 -year-old chemical engineer who was born in Nevada, raised in Arizona, and is among the most decorated process scientists of his generation. After stints teaching at Colorado State University and Texas A&M, Dr. Dale joined the faculty of Michigan State University in 1996 to chair the chemical engineering department and prepare for the biofuels boom that he anticipated would emerge as petroleum prices rose to unmanageable levels. He is now the associate director of MSU’s  Office of Bio-based Technolgy, helping to coordinate an interdisciplinary team of scientists and social theorists that span more than a dozen departments at the nation’s second largest university. He also is  one of the five team leaders of the Great Lakes Bio-Engineering Research Center, a collaboration between MSU and the University of Wisconsin that earlier this year was awarded a $125 million, five-year grant from the Department of Energy to develop the scientific foundations for vastly expanding the American production and processing industry that is turning plants into transportation fuels.  

Over the last two years, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media but with increasing visibility in policy, industrial, capital, and scientific circles, Dr. Pimentel and Dr. Dale have been locked in a profound disagreement about the usefulness of producing fuel from plants. On the most basic human level, the strikingly different conclusions that these two eminent experts draw about the perils or promise of biofuels is the most personal high-profile scientific disagreement since the 1980s . During that era economist Julian Simon of the University of Maryland bet Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich that the prices of five key metals would either rise because of the trend to ever more scarce natural resources, as Dr. Ehrlich predicted, or fall because of innovation, as Dr. Simon said. In 1990, Dr. Ehrlich conceded defeat, an event that helped lay the intellectual foundation of the free market attack on American environmental laws as overly restrictive and pessimistic.

The expert disagreement between Dr. Dale and Dr. Pimentel rivals the earlier dispute in substance and significance. Dr. Pimentel’s analysis has influenced public opinion and the media, including this blog, with a penetrating critique of the environmental safety and economic wisdom of committing to a fuel production sector based on crop science, agronomy, and new processing technology. Dr. Dales asserts, though, that the Pimentel analysis is flawed in its basic construction. Those flaws, he argues, are impeding the progress of a vital sector in the green economy that promises to be much more environmentally sensitive to soil, air, and water even as it builds a new regional farm production and processing economy that will benefit rural America, and the Middle West in particular. To hear Dr. Dale tell it, generating the production capacity to fill tanks with what he calls “grassoline” could  be as essential to the Midwest’s new prosperity as the digital economy has been to the Pacific Rim states.

At the core of the discord is an analysis of how much energy it takes to make a gallon of fuel from ethanol versus how much energy that same gallon produces. Technical folk call this the “net energy” balance. Dr. Pimentel asserts that producing ethanol from corn yields a negative net energy balance, meaning it takes more energy to make a gallon of ethanol from corn than the energy produced. His calculations gained credence because of the energy intensive practices involved in growing corn — lots of irrigation, farm chemicals, fertilizers, and  fuel go into its production. Essentially, he argued, it takes as much energy to produce a gallon of ethanol as the energy that results. 

But more recently, Dr. Pimentel has made the same assertion about producing fuel from switchgrass and other crops that yield higher levels of biomass from which to produce ethanol, and can be grown with much fewer inputs.  Producing ethanol from switchgrass, according to MSU plant scientists, involves planting the crop once, applying no farm chemicals, and much less fertilizer than is used to produce corn, and harvesting the crop once a year.

Dr. Dale, meanwhile, argues that “net energy” critics are “dead wrong and dangerously misleading.”   Here’s why, he says. Producing a mega jule (MJ) of gasoline, a unit of energy measure, requires 1.1 MJ of petroleum, 0.03 MJ of natural gas, and 0.05 MJ of coal. The total fossil fuel input is 1.18 MJ per 1 MJ of gasoline or a – 18 percent net energy balance. Producing a MJ of ethanol, meanwhile, takes 0.04 MJ of petroleum, 0.28 MJ of natural gas, and 0.41 MU of coal, for a total fossil fuel input of 0.73 MJ. Thus producing ethanol, says Dr. Dale, yields a +.27 percent net energy balance, considerably better than gasoline. 

Corn ethanol also produces 18 percent less global warming gases than gasoline, says Dr. Dale. Ethanol made from switchgrass produces 88 percent less global warming gases, and its use would displace petroleum as a fuel source, reducing reliance on imported oil and all of the useful results that would confer on the nation. 

Settling this rupture is not about who’s right, but who’s wrong. If Dr. Dale is wrong, then pursuing the biofuels future he advocates would be irresponsibly expensive to taxpayers, cause enormous environmental damage, and do nothing to loosen the noose that rising oil prices and diminishing supply has wrapped around the nation’s neck. If Dr. Pimentel is wrong then a promising green economy that reduces environmental damage, shores up the Midwest’s flagging farm economy, curtails America’s dependence on imported petroleum, and fosters a new community-based green fuel production and distribution system could be seriously weakened by a public backlash predicated on faulty data.

Dr. Pimentel, in an email message to me this week, said, ”I am quite familiar with Bruce Dale’s arguments. I am sure you are aware that no one else supports his views on energy analyses. Some chemcial engineers have told me that that Bruce does not understand thermodynamics.”

Two years ago David Morris, a researcher and vice president of the Institute For Local Self Reliance, a respected public interest organization in Minneapolis, analyzed the “net energy” debate and in a widely-read report responded this way to the question about whether it takes more energy to make ethanol than is contained in ethanol: “In 1980, the short and empirical answer to the question was yes. By 1990, because of improved efficiencies by both farmer and ethanol manufacturers the answer was, probably not.  In 2005 the answer is clearly no.”

No doubt, I’ll be reporting more on this as we go along.  

There’s never been a time in my life, which now spans 51 years, when the conversation in communities is so distanced from what state lawmakers choose to talk about. And the gulf only gets wider between the concerns knocking around state capitols and what Congress and the White House think is important. This isn’t a partisan problem. It’s a national disgrace.

Our state government here in Michigan, for example, is led by a two-term Democratic governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, who began her administration with a very solid and popular economic development program. It called for investing in the state’s cities, protecting natural resources, securing open spaces, fixing roads instead of building new ones, promoting public transit, improving public education, and strengthening the state’s terrific public universities. Ms. Granholm also talked about leveraging public and private funds to encourage entrepreneurism and recruit new knowledge-based companies. The idea was to overcome the state’s hierarchical economic principles, forged in the factory floor/front office clashes of the 20th century’s auto culture, and produce clean, green, prosperous cities and inner ring suburbs that could attract the highly educated young people who rule the 21st century economy.

The three most prosperous regions in Michigan — Ann Arbor, Traverse City, and Grand Rapids — actually thought highly of Ms. Granholm’s new strategy, embraced its basic principles, and have emerged late in the 21st century’s first decade as among the best places to live and do business in the country. Lesson: it worked.

Ms. Granholm, meanwhile, was buffeted by her conservative opponents, a state economy that faltered, the nation’s largest fiscal deficit, and abandoned the strategy almost entirely. The new core of her economic plan is expressed by a scary sounding slogan to “go anywhere and do anything” to generate new jobs.

This tendency of political leaders to govern as though they were at a buffet, picking and choosing almost indiscriminately from a myriad of interesting dishes, is emblematic of our drift as a nation. Great organizations develop core strategies and stick to them over time. Those that are most successful anticipate and adjust to new market signals, incorporate new ideas, and update their vision and goals in a careful and logical process. The same goes for successful businesses and productive lives. The idea is to write a strong narrative for yourself, your company, your state or nation that makes sense. Having a strong story, effectively and courageously executed over time, generally gets people close to what they’re after. Sharp changes in goals without consideration and anticipation is a story that has departed its narrative track and generally leads to failure in business and disappointment in governing.

I’ve had the chance to apply these lessons to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican who was born in Detroit 60 years ago, raised in a political family, and governed for one term in Massachusetts. What’s interesting is that Mr. Romney’s first gubernatorial year, 2003, was distinguished by several acts which might otherwise be called progressive. Two are of particular note. Mr. Romney hired Doug Foy, the head of the Conservation Law Foundation and arguably New England’s most important environmentalist, to head a new Office For Commonwealth Development. And second, Mr. Romney charged Mr. Foy with developing and enacting a new economic development strategy for Massachusetts based on Smart Growth principles very similar to those that Governor Granholm talked about at the start of her administration the same year in Michigan.

Though critics and supporters argue about the success of Mr. Romney’s initiative, one of its important achievements was embedding the idea that where state government decides to spend money for transportation, water, housing, offices, education, and the environment has a lot to do with where people choose to live, and where businesses choose to locate.

The Environmental League of Massachusetts counts among the achievements in the last year that it made in collaboration with the state a $30 million investment in a state brownfield redevelopment fund, a major help for developers seeking to build on land in the Commonwealth’s older industrial cities and core suburbs. The state agreed to consider carefully the consequences to communities and land use for extending new water lines. The state also raised its Historic RehabilitationTax Credit to $50 million annually from $10 million, helping developers build in existing neighborhoods rather than promote sprawl.

These and a host of other Smart Growth policies and investments helped to stabilize the state’s economy and contributed to the growing number of highly educated young people who’ve settled in Boston and Cambridge, both of which are experiencing moderate population growth, according to the Boston-based Metropolitan Area Planning Council. It’s a strong record of sound governance that produced real results. You’d think a former governor running for president might want to take note of what he’d done.

But Mr. Romney doesn’t mention a word of it in his campaigns, on his Web site, in his speeches. His campaign is a dullard’s banquet of the same old — lower taxes, oppose abortion, support the surge, defend the family. His energy policy is about more nukes, liquifying coal as a fuel, and drilling for oil in Alaska. I travel in moderate liberal and conservative circles. There isn’t anybody I know who thinks that this governing formula will make America better.

John Bebow, the executive director of The Center For Michigan and a former reporter for the Detroit News and Chicago Tribune, reports in his weekly update that M and M Energy, a Florida-based energy development company, has proposed building a multi-billion dollar “polygeneration” coal-fired electric generating station on the site of a shuttered oil refinery in Alma. The company presented its plan to the state Senate Energy Committee in mid-April and has been busy shopping the idea in and out of Michigan. 

What attracts the attention of the fossil fuel industry and its champions in the capital markets is the trifecta that M and M Energy promises to its supporters. First, the company asserts it is building a “clean” coal generating station that uses Conoco Phillips technology to heat to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit and turn coal, an abundant all-American resource, into a gas. Second, the plant will then pump the dangerous byproducts of the heating and power generation process, particularly sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, deep into the earth. And third, get this, those gases will have the effect of pressurizing played out liquid fossil fuel reservoirs and enable Michigan to recover billions of dollars worth of oil that would have been lost. The federal Department of Energy published a report on what it called “Co2 enhanced oil recovery” last year.

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I understand why mid-Michigan job seekers and allied business owners could get excited about such a proposal. Investments of the magnitude that M and M Energy proposes aren’t made in this state very often. It’s also easy to see how Michigan’s oil and gas industry would be geeked about allying themselves with a coal-fired utility. But what are the consequences to electricity prices, for one, and the safety of underground CO2 storage chambers for another. Moreover, the idea of perpetuating fossil fuel combustion in an era of global climate change that has already harmed the state’s snow sports industry and appears to be playing havoc with Great Lakes water levels, isn’t so appetizing either. 

What’s most clear at this point is that energy is the industrial sector that business and political leaders are looking to first to rebuild Michigan’s economic competitiveness. Governor Jennifer M. Granholm has used her State of the State address each of the last three years to tout the usefulness of encouraging a research and production capacity for ethanol and other alternative energies as a competitive advantage.

She and the state are making a bit of progress, but there are very big questions about ethanol as a useful fuel. The number of BTUs that go into making a gallon of ethanol is only slightly less than the number of BTUs that same gallon produces.

Meanwhile a much more significant and worrisome development is the number of big coal-fired electric generating stations planned for Michigan. Along with M and M Energy’s proposal, two more convetnional coal-fired plants are planned for Rogers City and Midland. Several others are in the discussion stage and have not been publicly announced by state utilities.

It’s hard to overstate what is obvious. Powering Michigan’s 21st century economy with a dirty 18th century fuel source is an epic mismatch that will ensure that Michigan’s economic slide will continue. In a new century that prizes clean, efficient, environmentally-sensitive business practices, and the jobs that come with that kind of transformation, it’s hard to fathom how burning coal advances state prospects.

In the fall of 1993, when I moved to northwest Michigan, Poppycocks was the only decent place to eat on Traverse City’s Front Street. The city had plenty of surface parking lots where buildings once stood, a delapidated State Theatre on Front Street, and a ghostly 100-year-old psychiatric asylum on its western boundary. On the sprawling outskirts, the Grand Traverse Mall had just opened and the South Airport ring road at the mall’s doorstep was so fry pit-ugly and congested that it was a metaphor for what people feared the city and region would eventually become. 

Traverse City is a much different place today. New homes and office buildings are replacing the parking lots. Front Street is host to bars and restaurants and coffee shops and specialty food stores too numerous to name. The state hospital, where one of the largest historic restoration projects in the United States is under way, is being turned into a mixed-use village of homes, shops, and offices. To be sure, the mall is thriving and South Airport Road is busier than ever. But citizens and non-profit groups, including the one I work for, killed the highway bypass and bridge that would have been the next junked-up ring road, and replaced it with a federally-financed plan to make sure we are smarter about how to use our natural assets.

Traverse City, in other words, has stepped across an economic and cultural threshold. The distinctive ingredients of neighborhood, history, geography, and good taste are being mixed in very new ways. Perhaps none of the many events that now mark the city’s busy calendar reflects this new era more than the Traverse City Film Festival, which ended tonight.

The festival, of course, is the handiwork of Michigan native son, author, and documentary film maker Michael Moore (see pix), who several years ago built a house on nearby Torch Lake in Antrim County and embraced the Traverse City region as his home. On Saturday night I was one of the thousands of people carrying lawn chairs and blankets to the Open Space on the lakeshore to watch a free outdoor showing of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Before the show, Moore spoke to an enthusiastic audience and without any trace of irony described the decency, neighborliness, and community he found in Traverse City, and how those values were so throughly woven into the festival’s motto of “just great films.”

Moore’s comments struck me as intensely personal. I don’t know Michael Moore and only met him once when he spoke a decade or so ago at the annual awards meeting of the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council. But an ambitous 53-year-old man who’s used his brain, mouth, and story-telling skills to become a genuinely influential figure of his time also needs a place to feel safe. In Traverse City he found that and more. 

“Just great films” is an apt summary for why the festival is so successful. Moore’s knack for choosing movies that are funny, provocative, intelligent, and tell great stories is almost flawless.  

“Just great films,” though,  also says just as much about Moore’s needs. It’s a not so subtle reminder that in Traverse City, Moore isn’t interested in being the national figure, the activist pushing back against an inept president, an unfair system, and his critics, as he did on CNN last month. He has no desire to roil the political waters here and does not want to be a pariah in his new community. 

But make no mistake. This is an ambitous Academy Award-winning director who likes to make a point. With the help of two well-known and well-liked local guys– author Doug Stanton (“In Harm’s Way,” Owl Books, 2003) and photographer John Robert Williams – Moore crafted a week-long film experience that fits its place; a city of stable neighborhoods, hard working entrepreneurs, and welcome optimism. The Traverse City Film Festival is a prominent statement about what it takes for a newcomer, a developer if you will, to build something enduring that people love instead of fear. 

The three men accomplished this trick by using the civic resources at hand. The film festival’s venues are a restored city opera house, an existing community playhouse, an auditorium in a neighborhood school, and the partially restored State Theater downtown, which hadn’t shown a movie in years. By deploying existing assets to show 63 films in 98 screenings to a collective audience of 80,000 viewers this year, the festival strengthened Traverse City, not weakened it.  

How rare that is in a fast-growing region contending with out-of-scale, out-of-context, community-disfiguring development that makes people here flinch, whether it’s the $600 million Bay Harbor gated community south of Petoskey, the billion-dollar-plus proposals for new coal-fired electrical generating stations in Midland and Rogers City, or the monster amusement park that a developer wants to cut from state forest land in Grayling.

Two other essential ingredients also were mixed into the festival’s successful formula — civility and volunteers. Moore and his colleagues appear intent on instilling a heartland culture that displays no interest in attracting the glitz and glamor and publicity of better-known film festivals. For the moment, and hopefully for many years to come, the Traverse City Film Festival will continue to be as courteous and approachable as its famous principal founder. 

Lastly, the film festival operates with the financial help of dozens of local sponsors and roughly 1,100 volunteers. Nothing is more valuable than a person’s time. In a city of 14,300 residents, a volunteer swarm  that size indicates that people find tremendous merit in this new and evolving community event. 

While visiting last month in New Buffalo, a summering village along Lake Michigan’s southeastern coast, I learned that realtors and developers were preparing a campaign to significantly weaken or entirely repeal the 31-year-old state law that protects Michigan’s magnificent fresh water sand dunes. The reason: the law was deemed to be an affront to “property rights” and an impediment to the development of some of the most compelling maritime geography on the planet.

Earlier this year, while researching a paper for a group of property owners and environmental advocates in Saugatuck, I’d learned that an Oklahoma oil and natural gas industry billionaire named Aubrey McClendon was financing a Lansing lobbying firm’s work to make the same case  to a group of sympathetic Republican lawmakers in the state House and Senate. A year ago Mr. McClendon spent $39.3 million to buy 402 acres of untouched and magnificent dunes and wetlands at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River in Saugatuck. His apparent, though as yet unannounced goal: Build a gated community of luxury beachside homes. The land he purchased lies within the zone protected by the Sand Dune Protection and Management Act. Unless it’s amended and seriously weakened, he’s going to have a very hard time putting any new homes there.

Two days ago I thought about the impending attack while hiking through a thick hemlock forest to the summit of Old Baldy (see pix), the tallest sand dune in Benzie County, Michigan, where I live. The walk starts on a narrow dirt road, climbs gradually through a forest now permanently protected as a natural refuge, and then takes you up a steep sand face to the top of a ridge overlooking Lower Herring Lake, Lake Michigan, and the sand dunes and high bluffs flanking Frankfort, some five or six miles north. It’s a tableau of brilliant blue water, warm blue sky, yellow sand, and green forest. In all of the coastal world that I’ve traveled, from California to the Olympic Peninsula to Prince William Sound. From Acadia National Park to Martha’s Vineyard to the South Carolina Low Country. From coastal Denmark to Portugal to Morocco to Greece. In those places and more I’ve never seen a more beautiful coast than the one visible from that spot.

Michigan’s dunes, which stretch for 270 miles along Lake Michigan, form the longest and tallest chain of freshwater dunes in the world. A great moderate Republican Governor ,William G. Milliken, assured their conservation in 1976 with the passage of the Sand Dune Protection and Management Act. The law restricts construction of roads and infrastructure on steep slopes, and has helped to preserve a scenic and ecologically crucial resource that also has sustained Lake Michigan’s recreational economy. 

Our state, though, is enduring the most treacherous economic circumstances since the early 1980s. Our Democratic Governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, who happens to be sympathetic to resource conservation and a warm and intelligent human being, is nevertheless unwittingly (I hope) prompting a kind of economic free for all at the grassroots in Michigan with some reckless rhetoric about jobs and the economy. Ms. Granholm’s favorite slogan for several years now has been her vow to “go anywhere and do anything” to secure the state new jobs. 

That message has permeated the industrial community, the development community, the utility industry, and local governments. It’s producing unethical, unwelcome, and potentially dangerous consequences across the state. In Presque Isle County, where a utility is proposing a new coal plant, a 17-year elected county commissioner who’s helped to guide the project also is a paid board member of the utility who collected more than $25,000o from the company in 2005, according to the most recent Federal IRS tax filing. With his behind the scenes support, the county issued land use permits for the plant without even knowing how big it would be. Almost noone said a word.

Similarly in Grayling, elected and appointed government leaders signed confidentiality agreements put before them by an amusement park developer even as many of those same officials were involved in the process of issuing land use and other permits.

And along the southern Lake Michigan coast, developers and realtors are convinced it is perfectly reasonably to team up with an out of state oil billionaire to finance and execute a surreptitious inside-Lansing campaign to diminish the Sand Dune Protection Act. My walk up Old Baldy convinced me that I will do everything in my capacity to make sure that won’t happen.