Modeshift

In the troubled climate action summer of 2010 it’s at least a little relief to know that some progress is occurring. The Department of Energy, in its latest assessment released this month of the American wind energy sector, reports that Texas is generating 2.29 gigawatts of energy from wind – equivalent to four good-sized coal plants.  Four other states are generating more than 10 percent of their electricity from wind. They are Iowa (20%), South Dakota (13%), North Dakota (12%), and Minnesota (11%).

The other piece of good news this week is out of China, where Keith Bradsher reports in the New York Times that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has ordered 2,087 dirty, polluting, inefficient, carbon emissions spewing industrial plants shuttered by September 30. The heavy-fisted directive is intended to draw China closer to energy efficiency goals.

China and U.S. Going Different Ways
From an American perspective it’s easy to imagine the fear and frustration of the owners and workers of the doomed plants. Still, China’s action joins a series of other policy steps the world’s largest energy consumer and carbon emissions producer is taking to make the transition to a cleaner, low-carbon economy. In early October, during the UNFCCC intercessional meeting, the first UN climate conference ever hosted by China, the world will learn much more. Suffice to say that China is acting to 1) meet the world’s fastest rising demand for energy, 2) tame the damage to its air, land, and water resources, and 3) still deal with its soaring carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, U.S. climate and energy policy remains ad-hoc. Cities and states, in doing such useful things as approving energy efficiency standards for buildings, promoting public transit, and passing renewable energy standards are putting a big dent in U.S. carbon emissions. The Obama administration, in issuing new emissions limits for cars and light trucks in April, and in May announcing the intent to do the same thing with heavy trucks, also is making a difference.

But the dysfunctional Senate, in refusing to address the warming planet, is aiding the fossil fuel industry’s clear objective to sharply accelerate the opening of the next era of hydrocarbon development — mining “unconventional” tar sands and oil shale reserves for oil, and fracturing deep rock layers for natural gas. To put it bluntly, tapping each produces more carbon emissions, uses more water, damages more land than the disappearing “conventional” oil and gas reserves they are meant to replace.

In northern Alberta, Canada, energy developers are spending $15 billion annually to expand production of bitumen-saturated tar sands, which are the largest source of American oil imports and produce 40 million tons of carbon emissions annually, according to the Pembina Institute. In the U.S., pipeline builders are spending $31 billion to triple the flow of tar sands oil across the border to a legion of American refineries in the Great Lakes, Midwest, and Gulf Coast that are being expanded to receive it at a cost of more than $20 billion.

“Asleep At The Wheel”
In other words while China appears intent on making the transition to a low-carbon economy, the U.S. is sending mixed signals at best. That message is being received loud and clear by the global investment community, a sector of the economy that can reach senators of both parties.

As the week closed Reuters reported that in the wake of the Senate decision earlier this month to abandon a comprehensive climate and energy bill Deutsche Bank’s Deutsche Asset Management Division will focus its $6 billion to $7 billion annual “green” investment dollars on opportunities in China and Western Europe, where it sees governments providing clean energy and climate leadership.

“You just throw your hands up and say we’re going to take our money elsewhere,” said Kevin Parker, the global head of the Asset Management Division, reflecting the consensus view of climate activists as well. “They’re asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry.”

– Keith Schneider

This morning I received an email message from Tom Mair, a Green Party candidate for the Grand Traverse (Michigan) Board of Commissioners, who wanted to know what I thought about the decision in June by Traverse City Light and Power to abandon its proposal to build a wood biomass plant. I served as communications and engagement consultant on the public hearings the utility held this winter.

Tom’s message and my response follow:

good afternoon Keith,
Tom Mair from the Greens here…
where are you on biomass and TCLP now that the TLCP board seems to have shelved biomass?
I’m concerned about biomass in Michigan… is there any regulation of the number of plants (that’s power plants) and the capacity? Seems like there should be. Otherwise every town could build one. Before long there would be too many plants and fewer plants to cut down.
I’m running for GT County Bd of Commissioners Dist 7.
peace,
Tom

Tom:
You raise good questions about oversight and management. The TCLP proposal included a sustainable forestry initiative to assure steady fuel supply. After all, what sense does it make to build a biomass plant that couldn’t secure fuel at an affordable rate, causing electric rates to rise? By the way, TCLP had a plentiful supply of fuel from cherry orchard tree wastes, which are routinely burned in giant bonfires with no emissions control or harvesting of heat value at all.

The easy politic here is the flat out lying, exaggeration, misinformation, and fear-mongering of opponents. It was eye-opening to me and reflected the stiff resistance at the grassroots to clean energy projects. I’ve written extensively about that on my ModeShift blog. Check out the bottom of this piece.

Clean energy development is dividing American environmentalism in interesting and potentially harmful ways. The inflexible ideological wing, expressed by TC biomass proponents, essentially wants to do nothing different. The risk of doing something to take care of baseload generating needs was rejected, and the utility’s 30 by 20 goal is likely dead for a good while. That’s a shame if you are convinced that anything we can do to reduce the effects of climate change are worthwhile.

I’ve worked and reported on the climate and energy sector for years and know there is no easy answer.

Some in the TCLP public meetings called for more natural gas generation, but the risks of doing that have been very high in the Antrim play — shredding the forests with 10,000 well pads and thousands of new miles of roads and pipelines. The risks of the new deep shale play are unknown in Michigan but similar formations in other states are raising havoc with water supplies. I also wonder whether Traverse City residents are any more willing to build a right-size natural gas-fired plant within city boundaries.

Some called for reversing a public decision two years ago and rebuilding the Boardman dams, which generate 2 mw. The cost is high and the environmental goal of restoring the river’s natural flow would be halted.

Some called for more efficiency, a good idea and well worth pursuing, as TCLP is doing with more success than most Michigan utilities. But saving energy doesn’t replace the need to also generate it. It also doesn’t obviate the need to replace coal-fired baseload generation.

Some called for more wind, which TCLP is executing. Wind has an important role but is intermittent and doesn’t replace the need for baseload energy.

So the utility pursued a path I call radical pragmatism. If your goal is to reduce reliance on coal, the dirtiest and most resource-wasting fuel there is, and you want to do so with a local source of renewable energy to replace baseload coal-fired electrical generation, then TCLP had a reasonable response. Build a right-size, 10 mw, clean-burning, state-of-the-art, wood-burning, gasification plant that generates heat and power and makes a lot of sense.

It generates half the C02 emissions of a coal-fired plant and burns much more cleanly than the wood-burning stoves that operate in the northwest Michigan homes of its critics. It produces no mercury to contaminate water and fish and no heavy metals, like a coal-burning utility. It will never account for anything like the 29 mining deaths that occurred earlier this year in an Appalachian coal mine. And it produces little if any of the health-threatening particulates that the sham “authorities” contended would sicken women and children. In fact all those light trucks, SUVs, diesel-powered, and gasoline-powered cars the critics drive each day actually produce and stir up health-threatening particulates, as do the western strip mines and coal-burning power plants that provide the region’s electricity.

Lastly, building that state-of-the-art biomass plant would permanently employ 20 or 30 people in good benefits-paying jobs and keep in the community the $4 million dollars that TCLP is sending each year downstate to generate power and to western strip mines and railroads to bring the fuel to Michigan.

As you can see I’m no politician. It’s just clear to me that when weighing the risks and benefits a right-sized modern biomass plant makes more sense than what’s almost certain to occur now. TCLP will be forced to sign contracts with coal-fired utilities to provide Traverse City electricity at reasonable cost. One of those contracts could be with a proposed new plant in Bay City that some of those very same biomass critics have been fighting, in order to block its construction.

What happened with the biomass plant reflects all kinds of social and economic trends that are colliding, including an oppressive fear of the future that has produced a crippling politics of stasis — on the right and on the left.

Best of luck in your campaign, Keith

– Keith Schneider

Late last month more than 1 million gallons of crude oil leaked into the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan, the biggest oil accident in the Midwest ever. This has been the year of understanding the oil/water nexus, even if it’s seawater.

This week the U.S. estimated that the BP Gulf blowout poured 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. Even with the 800,000 barrels that BP said it collected and skimmed, the disaster is, by most measures, the largest ever. That includes the mess Saddam Hussein unleashed after the first Gulf War in 1991. Kellyn Eberhardt, a colleague at the US Climate Action Network, sent these confirming statistics.

Gulf War oil spill: January 23, 1991
2,000,000 – 6,000,000 barrels
84,000,000 – 250,000,000 gallons
270,000 – 820,000 tons

Sources:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/5258v781742…
http://www.unep.org/dewa/westasia/data/Knowledg…
http://www.marinergroup.com/oil-spill-history.htm

Deepwater Horizon oil spill: April 20, 2010
4,900,000–8,700,000 barrels
154,600,000–348,000,000 gallons
414,000–1,186,000 tons

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03spill.ht…
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/gulf.coast.oil…
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/…

Given the dearth of new economic strategies that make sense and actually work, it’s appropriate to again take note of what’s happening here in my home state of Michigan around clean energy development. The more you think about it, the clearer the significance of what Governor Jennifer Granholm (with the president in pix above at July 15 groundbreaking of a new lithium-ion battery plant in West Michigan) has accomplished becomes clearer and clearer.

In short, one of the important and unsung low-carbon economy success stories in the United States, one that’s been shaped by a fortunate convergence of state and federal investment, is rapidly taking shape in Michigan. More than 40 new plants have been built, are under construction, or approaching ground-breaking to manufacture components for wind and solar energy, and to scale up Michigan’s electric vehicle sector, particularly the construction of new manufacturing plants to make dense, powerful lithium ion batteries.

Some $9 billion has been invested — $6 billion for next generation electric vehicles, $3 billion for solar, wind, and other energy alternatives – which represents a mix of private capital, state tax incentives, and federal grants from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Gov. Granholm asserts that the first phase of the state’s industrial redevelopment already has produced over 3,000 new jobs and will soon produce 86,000 more.

Senate Failure, Michigan Advances
This morning, just days after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that action on a proposed Oil disaster response  bill would not occur at least until September, and advocates worried it may not happen at all, Gov. Granholm appeared at a clean energy briefing in Washington at the Center For American Progress. She was asked what she would do to advance comprehensive national climate and energy legislation.

“We have to get off the debate about whether global warming is occurring,” said the two-term Democratic governor. “We have to talk about jobs.”

She added: “Assume that the 132 countries that made commitments to cut their emissions are serious. Assume that those countries have analyzed the jobs that are inherent to do that. Then the best argument is about jobs for America. We need all kinds of jobs for all kinds of people. We are turning our back on this opportunity. Let’s just talk about the opportunity for jobs.”

Over the last eight weeks, as the work to achieve a comprehensive national climate and energy policy devolved from President Obama’s “new national mission” to no bill at all, the reasons for the collapse have been turned over and again like a compost pile.

It’s Jobs Stupid
The environmental community mounted a multi-faceted campaign in and outside Washington to accomplish its goal of cooling the planet. It hasn’t worked at the federal level. Gov. Granholm’s advice is to focus on heating up the economy.

We ought to think hard about embracing the counsel more than we have. Michigan has served for years as a warning sign for the economic and social dysfunction that occurs when major industries and government utterly fail to keep pace with changing markets. It still has the second highest unemployment rate in the nation.

Yet since the signing of the federal stimulus bill in February 2009, the state has emerged, arguably, as the nation’s clearest example of the real progress that can be made in job growth, modernization, and carbon emissions reductions when industry and government collaborate to command a new market.

In a nation where people care most about either finding or hanging on to a good job, isn’t that the best way to reach voters and the political leaders who represent them?

– Keith Schneider

Gabrielle Gurley, a writer for Commonwealth, the magazine of the think tank MassINC, has a rigorously balanced assessment in the most recent issue of the simmering dispute in American environmentalism about big clean energy projects. All across the country, including Massachusetts, where Gurley bases her reporting, grassroots environmentalists are fighting to block clean energy installations.

In the battle between principle and pragmatism, the efforts by older green activists is producing a generational schism in the movement, one of several fractures opening in American environmentalism around clean energy and climate issues.

“Younger environmentalists, alarmed by climate change, seem to have less patience for the siting battles,” reports Gurley. “Alyssa Pandolfi, in her third year of environmental science studies at Northeastern University, is a member of the Husky Energy Action Team, which looks for ways to get students and university departments to reduce their energy usage. She gets frustrated with environmentalists who are more concerned about blocking wind farms than they are about greenhouse gases, acid rain, or the chronic diseases that affect people in coal mining states like West Virginia and Kentucky. “What’s a wind turbine on the horizon if we are killing people [with] our current energy system?” she asks.

Craig Altemose, a graduate student at Harvard and the coordinator of Students for a Just and Stable Future, lobbies on Beacon Hill for a task force to research how the state can move toward 100 percent clean energy statewide in the next decade. He believes that there is no legitimate way to oppose wind projects based on their impact on the environment.

“Every place that you try to preserve today is going to be a different place a hundred years from now if we don’t stop putting carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” he says.”

Readers of ModeShift know how concerned I’ve been about the environmental movement’s response to scaling up the clean energy sector. Earlier this year I designed and helped to execute a public engagement process to help a local utility, Traverse City Light and Power, generate 30 percent of its energy from local renewable resources. The utility wanted to build a right-size, 10 mw, wood burning biomass gasification plant  to replace  dirty coal-burning baseload generation.

Grassroots leaders objected, asserting the plant would “slaughter” forests, “injure” public health with particulates, and cause all sorts of other entirely fictional results. The utility board, after initially voting to approve the biomass plant, abandoned the idea in June citing public opposition. One of the board members who approved and participated actively in the communications plan, Jim Carruthers, who’s also a Traverse City commissioner, then ripped me in the local news for doing “a horrible job” in the engagement process. So  much for working with political pipsqueaks.

By no means, though, was the utility’s experience with such opposition unique.

• The resistance at the grassroots to wood biomass is occurring in Michigan and six other states.
• Grassroots resistance to geothermal energy is occurring in California and Hawaii.
• Grassroots opposition to new transmission lines is occurring in seven states.
• California is a hotbed of opposition to solar thermal projects.
• Opposition to wind projects is occurring in 13 states.

There will be more reporting on this divide in environmentalism. It represents a threat to the air, water, and land that environmentalists assert they want to protect. It also represents a threat to the movement’s credibility, which this year is sustaining huge damage with its failure (our failure, my failure) to move a nation to action on energy and climate. How can a movement remain influential when one sector — national groups in Washington — actively fights for clean energy investment that a second significant sector — the grassroots — doesn’t think is valuable and is organizing to block. Answer: it can’t.

– Keith Schneider

HOLLAND, Mich. — In February 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which among other things provided $2.4 billion to encourage development of a domestic industry to make lighter, more energy-dense lithium-ion batteries to power electric vehicles.