Articles by Gar Lipow

Economics, policy, and vision for fighting global warming

Z magazine has published an extended article by me on the politics and economics of global warming. It begins:

Nobody, except for a small lunatic fringe, still disputes that human-caused climate chaos endangers all of us. Further, most serious scientific and technical groups who have looked at the question have concluded that we have the technological capability today to replace greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuels with efficiency improvements and clean energy -- usually at a maximum cost of around the current worldwide military budget, probably much less. The question therefore is: What's stopping us?

To answer that we need to look at the causes of global warming -- not the physical causes, but the economic and political flaws in our system that have prevented solutions from being implemented long after the problem was known.

One driver is inequality and the maintenance of power that keeps inequality in place produces perverse incentives in resource use.

Read the whole thing. (Note this will disappear behind a paywall eventually. I urge you to buy a copy of Zmag or subscribe to the electronic edition to support alternative media. But if you want to read it for free, grab your electronic copy now.)

Don’t be afraid to claim the term ‘environmentalist’

A number of Grist contributors have grumpily said things along the lines of, "I'm not an environmentalist," or "I'm not sure I'm an environmentalist."

Environmentalism comes in all flavors. Wanting to protect natural environments because they benefit humans is a perfectly valid form of environmentalism -- in fact, I'd argue more valid than the "humans are evil, tapeworms are virtuous" variety. If you want to protect our world against the worst consequences of global warming, if you want clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and yes, some wilderness and wild left for the sake of your sanity, then you are an environmentalist.

Every now and then I will run into someone who says, "yes, I think women are fully human and should be treated as such. I believe in equal pay for equal work, anti-discrimination laws, anti-harassment laws. I think there are important ways in which women are not treated as fully human that have to be changed. But I'm not a feminist." If you believe those things, you are a feminist. You are just buying into an anti-feminist stereotype. And not calling yourself a feminist won't stop all mini-Limbaughs who dominate talk radio from calling you whatever the latest version of "feminazi" is. Similarly, if want to protect the environment, even for the most anthropocentric reasons in the world, claiming not to be environmentalist won't protect you against being called names by those who think the ideal breakfast is fried spotted owl cooked over an open flame fueled by old-growth timber. So own the term "environmentalist." Claim it proudly. Don't let hate-mongers define it, or purity trolls monopolize it.

[Updated title to take out the damn 60s reference the editor put in.]

More than half of today’s electricity, more than 16 percent of today’s energy

Enough sunlight strikes unshaded U.S. rooftops to replace all the coal and some of the natural gas we use to make electricity. Backup via ground source heat pumps, and smart grid technology would allow this variable energy source to displace base-load coal with today's technology. Whether this is the most cost effective way to displace coal is another question. Also rooftop solar is a silver BB rather than a silver bullet: Even after massive efficiency improvements we will need to get many times the power from non-rooftop sources than from rooftops.

According to a 2003 study by the Energy Foundation (PDF), solar PV that converts 15 percent of sunlight to electricity could produce 710,000 Megawatts on rooftops that will be available in 2050. Doug Wood thinks that with concentrating PV using advanced aerospace quality cells we could convert solar at 30 percent rather than 15 percent efficiency. Scaling back to rooftops available today (using 2003 numbers from the same study and extrapolating forward) we could produce around 1.05 billion megawatts today. We normally assume 22 percent capacity factor (PDF) for PV. So that would give us about 2.3 billion megawatt hours, or around 56 percent of today's electrical production -- more than coal provides.

Further, waste heat from this process could provide much of our heating and cooling needs as well. The EF study I cited suggests that about 65 percent of commercial roof space is unshaded compared to about 22 percent of residential roof space. Since some commercial scale chillers run on low to medium temp heat today, with enough storage solar CHP could provide close to 100 percent of commercial heating and cooling. But that much storage takes a lot of capital for a small incremental gain. So more realistically, we would put 16 to 24 hours of low temp Phase Change Material storage and use ground source heat pumps to provide the other 15 percent of low temp needs. As a side effect, the overnight storage would let us run those heat pumps when the electricity was cheapest -- which will prove more important than it might appear at first glance.

Kudzu as the next biofuel source?

Some biofuel experts seem to think that the next big biofuel source should be kudzu in the U.S.

I hope biodiversity experts and readers from the South will comment on this idea. Take the poll beneath the fold: