A team of scientists at Harvard have discovered how to make crazy, beautiful, very tightly controlled shapes that are so tiny they’re invisible to the naked eye. Just by making simple changes in the environment in which salt and silicon crystals grow, they’ve made gardens of flower-like structures. Wim Noorduin, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, grew a variety of these “flowers,” recently featured in the journal Science.

The process starts with a solution of salt and and silicon. By altering the acidity, alkalinity, and temperature of the solution, Noorduin discovered he could make his structures grow outward or inward. In other words, he could control the way the petals on his flowers are furled or unfurled. The thickness of the flowers’ petals is determined by how much carbon dioxide is introduced to the compounds. Combining various steps allowed him tighter control to manipulate the shape. He once created an entire field of these flowers on a penny, picturesquely planted along the base of the Lincoln Memorial. Noorduin, who is Dutch, also grew a tulip, because Dutch people are obsessed with tulips, even microscopic ones.

To be clear, Harvard’s main goal here was not to make teeny tiny beautiful flowers. That was just something that sort of happened as the researchers went about the very serious business of making “industrial applications.” The reason the flowers are significant is they demonstrate how precisely scientists can control shapes, even at this scale. But I bet a lot of people will just settle for the flowers.

Don’t freak out, but there’s a problem with green roofs: They’re not necessarily greener than ordinary roofs. Soooooo kind of a major problem. With a little extra effort, though, green roofs can be efficient AND locally sourced — you just can’t take the easy way out.

Scientific American reports:

[R]ooftop vegetation has to be able to survive the high winds, prolonged UV radiation and unpredictable fluctuations in water availability. To resist these harsh environments, a majority of green roofs are planted with sedum, a non-native species that can survive wind and long periods without rainfall. A roof planted with sedum, however, is no greener, from the standpoint of sustainability, than is ordinary tar or asphalt.

Sedum, it turns out, absorbs sunlight, just like a tar roof would, and isn’t particularly good at absorbing water. Planting your green roof with sedum is like hiring employees based on how long they can physically sit in an office chair instead of how good they are at doing the work. Sedum plants are hardy, but they don’t do anything: “They’re just there,” one scientist studying the plants told SciAm.

But, hey, there’s another way of doing this: Plant diverse groups of native species. Only problem with that is that it might take a little bit of effort to keep them thriving. Someone might have to visit the green roof of the corporate office building every once in a while. Sounds terrible.

While most of Washington, D.C., is consumed with the faux scandals du jour, in a few corners of Congress, actual work is getting done. A day 329 days late and a dollar $20 billion short, perhaps, the farm bill, an every-five-years legislative train[wreck], lumbers slowly forward.

Both the House and the Senate agriculture committees have just passed their own versions of the massive piece of legislation that controls U.S. agricultural policy as well as the federal nutrition program formerly known as food stamps (now called SNAP). A full House and Senate vote is the next step. Congress tried and failed to pass a farm bill last year. The question now is whether Congress can do it this time.

Actually, the question really is whether Congress will ever pass a farm bill again. For the first time, those close to the legislative process are starting to have their doubts. And that may be a really bad thing.

Bah, humbug, you say! The farm bill is larded with bipartisan subsidies for the largest-scale farmers who grow commodities like corn, soy, and cotton. It’s also the bill that authorizes the federal crop insurance program, which has grown like gangbusters over the last decade. Last year (thanks to the drought) farmers received over $17 billion in insurance payouts — almost all of which benefited large-scale commodity agriculture. A chicken pox on all their coops!

That not an unreasonable reaction. But also at stake in the farm bill are billions of dollars for conservation programs that help farmers mitigate the environmental effects of their work, and pay them to set aside marginal farmland as wildlife habitat. It also contains millions in federal funds that support organic farmers, help younger and “new” farmers get their start, and prop up local food efforts, organic research, and farmers markets.

Admittedly, both bills are, by the standards of sustainable agriculture, horrible. The Senate’s is the more “benign” of the two. It “only” cuts food stamps by $4 billion and conservation funding by $3.6 billion. It reduces farm subsidies by $16 billion, but increases crop insurance by $5 billion — a huge gift to corporate ag.

The House hews to the Senate blueprint overall, though it’s even friendlier to agribusiness, if that’s possible. But the House wants to cut a whopping $20 billion from food stamps — dropping from the program up to 2 million hungry Americans who are still suffering the effects of the Great Recession.

Ag Committee members will applaud themselves for also ending the controversial and wasteful subsidy program known as “direct payments” whereby farmers who grow certain commodity crops get cash regardless of how much they actually plant. But almost all the savings harvested from this program are plowed back into the expansion of crop insurance — including the introduction of an outrageous new “revenue insurance” program that would pay farmers in the event of small drops in prices. This would come at a time when crop prices and farm revenue are at all-time highs (more on the history of this proposed policy is here).

There are a few bright spots. Senate Ag Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) managed to include a provision in the Senate version that would link participation in the crop insurance program with adoption of conservation practices, and includes additional protections for disappearing native grasslands. The House version boosts funding for “new farmer” programs and a few local food initiatives.

But the bill, as envisioned by both houses of Congress, continues to be a virtual giveaway to the largest farmers while leaving crumbs to sustainable agriculture and small and medium-sized farmers. On many counts, it’s even worse than its 2008 predecessor.

So will it pass in the end? The answer is somewhere between “Reply hazy try again” and “Cannot predict now.” Both the House and Senate leadership have promised a vote by the end of June — so that’s something. But getting it through Congress will be a trick.

House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) could use the same trick he used to avoid the “fiscal cliff” earlier this year: pass a harsher version of the bill through the Tea Party-controlled House with only Republican votes, and then turn around and pass a final compromise version — with lower cuts to food stamps — using mostly Democratic votes. But there’s reason to believe that the Tea Party wing may not stand for such a maneuver — and that the farm bill could die on the vine for the second time in a year.

It’s those food stamps cuts that threaten to doom the whole enchilada. The Senate passed a farm bill last year that included $4 billion in cuts and likely will again. But splitting the difference with the House version — say, adding another $8 billion in cuts to food stamps — is a non-starter in the Senate. Meanwhile, the Tea Party wing of the House killed the farm bill last year because food stamp cuts weren’t deep enough, so it is unlikely to support less than the $20 billion figure currently in the House version.

The death of such an abysmal farm bill would likely be greeted with cheers and confetti from some corners. After all, according to an analysis of federal data by the Environmental Working Group, 75 percent of crop subsidy payments go to the top 10 percent of farmers. A mere 10 percent of farmers also received just over half of the total crop insurance subsidies in 2011, including over two dozen farms that received $1 million each in insurance subsidies.

But Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, warns critics to be careful what they wish for. Reformers “would really be in big trouble” if the farm bill dies once and for all, Hoefner told me in an interview. While subsidies might still get tweaked here and there in a post-farm bill era, “the chance for investment in local food or farmers or organic or anything else will just go up in smoke.”

The reason is that the improvements to conservation policy and organic production and local food and farmers markets and so on have all been funded out of money pulled from the tens of billions of dollars spent on commodity crop subsidies. Without that “piggy bank,” as Hoefner called it, there’s no just no money for those programs, especially in the current era of federal budget sequestration.

If the farm bill fails, crop insurance would persist indefinitely without any further congressional involvement. The food stamps program does need minor adjustments every few years, but those can and have been handled outside of the farm bill. Every other component, however, would require new laws to be passed every few years. And as Hoefner observed, the parts of the farm bill most dear to sustainable agriculture advocates would be the parts least likely to survive as stand-alone bills.

Would the failure of the farm bill lead to a real shake-up in how the government makes farm and nutrition policy? Maybe. A crisis is also an opportunity and all that. But it’s also still a crisis. And very soon, farmers and eaters may find themselves in a big one.

As of this week, Loflin has planted America’s first real crop of industrial hemp in more than a half-century.

The 40-year-old farmer from Springfield, Colo., has been scheming for months. “I believe this is really going to revitalize and strengthen farm communities,” Loflin told the Denver Post in April. Now he’s leased 60 acres of his father’s alfalfa farm to plant and tend the hundreds of hemp starters he’s already been grooming.

Hemp, for those who aren’t familiar, is a variety of cannabis that — sorry kids! — won’t get you high. Strong, nutritious, and super sustainable to grow, hemp is used for everything from rope to cereal. It requires few herbicides, and has even been called carbon negative by some boosters. And while it’s illegal to grow it in the U.S., it’s not illegal to sell. Right now imported hemp — the only legal kind — accounts for about $500 million in annual U.S. sales, according to the Hemp Industries Association.

So what if it were homegrown, Loflin-style?

Loflin’s not completely on his own here. Colorado legalized hemp, along with recreational marijuana, last November. Last week, Colorado passed a bill that would register hemp farmers with the state and create a committee that would work with farmers and the Department of Agriculture to (hopefully) keep plants in the fields and farmers out of jail.

“This is monumental for our industry,” Bruce Perlowin, chief executive of Hemp Inc., told the Denver Post. “It will unlock a clean industrial revolution that will be good for the economy, good for jobs, and good for the environment.”

In April, Kentucky passed a measure to legalize industrial hemp production, over the objections of local law enforcement who said it would turn the state’s residents into a bunch of stoners. Kentucky farmers are a bit more cagey about plowing ahead Loflin-style, though, and are instead lobbying the feds to just make this stuff legal already.

So far, though, the feds aren’t buying it. The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013, first introduced in Congress in February, is currently chilling on a couch in committee, with no vote in sight.

Because that dank shit sustainable fiber is still straight-up Schedule I illegal, hemp farmers don’t qualify for federal crop insurance and other government benefits afforded to farmers of legal crops. And fear of reprisal is keeping many farmers and researchers away, even in states that say it’s OK.

“The law is clear on this matter,” a board member at Colorado State University, a top farming research school, wrote in a letter to U.S. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), “and we do not want to do anything that would unintentionally result in personal criminal liability for CSU employees or that would disqualify the institution from obtaining future government funding.”

Without movement in Washington, this fibrous future rests with folks like Loflin, who are willing to risk jail time for this plant. But even if Loflin lands behind bars, he’ll always be able to say he was the first. As he told Denver’s Westword, “It’s my crazy competitive nature.”

The conflict between electric utilities and distributed energy — mainly rooftop solar panels — is heating up. It’s heating up so much that people are writing about electric utility regulation, the most tedious, inscrutable subject this side of corporate tax law. The popular scrutiny is long overdue. So buckle up. We’re getting into it.

I wrote about the fight a while back — “solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities ” — but it’s worth taking a closer look at what’s under dispute. Some bits are unavoidably wonky and technical, but it’s important to understand exactly what’s happening. This is a pivotal issue, a trial run for many such struggles to come.

There’s a short-term problem and a long-term problem. The former is about how electricity rates are structured, specifically how utilities compensate (or don’t) customers who generate power with rooftop solar PV panels. The latter is about developing an entirely new business model for utilities, one that aligns their financial interests with the spread of distributed energy. The danger is that fighting over the former could delay solving the latter.

Today, let’s dig into the fight at hand. It’s about utility rates, specifically “net metering,” yet another nerdy green term no one understands. I will endeavor to make clear what it is and why the fight over it is so damn interesting and exciting. Exciting, I tell you! Wake up!

The utility perspective

First, note that I’m focusing here mostly on investor-owned utilities (IOUs), which serve about 70 percent of America’s customers. These are the old-school, for-profit, regulated-monopoly utilities, with a captive customer base and profits guaranteed by law. IOUs are the main (though not exclusive) force pushing back against distributed solar.

Here’s how IOUs make money: 1) they estimate how much power their customers will need; 2) they estimate the investments they’ll need to make in power plants, fuel, transmission lines, etc. in order to meet that demand; 3) they estimate what rate they need to charge customers to cover those investments and offer a reasonable “rate of return” to their investors; 4) they go to the state public utility commission (PUC) to make a “rate case” justifying the rate; 5) if the PUC signs off, the IOU charges that rate until time to make their next rate case.

The free market in action! [cough]

Anyway, that’s the rate residential customers pay: the PUC-approved “retail rate.” Typically, the retail rate bundles all the utility’s costs into a single package, not just the “variable costs” of fuel and electricity but also the “fixed costs” of investment in transmission lines, transformers, power plants, and the like.

That’s all background. Now. Into this milieu comes “net metering,” a policy in place in just over 40 states (though the details differ substantially from state to state). Under net metering, a residential customer with solar on her roof is credited the retail rate for the electricity she produces. If she produces as much electricity as she consumes, her bill nets out to zero. That means she’s not paying for electricity, but it also means she’s not paying anything toward the utility’s fixed costs. As more customers zero out their bill through net metering, fixed costs will be transferred to a smaller group of ratepayers, thus raising their rates (and their unholy ire).

According to utilities, this is not fair, since solar customers are still making use of the grid and the services that utilities provide. In fact, they say, the complexity of managing thousands of distributed solar panels makes grid management more difficult and costly. Through net metering, the customers who can’t afford solar end up subsidizing grid services for those who can.

That’s why utilities view net metering as unsustainable. That’s why they’re going after it in California, Texas, and elsewhere.

The immediate solutions favored by utilities are well-captured in the first two recommendations from that now-infamous Edison Electric Institute paper (the one where the utility trade group predicted a solar-induced death spiral). The first is that utilities institute a “monthly customer service charge to all tariffs in all states in order to recover fixed costs.” This “fixed charge” is something all homeowners would have to pay, whether or not they’d created a net surplus of electricity.

The second is to “develop a tariff structure to reflect the cost of service and value provided to [distributed energy] customers,” said service and value consisting in “off-peak service, back-up interruptible service, and the pathway to sell [distributed] resources to the utility or other energy supply providers.” To my ears, this sounds like a recommendation to pay rooftop solar producers wholesale rather than retail rates.

David Rubin of Pacific Gas & Electric sums up:

We need to set the stage for continued growth in solar in what we believe will be a sustainable way which is to not have solar customers that are being subsidised by the rest of our customers and producing unsustainable rates for those customers.

The solar perspective

Solar installers, customers, and advocates are not impressed by these arguments. In fact they are up in arms. Some of the country’s biggest solar installers have formed a group call the Alliance for Solar Choice to defend net metering. (This is happening in Australia too, where a campaign called Solar Citizens was just started for the same reason.)

They say: Gimme a break. Utilities don’t care when rates rise. That’s how utilities make their money.

Imagine if Walmart had a monopoly on retail sales. It could charge whatever it wanted for its goods, as long as the charges were approved by a PRC (public retail commission). In fact, the more Walmart bought, the more warehouses and stores it built, the bigger its truck fleet, the more it could justify charging customers. It was guaranteed a healthy rate of return on its investments, whether or not those investments were wise, whether or not customers end up needing them.

Would monopoly Walmart have any reason to object to rising retail prices? Of course not. Would it have any incentive to reduce costs? Of course not. As long as it’s got a captive customer base, it has no incentive to innovate or take chances.

That’s why utility customers are getting shafted all over the country. Utilities overestimate demand, underestimate efficiency, and contract for gigantic central-generation power plants that customers pay for whether or not they need the power. Why just elsewhere in California, Southern California Edison customers have been paying on the order of $68 million a month for a “refurbished” San Onofre nuclear plant that crapped out over a year ago and hasn’t produced a watt since. In Mississippi, rates are rising to pay for the new Kemper County coal-fired power plant. We Energies in Wisconsin is trying its damnedest to raise rates on its customers to pay for the ill-fated Oak Creek coal plant. And so on.

So no, utilities are not upset that solar is (allegedly) increasing some customers’ rates; they’re upset that solar is reducing their revenue. Rooftop solar panels are investments upon which utility shareholders receive no return. It’s competition they don’t like, the potential loss of their captive customers.

That, say solar advocates, is the core utility incentive, so anything from utilities about what they “need” to cope with solar should be taken with a large teaspoon of salt.

Relatedly, the notion that onsite solar generation and consumption is a “cost” to utilities is somewhat Kafka-esque. A home creating its own power basically unplugs itself from the grid. If you unplugged an old freezer or TV, would that be a “cost” to the utility? After all, the electricity that’s generated onsite on a solar home is used by that home or its immediate neighbors. It barely touches the utility’s transmission and distribution system. It is effectively delivered energy, which is why it gets the retail rate: It saves the utility on transmission and distribution costs. It also reduces line losses and the cost of meeting state renewable energy targets.

Nonetheless, last year, California Assemblyman Steven Bradford (D) — chair of the Committee on Utilities and Commerce and, ahem, a former Southern California Edison executive — managed to pass AB2514, which mandated that California PUCs consider onsite solar a cost. That’s how California utilities are trying to justify new fixed charges.

Tom Beach of energy research firm Crossborder Energy took those benefits into account when he analyzed the costs and benefits of net metering in California and (in a separate study) Arizona. He found that net metering will create a small net benefit for all customers: $92 million a year for customers in California and $34 million a year in Arizona, both by 2015. (Both these numbers are small beans relative to total utility revenue, by the way.)

This is from a Vote Solar infographic [PDF] on the California study:

And finally, solar advocates argue that utilities are ignoring the load-reducing benefits of distributed energy (and energy efficiency) in their resource and infrastructure planning. Distributed energy and efficiency reduce the utilities’ fixed costs by reducing the need for new power plants and transmission lines, but utilities don’t take that into account. They end up planning for — and justifying rates for — a level of infrastructure they won’t actually need. So those rising rates they’re squawking about are in part due to their own poor planning. Nick Chaset, energy advisor to California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), put it this way earlier this year:

… there is a bit of a disconnect in utility planning. … Typically, the investor-owned utilities do not fully account for the expected deployments of distributed resources in their distribution infrastructure planning. … [As a result,] we do some degree of double-paying. We are paying for the rooftop solar and a distribution system that is accounting for expected load growth that might be offset by that rooftop solar.

If utilities would plan around distributed resources better, solar advocates say, maybe they wouldn’t need to raise rates so much.

It’s not simple

My sense, looking on this battle from the outside, is that solar advocates have the stronger case, but that they’ve been a little too quick to go to Defcon 1 and tar all utilities as evil. Some utilities, at least, seem to be grappling with this issue in good faith.

Here’s a kind of parable. CPS Energy in San Antonio, a municipal (not investor-owned) utility generally considered a friend of solar, last month announced that it would scrap its net metering program and replace it with a “solar credit” worth about half as much. Solar advocates went ballistic. Among other things, they compared CPS unfavorably to Austin Energy, which offered a solar credit that was roughly twice as large.

Well, since then, CPS Energy has agreed to delay its move for a year, giving it time to work with solar advocates and installers to find a solution acceptable to everyone. Meanwhile, Austin Energy reduced its rebate for new solar installations.

This is not to say either utility is in the right, just that even the “good guy” utilities are struggling with the question of how to appropriately compensate for distributed solar. The fact is, as long as utilities operate under their current business model, rooftop solar really does hurt them.

What’s ultimately needed is not this kludgy, rate-jiggling solution, which will have utilities and solar advocates forever squabbling over pennies on the margins, but a deeper rethinking of the utility model, particular the investor-owned utility model.

It is to that deep thinking we will turn in my next post.

When shopping in any store that carries national brands, it’s virtually impossible to remember which ones you’re not supposed to buy for which reasons. This one uses palm oil … or was it this one? This brand is “all-natural” but it sprays evil chemicals all over the world. This company kills panda babies. And so forth. You can either hold out for Sunday’s farmers market and not eat in the meantime, or just go ahead and buy the cornmeal from the brand that’s probably in bed with Monsanto.

But now a programmer named Ivan Pardo is putting an end to this misery. Scan a product with his app, Buycott, and it analyzes the insane web of corporate ownership in order to tell you exactly what terrible policies you’d be supporting if you bought that cereal.

Forbes reports:

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.

Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.

There are also positive campaigns — you can support brands that support issues like gay marriage. Given that most corporations are terrible on some issue or another, this may not solve the “I can’t shop at a mainstream store without compromising my principles” problem. But at least you won’t have to guess.

Is it OK to slaughter hundreds of thousands of birds every year in the name of clean energy? Is it OK for a luxury home developer to kill California condors in its quest for profits?

The Obama administration seems to think so. It is flexing little to none of the legal muscle needed to encourage wind energy companies to avoid killing eagles, hawks, and other birds that can be fatally drawn into their spinning turbines.

An Associated Press investigation revealed that the administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing a bird. Many of the avian victims of the fast-growing wind sector are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and some are protected by the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

An estimated 573,000 birds were killed last year in the U.S. by wind turbines, the AP reported, citing a study published in March in the journal Wildlife Society Bulletin. About 83,000 of those were estimated to have been raptors.

From the AP article:

Each death is federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines. No wind energy company has been prosecuted, even those that repeatedly flout the law.

Wind power, a pollution-free energy intended to ease global warming, is a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s energy plan. His administration has championed a $1 billion-a-year tax break to the industry that has nearly doubled the amount of wind power in his first term.

The large death toll at wind farms shows how the renewable energy rush comes with its own environmental consequences, trade-offs the Obama administration is willing to make in the name of cleaner energy.

“It is the rationale that we have to get off of carbon, we have to get off of fossil fuels, that allows them to justify this,” said Tom Dougherty, a long-time environmentalist who worked for nearly 20 years for the National Wildlife Federation in the West, until his retirement in 2008. “But at what cost? In this case, the cost is too high.”

And it’s not only the wind industry that’s getting a free pass. The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed not to prosecute deaths of endangered California condors caused by two projects in California — one a wind farm being built in the Tehachapi Mountains, the other a luxury home, hotel, and golf-course development in the middle of condor country 60 miles north of Los Angeles. From the L.A. Times article:

Fish and Wildlife Director Daniel Ashe said the decision reflects a difficult reality. The threat of prosecution jeopardized the construction of large-scale alternative energy facilities and real estate developments in the wild and windy places preferred by condors.

“This is the first time we’ve authorized incidental takes of California condors — and we’re approaching them very cautiously,” Ashe said in an interview.

“The good news is that we have an expanding population of condors, which are also expanding their range,” he said. “We have to make sure that as the condor population grows, we are learning to work with local private businesses to fit a conservation effort into the landscape.”

The agency invited other wind farms to apply for similar permission.

Wildlife advocates and conservationists said the decision threatens the survival of the 150 free-flying condors in California and will weaken the concept of federally designated critical habitat for endangered species.

If wind energy firms are given free passes to kill federally protected birds, they’ll have less motivation to invest in wildlife-friendly technological advances, or to site their turbines in areas where bird strikes would be minimized. (And wind energy at least helps fight climate change, whereas there’s no public benefit from luxury real estate development.) Clean energy and wildlife can coexist, but such coexistence is going to take hard work, planning, research and development — and diligence and occasional heavy-handedness from the federal government.

North Carolina’s numerous coal plants might be driving Tar Heel State residents to kill themselves.

Suicide is a leading killer in America, and links between air pollution and suicide rates have been known for years. Breathing in bad air might drive people to take their own lives by worsening their health problems, affecting their nervous systems, or generally lowering their life satisfaction.

So Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researcher John Spangler set about trying to understand how polluting coal-fired power plants might affect county-by-county suicide rates in North Carolina, where the statewide rate is higher than the national average [PDF]. What he discovered was an alarming correlation.

Spangler looked at census data, mortality rates, and air contamination levels in North Carolina counties. He found that for every coal plant operating in a county, the number of yearly suicides rose by 1.96 people for every 100,000 people living there. The results were published in the Journal of Mood Disorders [PDF].

From a press release about the study, published by the medical center:

As there were 20 coal-fired electricity plants in North Carolina when this study was carried out, that means there were about 40 suicides a year per 100,000 population related to the plants. When applied to the state’s year 2,000 population of 8,049,313, this equals about 3,220 suicides a year associated with coal-fired electricity plants.

There are many factors that drive people to take their lives, of course, and there was no way that Spangler’s study could account for all of them. That said, he thinks his findings could be useful. Again from the press release: 

“Still, it raises the interesting question of whether suicide in a given population is related to the presence or absence of coal-fired electricity plants and the air quality,” he said. “Further research is needed to understand what factors related to coal burning actually are at play and suggest that tighter regulation of coal-fired power plant emissions might cut down on county suicide rates in North Carolina.”

North Carolina lawmakers are rushing to protect the state’s car dealers from Tesla’s subversive direct-to-consumer business model.

Silicon Valley-based Tesla sells its all-electric roadsters and sedans online and over the phone. It seems to be doing a pretty good job of it so far. It doesn’t sell its cars on the concrete lots or in the sterile showrooms of car salesmen, who take commissions that hike prices. The company considers dealerships unnecessary.

And that rubs the powerful North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association the wrong way.

The association wants a piece of the Tesla pie, and it’s accustomed to getting its way. State law already bars anybody other than a licensed dealer from selling more than four motor vehicles in a year.

The association has backed Senate Bill 327, sponsored by state Sen. Tom Apodaca (R), which would broaden the scope of that protectionist law to also cover internet and telephone sales.

From the Raleigh News & Observer:

The whole misunderstanding would go away, the dealers say, if Tesla sold its cars through licensed dealerships. [Tesla Business Development Vice President Diarmuid] O’Connell countered, in essence, that displaying a Tesla in a showroom of subcompacts and SUVs would be akin to selling Dom Perignon in the food court at the local mall.

Oh, snap.

But it’s not Tesla per se that worries the dealers. It’s the precedent. The prospect threatens the livelihood of North Carolina’s 7,000 licensed dealers, who invest millions in building big lots and showrooms to efficiently move product, say supporters of the bill.

“We care about the franchise system,” said Robert Glaser, president of the N.C. Automobile Dealers Association. “The whole point of the retail system is to protect the consumer.”

The local dealer is the customer’s point of contact on malfunctions, defects and recalls, Glaser said. Automakers are designers, manufacturers and wholesalers that remain largely invisible to the car buyers, he said.

“You tell me they’re gonna support the little leagues and the YMCA?” Glaser asked, directing his glance at the Tesla contingent milling about a few feet away in the legislative building.

Oh, snap back atcha, out-of-town tech company.

The North Carolina Senate’s Commerce Committee unanimously approved the legislation last week. Apparently, not a single committee member saw a problem with passing a law that would force a company to incorporate an old-fashioned and costly middleman into its business model.

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

Let’s say I win the lottery, and want to use my $50 million winnings to save the planet. For example, I could fund enviro groups. I could fund political campaigns to defeat Big Oil’s congressmen. Or I could provide subsidies to buyers of electric cars. But where would I find the biggest bang for my big bucks?

Hypothetically yours,
Mark M.
Athens, Ohio

A. Dearest Mark,

I would suggest you donate it to Grist. As it happens, we’re in the middle of a fundraising campaign, and $50 million would go a long way. (So would $5, come to think of it.) Imagine all the cruelty-free peppermint tea I could buy with that kind of cashola!

Your question is an intriguing one, and I will gladly use it as a break from discussions of dish soap and lightbulbs, not that I don’t love those too. Let’s indulge in a bit of good old-fashioned fantasizing.

What I would do with your hypothetical money, Mark, is a combination of things. First I’d take a tiny piece of it and upgrade my dwelling to make it as energy-efficient as possible. Then I’d invest another tiny piece of it in some sort of socially responsible way, creating an eco-nest egg for myself while supporting businesses that are doing the right thing. Then I’d pour myself a big glass of organic chocolate milk and look through an eco-crowdfunding site like ioby or Mosaic to find interesting and innovative ideas that need a boost. I would shy away from the ugly money games of politics and support solutions instead.

Figuring other people might like the chance to play with your Monopoly money, I reached out to a few sustainability leaders for their ideas. They all had a lot to say, and I cannot possibly do them justice in this space, so we’ve collected their full answers here.

But to paraphrase: Starting close to home, Grist’s own David Roberts offered a similar idea to mine, with a bit more focus and a bit less chocolate milk: “I would break it up into 50 $1 million chunks and seed-fund 50 different people/organizations doing work around community-based distributed energy … A little money in that area, spent strategically, could go a long way.”

José Quinoñez, executive director of Mission Asset Fund, says he would “invest every penny in funding advocacy groups that focus all of their energy on changing public policy … the only way to bend the curve on deadly emissions is to change our laws.”

Weighing in from SustainAbility, Executive Director Mark Lee offered another approach: “Like an investor trying to stay afloat while succeeding in the marketplace, I’d diversify,” he said, and laid out a plan for investing five $10 million chunks in five areas: a promising grassroots campaign; daring entrepreneurs; climate adaptation and mitigation efforts near home; conservation of biodiversity in an emerging economy; and key political battles. He would also, he added, “play The Barenaked Ladies’ ‘If I Had a Million Dollars’ 50 times.” (Remind me to stay away from Mark’s neck of the woods.)

Erika Allen, Chicago and national projects director of Growing Power, discussed the idea with her 5-year-old son: “He would buy buildings in the town and make sure everyone has a nice place to live and lots of strawberries to eat.” Erika would invest in “community food systems that are closed loop … that recirculate wealth and monetize everyone’s contributions and inputs.”

Green-investment pioneer Jack Robinson says programs focusing on human behavior are what really need a $50 million injection: “Unless and until employees, consumers, and voters integrate sustainability into all aspects of their daily lives, the planet will remain at risk.”

And Auden Schendler, VP of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of Getting Green Done, would put the money toward building a civil rights-style movement to solve climate change: “That would have much greater impact than, say, trying to fight Big Oil’s influence in politics, which laughs at your silly $50 million.”

As I said earlier, you can read everything these smart people had to say here. I’ll bet your fellow readers have even more ideas, which they will now share with us. In short, Mark, opinions on this topic are as diverse as the ideas and projects that could use our help. Too bad your windfall was a mythical one. Or was it? Call me.

Fisk-ally,
Umbra