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Former TVA head rips coal, coal ash, coal industry, kids on his lawn

On Monday Living on Earth did a priceless interview with former utility exec David Freeman, ex-head of the TVA (and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the New York Power Authority), about the massive Tennessee coal ash spill.

Freeman's a crusty old coot (in a good way!) and he minces no words. Hard to pick my favorite bit, but this is a gem:

CURWOOD: Now it seemed to me though that there must be some kind of alternative to just dumping the stuff in a big pile. I mean, what alternatives, if any, are there out there?

FREEMAN: Well, the best one is to stop burning the coal and shut the plant down and use solar power and wind power. I am not gonna suggest that there is a clean way to control the filthy stuff that's left over when you burn coal. It's time that we outlawed new coal-fired plants and start systematically by age, shutting down the old ones.

Or this:

VRB's long-life flow battery was a reliable electricity storage alternative for renewable energy

VRB Power applied for insolvency in November [PDF]. A combination of a bad economy and a product that was more suited for future markets than today's electricity generators dealt VRB the final blow. This is bad news for the green energy community.

VRB built flow batteries -- utility scale batteries that could last for over 10,000 full charges and discharges. Cost was from $650 per kWh for small-scale systems to as a little as $300 per kWh for large-scale systems.

Admittedly the latter price was for larger systems than anyone ever ordered. It was the perfect utility-scale battery: too heavy for automobile use, but rugged and tolerant of cold, heat, and shocks. It required minimal operations and maintenance.

Even at current costs, these flow batteries could have played a key role in an energy grid based on variable sources. In today's world, it found a niche market at UPS for remote systems where maintenance was difficult, and for telecom use. Unfortunately its greater reliability could not make up for its higher cost. It was an excellent product, unfortunately mostly suited to a electric system that does not yet exist.

We can only hope the battery does not end up in patent hell -- owned by somebody who neither licenses it nor develops it themselves.

'Plan B' efficiency and conservation measures drop energy demand by 2020

Projections from the International Energy Agency show global energy demand growing by close to 30 percent by 2020, setting the stage for massive growth in the carbon dioxide emissions that are warming our planet. But dramatically ramping up energy efficiency would allow the world to not only avoid growth in energy demand but also actually reduce global demand to below 2006 levels by 2020.

We can reduce the amount of energy we use by preventing the waste of heat and electricity in buildings and industrial processes and by switching to efficient lighting and appliances. We can also save an enormous amount of energy by restructuring the transportation sector. Many of the needed energy efficiency measures can be enacted relatively quickly and pay for themselves.

Buildings are responsible for a large share of global electricity consumption and raw materials use. In the United States, buildings account for 70 percent of electricity use and close to 40 percent of total CO2 emissions. Retrofitting existing buildings with better insulation and more-efficient appliances can cut energy use by 20 to 50 percent. A U.S.-based group of forward-thinking architects and engineers has set forth the Architecture 2030 Challenge, with the goal of reducing fossil-fuel use in new buildings 80 percent by 2020 on the way to going entirely carbon-neutral by 2030.

A legacy-making move for the outgoing prez

President George W. Bush deserves praise from ocean lovers for his creation of three new marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean. This action protects some of the few remaining pristine coral reefs in the world by prohibiting all forms of commercial fishing and severely restricting recreational fishing.

These are among the last places on the planet where you can still see sharks and other top predators in something like a healthy state. President Bush -- and the Pew Environment Group, Marine Conservation Biology Institute and Environmental Defense Fund, who worked so hard for these monuments -- can be justifiably proud of the results.

It's easy to point out that the protected areas around the 10 islands could have been 16-times larger if Bush had included the full 200-mile exclusive economic zone in the monuments. As National Geographic scientist Enric Sala points out, there's no magic scientific line at 50 miles. It looks more like a political line to me.

More on Jones and green jobs in the New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert waxes New Yorker-ish over Van the Man. You know, in case you've been busy under that rock.

They affect consumers the same either way, and upstream is simpler and more transparent

In his post on conservatives and carbon taxes, David said:

First, we have to remember all the places the price signal created by an upstream tax can be diluted or stymied on the way to consumers -- i.e., those who can change their behavior in response to prices. Not every industry or business will pass an increase in operating costs directly on to the next link in the chain. Information failures and split incentives abound. Price signals that begin strong, catholic, and clear become fragmented and faint downstream. For all the hype, an upstream carbon price will deliver fairly little incentive to where the carbon is used.

There are two problems with this: It is overstated, and it places blame in the wrong place, i.e., the fact that the tax is levied upstream.

The Kheel-Komanoff Plan: A congestion toll to liberate New York

Back in 1993, I took a scalpel to the "AUTO-FREE NEW YORK" sticker on my bike, excising the first "R" so that "AUTO-FREE" became "AUTO-FEE." After years of battling motor vehicles, first as an urban cyclist and later as president of the bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, I became convinced that it made more sense to charge for cars' use of roads than to try to eliminate them. "Don't ban cars, bill them!" Discourage vehicle use by internalizing the harms from driving in the price to drive, and invest the revenues in mass transit and other alternatives.

Since then, cities like London, Stockholm, and Milan have demonstrated the power of road pricing to reduce driving and cut travel times, pollution damages, crash costs, and the like. But even those gains pale beside the profusion of benefits for New York City promised by a new plan I've developed with Ted Kheel:

• Enough revenue to finance an average 60 percent cut in transit fares;
• A 15 percent-or-greater improvement in traffic speeds in gridlocked Manhattan;
• Yogi Berra made real: greater usage of less-crowded buses and subways;
• More car-free spaces, and fewer cars, in the heart of the city.

The Kheel-Komanoff Plan (so named to distinguish it from the "pure" Kheel Plan approach, with 100 percent-free transit) delivers all this with just four measures:

Tim DeChristopher and Utah stand up to Big Oil

I've never been big on rules.

Neither, apparently, is Tim DeChristopher. He's the young activist who just completely derailed the Bush administration's plans to sell more of our public lands to the oil companies.

He sat in the lease sale in Salt Lake City on Dec. 19 and "bought" 22,500 acres of public lands right out from under the suits from Chevron and Exxon.

One small problem -- Tim doesn't actually have the money. It almost doesn't matter, though, because he's monkeywrenched the process so thoroughly that they won't be able to conduct another sale until after the Obama administration takes over -- and thus hopefully never.

Tim needs to raise $45,000 by this Friday, Jan. 9, in order to avoid fraud charges and put the sale out of reach to the Bush administration and their oily friends. He's already raised almost half.

I, for one, will be supporting Tim DeChristoper, Bidder 70, with a tax-deductible contribution via the Center for Water Advocacy in Moab, Utah.

He deserves thanks for reminding all of us that direct action still gets the goods!

An open reply to James Hansen's open letter

Dear Dr. Hansen:

An old engineer's dictum says "fast, cheap, good: pick two." Unfortunately, and I'm sure completely contrary to your intention, your solution to global warming favors "cheap" over fast.

Energy efficiency, renewable energies, and a "smart grid" deserve first priority in our effort to reduce carbon emissions. With a rising carbon price, renewable energy can perhaps handle all of our needs. However, most experts believe that making such presumption probably would leave us in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants worldwide. Such a result would be disastrous for the planet, humanity, and nature.

Fourth generation nuclear power (4th GNP) and coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at present are the best candidates to provide large baseload nearly carbon-free power (in case renewable energies cannot do the entire job).

OK, this begs the question of why depending on efficiency, carbon negative forestry and agriculture, and renewables would leave us "in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants worldwide."

We certainly have the physical capacity to build wind and solar generators that could provide all our power. Archer and Jacobson, perhaps the world's leading experts on wind potential, estimate that wind energy at 80 meters in commercially developable sites alone could could supply [PDF] five times the world's current energy demand. Note the emphasis: That is not five times world's current electricity consumption, but five times total world energy consumption, including cars and factories and non-electric heating¹. Similarly, solar thermal power plants of the type already running in U.S. deserts² can provide the world's entire energy needs [PDF] from less than 1 percent of total desert land³. Those are only two possibilities, albeit the ones with the biggest potential with today's technology.

Obama's campaign ag adviser mounts a weak defense of industrial food

Will Obama lead food and ag policy in new directions?

He raised hope late in the campaign season, when he indicated he had read -- and understood -- Michael Pollan's "Farmer in Chief" essay.

Since then, things have turned more dour. Obama made a boldly conventional pick for USDA chief -- a corn-belt ex-governor with ties to the GMO and biofuel industries. And now the chief adviser to this campaign on agricultural issues, Marshall Matz, has come out with a Chicago Tribune op-ed advocating a business-as-usual approach to ag policy. Matz co-wrote the piece with Democratic Party eminence grise (and farm-state politician) George McGovern.