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Let Him Without Synfuel Cast the First Stone

Air Force tests synfuel in jets The Air Force consumes more than half the fuel used by the entire U.S. government; in fiscal year 2005, it guzzled 3.2 billion gallons of jet fuel at a cost of $4.7 billion. Under a directive from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the military is conducting tests to determine whether […]

Consulting With the Devil

Can you work as an environmental consultant without losing your soul? Jacqueline is a 40-year-old environmental consultant who’s disillusioned by all the pollutocrats asking her to fudge data. She wants to make a career change — just one among many who are frustrated by their seemingly ineffectual eco-related jobs, says green-careers guru Kevin Doyle. In […]

Honorably Discharged

Supreme Court sides with enviros on licenses for hydroelectric dams Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the first environmental case considered under new Chief Justice John Roberts … and sided with enviros (supported, this time, by the Bush administration). At issue was a Maine case hinging on wording in the Clean Water […]

Michael Hayden Is Taking Notes

Chinese environmentalist faces trial on questionable charges Chinese environmental activist Tan Kai went on trial yesterday, facing charges widely considered dubious. Inspired by protests in the province of Zhejiang, where residents say chemical plants are destroying crops and causing birth defects, Tan and five others informally launched a group called Green Watch last summer. In […]

Americans and Climate Change: Representative recommendations

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

Below the fold is short list of the most prominent recommendations yielded by the conference's working groups. I tend to think too many of the recommendations pinned their hopes on the creation of new institutions, but I'd love to hear what y'all think.

Big Ethanol …

... wins again.

House Majority Leader John Boehner's attempt to lower the ethanol tariff (and thus allow ethanol-hungry oil refineries to purchase ethanol from overseas) has gone down in flames:

Sweden …

... is cool.

The built environment

It seems to me there's a bipartisan consensus forming -- at least among the pundit class -- that the sensible answer to our energy problems is a stiff gas tax (typically combined with reductions in other taxes, to cushion the blow to the poor). The idea is that such a tax will force people and businesses to start making the necessary changes.

But what are the necessary changes? Anthony Flint has a problem:

... the discussion always comes right up to the ultimate reason we use so much energy -- our physical environment and how we live -- and then backs away.

This is true. No politician has the stones to question sprawl -- where their most coveted voters live -- and most mainstream pundits fear the dread tag of "elitism." But Flint's right: You can't get around the built environment.

Here's what he suggests:

Zakaria on oil

Fareed Zakaria is one of the few mainstream opinion writers I consistently respect. He's smart -- and furthermore, he's funny on the Daily Show, which goes a long way with me.

In this column on oil, he basically elides the peak problem and instead focuses on this:

There are really only five countries that matter in the world of oil: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Russia and Venezuela. ... In order to build up real capacity, these governments would need to take their oil revenues and reinvest them in projects that would take five to 10 years to spout oil. Which of these countries has that level of stability, confidence or competence?

This is accurate, and gets at something about peak oil that's been bouncing around, slightly inchoate, in my head. It seems to me many peak oil prophets overstate the degree to which peak oil will be a prime mover in geopolitics (and domestic politics) in the coming decade. It will certainly serve as a background condition, slowly ratcheting up the pressure on the entire system. But in the foreground, it will be politics and circumstance that provide the big developments.

Zakaria also takes aim at U.S. demand:

Intermittency and storage

One of the annoying arguments against solar and wind power is "intermittency" -- the fact that the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. This allegedly proves that solar and wind can't be anything more than add-ons to a more reliable coal-based grid.

I say "annoying" because I don't have a solid, easy comeback. But it something about it sticks in my craw.

The obvious way to address the problem would be storage -- store the energy and use it when the sun/wind isn't "on." But store it how? If we ever produced electric cars, or even plug-in hybrids, the batteries therein could be used as a kind of distributed storage, feeding into the grid when circumstances require it. Or we could develop industrial-scale batteries. I've heard some interesting stuff about using methanol to store the energy. And of course there's always hydrogen fuel cells.

Robert Rapier discusses storing wind energy as compressed air, based on this MSNBC story. Sounds promising to me.

Anybody out there know more about this stuff? What's the best way to overcome intermittency?