Gristmill

On the greenness of Jimmy Fallon's set

Word is that Jimmy Fallon's new late-night set is green, with features including low-VOC paint and reclaimed seats from Radio City Music Hall.

Which is cool and all. Except wouldn't it have been greener to just ... use the old set? (That said, kudos to Build It Green! for salvaging Conan's remains.)

And P.S.: As Kate rightly points out, Jimmy's house band, The Roots, is oh-so-green -- seen most recently at last weekend's Power Shift conference.

Google CEO tells conference to get ambitious

Following Mulally (that's fun to say ... following Mulally following Mulally whee!) last night was Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Good lord what a contrast!

Most of what Schmidt had to say was about Clean Energy 2030, Google's big renewable energy plan. I won't go over that again. Suffice to say it's great.

WSJ's Alan Murray started off by asking Schmidt what he would say to a shareholder who didn't approve of Schmidt's focus on renewable energy and do-goody environmental stuff. Said Schmidt:

Money we save on energy goes straight to the bottom line. Lower costs mean higher earnings. Green energy done right is more profitable than old energy. Is that a crisp enough answer for you?

Yes. (More on Schmidt's remarks on the WSJ energy blog.)

One of my favorite things about Schmidt is that he clearly understands, as so few people in the climate/energy discussion do, that one of the central barriers to renewables and efficiency is dumbass utility regulations. People tend to recoil from the subject -- so boring! so technical! -- but nonetheless, it's the elephant in the room.

And it prompted one of the more interesting exchanges in the audience Q&A.

First, Michael Morris, CEO of American Electric Power (a Southeastern utility), stood up and and showed that fossils can walk and talk. In so many words, he said building retrofits are a myth, renewables are far away, and decoupling (so utilities can make money from efficiency) is bogus. Specifically, "I'm not a decoupler. If my revenues go down, they go down." (Yes, I'm sure AEP and the utility regulators it's in bed with will stand by idly and watch its revenue go down.)

Then Peter Darbee, CEO of PG&E (a California utility) stood up and showed what it looks like to live in the 21st century. He said he's made tons of money off decoupling. He said PG&E's found it easier to reach their renewable targets than anyone thought. He said ambitious targets always sound "impossible" when they're first proposed and American innovation always hits them.

Schmidt and Darbee come out of the forward-looking, ambitious, innovative culture of California tech. They both seem frankly astonished at the lack of ambition, the fear, the smallness of thinking -- not only of some of the business folk, but of the media too. Eventually Schmidt burst out: "This is America! We can do this!"

I hope.

Economists rip off climatologists, get away with it

As if we didn't have enough problems with the atmosphere, now along come economists to rip off the rhetoric of climatology. Or so I argue in an op-ed in the Ventura County Star. Here's the "nut graph," as they say in journalism:

The more we discuss the economic crisis in terms of the physical world, the less we discuss the climate crisis itself, even though restoring balance in the atmosphere will be far more difficult than reviving the faltering economy. It's an alarming irony. As we worry about our melting savings and our vanishing jobs, we forget about melting icecaps and vanishing species.

If you like to double-check sources, check out a linked version of the op-ed.

Canada, U.K. push green-building regs

A few green-building developments this week: On the heels of a federal budget that included $300 million to expand a home-retrofit program, Canada released its first LEED guidelines for homeowners and homebuilders. “We suspect some builders will be slow to warm to sustainable construction,” said Winnipeg-area developer Cam Dobie. “But we know when we build […]

Gore backs idea for a new .eco domain name

Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection are partnering with the group Dot Eco LLC to pursue a new top-level domain for environmental groups and initiatives, “.eco.” Rather than a “.com” or a “.org,” groups could choose to use this new domain to show their eco-tasticness. According to the press release, “.eco will be […]

Ford Motor Co. CEO says everything's going to be juuust fine

The kick-off discussion here at Eco:nomics was with Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally. (Which you'd know if you were following my tweeteriffic tweets!)

Last year's kick-off session was with GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who was 50 percent drunk and 100 percent entertaining -- frank, blunt, and occasionally profane. The contrast this time around could not have been more stark. Mulally, looking like Mr. Rogers in his sleeveless red sweater vest, murmured the corporate line in soothing tones, assuring us all that Ford is great, its new goal is to make great cars that get greater every year, and that the future is great, also filled with greatness.

He's got that lilting PR voice that releases your endorphins, but afterwards you can't remember a thing he said, except about how everything is great. For instance, he answered a question about California's fuel efficiency waiver with a torrent of won't-you-be-my-neighbor filler that you had to concentrate on really hard to realize that he, just like the other Big Auto executives, opposes granting it. The answer, basically, was "we don't want to have to make make cars to meet two standards, even though we're already making our cars more fuel efficient every year." Well, why not make them fuel efficient enough to meet the stronger standard? Then you only have to meet one.

Nothing Mulally said would begin to explain why Ford's valuation is tanking.

Talking about the future, it was clear that although Mulally sees some ethanol and electric cars in the mix, his true love and focus is the internal combustion engine, which he said Ford engineers could improve by 20-30 percent efficiency. He said ICEs will be the dominant vehicle technology for at least the next 10-15 years. Compact disc manufacturers are probably saying the same thing.

A couple of notable moments from the audience Q&A:

T. Boone Pickens got up and asked him about making cars that run on natural gas -- for "energy independence," you know. Mulally was polite, but basically said, um, no. That's dumb fracking idea and nobody wants those cars. It was pretty hilarious.

Another man got up and said that Ford had basically lost his whole generation. Mulally said, "I want to come up to your room later." I know the car companies are desperate, but I didn't know their executive were literally prostituting themselves!

Anyway, it was largely a nothingburger with happy talk sauce. Pretty much what you'd expect from an American auto company. Meanwhile, later in the evening I ran into Bill Gross of IdeaLab, who took me out to the parking lot to show me this:

That's the Aptera, a safety tested, super streamlined, fully electric two-seater, made entirely of carbon fiber, with a 100-mile range. (Tons more pictures here.) It will soon be available in California for $30,000. It's what car companies make when they're innovating instead of lobbying.

Is a payment cut real reform or just tweaking with the numbers?

Tom Vilsack has certainly got farm-state legislators talking. The buzz generated by the Obama administration's proposal to cut "direct payments" to farmers continues to grow. Unfortunately, all the sturm and drang may be for naught. And not necessarily because the cut to this particular agricultural subsidy will fail, but because it's not really reform.

The original budget language certainly seemed promising as it linked the cut in government subsidies to a new market in "ecological services." Farmers could use this new revenue to offset the losses from the subsidy cut (and would also have a new incentive to farm more sustainably). But based on recent comments from Vilsack, that whole angle seems to have gone out the window. Instead, Vilsack appears to have decided that the best course of action is to pit farmers against hungry kids. According to Reuters:

U.S. lawmakers will need to choose between supporting rich farmers or feeding more hungry children amid a slumping economy and a surging deficit, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Monday.

Vilsack said he already has heard concerns about the Obama administration's plan to redirect subsidy payments for large farmers into nutrition programs as a way to help end hunger by 2015 and stem the rising tide of childhood obesity.

"We will do our best to frame this discussion in that way, so that people understand: 30 million children, 90,000 farmers," Vilsack told Reuters after speaking to people who work with the nation's food banks and anti-poverty groups.

"It is a tough choice, but it's a choice that folks are going to have to make," he said.

Leave aside the fact that the middle of a severe recession isn't the time to start getting stingy. More importantly, I didn't see anything in the budget that suggested the subsidy savings would go to nutrition -- the stated rationale for the cut was environmental. And it's surprising that Vilsack would go there in the first place. It's no accident that anti-hunger programs are legislated within the Farm Bill -- the better to balance demands from farm state and urban representatives. It's true that, as food writer Michael Pollan has long observed, this marriage of convenience helps perpetuate subsidies. But it's not at all clear that explicitly pitting farmers against hungry children is the way to go.

While a cage match between 30 million children and 90,000 farmers would certainly meet the Hobbsian ideal (nasty, brutish, and short), the legislative process isn't about whose side enjoys a numerical advantage. The only measures of consequence in Congress are the size, strength, and acumen of your lobbying team -- and in that area Big Ag is hard to beat.

Obama says there’s no need to choose between sustainability and the economy

“Throughout our history, there’s been a tension between those who’ve sought to conserve our natural resources for the benefit of future generations, and those who have sought to profit from these resources. But I’m here to tell you this is a false choice. With smart, sustainable policies, we can grow our economy today and preserve […]

Waterkeeper Alliance unveils anti-coal campaign

The essay below was written by Steve Fleischli and Scott Edwards of Waterkeeper Alliance.

Right now the coal industry is engaged in a multi-million-dollar campaign propagating the lie that coal and so-called clean-coal technology are the answer to America's future energy needs. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is no such thing as clean coal.

Waterkeeper programs in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia have been fighting the coal industry for years. Now, they have joined together with the nearly 200 programs of Waterkeeper Alliance in a grassroots campaign called "The Dirty Lie" -- because none of us can afford to wait another minute to start creating a new national energy policy that frees us from a reliance on fossil fuels.

You don't have to live in the coal fields or in the shadow of a coal-fired power plant to be affected by this filthy industry -- coal causes acid rain, pollutes our water and food chain with mercury, and is grossly accelerating climate change. From mining it to the disposal of ash after it's burned, there is no part of the coal industry that is good for the environment, good for people, or good for America.

Every year, the 1,100 coal-fired power plants in America spew 48 tons of toxic mercury into our air, poisoning hundreds of square miles of rivers, lakes and streams, accumulating in fish, and entering our bodies through fish consumption.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one of every six women of childbearing age now has unsafe mercury levels in her blood and, potentially, breast milk, putting more than 410,000 American children born each year at high risk for neurological damage and a grim inventory of illnesses.

And while coal-fired power plants generate about half of America's electricity, they contribute 80 percent of the total greenhouse gases from electricity production that cause global warming. Yet, even if carbon capture and sequestration technology existed to remove these emissions, it still wouldn't make coal clean.