Gristmill

Van Jones talks to Grist about his new job as Obama’s green jobs guru

It’s official: Van Jones is joining the Obama administration to be the voice of green jobs in the White House. “I’m honored and proud and humbled,” Jones told Grist on Tuesday, after the appointment became official. “Some of these ideas, we were kicking around in Oakland and the Bay Area for a long time; to […]

Envisioning a future without disposable hotel pens and Timex watches

You know that point when you realize that you just can't keep buying more crap? Many families call it "December 26." Thomas Friedman calls it the Great Disruption. Saul Griffith has a more compelling framing. A sustainable future society, he says, will be a Rolex and Mont Blanc society. That is, when you are born, you get a Rolex and a Mont Blanc pen. And that's it. No Swatches to match your outfit. No gimme-pens from the Holiday Inn. It's an appealing aesthetic.

Coal is the enemy of the human remains

"I wanted to secure in my mind that this cemetery was OK. I found out it wasn't OK. It was gone."

-- Walter Young, a resident of West Virginia whose great-grandmother's grave was moved, without his knowledge, by a coal mining company -- the company has no record of where they moved it

Why electric utilities like coupling

Writing from the Eco:nomics conference last week, David noted that at least one utility CEO is pretty down on decoupling:

Michael Morris, CEO of American Electric Power ... said "I'm not a decoupler. If my revenues go down, they go down."

David appropriately questioned whether AEP is really so agnostic with respect to falling revenues. But Morris does raise a larger, quite accurate point. Namely, many electric utilities aren't decouplers. Given the prominence that decoupling has come to play in many state and federal policies, it's worth taking the time to understand why.

Decoupling is often framed as a way to get rid of the utility disincentive created by energy efficiency. With large fixed costs, small reductions in revenue can have big impacts on equity returns. This has historically made many utilities work really hard to incentivize inefficient use of their services, from special all-electric rates to exit fees, declining-block pricing schedules, and standby tariffs. (Don't worry about the jargon -- the unifying feature of all of the above is that they penalize any customer who has the temerity to invest in energy efficiency.) It has also made the regulated electricity industry the biggest opponent of sensible energy use.

Eliminate the "coupling" of revenues and equity returns -- so the theory goes -- and you eliminate utility hostility to efficiency.

What year will coastal property values crash?

Coastal property values won't wait to (permanently) fall until sea levels have actually risen four or five feet, as they almost certainly will by the end this century on our current CO2 emissions path).

Coastal property values will crash when a large fraction of the financial community and of opinion-makers -- along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public -- realize that it is too late for us to stop four to five feet of SLR. And remember, if we don't get on the sustainable sub-450-ppm path soon, then people will quickly come to understand that SLR won't stop in 2100. Seas will continue rising post-2100 perhaps 10 to 20 inches a decade (or more) for centuries until we are ice free and seas are 250 feet higher. And that makes protecting most coastal cities very, very difficult and expensive.

One of the points of my post "Ponzi, Part 1," of course, is that we haven't hit that critical mass of knowledge yet. If we had, the world would be engaged in a massive, desperate effort to avert catastrophe.

And so I pose the question in my talks: What year will coastal property values crash?

On energy, LCV tags Republicans as Limbaugh accolytes

LCV has their claws out! I love it.

Sustainable funding for sustainable infrastructure

This past Friday, Princeton University's PRIOR Center and New York University's Rudin Center convened a conference on what's next in transportation. The speakers, who included Mort Downey, former Deputy Secretary of Transportation and leader of the Obama transition team for transportation; Tony Shorris, former head of the New York and New Jersey Port Authority; current PA chairman Anthony Coscia; and others, agreed that we are at a crossroads in transportation policy.

On the one hand, there has never been more enthusiasm for new modes of transportation such as high-speed rail and new approaches such as vehicle mileage tolling and congestion pricing. Billions in the stimulus bill and the Obama budget for rail have set off a frenzy of excitement about building high-speed rail in the United States. At the same time, however, the old system of funding infrastructure, the Highway Trust Fund, fed by gas taxes, has never been under greater stress. With a new transportation authorization bill likely to move this year, we stand at a key juncture in U.S. transportation policy.

Transportation reform is vital to building a clean economy. Not surprisingly, therefore, much of the discussion at Princeton focused on the irony of trying to fund the reinvention of transportation out of a five-cents-per gallon gas tax -- at a time when reducing gas consumption has emerged as a national security, economic and environmental priority.

Currently, the Highway Trust Fund, built on nickel-a-gallon gas tax, accounts for the lion's share of infrastructure funding in the United States -- not only for roads, but for mass transit as well. But the fund is essentially depleted (having required a bailout last fall to stay solvent). Additionally, with construction prices higher but gas usage falling, the gas tax now provides only about half the purchasing power needed to sustain our current system, let alone make improvements.

Using less fertilizer has no meaningful effect on yield

Speaking of limiting the use of synthetic fertilizer, allow me to throw a little science your way courtesy of Science Daily and the USDA's Argriculural Research Service:

From 1998 to 2008, the researchers evaluated and compared potential management strategies for reducing nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen levels in soil and groundwater.

The first study showed that onions used only about 12 to 15 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen applied to the crop. Much of the remainder stayed in the top six feet of soil. The next year, Halvorson and his colleagues planted corn on the same land and found that it recovered about 24 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen that had been applied to the onion crop.

Following that study, the scientists grew alfalfa on the land for five years, then followed it with a watermelon crop, followed by a corn crop. In the first year that the corn was grown, an unfertilized control plot yielded about 250 bushels of corn.

By comparison, a plot fertilized with 250 pounds of nitrogen per acre yielded about 260 bushels, a small increase that required a significantly higher investment of time and money. Additional corn studies following onion in rotation showed corn was a good residual nitrogen scavenger crop.

How a small Nevada town lures major solar investment

In 1995, Boulder City, Nevada, paid $1.3 million for a land buffer to make sure that Las Vegas didn't get any closer. It has since used that buffer to become a world leader in solar energy, and is making $2 million (and counting) in annual revenue from solar leases. How did the city pull this off? What is the key to their solar success? Read this excellent article in the Las Vegas Sun to find out.

The city, 40 miles southeast of Las Vegas, averages 350 sunny days per year, allowing a local tavern to offer free beer on the days when the sun doesn't shine.

That's got to have at least something to do with it.