Energy & environment

What's a fundamentalist?

A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith, before they explore it.

As opposed to a curious person, who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.

Seth Godin.
Incidentally, Wikipedia defines fundamentalism as 'strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles'.

I'm no expert on climate. I do not have the earth's entire eco-system in mind, with all its interactions, and how they evolved over the past millions of years. But probably not too many people have.

And the media or blogosphere, where every weather event, glacier retreat or decline of a polar bear population is interpreted as a sign of pending doom, do not really help.

We could read the IPCC reports for clarity, but a consensus of 1,500 scientists doesn't provide light reading. So here's 3 lean resources, 2 with a bird's view, 1 with a worm's view, that summarise the issue in less than an hour of your time:

In their book Made to Stick, the Heath brothers introduce a practical tool to evaluate the power of 'sticky' communication messages along 6 criteria:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

A textbook case of a sticky message is J.F. Kennedy's 'man on the moon within a decade' message, which meets at least 4 if not 5 of above criteria.

With last spring's auction of promises on energy by the European institutions, how sticky is a 20% by 2020 target?

Energyville is another simulation game allowing players to qualitatively explore tradeoffs in the choices we make for our energy system.

In the game, you need to ensure the energy needs (not just electricity, but also transport and heating) for a city of 3.9 million people, with a 2030 time horizon. And of course, you need to keep citizens prosperous and minimise impact to the environment.

This game is a bit mroe crude than Electrocity, which should not matter, since anyway the simulation is at best a rough approximation. The learning cycle is much faster, and play much easier, but at the expense of the higher resolution offered by Electrocity.

If you have 5 minutes, try Energyville. If you can spare half an hour, go for Electrocity.

A small eBook with overview of the most relevant articles this summer on Leonardo ENERGY.

More information  

In their book 'Made to Stick', the Heath brothers introduce an example in which an American health institute finds that 'one bag of popcorn contains 37 grams of saturated fat'. To communicate this story, they develop a message 'one bag of popcorn is equivalent to a full day of unhealthy eating'. Another message that the institute might have said is 'a bag of popcorn contains as much Vitamin J as 71 pounds of broccoli', a declaration which is as meaningful as it is correct.

Viewing these statements from a distance, now let's now reconsider popular messages in the energy industry, for example about renewable energy, zero-energy houses or carbon neutrality:

• A 1.5MW wind turbine generates electricity for a 1000 families (meaning the electricity produced over a year equals the electricity consumption of 1000 average homes)
• A 'carbon-neutral' conference handed out compact fluorescent lamps to its participants. The 250 kg of CO2 that the lamp will save over its lifetime offsets the emissions for travelling to the conference
• A zero-energy home generates as much electricity over a year as it consumes

We can easily see that we'll have to live with these kinds of messages for a while, and that lots of creative communications can be developed.

Review by Dr P D Hopewell, B.Eng, Ph.D, C.Eng, MIET

In recent years industry and the public alike have, rightly, become less tolerant of pollution and much progress has been made to 'clean up our act'. However there is a new cause for concern; climate change is now recognised to have a major impact on the world's people and economies. Publication of the authoritative and comprehensive 'Stern Review' in 2006 put the UK at the forefront of attempts to assess the economic cost of climate change, the costs of tackling global warming and the policies required to address the problem. With widespread acceptance in the media and Government of CO2 as the de-facto cause of climate change and global warming, it would seem to the layman that there is no longer any scientific debate or doubt about this assertion. Svensmark and Calder's book is one of the very few recent publications to
present an alternative view.

Given the strong emotions associated with global warming, Svensmark and Calder's work may be seen by many to be unfashionable at best, or irresponsible at worst. However, an open-minded reader is likely to be intrigued by the theories and analysis presented and may well begin to question the mainstream CO2 = global warming link.

IEEE Spectrum's special issue on Megacities

Cities need to import the materials, food and energy they consume, and have a footprint which is much larger than the area they occupy. For example, Tokyo's footprint is 60% larger than all productive land available in Japan.

Paradoxically, because of their concentration, cities offer a potential to rething transport, eliminate cars, use cogeneration, recycling and remanufacturing. Compact enclosed dwellings near a place of work can be heated efficiently. But we're not yet using cities in this manner.

Cities' inefficient design, combined with the relatively higher incomes of urbanites increase the footprint of the urban environment well beyond what it could be.

The perfect city could very well be sustainable. Since 3 decades, Paolo Soleri is promoting the concept of the lean linear city, which aims to combine quality of life with a low footprint.

In China, where major greenfield cities are mushrooming, the concept of a sustainable city design is being developed with the city of Dongtan, a new urban development which will eventually be home to half a million people.

Gristmill has an interesting post with subsequent discussion (including lots of resources) that corporate greenwashing isn't necessarily all bad.

If companies can receive recognition for going some part of the way, while avoiding blatant cover-ups and consumers buying a green conscience, mobilizing corporate resources for raising public awareness just might make a positive difference. 

By Kenneth S Deffeyes

As an academic geologist from Princeton who has spent a large part of his working life in exploration, Professor Kenneth S Deffeyes is worth reading on carbon energy sources. 'Beyond Oil' obliges through providing the usual chapters on oil, gas, coal and uranium. It discusses alternative carbon supplies such as tar sands and oil shale. But if you can spare only time for reading one chapter, read the last one 'the big picture'.

With earth formed 4,500 million years ago, geologists 'can't be bothered with stuff that lasts less than a million years', which is incidentally about the lifetime of a mammal species. As there is no reason why Homo Sapiens should be an exception, we may have 900,000 years left before the next stage in our evolution.

Thinking out of the box, an example that we can make deliverate changes to the earth's major systems: digging 2 sea-level canals accross the Isthmus with flap gates could wipe out in a few 100 years the salinity difference between the Pacific and the Atlantic, making the tropics less hot, and the poles less cold. In other words 'San Diego everywhere'.

Beyond Oil offers further musings on population control as an instrument for sustainability. Obviously controversial, the most humane and acceptable method would be to teach calculus to teenage girls.

Its recipe prefers a mix of existing technologies, such as high efficiency automobiles, coal-fired power plants located near to CO2underground storage areas, wind turbines and nuclear power plants. It also pleads for a better use of combined techniques, i.e.:

• plan coal-fired electric power plants near to oil fields, to use CO2 for enhanced oil recovery
• nuclear plants supplying heat and hydrogen for processing heavy-oil sands
• agriculture to produce both food and burnable waste products