The Power of Green - And the Economic Realities of Change

[Guest guest]

Hi y'all,

 

This is a long one and it might take some folks to the school house ..

but I think its worth reading. :-) Butch

 

 

International Herald Tribune

 

The Power Of Green

By Thomas L. Friedman

Sunday, April 15, 2007

 

I.

 

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush

years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get

its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home,

reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in

the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I

have an idea how. It's called " green. "

 

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name

an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about

the term " green " was the degree to which, for so many years, it was

defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it.

And they defined it as " liberal, " " tree-hugging, " " sissy, "

" girlie-man, " " unpatriotic, " " vaguely French. "

 

Well, I want to rename " green. " I want to rename it geostrategic,

geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I

think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting

America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political

movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular

green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and

Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to

addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs,

temperature and terrorism.

 

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a

warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those

are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of

the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they

can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states —

not an America divided between red and blue states.

 

Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to

mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big

business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us

together and propel us forward. That's why I say: We don't just need

the first black president. We need the first green president. We don't

just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental

president. We don't just need a president who has been toughened by

years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to

level with the American people about the profound economic,

geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and

to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

 

After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of

Communism and the " red menace " with massive spending on an interstate

highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could

better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That

highway system, though, helped to enshrine America's car culture

(atrophying our railroads) and to lock in suburban sprawl and

low-density housing, which all combined to get America addicted to

cheap fossil fuels, particularly oil. Many in the world followed our

model.

 

Today, we are paying the accumulated economic, geopolitical and

climate prices for that kind of America. I am not proposing that we

radically alter our lifestyles. We are who we are — including a car

culture. But if we want to continue to be who we are, enjoy the

benefits and be able to pass them on to our children, we do need to

fuel our future in a cleaner, greener way. Eisenhower rallied us with

the red menace. The next president will have to rally us with a green

patriotism. Hence my motto: " Green is the new red, white and blue. "

 

The good news is that after traveling around America this past year,

looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can

report that green really has gone Main Street — thanks to the perfect

storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution.

The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans

and the third flattened the global economic playing field. The

convergence of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions

about " green " upside down in a very short period of time, making it

much more compelling to many more Americans.

 

But here's the bad news: While green has hit Main Street — more

Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call

" Geo-Greens " to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green

ideology — green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly

has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our

lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we're fooling ourselves. We

in America talk like we're already " the greenest generation, " as the

business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here's the really

inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the

costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to

shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely

emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.

 

II.

 

A few weeks after American forces invaded Afghanistan, I visited the

Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism.

On the way, I stopped at the famous Darul Uloom Haqqania, the biggest

madrasa, or Islamic school, in Pakistan, with 2,800 live-in students.

The Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar attended this madrasa as a

younger man. My Pakistani friend and I were allowed to observe a class

of young boys who sat on the floor, practicing their rote learning of

the Koran from texts perched on wooden holders. The air in the Koran

class was so thick and stale it felt as if you could have cut it into

blocks. The teacher asked an 8-year-old boy to chant a Koranic verse

for us, which he did with the elegance of an experienced muezzin. I

asked another student, an Afghan refugee, Rahim Kunduz, age 12, what

his reaction was to the Sept. 11 attacks, and he said: " Most likely

the attack came from Americans inside America. I am pleased that

America has had to face pain, because the rest of the world has tasted

its pain. " A framed sign on the wall said this room was " A gift of the

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. "

 

Sometime after 9/11 — an unprovoked mass murder perpetrated by 19 men,

15 of whom were Saudis — green went geostrategic, as Americans started

to realize we were financing both sides in the war on terrorism. We

were financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars; and we were

financing a transformation of Islam, in favor of its most intolerant

strand, with our gasoline purchases. How stupid is that?

 

Islam has always been practiced in different forms. Some are more

embracing of modernity, reinterpretation of the Koran and tolerance of

other faiths, like Sufi Islam or the populist Islam of Egypt, Ottoman

Turkey and Indonesia. Some strands, like Salafi Islam — followed by

the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and by Al Qaeda — believe Islam should be

returned to an austere form practiced in the time of the Prophet

Muhammad, a form hostile to modernity, science, " infidels " and women's

rights. By enriching the Saudi and Iranian treasuries via our gasoline

purchases, we are financing the export of the Saudi puritanical brand

of Sunni Islam and the Iranian fundamentalist brand of Shiite Islam,

tilting the Muslim world in a more intolerant direction. At the Muslim

fringe, this creates more recruits for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas,

Hezbollah and the Sunni suicide bomb squads of Iraq; at the Muslim

center, it creates a much bigger constituency of people who applaud

suicide bombers as martyrs.

 

The Saudi Islamic export drive first went into high gear after extreme

fundamentalists challenged the Muslim credentials of the Saudi ruling

family by taking over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 — a year that

coincided with the Iranian revolution and a huge rise in oil prices.

The attack on the Grand Mosque by these Koran-and-rifle-wielding

Islamic militants shook the Saudi ruling family to its core. The

al-Sauds responded to this challenge to their religious bona fides by

becoming outwardly more religious. They gave their official Wahhabi

religious establishment even more power to impose Islam on public

life. Awash in cash thanks to the spike in oil prices, the Saudi

government and charities also spent hundreds of millions of dollars

endowing mosques, youth clubs and Muslim schools all over the world,

ensuring that Wahhabi imams, teachers and textbooks would preach

Saudi-style Islam. Eventually, notes Lawrence Wright in " The Looming

Tower, " his history of Al Qaeda, " Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only

1 percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of

the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam. "

 

Saudi mosques and wealthy donors have also funneled cash to the Sunni

insurgents in Iraq. The Associated Press reported from Cairo in

December: " Several drivers interviewed by the A.P. in Middle East

capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj

pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit

money transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses

with returning pilgrims. 'They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me

to deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq,' said one driver. ... 'I

know it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don't take it with

me, they will kill me.' "

 

No wonder more Americans have concluded that conserving oil to put

less money in the hands of hostile forces is now a geostrategic

imperative. President Bush's refusal to do anything meaningful after

9/11 to reduce our gasoline usage really amounts to a policy of " No

Mullah Left Behind. " James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces

no words: " We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves. "

 

No, I don't want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist

revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its

people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its

religious establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy.

Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s,

dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more

science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections.

But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.

 

That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The

price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite

directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for

their income and have weak institutions or outright authoritarian

governments. And this is another reason that green has become

geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international

system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.

 

Look what's happened: We thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was going

to unleash an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people, and

for about a decade it did just that. But those years coincided with

oil in the $10-to-$30-a-barrel range. As the price of oil surged into

the $30-to-$70 range in the early 2000s, it triggered a countertide —

a tide of petroauthoritarianism — manifested in Russia, Iran, Nigeria,

Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Angola, Azerbaijan

and Turkmenistan. The elected or self-appointed elites running these

states have used their oil windfalls to ensconce themselves in power,

buy off opponents and counter the fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall tide. If we

continue to finance them with our oil purchases, they will reshape the

world in their image, around Putin-like values.

 

You can illustrate the First Law of Petropolitics with a simple graph.

On one line chart the price of oil from 1979 to the present; on

another line chart the Freedom House or Fraser Institute freedom

indexes for Russia, Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela for the same years.

When you put these two lines on the same graph you see something

striking: the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely

correlated. As oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition,

transparency, political participation and accountability of those in

office all tended to go up in these countries — as measured by free

elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform

projects started and companies privatized. That's because their

petroauthoritarian regimes had to open themselves to foreign

investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn

income. But as oil prices went up around 2000, free speech, free

press, fair elections and freedom to form political parties and NGOs

all eroded in these countries.

 

The motto of the American Revolution was " no taxation without

representation. " The motto of the petroauthoritarians is " no

representation without taxation " : If I don't have to tax you, because

I can get all the money I need from oil wells, I don't have to listen

to you.

 

It is no accident that when oil prices were low in the 1990s, Iran

elected a reformist Parliament and a president who called for a

" dialogue of civilizations. " And when oil prices soared to $70 a

barrel, Iran's conservatives pushed out the reformers and ensconced a

president who says the Holocaust is a myth. (I promise you, if oil

prices drop to $25 a barrel, the Holocaust won't be a myth anymore.)

And it is no accident that the first Arab Gulf state to start running

out of oil, Bahrain, is also the first Arab Gulf state to have held a

free and fair election in which women could run and vote, the first

Arab Gulf state to overhaul its labor laws to make more of its own

people employable and the first Arab Gulf state to sign a free-trade

agreement with America.

 

People change when they have to — not when we tell them to — and

falling oil prices make them have to. That is why if we are looking

for a Plan B for Iraq — a way of pressing for political reform in the

Middle East without going to war again — there is no better tool than

bringing down the price of oil. When it comes to fostering democracy

among petroauthoritarians, it doesn't matter whether you're a neocon

or a radical lib. If you're not also a Geo-Green, you won't succeed.

 

The notion that conserving energy is a geostrategic imperative has

also moved into the Pentagon, for slightly different reasons. Generals

are realizing that the more energy they save in the heat of battle,

the more power they can project. The Pentagon has been looking to

improve its energy efficiency for several years now to save money. But

the Iraq war has given birth to a new movement in the U.S. military:

the " Green Hawks. "

 

As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who has been working

with the Pentagon, put it to me: The Iraq war forced the U.S. military

to think much more seriously about how to " eat its tail " — to shorten

its energy supply lines by becoming more energy efficient. According

to Dan Nolan, who oversees energy projects for the U.S. Army's Rapid

Equipping Force, it started last year when a Marine major general in

Anbar Province told the Pentagon he wanted better-insulated, more

energy-efficient tents in the Iraqi desert. Why? His air-conditioners

were being run off mobile generators, and the generators ran on

diesel, and the diesel had to be trucked in, and the insurgents were

blowing up the trucks.

 

" When we began the analysis of his request, it was really about the

fact that his soldiers were being attacked on the roads bringing fuel

and water, " Nolan said. So eating their tail meant " taking those

things that are brought into the unit and trying to generate them

on-site. " To that end Nolan's team is now experimenting with

everything from new kinds of tents that need 40 percent less

air-conditioning to new kinds of fuel cells that produce water as a

byproduct.

 

Pay attention: When the U.S. Army desegregated, the country really

desegregated; when the Army goes green, the country could really go green.

 

" Energy independence is a national security issue, " Nolan said. " It's

the right business for us to be in. ... We are not trying to change

the whole Army. Our job is to focus on that battalion out there and

give those commanders the technological innovations they need to deal

with today's mission. But when they start coming home, they are going

to bring those things with them. "

 

III.

 

The second big reason green has gone Main Street is because global

warming has. A decade ago, it was mostly experts who worried that

climate change was real, largely brought about by humans and likely to

lead to species loss and environmental crises. Now Main Street is

starting to worry because people are seeing things they've never seen

before in their own front yards and reading things they've never read

before in their papers — like the recent draft report by the United

Nations's 2,000-expert Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

which concluded that " changes in climate are now affecting physical

and biological systems on every continent. "

 

I went to Montana in January and Gov. Brian Schweitzer told me: " We

don't get as much snow in the high country as we used to, and the

runoff starts sooner in the spring. The river I've been fishing over

the last 50 years is now warmer in July by five degrees than 50 years

ago, and it is hard on our trout population. " I went to Moscow in

February, and my friends told me they just celebrated the first Moscow

Christmas in their memory with no snow. I stopped in London on the way

home, and I didn't need an overcoat. In 2006, the average temperature

in central England was the highest ever recorded since the Central

England Temperature (C.E.T.) series began in 1659.

 

Yes, no one knows exactly what will happen. But ever fewer people want

to do nothing. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California summed up the

new climate around climate when he said to me recently: " If 98 doctors

say my son is ill and needs medication and two say 'No, he doesn't, he

is fine,' I will go with the 98. It's common sense — the same with

global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority. ... The

key thing now is that since we know this industrial age has created

it, let's get our act together and do everything we can to roll it back. "

 

But how? Now we arrive at the first big roadblock to green going down

Main Street. Most people have no clue — no clue — how huge an

industrial project is required to blunt climate change. Here are two

people who do: Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen

Pacala, an ecology professor, who together lead the Carbon Mitigation

Initiative at Princeton, a consortium designing scalable solutions for

the climate issue.

 

They first argued in a paper published by the journal Science in

August 2004 that human beings can emit only so much carbon into the

atmosphere before the buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) reaches a level

unknown in recent geologic history and the earth's climate system

starts to go " haywire. " The scientific consensus, they note, is that

the risk of things going haywire — weather patterns getting violently

unstable, glaciers melting, prolonged droughts — grows rapidly as CO2

levels " approach a doubling " of the concentration of CO2 that was in

the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.

 

" Think of the climate change issue as a closet, and behind the door

are lurking all kinds of monsters — and there's a long list of them, "

Pacala said. " All of our scientific work says the most damaging

monsters start to come out from behind that door when you hit the

doubling of CO2 levels. " As Bill Collins, who led the development of a

model used worldwide for simulating climate change, put it to me:

" We're running an uncontrolled experiment on the only home we have. "

 

So here is our challenge, according to Pacala: If we basically do

nothing, and global CO2 emissions continue to grow at the pace of the

last 30 years for the next 50 years, we will pass the doubling level —

an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 560 parts per

million — around midcentury. To avoid that — and still leave room for

developed countries to grow, using less carbon, and for countries like

India and China to grow, emitting double or triple their current

carbon levels, until they climb out of poverty and are able to become

more energy efficient — will require a huge global industrial energy

project.

 

To convey the scale involved, Socolow and Pacala have created a pie

chart with 15 different wedges. Some wedges represent carbon-free or

carbon-diminishing power-generating technologies; other wedges

represent efficiency programs that could conserve large amounts of

energy and prevent CO2 emissions. They argue that the world needs to

deploy any 7 of these 15 wedges, or sufficient amounts of all 15, to

have enough conservation, and enough carbon-free energy, to increase

the world economy and still avoid the doubling of CO2 in the

atmosphere. Each wedge, when phased in over 50 years, would avoid the

release of 25 billion tons of carbon, for a total of 175 billion tons

of carbon avoided between now and 2056.

 

Here are seven wedges we could chose from: " Replace 1,400 large

coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants; increase the fuel economy of

two billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; add twice today's

nuclear output to displace coal; drive two billion cars on ethanol,

using one-sixth of the world's cropland; increase solar power 700-fold

to displace coal; cut electricity use in homes, offices and stores by

25 percent; install carbon capture and sequestration capacity at 800

large coal-fired plants. " And the other eight aren't any easier. They

include halting all cutting and burning of forests, since

deforestation causes about 20 percent of the world's annual CO2 emissions.

 

" There has never been a deliberate industrial project in history as

big as this, " Pacala said. Through a combination of clean power

technology and conservation, " we have to get rid of 175 billion tons

of carbon over the next 50 years — and still keep growing. It is

possible to accomplish this if we start today. But every year that we

delay, the job becomes more difficult — and if we delay a decade or

two, avoiding the doubling or more may well become impossible. "

 

IV.

 

In November, I flew from Shanghai to Beijing on Air China. As we

landed in Beijing and taxied to the terminal, the Chinese air hostess

came on the P.A. and said: " We've just landed in Beijing. The

temperature is 8 degrees Celsius, 46 degrees Fahrenheit and the sky is

clear. "

 

I almost burst out laughing. Outside my window the smog was so thick

you could not see the end of the terminal building. When I got into

Beijing, though, friends told me the air was better than usual. Why?

China had been host of a summit meeting of 48 African leaders. Time

magazine reported that Beijing officials had " ordered half a million

official cars off the roads and said another 400,000 drivers had

'volunteered' to refrain from using their vehicles " in order to clean

up the air for their African guests. As soon as they left, the cars

returned, and Beijing's air went back to " unhealthy. "

 

Green has also gone Main Street because the end of Communism, the rise

of the personal computer and the diffusion of the Internet have opened

the global economic playing field to so many more people, all coming

with their own versions of the American dream — a house, a car, a

toaster, a microwave and a refrigerator. It is a blessing to see so

many people growing out of poverty. But when three billion people move

from " low-impact " to " high-impact " lifestyles, Jared Diamond wrote in

" Collapse, " it makes it urgent that we find cleaner ways to fuel their

dreams. According to Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy

Institute, if China keeps growing at 8 percent a year, by 2031 the

per-capita income of 1.45 billion Chinese will be the same as

America's in 2004. China currently has only one car for every 100

people, but Brown projects that as it reaches American income levels,

if it copies American consumption, it will have three cars for every

four people, or 1.1 billion vehicles. The total world fleet today is

800 million vehicles!

 

That's why McKinsey Global Institute forecasts that developing

countries will generate nearly 80 percent of the growth in world

energy demand between now and 2020, with China representing 32 percent

and the Middle East 10 percent. So if Red China doesn't become Green

China there is no chance we will keep the climate monsters behind the

door. On some days, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,

almost 25 percent of the polluting matter in the air above Los Angeles

comes from China's coal-fired power plants and factories, as well as

fumes from China's cars and dust kicked up by droughts and

deforestation around Asia.

 

The good news is that China knows it has to grow green — or it won't

grow at all. On Sept. 8, 2006, a Chinese newspaper reported that

China's E.P.A. and its National Bureau of Statistics had re-examined

China's 2004 G.D.P. number. They concluded that the health problems,

environmental degradation and lost workdays from pollution had

actually cost China $64 billion, or 3.05 percent of its total economic

output for 2004. Some experts believe the real number is closer to 10

percent.

 

Thus China has a strong motivation to clean up the worst pollutants in

its air. Those are the nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and mercury that

produce acid rain, smog and haze — much of which come from burning

coal. But cleaning up is easier said than done. The Communist Party's

legitimacy and the stability of the whole country depend heavily on

Beijing's ability to provide rising living standards for more and more

Chinese.

 

So, if you're a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs

and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: coughing

workers are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers.

That's a key reason why China's 10th five-year plan, which began in

2000, called for a 10 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide in China's

air — and when that plan concluded in 2005, sulfur dioxide pollution

in China had increased by 27 percent.

 

But if China is having a hard time cleaning up its nitrogen and sulfur

oxides — which can be done relatively cheaply by adding scrubbers to

the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants — imagine what will happen

when it comes to asking China to curb its CO2, of which China is now

the world's second-largest emitter, after America. To build a

coal-fired power plant that captures, separates and safely sequesters

the CO2 into the ground before it goes up the smokestack requires

either an expensive retrofit or a whole new system. That new system

would cost about 40 percent more to build and operate — and would

produce 20 percent less electricity, according to a recent M.I.T.

study, " The Future of Coal. "

 

China — which is constructing the equivalent of two 500-megawatt

coal-fired power plants every week — is not going to pay that now.

Remember: CO2 is an invisible, odorless, tasteless gas. Yes, it causes

global warming — but it doesn't hurt anyone in China today, and

getting rid of it is costly and has no economic payoff. China's

strategy right now is to say that CO2 is the West's problem. " It must

be pointed out that climate change has been caused by the long-term

historic emissions of developed countries and their high per-capita

emissions, " Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for China's Foreign Ministry,

declared in February. " Developed countries bear an unshirkable

responsibility. "

 

So now we come to the nub of the issue: Green will not go down Main

Street America unless it also goes down Main Street China, India and

Brazil. And for green to go Main Street in these big developing

countries, the prices of clean power alternatives — wind, biofuels,

nuclear, solar or coal sequestration — have to fall to the " China

price. " The China price is basically the price China pays for

coal-fired electricity today because China is not prepared to pay a

premium now, and sacrifice growth and stability, just to get rid of

the CO2 that comes from burning coal.

 

" The 'China price' is the fundamental benchmark that everyone is

looking to satisfy, " said Curtis Carlson, C.E.O. of SRI International,

which is developing alternative energy technologies. " Because if the

Chinese have to pay 10 percent more for energy, when they have tens of

millions of people living under $1,000 a year, it is not going to

happen. " Carlson went on to say: " We have an enormous amount of new

innovation we must put in place before we can get to a price that

China and India will be able to pay. But this is also an opportunity. "

 

V.

 

The only way we are going to get innovations that drive energy costs

down to the China price — innovations in energy-saving appliances,

lights and building materials and in non-CO2-emitting power plants and

fuels — is by mobilizing free-market capitalism. The only thing as

powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed. To a degree, the market is

already at work on this project — because some venture capitalists and

companies understand that clean-tech is going to be the next great

global industry. Take Wal-Mart. The world's biggest retailer woke up

several years ago, its C.E.O. Lee Scott told me, and realized that

with regard to the environment its customers " had higher expectations

for us than we had for ourselves. " So Scott hired a sustainability

expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor the company. The first lesson Ellison

preached was that going green was a whole new way for Wal-Mart to cut

costs and drive its profits. As Scott recalled it, Ellison said to

him, " Lee, the thing you have to think of is all this stuff that

people don't want you to put into the environment is waste — and

you're paying for it! "

 

So Scott initiated a program to work with Wal-Mart's suppliers to

reduce the sizes and materials used for all its packaging by five

percent by 2013. The reductions they have made are already paying off

in savings to the company. " We created teams to work across the

organization, " Scott said. " It was voluntary — then you had the first

person who eliminated some packaging, and someone else started showing

how we could recycle more plastic, and all of a sudden it's $1 million

a quarter. " Wal-Mart operates 7,000 huge Class 8 trucks that get about

6 miles per gallon. It has told its truck makers that by 2015, it

wants to double the efficiency of the fleet. Wal-Mart is the China of

companies, so, explained Scott, " if we place one order we can create a

market " for energy innovation.

 

For instance, Wal-Mart has used its shelves to create a huge, low-cost

market for compact fluorescent bulbs, which use about a quarter of the

energy of incandescent bulbs to produce the same light and last 10

times as long. " Just by doing what it does best — saving customers

money and cutting costs, " said Glenn Prickett of Conservation

International, a Wal-Mart adviser, " Wal-Mart can have a revolutionary

impact on the market for green technologies. If every one of their 100

million customers in the U.S. bought just one energy-saving compact

fluorescent lamp, instead of a traditional incandescent bulb, they

could cut CO2 emissions by 45 billion pounds and save more than $3

billion. "

 

Those savings highlight something that often gets lost: The quickest

way to get to the China price for clean power is by becoming more

energy efficient. The cheapest, cleanest, nonemitting power plant in

the world is the one you don't build. Helping China adopt some of the

breakthrough efficiency programs that California has adopted, for

instance — like rewarding electrical utilities for how much energy

they get their customers to save rather than to use — could have a

huge impact. Some experts estimate that China could cut its need for

new power plants in half with aggressive investments in efficiency.

 

Yet another force driving us to the China price is Chinese

entrepreneurs, who understand that while Beijing may not be ready to

impose CO2 restraints, developed countries are, so this is going to be

a global business — and they want a slice. Let me introduce the man

identified last year by Forbes Magazine as the seventh-richest man in

China, with a fortune now estimated at $2.2 billion. His name is Shi

Zhengrong and he is China's leading manufacturer of silicon solar

panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.

 

" People at all levels in China have become more aware of this

environment issue and alternative energy, " said Shi, whose company,

Suntech Power Holdings, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

" Five years ago, when I started the company, people said: 'Why do we

need solar? We have a surplus of coal-powered electricity.' Now it is

different; now people realize that solar has a bright future. But it

is still too expensive. ... We have to reduce the cost as quickly as

possible — our real competitors are coal and nuclear power. "

 

Shi does most of his manufacturing in China, but sells roughly 90

percent of his products outside China, because today they are too

expensive for his domestic market. But the more he can get the price

down, and start to grow his business inside China, the more he can use

that to become a dominant global player. Thanks to Suntech's success,

in China " there is a rush of business people entering this sector,

even though we still don't have a market here, " Shi added. " Many

government people now say, 'This is an industry!' " And if it takes

off, China could do for solar panels what it did for tennis shoes —

bring the price down so far that everyone can afford a pair.

 

VI.

 

All that sounds great — but remember those seven wedges? To reach the

necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require big clean coal

or nuclear power stations, wind farms and solar farms, all connected

to a national transmission grid, not to mention clean fuels for our

cars and trucks. And the market alone, as presently constructed in the

U.S., will not get us those alternatives at the scale we need — at the

China price — fast enough.

 

Prof. Nate Lewis, Caltech's noted chemist and energy expert, explained

why with an analogy. " Let's say you invented the first cellphone, " he

said. " You could charge people $1,000 for each one because lots of

people would be ready to pay lots of money to have a phone they could

carry in their pocket. " With those profits, you, the inventor, could

pay back your shareholders and plow more into research, so you keep

selling better and cheaper cellphones.

 

But energy is different, Lewis explained: " If I come to you and say,

'Today your house lights are being powered by dirty coal, but

tomorrow, if you pay me $100 more a month, I will power your house

lights with solar,' you are most likely to say: 'Sorry, Nate, but I

don't really care how my lights go on, I just care that they go on. I

won't pay an extra $100 a month for sun power. A new cellphone

improves my life. A different way to power my lights does nothing.'

 

" So building an emissions-free energy infrastructure is not like

sending a man to the moon, " Lewis went on. " With the moon shot, money

was no object — and all we had to do was get there. But today, we

already have cheap energy from coal, gas and oil. So getting people to

pay more to shift to clean fuels is like trying to get funding for

NASA to build a spaceship to the moon — when Southwest Airlines

already flies there and gives away free peanuts! I already have a

cheap ride to the moon, and a ride is a ride. For most people,

electricity is electricity, no matter how it is generated. "

 

If we were running out of coal or oil, the market would steadily push

the prices up, which would stimulate innovation in alternatives.

Eventually there would be a crossover, and the alternatives would kick

in, start to scale and come down in price. But what has happened in

energy over the last 35 years is that the oil price goes up,

stimulating government subsidies and some investments in alternatives,

and then the price goes down, the government loses interest, the

subsidies expire and the investors in alternatives get wiped out.

 

The only way to stimulate the scale of sustained investment in

research and development of non-CO2 emitting power at the China price

is if the developed countries, who can afford to do so, force their

people to pay the full climate, economic and geopolitical costs of

using gasoline and dirty coal. Those countries that have signed the

Kyoto Protocol are starting to do that. But America is not.

 

Up to now, said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute,

we as a society " have been behaving just like Enron the company at the

height of its folly. " We rack up stunning profits and G.D.P. numbers

every year, and they look great on paper " because we've been hiding

some of the costs off the books. " If we don't put a price on the CO2

we're building up or on our addiction to oil, we'll never nurture the

innovation we need.

 

Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, has worked for G.E.

for 25 years. In that time, he told me, he has seen seven generations

of innovation in G.E.'s medical equipment business — in devices like

M.R.I.s or CT scans — because health care market incentives drove the

innovation. In power, it's just the opposite. " Today, on the power

side, " he said, " we're still selling the same basic coal-fired power

plants we had when I arrived. They're a little cleaner and more

efficient now, but basically the same. "

 

The one clean power area where G.E. is now into a third generation is

wind turbines, " thanks to the European Union, " Immelt said. Countries

like Denmark, Spain and Germany imposed standards for wind power on

their utilities and offered sustained subsidies, creating a big market

for wind-turbine manufacturers in Europe in the 1980s, when America

abandoned wind because the price of oil fell. " We grew our wind

business in Europe, " Immelt said.

 

As things stand now in America, Immelt said, " the market does not work

in energy. " The multibillion-dollar scale of investment that a company

like G.E. is being asked to make in order to develop new clean-power

technologies or that a utility is being asked to make in order to

build coal sequestration facilities or nuclear plants is not going to

happen at scale — unless they know that coal and oil are going to be

priced high enough for long enough that new investments will not be

undercut in a few years by falling fossil fuel prices. " Carbon has to

have a value, " Immelt emphasized. " Today in the U.S. and China it has

no value. "

 

I recently visited the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant with

Christopher Crane, president of Exelon Nuclear, which owns the

facility. He said that if Exelon wanted to start a nuclear plant

today, the licensing, design, planning and building requirements are

so extensive it would not open until 2015 at the earliest. But even if

Exelon got all the approvals, it could not start building " because the

cost of capital for a nuclear plant today is prohibitive. "

 

That's because the interest rate that any commercial bank would charge

on a loan for a nuclear facility would be so high — because of all the

risks of lawsuits or cost overruns — that it would be impossible for

Exelon to proceed. A standard nuclear plant today costs about $3

billion per unit. The only way to stimulate more nuclear power

innovation, Crane said, would be federal loan guarantees that would

lower the cost of capital for anyone willing to build a new nuclear plant.

 

The 2005 energy bill created such loan guarantees, but the details

still have not been worked out. " We would need a robust loan guarantee

program to jump-start the nuclear industry, " Crane said — an industry

that has basically been frozen since the 1979 Three Mile Island

accident. With cheaper money, added Crane, CO2-free nuclear power

could be " very competitive " with CO2-emitting pulverized coal.

 

Think about the implications. Three Mile Island had two reactors,

TMI-2, which shut down because of the 1979 accident, and TMI-1, which

is still operating today, providing clean electricity with virtually

no CO2 emissions for 800,000 homes. Had the TMI-2 accident not

happened, it too would have been providing clean electricity for

800,000 homes for the last 28 years. Instead, that energy came from

CO2-emitting coal, which, by the way, still generates 50 percent of

America's electricity.

 

Similar calculations apply to ethanol production. " We have about 100

scientists working on cellulosic ethanol, " Chad Holliday, the C.E.O.

of DuPont, told me. " My guess is that we could double the number and

add another 50 to start working on how to commercialize it. It would

probably cost us less than $100 million to scale up. But I am not

ready to do that. I can guess what it will cost me to make it and what

the price will be, but is the market going to be there? What are the

regulations going to be? Is the ethanol subsidy going to be reduced?

Will we put a tax on oil to keep ethanol competitive? If I know that,

it gives me a price target to go after. Without that, I don't know

what the market is and my shareholders don't know how to value what I

am doing. ... You need some certainty on the incentives side and on

the market side, because we are talking about multiyear investments,

billions of dollars, that will take a long time to take off, and we

won't hit on everything. "

 

Summing up the problem, Immelt of G.E. said the big energy players are

being asked " to take a 15-minute market signal and make a 40-year

decision and that just doesn't work. ... The U.S. government should

decide: What do we want to have happen? How much clean coal, how much

nuclear and what is the most efficient way to incentivize people to

get there? "

 

He's dead right. The market alone won't work. Government's job is to

set high standards, let the market reach them and then raise the

standards more. That's how you get scale innovation at the China

price. Government can do this by imposing steadily rising efficiency

standards for buildings and appliances and by stipulating that

utilities generate a certain amount of electricity from renewables —

like wind or solar. Or it can impose steadily rising mileage standards

for cars or a steadily tightening cap-and-trade system for the amount

of CO2 any factory or power plant can emit. Or it can offer loan

guarantees and fast-track licensing for anyone who wants to build a

nuclear plant. Or — my preference and the simplest option — it can

impose a carbon tax that will stimulate the market to move away from

fuels that emit high levels of CO2 and invest in those that don't.

Ideally, it will do all of these things. But whichever options we

choose, they will only work if they are transparent, simple and

long-term — with zero fudging allowed and with regulatory oversight

and stiff financial penalties for violators.

 

The politician who actually proved just how effective this can be was

a guy named George W. Bush, when he was governor of Texas. He pushed

for and signed a renewable energy portfolio mandate in 1999. The

mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new

megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009. What

happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built

wind turbines to meet the mandate, so many that the 2,000-megawatt

goal was reached in 2005. So the Texas Legislature has upped the

mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015, and everyone knows they will beat

that too because of how quickly wind in Texas is becoming competitive

with coal. Today, thanks to Governor Bush's market intervention, Texas

is the biggest wind state in America.

 

President Bush, though, is no Governor Bush. (The Dick Cheney effect?)

President Bush claims he's protecting American companies by not

imposing tough mileage, conservation or clean power standards, but

he's actually helping them lose the race for the next great global

industry. Japan has some of the world's highest gasoline taxes and

stringent energy efficiency standards for vehicles — and it has the

world's most profitable and innovative car company, Toyota. That's no

accident.

 

The politicians who best understand this are America's governors, some

of whom have started to just ignore Washington, set their own energy

standards and reap the benefits for their states. As Schwarzenegger

told me, " We have seen in California so many companies that have been

created that work just on things that have do with clean environment. "

California's state-imposed efficiency standards have resulted in

per-capita energy consumption in California remaining almost flat for

the last 30 years, while in the rest of the country it has gone up 50

percent. " There are a lot of industries that are exploding right now

because of setting these new standards, " he said.

 

VII.

 

John Dineen runs G.E. Transportation, which makes locomotives. His

factory is in Erie, Pa., and employs 4,500 people. When it comes to

the challenges from cheap labor markets, Dineen likes to say, " Our

little town has trade surpluses with China and Mexico. "

 

Now how could that be? China makes locomotives that are 30 percent

cheaper than G.E.'s, but it turns out that G.E.'s are the most energy

efficient in the world, with the lowest emissions and best mileage per

ton pulled — " and they don't stop on the tracks, " Dineen added. So

China is also buying from Erie — and so are Brazil, Mexico and

Kazakhstan. What's the secret? The China price.

 

" We made it very easy for them, " said Dineen. " By producing engines

with lower emissions in the classic sense (NOx [nitrogen oxides]) and

lower emissions in the future sense (CO2) and then coupling it with

better fuel efficiency and reliability, we lowered the total

life-cycle cost. "

 

The West can't impose its climate or pollution standards on China,

Dineen explained, but when a company like G.E. makes an engine that

gets great mileage, cuts pollution and, by the way, emits less CO2,

China will be a buyer. " If we were just trying to export

lower-emission units, and they did not have the fuel benefits, we

would lose, " Dineen said. " But when green is made green — improved

fuel economies coupled with emissions reductions — we see very quick

adoption rates. "

 

One reason G.E. Transportation got so efficient was the old U.S.

standard it had to meet on NOx pollution, Dineen said. It did that

through technological innovation. And as oil prices went up, it

leveraged more technology to get better mileage. The result was a

cleaner, more efficient, more exportable locomotive. Dineen describes

his factory as a " technology campus " because, he explains, " it looks

like a 100-year-old industrial site, but inside those 100-year-old

buildings are world-class engineers working on the next generation's

technologies. " He also notes that workers in his factory make nearly

twice the average in Erie — by selling to China!

 

The bottom line is this: Clean-tech plays to America's strength

because making things like locomotives lighter and smarter takes a lot

of knowledge — not cheap labor. That's why embedding clean-tech into

everything we design and manufacture is a way to revive America as a

manufacturing power.

 

" Whatever you are making, if you can add a green dimension to it —

making it more efficient, healthier and more sustainable for future

generations — you have a product that can't just be made cheaper in

India or China, " said Andrew Shapiro, founder of GreenOrder, an

environmental business-strategy group. " If you just create a green

ghetto in your company, you miss it. You have to figure out how to

integrate green into the DNA of your whole business. "

 

Ditto for our country, which is why we need a Green New Deal — one in

which government's role is not funding projects, as in the original

New Deal, but seeding basic research, providing loan guarantees where

needed and setting standards, taxes and incentives that will spawn

1,000 G.E. Transportations for all kinds of clean power.

 

Bush won't lead a Green New Deal, but his successor must if America is

going to maintain its leadership and living standard. Unfortunately,

today's presidential hopefuls are largely full of hot air on the

climate-energy issue. Not one of them is proposing anything hard, like

a carbon or gasoline tax, and if you think we can deal with these huge

problems without asking the American people to do anything hard,

you're a fool or a fraud.

 

Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue — helping

Americans understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it,

" that we're not 'post-Cold War' anymore — we're pre-something totally

new. " I'd say we're in the " pre-climate war era. " Unless we create a

more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world.

Intensifying climate change, energy wars and petroauthoritarianism

will curtail our life choices and our children's opportunities every

bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.

 

Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans

understand that green is not about cutting back. It's about creating a

new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a

whole new industry. It's about getting our best brains out of hedge

funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power

industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the

technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams

without destroying the planet. It's about making America safer by

breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply

hostile to our values. And, finally, it's about making America the

global environmental leader, instead of laggard, which as

Schwarzenegger argues would " create a very powerful side product. "

Those who dislike America because of Iraq, he explained, would at

least be able to say, " Well, I don't like them for the war, but I do

like them because they show such unbelievable leadership — not just

with their blue jeans and hamburgers but with the environment. People

will love us for that. That's not existing right now. "

 

In sum, as John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, taught me:

Confronting this climate-energy issue is the epitome of what John

Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, once described as " a series of

great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems. "

 

Am I optimistic? I want to be. But I am also old-fashioned. I don't

believe the world will effectively address the climate-energy

challenge without America, its president, its government, its

industry, its markets and its people all leading the parade. Green has

to become part of America's DNA. We're getting there. Green has hit

Main Street — it's now more than a hobby — but it's still less than a

new way of life.

 

Why? Because big transformations — women's suffrage, for instance —

usually happen when a lot of aggrieved people take to the streets, the

politicians react and laws get changed. But the climate-energy debate

is more muted and slow-moving. Why? Because the people who will be

most harmed by the climate-energy crisis haven't been born yet.

 

" This issue doesn't pit haves versus have-nots, " notes the Johns

Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, " but the present

versus the future — today's generation versus its kids and unborn

grandchildren. " Once the Geo-Green interest group comes of age,

especially if it is after another 9/11 or Katrina, Mandelbaum said,

" it will be the biggest interest group in history — but by then it

could be too late. "

 

An unusual situation like this calls for the ethic of stewardship.

Stewardship is what parents do for their kids: think about the long

term, so they can have a better future. It is much easier to get

families to do that than whole societies, but that is our challenge.

In many ways, our parents rose to such a challenge in World War II —

when an entire generation mobilized to preserve our way of life. That

is why they were called the Greatest Generation. Our kids will only

call us the Greatest Generation if we rise to our challenge and become

the Greenest Generation.

 

2007 The International Herald Tribune

[Guest guest]

Butch, you’re my hero de jour for posting this.

 

 

 

Dave

 

 

 

This is a long one and it might take some folks to the school house ..

but I think its worth reading. :-) Butch

 

 

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[Guest guest]

When I was a wee one, probably in 1953 or 1954, I discovered one day that

the exhaust coming from my grandma’s big old Hudson Hornet smelled kinda

neat. When my daddy saw me he stopped me and explained that the exhaust was

poison. I asked him then: “If it’s poison, won’t it poison the air?” My

daddy said no, the world is too big for the exhaust from cars to ever poison

it.

 

 

 

We moved to California in 1960, the summer I was nine. We drove out from

Iowa in a red-and-black Studebaker Commander – and for some reason I still

remember our first California license plate number. At some point I learned

that not only do people pee in this wondrous new thing, the ocean, but ships

and industries and cities and nations dump all kinds of stuff in it, too.

And I asked my dad if that wasn’t kind of a bad thing, and he said the same.

The ocean is self-correcting, he said, and far too large for us to ever

really affect it.

 

 

 

How wrong he was.

 

 

 

Dave in CA

 

 

 

" Don't be afraid to try new things. After all, the Ark was built by

amateurs, and the Titanic was built by professionals "

-Unknown

 

 

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[Guest guest]

If we basically do

nothing, and global CO2 emissions continue to grow at the pace of the

last 30 years for the next 50 years, we will pass the doubling level —

an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 560 parts per

million — around midcentury.

 

 

 

[Dave]: The normal level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.03%. Think about

it: 99.97% of the air we breathe is other stuff, and yet it is necessary to

the balance of life. Gives you an idea how fragile our atmosphere is.

Another thought: if the earth was the size of a basketball, how thick would

the atmosphere be? An inch? A centimeter? No, it would be thinner than a

sheet of paper.

 

 

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[Guest guest]

Hi y'all,

 

This is a long one and it might take some folks to the school house ..

but I think its worth reading. :-) Butch

 

> The Power Of Green

> By Thomas L. Friedman

> Sunday, April 15, 2007

 

 

I've been saying for YEARS now (decades actually, as scary as that

sounds to me) that by imposing stricter standards and " going green "

anyone who is business smart should know that it wouldn't devastate our

economy, but rather stimulate it wonderfully by creating new industries

and many jobs because of the need to retool (not to mention the money

that would be saved by improved efficiency and less wasted

materials/resources) ... like all the stuff that went on after WWII.

 

I guess that was/is the entrepreneur in me talking

 

*Smile*

Chris (list mom)

http://www.alittleolfactory.com

 

 

 

>

[Guest guest]

I guess that was/is the entrepreneur in me talking

 

[Dave:] And you’re totally correct. There will be all kinds of unforeseen

opportunities.

 

 

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[Guest guest]

Excellent, AND: what took so long?

Does anyone remember the report by the Club of Rome, on

the limits of growth?

 

I remember a great surge of environmental awareness in the early

seventies, when Earth Day was born. Some good laws were passed.

 

Then the crazy eighties hit and the world was consumed by the

stock market.

 

We got another surge in 1989/early nineties, and now we are all

expected to get excited again.

 

Let's hope we are not looking at a 19 year long cycle of awareness.

Momma is playing for keeps, and She can do without us a lot

better than we can do without Her.

(So far, anyhow. Sooner or later we have to hit Space. We are

Gaia's Star Seed)

 

Ien in the Kootenays

http://freegreenliving.com