Leave it to a late-night comedian to set Sarah Palin straight on climate science:
The best line? “There’s no debate about the greenhouse effect, just like there’s no debate about gravity. If someone throws a piano off the roof, I don’t care what Sarah Palin tells you — get out of the way, it’s coming down on your head.”
And then he has a great takedown on the inevitable social media attacks he received after the original segment aired:
Nice to see pop culture taking on the naysayers. At this point, there’s probably not much more we can offer other than ridicule.
Every year, Californians send about 30 million tons of trash to landfills. While the state’s residents do their part to reduce, reuse and recycle, that’s still a whole lot of garbage. It’s not only a land use issue, it’s a climate change issue: as landfill waste decays, it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Many other countries and states are using energy recovery technologies to turn that trash into power. Mostly it’s done by heating and gasifying the material, now using more advanced and cleaner technologies to recover energy from this solid waste. California has three such facilities in operation. But since the 1980s we’ve essentially not allowed any new ones to be built, out of concern for local pollution impacts, particularly on low-income communities of color.
But as the energy recovery technology improves and the state grapples with its needs both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and find non-fossil fuel-based sources of energy, waste-to-energy has emerged as an important issue in the Capitol recently.
To that end, Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) convened a group of environmental advocates, waste-to-energy technology developers, and state and local officials to discuss prospects for moving forward on this issue.
The concerns are significant: will the technologies adversely impact nearby communities, many of which may be disproportionately low-income and of color? Will energy recovery incentives discourage recycling? How reliable are these new technologies in reducing local emissions?
Based on that discussion, CLEE is today releasing the report Wasted Opportunities: How to Secure Environmental & Clean Energy Benefits From Municipal Solid Waste Energy Recovery, which I co-authored with Daniel Gergely Szabo. It recommends solutions for the state to address this challenge, including:
- The development of technology-neutral, performance-based standards for energy recovery of waste materials that will not discourage recycling;
- A revised waste disposal hierarchy that includes energy conversion that reduces overall pollution and contemplates “dispersion” as the lowest rung beyond disposal; and
- A revised landfill tipping fee that accounts for the full range of environmental costs.
Ultimately, should decision-makers identify appropriate technologies to deploy, the state will need a discussion on land-use siting to ensure that environmental justice concerns are addressed. While that process is not the subject of this report, it would be a worthwhile second step in contemplating these technologies.
You can read more on the report page here. In addition, I will be hosting a radio show discussion on this topic tonight at 7pm on San Francisco’s KALW radio 91.7 FM, a local NPR affiliate, for the show City Visions. My guests include:
- Jack Macy, Senior Commercial Zero Waste Coordinator for the City and County of San Francisco Department of the Environment;
- Rob White, Chief Strategist at Sierra Energy, a waste gasification and renewable energy company founded in Davis, California in 2004; and
- Heather Youngs, Senior Analysis Fellow at the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and an adjunct professor of biochemistry at Michigan Technological University.
For those not in the area, you can tune in via the website, either live or afterwards when the audio is posted.
In a long and fascinating piece on President Obama’s views on foreign policy, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg relays the president’s thinking on a range of global issues, gleaned from multiple and extended interviews.
While the Middle East is much of the focus of the article, the president reveals his real concerns for the safety of the United States:
“Isis is not an existential threat to the United States,” he told me in one of these conversations. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” Obama explained that climate change worries him in particular because “it is a political problem perfectly designed to repel government intervention. It involves every single country, and it is a comparatively slow-moving emergency, so there is always something seemingly more urgent on the agenda.”
And it’s also dominating his thinking about the transition to the next president:
In a conversation at the end of January, I asked the president to describe for me the threats he worries about most as he prepares, in the coming months, to hand off power to his successor.
“As I survey the next 20 years, climate change worries me profoundly because of the effects that it has on all the other problems that we face,” he said. “If you start seeing more severe drought; more significant famine; more displacement from the Indian subcontinent and coastal regions in Africa and Asia; the continuing problems of scarcity, refugees, poverty, disease—this makes every other problem we’ve got worse. That’s above and beyond just the existential issues of a planet that starts getting into a bad feedback loop.”
It’s reassuring that the president personally is so focused on climate change. To my mind, there is no greater issue facing humanity. Of course, for any single individual, there may be more important concerns: the Syrian refugee, the low-income person with health troubles, the migrant worker.
But climate change supersedes all these issues on a global scale, with the following potential consequences:
- Economic — the cost of relocating major American cities from inundated coasts or drought-stricken regions will be enormous. Probably not fatal to the U.S. economy, but likely to be deeply crippling.
- National security — the climate stressors on various nations, as we saw in the Middle East with drought-fueled rising food prices that sparked the Arab Spring, could lead to instability, wars, and more refugees. We’re already getting a taste of what that may look like in Europe and the Middle East right now.
- Species survival — as the planet blows past 2 degrees centigrade warming by the end of this century, with steeper temperature increases to come in the next, there’s a strong risk of global crop failure and further massive species die-off, leading to the risk of extinction for humans.
Of course, there are other planetary risks, like nuclear war and viruses/plagues. But those threats are likely to leave pockets of the planet (or percentages of people) unharmed, allowing life on Earth as we know it to continue.
In the long run, I believe life on Earth will survive, whether we’re here or not. In fact, a mass die-off now will probably provide a great opportunity for some other species, currently around us somewhere, to flourish and diversify, much as mammals did after the die-off of many dinosaur-era species.
But I’d rather have that future come much later, and keep the present arrangement for as long as we can. And at the very least, at least we have a president who shares these concerns, even as his political power — and boldness to tackle the issue when we had a better opportunity — has faded.
To clean the grid, we’re going to need lots of energy storage to capture surplus renewables and dispatch them when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. This market for energy storage technologies is growing rapidly, helped by battery innovations spurred in part by electric vehicle deployment.
But batteries aren’t the only way to store energy, and the recent push is spurring some creative ideas. As an example, gravity could be used in more ways than just pumping water uphill for pumped hydro storage, according to Business Green:
The ARES [Advanced Rail Energy Storage] Nevada project uses the same principles as pumped hydroelectric energy storage projects, but instead of relying on water in a water-stressed region it plans to make use of an inclined rail track and generator locomotive cars that will run along it.
Once operational, the project will encompass 106 acres of public land in Southern Nevada, near Pahrump in Clark and Nye Counties. ARES plans to connect the energy storage system to the power western grid via the facilities of Valley Electric Association, providing grid stabilization services to the region.
It reminds me of a pumped hydro example I read about using the tides: an enclosed container fills up at high tide with seawater, and then the height differential created with low tide allows the water to spill out and spin a turbine. I guess you could call that Tidal Energy Storage.
Either way, it’s encouraging to see some creative and hopefully low-cost projects that could help us solve the energy storage challenge.
Last month I summarized Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s views on various environmental issues. Since then, the candidate completed an environmental and energy questionnaire from the Koch-supported American Energy Alliance that sheds further light on his thinking, or at least where his thinking isn’t.
One thing that stood out is that he seems to have backed away from his desire to completely eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, he wants more scrutiny:
Under my administration, all EPA rules will be reviewed. Any regulation that imposes undue costs on business enterprises will be eliminated.
Of course, EPA rulemaking already is required to take into account cost-benefit analyses in its major rules, but Trump answered affirmatively in the questionnaire that agencies have abused this analysis in order to give themselves more regulatory power.
On energy, he takes a position that may actually hurt the oil and gas industry:
Subsidies distort markets and should be used only when national security is at stake. Eventually, all subsidies should end so that the demand for energy will set prices, allow consumers access to the best values and encourage all facets of the energy industry to do all they can to keep their particular source competitive.
Ironically, the oil and gas industry receive significant subsidies from government, possibly close to $40 billion or more per year by some estimates. I’ve often thought of ending these subsidies as a sort of “dormant carbon tax,” because they could potentially raise the cost of oil and gas the way a carbon tax would.
But Trump seems to contradict himself somewhat in the next answer, where he says he favors subsidies if it means “energy independence.” He thinks that urgent need means “we must support all energy sources.” By that logic, he may be persuadable to support renewable energy and electric vehicles, although he rules out support for a carbon tax, which would be the most efficient way to boost energy independence and those clean technologies.
Trump also supports the renewable fuel standard (RFS) for the energy independence reason (although I’m sure Iowa politics played a role). He wants the RFS program to continue, although environmentalists don’t like the mandate because it doesn’t have an environmental screen on what fuel is produced. But that policy is actually an important backstop for California’s low-carbon fuel standard, which does have that screen (not that it’s a reason to keep the federal program as-is).
Trump went on to give muddled and confused answers on what the U.S. government should do with the federal land it owns (establish “a shared governance structure” with states) and on clean water (it’s the “responsibility of all citizens and governments” and “shared governance of waterways seems a logical way to go”).
Overall, a bit more of a window into the candidate’s thinking on issues. But these bits and pieces are all we’re likely to get at this point, given how little substance is on his website on environmental topics.
Much of our efforts to reduce carbon emissions involves fairly complicated and advanced technologies. Whether it’s solar panels, batteries, flywheels, or fuel cells, these technologies have typically required public support to bring them to scale at a reasonable price, along with significant regulatory or legal reforms to accommodate these new ways of doing old things, from generating power to driving a car.
Yet ironically, here in California we seem to be making the most progress on some of these more technologically advanced areas, and not enough progress in one of the simplest and most cost-effective means of reducing carbon emissions: using less energy in our existing buildings.
Being more energy efficient certainly can involve technological advances, like LED lights instead of incandescent bulbs, lights with sensors that turn off when people leave a room, or more efficient heating or air conditioning units. But it is fundamentally about doing the same with less, and it can often pretty quickly pay off, given the reduction in utility bills that result.
But in California, despite billions spent on energy efficiency efforts, our energy efficiency efforts are barely keeping pace with the increasing demand for electricity. Current utility efficiency programs focus on voluntary, often self-financed measures, with rebates and fixed incentives meant to spur them on. Meanwhile, administrator costs are taking up half of the budgets for many efficiency programs.
Clearly, something needs to change if we are to have any hope of achieving our long-term climate and energy goals in the state. After all, it’s a waste to focus on expensive new renewables and energy storage if we’re not making better progress on the efficient use of the energy we already have.
Given this challenge, the state legislature recently acted to change the nature of our efficiency programs. SB 350 (De Leon, 2015) requires a doubling of efficiency in our buildings by 2030, while AB 802 (Williams, 2015) in part requires utilities to plan for efficiency programs that compensate building owners based on the measured energy saved. These steps will be necessary to change the paradigm and unlock more private investment in energy efficiency retrofits.
To recommend policies to boost this capital market financing for energy retrofits, UC Berkeley and UCLA Law are today releasing a new report “Powering the Savings: How California Can Tap the Energy Efficiency Potential in Existing Commercial Buildings.” The report is the 17th in the two law schools’ Climate Change and Business Research Initiative, generously supported by Bank of America since 2009.
The report describes ways that California could unlock more private investment in energy efficiency retrofits, particularly in commercial buildings. This financing will flow if there’s a predictable, long-term, measured and verified amount of savings that can be directly traced to energy efficiency measures. New software and methodologies can now more accurately perform this task. They establish a building’s energy performance baseline, calibrating for a variety of factors, such as weather, building use, and occupancy changes. That calibrated or “dynamic” baseline can then form the basis for calculating the energy savings that occur due specifically to efficiency improvements.
But the state currently lacks a uniform, state-sanctioned methodology and technology standard, so utilities are reluctant to base efficiency incentives or programs without regulatory approval to use these new methods. The report therefore recommends that energy regulators encourage utilities to develop aggressive projects based on these emerging metering technologies that can ultimately inform a standard measurement process and catalyze “pay-for-performance” energy efficiency financing, with utilities able to procure energy efficiency savings just like they were a traditional generation resource.
To learn more about the report and its recommendations, please join us for a webinar on Monday, April 18th from 10 to 11am. Speakers will include:
- Jeanne Clinton, Special Advisor to Governor Brown for Energy Efficiency, California Public Utilities Commission
- Cynthia Mitchell, energy economist and TURN consultant
- Dennis Quinn, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder, Joule Assets. Inc.
You can register via this site.
Hopefully, by tapping into the state’s spirit of innovation, California leaders can show the way to an energy efficiency revolution the way the state helped create a strong market for other clean technologies, like solar panels and energy storage. Because failure on the efficiency front could otherwise nullify so much of our progress in these other areas.
Last week I keynoted the California Biodiesel Conference in Sacramento, and I learned a lot from the panel presentations. The organizers have how made all the slides available here (scroll down a bit).
You can learn about the Governor’s Office priorities for funding more in-state biodiesel production, why gasoline consumption is projected to decline but diesel consumption to rise in the coming decades, and why biodiesel is one of the fastest growing biofuels in use in California, among other interesting tidbits.
And if that’s not enough, read our Berkeley / UCLA Law report Planting Fuels to learn about policies that could boost in-state production even more.
While electrification of transportation will be desirable for passenger vehicles and some goods movement, ultimately we’ll still need biofuels for many transportation needs, from long-haul trucking to aviation. Low-carbon biodiesel will therefore be a key part of our fuel mix for the foreseeable future.
The future of a clean electricity grid will require more decentralization based on clean technology, like solar and energy storage. Large industrial customers are investing in these technologies and also signing up to moderate their electricity demand in response to larger grid needs (i.e. reducing usage when electricity becomes expensive and dirty to produce). Smaller users like homeowners can become part of a bundled, aggregated group that can produce the same effect as a single large user through automated software and payments that encourage reduced demand at key times.
Under an important federal regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) back in 2011, clean tech companies sell this aggregated change in demand (called “demand response”) to regional grid operators as a package deal. The reduced demand that these companies bundle helps to alleviate strain on the grid, lower economic costs on the wholesale power market, and reduce pollution in the process.
But as I wrote in October, the future of this arrangement was in doubt, with the Supreme Court considering a major challenge to the legality of FERC’s order 745, which enabled this aggregated demand response. The issue is that states control their in-state retail market, while the federal government through FERC can only regulate the wholesale power market across state lines. When FERC allowed clean tech companies to bundle changes in user demand through retail price signals and then sell that aggregated change in demand to regional grid operators in the wholesale power market, opponents argued that FERC was overstepping its bounds into areas under state jurisdiction. Think of it like a commerce clause challenge to FERC authority.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court decided today in a 6-2 vote (Alito recused himself, with Scalia and Thomas dissenting) that FERC’s order was a legitimate regulation under the agency’s wholesale interstate market jurisdiction. As Justice Kagan wrote:
It is a fact of economic life that the wholesale and retail markets in electricity, as in every other known product, are not hermetically sealed from each other. To the contrary, transactions that occur on the wholesale market have natural consequences at the retail level. And so too, of necessity, will FERC’s regulation of those wholesale matters.
The court found that FERC can regulate in areas that directly affect the wholesale power market, as in this demand response arrangement, and that a scheme to provide payments for users to moderate demand and then sell it on the wholesale power market does not constitute a direct setting of in-state retail rates, which would otherwise be under state jurisdiction.
The implications of this decision are critical not just for demand response but for other clean technologies as well. As states look to broaden their clean technology base outside of their boundaries, they’re going to need federal regulations to enable interstate coordination, sometimes grounded at the local level. For example, just as customers can aggregate their retail demand changes to sell to the wholesale power market, they may want to aggregate their on-site energy storage such as using the Tesla PowerWall battery. Or they may want to aggregate power they return to the grid from their plugged-in electric vehicles. Or they may want to share surplus solar power from their roofs across state lines.
The possibilities are myriad and all indispensable to a technology-driven approach to decarbonizing our grid. With the Court’s decision today, this innovation can continue, leading to further economic and environmental benefits for all electricity ratepayers.
Just in time for our lunch event on biofuels today, the Navy this week announced a major investment in biofuels for its fleet, per the San Diego Union-Tribune:
This Wednesday, there surely will be tears, hugs and excitement as sailors begin another deployment to the world’s hotspots. On the surface, it will be a replay of a common occurrence in any Navy town when sailors go to sea, but in the ships’ gas tanks will be fuel made from renewable resources that has officials back at the Pentagon exuberant.
“Underway on beef-fat power” might not have the same ring as “Underway on nuclear power,” the historic message the Nautilus submarine beamed when it left the pier 61 years ago today. Nonetheless, the Navy is trumpeting the use of renewable biofuels as a game-changer.
In 2009, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced that the Navy and Marine Corps would get half of their power from non-fossil fuel sources by 2020, and that the Navy would deploy an entire carrier strike group using biofuels by 2016.
Since then, every type of aircraft in the service’s hangars and every class of ship in the Naval Vessel Register has flown or gone to sea with biofuels made out of beef fat, municipal waste, palm oil, algae or camelina, a plant in the mustard family.
Critics may object to the higher cost, but for the Navy, it’s a national security issue. No military wants to be wholly dependent on foreign sources of fuel, and biofuels mean local production and a hedge against volatile oil prices.
For California, the military investment also means a guaranteed market for a nascent biofuel industry that can really use the help. Oil prices won’t stay low forever, so keeping our biofuel industry alive to step in when needed is important economically, environmentally, and for national security, too.
As California commits itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, what role will biofuels play as a petroleum alternative? And how can California ensure that more low-carbon biofuels are produced in-state, especially given the competition from cheap oil and cheap international biofuel?
State officials and biofuel producers will address these questions at a free legislative lunch briefing this Friday, January 22nd, in the Capitol. The event will also discuss findings from the recent UCLA/UC Berkeley Law report on ways to boost in-state biofuel production, “Planting Fuels: How California Can Boost Local, Low-Carbon Biofuel Production.”
The event will include the following speakers:
- Lisa Mortenson, chief executive officer at Community Fuels
- Tim Olson, energy and fuels program manager at the California Energy Commission
- Cliff Rechtschaffen, senior adviser to Governor Brown
- Floyd Vergara, industrial strategies division chief, California Air Resources Board
When: January 22, 2016, 12:00pm-1:30pm
Where: Governor’s Office large conference room, Capitol Building, Sacramento
Lunch will be served. More information can be found here. Please note space is limited, so register soon via this link.
