Peak Energy: Demonstrating The Future

Green Car Congress has an article on Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s efforts in demonstrating real live V2G (vehicle to grid) technology – a cornerstone of the clean energy future.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, California’s biggest utility, showcased the first-ever utility demonstration of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology during an alternative energy solution summit in Silicon Valley.

V2G technology allows for the bi-directional sharing of electricity between Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plug-in Electric Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs), and the electric power grid. The technology turns each vehicle into a power storage system, increasing power reliability and the amount of renewable energy available to the grid during peak power usage.

PG&E, using a Prius converted to a PHEV in partnership with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and Energy CS, showed the reverse flow of energy from the vehicle back to the outlet—a first public showcase for any utility.

PG&E then ran several lights and appliances to show how V2G could benefit its customers. Although PG&E’s PHEV is currently in prototype form, the company sees the possibility that its customers will be able to take advantage of V2G technology and PHEVs by providing power to their home or businesses during hot summer days to avoid high energy prices and help prevent outages.

PG&E’s V2G demonstration marks an important milestone for plug-in vehicle technology. Using a grid-connected car’s battery as distributed energy storage for homes or businesses expands the economic and environmental benefits of plug-in vehicles.
—Felix Kramer, Founder of CalCars.org

Research has suggested that the most promising utility markets for V2G power are for the ancillary services for which hourly wholesale markets exist: power-regulation and spinning reserves.

These services require fast and accurate responses to electric grid operator signals, and typically are used for short durations. Grid operators across the country require each of these services for every one of the 8,760 operating hours in a year, and they represent a multi-billion-dollar combined market.
—“Electric and Hybrid Vehicles: New Load or New Resource?”

Regulation (frequency response) services today are used to increase or to decrease grid power in a specific area. If demand is greater then supply at any given moment, then regulation up is required. If demand is less than supply, then regulation down is required. With a PHEV in the loop, regulation up would discharge the battery, and regulation down charge the battery.

Spinning reserves are used to deliver fast power to the grid in case of a sudden contingency, such as a scheduled generator tripping offline, or the failure of a transmission or distribution facility. Spinning reserves, when called upon, are required for only a short period.

Central to these schemes is having the utility have control of the timing of the charging and the discharging, and therefore the use of intelligent grid technology.

This excess capacity could potentially provide electricity to PHEVs provided the utilities have some control over when charging occurs. We did not evaluate system-wide effects of uncontrolled charging; however, we would anticipate significant negative impacts if this were allowed at a large scale.
—Denholm and Short, NREL report

In a scenario outlined by PG&E, vehicle owners will select a price threshold at which they are willing to sell energy, and when the price reaches this point the utility will be able to automatically draw energy out of the vehicle, leaving enough for the drive home if necessary. The utility’s customers would then earn credit in the amount of energy used by the utility toward their monthly energy bill.

V2G technology also serves as a way to increase the amount of renewable energy used during peak energy hours. During times of maximum demand, electrical utilities have to buy power from expensive and less efficient fossil fuel power generating sources. PHEVs will charge their batteries at night when energy is inexpensive and is generated with a larger percentage of renewable resources.

When demand is high the next day, instead of turning on a fossil-fuel based generator, the utility can purchase the renewable energy stored in the vehicle batteries.

While I’ve been rattling on about smart grids for ages I only occasionally touch on energy efficiency initiatives in the tech industry – here’s one that caught my eye in The Register on “green (computing) grids“.

The bandwagon that is energy efficiency has gained 28 more riders, with Brocade, Novell and Copan among those signing up to the Green Grid, a non-profit consortium set up to address the problems of energy consumption in the data centre.

Copan claims that because its massive array of idle disk (MAID) technology powers down unused disks, it can run 91TB of storage per kilowatt of power, versus 4TB per KW for Fibre Channel disk and 17TB per KW for SATA disk. Copan also claims to be the first storage company to join, even though you might have read somewhere that GG founders IBM, Sun and HP may also have some sort of minor interest in storage.

Novell meanwhile reckons its ZENworks management tools and virtualised SUSE Linux on Xen have a big role to play in saving server power, and Brocade says it needs to be in there because networked storage has become a major power consumer in the data centre.

Business 2.0 reports that as climate worries grow, cities turn green.

Green roofs aren’t the future: They’re already here. In Chicago, 2.5 million square feet of downtown roof space is now covered with hardy plants such as sedum and prairie grass–the better to lower heating and air-conditioning costs (by 10 percent or more) and dramatically reduce rainwater runoff. The Windy City’s rooftops aren’t alone: The total square footage of green roofs in the United States is growing at the healthy rate of 125 percent a year.

Now some entrepreneurs are placing bets on something even more forward-thinking: green walls. “They’re taking off way faster than green roofs,” says Chad Sichello, president and CEO of G-Sky, a Vancouver, British Columbia, company that offers both.

Now some entrepreneurs are placing bets on something even more forward-thinking: green walls. “They’re taking off way faster than green roofs,” says Chad Sichello, president and CEO of G-Sky, a Vancouver, British Columbia, company that offers both. Starting at $ 100 per square foot, G-Sky will install plant-filled wall panels that can go on any vertical surface–meaning G-Sky just quintupled its opportunity. After all, “for every roof out there, there are four walls,” says Steven Peck, founder of the Toronto- based industry association Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, who says he expects the vertical greenery market to be “huge.”

Green walls can provide as much bill-saving insulation as green roofs, but put less load-bearing strain on the building. Whole Foods (Charts), Vancouver International Airport, and the W Hotels (Charts) chain are early G-Sky clients. And that’s just the start. G-Sky is looking long-term, to a world where carbon-trading is king and companies are eager to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. What better way to do that than to cover your building with greenery? “Even in small plants, there’s a very easy calculation for how much carbon they offset,” Sichello says.

Green walls can also help offset the newly identified urban heat island effect: All the heat-absorbing surfaces in a city raise its temperature to as much as 8 degrees higher than that of the surrounding countryside. Peck says no North American city will have enough green roofs and walls to combat this effect before 2027–not even Chicago.

Gar Lipow at Grist has an interesting article on “Doing carbon taxes right“.

One advantage of carbon taxes (and auctioned permits as well — close enough to a carbon tax for practical purposes) not often noted is that it they produce revenue that can be directed back to consumers. This is an important contrast to the Kyoto system, where large numbers of permits were given away to big polluters. As with any method of raising the price of carbon, ultimately the cost was passed on to consumers. But with the permit giveaways, the consumer did not recover any of those costs.

On a small scale, this is merely painful and unfair. But suppose this was done with a large-scale rise in emission prices — one that increased the prices of consumer goods by 25 or 50 percent? Not only would this cause direct suffering, the odds are pretty good that reduced consumer demand would cause at least a recession, with a real risk of world-wide depression. You need to return some the costs to consumers, not only on moral grounds but on Keynesian ones — to avoid a precipitous drop in overall demand.

I will add that when you talk about a drop in consumption for poor people, you are talking not just suffering but death. Even in the rich nations, there people poor enough that cutting their real income by a third or half will kill some of them. Cut the income of people in poor nations already living on a few dollars a day, and you are talking slaughter.

Gifting the money to the rich (as permit giveaways or income tax cuts do) does not solve this. The rich cannot, by themselves, keep consumption from falling. And for you supply-siders, additional capital made available from such cuts or giveaways would not provide stimulus to make up for what would be a demand-led downturn. So a carbon tax or auctioned permit system lets you avoid serious economic consequences a permit giveaway would provoke — providing the money is directed in a way to benefit large numbers of people.

Most people proposing a carbon tax understand this. That is why you have proposals to use the money to reduce payroll taxes, or to fund school programs, or fund a clean energy program; use the revenue in ways that probably benefit large numbers of people; the result is not only more fair (benefiting people who otherwise would be hurt) but provides the stimulus to avoid a downturn.

However, I still see a political problem with such programs: they tend to benefit narrower groups than are hurt by them — either demographically or over time. Payroll tax cuts do nothing for retired people (many of whom are either poor or on the edge of poverty and would be deeply hurt by utility and other price increases), nor the non-working disabled. Additional funding for schools provides no immediate benefits to families without someone attending those schools — the old again, as well as single people. Remember these taxes distribute pain to just about everybody, so distributing benefits to a smaller number is political suicide.

In addition, in the long run, revenue from these taxes will decline. Their whole point is to discourage consumption. Of course they will be phased in gradually via escalator clauses; so even as emissions decline, revenues will rise for a while. But past a certain point, that will change. The tax will be fully phased in, and revenue will decline. It is not a good idea for things like social security or school funding to depend on declining revenue sources. When the time comes to replace those revenues, I guarantee conservatives will use the opportunity to push for funding cuts instead.

What about using carbon tax revenues for a clean energy fund? It answers one objection: such a fund would ultimately benefit everybody. But it replaces it with a question of timing. Efficiency improvements and clean energy sources can be put in place quickly, but not at the same rate as a carbon tax is put into place. So the benefits would trickle in much more slowly than the costs. Most people would see higher energy bills long before efficiency means lowered them again.

As an example, think of climate control improvements in existing buildings — perhaps the single thing that could be implemented most quickly. Imagine a package: attic and floor insulation, weather sealing, window insulation kits, insulated curtains or shutters. Now here is the problem: there are only so many people skilled at doing energy audits and installing this kind of package. You can train some, but recently trained workers without experience are not who you want installing insulation in your home. Training would need to be done at a slow enough rate that trainees could be absorbed into experienced teams and gain experience themselves before new trainees were added. Even a crash program for every home the U.S. (minus those with climate control efficiency measures already in place) would realistically take between four and ten years (at minimum) if you wanted quality work.

So the only way to use the revenue from a carbon tax or auctioned permit system would be to return that revenue directly to the residents of the region that levied it. Everyone who bore the costs of a carbon tax would benefit from it, in about the same time frame. Because higher income people tend to cause more greenhouse emissions than poor ones, such a refund system would be slightly progressive net — providing most people with more income than the carbon tax increased their costs. Once in place it would be popular; everyone likes getting checks; see also Alaska.

A long term advantage to this is less resistance to incremental raises. Higher carbon taxes would mean larger checks. So you could build both scheduled increases and automatic ratchets that respond to emissions declining less than scheduled.

Yes, we would still need a clean energy fund. But we could fund it from something other than a carbon tax. Everyone who has looked seriously at what it would take to solve global weirding has realized it will take more than putting a price on carbon. George Monbiot, Joe Romm, the Stern report, the CERES group, and RMI are examples. Note that this transcends ideology. Monbiot is somewhat left, Stern and the CERES group are conservative. I’d describe both Joe Romm, and the RMI as centrists.

WorldChanging is wondering where all the green designers are.

Why are there no big-name green product designers? Architecture has its William McDonoughs and its Shigeru Bans, who does product design have?

Nobody. (Really, I encourage you to try naming some in the Comments. I’d like to be proved wrong.) Franco Lodato is a big-name designer doing biomimicry, but he’s not particularly green. Michael Braungart is one of the greenest people in product design, but he’s a chemist. McDonough has also done a lot with Braungart to suggest guidelines like Cradle to Cradle, but he’s still an architect, he doesn’t design products. Buckminster Fuller could have been called a green designer for his Dymaxion car, and kitchen, and such, but he was more of an technologist than a designer, and in any case he’s not around anymore. Amory Lovins, Gunter Pauli, and other big names have helped companies green their manufacturing lines, but have not done much if any design.

So why are there no green product designers?

A few reasons. Partly it’s because what makes a product sustainable are the manufacturing & business model on one end, and the science & technology of green materials on the other end. The company owners are the ones who can make green happen. The designers just use the tools they have and design to spec. For instance, Herman Miller had big-name designer Yves Behar do a green lighting product for them, their Leaf Light LED lamp. Behar is not a particularly green designer on his own, but Herman Miller’s design requirements made the product green. Just like with their Mirra and Celle chairs, it is their specs for materials, technology, and manufacturing methods that make the product green. … Our own Dawn Danby is a designer who’s getting an MBA at a green school instead of pursuing a green design degree. I have tried (as have many designers I know) to talk clients into greener designs and materials, but at the end of the day, they are the ones who make the choice. As Dawn said:

[This] is why you get indie designers making dumb stuff out of rubbish: they can control the whole system outside of end-of-life, by identifying materials (“these plastic tubs were being thrown away!”) and then assembling crafty things in their garages. A lamp made out of leftover evian bottles vaguely represents sustainability, it loosely alludes to it, but it doesn’t get us very far along the path. What makes me crazy is the fact that ecodesign that looks like that has been around for decades, and now it’s getting famous… while still missing the point.

The point that she’s talking about is that little one-off crafty pieces, no matter how hip and trendy, won’t stop the freight train of industrialism from running over the planet; they will just make quiet crunching noises as the train roars over them and slows down half a percent. What we need is a transformation of mass-manufacturing, nothing less than a second industrial revolution, as several luminaries have pointed out before.

Architects can build impressive one-off projects because all buildings are one-offs (except the tiny prefab industry); product designers have to manufacture at scale to make an impact. Perhaps this is why green building boomed before green products–because an architect only needs to convince one client of sustainability’s benefits, while a product has to convince millions of customers while sitting on the shelves.

WorldChanging also has a detailed article on bee, colony collapse disorder and all other aspects of Apiculture

If ever you needed a visual example of the value of ecosystem services, try envisioning an army of human laborers attempting to pollinate an orchard of fruit trees by hand, one blossom at a time. Absurdly enough, an alarming decrease of bee populations worldwide, known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), has some farmers hiring teams to do just that.

With much of our focus on bigger species as indications of environmental crisis — polar bears drowning, grizzly bears terminating hibernation early — we sometimes forget about the little creatures that keep things in balance. But bees are an important provider of the ecosystem service of pollination, and as calamity strikes it is all the more obvious how important they are in the agricultural economy. From a strictly financial perspective, pollination is an invaluable service, provided by bees at no cost. But the cost we’d incur if the buzzing workers disappeared has been estimated at anywhere between $ 14 billion and $ 92 billion in the U.S. alone.

There’s also speculation that genetic modification may be contributing to physiological dysfunctions in bees which lead to their decline.

According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of a study…examining the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called “Bt corn” on bees…the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have “altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry…”

The causes haven’t been determined with certainty, but many farmers have begun instituting precautionary solutions. In the Himalayan regions of Northern India and Tibet, as well as in parts of China, farmers have found some entrepreneurial opportunity in the necessity to hand-pollinate as their bee crews diminish, but managing a labor force doesn’t make up in the long run for an orchard suffering from sterility.

Hand pollination is an interesting method of pollinating crops and provides employment and income generating opportunities to many people during apple flowering season. But at the same time it is an expensive, time-consuming and highly unsustainable proposition of crop pollination owing to the increased labour scarcity and costs. Moreover, a large part of farmers’ income is used in managing pollination of their crops.

The longer-term solution to CCD is the most obvious: steward bee populations and keep them thriving. Bees have become a mostly domesticated insect, which means it’s up to us to help keep them populous. As professor May Berenbaum said in a podcast on Earth & Sky, “I don’t think people realize just how utterly dependent we are on bees. To some extent, historically, there have been feral bees, wild bees that people haven’t domesticated that contribute pollination services. But when verola mites were introduced, feral populations all over the country crashed; nobody was there to protect them. And as a consequence, nobody has been there monitoring them, we have no idea what the feral bee population is in this country, whether there are bees that can fill in for the missing bees is just an open question.” Apiculture advocates have set up numerous web-based resources which allow beekeepers to do some citizen science, swapping important observations about their experiences, and tracking trends through systems like this open survey run by Bee Alert. The International Bee Research Association has a huge archive of information to help guide people through keeping hives. And of course, while the pollination value of bee colonies may be a more serious reason to protect them than for the honey and wax they produce, it’s an undeniable benefit. In urban environments, just a small hive can keep pollination healthy and produce bee products for a household or two. An urban farmer in New York named David Graves, is a model of a self-taught apiculturalist, having learned the ropes through reading and watching instructional videos, and started a network of rooftop hives in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He now sells his famed “high-rise
honey” at the city’s farmer’s markets.

Urban flowers provide a surprising line of uniquely flavored honeys. Graves’s bees work asters (supplying abundant nectar in the fall), locust, sumac and the August-blooming Chinese Scholar tree. A coveted mint-flavored honey from the Linden tree is a fast seller. Nectar from an inconspicuous Japanese plant, growing even in parking lot cracks, produces a dark, caramel candy like honey, which Graves considers one of his best. It is popular with his customers, as they love its unique taste.

He claims healthy hives, and his honey production supports that. Two years ago, a record honey harvest yielded 140 pounds from one Upper West Side rooftop hive (unfortunately, the stolen hive), exceeding an average annual yield by 60 pounds.

While CCD is bound to have negative consequences for both farmers and apiculturists, looking at the entire agroecological system, bees are only responsible for a part of all the pollination services delivered. Other insects, birds, wind and rain make up the rest of pollination we rely on for our daily bread. But alas, some of those pollinators are facing declines too as a report from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development cites “decline in wilderness and loss of habitat, land use changes, monoculture-dominated agriculture and excessive and indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals and pesticides” as composite factors in a challenge that worsens yearly.

Industrial agriculture, problematic as it is, affords those of us living within the system something of a cushion in looking at ways to deal with these pollinator declines. But for subsistence and small commercial farmers, inadequate pollination poses a serious and fairly immediate threat to livelihoods and food security. Unfortunately — though not surprisingly — it’s in part because of industrial agriculture that bees find themselves under threat. While we hold bees to such high regard, we must also remember that at least in North America they are not a native species, and as succinctly said by Prof. May Berenbaum, “over-reliance on one managed non-native species is inherently unstable.”

TreeHugger has the buzz on Pollinators In Peril.

The latest buzz: The week of June 24 through June 30, 2007 has been designated National Pollinator Week, thanks to the efforts of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) and its successful lobbying with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Senate.

As part of a national campaign to publicize the rapid and marked decline of pollinating insects and mammals, the NAPPC has also convinced the U.S. Postal Service to issue a series of four pollination-themed stamps this summer, depicting a Morrison’s bumble bee, a calliope hummingbird, a lesser long-nosed bat, and a Southern dogface butterfly.

Pollinators—which help spread the pollen, thereby fertilizing a third of our crops—are besieged by the triple threat of habitat destruction, pesticides, and pollution. Bees are also vanishing in untold numbers in a mysterious nationwide epidemic that is short on answers.

“This is serious,” says Orley “Chip” Taylor, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas. “We’re losing six thousand acres of habitat a day to development, 365 days a year. One out of every three bites you eat is traceable to pollinators’ activity. But if you start losing pollinators, you start losing plants.” …

Want to take a more active role in encouraging and protecting our pollinating pals? Consider ditching your lawn for a pollinator garden sanctuary or a Monarch butterfly waystation.

The Energy Blog has an update on the “Suncube” from Green and Gold Energy.

Green and Gold Energy of Australia just released this picture of their Sun Cube rooftop concentrating solar photovoltaic module. Shown left: 600 711kWh/year SunCube Mark 5 Solar Applianceâ„¢ with toughened glass lenses, internal 2 axis tracking motors / grid connect inverter.

Retail cost of the AC SunCube = AU$ 1,500 inc GST at 10%. Cost in the US is expected to be US $ 1,000. Their website states: We anticipate the SunCube development process will be completed by the end March 2007 with the first Adelaide installations occurring before the end of April 2007.

According to their discussion group, there are at least several months of backorders in the queue. SunCubes are not available for export, but will be built by local licensees. As far as I have been able to determine, outside of Australia there are licensees in Korea, India, Malta, Spain, Portugal, Israel, and Italy with ongoing negotiations in several other countries.

The Australian production is to proceed as follows:

1) Initial 1,000 SunCube per month manual assembly line – in progress now
2) 5,000 SunCube per month manual assembly line – to be operational mid 2007
3) 50,000 SunCube per month robotic assembly line – to be operational end 2007
4) Many more of the 50,000 robotic lines – as required by the market

The Daily Reckoning has an article on “Oilfield Technology and the Race Against Peak Oil“.

The trend toward heavier, sourer crude oil will directly benefit manufacturers of specialized wellhead equipment. These lower grades of crude make up a steadily rising share of global oil production because just as you’d expect, the sweetest, lowest-hanging fruit in the oil patch tends to be picked and consumed first.

More barrels of crude will require upgrading, particularly the abundant, yet barely accessible heavy crude from sources like the Orinoco belt in Venezuela. Technology is what the Venezuelans, the Russians, and the Saudis need, and they will pay up for it. Some of the biggest wealth-creating companies of the next generation will be those that can unlock the value these politically unstable resources – without committing billions in capital to projects that can be seized overnight.

Odds are, the next few years will look like the last few – a period of growing resource nationalization not unlike hoarding. Leaders of countries sitting on vast reserves are taking actions in the best interest of their people (or their personal Swiss bank account) and telling major oil companies to “get out.”

Most of their remaining reserves are difficult to produce, so Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez wouldn’t have kicked the big oil companies out if they hadn’t planned on granting major development projects to big service companies like Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, and Halliburton. Yet despite having access to the best oilfield technology in the world, most big projects still suffer from bottlenecks, delays, and cost overruns. This phenomenon is widespread enough that it supports the core ideas behind the Peak Oil theory – most notably that the “easy oil” has already been consumed.

Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, became a leading Peak Oil theory proponent after initially setting out to prove that it was nothing more than worrywarts seeking to make headlines. With decades of international oilfield consulting and research experience, he ran the numbers and concluded that data on both historical production and future projects was not precise enough to assume ample oil supply as far as the eye can see.

So Skrebowski started a “megaprojects” database to track the projects widely expected to satisfy growing demand. He’s noticed an undeniable trend of delayed startups and shortages of everything from drilling rigs to qualified personnel. Assuming that the current backlog of projects proceeds without a hitch, he expects that ” 24.8 [million barrels per day] of new capacity [is] due to come onstream between January 2007 and December 2012.”

An extra 24.8 million barrels per day of new capacity may sound like plenty for the world’s 2012 production needs. After all, it represents a little over 4% annual growth over the next 6 years. But this ignores depletion of the existing base, the elephant in the room that most Peak Oil critics either overlook or avoid. Skrebowski warns that the data behind the existing base, especially from national oil companies like Saudi Aramco, is not transparent enough for us to make happy assumptions about long-term supply. If average global depletion is running a little over 4% per year – a fair estimate – the world is likely to have the same oil production capacity in 2012 as it has today.

Skrebowski draws two conclusions from his latest megaprojects analysis. “First, data on production, project performance, and depletion rates is wholly unsatisfactory, particularly for the OPEC producers. Second, the large volumes of new capacity being added between 2007 and 2012 may not translate into the sort of increased production flows the world economy needs to underpin economic growth.”

According to the Christian Science Monitor Sydney is being patrolled by water police (no, not the “Water Rats” type) checking up on people wasting water. Maybe they are, but I’ve never seen any and they certainly never hassled the guy who used to wash his huge motor boat outside my apartment building every weekend last year.

At first glance it looks like a police car – a white vehicle with a black-and-yellow checkerboard stripe running along its flanks. But as the patrol vehicle turns a corner in the leafy district of Paddington, in central Sydney, its true purpose becomes clear from the bold black lettering across its trunk: “Water Restrictions.”

Australia, already the driest inhabited continent on the planet, is in the grip of its worst-ever drought.

The water crisis is no longer about desperate farmers in the Outback watching their sheep and cattle perish. Over the past six years, it has extended its grip to the cities and is changing the way Australians regard a resource they once took for granted. The patrol car is one of 50 that cruise Sydney’s streets around the clock, every day of the week, sniffing out water wastage.

Climate scientists agree that Australia’s drought is linked to global warming.

“There is very strong consensus,” says Blair Nancarrow, director of the Australian Research Centre for Water in Society. “There’s a lot of climate-model evidence that says that the drought is, at least in part, human-induced.”

Data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology show that, since 1970, rainfall has increased in the barely developed northwestern corner of the continent. But it has decreased in the densely populated east and southeast, the areas where it matters most.

Australians are increasingly bombarded with pleas to conserve their most precious resource. Last October a major electricity supplier asked people to refrain from singing, daydreaming, and engaging in other “nonessential activities” in the shower to save power and water. . Exhortations range from installing a rainwater tank in the backyard to eating less meat, on the grounds that rearing livestock requires far more water than growing crops.

Under Sydney’s strict water-conservation measures, introduced in 2003,, cars must not be washed with hoses, only buckets. Watering lawns and gardens with hoses or drip-irrigation systems is allowed on two days a week. A special permit is required to fill a swimming pool. Breaking any of these rules incurs a spot fine of A$ 220 (US$ 178) for householders and A$ 500 for businesses. …

The Guardian has an article on Britain’s new “Green Revolution” at home.

During the second world war the government famously urged every able man and woman in Britain to “dig for victory” – to grub up their flower beds and tear up their lawns to grow vegetables to avoid widespread hunger. Today, a new British land army of gardeners appears to be doing the same to avoid eating industrially-produced foods.

New figures from the Horticultural trades association show a 31% increase in the sales of vegetable seed to householders, and a corresponding 32% decline in the sale of flower seeds. We are also buying nearly twice as many seedlings and young edible plants like tomatoes and marrows, and are growing far more herbs than ever before.

Confirmation that the worm is turning away from flower growing to vegetables comes from the Royal Horticultural Society and seed companies, which say that vegetable seeds sales are now outstripping flower seeds for the first time since the second world war. Suttons, which sells nearly a third of all household vegetable seeds in the UK, said this week that there had been a massive increase in vegetable growing in Britain. “We are seeing a big move away from flower seeds to vegetables. There has been a dramatic rise in things like sales of onions and potatoes. Spuds in particular are nearly 60% up on last year, which was 20%-30% up on the year before,” a spokesman said. This year the company expects a 30% increase in its sales of UK vegetable seeds.

The proof that we are going back to our roots is seen in Britain’s 330,000 allotments. Thirty years ago thousands of acres fell into disuse and were taken back by local authorities for development. Today, almost all allotments are full and it is nearly as hard to get one as to get a place in a good school. “I’ve got people climbing all over me for allotments. Our waiting list is closed and there’s no chance of even getting on to it. It’s becoming a real bun fight,” said Bruno Dore, site secretary of the Shepherds Hill allotments group in north London. The city is now believed to produce nearly 16,000 tonnes of vegetables a year. “There’s definitely a big increase in the demand for allotments,” said Geoff Stokes, secretary of the National Association of Allotment and Leisure gardeners. “Sites which were vacant for years are now full.”

The reasons given for the shift to vegetable growing in the most urbanised country in Europe range from a political desire to not be beholden to large supermarkets, to a new awareness about healthy food and the environment, and deep dissatisfaction with industrially grown food. …

The seed sellers also detect a profound shift taking place, with people wanting to grow old varieties of vegetables that the industrial food system has left behind and legislation has made hard to grow. A myriad of specialist seed clubs has been set up because it is technically illegal to sell seeds that are not on the government-approved national seed list, designed to provide large scale farmers.

Yesterday Prince Charles added his weight to the heritage vegetable seed movement, urging people to grow older varieties to maintain biodiversity. Speaking on the 60th anniversary of Radio 4′s Gardeners’ Question Time, he said it was “crucially important” to preserve genetic diversity.

“What could be crazier than to reduce ourselves to fewer and fewer varieties? [Or] to have the kind of EU legislation that makes it impossible to sell the seeds of all those varieties? Hundreds of varieties [of vegetables] that our forefathers took a lot of trouble to develop are being lost. The old varieties are not hugely productive, but they have disease resistance.”

Garden Organic, Britain’s leading organic research organisation, now has 10,000 members in its heritage seed “library”. Members exchange and distribute over 800 old vegetable varieties. “There is a big increase in interest in growing older varieties. Our courses are well over-subscribed,” said Andy Strachan, an adviser with Garden Organic.

I might throw in another quote from the Monbiot talk I linked to yesterday to continue my occasional noting of Silvio Gesell and localised currency schemes.

I think you may be teetering on the edge of some very interesting potential discoveries. I’m not sure if you are aware, but with your Totnes Pound you seem to have reinvented Stamp Scrip, first pioneered by Silvio Gessell in Austria in the late 1920s, which was incredibly effective at revitalising local economies which were more or less completely finished at the time. The great economic thinker Bernard Lietaer has commented that if Gessell’s idea were not squashed by the Austrian Central Bank because it felt that its monopoly over the money supply was being challenged, the Second World War might not have happened, because the economic crisis in central Europe, caused by perpetual hyperinflation and all the other issues to do with the collapse of the central bank economy could very easily have been cured by Silvio Gessell’s system of stamp scrip. One further caveat, if you exchange it for pounds its not going to work, it has to be an isolate as far as the cash system is concerned. Anyway, it’s a great idea apart from that!

The other brilliant thing about what Rob is doing is that we can all start doing it right now. We don’t have to wait for Governments to act, we don’t have to wait for central banks to act, we don’t have to wait for corporations to act. Of course, they will try and get in our way as much as they possibly can, they’ll try impede the initiatives we might try to unleash, but what even David Milliband in his quote that you brought up, is aware of, is that Government can’t keep doing that if its going to pay any kind of cognaisance towards either climate change or a whole variety of climate problems of which peak oil is just one. I think we might begin to see Governments even beginning to encourage initiatives like this if they have any view at all to the long term future.

So let’s do it. Primarily in the name of climate change, secondly in the name of peak oil, and thirdly and importantly in the name of our quality of life, and that being not just our material quality of life but also our psychological quality of life. I think the revitalisation particularly of the local food economy, which the most obvious, the easiest and the most ethical thing to relocalise, because some forms of relocalisation can have fairly disastrous consequences for other parts of the world, but where food is concerned it makes absolute sense, and has just as great a role in knitting a community together as it does in dealing with our multiple energy crises.

While I’m doing repeats I might also throw in a different quote from the WorldChanging interview with Bill McKibben I quoted yesterday.

EG: What’s changed since you wrote your book about global warming, The End of Nature, in 1989?

BM: For along time, nothing changed. But in the past three years a couple things changed. The science has gotten a lot worse; we really understand just how high the stakes are. Hurricane Katrina blew open a door in the public’s consciousness. And Al Gore walked through that door with his movie, and really educated people.

What we’re trying to do now is to capitalize on that education, and turn it into action.

EG: Your new book, Deep Economy, isn’t just about global warming: it’s speaking to broader kinds of dissatisfaction that Americans are feeling with their lives today.

BM: Absolutely. It’s interesting; one of the bad effects of fossil fuel is that it’s destroying the world. And another is that in odd ways it managed to make our lives less happy instead of more. The endless expansion of our economy stopped producing more satisfaction about fifty years ago. That’s when Americans started to become steadily less happy and less satisfied with their lives.

It’s remarkable, that statistic, because that same fifty years has seen us treble the amount of stuff that we have. If any of the things that we tell ourselves all the time about the economy were true, those numbers would move in the same direction, not opposite directions. But the fact that they’re moving apart like that should cause us feel a little sad that we’ve wasted this much effort and caused this much damage to the environment without accomplishing anything in terms of human satisfaction. And it should make us think a little harder about what we’re going to do in the future. The idea of “more” and “better” being the same thing is very tired now, and you can’t make much of a case for it with the data. So it’s time to think more cleverly.

EG: How are we going to make that case to countries like India and China, where they’re still barely on the cusp of “more”?

BM: I don’t think that’s the first place it needs to be made. We spent a hundred years getting rich putting carbon in the atmosphere. We can’t very well say, well, we used it all up, so you’re going to have to think of something else. The Chinese are smart; they know that coal is the cheapest possible option. If they’re not going to use it, then they should be recompensed to some degree for that. There’s an international deal waiting to be made, and everyone knows its basic outlines. The only question is whether we’ll step up and make it or not.

The book talks a lot about China in particular. There are many places in China where people are still at a point in their economic development where “more” and “better” are pretty closely linked. If you’re living eight to a room in a hovel in rural China, trying to support your family on a half-acre of not very good farmland, then it’s pretty easy to understand why a little more income, and the chance to eat a little better, and maybe have two rooms instead of one, would be a pretty attractive proposition.

One of the big questions for the world is whether China’s going to develop on a more European or a more American model. It makes a big difference, because Europeans use half as much energy as Americans do. They consume less. They live in somewhat smaller houses. They take public transportation, which they tax themselves to pay for. Their disposable income is about two-thirds of what an American’s is. They have less in the way of material goods, but they take their productivity in guaranteed health care, in guaranteed education for their children, in a guaranteed retirement even if they’re not rich, and on and on and on.

EG: In Deep Economy you offer the example of a Norwegian office worker who sits at her desk at lunchtime and eats the sandwich she brought from home, and doesn’t feel deprived; she feels very content. Compare that to America, where if you’re not going out during lunch hour and spending $ 15 on a big bowl of salad, you’re missing out.

BM: Our perception of what is necessary is out of whack. The world is telling us so: the temperature is going up. And our own society is telling us so: if our consumption was making us unbelievably happy, then there would be no hope of changing it no matter what damage it was doing. We’d have a Pavlovian reaction and just keep hitting the lever. But since that’s not true, there’s some real hope for things to begin to change.

We’re beginning to see it happening: farmers markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy, and that’s not because they’re old-fashioned and rustic. It’s because these are people who are using a combination of old and very new ideas about agriculture to produce good food and produce good livings, and do it for a lot of people. And they’re also able to make the rest of us happier because we’ve got something good to eat, and we’ve got a place to buy it that’s way more congenial than the supermarket.

Sociologists last year followed shoppers around farmers markets and around supermarkets. They found people having 10 times more conversations in the farmer’s markets. That’s a big number. And they were using about 10 times less energy to feed themselves than the rest of us who were just ordering takeout from two thousand miles away every night of the year.

EG: In your book you describe the Intervale, an area of a couple hundred acres in Burlington, Vermont that’s been reclaimed by organic farmers, and now supplies a significant amount of fresh produce to the city, which is the largest in Vermont. But the population of Burlington is pretty small, around 200,000. How do you imagine something like that playing out in a city on the scale of New York?

BM: It’s harder to imagine in New York, until you start to reflect on the fact that 75 years ago, the New York metropolitan area supplied all its own food, not just the 10 percent that the Intervale’s managing to supply in Burlington. We call New Jersey “the Garden State” for a reason. Some of that soil — too much — is covered up with housing developments, but there’s still a lot of it left.

There’s a lot of land north of New York, in Westchester County, and beyond, all the way up into the southern tier of the state of New York, good and productive land that’s been growing into scrub forest for two or three generations because we weren’t growing food on it; we’ve been buying it all from the Midwest. It’s quite possible to imagine the remarkable expansion of the very successful green markets all over the city extending to the poorer parts of Brooklyn and Queens, as well as the one in Union Square.

And it’s quite possible to imagine lots of other changes. The building code in New York City should make sure that every new skyscraper is a net energy producing building, which wouldn’t be hard — it’s huge panels of glass exposed to the sun. We should be working hard to reduce energy use across the city with all the interesting technologies that we’ve figured out. New York is already a pretty green place in terms of its energy use, and it could get greener still. …

EG: Do you imagine that we’re going to see legislation mandating carbon caps in the country this year?

BM: I don’t know about this year; it’s possible that President Bush is such an idiot that we won’t see anything until he leaves office. But if not, then we’ll see them in the first two months of the next presidential administration. The only question is if they’re going to be tough ones or not. The industries know this; they’re going to try and cut an easy deal. We have to make them cut a much harder deal. And when we do, all the kinds of technological change we need to make will be much easier.

Right now, the force of economic gravity works in the wrong direction. Every good thing has to fight against that force, because we assess no penalty on fossil fuel for its environmental devastation. If we did, then that economic gravity would work to support a thousand great technological and cultural changes, and we would really start to see, not a thousand flowers bloom, but a thousand solar panels unfold, a thousand windmills spin.

EG: What about nuclear power? Some very prominent environmentalists, like British scientist James Lovelock, are supporting expansion of nuclear as the only way to produce the amount of energy modern societies need without contributing to global warming.

BM: If you want to hand me $ 2 billion to build a nuclear reactor, I can show you two billion things to do with it that would get you a lot more carbon bang for the buck, mostly to do with conservation. Spend that money going around your state and refitting every industrial motor to make it three times as efficient. Go stuff insulation in every old house in your state. Take your $ 2 billion and go to Wal-mart and buy compact florescent bulbs, and mail them at random to everybody in the phone book, and you’d get more bang for your buck than building a nuclear power plant.

The one thing I will say is that it’s very useful to talk about it, because it allows people to understand that a new coal-fired power plant is at least as dangerous as a nuclear-fired one. A nuclear power plant carries risks; a new coal-fired plant carries the absolute certainty of climatic destruction.

EG: Americans are not well known for embracing energy conservation.

BM: It’s only going to happen if it’s driven by the economic system. And that’s what all this carbon cap and trade stuff is about. The effect is going to be drive up the price of fossil fuel, and cause people to conserve, and to invent the technology that will allow us to conserve more easily.

Technology Review has an article on a big brotherish scheme to build a citywide wireless-sensor network in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The positive side of these things is that you can monitor things like pollution and traffic levels and thus actively try to adjust these aspects for the better – enabling smooth traffic flows is a big energy saver, for example.

The plan is to install 100 general-purpose nodes onto the streetlights of Cambridge, drawing power from the city’s infrastructure. Already there are five installed on Harvard’s campus and five at BBN’s facilities. Each node will be relatively large–about the size of a Mac Mini computer. A node will include a PC that runs the Linux operating system and a couple of gigabytes of flash memory as a hard drive. And instead of using a common low-power wireless-sensor protocol called Zigbee, CitySense nodes will use standard Wi-Fi radios; two radios will be in each node, one for management and control of the network, and the other for experiments. And, Welsh says, virtually any type of sensor will be able to connect to the nodes.

A first batch of sensors will collect weather data such as rainfall, wind speed, and barometric pressure. Another set of sensors will measure pollution such as the amount of particles in the air. Researchers could use the weather data to understand how temperature or wind speed vary throughout the city, and doctors could use the pollution data to advise patients with asthma to stay away from certain areas at certain times of day. Eventually, more sensors could be incorporated: for example, motion sensors could measure traffic flow, and light sensors scattered throughout the city could monitor parking spaces; the data would be uploaded to the CitySense network. “With something like CitySense,” Welsh says, “we’re going to be able to blanket the city with sensors and get a much more complete sense of what’s going on.”

Welsh expects that CitySense will, in addition to collecting and transmitting sensor data, be employed by computer scientists to test new network software and protocols, which could be used to help make Wi-Fi connections more robust. Currently, the only way to test new wireless protocols, says Welsh, is to run them on a computer simulation. But CitySense could be thought of as “an open laboratory,” he says, where researchers can upload and run their programs, collect data, and write papers.

The payoff of having an openly available wireless network like CitySense could be great, says Thomas Little, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University. “The existence of a wireless backbone like CitySense becomes an enormous asset,” he says. “There are very interesting opportunities to exploit,” he adds, including business opportunities. He envisions being able to integrate all sorts of sensors into the CitySense backbone, such as those that track the position of public transportation–which could help people know when the next bus is coming–and even video cameras that could monitor anything from traffic to urban wildlife.

Crooked Timber has a post on “The Paranoid Tendency in American Life“.

Driving home today I saw a guy standing by a busy downtown intersection holding a large sign that read, “9-11 Was An Inside Job.” It doesn’t quite rise to seeing a giant muppet-like creature holding the same sort of sign, but maybe he’s working on it.

Update: Here’s a recent piece from the Chronicle about 9-11 Conspiracy Theories in academia.

Some American paranoia is probably justified though – however its not “you” the government is out to get – its some other guy with a similar name – you’re just unlucky. From Bruce Schneier on “Ordinary People Being Labeled as Terrorists“. I wonder if the US economy collapses shortly after terrorists named Smith, Jones, Thomas and Gates are added to the list ?

By law, every business has to check their customers against a list of “specially designated nationals,” and not do business with anyone on that list.

Of course, the list is riddled with bad names and many innocents get caught up in the net. And many businesses decide that it’s easier to turn away potential customers with whose name is on the list, creating — well — a shunned class:

Tom Kubbany is neither a terrorist nor a drug trafficker, has average credit and has owned homes in the past, so the Northern California mental-health worker was baffled when his mortgage broker said lenders were not interested in him. Reviewing his loan file, he discovered something shocking. At the top of his credit report was an OFAC alert provided by credit bureau TransUnion that showed that his middle name, Hassan, is an alias for Ali Saddam Hussein, purportedly a “son of Saddam Hussein.”

The record is not clear on whether Ali Saddam Hussein was a Hussein offspring, but the OFAC list stated he was born in 1980 or 1983. Kubbany was born in Detroit in 1949.

Under OFAC guidance, the date discrepancy signals a false match. Still, Kubbany said, the broker decided not to proceed. “She just talked with a bunch of lenders over the phone and they said, ‘No,’ ” he said. “So we said, ‘The heck with it. We’ll just go somewhere else.’ “

Kubbany and his wife are applying for another loan, though he worries that the stigma lingers. “There’s a dark cloud over us,” he said. “We will never know if we had qualified for the mortgage last summer, then we might have been in a house now.”

Saad Ali Muhammad is an African American who was born in Chicago and converted to Islam in 1980. When he tried to buy a used car from a Chevrolet dealership three years ago, a salesman ran his credit report and at the top saw a reference to “OFAC search,” followed by the names of terrorists including Osama bin Laden. The only apparent connection was the name Muhammad. The credit report, also by TransUnion, did not explain what OFAC was or what the credit report user should do with the information. Muhammad wrote to TransUnion and filed a complaint with a state human rights agency, but the alert remains on his report, Sinnar said.

Colleen Tunney-Ryan, a TransUnion spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that clients using the firm’s credit reports are solely responsible for any action required by federal law as a result of a potential match and that they must agree they will not take any adverse action against a consumer based solely on the report.

The lawyers’ committee documented other cases, including that of a couple in Phoenix who were about to close on their first home, only to be told the sale could not proceed because the husband’s first and last names — common Hispanic names — matched an entry on the OFAC list. The entry did not include a date or place of birth, which could have helped distinguish the individuals.

In another case, a Roseville, Calif., couple wanted to buy a treadmill from a home fitness store on a financing plan. A bank representative told the salesperson that because the husband’s first name was Hussein, the couple would have to wait 72 hours while they were investigated. Though the couple eventually received the treadmill, they were so embarrassed by the incident they did not want their names in the report, Sinnar said.

This is the same problem as the no-fly list, only in a larger context. And it’s no way to combat terrorism. Thankfully, many businesses don’t know to check this list and people whose names are similar to suspected terrorists’ can still lead mostly normal lives. But the trend here is not good.