The Thirty-Second Post

Like many energy sources, the benefits of natural gas — and to be specific, natural gas produced from shale – come with drawbacks. While I have been a proponent of shale gas as a domestic alternative to foreign oil as a transportation fuel — and for now, remain so — the drawbacks of shale gas production are increasingly concerning to me.

In today’s Houston Chronicle, Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations does a great job of expressing sentiments about shale gas that I substantially share: Great option for domestic fuel, but are we sure this isn’t screwing with our water? Don’t think so, but shouldn’t we make sure? Yes, we should. Let’s keep an open mind regarding what the current EPA study might find.

And other concerns have recently been raised as to whether fracking during shale gas production releases a lot more methane than previously thought. Some researchers from Cornell University are worried about this. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and large releases of it contribute to climate change, so if the concerns of the Cornell scientists are valid, this should give us pause about how we go about producing shale gas. If you do believe that climate change is real, and that the causes are primarily man-made, you can’t be denying that large emissions of methane from fracking are a problem.

The Thirty-First Post

If I seem grumpy while (re-)writing this post, it is because among other reasons, after an hour of writing and completing this post, the first version of this post was somehow deleted. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for the direction of this country. Still:

The FY 2011 continuing resolution budget compromise agreed to by the President and Republicans and Democrats in Congress is an unmitigated failure, with regards to building a more sustainable society. Among the lowlights:

• It ZEROES OUT FY 2011 funds for high-speed rail, despite gas prices rising above $4 a gallon in some parts of the country, and despite our country paying $1 billion a day for foreign oil
• It cuts $432 million from renewable energy and energy efficiency programs — $200 million more than cuts for fossil fuel R&D
• It takes a meat ax to the EPA, slashing its budget by 16 percent, including $49 million in cuts to climate programs
• It cuts $142 million from NOAA — the parent agency of the National Weather Service — in the middle of severe weather season, right after two unusually violent severe storm outbreaks
• It scraps NOAA’s plans to establish a Climate Service, to gather and disseminate important data on our changing climate

(Here is detailed breakdown of the cuts to be enacted, from the House Appropriations Committee’s Republican staff, via Talking Points Memo.)

(BTW, they also cut $200 million for wildfire suppression. Seriously. Anyone west of the Rockies think that’s a great idea?)

These cuts are occurring because our leadership in Washington has bought into the narrative that the federal government is “broke” — and yet it’s not broke enough to not increase Pentagon funding by $5 billion, and to not continue providing sweetheart tax breaks to certain well-connected old school industries, and to not borrow billions from the Chinese to provide tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.

So to summarize, the government is broke if you want to enact policies that will produce a more sustainable and equitable modern society, but it’s flush with cash if you’re a multinational corporation that would like a tax break, or are a politically-connected billionaire who wants to evade a higher tax rate.

It is unfortunate that our leaders are more concerned with satisfying their corporate and wealthy individual benefactors, than they are concerned with aggressively positioning our country to be prepared for — and to take advantage of — the energy and environmental challenges of the 21st Century, in a way that will maximize benefits to many Americans.

Leadership in both parties have failed — including the leadership in the White House. Those who had hoped that President Obama would be a transformational leader have not seen a good return on their political investment.

As for the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that Democrats “stayed true to their values” with this budget deal.

Is that so?

This country is in deep trouble.

The Thirtieth Post

(h/t Greenbiz.com for the following): Two-thirds of 1,000 Americans recently polled by the strategic marketing firm EcoAlign favor the phase-out of traditional light bulbs that President George W. Bush signed into law in 2007 as part of the Energy Security and Independence Act.

Also according to the poll: Respondents don’t necessarily buy the cheapest light bulb available. They also factor in quality-of-life considerations such as light quality. They also consider lighting efficiency.

This poll will be good news to a company like Cree, which manufactures the LED light pictured at right.

However, Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton might feel differently. Rep. Barton, he of apologizing to BP for being pressured to take responsibility for the costs of remediating its Deepwater Horizon incident, and he of defending tax breaks for a company with a market capitalization of more than $400 billion, is attempting to repeal the 2007 law. Why?

Why does a scorpion sting? Because that is what he does.

The Twenty-Ninth Post

This is from 2010, but this is still a good New York Times article about the $4 billion a year or so worth of tax expenditures (aka, “subsidies”) that oil companies receive. It’s a good read for some background and historical perspective on the issue.

Of special note:

Some of the tax breaks date back nearly a century, when they were intended to encourage exploration in an era of rudimentary technology, when costly investments frequently produced only dry holes. Because of one lingering provision from the Tariff Act of 1913, many small and midsize oil companies based in the United States can claim deductions for the lost value of tapped oil fields far beyond the amount the companies actually paid for the oil rights.

Other tax breaks were born of international politics. In an attempt to deter Soviet influence in the Middle East in the 1950s, the State Department backed a Saudi Arabian accounting maneuver that reclassified the royalties charged by foreign governments to American oil drillers. Saudi Arabia and others began to treat some of the royalties as taxes, which entitled the companies to subtract those payments from their American tax bills. Despite repeated attempts to forbid this accounting practice, companies continue to deduct the payments. The Treasury Department estimates that it will cost $8.2 billion over the next decade.

Over the last 10 years, oil companies have also been aggressive in using foreign tax havens. Many rigs, like Deepwater Horizon, are registered in Panama or in the Marshall Islands, where they are subject to lower taxes and less stringent safety and staff regulations. American producers have also aggressively exploited the tax code by opening small offices in low-tax countries. A recent study by Martin A. Sullivan, an economist for the trade publication Tax Analysts, found that the five oil drilling companies that had undergone these “corporate inversions” had saved themselves a total of $4 billion in taxes since 1999.

Again, I ask: If we are in a time when we must slash the federal budget, with no real prospect of raising significant revenue, is the goal of building a sustainable society best achieved by continuing to provide these tax expenditures to oil companies?

The Twenty-Eighth Post

The Japanese, architects par excellence of a thoroughly advanced society, have an earthquake warning system that saved lives during the 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami earlier this month. Here is a You Tube video of the public broadcast of the emergency earthquake and tsunami warnings in Tokyo that day.

Why don’t we have a system like this in the United States?

For a $150 million investment, plus $6 million a year in maintenance, a similar system could be installed and operated to cover the entire West Coast, according to the Seattle Times.

Along with the U.S. Geological Survey, Jordan and a consortium of colleagues have been fine-tuning and testing a prototype warning system in California for years. Rolling it out statewide would cost $100 million, he said.

The price tag for a system in Washington and Oregon, which face more powerful but less frequent quakes than California, would be about $50 million, Vidale estimates. Maintenance and monitoring would require an additional $6 million a year.

Those costs are small compared with the multibillion-dollar toll of even a modest earthquake. But with the state budget in its current state, Washington is considering cuts to the existing seismic-monitoring program.

In Japan, where earthquake preparedness is woven into the fabric of life, the government spares little expense to protect its citizenry. “For every 10 seismic stations we buy [in the United States], they buy a thousand,” Cal Tech geophysicist Egill Hauksson said.

Again, we face the issue: Is the issue that we cannot afford such technology, or is the issue that we don’t want to pay for such technology, even if it demonstrably saves lives, because we’d rather borrow money to subsidize tax cuts for millionaires?

Also, an expert in the article says that the Pacific Northwest will eventually have its own system, once the California system is “vetted.” But why wait? While major California quakes such as the 1989 Loma Prieta (aka, the World Series quake) and 1994 Northridge events are well known (and see if you recognize the reporter in that last clip), the Pacific Northwest, most people don’t realize, is more vulnerable to a catastrophic-magnitude quake (in the 9.0 range) than is California.

That’s thanks to the energy that is currently being stored, unfortunately, in the Cascadia Subduction Zone (detailed here in this wonderful primer) — subduction zones being the locations of the world’s largest earthquakes. (Also see this Oregon Live article here, for more on the danger to the Pacific Northwest.) As someone who was in a suburb of Seattle during the 6.8 Nisqually quake in 2001, that was good enough for me.

The Twenty-Seventh Post

Danger, I am binging on greentech blogs. Here’s another interesting post, this time by Justin Thomas at metaefficient.com, who in turn links to a World Architecture News post about a nightclub in London that is 100 percent illuminated with LED lights.

Here’s a primer by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) on LEDs, or light-emitting diodes (and here’s another in PDF form). By the way, back here in the US, per the Energy Policy Act, you may be eligible for a tax deduction if you install LED lights at your commercial property. And you might save some money in the long run.

I love LED lights — they are FUN – but there are pros and cons to installing LED lights. 

The pros include energy cost savings over time and relative durability. (Here’s a great list of the pros of LEDs by EERE.) The cons include the upfront costs, and performance if you need much more than directional lighting. LEDs are not the best option for ambient lighting, unless you want your room or office to look like a nightclub or a product display. However, I do have an LED desk lamp and enjoy it, and this is a good example of using an LED for useful directional lighting.

This site has some great ideas for using LED lights around the home. You can really have fun with these lights. Imagine the possibilities. Why should we save them for Christmas time?

Sustainable interior design is an interesting topic. I’ll have to post more about it.

The Twenty-Sixth Post

Blogger Tina Casey at Clean Technica has a very interesting post here about how the Virginia Department of Transportation is using recycling techniques to make the reconstruction of a stretch of Interstate 81 more environmentally friendly.

In her post, she links to this post from roadsandbridges.com. Of note:

VDOT’s research facility, the Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation and Research (VCTIR) in Charlottesville, has studied a number of pavement rehabilitation techniques and has recommended widespread use of innovative recycling processes throughout the commonwealth.

“VDOT will employ a specific combination of reconstruction methods that has the potential to revolutionize how we rehabilitate our aging roads,” said Dr. Brian Diefenderfer, a VCTIR pavement researcher. “We are using three specialized processes to recycle existing pavement materials at the site and reuse them as we rebuild the pavement. This is the first time the three recycling methods will be used together on a single pavement reconstruction project in the United States.” …

The construction work on this in-place pavement recycling project is expected to take two months to complete; the entire project will take eight months and cost $7.64 million. Traditional construction methods for this project could taken up to two years and cost more than five times the contracted amount.

The Twenty-Fifth Post

So my friend David Wogan earlier poked the hornet’s nest over the question of, will higher taxes be needed to achieve the kind of sustainable and innovative future that will ensure the most sustainable future for the most Americans? In this post, I borrow his stick and proceed to slap the hive of whether it’s time to phase out federal tax expenditures — commonly known as “subsidies” – to the oil and gas industries.

These kinds of discussions are often passionate. The oil and gas industry receives, depending on estimates, the benefit of more than $3 billion worth of tax expenditures each year. As the link there explains, these expenditures include tax deductions for drilling costs, a depletion allowance that permits a company to deduct 15 percent of a well’s revenue (even if that amount exceeds the value of the well itself), deductions for manufacturing products in the US that are derivatives of petroleum or natural gas, credits for taxes paid abroad, deductions for exploring for oil and gas, and more. Eliminating these expenditures, according to this source, could save $45 billion over a decade.

Since Members of Congress insist that severe cuts be made to the federal budget, it makes sense to examine these particular expenditures, and judge whether they provide the most benefit to the lives of Americans relative to other options.

It is worth asking if these companies truly need these expenditures to carry out their activities and remain profitable. To cherry pick three examples to consider: ExxonMobil, as of today’s Wall Street closing bell, had a market capitalization of about $401 billion, and a net income in the final quarter of 2010 of $9.25 billion. Chesapeake had a market cap today of about $22 billion, and a 4Q 2010 net income of $223 million. To give one more example, Devon Energy’s market cap today is about $38.5 billion, and they had a 4Q 2010 net income of $562 million.

Do these sound like companies that need federal tax goodies to be profitable?

However, not every oil and gas firm in America is an Exxon Mobil, or a Chesapeake, or a Devon. Many are a lot smaller. And even so, the issue is much broader than that.

The Twenty-Fourth Post

Here’s a New York Times piece on Thomas Steyer, a wealthy hedge fund manager based in California who is emerging as an important counterweight to the Koch Brothers’ vision for America.

The NYT piece claims that Steyer is a billionaire, but that claim is questionable. While the 2008 Forbes list of billionaires lists him as being worth $1.2 billion (and possessing the obligatory Stanford MBA), the 2011 iteration of the list does not include him. Clearly his fortune pales in comparison the fortunes of Charles and David Koch, who are worth a combined $44 billion. But whether Steyer is worth $1.2 billion, or a “mere” $900 million, it is refreshing to see a person of great means who is fighting to effect a more rational and sustainable society. (There are others, of course.)

The Twenty-Third Post

Headlines like this one regarding Japan’s nuclear energy emergency after the 9.0 earthquake there has led to predictable grumbling by anti-nuclear advocates that nuclear energy isn’t worth pursuing.

(And if, as the NRDC claims, it is not anti-nuclear, then why did it send this tweet, or feature this blog post? Sure doesn’t seem nuclear friendly. I like the NRDC’s stances on some issues. But not this one.)

But the promise and possibilities of more advanced nuclear energy technologies, such as pebble-bed and thorium-powered nuclear reactors, demonstrate why we cannot give up on nuclear energy in the United States.

What we don’t need are inherently hypocritical arguments against nuclear energy, like this one from Greenpeace, found in the linked-to press release in the first graf of this post:

“We are told by the nuclear industry that things like this cannot happen with modern reactors, yet today Japan is in the middle of a nuclear crises with potentially devastating consequences.”

So they have chosen to ignore the fact that newer, safer nuclear energy technology has been developed; and that what is happening in Japan is affecting 1960s and 1970s-era reactors struck by an earthquake and a tsunami of apocalyptic magnitudes.

Has Greenpeace or the NRDC ever said that we need to hold off on wind energy development, given that wind turbines built relatively recently have been proven to cause dangerous interference to NOAA weather radar operations? (Weather radar and wind turbines are often sited proximate to each other due to mutually favorable conditions for siting.)

Why does the real risk of a tornado warning not being issued, or being issued too late, due to confusion over wind turbine interference not concern Greenpeace enough to call for a moratorium on wind turbines being placed in the Central United States? Do they not understand what can happen to a community that doesn’t receive an adequate tornado warning?

I live in Tornado Alley, as do the vast majority of my relatives. This is not an academic issue for me. Faster severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings issued thanks to Doppler radar has resulted in three billion dollars worth of saved economic costs, while saving thousands of lives. I don’t want the political right cutting funds to the National Weather Service that make a robust Doppler network possible. I am infuriated by that proposal. So do you think I’ll be okay with the political left uncritically supporting something that might also affect the performance of that network?