Nathanael Greene's Blog: Living Sustainably

The light bulb, the cocktail party, and you

2008-06-26T23:12:43Z

Years ago, when I was young, I spent most of my time working on energy efficiency technology policy. Now I spend most of my time working of renewables, but from time to time, my colleagues forget and ask me questions that are way over my head. And so it was that I was recently pressed to provide our board with simple answers to all the questions they might possible get asked at a cocktail party.

One of the issues that everyone asks about is mercury in compact fluorescent. I wrote one of my early blogs about it, and spent a good chunk of my talk for the board focusing on it. My main message on CFLs and mercury is that if you care about mercury pollution, one of the best things you can do is use more CFLs. But if after using a CFL, we can recycle it, that's even better. So I was happy to see this story that Home Depot is going to start to take CFLs back for recycling.

NRDC's real expert on bulbs and all energy efficient appliances is Noah Horowitz and I encourage you to read more about him and his great work here and here. Now Noah is one of those incredibly smart people that have the ability to make very complicated topics comprehensible. And he helped me do that with bulbs for the board. So without further ado, here's the presentation I gave at NRDC's most recent board meeting.

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The Energy bill, NBC, LED, Christmas trees, and me

2007-12-06T22:05:26Z

The great news of the day is that the House passed it's comprehensive energy bill. Here's NRDC's official press release. As noted in our release, the renewable fuel standard in the bill is a big change in our approach to biofuels policy. The bill

calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels to be brought to the market by 2022 – a five-fold increase over the current standard – including 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels made from plant material such as grass and wood chips. Conventional biofuels must generate 20 percent fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline, and advanced and cellulosic fuels must generate 50 percent and 60 percent less, respectively. These targets help ensure that the renewable fuel standard would have a net-positive impact on climate, taking into account land conversion and full lifecycle impacts of ethanol production.

This isn't as big a change as is called for under the low-carbon fuel standard in the Liberman-Warner, but more on that at another point.

Another great part of the energy bill is the efficiency standard for light bulbs. As noted in our press release:

The final bill sets historic efficiency standards for light bulbs, which would require typical bulbs to use 25-30 percent less energy by 2012-2014 and two times less energy by 2020. Experts say that the light bulb standards would reduce global warming pollution by 100 million metric tons, which works out to be about 1 percent of emissions produced by the United States in 2005.

Along these lines, I went up to NBC studios here in the city a week or so ago and gave them a few quotes about the environmental benefits of LED lights compared to incandescents. Now the story is up on their web site and being shown by their local affiliates, I believe. The pieces is about LED holiday lighting specifically and they have the nifty figure that if we all swtiched to LED holiday lighting we could save about $250 million per year!

Here are two helpful links (here and here) to other parts of NRDC's web site that both suggest LEDs as holiday presents. You have to search a little to find the LED mention on the second link, but it's a list of green gift ideas so think of all the other cool stuff you'll find.

On a more technical note, here's an unofficial factsheet on LEDs that Cai Steger, our former business school fellow extraordinaire. I highly recommend this as a short overview of the technology and the industry.

Pretty rocking day all in all!

On being an optimist and an environmentalist

2007-10-15T13:50:11Z

I haven't gotten to do much pleasure reading since my first daughter was born way back in 2004 and even less since my second daughter was born in 2006, but I'm finally trying to tackle something longer than a New Yorker listing. I'm nearly done with "Cloud Atlas," by David Mitchell, which I think qualifies as an entertaining serious read. The book covers a couple hundred years through six somewhat linked short stories and paints a dystopic picture of the arc of society and science. The book's vision of society and science is captured in this passage from near the end:

...Our will to power, our science, and those [very] faculties that elevate us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that'll snuff our Homo sapiens before the century is out!

But while the view is dark, there is a love and perseverance to the novel's main characters (I don't want to give too much away) that suggests a faith in individuals. While I can only imagine that Mitchell would wince at me simplifying this novel this way, it's message boils down to something like "as a society we're going to screw it up, but through out it all individuals will be humans--loving, failing, being cads, and being heroes." (There's more to in including a great Russian doll simile, but for now let's leave it at this.)

Reading the New York Times article yesterday about Wu Lihong and his valiant but ultimately unsuccessful effort to save China's Lake Tai from chemical plants and agricultural pollution, I felt the lure of Mitchell's view. But there were also also uplifting stories recently like the Nobel Peace prize for Al Gore and the IPCC, for example.

Our president has talked a lot about the power of technology and called for a lot of R&D and voluntary measures. I on the other hand have closed my last two posts and many before that with calls to get our public policies right.

Ultimately, I believe to be an environmentalist you have to be an optimist. Given the constant barrage of bad news that dominates our media, you probably have to be an optimist just to be a functioning human. However this Blog Action Day, as thousands of individual bloggers use the power of the Internet to join in new form of civil action, it seems reasonable to ask is there a specific type of optimism that better suits environmentalists? Should we be techno-optimists, Any-Rand individualist-optimists, or political optimists?

While folks may not use these terms, this debate is alive and well within the community. There are those that have faith in technology and believe it's largely a question of choosing the right technologies. Other's argue that individuals must change their behaviors. And still others that say it's all about our public policies. These differences are to some degree captured between three of my favorite blogs: Treehugger, Gristmill, and the Switchboard here--green consumerists, freeze-in-the-darks, and green wonks.

Of course, these options are not mutually exclusive. My colleague wrote this very thoughtful post about the need for balance. I might call it the middle path. What we need are individuals making the right choice about technologies and policies/politician, technologies that make it easier to live lightly on the land, and policies and leaders that drive the market to develop better technologies and use them in better ways.

In the end, whatever gets you up working to make the world a better place, right? For me, when I look at my girls, I got to believe that we can make it work out--we'll get the balance right--people, science, and society--to get to a better future. Mitchell's future is fun to read about, but I don't want my girls growing up in it.

Making the invisible visible and doing it beautifully

2007-07-31T22:00:11Z

Last week, Wired carried a very smart article (Clive Thompson Thinks: Desktop Orb Could Reform Energy Hogs) about how the invisibility of our energy consumption makes reforming our profligate habits much harder and how gadgets that make it visible could help. I couldn't agree more. This is one of the reasons that I love the screen in a Toyota Prius--drivers get real time feedback on their driving and they generally become more efficient drivers.

Clive spends most of the article talking about the Ambient Orb which SoCalEdison configured to show demand on the grid, but to my mind, the really exciting gadget is the one that he mentions at the end of the article: the Wattson. Produced by DIY Kyoto, a hip trio in London, the Wattson is a beautiful piece of industrial design that show people how much energy they're using in the home through numbers and pretty lights. Finally, a gadget that my interior-designer wife would welcome into the home.

I've emailed the folks at DIY Kyoto to find out when a version of the Wattson will be available in the US. I want one!

A few random observations on kids, carbon, biodiesel... the usual

2007-07-12T08:13:42Z

Well I did say that things would be quiet here at the Switchboard, but I didn't realize how quiet. For my part, I was on vacation and then...how to put this delicately...well let's just say that I took this entry to heart and have been recovering. Anyway it wasn't my fingers that were effected, so time to start things up again with a few unconnected observations:

The Energy Blog reports here that GreenFuels' pilot algae plant in Arizona has been closed due to unexpectedly high algae densities and costs. Referring to a Boston Globe article, the posting mentions that GreenFuels staff has been cut from 43 to 28 and Carry Bulluck has been replaced as CEO with Robert Metcaff. I was on a number of panels with Carry and know a few of the staff (or at least I think they're still staff). The news comes on the heels of this other bad news that a South African company that licensed GreenFuels technology turned out to be a fraud. Stumbling is of course part of learning, but still this is unfortunate.
David Roberts over at the Gristmill has a great post today on carbon offsets and the unfortunate criticisms that are regularly launched against them and the folks that buy them. As he points out there are important substantive challenges to developing good offsets, but the intentions of those that develop them and those that buy them get the bulk of the attention.
I've often wondered why more hasn't been made about the impact of ethanol's demand for corn on the price of soy beans and thus on biodiesel, but the folks at Biodiesel and Ethanol Investing noticed. I'm not so much worried about reduced biodiesel availability (vegetable oil based biodiesel is inherently a very limited market anyway), but high soy prices will drive more soy development in Brazil, which puts more pressure on the rain forests. Also connecting the dots, it's not surprising given the high demand for biodiesel to see this post over at Biopact about the geneticists starting to look at the oil palm plant. Palm oil has much higher yields than soy but production generally competes for land with some of the most carbon rich and biologically diverse lands--tropical rain forests.
Finally speaking of connecting dots, Carbon Copy points out both that online maps always assume you're driving and that Google has started marking public transportation stops on their maps. I checked it out and sure enough for my home town of NYC, you can see all the subway and path stops, but not the bus stops. And unfortunately, if you ask for directions even from two locations right next to subway stops on the same subway line, you still get driving directions.

So what we really need is a Google mapping tool that will show us the way to mandatory carbon regulations and good energy policy so that we make land-efficient technologies like algae work and can avoid cutting down our rain forests for soy and palm oil. Did I say these were unconnected observations?

Small wind breaking... into the mainstream?

2007-07-01T08:57:30Z

Found this post in Triple Pundit, but the original source is actually One Shade Greener. Exciting that progress is still being made on small scale wind power, but what really caught my eye was the news that the DOE has a "Wind Turbine Buyer's Guide." Who knew? The answer is I should have, but in my defense, it does appear to be very new, dated 6/1/07 to 7/31/07. (I wonder what happens after that date?) In any case, it looks like a useful resource and I look forward to referring folks to it. NRDC is not equipped to review products let alone make recommendations for specific projects, but folks always ask us.

Of electric cars and lawn mowers too

2007-06-20T07:53:35Z

Just two bits of news round up. First, as reported by Triple Pundit and the New York Times, Google and PG&E are working together on plug-in hybrids that can store electricity from the grid and then sell it back. It's an interesting idea. Spinning reserve--power plants kept running but not generating power just in case--and peaking power is expensive and often very polluting. On the other hand, electricity generated from a gasoline powered ICE is also very polluting at least from a global warming perspective. So it's not at all clear to me that if a plug-in ended up dumping all of it's electricity back into the grid and then having to run its own engine to get the driver home that it would be good for the environment. I look forward to seeing the study.

Second, and connected only tenuously through the notion of replacing ICEs with electric power, Wired reports on its test of a bunch of electric mowers. As the article points out, gasoline powered mowers are incredibly polluting. But my dad is the ultimate proponent of all electric yard equipment and it's not because of the reduced air pollution (though he certainly cares about that too). No, the big selling point for electric yard equipment for people like my dad is that they're quiet. And the fact that when you're done with your mowing all you smell is the sweet scent of cut grass and no noxious fumes, well, that's just the trimmings, so to speak.

Welcome to my corner

2006-12-01T09:40:22Z

I'm going to keep my inaugural entry simple. I'm a senior policy analyst at NRDC where I work on clean energy technologies, which include energy efficiency technologies and clean generation technologies such as wind, solar, and bioenergy. For the past 5 years or so, I've spent a lot of my time focusing on bioenergy and increasingly on biofuels.

However, for this first energy I thought I'd show the view from my window at work. I work at NRDC's headquarters on 20th St. off of 6th Ave. in NYC. Looking west across 6th Ave towards the Hudson River this is what I see:

That's a green roof. It was installed by Bob Fox of Cook and Fox Architects. Bob is a long time friend of NRDC's and one of the heroes in the green building movement. Bob tells me that by next summer the roof will be all bushy with the plants standing 6-12 inches tall. I'll post pictures periodically.

As you can see this is what they call a "light" green roof because it simply sits on top of the normal roof. This means that basically anyone can do it. It also adds insulation to the roof, keeping the office below it cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. Plus it's so much more interesting that a normal black roof.