Tuesday, February 27, 2007

An Inspiring Afternoon Seminar with Tom Friedman and Dr. Nate Lewis

Yesterday I went to the first seminar in a new series launched here at Caltech entitled "Sustainable Energy Seminar Series." Endowed by a couple of Caltech grads who were inspired by a lecture by Dr. Nate Lewis, a professor in Chemistry, this series brings guests for discussions about what may be the most important topic / crisis this planet has faced to date.

Before I go further and you lose interest - let me just note that there is a March on DC - to put pressure on our govt. to make climate change a central issue. Please go and see this web site and if you can go - go! :)

The first guest was Tom Friedman from the NYTimes. Appropriately the moderator / interviewer was Dr. Nate Lewis who was, in retrospect, as much a star of the show as Mr. Friedman. In less than two hours, the two managed to cover an amazing amount of ground and left the audience both depressed and inspired at the same time. This blog is an attempt at capturing the main points from the seminar. These are not in any order - these are just points I jotted down because they struck me as interesting / unique (trying to paraphrase the speakers in italics):


Coal and Ethanol are Geo-political alternatives - They are NOT Environmentally Sound Alternatives: There is no such thing as clean coal despite what you might hear in the media! Even if you could burn coal, and capture all the by-products like CO2 - where are you going to put them? If you try and bury them underground, you have to ensure they remain there for about a thousand years so that they can then be absorbed into the earth and not released into the atmosphere. (My additions: The oceans are one of our most important CO2 reservoirs - but as the temperature warms their ability to absorb the CO2 will decrease. Even more scary is the impending release of methane - a substance 8 times worse than CO2 as a green house gas - as the oceans warm, methane trapped in the Earth's crust will be released increasing dramatically the global warming cycle. I thought about adding links here but you can google this as well as I can I am sure. )

Ethanol - another politically idiotic idea. It takes more energy to produce ethanol than is saved by burning it as a fuel in cars. The only reason ethanol (like even more ridiculous hydrogen fuel cells) is hip is because it is being pushed by corn producing states! Even if one could produce ethanol more efficiently -- think about the infrastructure required to get ethanol engines, gas stations, pipelines put in! Does this make sense? Any respectable scientist will be able to tell you why ethanol is not a panacea for our energy problems. We need to go to solar, wind or nuclear energy - the latter being the most difficult to sell because of the general fear amongst people about the word "nucular"!

Global Dimming:
At the end of the seminar, I mentioned in the question and answer session the incredibly disturbing new research on global dimming. See more about this here or see this documentary! Basically the pollutants we have created (the soot particles) have gone into the upper atmosphere and created new sites for ice nucleation thus increasing the earth's reflectivity (ice!) and reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. As a result the measured 1 degree temperature increase is really more like 5 or 6 degrees - and our horizon for global warming is not 50 years as Gore says but more like 10 years!! This is one of the most troublesome new findings!

Changing the Vocabulary Green vs. Geo-political / geo-strategy / geo-economics: Paraphrasing Tom Friedman here: When the word green first came into existence, environmentalists were portrayed as sissies, girly-men, wimps by the establishment. For their part, environmentalists accepted these labels because they didn't feel that everyone was entitled to be part of the green/eco-movement. They wanted to create a more boutique-y group. But now more and more people are recognizing that being eco-friendly is a good thing and the word green has come to Main Street. But we still need to change the language to make being green a more holistic approach - people have to start realizing that the environment or a green outlook affects every aspect of their life!

Although Green has come to Main Street, it has not gone anywhere - not a SINGLE member of the Congress has suggested, for instance, a tax of say a mere 10 cents on use of gasoline! You would think that just one member would go out on a limb in the last few years and suggest such an idea - but such an idea is out-rageous - we have no green policy - we have faux green realism / green politics. The mid-western states want Ethanol front and center (even though Ethanol and using Ethanol is LESS fuel efficient than using oil or even coal!), the coal states like Penn, W.Va want "clean coal" - again no such thing exists (see more below).

We need to start changing our language because language is very powerful. We need to not have a environmental policy that encompasses becoming green in context of geo-politics
(my additions here: think Iraq and oil, famine and sub-saharan Africa, clean drinking water and Bolivia! etc.), geo-economics and geo-strategy.

Failure of Politicians: As noted above the US politicians have completely failed. We have said that there is a war on terror now and either you are with us or against us - but when it comes to the environment and the Kyoto protocol, we are not with anyone! How can anyone expect the world to follow us or believe us! And its not just he politicians - its the failure of each individual voter for not making their politicians listen - it is NOT enough to go see An Inconvenient Truth and talk about it, or to buy a Prius. (my addendum: These are necessary but not sufficient requirements for each of us.) However the voters who will be most affected by the environmental disaster we are creating have not even been born yet! So they cannot march to DC and demand change -- what we need to do - is to appeal to the Ethic of Stewardship. For our children and grand-children! (my addition - there is march being organized next month - go here: http://ga3.org/climatecrisis/join.html

Recognizing the Enormous Scale of the Problem: If you wanted to convert all energy usage to nuclear in the world, we would have to build a new nuclear plant every other day for the next 50 years! That is the scale of the problem we are talking about. That is the amount of energy we are using today! Yes, conservation is critical and will help (more below) but recognize that this is an enormous challenge and without a obvious reward for innovation (next)...

Innovations: Imagine this: When the first person invented a cell phone, s/he could have gone to someone in the world and said - hey here's a phone you can carry around with you! The consumer would have said "Wow - that's incredible - here's five hundred dollars for it!" - these five hundred would then be re-invested to produce more and cheaper phones and innovation would thus proceed. However the case is different for clean energy because there is nothing new for the consumer when s/he flips on the lights whether their electricity comes from coal or wind energy. This is a serious issue and the only way out is to create policy that dis-incentivizes using fossil fuels - i.e. a tax on gasoline! instead of current model where we actually pay a premium for being green!

Another nuggest of info was in a conversation with someone at GE. This person at GE health division said they were in the 7th generation of innovations in medical technology at GE. At the same time - guess how many innovations there have been in generating energy? One! Nuclear energy in the 50s. Except for that we have developed no new technology and one of the reasons is a lack of political, economic and social emphasis on energy generation techniques.

The China Price: It is not feasible nor fair to expect someone in China or India making $500 a year to pay the high premium of alternative energy. What we need to avoid the impending crisis that seems inevitable is to be able to create energy at the China price. My addendum: Best way is to make a huge investment in basic R&D (research and development) - the market is certainly out there and given an equivalent choice, it seems to me that people would choose an alternative energy source that is clean and not a contributor to global warming. Again it goes back to us, as voters, and as part of one of the richest and most technologically advanced country (and more broadly any citizen of a western country) to push our politicians to make this investment - this must be our top priority.

Market Pragmatist vs. Market fundamentalist: I colored this purple hoping to draw attention to one of the classic right-wing / old school arguments - oil reserves in the world are part of the market and if we don't buy it, someone else will. So why should we not get it ourselves! Certainly China and India will buy the fossil fuels if we don't. There are several problems with this market fundamentalist point of view promoted by some analysts at think tanks like the Kato institute. One, oil is not an unlimited resource - so should we not reduce our dependence on it. If we reduce the demand for oil, its price should go down. The price of oil is inversely correlated with the index of freedom around the world (this is in a recent Friedman article) - basically when the price of oil goes down, countries seem to elect more liberal politicians, institute more market reform and improve on human rights and civil liberties. When I find a link to this article I will post it here. In any case - point is that the market fundamentalist way of thinking is very old school - as an exmaple, Friedman noted that if people thought that way, slavery would never have been challenged and abolished.


CO2 costs zero dollars: CO2 is invisible, odorless and costs nothing to release into the atmosphere! Again - government + public pressure is the only way to regulate this. Stringent cap and trade policies / laws would make a difference here.

California Rocks! In 1979 California elected (?) appointed someone who has been incredible at keeping our environmental footprint in check. In fact the average Californian is no worse in their environmental footprint today than they were 28 years ago!! In the meantime, the rest of the country has increased its footprint by 50% per person! This means that if the rest of the country adopted California standards for cars, emissions, power plants etc - we would see an INSTANTAENOUS reduction of nearly 50% in our contributions to global warming and pollution!

Schwarznegger's popularity and ability to bridge the Dem/Rep divide on the environment issue is attracting other states and other politicians. Now if we can only make the current administration utter the words "Conservation!" and make the presidential candidates more green!!

Optimistic or Pessimistic? When asked this question - Friedman replied - pessimists are usually right but optimists bring about change! So he prefers to be an optimist but he believes we may have to wait till another crisis before America and the world take heed! If Katrina had hit NYC or LA or DC - things would be moving at a very different pace.

Doing it in the Dark: Williams College has a competetion between its dorms to see which one can conserve the most energy. They have adopted the Kyoto protocol standards on campus and the slogan on campus is "let's do it in the dark!". Catchy huh? Anyways - what we need to do is to educate the next generation of students in green technology and a greener future. No architect, chemist, engineer etc. should be able to get their degree without taking at least one class in green or eco-friendly designs and technology.