GreenYour.com

I haven't had a chance to read the remainder of the NYT's green-focused magazine, but I expect I may have more to say or share from that. One of the constant challenges in trying to be more green is knowing exactly what to do. There are a wealth of great resources out there and it seems one more has been added to the mix. I haven't yet spent much time on the site, but GreenYour.com is a personal reference service for making environmentally sound choices. I believe the service was started by some folks that I crossed-paths with a few jobs back, and I figure it's Web 2.0-take (judging by the look of it) on going green is at least worth a look. More on it later, most likely.

Why Bother?

Michael Pollan with a wonderful essay in the New York Times arguing for the importance of personal choice in making a difference in the face of climate change (and an argument that can easily be extended to a wealth of other environmental, social, and economic factors). Pollan's essay touches on issues that have long troubled me. Among the positives are framing environmental responsibility as a fundamentally moral choice (albeit, in the positive sense of moral, not the finger-wagging, school-marmish sense) and framing environmentally responsible acts as pleasurable (for me, living in a city, for Pollan, planting a garden and growing your own food). More vexing is how to convince people to embrace personal change when confronted with the overwhelming sense that the problem is too large to impact, or when faced with concerns of developed countries somehow falling behind in a consumer arms race with their counterparts in China (the traditional bogeyman) or elsewhere. And kudos to Pollan for re-raising the profile of Wendell Berry, an essayist who deserves a much wider following. Read on:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

Read the rest.

Supply and Demand: Energy and Food Policy

A few weeks ago, I went to a lecture arranged by the Stanford alumni association by Professors Roz Naylor and David Victor at NYU. Professor Naylor, who I studied with briefly, is an economist who has long focused on food economics and other issues inter-relating environmental and developmental policy, and Professor Victor, whom I did not cross paths with at Stanford, is a law professor focused on energy policy. The lecture was good, although brief and, as such, handled some very complex issues very simply. A few modest comments that have been kicking around in the back of my head for the past few weeks:

- Professor Victor made an interesting comment in response to a question about whether small-scale "clean energy" solutions constitute an effective energy policy. Specifically, the question seemed tied to a lot of success stories coming out of India and China where distributed energy producers (like local solar-powered batteries are loaned out at the village-level) are emerging to meet the burgeoning energy demand that is occurring in areas not well served by existing energy grids. The substance of Professor Victor's comments was that while such trends were interesting, distributed/point solutions to supplying energy would simply never scale -- and therefore, couldn't be a central part of a sustainable energy policy. He suggested, as I understood, focusing on large capacity production that could be made "cleaner," including nuclear, natural gas, and the cleaner forms of coal burning. While I agree that the magnitude of our energy problems require large scale solutions, I am always curious at how quickly distributed solutions are dismissed as being a component of an overall policy solution. Unfortunately, the session was too abbreviated to really push the issue.

- Professor Naylor forced me to an interesting, if unintended, connection between food policy and energy policy. I'm still sorting the thinking out on this, but it basically works like this:

1. We are confronting a supply problem in the world energy markets. The increasing demand for energy, driven by growing economies and growing populations, can not be met by our current, known energy production capacities. We need to innovate on the ability of the world economy to deliver energy (and when you tie in climate policy, clean energy) to the marketplace.

2. In the 1940s and 1950s, the world confronted a supply problem in food markets. Population growth created greater demand for food than was immediately available. Investments were made in food technology, specifically fostering the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was successful in increasing world food supply, which, in turn, certainly staved off a lot of human destitution. However, simply addressing the supply problem did not address the challenge of world hunger. Massive logistical problems, failure of political will and infrastructure (notably, corrupt/incompetent third-world governments failing to deliver on food aid provided by incompetent/corrupt multinational aid and relief agencies, including UN and GATT), failures in wealth distribution to the poorest segments of economies, and disproportionate population growth at the bottom of the demographic pyramids (from both an income and a poverty level) thwarted a purely supply-side solution to the food problem.

So, the question I have, with this history of food policy behind us, is why do we continue to think of the energy problem as strictly a supply issue?

Not that I have a pat answer to this question, but the inability of the political, economic, and academic leaders to address either the demand side of the equation or the equality issues bound up in how resources get consumed fails to take our analyses of these problems off charts and graphs and into the human dimensions of the real world.

Still, a very compelling talk, with a lot of interesting issues to follow up on.

Eat or Drive?

A spate of articles in the past few weeks have called into question whether the 'Ethanol boom' is going bust. Judged largely from the downward trends of the stock performance of many ethanol biofuel companies, but drawing also from long-standing criticisms of ethanol subsidies as a deeply flawed government policy, there has been a clamor that ethanol, in America, at least, has been a failed energy policy. The reason for this failure is laid partly at the feet of the policies themselves, in creating subsidies for a fuel that has not yet found sufficient use, and partly at the implementation of the policies, specifically, in the lack of investment made in fostering the demand side of the market for ethanol, and in creating the delivery infrastructure for bringing ethanol to the consumer. Every critique of ethanol has, at some level of subtext, a questioning of the motivations of the public policy. Was it driven by smart energy policy, or simply to satisfy the powerful agribusiness constituencies which control so much of the farmland in the US? As observers like Daniel Gross in Slate have concluded:

Critics of ethanol have long argued that ethanol production subsidies are a half-baked industrial policy scheme intended to reward politically powerful farmers in the Midwest. The gulf between the rich incentives for creating ethanol supply and the poor incentives for creating wholesale and retail distribution suggest the critics were absolutely right.

An early death-knell, perhaps, but one made the more interesting by a complementary article in the New York Times that emerged at the same time, describing how the diversion of corn crops into biofuels have driven up the price of the commodity, essentially pricing buyers, trying to secure corn for food aid programs, out of the market. One ill-advised, if well-intentioned public policy inadvertantly gutting another (as foreshadowed in a lengthy Foreign Policy article from earlier in the summer).

Not that this most recent set of concerns signals that giant of a catastrophe. Unfortunately, neither food air nor ethanol have proven to be fundamental solutions to the problems of hunger and energy supply that they are trying to address. The silver lining, in this case, is that the situation is more bleak.

Green Monsters

Flipping through a magazine the other evening, I stopped on a two page advertising spread by Chevron entitled "Chevron Presents: Energyville." Billed as an "energy game," Chevron asks "This is your city. How will you power it? How do we meet growing global demand? What new kinds of fuels and power sources should we develop? And how do we safeguard the environment at the same time?" The reader is then directed to play the game, hosted at the website www.willyoujoin.com.

Now, it is easy to be dismissive of the efforts of massive energy companies to engage in fundamentally changing the dynamics of our energy economy. Their generally upbeat and eco-friendly advertising campaigns, which cheerily suggest that we've got a problem, but, hey, together we can fix it are a little to, well, cheery and upbeat. And I have no illusions that the extremely rich and extremely powerful people who run these companies are concerned as much about tackling global sustainability problems as they are about finding new markets in which to create better margins (after all, when they send the lucky one percent into space after we've despoiled this lovely planet, no doubt the heads of oil companies and their antecedents will be first in line at the launching pad).

But it can't be denied that each and every energy company, whether on the exploration/ production-side or the delivery-side, has a distinct strategic interest in understanding the dynamics of energy in coming years, influencing the market to align with the investments in technology that they are making, and innovating more efficient (and, consequently more eco-friendly, one would hope) solutions to our collective energy needs. Nor can it be denied that the actors most readily positioned to dramatically influence our energy economies are the energy companies themselves. And outside a small coterie of academics and advocacy groups, no one has been forced to think quite so deeply as the energy companies.

Which all sounds like a resounding defense of the Goliaths! Not meant to be. But what has caught my interest is the effort made, in advertising and public relations, at least, by energy companies to engage the public in a dialogue about our energy future. And with the resources available to them, energy companies have been able to provide slicker tools to help the conversation move forward, and often are doing quite a good job at putting out worthwhile information and analyses. Take the aforementioned game at www.willyoujoinus.com, BP's Carbon Footprint Calculator or Statistical Review of World Energy site, or ConEd's more humble, but useful campaign to educate consumers on household energy conservation tips.

Are my fundamental concerns about energy consumption allayed? No. Do I think that these resources are actually useful in furthering questions about looming energy problems into our consumer consciousness? Yes.