Introduction to Chapter 18

Dear Mr. Friedman,

You are exactly right about government needing to take a strong hand in shaping the market. I am currently living that reality. I market commercial-scale solar installations for industrial rooftops on the East Coast through power purchase agreements. I have four clients ready to go, interested in installing 1MW facilities each in the State of Maryland. The Maryland Solar RECs are large enough to incentivize the projects, the RPS has enough capacity to support the projects, the financiers are willing to pay for the projects...but no one wants to take a risk that the regulations will change and make the RECs worthless. I have even approached insurance companies to see if they would insure the risk, much like political risk insurance for Kyoto Protocol projects in developing countries, but none wants to take the bet. It is obvious, when government comes in and sets a price, like in Spain or Germany, the market goes crazy, when you have uncertainty in the market, like in New Jersey, companies go out of business.

California has some good ideas that have spurred their market. TOU (Time of Use) meters that help bring electricity closer to its true cost and a guarantee fund to make sure that production incentives won't disappear overnight.

If you really want to see the solar market explode, we would have to let everyone sell electricity. Right now, net metering laws are designed to protect Utilities from competition. You develop credits on your bill for producing your own electricity, but if you over produce beyond your needs, the local Utility gets to keep that. When the average American entrepreneur can rent roof space, put some panels up and sell the generation to the grid at true market prices, watch out.

Electricity arbitrage would be a winner too, where businesses, homeowners and plug-in drivers are allowed to store electricity at night and sell it back during the day for profit. We don't need more power plants, just more batteries.

I am looking forward to reading your book. I hope many or your ideas stick, just like Al Gore's slide show did. In a country where we chant, "drill baby drill," but crush electric cars, we better wake up and make our politicians do the right thing or we will be next previous super power.

Coal is the Elephant in the Room...

Disclaimers first - I haven't read the book yet although I plan to. From the Scientific American podcast interview I infer that it builds on themes developed in books like "Half Gone" and "The Meaning of the 21st Century" etc etc.

Like many scientists and engineers in today's energy industry I agree with many of the far reaching conclusions about the transition in energy use and supply, the need for clean fuel systems, weaning ourselves off oil, needing these changes to be market driven and the need to shape direct market forces etc.

However I disagree with one key point. Thomas Friedman seems to say in the interview that the clean energy revolution needs to take place regardless of global warming. It isn't as simple as this. China, India and the US are nowhere near "Peak Coal", and coal-fired power stations will continue to produce base load electricity in these three countries in huge quantities over the next twenty to thirty years under all credible scenarios. Renewables simply cannot displace coal quickly enough.

If you believe in cutting CO2 emissions then there is a solution - Carbon Capture and Storage. If you don't believe in cutting CO2 then CCS is just a very expensive white elephant.

Most of Mr. Friedman's readers will belong, like myself, in the former category along with Mr. Friedman himself. Some probably believe that 'we' can get by without new coal fired power stations. This just isn't going to happen. Whatever 'we' do in Europe or the US, the Chinese and Indians will be burning their coal. They have to.

CCS technology is well understood, nothing new. The big issue boils down to this - who is going to pay for CCS in existing and new-build coal fired stations in the developing world? If we don't solve this one then forget about reversing the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. Of course, if you don't believe GHGs in the atmosphere are a problem then this question is irrelevant and you can happily ignore it. So having a climate change rationale for the clean energy revolution IS fundamental. IMHO.

Thomas L. Friedman - For U. S. President!!!!

Nuff said...
M.G.

Dear Mr. Friedman,

I support your urgent analysis of current political obstructionism and your call for immediate Congressional action to develop Green Energy Technologies.

Tonight on PBS on Charlie Rose, you wondered what in 50 years will be seen as the crucial change resulting from 9-11, just as the internet began with Sputnik. I believe that if we continue on the national path of perverse and devisive denial on many different levels, the clouding of the conscience of America and the collapse of our Constitutional rights will be a loss greater than any gain. We need the truth to set us free to breate life into creative solutions that benefit humanity, not only narrow private or national interests. Green China needs an honest USA.

World-saving creative solutions envisioned by you and others are possible only if we learn the true meaning of 9-11. We've all seen that it took 10 seconds for the twin towers' roofs to hit the ground (photos from 9-13-01 show no "pancaking", almost all was turned to dust), collapsing at the rate of gravity, free-falling like hollowed out casinos. During the 7 years since the pyroclastic poisons from the WTC filled the airwaves and toxic cortisol filled our veins, fear has been used to blind us to the fact that only implosion by explosives could cause the destruction of towers designed to withstand direct hits from multiple airliners. PBS taped witnesses from firefighters to survivors to bystanders who reported "explosions". Every major tv anchor used the words "explosions" and "implosion" as they watched the only steel frame skyscrapers in history go down "because of fire."

You mention the need for nation building at home now, as infrastructure crumbles and SWAT teams flourish. Your allusion to an anonymous arbitrary authority forshadows your banana republic scenario, but it could have been taken from the streets of St. Paul last week. I hope you are going to pursue the implications of arresting journalists and peaceful protestors, as our bodies and our rights are now being stomped by fellow Americans in the name of homeland security and anti-terrorism.

You can help Americans in great numbers immediately wake up and take action based on the truth of the evidence of 9-11, so there might yet be hope for a constitutional democracy in America in 2051. The creative solutions to climate change and global energy policy will have something to do with that, if given a chance. We need to let the truth of 9-11 "set us free" if in 43 years someone's beloved schoolgirl is to be able to write about our awakening as citizens of America and the restoration of the democratic Constitution that led to the greening of the global community. Or will she be condemned by the Big Lie to ignorant fear and worship of symbols of power, because we let her down?

Why do we hear so little about "Alcohol Can Be a Gas", which came out in the 80s? Gasoline from bulrushes; energy from kelp farming in the Gulf, tamping down hurricanes and sinking CO2. Who could ask for more? Has this all been discredited, or is it time to give it a try?

I admit I heard of it on Noory's 'Coast-to-Coast', but that doesn't have to automatically make it coucou does it?

Listening to you on Charlie Rose right now (about your new book, and what our future might be, in general) the desperate need of this moment seems clear: How to get through to Americans what our choices really are? What the stakes really are?

The danger is NOT that we might become a Banana Republic.

The danger is: if we don't change, we could well become the next France, the France of the 21st Century -- gassing on, at the younger nations about our glory, which is all behind us; demanding -- impotently -- that people still consider us an Empire; arresting people who don't use English. Angry, obsolete -- pathetic.

That's a future Americans might decide they want to avoid.

Even birds dont fly there -

I dont know if this is the right forum for this comment but I just read an article which highlights your comment - "Even birds dont fly there".

In a recent verdict on July 10, 2008, US Courts gave a go-ahead to search someone's laptop/electronic device 'without suspiscion' when he/she is crossing the border. (http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinion...). I do not want to comment on the ruiling or the circumstances of this trial but definately on the outcome of this decision.

In this new 'Flat World' when business travel across nations is so common, this ruiling can force people to think twice of what confidential data is secure in their own laptop. If this is taken a bit far off to intra-country travel, this can have detrimental effects. How far are we from including email search or online account search? This also shows how open the borders are in the post 9/11 era. Is this the image we want to show the world??

Just started reading the book, so I will come back with more thoughts on Chapter 12.

Big business dictating public policy is at the heart of all the challenges we face in the U.S.A. I have not yet read the book, but an exploration of how we need to reform government to achieve our goals intrigues me. As a Texas democrat, doing away with the electoral college seems like a good start to me!

I see that public policy has not kept up with our changing economy and environment. For example,
at some point in our nation's history we decided to fund public education through grade 12. And until the 1980's perhaps, a high school graduate could find employment that provided a living wage. Now, hardly any one without a college education can make enough $$ to survive, and the combined incomes of parents without a college education can barely support a family. Don't even get me started on the corrupt Student Loan industry and why that's a bad idea, I worked in it for 7 years. Why hasn't public policy addressed extending public education if economic realities dictate that necessity?

Education, energy, agribusiness are but a few areas where policy seems to be rooted in the realities of 1970's America, instead of today's America.

It all boils down to those with the money and the power are doing everything they can to maintain the status quo, at the expense of the planet and the 98.8% of the non-wealthiest Americans. Government needs to grow a new set and take back some power over corporate America. At the same time, cooperation with corporate powers is essential.

Government can appease Big Business by removing the burden of providing health care with a single payer system. Government can do more to guarantee retirement income, since businesses can't or won't provide the benefits of days past.

Government can offer credits for liberating cubicle drones to telecommuting positions. Eliminating the need to commute is something we can do now with the technology that we have in place.

We can write local building codes that require developers to build roads and houses in accordance with the natural elements of the environment so that less energy is needed for heating and cooling.

I would like to read about other ways that policy needs to change to be in step with reality. Thanks!

EcoAlign, a strategic marketing company in Washington DC, indicates there is a "green gap" between stated propensities for sustainable lifestyles and practices and actual behavior.

EcoAlign's research indicates that, despite our responses to survey and focus group questions, our global, consumer-driven society still equates consumption with wealth. People and businesses value freedom of choice, esthetics, ease, comfort, quantity, convenience and low prices; an yet the same people (and businesses) are asked to change habits, behavior, conserve, be more efficient, less concerned about the esthetics (wind farms or CFLs) and pay a lot more (and not be resentful).

Not knowing what is in the first 17 chapters, I would think chapter 18 could serve a useful purpose if it focused on how to drive customers to the adoption of an eco-behavior that delivers both economic performance and environmental benefits.

Your NPR interview was as passionate as it was insightful, for that I thank you and hope and pray that people in power will listen and more importantly act.
My suggestion for Chapter 18 is to discuss what the single most critical thing is that is holding us back from achieving the goal of getting off not only oil but all fossil fuel in ten years as Al Gore also proposes. It is not technology (read Winning The Oil End Game by Amory Lovins) and it is not desire (do you know anyone that actually likes $4 gasoline?) No, it is The Oil Cartels. Since the discovery of oil in the 1800's the worlds most powerful men have been oil magnates. Those same families, whose wealth began in the 1800's (along with their enablers the banking cartel) now unquestionably control the country and the world. The last thing they want to do is have their extremely profitable meal yanked off their table through the adoption of renewable energy and they will fight tooth and nail using every dirty trick imagined and unimaginable in order to maintain the wealth and power that fossil fuel provides.
Green energy, when it gets developed, and it will, is in its essence democratic and distributed as opposed to concentrated and tyrannical, as fossil fuel is. Throwing off the oppressive chains of our fossil fuel economy will be far more a political revolution than a technological one and FAR more difficult than throwing off the chains of oppression from King George, but no less critical.
We have the technologies, we have the desire, what we do not have is the permission from the owners to cut off their gravy train. Until we address where the roots of power lie and why, then as a nation and a world we will be crippled by the continuing and oppressive concentration of wealth and power that the end of oil is bringing us. Now that the power elite own 90% of all media and are working on controlling the internet as well, I do not hold out much hope for getting off oil before our economy collapses and the world succumbs to more oil wars such as Iraq. The blinding ignorance shown so succinctly at the Republican Convention by chanting "Drill baby, Drill" indicates, with out a doubt, how far we have to go before we, as a nation, even realize that we have a problem. By the time a majority of the electorate awake from their slumber, I fear we will no longer have any semblance of a democracy and we will be left trying to pick an existence, let alone a renewable energy future, out of the ashes of the era of cheap oil.
Voices like yours Mr. Friedman, are actually our best hope.

ot in any order:
1. We have all these incredibly talented people at labs like Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos who deal with energy. They should be tasked to develop a replacement(s) for the gasoline/diesel engine and other transport systems, improve air conditioning efficiency, better solar panels.
2. The political stranglehold big oil has on the national legislative process must be broken. We have a real problem, and yet no one is suggesting changing national speed limits and increased auto fuel efficiency standards. What does that tell you?
3. We need to develop an effective mass transit system (see #1) and redesign our urban areas to use it.
4. Our tendency to sprawl should be curbed. we need to build more "up" than "out."
5. Ann additional tax on fuel should go into a "Global Warming Fund" to encourage the development of new technologies and to help pay for mass transit.

Mr. Friedman, I just saw you interviewed by Tom Brokaw following Biden, and it reminded me how I wished an innovator, especially a low-level-language programmer (all natural born philosophers and debuggers) could EVER run for president. No statesmen / inventors since Jefferson or Franklin??
GREAT interview! Inspiring. I'm a new fan of your vision.

I have two suggestions for some chap. 18 material.
Patent office innovations such as having the mere online publication act as a disclosure document.
So we garage inventors can safely colaborate fully, with credits following each revision, and any awarded patents jointly owned. At minimum, garage entrapreneurs could build recognition.
A simple attractor like that could involve millions (like me) who are sitting on inventions but can't even afford to begin the patent process. ($6000 shut me down cold).

The second idea is what I've been working on for around 6 years. A graphics engine (OpenGL) which competes with Half-Life2 for eye-candy, physics and frame-rate, (slam dunks it for load times), but instead of elaborate editors and compilers, you are forever in mod mode, so anything you see you can tweaked in realtime.
The main idea is a virtual workplace wherein colaborators can show inventions of any variety, animate and rely on a decent physics engine for POC.
Of course any CAD can do better, but the inspirations would flow on the scale that online games do now.

First design that will come with the graphics engine, (public domain) is a simple biosphere design which only asks one question: What is the minimum it takes to sustain one fairly self-sufficient human life, cradle to grave.
As energy it employs a "solar engine" is it was called in the 1800s. A parabolic dish, probably >30 feet across, tracking the sun, producing steam at the focal point, whose irratic output would be stored in a simple heavy flywheel below ground. EXTREMELY low tech. Africa could build these.
In fact the dish is built exactly like a Liquid Reflector Telescope. Except you spin up resin instead of murcery which hardens into shape. VERY low cost, and you have, essentially, a para-nuclear reactor. :)

From there this graphics demo-project branches off forever into lists of inventions:
A "variable displacement gerotor" for a car engine which uses CF tanks and air-pressure rather than fuel. It throws out the drive-line, the transmission, starter, battery timing (or any engine electronics), brakes, and can re-accumulate braking energy back into the tanks. (flattens out hills and stops).
One WONDERFUL side effect is that with carbon fibre tanks, it's traditional to fill them with Co2. If you get my drift... It could careen past liberals emitting 100% Co2 and the IPCC mob couldn't say a damned thing about it. :)

Why McCain did a sort of X-Prize fund specifically for electric batteries, I'll never understand. Air pressure is far lower tech to charge, lasts forever by comparison, lower tech, eventually cheaper, efficiency is in another league and air conditioning is a FREE side effect.

If interested sir, please email me.
My only hope is also that our country is the one that shows them all how we do things downtown.

Best wishes,
Marcus

I heard part of your interview on NPR today as I was driving, and listened to more of it online later. While I agree wholeheartedly with you on most of this, I have to make a correction on your statement about Senator George Voinovich and his vote on the Renewable Energy Tax Credit. His votes on this are as follows: He voted 3 times Nay on the cloture of the act,(cloture - The only procedure by which the Senate can vote to place a time limit on consideration of a bill or other matter, and thereby overcome a filibuster. Under the cloture rule (Rule XXII), the Senate may limit consideration of a pending matter to 30 additional hours, but only by vote of three-fifths of the full Senate, normally 60 votes.) and voted Yes on the actual act itself. Here are the links to the votes
http://www.senate.gov:80/legislative/LIS/roll...

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_ca...

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_ca...

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_ca...

Thank you for bringing these important issues to the forefront. The future of our country depends on it!

We have met the enemy and it is US.
The common denominator in energy usuage, pollution, traffic, carbon footprints and on and on belongs to US. People.
First off, if EVERY person in America simply adopted the 10% solution. Reduce your PERSONAL consumption by 10%.Daily,weekly and monthly.Drive 10% less each month. Thats 1 day a week that you carpool, work from home or use mass transit. One stinking day.
Same can be applied to energy etc.
As an aside. I was born in Delaware but grew up in South Carolina. Up until the late 80's early 90's there was a thing called "The Blue Law". No businesses are open on Sunday. Oh that is old fashion and not with the times.
But look at the benefits. A full day of rest(some book about resting on the 7th day comes to mind). Less people driving, relationships and family oriented for one day.
We all slooooooooow down just a bit to get refreshed.
Funny I don't remember carbon footprint or Global Warming being in the vernacular at that time.
Going forward, each new neighborhood must have 10% of its energy not be traditional.
Make junk mail a crime.
All prospectuses from brokerage firms be online.
Bring back PE. Kids that are in shape eat less, are outdoors more and are using less electricity in the home being on the PC playing games and watching tv etc.
Jam cell phones and Blackberry's from working in elevators, churches,hospitals(unless doctor or nurse).
We are wireless for sure. We are NOT connected as we think.
Create a charity/volunteer czar.
Let there be a contest where an average citizen can go to various economic/climate/social summits.
Its always the "intellecutals" that go and yet here we are.
This will be controversial but, reduce NASA's budget by 50% for 5 years and redirect those funds to infrastructures.
The sheer poor planning of highways or the lack of updates has caused MORE traffic. Thats alot of cars just spewing out toxic waste.
Partner with all Major sports. Have a foundation set up that either the fines(players getting ejected or in trouble) or luxury taxes etc go into a general Education Revamp Fund.
Take the top 20 WORSE performing school DISTRICTS.
Create a criteria for being eligible and just like the NBA lottery with a # of ping pong balls that is weighted so schools don't tank it they get into the Revamp Draft.
You can NOT have back to back Top 5 picks.
There will be an overseer from anyone of those leagues that partners up with that district to ensure the money is wisely spent on supplies, specific upgrades to the schools.
Speaking of schools.
We need to have a think tank summit to figure out a better solution for busing.
A yellow and black elephant in the room.
Costly and creates pollution.
Create Tax Credits for energy solutions.
More corporations need to embrace tele conferencing.

Golf Carts, whether they are electric or gas, turn off when one stops and turn back on as soon as one steps on the accelerator. Engineers could design a similar method that could be retrofitted on existing cars. The biggest challenge would be how to run the electrical accessories in the car (AC, heater, radio, etc.) while the engine is temporarily off.