The End of Green?

Tom,

Just saw a presentation by Ed Mazria who is the founder of Architecture2030.org and a famous energy efficiency. architect.

He has shut down his private practice to campaign for building standards that would rachet down to zero net carbon use by 2030.

He has a convincing plan and the support of many technical groups including the AIA and ASHRAE.

Contact him for an interview. Seriously!

-Jeff

Dear Mr. Friedman,
i appreciate your work very much. I chose to write this op-ed style article as my class assignment and in response to your New York Times article "Green the bailout".

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity. “John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), Speech in Indianapolis, April 12, 1959
Thank you President Kennedy. Analyzing our present financial crisis, one immediately identifies the danger in how seriously borrowed-out we have become-both individually and as a nation. Our innovation along with our currency is at a troublesome low, while our dependence on fossil fuels is unabated. What better method of rejuvenating a nation as well as its stature abroad than strengthening it internally in a sustainable fashion?
We have grown accustomed to hearing the clarion calls of the future like "global warming", "eco-smart", "green", "renewable", "sustainable" to name a few. As a nation however, we have yet to heed the call. Bolstering the green technology industry with strong investment, deliberate incentives and steady support on Capitol Hill will renew our nation inside out. These much needed changes to our economy will encourage job creation at home and in time infuse much needed fresh blood to help rebuild us internally.
Implore your government representatives to commit their support to the mission of our time, the Green Technology revolution. It will take determined leadership to communicate to all the benefits of thinking, planning and acting green; our representatives must advocate "green" to proponents of the status quo across the spectrum; our leadership must vote on the floor of the House and the Senate with the visionary strength and conviction needed to step up to this historic opportunity.
America must seize on this opportune moment, learn from history and chart the course to a green future.
Zeco Krcic

Dear Mr. Friedman:
In my heart I know you are right. In my mind I know your are right. I've always driven smaller, more fuel efficient cars; I got started that way because, although the danger is admittedly greater, the small car is more fun to drive--the price we pay for feeling more alive. If I have one larger vehicle, it's because I have to HAUL something bigger on a regular basis.

But, the principle is the same. Put a lower wattage bulb in the socket, use a little less water to flush. Be entertained by the small satisfactions.

Sorry, though, to have to say that I don't have many friends in the petroleum industry, or the military industry, or the agricultural industry for that matter, who have much fun driving smaller cars or admiring their efficient toilets. They may pay lip service to the idea of a green revolution, but in THEIR hearts they're worried that they won't get their share of this wonderful, extravagant life we enjoy in America. After all, I'm told, anything less threatens their entitlement.

You can't have a green revolution without inspiration. You can't have a green revolution without an intuitive idea about how one is connected with the planet. You can't have a green revolution if you don't know that London is in England, that Australia is south of the equator, and that we live on sphere circling a star. You can't have a green revolution unless our children perceive their future in terms of consequences rather than entitlements.

I would ALMOST say that you can't have a green revolution listening to an MP3 player instead of birds chirping--but that would be extreme and I do like my recording of Judy Collins. One has to have some small indulgence.

Even so, we used to know that life isn't about collecting small samples of nearly everything; that piles of things tried and discarded after a moment of brief interest is like stacks of worn out tires. Easy to come by, but hard to get rid of. Fear the drop in gasoline prices in the same way that a bag of candy drops in price after a holiday.

Green is not turning back the clock. Green is a signficant marker of maturity. Green is a philisophical advance that recognizes the competition for the next stage of survival where we have to be ready to face ourselves in the mirror.

Green is the dream of ourselves living in harmony that recognizes that human nature is not fixed in the past. Like all dreams, Green is the precursor to something new and challenging. Time to leave the old husk behind for the new. Time to recognize that old stone monuments melt in the rain.

So, Thomas Friedman, whether you've got the details of our "flat world" right, or whether tomorrow's opening of a Brazillian oilfield will plunge us back into old indulgences, you're doing a great job on moving us along a path of inspiration where at least some will see Green, not as milestone after which we will all get cured of bad habits, but as a state of mind that moves us one step closer to our potential.

Its not the end of green... at least not for my office building. I work in a 35 story building in West Los Angeles. Here is what our property manager just emailed us:

As part of our MGM Tower’s ongoing Greening Program and its commitment to the environment we will be installing 1,408 solar panels on the roof of the parking structure. The solar panels will feed into two high efficiency DC-to-AC inverters which will in turn feed into one of the three main electrical services at the building. This system will generate approximately 570,000 kWh of energy per year which is the equivalent energy needed during the day to power about 370 homes!

Sydney, Australia

Our government has commenced its own bail-out agenda this week (15 Oct 08).
• $4B AUD to mortgage lenders
• $11B AUD to pensioners, families (child allowances) and new home buyers - as one off pre-Xmas payments (housing payments will be made over a longer period).

Daily, the figures are growing. Yesterday the Greens added a request for another $1.5B. Sadly, concerns focus on short-term injecting of cash – to encourage consumption of goods (stocking stuffers). Several local headlines read along the lines of our 'shop till we drop' holiday season...

Australia is in the enviable position of having built budgetary cash surpluses. In addition, we have $1T or more in our Fed Gov Superannuation fund, a wealth of resources, and are pretty much able to feed our population.

Unfortunately, our transport and communications infrastructures suck, our largest state (NSW) is too embarrassed to post last year's financial figures, the fossil fuel lobby has a stranglehold on energy generation – and we're running out of water.

I worry that we may end up frittering away our future. I like my iPod, but I'm more than happy not buy another one...

I've just ordered 'The World is Flat' and 'Hot, Flat, and Crowded' - and look forward to reading both.

I think you should come speak at College of the Atlantic, "the greenest college in the world" according to Grist.org. We would love to have you and hear you!

This is a moment I've been waiting for for a long time. The trends are all coming together to demonstrate that we do indeed live on a finite earth, and that it is only with our infinite ideas and good will that we will re-make the American dream, and heal our planet -

Victoria Parmele

I have not yet finished reading Hot, Flat and Crowded but it is the most thought provoking book I have read since reading Fred Krupp’s Earth: The Sequel, six weeks ago.

The author quotes John Gardner, the founder of the Common Cause as saying the period we are now in, (the Energy-Climate Era) is “A series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems”.

The global perception, I would have to say, given the media coverage of the climate, economy and energy, is a bleak and depressing one. However, we must all take heart from John Gardner’s quote above.

No one likes change nor accepts it willingly, but perhaps they are more likely to accept change in a time when the future looks like a series of insoluble problems.

Let us use this Energy-Climate Era to craft a better more sustainable world for our children.

Nick Robson - The Cayman Institute

**Note: the views expressed below are my own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the professional organizations with which I am affiliated.**

George Hart's suggestion that you draw together a small group of key thinkers to devise "a plan of specific decisive action..where the emphasis should wherever possible be on those things requiring minimum government involvement" is an important one.

Many of us also believe that government action is necessary and still quite possible, but it is critical to push forward with progress on both tracks (government action and "things requiring minimum governement involvement").

To that end, while I support George Hart's sentiment, I wanted to add a suggestion. I believe that that outcomes from such a gathering would benefit from including slightly broader perspectives from one or more high-level women who have spent their careers thinking about these issues, and from 1-2 people who are deeply immersed in the environmental justice/equity challenges posed by our current economic system, who will have valuable thinking about how the new green economy can have different impact.

Including slightly broader perspectives could potentially slow the conversation down, while encouraging the group to cover more ground than they otherwise would (e.g. a broader set of topics and/or opinions). I believe this would be well worth the investment in order to achieve the highest level of insight possible to address this tremendously challenging and important question: "Is this financial crisis going to be the end of green, or is green going to be how we end this financial crisis?”

George Hart's suggestion:
"At a minimum those who should be there would include: Warren Buffett, T Boone Pickens, Dan Reicher of google.org, John Doerr of Kleiner-Perkins, Vinod Khosla, James Woolsey ex CIA head and strong advocate of the National Security aspects of New Energy, and Matt Simmons. I’m sure a couple of other names would pop into mind. But there should be no more than one or two others."

One additional suggestion (obviously, others will have different takes on who and why):
Gia Schneider, partner at EKO Asset Management Partners, previously at the Energy Trading & Marketing Group at Credit Suisse where she started the carbon emissions trading and marketing desk, and for which she led business development in the U.S. and Japan. Gia previously co-managed the U.S. weather and emissions proprietary trading books at Credit Suisse. She has extensive experience in the energy sector designing and implementing risk, trading and valuation systems. Gia joined Credit Suisse in late 2004 to help start the commodities desk. She came from the Strategy Group at Constellation, a leading merchant generation company, where she focused on structured power transactions in the Western U.S. and Alberta. Prior to Constellation, Gia was a consultant with Accenture where she focused on trading and risk management in the energy and utility industries.

**Note: the views expressed above are my own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the professional organizations with which I am affiliated.**

Tom

In the context of what has occurred in the last two weeks nationally and globally on the economic front it would be terribly short sighted and irresponsible not to take advantage of the path out of this disaster which your book HFC puts on the table right in front of us.

Going back several years Warren Buffett warned of how derivatives could serve as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Well all of those weapons have gone off at once. And now in Warren’s phrase “This really is an economic Pearl Harbor.”

Action commensurate with that crisis is called for, especially as we are perched right on the cusp between deep concern and outright panic. There has been massive destruction of wealth. Congressional Budget Office figures delivered to the House last week are startling: “$2 trillion wiped out of retirement funds — Nest eggs dwindle by 20 percent in 15 months.” And that’s just a fraction of the total damage. We’ve lost 10 going on 20 trillion dollars of market capitalization.

There is one, and only one, path that can re-create the capital destroyed over the last two years and generate millions of jobs at the same time.

That path is a concerted and coordinated effort to move ahead on a massive build-out of needed infrastructure and the New World of Energy. Over the next several decades that path could create 20 to 40 trillion dollars of wealth through market capitalization of the industries involved.

This process of precipitous decline and fall and possible recovery through infrastructure and new energy has been crystal clear to me for several years. I’m on the record repeatedly on broadcast media in describing it. Monday night of last week before Armageddon hit Wall Street I was on the Alan Colmes Fox Radio show (Alan is a friend and co-host of the Hannity and Colmes show) reviewing those past predictions and my detailed step-wise prescription for the future.

We got into this mess from too much money sloshing around chasing fictitious opportunities leading to the dot-com crash and then the housing bubble aggravated by over $60 trillion in Credit Default Swap “side bets.”

The real problem now is that the immense wealth and job creation potential of New Energy is a very capital intensive path. Renewable energy has the hallmark characteristic that the “fuel” is “free” but the up front capital costs are high. In fact the cost of energy becomes an issue of paying back those capital costs over time. Nuclear is very much in the same boat although not to the same manner since there are nuclear fuel costs.

The real issue confronting us is not technology development, it is project financing. That’s doubly true at a time when so much capital has been destroyed and no one wants any risk at all. The beauty of infrastructure and New Energy investments is that the risk level can be held so low. At the same time the job creation potential has been carefully quantified, at about 6 million laborer hours per installed gigawatt.

We don’t have the time to twirl our thumbs until a new administration is place. Plus as I have been broadcasting for years, and people now understand, much of this is beyond politicians and politics to solve. What is called for, right now, is the formation of a national working group of people who understand working with huge amounts of capital on infrastructure and energy projects.

Tom, between you and your network of contacts, you could pull the right other people into a room, either physical or virtual. At a minimum those who should be there would include: Warren Buffett, T Boone Pickens, Dan Reicher of google.org, John Doerr of Kleiner-Perkins, Vinod Khosla, James Woolsey ex CIA head and strong advocate of the National Security aspects of New Energy, and Matt Simmons. I’m sure a couple of other names would pop into mind. But there should be no more than one or two others.

A plan of specific decisive action can be drawn up, where the emphasis should wherever possible be on those things requiring minimum government involvement. Without doubt the government is going to be so fiscally hobbled for the foreseeable future that it would be foolish to “bank” on it as a savior.

This is a true national emergency requiring immediate effective action which you are in a perfect position to initiate. The www.pickensplanplus.com web site which I put together for Matt Simmons, and presented in the same Senate hearing where T Boone Pickens appeared, was a big step in the right direction. But there is far more that can be tied together. A week ago at the invitation of StatoilHydro I spent a week in Norway briefing their upper management on the New World of Energy and how to structure a R&D plan to fully participate in it. Their Executive VP of Technology and New Energy was totally captivated by the “core vision” of a system architecture for the New World of Energy which I presented. People at that level have two criteria: Does this person know what they are talking about in depth, and does the solution match the problem. Thirty-five years working with DoD and major contractors on system concept definition for projects costing 50 to 150 billion and taking 20 to 30 years to implement has given me a fluency with thinking big and bold rather than small and slow. Time voluntarily spent as a “range rat” each year keeps me honest and well acquainted with Murphy’s Law.

This month’s one hundredth anniversary of the introduction of the Model T by Henry Ford is the perfect time to initiate a similarly world changing enterprise in the 21st century. We desperately need a solution on that scale.

You actually can play a unique and critical role this week, and in the following weeks. Not in bringing garage technologies to the fore, but in organizing a global rescue effort to respond to this financial Pearl Harbor of grimly epic proportions which we have suffered.

Answer the challenge which you are so particularly well positioned to meet. Help lead the effort to put together a business plan for the New World of Energy.

I think the financial crisis of 2008 is one of the clearest illustrations of how "dumb as we wanna be" plays out, yet again. How many people are now claiming to have signaled the warnings of an impending subprime-lending crisis at least a year or two ago? Nevertheless, nobody took action until it was too late to avoid having to bail out the financial system.

Just as a $1.00 per gallon gasoline tax on Sept. 12, 2001 would probably have triggered a new era of energy independence, perhaps a visionary president will take the opportunity to make a brave, but unpopular decision early in their first term of office.

He could simply point to how small a fraction of the financial bailout cost it would take to at least get the ball rolling, by changing the incentives for clean energy. It would be like opting for the hybrid upgrade on a new car, when you know it's going to pay off in the long-run... just like it did for the NYC cabs.

Happily, at least one of the presidential candidates claims to be able to address two important issues at the same time. Otherwise, sadly, you will have to rename your next edition, "Hot, Flat, Crowded, Broke and Handcuffed."