By summer, if all goes as scheduled, 70-80% of California will have access to a PACE program. That’s good news for property owners and the carbon cause.

Signficantly, most of the state’s PACE programs will require some sort of loading order—a certain level of energy efficiency first before you can do solar PV or solar thermal. This whole-building approach is going to require a greater level of integration between the solar and EE industries than currently exists. Business op!

Related Links:

A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Bill Gates thinks about energy innovation

Large-scale distributed energy is here: Recurrent Energy signs 50MW power purchase agreement

At first blush this seems like more teabagging—appealing to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins. If you check in the comments under the video, that perspective is well represented. Says Metallicafan6611, “You guys all laugh. But this is really going to happen. Wake up people! Stop being sheep!” Enviros are predictably steamed (see, e.g., Adam Siegel).

The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more the teabaggy interpretation just doesn’t quite fit. The thrill at the end, when the guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police—not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that? Why offer escape from a moral dilemma your audience doesn’t acknowledge exists?

The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police—people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.

Now go back through the ad. Notice that everyone who gets busted is a man. There are lots more urban and suburban professional males in Audi’s target market than there are teabaggers.

To scratch one layer deeper: what is Audi’s message to these guys who want to be good but find the effort anxious-making? Here’s a way to meet your green obligations and still have a bad-ass car!  The Audi A3 is both green and desirable—indeed more desirable because it’s green. Buried deep in this ad, in other words, is a bright green message: prosperity, pleasure, and sustainability can be achieved together.

Anyway, not to overthink it (ahem), but the ad is not just another pot shot at greens. It’s an appeal to a new and growing demographic that isn’t hard-core environmentalist—and doesn’t particularly like hard-core environmentalists—but that basically wants to do the right thing. Audi’s effort to reach them, however clumsy, is actually a bit ahead of the curve.

Related Links:

U.S. feeds one quarter of its grain to cars while hunger is on the rise

America’s Century-Long Love Affair with the Car May Be Coming to an End - Data Highlights

U.S. car fleet shrank by four million in 2009

Cross-posted from LeadEnergy.org

A special three-part series in last week’s San Jose Mercury News, entitled “The Cleantech Revolution,” highlighted the enormous economic opportunity in the clean-tech sector and warned that the U.S. is quickly falling behind while Asia seeks to gain global market dominance.In its analysis of the clean technology market, the Mercury‘s rhetoric is grand and its data convincing.  The first part of the series begins:

“Cleantech is poised to be the valley’s third great wave of innovation — not just the next big thing, but perhaps the biggest thing ever. Confronting the peril of greenhouse gases and climate change happens to be a multi-trillion-dollar business opportunity.”

The numbers provided support this claim: U.S. yearly utility bills exceed $1 trillion annually and the global energy and transportation market is estimated at $7 trillion.  The wind and solar industries—valued at $80 billion in 2008—are projected to triple in 10 years and employ 2.6 million people.  Smart-grid technology, according to Morgan Stanley, will grow to $100 billion by 2030 and Cisco Systems believes smart-grid communications infrastructure could be worth $20 billion in the next 5 years.In a nod to its geographic location, the paper focuses primarily on Silicon Valley’s role in the industry.  And local experts have a strong take on the subject:

“When it comes to cleantech, we have the largest market opportunity inthe history of the planet driven by global climate change, resourceconstraints and energy independence,” said Dallas Kachan, managingdirector of Cleantech Group. “Silicon Valley is critical to thisrevolution, but it does not occupy the throne it once did.”

“Energy is the biggest opportunity Silicon Valley has ever seen,”declared T.J. Rodgers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor andchairman of SunPower, a leading maker of photovoltaic panels to producesolar energy.

Much of the progress being made in the U.S. can be attributed to venture-capital funding, a development for which the Mercury has encouraging news.  Venture capital investment in clean-technology grew from 3% to 25% of overall investment over the last few years, expanding from $908 million in 2002 to $8.5 billion in 2008.  Significantly, California garnered 40% of the world’s funding in 2009.  The Bay Area’s 7,000 renewable energy jobs make it the country’s biggest hotspot.So with all this venture-capital flowing in, the American cleantech industry must be in good position, right?  Wrong.  The Mercury makes a strong appeal for the alarm bells to start going off in Washington about the state of American competitiveness.The report declares:

“In other tech revolutions of recent decades, Silicon Valley became the uncontested global leader. The region’s ability to innovate its way to the top in cleantech, though, is far from guaranteed. Competition is fierce and global, with trillions of dollars at stake.”

True, the Valley has benefited from venture capital funding and has built-in advantages with decades of expertise in semiconductors and software - vital to solar energy production and grid integration strategies - but there are simply too many disadvantages to ignore.For one thing, the American education system isn’t doing the clean energy revolution any favors, as noted venture capitalist Vinod Khosla observes:

“We (in Silicon Valley) don’t have a natural advantage in talent — like chemical engineers, fermentation experts, engine designers and physicists.”

This statement underscores the urgency for RE-ENERGYSE, the comprehensive energy education proposal from the Department of Energy that a growing number of organizations are mobilizing behind.  But solving the problem doesn’t end there.

Like several other sources—including “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant,” the first comprehensive comparison of Asian vs. U.S. clean-tech competitiveness—this report outlines the extensive foreign investment in clean-energy, particularly in China.  Pointing to annual investment in excess of $100 billion, renewable energy requirements, and tax incentives, the Mercury shows how China has already overtaken the lead in key markets such as solar.  Once again, testimony backs the evidence, starting with a prominently supported letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

A group of valley tech executives, including former Intel CEO Andy Grove, recently sent a letter to Chu urging the energy secretary to “sound the alarm bell to make America aware — clearly and unequivocally — of how rapidly other nations, particularly China, are moving on clean energy.

“Unless we move quickly and commit substantial resources on a sustained basis, we risk becoming an energy also-ran, and risk developing a new dependency,” said the letter

Only 5 of the world’s top 30 wind, solar, and battery companies are in the United States.  And on the current trajectory of only about $4 billion in annual federal investment in clean energy R&D—far below the $15 billion recommended by Nobel Laureate scientists—that trend will continue:

“Unless there’s a dramatic shift in national policy in the United States, the road to success in cleantech most likely goes through Beijing,” said Matthew Lewis, spokesman for the San Francisco office of ClimateWorks Foundation, an international philanthropic network that promotes clean energy. “From a policy perspective, they are doing everything right.”

And as the U.S. continues not to do everything right, the need for investment remains so acute because the technologies are still so new.

Every aspect of cleantech “needs new science,” said Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials.

Without adequate federal funding, this new science will come out of Beijing, as the Chinese aim to use “cleantech as a gold rush that will propel Chinese companies to world-domineering status.”

This prospect need not be seen entirely as a threat as Peggy Liu, founder of the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, sees it: “I’m afraid people are setting up China as the enemy,” she said. “You need to treat China like a partner.”

Liu is probably right: clean-energy development is not a zero-sum game and US-China cooperation could benefit from the competitive advantages in both countries.But the way it stands right now, the United States is standing still while other countries take advantage of “not just the next big thing, but perhaps the biggest thing ever.”

Related Links:

A Critical Moment for Energy Leadership

Silicon Valley to Copenhagen: It’s OK to fail, if you do it right

Winning the clean energy race: a new strategy for American leadership

Related Links:

Coal: clean it up or move on?

Climate Citizens

A rollicking tour of America’s energy landscape

Ask Umbra on engagement rings, straws, and napkins

Ask Umbra on toilet paper, dryer balls, and Twitter

Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: How food service turns a green school into an enviro hog

HeidiGarrett-Peltier and Robert Pollin at The Political Economy and ResearchInstitute of the University of Massachusetts report the following numbers forjobs created per dollar of investment.

Tosummarize, reforestation and restoration outperforms even the second-mostjobs-intense activity analyzed by 74 percent, and conservation exceeds othermajor jobs alternatives, including especially new highway construction, WallStreet, and conventional energy sources like oil and nuclear.

See full jobs table here [pdf].

Thismeans that if the government is serious about creating jobs, it’s got to passclean energy and climate legislation and a new jobs bill that includes powerfulincentives for reforestation, revegetation, sustainable forest management, andconservation.

Thislegislation can perform the equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, theextremely popular New Deal program that put millions of people to work inforestry and conservation.

Whyare forest investments such good job generators? Restoring forests (as well as rivers,wetlands, peat bogs, and prairies), requires people, which means jobs: soilscientists, tree planters, equipment operators, water engineers, and people tonurture the trees over time.

Conservation—investing in, for instance, the expansion of National Parks and other local,state, and federal recreation areas through, for instance, the Land and WaterConservation Fund—isn’t too far behind. Some of the direct jobs in thissector include park rangers, park transportation workers, and other parkpersonnel.

Relativeto other spending options, investments in forests and parks tend to go towardswages rather than capital investments—providing the greatest benefit tocommunities, especially in economically difficult times (since Nature largelyprovides the materials that go into making a tree or a prairie grow for free,you don’t need the same kind of capital as you do for, say, building ahighway).

Theactual jobs impact of forest investment is actually significantly greater thanwhat’s represented in the above table. A variety of other studies have analyzedjob creation through conservation and found dramatic indirect effects. Expand anational park, national forest, river or local recreation area, and spending onand employment in outdoor recreation—everything from birdwatching and hikingto fishing and hunting - is dramatically increased.

A 2006 report for the OutdoorIndustry Association found that the availability of active outdoorrecreation generated $289 billion in retail sales and services across theUnited States, with a total of 6.5 million jobs supported by the recreationeconomy overall. Other reports focusing on roadlessareas, nationalforests, and privately-owned forests have found similar results: the NationalAlliance of Forest Owners [pdf] reports that every hundred acres ofprivately owned forests supports eight jobs and the FAO reported lastyear that investing in sustainable forestry management could create ten millionnew, good-paying jobs worldwide. 

Ofcourse, jobs aren’t the only reason restoration and conservation are a goodidea: forests and other wildlands suck pollution out of the air, providewildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities—allowing America to putpeople back to work, and giving them somewhere beautiful to go when they’redone.  

Olivier Jarda, apolicy associate at the Center for International Policy, assisted with theresearch for this post.

Related Links:

Anti-jobs ‘California Jobs Initiative’ crew threatens suit over name change

[UPDATED] While the big cats cower, time to build robust food economies

Messaging that can save the clean energy bill

Recurrent’s power will not come from a single large-scale solar power plant out in the desert but from three small-scale solar PV projects, one 6MW and two 22MW installations in Kern and San Bernadino counties, which it will own and operate. In other words, Recurrent is selling distributed solar power, but in quantities that matter, at a price that’s competitive. That bodes well for the future of distributed energy (about which, regular readers know, I am very geeked).

Recurrent Energy

Because it is building small- to mid-size solar arrays, Recurrent has a number of advantages over power companies building large central plants:

This is not to unduly valorize Recurrent but simply to point out that the benefits it enjoys by focusing on distributed energy are the very benefits society accrues from distributed energy: more flexibility, resilience, and iterative speed. Most importantly, Recurrent is proof of concept that distributed projects can be aggregated into large-scale power purchase agreements. Distributed energy is now a viable market option.

I talked with Recurrent CEO Arno Harris—an energy geek himself, with his own blog—and he says the company has around 1 GW of projects in the pipeline. Let’s see how fast they come online relative to, say, their nuclear and “clean coal” competitors, or even their large-scale solar thermal competitors.

In fact, I’ll make a bet: the U.S. will see its next GW of distributed power before it sees its next GW of central-plant power. Any takers?

Related Links:

San Francisco sets the PACE

The little solar that could

A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Related Links:

In 3-2 vote, SEC requires companies to disclose climate risks to investors

Everyone Poops - - and a few spin gold

Only the numbers count—and they add up to hell on earth

“Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate alsoholds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The platemight have to be five feet across,” Foer writes. At current rates of fishery depletion, scientistspredict the demise of most seafood by 2048.

Foer describes modern fishing as warfare. Hajime Sato has asimilar take: “[It’s] like someone is beating somebody and I’m just walking byand noticing it but not doing anything about it.”

But Sato isn’t an environmentalist author or even avegetarian. He’s chef and owner of Mashiko, a Seattle sushi restaurant. Not wanting tothrow punches himself anymore, he revised his menu to include only sustainablefish last August.

Sato, who not only serves sushi but teaches others how toprepare it, knew the dreadful truth about certain fish. For a time, however, heserved them anyway. But then he met Casson Trenor, author of Sustainable Sushi.

Trenor knows just about everything that’s wrong or rightabout what can end up between your chopsticks. For instance, the mostdisgusting thing about shrimp isn’t even their visible poop veins: “Some shrimpers have been known to discardmore than ten pounds of unwanted sea life for every pound of shrimp they keep,”he writes.

After talking to Trenor about sustainability, Sato said,“Okay, within three months, I’ll change it [the menu] entirely.” Trenor didn’tbelieve Sato. But, Sato recalls, “I said ‘No, when I say I’ll dosomething, I’ll do it. That’s me.’” And he did.

Not your typical sushi chef. Not your typical sushi. Photo by Phu Son Nguyen of sushiday.com“Don’t do anything mediocre,” he says. Not a surprising personalmotto from someone who races motorcycles and whose diners are greeted by a signthat reads “Please wait to be seated. Unless you’re illiterate.”

Sato took a big risk with his 15-year-old, award-winningrestaurant.

The first few months were rocky; Sato couldn’t sleep forworrying. “Should I go back? Am I doing the right thing?” he asked himself,“People don’t get it.”

But business rebounded and he continues to be resolute aboutsustainability. He finds careless pescatarians’ logic odd and isincredulous that there are international laws against eating cheetahs, butBluefin tuna have only very limited protection. “You can basically wipe theentire species out in a week and say okay, next ...”

Although the plight of the Bluefin tuna has made headlinesrecently, Sato points out that eel (unagi) is the worst fish to serve. “Eel isactually [at] the category of extinction. It’s not even endangered anymore. Butpeople are still eating it,” he says.

Whatcha doin’ back there? This mysterious lover is a breed of eel that won’t end up on your plate. Its populations also happen to be healthy. Photo courtesy Richard Ling via Flickr The spooky thing about eels, besides their mean mugs, istheir mysterious breeding habits. It’s not just that eel lovin’ is anunpleasant subject: “They [eels] go back and forth between fresh water and saltwater about four or five times in theirlife. And we have no idea how they mate, how they reproduce at all. So let’snot really touch the eel.”

Wild or farmed, eating unagi is never a good idea. In eelfarms, they take the young from the wild and fatten them up. Those eels nevereven get the chance to do whatever only God knows they do in the dark.

Eel is classified as a red fish in Trenor’s book. Helpfully,he divides fish into three color categories. Green means chow down: “Thesefish and shellfish are caught or farmed in ways that don’t have any majoradverse effect on the environment.” Nimbly nibble yellow fish: “Animals in thiscategory are from fisheries that are either poorly understood or have sometroubling characteristics. Limit your consumption of these animals.” And red, of course, means by all means stop:“Fish and shellfish are caught or farmed in a manner that is inordinatelydeleterious to the health of the oceans.”

Sato mostly serves green fish, but he serves some yellow,too. Occasionally a customer will ask him, “Are you 100 percent okay with this?”“No,” he replies, “I eat the same as any other practice I do. I drive a car.”

But what if every fish out there was classified redtomorrow?

Then I’m not going to serve. I’m going to have a vegetarianrestaurant. Which is totally fine. But I’m trying to prevent it. I’m trying toprevent it so we can do this. People tend to wait wait wait until the lastmoment and then freak out. Let’s freak out just a touch more right now.

Keeping up to date on the status of each fish he servestakes a lot of time. “You cannot just stop learning about it,” he insists.

Trenor and Sato’s relationship continues. Sato readsJapanese publications on sustainability and Trenor reads English sources. Theytalk three times a week to share what they’ve learned.

Sato, the first traditionally trained sushi chef to gosustainable, can’t understand Japanese aversion to sustainable sushi: “The reality is, if you really read the history of sushi,tuna actually was not in there, [nor] toro, unagi ... I’m basically going back towhat traditional is. They didn’t have a huge fleet of boats.”

Though he doesn’t intend to challenge veteran sushi chefs(“They’d kill me with a knife”), Sato hopes to promote sustainable sushi andbring more chefs into the fold. He understands the difficulties of switching toand finding sustainable fish, but he’s willing to share his experience andsupport those who face the same hardships.

Have you ever even heard of the Sanma fish? Photo by Phu Son Nguyen of sushiday.com“I had to say goodbye to distributors that I’d been usingfor 15 years, which is really tough. They sometimes helped me out when I was infinancial trouble,” he says. He went from having four or five distributors tonearly 20 in order to fill out his menu. He sees this as a plus for his diners, giving them choices far beyondthe standard fare. “There’s so manyother fish. But some people don’t get that,” he says. Sato recommends dinersrelax and expand their tastes. “Today eat this, tomorrow eat that. It’s goodfor the ecosystem, economy, everything.”

In the past, his business philosophy was to make sushiaffordable for everyone. He’s kept his prices low and his sushi delicious, buthis philosophy has changed to something he calls egocentric: “I’d like to keepmy business longer than the next five years.”

Ultimately, Sato believes the fate of the fish and ourability to eat them in the future is up to the consumer. He hopes we choosewisely.

If you’re not in the Seattlearea, bring Trenor’s book with you to your favorite restaurant, the grocerystore, the fish market. Ask questions.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a good, simple pocket guide as well. And you can see how your local seafood restaurants measure up at Fish2Fork. Finally, check out Mashiko’s website sushiwhore.com, where you can read Sato’s blog about sustainability, peruse his mouth-watering menu, and watch silly sushi videos. (And it’s pointed out that sake is sustainable.)

Related Links:

Walking: A simple focus for the Smart Growth movement

My whiz-bang light rail is your pain in the asphalt

On talking to our kids about the future

“All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming,” bin Laden said in the message attributed to him by the pan-Arab news channel based in Doha.

In an unusual message possibly timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, he warned of the impact of global warming by saying that “discussing climate change is not an intellectual luxury, but a reality.”

“This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that,” he said.

The Al-Qaeda leader then slammed the U.S. administration under former President George W. Bush for not signing the Kyoto protocol on combating climate change. “Bush the son, and the Congress before him, rejected this agreement, only to satisfy the big companies,” he said.

Bin Laden then went on to urge a boycott of the U.S. dollar. “We should stop using the dollar and get rid of it ... I know that there would be huge repercussions for that, but this would be the only way to free humankind from slavery ... to America and its companies,” he added.

The broadcast came less than a week after bin Laden praised as a “hero” Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who allegedly tried to detonate explosives on a U.S. plane approaching Detroit on Christmas Day, in another audio message.

Bin Laden has a $50 million bounty on his head and has been in hiding for the past eight years. He is widely believed to be holed up along the remote mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Related Links:

Obama admin launches new Climate Service and climate.gov

U.N. climate chief raises the temperature with racy novel

New E.U. organic logo set for Europe’s supermarkets