Add dairy farmers to Campbell Soup on the list of those most likely to thrive through the downturn. A new bill sponsored by the senator from Nebraska--Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE)--would subsidize the production of "biogas"--a renewable source of natural gas processed from cow "flautus." As written the tax credit would nearly double the current street price of biogas, spurring new investments that would hopefully lower production costs.
The government estimates that all the nation's thousands of existing cow and pig farms could produce 6 million megawatt hours of electricity annually, which isn't actually all that much--equal to twice the capacity of the Solar Electric Generating System, the largest solar farm in the country. But it would take advantage of an--ahem--underutilized resource and cut down on odor and open lagoon deaths too.
Manufacturing costs for new solar technologies like thin-film and monocrystalline PV will drop below $1.50 a watt within the next few years, according to new projections by Greentech Media and the nonprofit Prometheus Institute. Global capacity will nearly triple, from 10.4 gigawatts today to 27.6 gigawatts, or approximately half the consumption of Great Britain.
But it's not all sunny news. Overall, the solar energy market is entering a big shakeout and consolidation phase. Despite an improvement in solar tax credits included in the Obama stimulus package, U.S. companies like OptiSolar, Ausra and Evergreen Solar are downsizing and cutting back. Anyone with shaky financing or bleeding edge technologies will disappear in favor of those that have the right connections to increasingly important government subsidies. Greentech especially likes the chances of cheaper thin-film and mass-market Asian manufacturers--the operative word here is cheap.
Surprisingly, when it comes to making OJ, it's not the packaging or the trucks--growing the fruit produces the single greatest proportion of the carbon footprint of Tropicana orange juice, as PepsiCo just hired an outside consultant to determine. Citrus growers employ huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, which is made from natural gas.
Tropicana, which recently redesigned its cartons and offers a dizzying number of varieties with add-ins from omega-3s to mango, did launch an organically grown brand in 2007; maybe they can start advertising it "Now With One-Third Less Carbon?"
Since I wrote about Mint in Fast Company I've been a user of their product, which has grown to become the most popular free online personal finance software. Yesterday I got an email that has made me an even more loyal customer:
"Over the past 24 hours, you may have read news reports in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and elsewhere that millions of Americans may have recently been fraudulently charged about $0.25 each from merchants named Adele or GFDL.
In response to this news, We reviewed all users’ accounts today and identified that you have a charge from one or both of these merchants."
I quickly looked up my account and sure enough, there was an unfamiliar 19 cent charge. Fifteen minutes later, I had successfully disputed the charge with Citibank--which, by the way, had not seen fit to alert its customers to the problem.
I would never have taken the time to check for this charge on my own. Some have raised privacy issues with letting a third party like Mint have your account passwords, but in a situation like this one I'm glad to have someone looking over my shoulder.
One creative source of revenue New York City is considering: Carbon credits. Yesterday, public transit chief Eliot Sander was on the Brian Lehrer show discussing the "doomsday budget", which basically is a choice between bad and worse. Either the city passes the Ravitch recommendations of fare hikes, tolls and a new tax, or we get...even bigger fare hikes plus drastic cuts in service, which typically disproportionately affect the elderly, poor and disabled.
One alternative: back in May, the MTA approved a $776,000 contract with consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton to measure their carbon footprint and look at ways to monetize it. The theory, Sander explained, is that mass transit diverts cars from the road, thus reducing the overall output of greenhouse gases. Under a carbon cap-and-trade system like the one Obama advocates, the MTA could maybe translate these carbon reductions into dough. Of course, green-minded citizens might not be too happy about that, because it would mean the energy you save by taking the bus would be offset by some deep-pocketed polluter elsewhere.
Another creative revenue source that results in a net overall carbon reduction is congestion pricing, using an EZ-Pass like setup to charge cars to drive downtown or in especially high-traffic areas. In the city of Stockholm, IBM's system cut traffic by almost a quarter, cut carbon emissions by 14% in the inner city, increased public transit use, and raised money too.
Of course, congestion pricing has been shot down once in New York. But if Stockholm's a guide, they just need to bring it back on a trial basis. After experiencing the benefits of the system for just a month, Swedes flipped from negative to positive on the changes, and voted to make them permanent.
Last year, 41 Oma premium bluefin tuna were on the block for the New Year's auction at Tokyo's famous Tsukiji Market, the biggest fish market in the world. This year, there were only four--and one of them sold for a seven-year high of $104,000, to be split between Hong Kong and Tokyo sushi bar owners.
The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is in charge of bluefin stocks around the world. Their own scientists had recommended slashing the international quota to 7500 tons to bring back the enormous, long-lived predator fish from the brink of extinction. Under pressure from the European Union, the Commission instead decided in November to lower the catch only slightly, to 22,500 tons. Greenpeace has determined that because of extensive pirate fishing, the real catch was more like 60,000 tons in 2007. But even the most unscrupulous trawlers can't find as many fish as in the past due to population crashes.
All of this puts innocent wasabi-loving diners in the same position as the Komodo-dragon dining plutocrats in that Matthew Broderick movie The Freshman.
Want to know what to order for lunch? Check out the book Sustainable Sushi or the Environmental Defense Fund's online Sushi Selector.
Green energy is still a lightning-fast growth area in venture capital--VC investment in green energy technologies in 2008 exceeded $7.7 billion in more than 350 deals, more than double last year’s dollar totals, according to GreenTechMedia.com. But the recession, and the accompanying plunge in the price of oil, are motivating a different type of thinking in clean tech. As a result, says the New York Times, "big, expensive projects like building factories to manufacture solar panels or biofuels are falling out of favor."
Why emulate the old, capital-intensive ways of creating energy, anyway? It's time to move from the mainframe model of big power plants to the equivalent of networked PCs and wireless mobile devices.
Clean Tech 2.0 is going to be smaller, more distributed, and more personalized than the previous solutions. It's going to take the biggest possible advantage of "negawatts," or extra capacity freed up by maximum efficiency. Information technology will allow us to optimize our use of energy and resources so nothing goes to waste. Financing will be shaped to government incentives. So, who are the winners in the negawatt revolution, and who are the losers?
Winners
Efficiency and renewables consultants that work with the public sector, like Chevron Energy Solutions.
small-scale solar installers like Sungevity or Recurrent Energy that take advantage of local financing, power purchase agreements, and tax rebate.
In the best possible scenario, we're living through a transition from scattershot privately funded efforts to bold, long-term, strategic public commitments with the heft required to get the job done.
Images of 1966 solar mirror construction courtesy of NASA/GRC.
Wind power was recently ranked in a comprehensive research study as the top energy alternative in terms of environmental impact and total power potential.
The steel industry, a bellwether of the US economy, is in a serious slump--its lowest production point since the 1980s.
Vestas, the world's largest wind power company with nearly a quarter of the market, is opening factories all around the world and has ambitious growth targets of over 20 percent a year, increasing wind's share of global power consumption from 1 percent to 10 percent by 2020. They're opening several manufacturing facilities across the US. Here's a video about a wind turbine factory replacing a steel mill in a small Pennsylvania town.
The steel industry is looking for more federal spending on infrastructure like highways and bridges to haul it out of the ditch. Maybe they should join forces with the green movement and call for rail lines and wind towers as well.
A friend of mine from college has always been committed to fighting international poverty. First she worked for some of the big aid organizations like Mercy Corps and CARE. Then she took a job with a more entrepreneurial, microfinance-related group. Lately she's very excited about the prospect of working for Obama's new state department.
My friend's vocational path is being mirrored worldwide. An incredible expansion of the nonprofit and NGO sector over the last 15 years has been driven by many converging factors--the sudden creation of new, vast wealth, technology which increases our awareness of the acute needs around the world, and a US political stance that favored private charity over government social programs.
In the post-crash world of 2009, at least two of those three factors will be changing--private fortunes are shrinking (though inequality may not be), and the American government is more or less back at the controls when it comes to social and economic programs.
Philanthrocapitalism is an excellent new book that tells the tale of the rise of so-called social entrepreneurs--the Bill Gates, Bill Clintons, Warren Buffetts, Bonos and Jeffrey Sachs of the world who brought innovation and even glamour to the fight against poverty. It has truly been a second Gilded Age, with its own Carnegies and Rockefellers, and the hope is that these new "Social Capitalists" can now bring some of their fresh thinking into the halls of government.
A couple of weeks ago the usually conservative International Energy Agency predicted that world oil production would peak by 2020. Peak oil has moved in a short time from an obsession somewhere between the Warren Commission and the Yeti in reputability, to the stuff of mainstream news reports. You don't have to look far on the Internet to find nightmare scenarios of a post-cheap-oil world--abandoned suburbs, idle factories, no cars.
But what does peak oil really mean? There are two post-peak futures that each seem more likely than the total collapse of civilization as we know it. A climate scientist named Ken Caldeira recently presented them at a meeting of his colleagues.
In one, we switch to wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. (Relatively) clear skies ahead.
In the other, we switch to cheaper, more abundant, and far dirtier coal, and "unconventional" oil shale and tar sands, thus hastening the destruction of land, pollution of water and air, and catastrophic global warming.
What path does the outgoing administration support?
"On Oct. 31, Congress allowed a moratorium on oil shale leasing to expire. That paved the way for the Bush administration to finalize leasing rules last month that opened 2 million acres of federal land to exploration."
"The president-elect has called for 10 percent of all electricity to be generated by renewable sources—wind, solar and the like—by 2012 and 25 percent by 2025.
He also would reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change by 80 percent by 2050, an ambitious goal."
The race is on. Shell Oil is digging pits under the Rockies as you read this.
