My letter to the IEA Press Office, sent just moments ago:

I would like to know what the IEA’s official response is to a story that’s just starting to make its way around the Internet regarding the Bush Administration stopping the IEA from updating its projections until after this November’s US presidential election.

I ran into this accusation on The Oil Drum, in this post (http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4241), in which the author says:

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I have been told by a reliable source that the IEA has been forbidden by the US administration from updating their absurdly cornucopian oil supply and demand scenarios until the report that comes out late this year (after the election); that report, which will publish the result of a “bottom-up” analysis (ie a summary of all existing oil fields, their production and/or prospects) is expected to show that oil production is unlikely to reach the levels that so many have blithely assumed - notably on the basis of previous optimistic IEA reports. The IEA, which was deeply unhappy about the current lies to was supposed to present and support, has been leaking word of the expected content of that new report for many weeks now, including an increasingly alarmist tone in its official reports, such as today’s Medium Term Market Outlook:

“Structural demand growth in developing countries and ongoing supply constraints continue to paint a tight market picture over the medium-term,” the IEA said in its Medium-Term Oil Market Report, released on Tuesday in Madrid.

“Poor supply-side performance since 2004, in the face of strong demand pressures from developing countries, has forced oil prices up sharply to curb demand,” the watchdog added.
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The author is “Jerome a Paris”, a very widely read and respected blogger on The Oil Drum and Daily Kos. Because of his high profile and the trust many people place in him, this accusation will very likely take on a life of its own in various online communities. Therefore, I would like to receive an on-the-record response from the IEA so I can cover this developing story on my own site (link below) in an appropriate manner.

Sincerely,
Lou Grinzo

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The Cost of Energy blog: http://www.grinzo.com/energy
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Let me add a little commentary to this.

I have a pretty high level of trust in Jerome a Paris, having read his work for quite some time. He’s by no means one of the Crazy People on the ‘net, or if he is, he’s hiding it extraordinarily well. I believe he’s said that he works on financing things like wind farms, so he certainly has some high-level contacts in the energy field.

On the other hand, I find it a little hard to believe that the Bush Administration can exert this kind of influence over an international organization with 27 members–unless they have some sort of veto power, ala the United Nations. As for incentive–would Bush want to delay the bad news and/or action, and dump it on the desk of the next president, in effect? Absolutely, and he’s built quite a track record on energy and environmental (and other) issues of doing just that. But that pattern of behavior doesn’t prove he did it in this particular case.

Frankly, this sounds like the birth of a classic Internet urban myth, in that it’s plausible (at least to those who have a sufficiently low opinion of the current administration and are willing to believe in such plots in general), but it’s virtually impossible to either prove or disprove definitively. And I think we all know what response I’ll get from the IEA, assuming I get one at all: They’ll categorically deny it, which is what I would expect them to say regardless of the underlying facts of the matter. But I felt that with such a huge accusation about a US president and an international organization coming from a trusted author, I was obligated to ask for an official response.

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In the spirit of the very great and dearly missed George Carlin, let me borrow a technique he used on his brilliant 1996 album, Back in Town, and present my own, energy- and journalism-themed list of “free-floating hostilities”, without using any of the Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television:

• Enough with “perfect storm” imagery. For years it’s been a cliche worn thinner than a politician’s soul, yet people keep using it. My fellow writers, trust me on this one: It would be more entertaining and no less obvious if you wore a flashing neon sign around your neck that said “HACK”.
• Enough with the “peak” one-liners. Every time people want to get the attention of the peak oil crowd and/or prove how far around the next curve they can see they claim something else is at or nearing a peak. Peak food, peak travel, peak popsicle sticks, peak orgasms (oh, wait…). Quit being so freaking lazy, leave the “look at me!” attitude switched off, and talk about the issue, OK?
• Enough with the maddeningly bad oil puns, e.g. “high oil prices have US over a barrel”, “crude realities of the new energy world”, etc. If you can’t work harder than that to say something interesting, do us all a favor and go find another way to turn time and gray cells into currency. (The same goes for transportation puns about airlines experiencing turbulence, car makers stalling, motorcycle sales revving up, etc.)
• To all the morons who try about 100 times every day to register on this blog and/or the discussion board as a way to spread their spam: You must be dumber than the product managers at GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Who the hell is going to believe a registration with a Russian e-mail address that says the person, with a name made up of seemingly random letters and numbers, who lives in Greenland and is interested in tennis, is real? Here’s a hint: Not me, ya buncha maroons.
• “The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stone.” No kidding, and we’re using more stone now for various construction purposes than people thought existed during the stone age (assuming they even thought of those things while trying to survive day to day). Yes, I understand the point, that we found better and different ways to do those things we now do with stone, so we’ll do likewise with oil, and everything will be just peachy keen. But who believes that the supply of oil will last for thousands of years at ever-increasing rates of consumption, as stone has? Anyone?
• To the denier bots who flood the comment sections of sites like the NY Times’ Dot Earth: Grow up. You’re not convincing anyone and you’re just making yourself and your side of the “argument” look stupid. Do you live in some fantasy world where you’ll be noticed for your tireless efforts and get a call from Karl Rove or the oil or coal industry with an offer of a high-paying job to astroturf blogs? Oh, that’s right–they don’t need to pay you, because you’ll continue to do their dirty work at no charge.
• Enough with the arguments that shun real numbers and analysis in favor of “common sense”, which so often leads to absurd conclusions, e.g. “We use a lot of oil to do X, therefore after the peak in oil production we won’t be able to do X any more.” I’ve seen this one so many times and in so many minor variations that I swear it must be the first thing they teach new recruits at The Apocalypticon Institute. I find it astonishing that the people who write such things virtually never give any consideration to finding much less oil intensive ways of doing X, or that doing X might be valuable enough to the economy (e.g. transporting food) that we’ll make sacrifices in other parts of the economy (e.g. vacation travel) to preserve our ability to do X at an acceptable level.
• Enough with the idiots who can’t get their brains around the simple concept that oil is a finite resource that we’re using at the rate of 86 million barrels per day, so it therefore will eventually peak and decline. Seriously, do you Cornucopian Clowns think there’s some kind of fossil fuel fairy out there who will let us pull all the oil we want out of the ground for decades to come without hitting a peak?
• Speaking of fairy tales, let us not forget abiotic oil. Enough already with this laughable theory that oil comes from non-biological sources, and that there’s enough of it to make a difference. Show me the oil, and in quantities, locations, qualities, etc. that will change the date of peak oil and/or the rate of decline in production post peak, then we’ll talk. Until then, trade in your keyboard for something less annoying to other people when you use it, like a set of bagpipes.
• Journalists: Can we please give the “interview with the guy gassing up his 9,000-pound SUV and bitching about the price” shtick a rest? For maybe 2 or 3 decades? Why don’t you ever interview the guy who says, “I work out of a home office, and I hypermile in a really efficient car, so I spend about $10/week on gas”?
• Enough with “energy independence”. Politicians feed it to us, “journalists” regurgitate it, and most of the US public thinks it’s actually possible to “achieve energy independence” in just a few years. It ain’t gonna happen, people. Not now, not in 50 years, and probably not in 100 years.
• Stocks vs. flows. Can we all, please, take a few minutes to learn that there’s a world of difference between X barrels of oil in a resource (field, oil sands, whatever) and Y barrels/day of that oil being extracted, transported to refineries, turned into useful products, and then transported again to consumers? We keep seeing these breathless articles about how Colorado has enough oil to fill a barrel the size of Jupiter, or some such blithering nonsense. It’s not just the size of the barrel that matters, but the size of the pipe we can drain it with, what quality oil we get out of that pipe, and where the pipe is.
• Enough with the confusion about oil being a major fuel for electricity generation in the US. This one boggles my mind. The US gets about 1% of its electricity from burning oil, yet we see media reports from major networks and print publications constantly that either explicitly or implicitly link the price of oil and the price of gasoline. (Yes, I know that there is a very weak linkage here; oil goes up, natural gas drafts along behind it, so there’s some upward pressure on electricity prices because the US gets about 20% of its electrons from natural gas. But there’s no freaking way I’m willing to believe that the stringers and the anchordolls reporting this nonsense see that deeply into the issue.)
• Stop looking for silver bullets, people. There isn’t one, and trying to find one only wastes time and other resources that are already scarce. Sure, there will be technologies and combinations of technologies–the plug-in hybrid with cheaper batteries leaps to mind–that will have a huge impact on our energy future, but even those aren’t silver bullets, just really useful mid-term solutions that get us to the next stage. This is an infinite game, one with no clear ending and no definitive winner (regardless of what Dick Cheney believes in that fist-size chunk of granite he calls a heart); every “solution” is merely a transition to the next problem and ensuing “solution”.
• Enough with the economist bashing by the peak oil crowd. Seriously, you guys look around the current landscape, including all the international and national oil companies, governments playing politics and going to freaking war over oil, the Cornucopian Clowns who keep telling us not to worry, everything will be fine, and deranged politicians, and you think economists are worth picking on???

If you follow energy and environmental news closely, you probably have noticed how dire things are sounding lately. Beyond the immediate, financial problems many consumers in industrialized countries are facing thanks to higher gasoline prices, there’s more than a little cause for concern, including:

• The evidence keeps piling up that not only is global warming happening faster than anyone[1] predicted, but that it could trigger some truly horrific scenarios, number one on my personal nightmare hit parade being a massive methane release leading to a runaway greenhouse effect.
• So far we’re seeing a stunning lack of reasonable public policy responses to peak oil and global warming, in particular. “Developed” and “developing” nations keep pointing fingers at each other over CO2 emissions, US politicians are still yammering on about “achieving energy independence”[2], and the deniers and delayers score victory after victory by valuing their own political ideology above science and in the process making it that much harder for us to act in our own collective best interest.
• Ocean acidification and overfishing
• Drought conditions becoming more prevalent around the world, impacting agriculture, drinking and sanitation water, and our ability to generate electricity with existing hydroelectric and thermoelectric plants.
• Food shortages and disease outbreaks, which will only get worse with global warming.
• The projections of 9 billion human beings living on our planet in just a few decades sound less like a demographic analysis and more like a recipe for unmitigated catastrophe every day. Not that anyone but the crazy people ever talks about the issue of human population; it’s simply too crass or personal or whatever a topic for our tender sensibilities.
• Perhaps worst of all is the breathtaking indifference to all these issues we see in mainstream consumers and voters. Energy and environmental concerns are seen as nothing more than yet another total immersion hobby that’s fostered by the Internet, just another form of pornography like college basketball, chess, gardening, antique cars, science fiction fandom, or, well, pornography. I can barely guess how many people I’ve talked to about these issues and warned in no uncertain terms that The End Of Cheap Oil Was Upon Us, only to see them buy one or more vehicles or move to a location that locked them into a stupendously bad situation for years. How bad will things have to get before people internalize the fact that there’s a connection, complete with painful consequences for bad decisions, between these “abstract” energy and environmental issues and reality?

Sadly, I can’t convince myself that I’m alone in seeing such a mounting list of problems. For example, this September, ABC (US) will air a two-hour special, Scientists From Around the Globe Join ABC News in a Forum on Surviving the Century:

Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?

According to many of the world’s top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now.

This September, in Earth 2100, a dramatic ABC News 2-hour broadcast, the greatest minds across the globe will join together in a countdown to the year 2100 to tell us what we must do to survive the next century … And what may happen if we don’t.

The time to act is now, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.

“The 21st century is going to be the century which determine[s] whether we live or die as a sustainable species,” Gleick said. “As populations grow, as our use of resources grows, I think we get closer and closer to that edge.”

Experts say that extreme changes in climate, combined with dwindling resources, famine, war and disease have the potential to create a post-apocalyptic world in less than a hundred years. Harvard University and Woods Hole climatologist John Holdrens says we cannot continue going down the same path.

“If we continue on business as usual, we are going to see more floods, more droughts, more heat waves, more wildfires, more ice melting, faster sea level rise,” Holdren said.

“We really have less than a decade to start getting this right. If we’re still dragging our feet in 2015 I think it really becomes at that point almost impossible for the world to avert a degree of climate change that we simply will not be able to manage without intolerable cost and consequences.”

As a trained economist, I’m strongly inclined to be a contrarian and look for the other side of the issue. Won’t we see higher prices signal economies–local, national, and world–to seek a new equilibrium point? Won’t we find ways to make better use of existing technology and invent hew solutions, some technological, some “merely” in the business arena?[3]

Yes, of course we’ll see such things, and we’re seeing them already. GM and Ford are shutting down truck plants or converting them to produce cars, US drivers are driving less and buying smaller cars in droves, and people are increasingly accepting the science behind global warming, albeit with some truly perverse exceptions. You can probably add your own list of adaptations from the large to the trivial.

So, the question isn’t will we make changes when kicked repeated by the mule that is higher market prices, but can we summon the will to make them fast enough? Can we conserve oil quicker than the supply declines post peak? Can we impose enough of a price penalty on CO2 emissions, even with rising energy prices, that we reduce them to 80% below 1990’s level by 2050? Or have we locked our children, including my three nieces and all of our children[4], into an unprecedented struggle for life?

Put another way–now that we’ve created these situations and waited so long to deal with them that convenient or comfortable solutions are no longer possible, can we do the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter and passing our final exam?

For the first time in my life I’m not sure how to answer that question.

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[1] By “anyone” I mean “anyone who has a freakin’ clue”, which excludes the misanthropic doomers on the ‘net who see disaster in the pattern of Cheerios in their cereal bowl every morning, as well as the money men we see propped up on business channel telecasts telling us how the magic of the market will make it all better, even as it (surprise!) makes the money men richer. The clueful category includes the real scientists, like James Hansen and the good people over at RealClimate.org.

[2] Which has about the same probability of happening during our lifetime as flying monkeys coming out of the next president’s butt live on a televised press conference.

[3] My favorite example of a business breakthrough is the PPA (power producer agreement) for solar panels. These are the arrangements where you agree to buy your electricity from a company for X years at Y cents per kWh, and they install solar panels on your house or business. The own the equipment and are responsible for repairs, etc., so you don’t have any large up-front costs. This very neatly gets around the very sizable barrier to entry for many consumers in adopting solar PV.

[4] When I talk about “fixing things for the children”, I get that look from people, and I get some amazingly rude e-mail. I no longer care. As I’ve said in presentations and on this site, the children of the world belong to all of us, no matter whose DNA they carry. That’s my motivation, pure and simple. If human beings suddenly went sterile and those of us already here were the last ones ever born, then I wouldn’t care about any of these issues I write about nearly every day. After the last of us died off the planet and nature would recover just fine.

I know how hard it is for a newcomer to get his or her mind wrapped around all this energy and environmental stuff. The sheer volume of information and sources (some with a very pointed, albeit unstated agenda), plus the technical nature of much of the information add up to quite a challenge.

That’s why I’ve decided to try something a little different, beginning with this post. Below I’ll give you my personal list of “must read” authors, with some explanation of why each person is on the list. My plan is to repost this list from time to time as I add or delete people from my list, assuming I get sufficient feedback from readers, which I hope you’ll either leave as a comment on this post or e-mail to me directly. I read this stuff compulsively, and I know I can’t keep up with all the authors I should be following, so you can help me in this area, too.

I suggest that for some of these authors you set a Google alert to keep track of their work, which appears in various publications as individual articles, not regular columns.

So, without further ado, the alphabetical list of authors (with a pair of bonus sites thrown in for good measure):

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Kjell Aleklett

Why: Aleklett is currently president of ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas), and has been writing about oil and natural gas issues for years. He’s also a professor in physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Global Energy Systems Group (former Uppsala Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group) at Uppsala University. You can see his bio and contact information here.

Where: His blog, Aleklett’s Energy Mix, plus occasional posts on the ASPO site.

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Dave Cohen

Why: He has a track record of writing exceptionally well about our oil situation.

Where: Cohen posts an article every Wednesday at the ASPO-USA site.

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Jim Hansen

Why: From his Wikipedia entry:

James E. Hansen (born March 29, 1941 in Denison, Iowa) heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Earth Sciences Division. He is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, and also serves as Al Gore’s science advisor. Hansen is best known for his research in the field of climatology and his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue.

Hansen is also the most conspicuous example of a scientist who is not afraid to speak plainly about where the data says we’re headed. This causes many people, especially global warming deniers, who don’t like his conclusions to label him as “alarmist”.

Where: His site, plus numerous other publications.

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Jim Kingsdale

Why: Kingsdale is a very pragmatic, knowledgeable analyst writing about energy topics, mostly oil. He has a track record of cutting straight through the BS and finding, and then analyzing, the core issues.

Where: His site, Energy Investment Strategies

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Michael T. Klare

Why: From his Wikipedia entry:

Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College, defense correspondent of The Nation magazine, and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency (Metropolitan). Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Klare also serves on the boards of directors of Human Rights Watch, and the Arms Control Association. He is a regular contributor to many publications including The Nation, Tom’s Dispatch, Mother Jones, and is a frequent columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

I’ve read the two books mentioned above, and while Klare very often says uncomfortable things, I can’t argue with his conclusions.

Where: The Nation (link searches for his name on the magazine’s site) plus various other sites and publications on an irregular basis.

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Paul Krugman

Why: An economist who gives economists a good name, even in the peak oil crowd, which is saying a lot. Sadly, he doesn’t write exclusively on energy and environmental issues.

Where: His NY Times columns

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Bill McKibben

Why: McKibben is one of the most passionate, informed, and dedicated writers covering environmental issues today. He’s also working with 350.org, a project to raise awareness of the need to reduce atmospheric CO2 to 350 parts per million. (It’s not clear from the site if he’s simply working with this project or if it’s “his” operation.)

Where: McKibben frequently writes for various high-profile publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.

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Joe Romm

Why: Romm was Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in Bill Clinton’s administration, and he’s a tireless advocate for taking action on climate issues. He strongly favors using smarter public policy to get the most out of current technologies and institutions. He’s written several books, most notably The Hype About Hydrogen.

Where: Climate Progress

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Matt Simmons

Why: Probably the most frequently interviewed and quoted guy on oil issues, at least in the mainstream financial press. He runs Simmons & Company International, an investment banking in the energy sector, and is the author of Twilight in the Desert, one of the “must read” oil books.

Where: Simmons is all over the mediasphere, but you can find his presentations here.

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Bonus entry: EnergyCollective

Why: A blog-of-blogs site featuring writers (including some guy with the probably fictitious name “Grinzo”) covering energy and environmental issues.

Where: The Energy Collective

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Bonus entry: RealClimate.org

Why: RC is “the” site for climate science. It’s run by real climate scientists, not a bunch of bloggers sitting around in their Star Trek pj’s. It also features an exceptionally high level of commentary from the readers.

Where: RealClimate.org

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Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

– Bertrand Russell

Fifty-four years ago, one of the landmark science fiction short stories was published, a story that has increasingly uncomfortable implications for everyone alive today. Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations, with its unblinking depiction of humanity in an indifferent universe, marked a crucial step in science fiction’s coming of age as an art form as it evolved from escapist crap into a far more serious genre of literature.

Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, it is now time for humanity to take the same steps that science fiction did, and recognize the coldest equation:

humanity’s env. impact = population * the average person’s impact

Let me take a second to deconstruct this brutally simple equation and it’s inescapable implications:

First, if either our population or our impact per person rises (which they both are), and the other remains constant, then our total impact also rises. There is no flexibility here, no loophole or exception possible.

Second, if we can reduce either the average human being’s impact on the world or our population, and the other factor continues to rise, then we’re only buying ourselves time before we exceed the carrying capacity of the planet.

Just to be clear, I’m using “environmental impact” in a much broader sense than I normally do on this site. When people in the industrialized world think of “environmental impacts” at all, they usually associate that phrase with CO2 emissions or mercury pollution, smog over cities, polluted streams and lakes, or perhaps mountain top removal coal mining. I’m using “environmental impacts” to mean all those things as well as the consumption of non-renewable resources. Every day that goes by in which we pull another 86 million barrels of oil, 8 billion cubic meters of natural gas, and 8.5 million tonnes of coal from the earth and pour another 75 million tonnes of CO2 into the air we’re having a huge impact on not just the environment but also on its ability to support us as we live now.

The crucial detail in the coldest equation is one of human perception. We all make the same implicit assumption that is increasingly at odds with the world we’ve created: we assume that those elements of the environment we rely on to sustain us are effectively infinite. Ask almost anyone if there’s an infinite amount of anything on the planet, and they’ll instantly dismiss the question; they there’s no such thing an infinite resource, so it’s obviously a trick. But nearly every one of us in the developed nations lives as if the resources we consume and the sinks of the land, sea, and air we fill with our waste are, in fact, infinite, as if the price of everything we buy or sell reflects its actual worth in the long run. Sum all those countless consumption decisions and the lifestyles and cities and organizations and governments they created over centuries, each ultimately built atop that shakiest of conceptual foundations, and we see a terrifying emergent property, a planet of 6.7 billion people racing ever faster toward a Malthusian cliff. As I’ve said before on this site, we are simultaneously emptying the world of its non-renewable resources and filling its sinks with our waste.

But wait, people say, what about all that energy efficiency stuff and green technology you talk about? Won’t it help? Yes, in one particular and crucial way: It will put downward pressure on the average environmental impact per person and buy us time to figure out a way to control, and then reduce, our global population, as well as find ever more ways to reduce our impact per person. Right now, with the compound and interrelated terrors of peak oil and global warming and food and water shortages all suddenly looming at once, extra time is an exceedingly precious thing.

Which brings us to the thorniest issue, the West not wanting to give up their lifestyles, coupled with the sudden emergence of portions of China and India as a Western-style consumer class. The sheer number of people in these two countries, roughly 2.5 billion or 37% of all humanity, means that even a small portion of them buying their first car or shifting their diet to include much more meat, or their country going on a coal power plant building spree (as China is doing right now) has worldwide implications, enough to raise the global impact per person in our equation. This is only compounded by the US, consumer of 25% of the world’s oil and emitter of about the same proportion of the world’s CO2, refusing to change without concessions from China.

In thinking about this, I believe I know the answer to Nick Bostrom’s question about the Great Filter, as he detailed in his Technology Review piece, Where Are They?: Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing. He ponders where the other intelligent life is in the universe, and whether the Great Filter, the most difficult phase in our development, the one that kills off most intelligent races, lies in our past or our future. My guess is that we’re in it right now, that it began roughly in the time frame depicted in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the use of tools by protohumans, and that we’ve yet to complete the exam. The test is not, as so many have speculated, whether we can overcome our militaristic and territorial tendencies, although that’s certainly a major part of it. The test is whether we can conquer those demons and also take the next and much more difficult step, and learn how to cooperate globally to live in a sustainable fashion, even if only as an open-ended expression of enlightened self-interest.

This is an imposing hurdle. A very large portion of the people in our world have become so cynical, so enamored of one conspiracy theory or another, and so often victimized by genuine conspiracies, that they either can’t, or won’t let themselves, summon the trust and compassion needed for cooperation on the scale needed. Their experience and (sometimes selective) knowledge of history have taught them to see the world as a matter of Us vs. Them instead of Us and Them. Their fear, ignorance, and myopia effectively changes all human existence from being an infinite game, with no set ending and no definitive winner, to a finite game between us and our own inner demons, a contest we can’t possibly win.

All is not lost, by any means, if only because we’ve already displayed the kind of cooperation needed. Perhaps every environmentalist’s favorite example is The Montreal Protocol, which phased out the use of CFC’s, albeit with not enough attention to HCFC’s. But as humanity continues to develop, that undeniable, narrow success is like a young child learning to sing her first nursery rhyme, decades before we’ll know if she can become an accomplished opera singer.

Many people I speak with about energy and environmental issues dismiss it all with a wave of the hand. They’re simply too busy with jobs and the million details of caring for their family and household to be bothered looking more than a few weeks into the future. They are so focused on the hyper-local, in both spatial and temporal dimensions, so tightly held in place by the glass fist that is their here and now, that they fall prey to that easy assumption that they live in a world of virtually infinite resources and sinks, which leads directly to their not taking any meaningful action to help themselves or those they love, let alone humanity as a whole.

Yes, this all sounds incredibly depressing. And it can be, if one surrenders to the cynicism. I refuse to take that step, the spiritual equivalent of suicide, because we humans can be breathtakingly altruistic and compassionate over short enough time frames. Watch news reports of tornadoes in the US, the tropical storm in Myanmar, or the earthquake in China, just to name three painfully current examples, and you’ll see many people risk their lives for strangers. In 1972, when I was a child, my mother and I lived through the Agnes flood in Pennsylvania, and we saw many such acts first hand and benefited from a few. That experience and nearly everything else I’ve seen in my life convinces me that individually we have the right characteristics–the self-interest, the compassion, the intelligence, and the organizational skills–needed to save ourselves and each other from this colossal mess we’ve created. The question then becomes: Can we find a way, and quickly enough, to cooperate on a grand scale and focus our abilities to avoid falling prey to the coldest equation?

My friend Pam e-mailed me a link to a truly fascinating piece in Technology Review about the implications of finding evidence of even long-extinct, primitive life on another planet. The author, Nick Bostrom, makes a logical connection that becomes blindingly obvious once someone turns your head and makes you look directly at it. Therefore, please consider this post my attempt to reach through the Intertubes, grab each of you by the noggin, and firmly but respectfully make you look in the desired direction:

Where Are They?: Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

Sorry for the difficulties in getting to the site this morning. My hosting service had a “known problem on their end” which made the site all but impossible to get to. It seems to be clearing up now, just in time for me to try to catch up on a little of the day’s lost posting before I have to head off to the Greywolves’ season opener against Tonawanda.

For those who simply cannot help but wonder what I do in those spare moments when I’m not chained to the keyboard, here are three photo galleries of my Rochester Greywolves lacrosse photos.

The best shots, in my opinion, are in the 4/20/2008 collection from the scrimmage against Onondaga, which is the first of the three galleries in the set. But what do I know–photography is like writing in that the creator is the last person who can judge it accurately.

A lot has changed here recently, so I wanted to steal a slice of your time for a quick update.

The site’s new dual identity, so to speak–the blog you all know and love plus the still-new discussion board–seems to be working out very nicely, even if not for the reasons that drove me to add the board in the first place.

My plan was to use the board as a test, to see how much of an ongoing discussion and, dare I say it, a community, it could kick start before I went through all the extra hassle and expense of setting up a Scoop site, like Daily Kos or numerous other virtual hangouts. So far, that goal has been annoyingly elusive, and I’ve basically given up on the dream. I don’t know if I’ve managed to attract too narrow a group of readers by beating up on both the Cornucopians and the Apocalypticons, or if all youse guys are shy, or what mechanism is at play.

Much to my surprise, it no longer bothers me. That’s not apathy, but a recognition that by splitting the site into the blog and the board, I’m suddenly free to dump the one-line news item things, the stuff I used to post in mashups, on the board, and save the blog for longer, more well developed oieces. In effect, I get to have it both ways.

Best of all, this breakout allows my writing for the blog, which in some ways is similar to my monthly column for Windows Magazine from long ago, to attract more readers. Between visitors to this site plus readers seeing my work in syndicated form and on The Energy Collective, I have a considerably larger audience than I did just a few weeks ago. I’m still making diddly in the money department, although there’s finally some progress on that front, as well. (Now if I could permanently screen out the spambots that keep trying to register fake ID’s on both systems, everything would be just peachy.)

To summarize:

I will very likely continue in this dual-track mode for the foreseeable future while I see how high I can push my readership and what kind of other opportunities it opens up.

I would still love to see more reader participation. (OK, maybe the dream isn’t quite dead.) Leave comments here or on the board, or best of all, register and start your own topics over there. I know I can learn a heck of a lot from you people, and I bet you’d find each other interesting, as well.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled enviro-energy-econo geekery….

Bill McKibben has an excellent piece online at Orion Magazine’s site, Where Have All the Joiners Gone?:

CHEAP FOSSIL FUEL has made us what we are. Which is to say: rich, powerful—Look at us! We can make the ice caps melt! The oceans rise! But something else too: cheap fossil fuel has made us the first people on Earth with no need of our neighbors. Think, in the course of an ordinary day, how often you rely on the people who live near you for anything of practical value. Perhaps carpooling your kids to school or soccer. If you live in a rural community, there may be a volunteer fire department, which keeps your insurance affordable. But your food, your fuel, your shelter, your clothes, and your entertainment most likely come from a distance and arrive anonymously at that. A meteorite could fall on your cul-de-sac tomorrow, disappearing your neighbors, and the routines of your daily life wouldn’t change.

…

For the rest of us, who aren’t planning to actually till the soil ourselves, relearning neighborliness means joining a CSA or going to the farmers’ market (where shoppers have ten times as many conversations per visit as they do at the Shop ‘n Save).

It means putting solar panels on our roofs and tying them into the grid so that our neighbors can cool their beer with the sunlight that falls on our shingles—and, of course, it means buying that beer from the local brewery. It means buying CDs when the artist is selling them after a concert, and listening to your local public radio station instead of the XM satellite-from-nowhere. It means not just supporting the idea of mass transit but getting on the darned bus sometimes.

It means embracing nonindependence—which to us may seem un-American, but in fact it is just the opposite. Tocqueville, in the greatest clichè of American political science history, called us a nation of joiners. We’ve gotten away from that—become a nation of drive-around-by-ourselfers. But in a world that seems likely to grow a little tougher all around, with weird weather, rising prices, and falling profits, a neighbor is what you’ll need most.

The irony here is almost overwhelming. At a time in our development of computer technology that’s dominated by networked configurations and “mesh” computing, we’re neglecting the most basic form of networking of all, people-to-people relationships. To add another layer to this lasagna of weirdness, it’s networked computers–as in the one you’re using this very nanosecond–that’s helping to accelerate this breakdown.

In the early days of the web (as opposed to the early days of the Internet, which is markedly older), there was considerable optimistic talk about the social and educational possibilities this new medium was creating. People could spend just a few minutes and find out about practically anything on the planet, and do it from just about anywhere on the planet. The potential was breathtaking.

The reality, of course, has turned out to be far less Utopian and far more polarizing. Instead of using the Internet as a learning tool, many of us use it simply to marinate ourselves in our own special interests. Whatever your personal fetish, from food and wine to politics to cars to energy and environmental issues to chess to build reproduction medieval musical instruments to investing to flying sailplanes to lacrosse to, well, the more traditional (a)vocations people usually refer to as fetishes, you can find all manner of online “communities” devoted to the objects of your obsession. A few quick Googles and you’ll soon have a list of discussion boards and web sites and downloadables that you can burn endless hours on, sometimes without even trying, under one pseudonym and manufactured persona or another.

Yet how many of us with an “active” online presence know the names of every neighbor who lives at the dozen addresses closest to our own? I’d fail that test, I’m ashamed to say.

All is not lost, of course. Even today, not all participation in online communities pushes us further into isolation, into a virtual world spinning forever down the ringing grooves of sameness, to bastardize Tennyson. We often find people online who become part of our real world community. I’m a perfect example, thanks to the people I met online associated with several local environmental groups, not to mention the local lacrosse community and team my work for them as team photographer.

But far too often the online world remains not merely a separate realm from reality, but a corrupting one. We shun new information in favor those who agree with and reinforce our own views. We become ever more attached to and self-identified with our positions, with a further, detestable and intractable polarization of society being the emergent property of that hardening of the attitudes. Given the astonishing gift of the world spread before our fingertips, we choose instead to narrowcast ourselves into the merest slice of that spectrum and become part of the problem instead of the solution.

Can we do better? Can we wake up, use information technology in much smarter and more productive ways, both related to energy and environmental issues, and not? Perhaps I’m too naive or optimistic, or maybe I’m just overly influenced by my personal experiences with online communities, but I’m convinced we can and we will make that change. It will take longer and happen more in response to genuine economic pain than most of us would prefer, but we’ll get there.

There’s been a sizable number of new visitors to this site recently, thanks to the huge number of hits one recent post received, so let me say a word or three to the newest members of the community:

• Welcome! The more the merrier.
• Don’t be shy. Lurkers are always welcome, of course, but the more you participate the more we’ll all learn from each other and benefit from this blog.
• If you have a minute, check the About page for a site intro. Yes, I know, that should be so obvious that it doesn’t need to be mentioned. If you saw the e-mail I get from readers, you’d know why I’m explicitly pointing you to the About page, especially the Mission Statement and Philosophy sections.
• I’m currently trying to bootstrap a much more interactive discussion board for energy and environmental issues, available here. (Also linked to from the menu in the upper-right corner of this page.) Feel free to stop over, look around, register, and contribute to a topic or start your own. Sorry, but the registration databases for this blog and the discussion board are separate, so you’ll have to re-reg over there. See also the original discussion board announcement.

I’ve been working this morning on adding a phpBB discussion board to the site. As best I can tell, it’s installed and running properly, and just waiting for my fellow e+e geeks to show up.

You can find it here as well as at a new link in the “Site links” in the upper-right corner of this page.

A few notes worth, well, noting:

• While I’ve talked about using Scoop to set up a Daily Kos-like e+e discussion site, I found that there was no way to do that with my current EarthLink account. It seems you need either complete control over your server or an account with a company that specializes in hosting Scoop sites. Rather than register a new URL and set up an entirely new hosting account, I decided to give this a spin using phpBB, which is included with my EarthLink account.
• I’m new to phpBB as an admin, so I’m sure I’ll make some fall-down-laughing mistakes. When I do, feel free to point at me and/or my mistake and then fall down laughing.
• I can’t stress this enough: The look and organization of the BB will likely change a lot in the next few days or weeks. I fiddled with a few themes, found one I can live with with (Getaway, for those who care about such frippery), but I haven’t yet spent any time configuring it with a customized header graphic, etc. Similarly, I expect to add a Google ad strip to the BB, likely tomorrow.
• The basic rules of the BB are pretty simple. You have to register to post anything, and the site requires that you have cookies enabled to work. You can’t create or change a category (the highest level of organization) or a forum (next level down), but you can create a post within a forum. If you think we need a new category or forum or want to suggest a re-org of the existing hierarchy, you’ll have to ask me to do it. I’ve created a “Contact Lou” forum in the first category on the page, “News and Administrivia”, for this purpose.
• Because this will be a much more open venue than the blog, I will be particularly attuned to people not playing well with others. You know what this means–no profanity, no disrespect towards other members of the community, no flying off on tangents, no trolling, etc. Basically, if you’re posting something that you think either I or your mother would disapprove of, then save me the effort of deleting it and don’t post it in the first place. And just so there’s no misunderstanding: Even though I’ve never deleted any non-spam comment from this blog I won’t hesitate to blast any inappropriate content that appears on the BB into the ether, ban repeat offenders, etc.
• I plan to post a much more explicit and detailed set of rules for the BB, but for now I will trust your common sense. (Why did half of you just fall down laughing? Is my zipper open?)
• I will be on the site under two different handles: “Lou” is my admin persona (to be feared by one and all), and “loudGizmo” is my evil twin.
• How will this new entity coexist with the blog, you might well be wondering. Good question, and that answer is almost entirely up to you. If this experiment turns into a viable online community then I will likely take the next step and do the full-blown Scoop site some time down the road.

Finally, I would “really a lot appreciate it” (to quote one of my all-time favorite movie lines) if you would give the BB a test drive and tell me what you think.

I’ll be making minor changes to the site behind the scenes this afternoon, and possibly tomorrow morning. If you get some unexpected “page not found 404″ errors, don’t worry, it’s my fiddling, not anything you did.

Update: Well, it seems that the change I wanted to make went much quicker and easier than I expected.

For those who care about such things, I was fiddling with how WordPress, the software that runs this site, creates “permalinks”, those hyperlinks to other pages on TCOE. I switched from the old, default format, which used the post number in the link, e.g. they ended in something like “/?p=500″ to a “pretty” format that should (finally!) make posts here show up in Google alerts.

Carry on.

DOE to Invest $34 Million in Enzymes for Cellulosic Ethanol Production:

DOE announced on February 26 its selection of four projects to develop improved enzymes for breaking down cellulosic biomass material into sugars, which can then be fermented into ethanol. The DSM Innovation Center, Genencor, Novozymes, Inc., and Verenium Corporation were all chosen by DOE for their proven ability to reduce the cost of ethanol by improving the performance of the enzymes. Among the many partners on the projects are four DOE national laboratories: Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. For all four projects, DOE intends to invest up to $33.8 million over the next four years, subject to congressional appropriations, and when combined with the cost sharing from industry, up to $70 million will be invested in the effort.

Cellulosic ethanol is produced from a wide variety of non-edible plant materials, including corn stover, cereal straws, sawdust, paper pulp, and switchgrass. Cellulosic ethanol could be produced in every region of the country using locally grown materials, while producing a fuel that creates less greenhouse gases than corn-based ethanol. Within the last year, DOE has announced that it will invest $1 billion in biofuels research and development, $114 million in small-scale cellulosic refineries, $405 million in bioenergy centers, and $385 million in commercial-scale cellulosic refineries. See the DOE press release and DOE’s Biomass Program Web site.

DOE and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also announced the latest members of the Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee in mid-January. The Committee was founded as part of the Biomass Research and Development Act of 2000 and assists DOE and USDA in meeting national goals that support energy security and rural economies. The chosen committee members, of which six are new and seven are reappointed, will serve three year terms. See the DOE press release and the Biomass Research and Development Initiative Web site.

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Arizona Utility to Buy Power from a 280-Megawatt Solar Power Plant:

Arizona Public Service Company (APS) is planning to draw power from a 280-megawatt concentrating solar power (CSP) plant to be built near Gila Bend, Arizona, about 70 miles southwest of Phoenix. Called the Solana Generating System, the new facility will be built by Abengoa Solar and is expected to begin producing power in 2011. It will be among the largest solar power plants in the world, producing enough power at full capacity to serve 70,000 households, and it will also have the ability to store energy, allowing power production to continue into the evening. The facility will use miles of parabolic trough-shaped mirrors to capture the sun’s heat and focus it upon a length of “absorber” tubing. A fluid passed through the tubing collects the sun’s heat, and the hot fluid is used to boil water to steam, which then spins a turbine to produce electricity.

APS will buy all the power produced by the facility in its first 30 years, costing the utility a total of about $4 billion, while providing an estimated $1 billion in economic benefits to the state of Arizona. The plant’s builder, Abengoa Solar, has built a demonstration solar trough plant in Spain and is building two 50-megawatt solar trough plants there. In addition, the company is currently operating the world’s first commercial solar power tower plant, which uses a field of flat mirrors to focus sunlight onto a thermal collector at the top of a tall tower. The facility, called PS10, produces 11 megawatts of power, and Abengoa Solar is currently building PS20, which will produce 20 megawatts of power. See the press releases from APS and Abengoa Solar and Abengoa Solar’s Power Tower Web page.

As the Abengoa Solar experience suggests, CSP is experiencing a resurgence in the United States and throughout the world. On February 23, dedication ceremonies were held for Nevada Solar One, a 64-megawatt solar trough plant near Boulder City that started producing power last year. The facility is the largest CSP plant to be built in the world since 1991. A number of new CSP plants are also planned for southern California, including the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a power tower facility that will reach 400 megawatts in three phases of construction. The California Energy Commission (CEC) is currently reviewing the Ivanpah application. With more CSP plants on the way, Ausra, Inc. announced in December 2007 that it will build a manufacturing facility in Las Vegas, Nevada, for CSP components such as mirrors, absorber tubes, and towers, and in January, Schott Solar announced plans to build a $100 million manufacturing plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to produce both absorber tubes and solar photovoltaic modules. The Ausra facility will begin production in April, while the Schott Solar facility should be completed next year. See the Nevada Solar One press release, the CEC Web page on the Ivanpah facility, and the press releases from Ausra and Schott.

Shall we do a little extrapolation? You have a part of the world that includes about 364.999 sunny days/year, a few bazillion square miles of desert, dramatically falling solar electricity costs, rising population, rising fossil fuel costs, rising CO2 emissions costs, and rising urgency to move electrons without consuming or drawing large amounts of ever scarcer fresh water.

Any guesses about how the solar energy future of the US Southwest might play out?

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New York Launches Clean Energy Workforce Training Initiative:

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) unveiled a $6-million clean energy workforce training initiative on February 25. NYSERDA will invest more than $4 million in a range of clean energy sectors including solar photovoltaic systems, small wind turbines, and biogas energy systems. An additional $2 million is included in the Governor’s Executive Budget for developing the solar workforce through programs at community colleges across New York State. The intent of the new efforts is to help develop a workforce that can design, install, and maintain renewable energy systems to ensure the successful implementation and promotion of renewable energy technologies in New York State. New York has already invested nearly $1 million to develop seven accredited solar training centers and continuing education programs across the state. See the NYSERDA press release and the pamphlet about New York’s Solar Electric Practitioner Training Centers (PDF 311 KB).

As noted in the NYSERDA press release, the agency is also seeking to establish a Wind Energy Research and Testing Center in New York. Although still in the preliminary stages of discussion and planning, the center would catalyze and support research in such topics as advanced materials, power electronics, turbine design, wind forecasting, and environmental impact assessment. The proposed Center would also provide resources to test new products while helping to provide a highly skilled workforce to meet the needs of the quickly growing wind power industry.

And yes, I think the wind research center would be just peachy in Rochester, given our proximity to wind farms in Western NY and Lake Ontario and Lak Erie, both of which will be used to site offshore wind farms eventually.

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Boxer: EPA Docs Show “An Agency in Crisis”:

Hoping to further ratchet up pressure on EPA Adminstrator Stephen Johnson, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has now released additional transcriptions of internal agency documents her EPW committee staff was able to view. David Roberts has posted some initial thoughts on the highlighted contents– including a plea from EPA staff to Johnson indicating that if he couldn’t grant the waiver at least temporarily, “…you will face a pretty big personal decision about whether you are able to stay in the job under those circumstances.”

Even more interesting to us, from a legal perspective, is the following excerpt from that same set of talking points, which is played out repeatedly in the 27 pages of documents transcribed and released by Boxer (added emphasis ours):

[It is obvious] that there is no legal or technical justification for denying this. The law is very specific about what you are allowed to consider, and even if you adopt the alternative interpretations that have been suggested by the automakers, you still wind up in the same place.

Please go read it all, my fellow Americans, and see just how absurd the Bush administration is in their attempts to stop any progress whatsoever on environmental issues.

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New fuel surcharge at US Airways:

Today, US Airways announced a change to our baggage policy. Beginning May 5, 2008, we’ll charge $25 for a second checked bag. The new fee applies to travel on or after May 5 for tickets purchased on or after February 26, 2008.

We’re making these changes to offset record fuel prices and rising airline related expenses. We simply must make changes to the way we do business to provide all of you with the high level of service that you’ve come to expect from US Airways. Also, we’re doing all we can to keep fares low. With this policy change, we’re able to give you the choice to avoid the fee and pack fewer items. With fewer bags to process, we save both money and fuel and can pass that savings on to you.

This is from an e-mailed notice my wife received today.

Once again: No major industry is at the mercy of oil prices to the extent airlines are. The actions a large company or industry can take in response to a shock to the system, including a persistently much higher price of a key resource, is to use less of that resource through conservation or substitution. Airlines have long squeezed their fuel requirements as part of normal cost cutting measures, which have increased lately in the form of flying smaller planes on some routes. So they’ve already all but exhausted that possibility. As for switching to alternatives, there aren’t any. The race to for biofuels is on, but that’s likely at least 10 years away from being used widely enough in the airline business to have a significant impact. And in the mean time, oil prices will soar and dip, with an overall rising trend.

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It’s Presidents Day here in the US, the day when we all try really hard to remember just when George Washington and Honest Abe Lincoln were born (or whether it should be spelled “President’s” or even “Presidents’”), give up, pick a handy Monday for the date, and go shopping.

What better time to indulge in a little naval gazing about the technological and social changes we’ve brought upon ourselves and the world since the days of the US’s Founding Fathers?

Like most history buffs, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to go joy riding in a time machine and visit certain people and places, partially for the sheer thrill of it, and partially to judge the accuracy of our 21st century history view of them. I’m sure we all have our favorite destinations and personalities we’d want to experience first hand. The one that I find the most intriguing, even more than the US Civil War, is not just visiting our Founding Fathers, but bringing some of them to 2008 and showing them what the country they helped found has grown into.

I’m sure that once they got over the initial shock, some of them would have enough criticisms of our government and politics to fill a dozen or so web sites. Imagine what they’d say about just the wars we’ve fought since their time, and how they’d practically weep at the idea of letting a sadistic lunatics like Hitler and Pol Pot, just to name two, rise to power. But let me focus on the technical stuff, and everyone’s favorite historical geek, Ben Franklin.

Once you got Ben used to the idea that we live in a largely electric society (sans benefit of kites), and that, yes, we really did land on the freakin’ moon, what would impress him the most about our world, positively or negatively? A few possibilities jump out at me:

• The ease with which we manipulate our immediate environment. Want your surroundings to be warmer or cooler? Press a button. Need light? Flip a switch. Need to do almost any kind of woodworking (a very big deal in 1800)? We have an electric tool for that. (And I have most them, sad to say.)
• The ease with which we transport ourselves and goods long (by 1800 standards) distances. Need to go somewhere? Hop in a car or on a plane or train. Need to ship a pair of shoes across the country or around the world? There are several companies that will gladly do that for you, at an astonishingly low cost.
• Our definition of “need”. See above.
• The ease with which we communicate. Cell phones, television, satellite and cable services, DVD players,and, of course, Ye Olde Internets. Hell, just the online porn would keep Ben fixated for days. (I suspect Jefferson would have more than a little to say about the squandered possibilities for promoting democracy with all that mass communications hardware. He’d sign up for his own blog and TV show on local access cable in seconds. But I digress.)
• How stunningly ignorant we are of what we’re doing to the biosphere. People on this site, including your host, can very easily forget how little mainstream consumers know about various forms of pollution (greenhouse gases, mercury, etc.), the impacts of coal mining, species extinction, global warming, etc.
• Our ability to mass produce identical goods. The Founding Fathers lived in an era of unique, hand-made items, and I suspect they would be almost speechless at the sight of thousands of absolutely identical cars or toys or appliances or iPods or whatever being churned out.
• Related in one way or another to all of the above, of course, is the sheer number of us walking around the planet (compared to the 800 million to 1.1 billion of us in 1800, and the mind-blowing throw-weight of all the stuff each of us in some countries owns.

I’ve probably overlooked a bunch of things, which is why it’s now your turn. What do you think a highly educated person from circa 1800 would think of us and our brave new chrome-plated world of 2008?

Compendium of Champions: Chronicling Exemplary Energy Efficiency Programs from Across the U.S.:

Executive Summary

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) conducted its 2nd national review of exemplary energy efficiency programs. This project sought to recognize and profile outstanding utility-sector energy efficiency programs that help customers lower their energy costs and reduce their energy use through improved energy efficiency. ACEEE performed a national search and nomination process to assemble a set of programs for this review.

The nomination process was open-ended. ACEEE sought leading examples of energy efficiency programs of all types and for all customer sectors and end-use technologies. The only constraint was that they had to be utility-sector energy efficiency programs (i.e., funded by utility rates, public benefits charges, or other similar utility revenue mechanisms). The programs could be administered by utilities, government agencies, or third-party independent administrators. Both electric and natural gas programs were eligible. An expert panel selected a total of 90 programs across 20 different program categories to be recognized from a large set of nominations received.

A strong and common conclusion emerged from our review of the selected programs: energy efficiency works. Today’s programs are having significant impacts on customer markets and energy use. Just the programs we honored in this review alone are producing annual savings of over 2,400 GWh of electricity and 400 MW of peak demand, as well as over 125 million therms of natural gas savings. This success is both wide and deep. We found exemplary programs across the entire spectrum of customers, including residential, small business, schools, offices, industries, and agriculture. We also found programs that are achieving deep savings with individual customers—programs that are facilitating the implementation of comprehensive packages of energy efficiency measures that together work to achieve significant energy savings.

Our review of exemplary programs gives strong evidence that there is a very solid foundation in place upon which to build a greater role for energy efficiency in the energy resource portfolios of today and tomorrow. There are programs in place that have been successfully delivering significant energy and cost savings for years—even decades. There also are programs newly put into place to address new types of customers and under-served customers from past programs. Many programs have not only affected energy use among participating customers, but are having broader impacts on the markets for products and services.

Despite the strong records and continuing innovation and success demonstrated by the programs selected and profiled in this compendium, there are still large parts of the U.S. with little or no access to such programs. We encourage decision-makers and leaders in such under-served areas to examine the success of this compendium of exemplary programs and implement the policy changes necessary to bring such successful program models to work for customers in their states and regions.

View the entire report or just the appendices for free as PDFs or click to order hard copy.

356 pp., February 2008, $75.00, U081

I haven’t yet read the document, which is 25 pages and about 113KB in size. Access requires free registration at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy site.

Let’s try a little experiment: An open thread like those on DailyKos, one where youse guys kick off the conversation. (I’ll post some links an’ such later today. Right now, I’m up to my baby browns in outline and research work on The Book, which is going pretty well, thank you very much for asking.)

So, what’s on your e+e overloaded minds today?

Focus the Nation Teach-In:

Focus the Nation is a national teach-in on January 31, 2008, engaging millions of students and citizens with political leaders and decision makers about Global Warming Solutions.

We stand at a unique moment in human history. Decisions that are ours to make today – to stabilize global warming pollution and invest in clean energy solutions – will have a profound impact not only on our lives and the lives of our children, but indeed for every human being who will ever walk the face of the planet from now until the end of time. At this moment in time, we owe our young people one day of focused discussion about global warming solutions for America

More than just that one day, Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions for America is an unprecedented educational initiative, involving over a thousand colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, faith groups, civic organizations and businesses. Focus the Nation is a catalyzing force helping shift the national conversation about global warming towards a determination to face this civilizational challenge.

A teach-in is a day when an entire school turns its attention to a single issue—when faculty, students and staff put aside business as usual, and focus the full weight of campus engagement on one topic.

The key to a successful teach-in is widespread faculty involvement. Focus the Nation challenges participating schools to engage at least fifty faculty members in their role as educators (as well as students, staff, alumni, and community members). With fifty plus faculty engaged from disciplines across the curriculum—art, science, politics, psychology, engineering, philosophy—the event will involve thousands of students on each campus, and millions of students nationwide.

Faculty will say yes to involvement for two reasons. First, the Focus the Nation model requires them to talk for only 10 minutes in a subject area close to their discipline, and then help lead a half an hour discussion. Faculty do not have to be climate change experts to participate, nor invest heavily in preparation. Second, faculty across the curriculum are eager to be asked. As educators and as parents, they understand the magnitude of the global warming challenge, and are looking for an opportunity to engage with students on this critical issue. And once 50+ faculty are involved, then Presidents and Deans will be supportive. Most critically, thousands of students will attend, because faculty will require them to go, or give them extra credit, because other faculty will “focus” their classes, and travel with them to attend the sessions, but primarily because global warming solutions will be the exciting focus of discussion that day. Using this model, we view 2 million students nationwide as a realistic participation goal.

For high schools unable to build a teach-in, and for faith organizations and civic groups, there is a second way to Focus the Nation: host a screening of our free, live interactive webcast, THE 2% SOLUTION, the night of Wednesday, January 30th. (Showing The 2% Solution is also the way to kick-off your teach-in)

This has been a stupendously really bad week here, so I wanted to let you all know just a little about what’s going on and why I’ve been largely missing from the site for the last few days.

I can’t go into a lot of detail, but my wife and I have been consumed by a situation involving her job, which, as best we can tell, was finally resolved yesterday. The result is that she is moving from a job at one big, TLA (three-letter acronym) corporation to another big, TLA corporation, and not by her own choosing. This came about because TLA #1 sold off a chunk of its business to TLA #2, with some not entirely positive ramifications for some of the thousands of transferees. So, for some time now we’ve been in deep planning and scheming mode, trying to line up a job for my wife at TLA