[ Groups file appeal against proposed Deerfield wind project ]

The Wilderness Society and Defenders of Wildlife are filing an appeal with the US Forest Service today, citing several problems with the planned wind development near Readsboro.

“Clean, renewable energy is the right idea for Vermont, but approving the Deerfield wind proposal was the wrong decision. It is simply the wrong place for this kind of project,” said Leanne Klyza-Linck, assistant vice president for eastern conservation with The Wilderness Society. 

“The Forest Service decision was based on incomplete or inaccurate information. The agency needs to take a closer look at the facts and address changes that have occurred since the Deerfield project was originally proposed in 2004. Since that time,  Vermonters have experienced the devastation of tropical storm Irene, witnessed the decline of our bat population  brought on by White Nose Syndrome and launched a natural resource assessment to inform energy siting decisions. Vermont has changed, and the Agency needs to take a closer look at the facts and recent changes in the state.”

The Wilderness Society and Defenders of Wildlife filed the appeal to challenge several aspects of the Forest Service’s special use permit for the project, including incomplete analysis and road building in a roadless area. 

In addition, the groups want the Forest Service to conduct a more thorough evaluation of wind energy resources in Vermont to identify appropriate areas for development. Such a forward-looking approach would avoid this kind of controversy, and is commonly used on western public lands through the Interior Department’s “smart from the start” approach.  

“The people of Vermont deserve to be fully engaged in planning for wind energy projects on these public lands in our state. We need full information and a chance to take a proper, holistic look at where wind projects should and shouldn’t be placed in the state,” said Klyza-Linck.

The appeal will be filed on Friday, February 24, 2012.

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[ Frito-Lay Electric Trucks Quieter Than a Doritos Crunch ]

Frito Lay has been steadily making inroads on sustainability throughout their operations. Beginning in late 2010, they launched an innovative electric fleet of delivery vehicles around the U.S., and have steadily been building out the fleet in key markets since then.

EarthTechling recently sat down with Frito Lay’s National Fleet Sustainability Manager, Steve Hanson, and his regional Pacific Northwest counterpart, Rich Wilson, to talk about everything from how these vehicles have boosted internal morale to whether you might buy an extra bag of Doritos once you get a look at one of them.

EarthTechling (ET): Start at the beginning and tell us how this program got off the ground. Why big electric vehicles?

Frito Lay (FL): Part of our objective at Frito Lay/PepsiCo has been broad corporate sustainability, a program going back really to the late 90s that’s primarily centered in manufacturing. On the fleet side, when fuel hit three and four bucks-a-gallon people started getting really serious about fleet sustainability. So we set some internal targets and now we’ve got public targets surrounded around turning down our on-road fuel usage by 50% by 2020.

ET: How many trucks are you guys rolling out across the country?

FL: Last year we ended up with 176 on the road in the U.S. and Canada, and then we’ve placed our next order for 15 and those should hit the road in the first quarter.

ET: Have you guys done calculations on your end about when it becomes cost effective? Or is it more for you guys a strategic environmental target that you’re trying to hit?

FL: Certainly one of the points of emphasis in all our sustainability activities is we are a publicly traded company. We do have to answer to shareholders at the end of the day so we’ve never tried to be green for the sake of being green. Certainly along with that comes the whole green-washing piece and the token purchase and press release. That’s really not the emphasis of what we’re trying to do.

We definitely need to see an economic return on the purchase. It’s a capital intensive project. The particulars we wont go into, but its a fairly manageable number that’s well within the capability of the vehicles, of the battery pack, the size of the purchase – if we’re hitting a number between 35 and 42 miles per day then that puts us where we need to be to hit our cost goals.

ET: With almost every publicly traded company that we talk to, the goal has to be somewhat economic and it looks like you guys obviously did the math about the hybrids vs. the electrics.

FL: Yeah, we did some testing back probably seven years ago with the state of Texas on some hybrid delivery vehicles, which is a smaller class of truck. We got, quite honestly, decent fuel performance but we could go spend $20,000 less on the cleaner new diesel technology and get better MPG so it didn’t make sense to pay for all that extra complexity.

The beauty and the sweet spot to be in when it comes to fleet is that you save money and reduce emissions and do the right things by the environment- it’s all the same thing. It’s not this balancing, complex equation. It’s less fuel, it’s less emissions, it;s less money, it’s fairly simple.

And when you’re trading to 10 cents per kWhour for electricity from three or four dollars per gallon of fuel, the math isn’t rocket science.

ET: Do you feel like it is generating consumer goodwill as well? That people see the trucks and feel positively about them?

FL: We’re probably never going to do big marketing campaigns around this – we’re a consumer product brand, we’re not a transportation company or whatever. But, you know, you like to see it and you start to hear lots of stories about people who start to notice these things, and we don’t take it for granted that we need to win over our consumers everyday and earn their trust and respect as a company.

ET: Where are the trucks being deployed now? They are here in Portland, and you said you have 176 trucks around the country.

FL: Yep, we’ve got a sizable number in the Bay Area as well as Southern California, a couple markets in Texas, Atlanta, Orlando, the D.C. Metro area, New York City, Boston and Columbus, Ohio. And then we’ve got a couple trucks in Toronto and Montreal.

ET: Do local government programs influence at all where you guys decide to put the trucks?

FL: It certainly helps. At this point in time it’s no shock to anybody that it’s an expensive proposition. It’s very early on and government incentives definitely help to make the economics more feasible and make it successful in our program. So we absolutely take that into the factors that we look at.

ET: What do the drivers really love about the trucks?

FL: It’s new. It’s brand new, so I mean, everyone likes a brand new rig. It’s quiet and doesn’t have a diesel making a lot of noise. They can talk to somebody out the window of the rig at the store or whatever. It is also just the pride of, “I’m drivin’ something that’s cutting edge stuff.”

ET: Where can people expect to see the trucks next?

FL: I would say you can expect to see a bunch more in the Pacific Northwest as well as California. New York is certainly being aggressive about trying to induce folks into coming and putting more trucks in their state, so we’ll do our best to accommodate them as well.

– Patricia Marchetti

This post originally appeared at EarthTechling and was republished with permission.

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[ Climate Researcher Lied to Get Documents, Triggering Ethics Debate ]

A top climate researcher—Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute—admitted he lied to obtain documents from the Heartland Institute, which he then leaked to media and revealed the organization’s plans to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change.

Gleick resigned from the board of the National Center on Science Education, and stepped down as chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) taskforce on scientific ethics.

His admission has triggered an ethics debate in the climate community, with ethics expert Dale Jamieson calling Gleick’s actions “unethical” but adding, “relative to what has been going on on the climate denial side, this is a fairly small breach of ethics.”

Cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky argued that “revealing to the public the active, vicious, and well-funded campaign of denial … likely constitutes a classic public good,” against which the ethics of Gleick’s deception have to be weighed.

The president of the AGU said the organization was disappointed with Gleick, whose actions were “inconsistent with our organization’s values.” NASA climate researcher Gavin Schmidt said “Gleick’s actions were completely irresponsible.” Bryan Walsh of Time argued Gleick’s actions “have hurt … the cause of climate science.”

In the U.K., a freedom of information act request for details on the funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate change skeptic group, was denied by a court on the grounds the foundation is not influential enough.

PTC Could Equal Permanent Tax Credit

The Production Tax Credit (PTC) that aids wind energy is set to expire at the end of 2012, but some legislators are fighting to save it, with Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado arguing that “every minute counts” in trying to forge a deal.

To avoid such struggles over regular renewals of the PTC, President Obama proposed a new corporate taxation plan that would make the subsidies permanent, as well as make permanent a research-and-experimentation tax credit that expired Jan. 1.

High Oil Prices a Drag

Since the start of the year, oil prices have been on the rise, putting adrag on economic recovery in the U.S., pushing up consumer prices and causing overall inflation—risking a repeat of early 2011, when high oil prices nearly pushed the country back into recession.

President Obama was scheduled to speak about the issue Thursday, and White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the rise in prices—despite a drop in domestic consumption and rise in production—“tells you that there are other things beyond our control.”

The threat high oil prices pose to economies across developed countries could trigger the International Energy Agency to release more oil from strategic reserves, as was done in spring 2011, argued Reuters analyst John Kemp.

The rising oil prices have U.S. consumers wondering why. The prices, experts said, have stayed high because of rising consumption in emerging markets, as well as the threat that Iran’s oil exports may be cut off. An International Energy Agency official said that other countries would be able to make up for a loss of Iran’s exports, which had been 2.2 million barrels a day, and to boost production, Saudi Arabia may restart its oldest oil field.

In response to the European Union’s decision to embargo Iranian oil, Iran halted oil shipments to Britain and France, and possibly other European countries. Major shipping countries are refusing to pick up Iranian oil, with one shipping executive saying it would be like “getting leprosy.”

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would get gasoline down to $2.50 a gallon. However Bryan Walsh said no president can deliver that—at least without making the U.S. economy tank.

Tar Sands Tussle

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would require approval of the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry diluted tar sands from Canada to Texas, which President Obama had earlier nixed.

The European Union held a vote on whether to ban imports of oil made from Canadian tar sands, but it ended in a deadlock.

The amount of tar sands is small compared with the amount of natural gas and coal in the world, so the tar sands alone don’t pose a major threat to the climate, argued a study in Nature Climate Change.

Some took this to mean that Canada’s tar sands are “not so dirty after all.” However, study leader Andrew Weaver—a climate modeler at the University of Victoria in Canada—argued that use of tar sands is “a symptom of the bigger problem of our dependence on fossil fuels,” and policy makers should avoid commitments to infrastructure supporting fossil fuel dependence.

Meanwhile, another study of tar sands sites found levels of air pollution—in particular nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide—were comparable to air above a large power plant.

Small Feet, Large Footprint

A new report on the carbon footprint of a diminutive creature—shrimp—shows they’re worse than cattle, at least when raised in aquaculture. When coastal mangrove forests are cleared to create shrimp farms, it’s the “the equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture,” said study leader Boone Kauffman.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday for National Geographic’s News Watch by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

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[ Concern Over Rare Rhino Rouses Clean Energy Drive in Malaysia ]

After a fight against a coal-fired power plant that threatened one of the last sanctuaries of the Sumatran rhino, a struggle for cleaner energy continues in east Malaysia.

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[ Natural Gas Boom Won’t Stall U.S. Renewables ]

The recent plummet of the natural gas spot price to a 28-month low has stirred discussion about implications for renewable energy—the majority electrical generating component in RMI’s vision of the 2050 U.S. energy economy.

Since mid-2009, it has been increasingly clear that the amount of natural gas supplied via hydraulic fracturing (popularly known as “fracking”) will create an oversupplied domestic natural gas market. The resulting low gas prices depress contract pricing for long-term power sales to utilities. This situation poses significant challenges for new, utility-scale renewable power projects, which must secure contracts with attractive fixed prices to obtain financing.

Yet, while fracking to unlock America’s shale gas reserves poses a near-term threat to the rate of utility-scale renewable energy development, it offers significantly lower risk to growth of domestic renewable energy just a few years out.

That’s in part because natural gas faces significant upward pricing pressure. Increased regulation, long-term underperformance of production wells, and higher-priced drilling leases all should push prices up on the supply side. On the demand side, increased use of compressed natural gas in vehicles, exporting of liquefied natural gas, and, most significantly, increased natural gas demand for electrical generation, replacing coal, also should elevate prices.

Even against the current natural gas futures pricing curve—much lower than just a few months ago—utility-scale renewables can compete unsubsidized within a few years. In good wind locations, wind power can already compete unsubsidized with natural gas selling for more than $6 per million BTU. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, wind turbine pricing has averaged 14 percent per-year declines since the mid-1980s. If that continues, by 2016 wind power should compete head-on in a growing number of locations with wholesale natural gas, which by then is expected to sell above the mid-$4s per million BTU.

Continued Year-Over-Year Growth

Even in the short term, while low natural gas prices will likely slow the deployment of renewable energy capacity, they may not stop absolute year-over-year growth.

First, in 2012 special financing circumstances will keep work going and capital flowing. Many project developers invested the necessary 5 percent minimum of total project costs prior to Dec. 31, 2011, qualifying these projects to receive a 30 percent Treasury grant. Many of these projects also signed power purchase agreements with utilities at attractive prices before the current dip in natural gas pricing. In addition, 50 percent bonus accelerated depreciation is available.

Solar PV Boom

A boom is projected to accelerate in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) development, which is less affected by low natural gas prices. While utility-scale renewable generation must compete against wholesale prices, distributed renewable installations such as solar panels on a factory roof compete against retail power rates. Those projects generate electricity used on site and reduce that business’s bill at the higher retail rates, which on a national average continue to rise despite falling wholesale prices.

While the retail rates are rising, solar PV development costs are rapidly decreasing. By the beginning of 2013, crystalline (industry “standard”) solar module costs are predicted by energy analysts to reach 70 cents/watt, dropping total cost of commercial installations to approximately $2.70/W and residential installations to about $3.60/W, based on Department of Energy SunShot data. These whole-system installation prices represent reductions of more than 50 percent from as recently as 2007.

Grid parity, the point at which renewables are price competitive with the existing grid, primarily based on coal- and gas-fired electricity generation, has already begun, with average retail prices in Hawaii above those levels, as are top retail prices in other states, such as California. While Hawaii and California feature some of the most expensive retail rates in the U.S., the fact that they have attained grid parity for many retail ratepayers indicates more areas will reach the grid parity tipping point with each penny drop in the price of solar PV installations.

The Takeaway

Cheap natural gas presents a challenge to utility-scale renewable power growth over the next couple of years, but increased distributed solar PV deployment may bridge the gap. RMI is working with utilities, public service commissions, financiers, and others empowered to enable PV deployment to exploit and accelerate this near-term opportunity. Long term, the relentless cost curve of both utility-scale wind and solar PV—as well as natural gas’s and coal’s environmental and market dynamic factors—will inevitably lead to accelerated build-out of renewable power.

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[ Looking to the Climate-Change Road Less Traveled ]

Congressional deadlock and new scientific insights force new direction.

The news on the avoid-dangerous-climate-change front seems to get ever bleaker.

On the Policy Side, Little to No Progress

The probability of a U.S. policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions any time soon is as close to zero as you can get — President Obama said as much in his State of the Union address. Internationally the news is not that much better: from the latest climate talks in Durban, it appears that, if all goes according to plan, 2020 is the soonest we can expect a new international agreement to go into effect.

On the Science Side, Too Little, Too Late for CO2-Related Policies

It’s looking ever more apparent that the time to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations from rising above 450 parts per million (ppm) — the line-in-the-sand threshold that’s been nominally identified to avoid dangerous climate change — is all but gone.

Durban’s target date might be 2020, but if the International Energy Agency’s 2011 energy projections [pdf] are accurate, waiting that long to seriously start cutting emissions will make keeping CO2 concentrations below 450 ppm virtually impossible.

(Related: “IEA Outlook: Time Running Out on Climate Change“)

Things look even bleaker if non-CO2 greenhouse warmers are figured into the projections. For example, in a recent project out of Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum, a suite of coupled climate-economic models was used to estimate what it would take to keep the total equivalent CO2  concentration below 450 ppm, 550 ppm, and 650 ppm. Most of the study’s models were unable to find any scenario capable of meeting the 450-ppm-equivalents threshold [pdf] without maintaining high concentrations of polluting and life-threatening aerosols.

And while much is being made of natural gas serving as a bridge fuel between coal-fired power and some future carbon-free energy system, Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution argue in the journal Environmental Research Letters that such a strategy will do little to nothing to reduce global warming in this century. To have any impact in that time period, they write, coal-fired power will need to be replaced by “conservation, wind, solar, nuclear power, and possibly carbon capture and storage.”

Non-CO2 Strategies Getting a Serious Look

So what’s a global-warming mitigator to do? Look for alternatives. And fortunately, it looks like one can at least buy us time.

(Related: “The Strange State of Climate Change Denial” and “Global Warming Mitigation: Smoke and Not Mirrors“)

Despite two important caveats — namely that CO2 is the largest single greenhouse warmer we add to the atmosphere, and there is no long-term global-warming solution that doesn’t involve major cuts in its emissions — the non-CO2 greenhouse warmers are not irrelevant. Collectively, they’re responsible for about 30-40 percent of global warming. Key among them are

• methane, which comes from such sources as agriculture, landfills and natural-gas leakage;
• black carbon (a k a soot), which comes from using low-tech cookstoves and burning biomass; and
• lower-atmospheric ozone, a product of photochemical smog largely generated from automobile and power-plant pollution.

Importantly, their temporal characteristics are very different from CO2’s. CO2 emissions largely come from energy generation; the infrastructure and technologies needed for this energy have decades of useful lifetimes, and so change is difficult and slow unless you’re willing to abandon investments already made. Moreover, because CO2 has a long atmospheric lifetime, slowing CO2 emissions enough to have a substantial effect on its concentration takes time — were CO2 emissions held constant today, its concentration would continue to rise for centuries.

Greenhouse warmers such as methane, black carbon and ozone are quite different. Lowering their emissions would not require huge investments or a retooling of our energy infrastructure; on the contrary, in most cases lowering their emissions would involve making current technologies cleaner and more efficient. Plus, their atmospheric lifetimes are relatively short — about 10 years for methane, weeks to a month for ozone, and about a week for black carbon. Cutting these emissions would reduce their concentrations much more quickly than cutting CO2, and have a more immediate effect on slowing global warming.

Tiny air pollution particles known as black carbon (or soot) form in the air when fuels like coal, wood, and diesel are burned. Because they absorb heat from sunlight, these airborne pollutants add to global warming. This animation shows how soot was dispersed around the Himalayas in 2009. Scientists and policy makers are looking to black carbon, among other targets, to help mitigate global warming as a stopgap measure. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

So how effective would a strategy focused on non-CO2 warmers be? Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and colleagues recently addressed that question in a paper published last month in the journal Science. The authors identified 14 measures (see table below) — seven that reduced methane emissions and seven that addressed black carbon — that collectively could reduce net global warming by 2050 by almost one degree Fahrenheit. Not enough to solve the problem, but enough to buy us time to get our act together on CO2 emissions.

14 Measures Addressing Methane Emissions and Black Carbons

After Shindell et al, Science magazine, 2012

State Department Gets Into the Act

A common refrain in international policy circles is that the United States should take a leadership role on climate change. But with the U.S. political climate currently what it is, that’s a tall order. Rather than tilting at the windmill, the State Department (and by extension the administration) has decided to take a different tack: the recently announced international voluntary program called the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants. Launched by six countries and the United Nations, the initiative targets black carbon, shorter-lived hydrofluorocarbons, and methane to achieve “concrete benefits on climate, health, food and energy resulting from reducing short-lived climate pollutants.” In addition to potentially reducing net global temperatures by almost one degree Fahrenheit by 2050, the 14 measures could avoid the annual loss of more than 30 million tons of crops and millions of premature deaths.*

(Related: “Time to Clear the Smoke” and “On Cookstoves, Research Paves Way to Action“)

A few mild barbs have been lobbed at the program. For example the World Wildlife Fund cautions that this should not be allowed to obfuscate the real imperative to cut CO2 emissions, and worries about its tendency to shift the burden from developed nations to developing economies where black-carbon emissions and ozone-producing gases are largest. Eileen Claussen, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, expressed similar sentiments.

The criticisms notwithstanding, I think the State Department is on to something here. The time for just focusing on CO2 emissions is past — that train left the station years ago.

____________________

Note

*In a related initiative the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a program to address black carbon emissions in the Russian Arctic.

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[ Linkin Park’s Bid to ‘Power the World’ ]

More than two years after the 2010 earthquake that left Haiti in rubble and displaced 2.3 million people, recovery has been slow in coming. Hundreds of thousands are still living in camps such as Corail-Cesselesse, a relocation area set up in the aftermath of the quake. And the cholera outbreak that has taken nearly 7,000 lives on top of more than 300,000 lost in the quake itself continues to cause suffering.

Aside from the quake, dependence on charcoal for cooking has continued to cause deforestation and health problems Haiti, prompting the U.S. Agency for International Development’s announcement today that it would support a $7.2 million project meant to bolster the market for cleaner cookstoves.

(Related: Time to Clear the Smoke)

The dearth of reliable, sustainable cooking options in Haiti is just part of the overall energy access problem in a country where fewer than one third of the residents have any electricity at all, and where outages are frequent. Haiti, like many other countries around the world, suffers from a crippling lack of power.

Not many bands are better suited to bring that message to a broad public than Linkin Park. With more than 39 million Facebook fans, more than 700,000 followers on Twitter and a listener base that has steadily expanded since the band’s debut album Hybrid Theory was released in 2000, Linkin Park has threaded a philanthropic mission throughout its website, social media and via video messages on YouTube.

Last November, the band announced its support for the United Nations’ Sustainable Energy for All initiative. Dave “Phoenix” Farrell, the Linkin Park’s bassist, answered questions via e-mail about their efforts.

Tell us about the Sustainable Energy for All initiative. The band pledged support for it last December. What will the band be doing?

Linkin Park and [our aid organization] Music for Relief have launched Power the World in support of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Year of Sustainable Energy for All in 2012. We chose Haiti for our first Power the World project because the country faces severe energy poverty. There are 34 million people in the Western Hemisphere who have no access to modern energy; 8 million of them are in Haiti. To help, you can go to www.powertheworld.org to make a $10 donation and Music for Relief will provide a solar-powered light bulb for a family in Haiti without access to energy.

What led to your interest in energy poverty? Have you done anything like this before?

I traveled to Haiti in April of 2011 to see firsthand how Music for Relief has helped the recovery effort. I visited Camp Corail and saw solar-powered lights, which MFR helped fund with the UN Foundation to help keep women and children safe. When the Secretary- General announced the energy initiative for 2012, I knew it was something we should be a part of.

Getting people interested in issues like energy poverty can be challenging. How do you plan to do it?

It’s definitely a tough issue to communicate fluidly and succinctly. In addition to our normal online channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) we are going to be creating some video components to help relay the magnitude and importance of sustainable energy for the future. We are also working in conjunction with the UN to create other projects throughout the year.

What has the response been like from fans (and maybe non-fans)?

So far the response has been very positive, but we are just getting started. I hope momentum continues to build through the year to facilitate a very strong interest in the issues of energy poverty.

There are so many issues related to energy. What stands out to you as being particularly pressing?

Fewer than 25 percent of households in Haiti are connected to electricity grids. That means 75 percent of households are lit using kerosene lamps, candles. In addition to being dangerous, this is also far more expensive than electricity. With sustainable energy, neighborhoods are safer at night, medical services can be more effective, and children can study and play after the sun goes down. Our solar light bulb is hopefully a small first step towards a far better quality of life for millions of Haitians.

How far do you think social media can go in creating change?

As has been seen in 2011, social media can be revolutionary. The potential social media has to create change is just starting to be tapped.

What do you hope to have achieved by this time next year?

Power the World is a pledge to help one million families gain access to clean energy solutions. That’s the goal, and with the help of music fans everywhere, we hope to achieve it. Once again, you can help by going to www.powertheworld.org. Make a $10 donation and Music for Relief will provide a solar powered light bulb for a family in Haiti without access to energy.

(Related: “Solar Energy Brings Light to Quake-Darkened Haiti“)

(Related: “The Solvable Problem of Energy Poverty“)

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[ Uganda’s Power Drive Stills the Headwaters of the Nile ]

Uganda, where 90 percent of the people lack electricity, taps deeper into waterpower, by eliminating cascading rapids on the Victoria Nile.

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[ Amid U.S.-China Energy Tension, "Clean Coal" Spurs Teamwork ]

China’s next president visits the White House amid tension on energy. But U.S.-China collaboration is emerging on projects to clean up coal.

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[ David Owen’s Efficiency Views Rebound With Error ]

David Owen continues to blame energy efficiency for the ills he ascribes to growth and wealth.

His misunderstandings of “rebound” in energy use were devastatingly rebutted when he published them in The New Yorker, and now he’s expanded them to book length. But his post in last week’s Wall Street Journal lucidly confirms that his big issue is much less with using energy efficiently than with the things people often choose to do with energy. In essence, he is echoing all major faith traditions’ warning against materialism—against what Ecclesiastes expressed as “He that hath silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that hath abundance with increase; this is also vanity.”

Of course, the economic growth Owen decries is boosted not just by energy efficiency but also, and far more, by many other things he doesn’t choose to criticize, such as education, public health, capital markets, and technological innovation. He is right that consumption has impact, and that one way to reduce impact is to consume less or differently. But he is dead wrong that using energy more productively has the perverse effect of increasing its use, eliminating or reversing the benefits sought: this has never been observed, and a vast literature shows that actual “rebound” effects, when observable, are small and unimportant.

NGS Stock Photo by James P. Blair

As often before, Mr. Owen also hasn’t done his technological homework. He correctly notes that airplanes have become far more efficient: actually, from 1958 to 2010, improved airplane design and airline logistics slashed the fuel burned per seat-mile by 82 percent. But this dramatic progress is very far from exhausted. Our new business book Reinventing Fire illustrates (at page 57) Boeing, NASA, and MIT airplane designs saving 59–80 percent of the fuel of today’s counterparts. Those new designs still burn kerosene, but the Pentagon is now driving a revolution in advanced biofuels (many needing no cropland), and over the coming decades, economically similar, even safer, and approximately climate-neutral liquid-hydrogen “cryoplanes” (p. 64) can ultimately raise efficiency even more.

To be sure, since fuel is a big cost for airlines, more-efficient airplanes with good returns on marginal cost may indeed make flying even cheaper—even as some jurisdictions, like the EU today, seek to internalize flying’s socialized external costs (a sound economic principle) so that flyers can’t impose their costs on others. Any resulting net drop in airfares couldn’t boost flying five times to offset the five-times fuel saving (let alone more, as Owen sometimes claims). The elasticities don’t work that way, so the great majority of the gross fuel saving will still remain as a net fuel saving. But it’s true that if flying did rise 5 times and fuels didn’t shift, we’d be back where we started.

The effects of flying, though, can differ in other ways than the efficiency of the airplane. When Owen flies to Melbourne, his muddled grasp of energy and economics could confuse people and cause some to reject energy efficiency—the most important single part of the solution to the problems he decries. In contrast, when I fly to Melbourne (or, as I prefer to, send just the electrons and leave the heavy nuclei at home), I reduce carbon and other impacts far more than enough to offset the flight, because I’m delivering not confusion but practical and profitable solutions that give more and better services with less energy, money, and impact.

Related: “As Jet Fuel Prices Soar, a Green Option Nears the Runway”

Related: “First Commercial U.S. Biofuel Flight Takes Off”

Related blogs: “Rebounds Gone Wild” and “Rebounds and Jevons: Nobody Goes Around There Anymore”

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