Measured Reactions to Modern Times
So here we go – either some ambitious scientists will learn a whole bunch of really cool stuff about the universe, or all humanity will instantaneously be swallowed up by a teeny tiny black hole. It’s anyone’s guess…
…the Large Hadron Collider…is scheduled to rev up for the first time on Wednesday at roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time following 13 years of planning, $8 billion in spending and immeasurable anticipation…
Update: So far so good.
There’s a piece in yesterday’s Times on the growing interest in small wind turbines; these are wind powered devices that can be used by individual homes or businesses to generate a portion of their own energy.
That’s an exciting idea in principal, though in practice it seems roofs may not be the best place for this type of device:
But many experts caution that rooftops, while abundant, are usually poor places to harness the breeze. Not only are cities less windy than the countryside, but the air is choppier because of trees and the variation in heights in buildings. Turbulence can wear down a turbine and make it operate less efficiently…
“In an urban environment, more times than not you’re better off with a solar panel,” said Mr. Stimmel, of the wind industry association.
Another problem is that microturbines are not really cost-effective:
These tiny turbines generate so little electricity that some energy experts are not sure the economics will ever make sense.
…
“Rooftop wind economics are abysmal, since the resource just isn’t there,”…
OK, they kinda-sorta work and they’re unlikely to pay for themselves…so, what explains their popularity?
The spread of the big turbines and a general fascination with all things green are helping to spur interest in rooftop microturbines, creating a movement somewhere on the border between a hobby and an environmental fashion statement.
Ahhh, they’re cool and fashionable.
Sticking a designer wind turbine on your roof (if you an afford it) certainly makes a statement with your friends and neighbors (and it may actually generate a small amount of electricity), but it risks framing the very real need for personal environmental action in the language of fashion, which is a slippery slope to fad. The climate problem is way too huge and serious to be solved by a revolving door of “green” accessories.
Grassroots campaigns empowering people to make better personal choices are extremely important, but empowering government and industry to make those choices on a gargantuan scale is the only real hope for managing the climate crisis in the long term. This starts with people and communities certainly, and it’s fine if it starts on your roof…so long as you climb up there next to your sexy microturbine and demand better policies.
From the once esteemed Wall Street Journal, we learn that many homeowners are simply shocked to find that their newly minted, west facing, high rise apartments, with full walls of glass, actually require window shades.
The air conditioning could barely keep the temperature tolerable as sun baked the $1.5 million apartment on summer afternoons. And the sun bleached her pair of brightly colored European sectional sofas, which cost $20,000.
In June, Ms. Antani gave in, spending $12,000 on motorized shades that she keeps lowered during the day. “I love being able to see everything,” says Ms. Antani, a 23-year-old graduate student. But “the sun’s just in your eyes; you can’t focus. Everything is so bright.” [Emphasis mine].
She “gave in”? Spending .8% of the condo cost on an essential furnishing is a sacrifice? C’mon folks, better journalism please.
And setting aside the socio-economic implications of a 23 year old grad student affording a $1.5 million condo, glazing technology is simply much better than is being described here. It sounds like our heroine (and her prized “European sectional sofas”) might have bought into an over-priced and cheaply made building.
The problem, which the article barely acknowledges, is that glass residential towers are de rigueur in urban real estate these days, yet only a small fraction are built with the budgets and design integrity required to responsibly integrate all that glass. The annoyances expressed by miss sun-in-her-eyes and others in the article suggest cheaply made glass towers are surely energy hogs of the highest order.
Buildings account for roughly 40% of all energy use in the U.S.(residential buildings account for 54% of that). We need better policies at all levels of government to raise the quality of our built environment and reduce energy use by buildings, especially as it relates to irresponsible developers out to make a quick buck on a high-end fad. I’d like to see stories focusing on that rather than the banal hardships of un-savvy luxury condo buyers.
And by the way, the issue of dead birds is very real.
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer is quite the entertaining speaker, and his speech last night at the Democratic National Convention was pretty great. He made some potent points regarding the state of America’s energy system and did it with a good bit of humor.
Some gems:
“We need a new energy system that is clean, green, and American made.”
…
“Barack Obama understands that the most important barrel of oil is the one that you don’t use.”
…
“We simply can’t drill our way to energy independence, even if you drilled in all of John McCain’s backyards, including the ones he can’t even remember.”
Update: Nice ad-lib apparently. And here’s a bonus quote:
“The petro-dictators will never own American wind and sunshine.”
Wind and solar power sure sound great – too bad we can’t use any of it, because our transmission lines suck:
The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. [Emphasis mine]
Are we at all serious about this stuff? I mean jeesh.
Politicians in Washington have long known about the grid’s limitations but have made scant headway in solving them. They are reluctant to trample the prerogatives of state governments, which have traditionally exercised authority over the grid and have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states.
…
Energy Department leaders say that, however understandable the local concerns, they are getting in the way. “Modernizing the electric infrastructure is an urgent national problem, and one we all share,” said Kevin M. Kolevar, assistant secretary for electricity delivery and energy reliability, in a speech last year.
…
Without a clear way of recovering the costs and earning a profit, and with little leadership on the issue from the federal government, no company or organization has offered to fight the political battles necessary to get such a transmission backbone built. [Emphasis mine]
OK, c’mon folks, how about some of that leadership at the federal level? You know, some guidelines, some incentives, some serious investment? Anyone out there even trying?:
A handful of states like California that have set aggressive goals for renewable energy are being forced to deal with the issue, since the goals cannot be met without additional power lines.
But Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a former energy secretary under President Bill Clinton, contends that these piecemeal efforts are not enough to tap the nation’s potential for renewable energy.
…
“We still have a third-world grid,” Mr. Richardson said, repeating a comment he has made several times. “With the federal government not investing, not setting good regulatory mechanisms, and basically taking a back seat on everything except drilling and fossil fuels, the grid has not been modernized, especially for wind energy.” [Emphasis mine]
Oh mon dieu.
Boesel recently showed off the Human Dynamo prototype, an exercise machine consisting of four spin bikes attached to a small generator. As he pedaled one of the human-powered bikes, a digital readout showed the amount of watts, a measure of power, that he was producing by pedaling and turning an arm crank that strengthens the upper body, he said. As many as four riders can propel the prototype system, which can produce 200 watts to 600 watts of energy an hour.
…
Most gyms are energy hogs, with sweeping floor space, high heating costs and hot showers always steaming in the locker rooms. Boesel doesn’t know how much energy the solar arrays and human-powered equipment will produce, but he expects his fitness center to use about half the energy of most gyms its size by providing as much as 40% of its energy needs. His goal is to have the gym run solely on the energy it generates.
There’s something undeniably poetic about using the pedestrian bits of our lives to keep the lights on. But these kinds of things remain on the fringe, more in the realm of novel, high-end gadgetry than viable technology. And they have yet to be transferred to a larger scale where they could actually have some impact and influence. This is where government comes in, or should. As Matt Yglesias says:
… But the trouble is that at the moment the incentives exist primarily as a means of doing marketing to a niche market of upscale consumers. That’s nice, and it’s produced some clever notions, but what’s really needed is smart policies that drive incentives in a bigger and broader manner. [Emphasis mine]
Second that.
It’s a remarkable circumstance of our knee-jerk reliance on technology that this kind of thing seems like a solution.
The government will allow food producers to zap fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce with enough radiation to kill micro-organisms like E. coli and salmonella that for decades have caused widespread illness among consumers.
Obviously, the problem isn’t an advancing army of E. coli, but rather a food industry that is beyond broken.
“It’s a total cop-out,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch. “They don’t have the resources, the authority or the political will to really protect consumers from unsafe food.”
But even given the self-inflicted “problem”, is irradiation a viable short term fix?
Critics say that not only does radiation make food less nutritious and potentially toxic but that the process also does not eliminate the risks of food-borne illnesses….
“The agency is choosing to have a high-tech expensive solution to a problem that needs a more thorough approach and one that really starts on the farm,” Ms. Smith DeWaal of the science center said. [Emphasis mine]
Farms, how quaint - do we still have those?
The plan, while still in its early stages, appears to be the boldest environmental proposal to date from the mayor, who has made energy efficiency a cornerstone of his administration.
Mr. Bloomberg said he would ask private companies and investors to study how windmills can be built across the city, with the aim of weaning it off the nation’s overtaxed power grid, which has produced several crippling blackouts in New York over the last decade.
While it’s unlikely something like this will happen anytime soon, you’ve got to hand it to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for even going there.
Whatever your opinion of Mayor Bloomberg, the scope of his environmental agenda is admirable. But as we saw with another great idea of his, getting far reaching, ambitious projects through New York’s political landscape is unimaginably difficult.
UPDATE: I think this article is making a rather simplistic critique of the windmill proposal. (Though there are some illustrations in the article that take some funny jabs.)
UPDATE 2: Also, a slightly tongue-in-cheek piece on the mixed history of Dutch windmills in Manhattan.
UPDATE 3: My pals at Pinko Magazine share their thoughts on the issue.
The Times had an encouraging piece last week about American cities re-investing in streetcars, a form of transportation abandoned long ago in favor of single occupancy autos.
“Today, young, educated workers move to cities with a sense of place. And if businesses see us laying rail down on a street, they’ll know that’s a permanent route that will have people passing by seven days a week.”
I saw the ‘Home Delivery’ exhibit at MoMA last month and was left a bit more bummed than inspired. This slideshow from Slate hints at some of what bugged me:
“Prefabricated houses have remained an elusive goal for architects, and the MoMA show is a stylish litany of second-place finishers, also-rans, if-onlys, and downright losers.”
There is a sense, ultimately, of failure in most of the projects in the show, if the idea is that prefab techniques can generate truly desirable and affordable homes. As the show illustrates, this promise has never been fulfilled in a meaningful way. And the full-scale works in the adjacent lot felt a bit gimmicky, again, if we’re focused on the real world potential of prefab to better people’s lives and environments.
The most interesting (and slightly incongruous) work in the show was by San Diego architect Teddy Cruz. The Parc Foundation in Manhattan currently has a worthwhile show up exploring this work.
It appears access to high speed internet remains an embarrassment here in America.
Affordable, universal high speed access is in everyone’s interest and should be a national priority. It would be nice to see this issue widely considered in the same breath as other essential infrastructures.
This NPR piece is indicative of the effect high speed access can have on rural communities, for instance.
“Living in a rural community is a larger impediment to Internet use than either race or class. The isolated rural community of Greene County, N.C., turned itself upside down to get its citizens online in five short years.”
