By: Erich Pica

On Feb. 16, while President Obama was in Maryland announcing an $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee for Southern Company to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia, inspectors at the Vermont Yankee reactor were finding dangerously high levels of tritium, a radioactive cancer-causing chemical, in the groundwater near the plant.

The next week, the Vermont state Senate voted overwhelmingly to shut down Vermont Yankee when its current license expires in 2012.

Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas (R) called the timing of the nuclear loan guarantee announcement and the Vermont Senate’s decision “ironic.” More than just some coincidence, though, the Vermont Yankee situation demonstrates that from the mining of uranium ore to the storage of radioactive waste, nuclear reactors remain as dirty, risky, and as costly as they ever were. If President Obama’s recent enthusiasm for nuclear reactors has led you to believe otherwise, you’ve bought in to the administration’s greenwashing of nuclear.

President Obama has justified his proposed $55 billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors by misrepresenting nuclear reactors as the largest “carbon-free” energy source in the United States. That’s like saying McDonald’s should be put in charge of a nationwide obesity campaign because it’s the largest restaurant in the U.S. that sells salads.

The argument that nuclear is “carbon-free” conveniently omits the entire process of mining uranium, which produces greenhouse gases, along with other pollutants. In Virginia, where a study has just been commissioned to determine its safety, uranium is mined in open pits. This destroys topsoil and increases runoff, which contaminates drinking water with cancer-causing toxins.

The uranium-enrichment process also emits greenhouse gases and is highly wasteful. Eighty percent of the ore that goes through the enrichment process ends up as waste. And this is to say nothing of the lye, sulfuric acid, and other caustic agents that must be used to turn the uranium into reactor-ready fuel.

While on the surface, the steam billowing from the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor is less harmful than the toxic smoke that spews from a coal plant, nuclear reactors still create byproducts that are dangerous to human health and welfare. There’s also the huge problem of radioactive nuclear waste, which can stay hot for hundreds of thousands of years. Storing the radioactive waste isn’t just a security threat; there’s potential for radioactive chemicals to leak, as they are in Vermont and at other aging reactors around the country.

Spent radioactive waste continues to sit at reactor sites and wait for a scientific breakthrough that is 50 years overdue. But a long-term waste storage solution doesn’t exist. The Yucca Mountain facility, the government’s radioactive waste repository project in Nevada, was marked by billions of wasted dollars, numerous legal challenges, and fundamental infeasibility. President Obama recognized Yucca Mountain’s failure and cut the funding for it in 2009. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu followed up by issuing a request last week to revoke Yucca Mountain’s application to be licensed as a waste repository.

In Maryland last month, President Obama told us the United States needs to build new nuclear reactors to keep up with France’s nuclear investments. But France has had its own problems with radioactive waste contamination. The government has had to close down entire rivers because of leaks.

In the same speech, President Obama also used China’s nuclear growth to greenwash his administration’s push for more nuclear reactors. But his argument doesn’t stand up. The United States already gets a greater percentage of its energy from nuclear reactors than China will after it reaches its target for nuclear growth, and China has pledged to invest even more toward increasing its solar and wind output. The goal of the United States should not be to build more nuclear reactors, but to make them irrelevant through our own investment in truly clean, renewable sources of energy.

In another inapt comparison, President Obama contrasted the emissions from a nuclear reactor with the emissions from a coal plant. But that false dichotomy ignores the cleaner and safer forms of renewable energy that exist and will do more to reduce greenhouse gases. Worldwide, renewables have actually outpaced nuclear reactors in energy capacity and fossil fuels in investment.

The $55 billion in taxpayer money the Obama administration wants to risk on more nuclear reactors would produce a far greater return if spent on truly clean, renewable energy. Building new nuclear reactors would be the most ineffectual method to reducing greenhouse gases, whereas building more wind turbines or installing more photovoltaic solar panels would not only do a better job at mitigating climate change, but would create more jobs. President Obama’s nuclear industry bailout instead pushes us back to the energy future of the 1950s and gives cover to the nuclear industry to continue to be lax on safety enforcement and lethargic in technological advancement.

President Obama has said that “environmentalists and entrepreneurs” should no longer retread the same arguments about nuclear energy. But Vermont Yankee shows us that there’s nothing new in nuclear that merits revisiting; clean and safe nuclear energy remains an “Atoms for Peace” pipedream. There may be a shiny green coat of paint on the cooling tower, but dangerous chemicals still leak from the pipes.

QUINCY,MA—

A disagreement between the housing authority and the city’s building and fire departments is holding up a $2.5 million federally funded heating upgrade for Quincy public housing.

The housing authority plans to replace hundreds of old steam radiators with gas-powered direct vent wall furnaces, similar to ones found in hotel rooms.

The wall heating systems are made by Rinnai America Corp. in Georgia. The housing authority wants to install them in 400 apartments at the Snug Harbor development in Germantown and 36 apartments at the West Acres development in West Quincy.

Jay Duca, Quincy’s inspectional services director, said he questions whether the heating units will provide enough heat for apartments.

“Wall furnaces are generally designed to heat one room or space,” Duca said. “(The housing authority is) proposing manual switches throughout the dwelling unit in order to heat the other rooms.”

Duca said the plans include installing wall fans and making other modifications so hot air can blow into other rooms.

The state Department of Housing and Community Development has approved the heating system, spokesman Phil Hailer said.

The $2.5 million is part of a $25 million federal stimulus package that the state is doling out for heating upgrades in public housing. Quincy’s authority is the first in the state to receive a share of the money, which has to be spent over the next two years.

Jay MacRitchie, director of the Quincy Housing Authority, said the buildings’ 60-year-old heating systems need to be replaced.

“As with any old heating system, the pipes are prone to leaks, they’re full of sludge from time to time and our boilers burn out very quickly,” he said. “(The state) is recognizing that the Quincy Housing Authority is due for a lot of upgrades, and they’re coming through with the money.”

MacRitchie said replacing boilers isn’t an option because the ones being sold today are too large for Snug Harbor.

MacRitchie said that wall furnaces are used effectively in New York housing and some already installed in Quincy apartments have been well received.

Duca said he allowed some wall units in Quincy public housing because of an immediate need. Some were installed without his permission, he said.

Duca said he has yet to see sufficient engineering data to show they will work. “… I’m not going to permit 400 of these and then find out it’s not going to work as designed,” he said.

In a letter to MacRitchie, Fire Chief Joseph Barron said that the proposed heating system is “rife with inadequacies. … In short, it is unlikely to provide the needed warmth required by a New England winter.”

MacRitchie said he’s optimistic he can address city officials’ concerns and get the work started.

“We certainly hope they’re going to conclude it’s a worthwhile program,” he said.

Sounding a familiar clean-energy theme, President Barack Obama on Tuesday announced details of a proposed energy rebate program he hopes will spur demand for insulation and water heaters – and jobs for hurting Americans.

Obama said the administration’s “HOMESTAR” program would reward people who buy energy-saving equipment with an on-the-spot rebate of $1,000 or more. He cast the idea as one that would save people money on utility bills, boost the economy and reduce American dependence on oil.

The plan would take the approval of Congress.

“When it comes to domestic policy, I have no more important job as president than seeing to it that every American that wants to work and is able to work can find a job,” Obama said at Savannah Technical College, in a state where the unemployment rate tops the national average of 9.7 percent.

“That was my focus last year and that is my focus this year,” he said, “to lay a foundation for economic growth that creates jobs.” He appeared in Georgia three days before the government releases the February unemployment report.

Speaking to the many people looking for jobs, Obama said he knows “it’s tough out there.”

The administration is hoping the energy rebate plan could become as popular as last year’s Cash for Clunkers money-back program for autos. Consumers would collect immediate rebates for buying insulation, water heaters or other equipment to make their homes burn energy more efficiently.

Various vendors, ranging from small, independent contractors to national home improvement chains, would promote the rebates, give the money to consumers and then be reimbursed by the federal government.

Some details of the program, including how long it will run and its total cost, remain to be worked out with Congress, administration officials said.

The price tag could be in the range of $6 billion.

Obama said the upfront costs would be worth it, just as homeowners must put money into their homes to improve them and save costs in the long term.

Appealing to Congress, Obama said: “I just hope Washington stands along side me in making sure we’ve got the kind of energy future that we need.” Congress has stalled several of Obama’s legislative efforts, including overhauling the health care system, addressing climate change and giving the government a bigger role in providing student loans.

Cash for Clunkers was a $3 billion program that ran for about a month last year, from July 27 to Aug. 25.

The latest proposal has two levels of rebates.

Under the first level of energy rebates, to be called Silver Star, consumers would be eligible for rebates between $1,000 and $1,500 for a variety of home upgrades, including adding insulation, sealing leaky ducts and replacing water heaters, HVAC units, windows, roofing and doors. There would be a maximum rebate of $3,000 per home.

Under the second level, Gold Star, consumers who get home energy audits and then make changes designed to reduce energy costs by at least 20 percent would be eligible for a $3,000 rebate. Additional rebates would be available for savings above 20 percent.

If the program is enacted, the administration expects millions of households will boost demand for insulation, water heaters and the like – the same way consumers pumped up car and truck sales last year by trading in their gas-guzzling autos with more fuel-efficient models.

Representatives of the construction and home improvement business sectors were invited to Obama’s speech.

Howard Feldman, co-owner of Coastal Green Building Solutions in neighboring Ridgeland, S.C., said he hoped an influx of business from homeowners seeking the rebates would allow his small company to bring work back to job-starved contractors his company hires to perform energy-efficiency upgrades.

Feldman said he also suspects the program would have a lasting effect after the government rebate program ends, when people who took advantage of it tell friends and neighbors about the money they save on utility bills.

Yet some viewed it differently.

Todd Odom of nearby Guyton, Ga., stood across the street from the college with a group of about 70 Obama supporters and protesters. Odom, a 42-year-old machinist, said the government’s already spending too much and “HOMESTAR” would be a wasteful giveaway.

“When is it my responsibility to pay to refurbish somebody’s kitchen?” Odom said. “I want the government to fight my wars, build my roads, house our prisoners and leave me alone.”

Before heading back to Washington, Obama visited two local businesses – a company that makes custom steel parts and a digital post-production studio that got started with help from some $2 million in loans from the Small Business Administration.

By: Leo Hindery Jr.

This Thursday, March 4, I am addressing the Apollo Alliance on Clean Energy and Good Jobs on the subject of “How to Make the U.S. a Leader in the Clean Energy Economy,” a topic made urgent in the midst of the ongoing Great Recession by the promising reality that ‘the deployment of just wind and solar power has the potential to support globally 20 million new jobs by 2030 and trillions of dollars in revenue.’

I believe that the answers — four in number — are actually pretty simple:

First — and foremost — we need to be much more capable and efficient in getting stimulus and private monies out the door into ‘things green’ and into improved infrastructure.

Second, we need to immediately level the global trade playing field, especially with China, which is already our biggest competitor in the green economy.

Third, we need a buy-domestic program that generally mirrors the programs of our major trading partners, especially China’s.

Fourth, because the green economy is very heavily weighted toward manufacturing, we need an all-of-government manufacturing policy that results in a near-term doubling of the sector’s employees and, compared to services, of its relative contribution to GDP.

Let’s take them in order.

Foremost, we need to find focus and have a nationwide sense of urgency regarding this issue, with a lot less rhetoric from the Obama administration and a lot more forceful advocacy.

The non-partisan GAO and the inspector general of the Department of Energy have just put out scathing reports regarding government’s inability to invest quickly and efficiently in anything, green or otherwise. As just one painful example, the biggest states have to date met less than 2% of their now year-old stimulus-funded weatherization goals (cold-weather New York is at just 0.62%), even though building retrofits are by far the most immediately accessible ’shovel-ready’ job-creation opportunity. And only God knows why we haven’t declared a federal economic emergency in order to streamline obtaining required permits and approvals.

By contrast, the other major developed countries — and China — are factors better both at bringing government and the private sector together to advance the green economy, and at actually spending, in a timely fashion, project-based stimulus funds. Japan, for example, has, on a macro level, done an excellent job of combining very large-scale government-sponsored R&D (about $3.5 billion a year) and state-supported industrial development to improve energy efficiency and develop its renewable energy industry. Germany, in turn, is very advantageously using targeted subsidies to improve energy efficiency in manufacturing – in less than one year’s time, its new 500 million Euros program for industry has generated a massive 10 billion Euros of follow-on investments that will produce significant long-term energy savings for the country.

Greatly compounding our problems from just not being very ‘efficient’ is our unwillingness to date to establish a National Infrastructure Bank (or NIB), a new entity which we desperately need in order to accelerate investments in things green and in infrastructure of all kinds.

As far back as February 2007, in a legislative initiative for Congress called the Horizon Project which I chaired, we identified the need for an NIB and for incentives for private funding. Long before this Great Recession began we knew that thoughtful investments in infrastructure were one of the top two ways to create lots of jobs, provided the spending was coupled with buy-domestic requirements. (The other way is employment programs for the roughly 5 million unemployed out-of-school youth.) And with the passage of time, we now know the specifics of this: each $1 billion spent creates on average 25,000 new jobs, and when the investments are for high-tech green things such as improving energy efficiency in manufacturing facilities, smart grids and smart meters, and large-scale building retrofits, the new-jobs figure is much greater.

An NIB would immediately increase many-fold, and at much lower costs, the infrastructure investment capacities of our federal, state and local governments; it would make such investments less dependent on annual appropriations and thus counter the almost knee-jerk political objections to them; and it would allow these governments to leverage and partner with private capital markets, large fiduciary and institutional investors, and foreign central banks.

As for leveling the trade playing field, no responsible American economist disagrees with the President’s recent (albeit overdue) conclusion that China’s currency is significantly undervalued compared to the U.S. dollar, by at least 25% and up to 40%. Yet currency manipulation is just one of China’s many unfair trade practices: 90%. of China’s domination in manufactured goods vis-à-vis the U.S. is due not to its much-discussed relatively low labor costs but to its subsidies on plant sitings, financing, taxes and currency and to its extremely low environmental standards.

Only responsible trade agreement enforcement on our part — enforcement that aggressively targets all illegal subsidies and poor environmental practices — can turn this trade imbalance around. And when we finally get around to enforcing agreements and not just negotiating them, we need to pay particular attention to China’s role in the global green economy. Already China is making all of its domestic expenditures under procurement rules that effectively lock out the U.S. and other nations from importing green components to it and that have thus already positioned the country to be the world’s largest exporter of ‘things green’. As Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) recently said, every day “is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy. It has made a long-term strategic decision and they are going gang-busters.”

To put this in context, while our federal government’s stimulus package devotes only $80 billion to the green economy, China’s comparable central government investment figure is $217 billion — and just last year alone, China spent overall, government-wise and ‘privately’, $440 billion on clean energy. But more important than any of China’s numbers is the fact that 100% of whatever is spent in the country will go to Chinese manufacturers and companies because of China’s “Indigenous Innovation Production Accreditation Program”, which it promulgated on November 15, 2009 and which limits central and provincial government procurement of any sort to goods with “indigenous innovation”, which simply means “made in China”.

So next, we obviously need to adopt our own buy-domestic requirements related to all federal government procurement, ‘green’ or otherwise, which generally mirror the buy-domestic programs of our major trading partners and last as long. Foolishly, America is almost alone among the major nations in not having such a program, yet no single stimulus effort would do more to resuscitate U.S. employment, especially manufacturing, and jumpstart our green manufacturing.

Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the biggest toady in the land when it comes to kowtowing to unfair trade practices that discriminate against American workers — is finally on the record in opposition to (quote) “China’s state-led and export-led development model and its intensifying discriminatory and discretionary innovation and industrial policies” (unquote).

Finally, we very much need to understand the sharp differences between manufacturing and service jobs. Some in the administration and Congress still wrong-headedly believe that a “job is a job” and that the decline in our nation’s manufactured goods (and, by extension, the labor force that makes them) can be made up by a favorable trade balance in such products as software, legal services, university tuition, and motion pictures. This latter contention is simply absurd, and as for a job being a job, manufacturing indisputably has the largest multiplier effect by far of all job sectors.

Manufacturing creates $1.40 of additional economic activity for each $1.00 of direct spending and, even more important, 2.5 other jobs on average for each direct job in the sector. And at the high-tech upper end of manufacturing, where the green economy ‘resides’, for each new job created directly, as many as 16 associated jobs are created. By contrast, each new service job creates on average no more than 1.6 associated jobs.
******

In addition to the four things we need to do, there is at once one overriding perspective we can’t lose sight of in the green economy, and that is Energy Secretary Chu’s and others’ contention that the goal of the green economy must be to make clean energy cheap in reality, not disguise its cost with, on the one hand, tax subsidies for wind and solar and, on the other, tax penalties for fossil fuels.

The simple fact is that it’s not possible, given the way other major economies in the world subsidize their industries, to maintain any semblance of a balanced and internationally competitive middle class American economy if we pursue a policy of systematically (and artificially) increasing the cost of energy and resources through ‘feed-in’ tariffs or otherwise. And if we do so, then we will clearly thwart our goal of promoting, both for export and for import substitution, more value-added manufacturing (and more value-added agriculture and mining). And we will also be thwarting our newest national goal of “Mak[ing] the U.S. a Leader in the Clean Energy Economy”.

The last thing we should do is reverse the trend of the last three centuries and move away from capital-intensive and resource-intensive technologies to activities that are not. If we ‘decarbonize’ our environment by shifting from coal to low-carbon natural gas and no-carbon nuclear, which are very energy intensive and efficient, we will continue to move forward — but if we shift from coal only to biomass, wind and water, then we will go backward in time.

It may well be that someday a lot of people will be hired by state and local agencies to weatherize homes – and actually do the work – on the grand scale envisioned when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law, a year ago this month. But by the end of December, some 10 months after the stimulus bill was enacted, most aspiring cast members of The Greatest Weatherization Show on Earth were still waiting for callbacks.

Over the past few months, a flurry of news reports – some of which we’ve recapped on GBA – have highlighted states’ struggles to expand their programs, manage huge funding increases delivered by the stimulus bill, and sort through accompanying federal regulations, such as the imposition of the Davis-Bacon Act’s prevailing-wage requirement. Federal officials are now echoing the concerns raised in the news stories.

A GAO preview

Earlier this month the Government Accountability Office released a report titled “Project Selection and Starts Are Influenced by Certain Federal Requirements and Other Factors” (a 34-page pdf), based on data collected in 16 states. The report cites three principal reasons that stimulus-funded programs have been slow to launch: the Davis-Bacon requirements; buy-American provisions (which mostly affected projects of the Departments of Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, and Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency) and the National Historic Preservation Act (affecting mainly programs of the Departments of Commerce and Transportation).

Last Friday, the DOE’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, issued a report that’s in line with the GAO findings but more explicit about the problems afflicting the Weatherization Assistance Program. Friedman’s report blames sluggish program rollouts on confusion over Davis-Bacon requirements but also on such things as recession-fueled hiring freezes and furloughs at some of the agencies managing weatherization programs, even though stimulus funds would have paid the additional salaries. (It’s an irony not lost on many bureaucrats.)

A recent New York Times story, for example, noted that a hiring freeze in New York City helped delay the rollout of weatherization programs throughout the state, whose goal is to weatherize 45,400 housing units over three years. By the end of December, however, the state had a completion rate of only 0.62%, or 280 units. The DOE visited sites in 32 states and found similarly dismal completion results in many of them, including Texas (with a 0% completion rate on its three-year target of 33,908 units), California (0.03%), North Carolina (0.89%), and Michigan (1.15%).

Diagnosis and treatment

Friedman called the overall results alarming, particularly for a program that, a year ago, was deemed “shovel ready,” and whose administrative infrastructure has been in place for decades. But the DOE report affirms what we know already about government programs that get really big: they can do plenty of good, but they struggle mightily with synchronization and implementation. What’s more, the political pressures accompanying stimulus-funded program expansions have prompted most administrators to move cautiously, and pay special attention to training and auditing procedures designed to prevent and detect fraud.

The DOE says it is taking steps to accelerate WAP work, in part by simplifying National Historic Preservation compliance rules for weatherizers and program-eligibility criteria for multifamily dwellings. Each state must complete work on at least 30% of the housing units it plans to weatherize during the three-year period before it can draw down on the remaining 50% of its stimulus-fund allotment. The delays so far have put pressure on a DOE outreach initiative, “Operation Green Light,” that dispatched senior department officials to nine of the highest risk states to help move things along.

With everyone scrambling to right the weatherization ship, it could be that the worst – the confusion and delays pegged to expanding some state programs – is over, or nearly over. But if it’s not, the DOE may have to rethink its program goals.

By: Bob Barr

Right now in Washington, our elected officials are ignoring an important solution to many of this country’s most pressing problems, and it’s one that has been staring Congress straight in the eye for almost a year. I’m talking about the NAT GAS Act.

Pull up the House and the Senate versions of the bill, and what do you see? A long list of cosponsors, particularly on the House side where 130 members have signed on. You’ve got everybody from Libertarians like Ron Paul to more progressive members as well as conservatives. Democrats and Republicans look at H.R. 1835 and say, “This makes perfect sense.” Its broad-based support spans geographic lines, commercial interests, and the political spectrum.

Look over at the Senate side. There are some pretty influential people on there including some very powerful people. Harry Reid’s on board. So are Orrin Hatch and Mark Udall. A New Jersey Democrat, Bob Menendez, sponsored the Senate version, yet there are more Republican cosponsors than there are Democrats. Think about that. Right now everyone is talking about how partisan Washington has become, yet here’s a bill that is the exception to the rule. The only problem is on the Senate side, just as in the House, there has hardly been any movement on NAT GAS. Why isn’t it going somewhere? Why hasn’t something happened on it? What can be done?

From my experience in the Congress and following a lot of these things as a consultant on the outside, the NAT GAS Act for many months has been competing with our national fixation on healthcare right now. That’s the bad news. The good news is that more and more Americans are now focusing on the economy and creating jobs, all of which this piece of legislation will impact positively.

But it needs to break through the chatter out there, and there’s only one way to do that. Members of Congress and Senators are motivated by heat. So we’ve got to turn up the heat. They have to start getting their mail rooms and inboxes flooded with positive messages, well-articulated messages, petitions, postcards, emails, whatever it takes. Why? Because the NAT GAS Act is a win-win. But we’ve got to start now. If we don’t, every day that goes by means it becomes harder and more expensive to mount that effort.

We import 70 percent of the oil we use, and in the process we send $700 billion overseas every year. There’s nothing inherently wrong with allowing the free market to work in this regard, but why not use a little common sense. It’s irresponsible to empower our adversaries, tie our country’s hands diplomatically and financially, and seriously hamper our economic recovery. Doing business with countries averse, or even hostile to American interests is not smart. Investing in our own industry and creating jobs is smart economics, smart politics, and smart foreign policy. That’s why we need to turn up the heat on Congress and get the NAT GAS Act out of committee and on the floor where it belongs.

GTM Research has released its “2010 North American Utility Smart Grid Deployment Survey”, a comprehensive analysis of the trends emerging in the US as utilities across the continent roll out smarter grids. The report shows that smart grids are no longer just a concept and are beginning to become critical to utilities’ business plans.

The 2010 North American Utility Smart Grid Deployment Survey draws on over 30 detailed smart-grid deployment questions posed to decision makers at more than 50 North American utilities. It provides critical insights about the near-term issues and longer-term plans for the developing smart grid market including: AMI and smart meter deployment schedules, priorities for building out a networked grid, utility deployment concerns, connecting smart grid networks to consumers, and the integration of renewables, storage and PHEVs.

“Many North American utility executives hold smart-grid initiatives as a very high priority,” said David J. Leeds, Smart Grid Analyst with GTM Research. “70% of survey respondents regard smart-grid projects as either a strong priority or the highest priority relative to their overall business plans between now and 2015.”

77% of utilities polled rank distribution automation as the top smart-grid application, while 87% of survey respondents claim that senior management at their respective utilities is assigning special importance to smart grid initiatives.

The three primary deployment concerns are systems integration, data management solutions and electric vehicle integration, each receiving marks over 50% when asked where the biggest technology gaps exist (multiple selections were allowed).

“The year 2010 is pivotal for the evolution of smarter grids, as it marks the time when the market will begin its transition from hype to reality,” said Rick Thompson, President and Co-Founder of GTM Research’s parent, Greentech Media. “The future success and ultimate size of the opportunity in terms of market growth will be largely dependent on the events that unfold within the next 12-24 months.”

In parallel to the release of The 2010 North American Utility Smart Grid Deployment Survey, GTM Research is also launching a new smart grid research annual subscription service. The subscription service includes eight smart grid market reports published over a twelve-month period, and dedicated time with GTM Research’s smart-grid analysis staff. All smart grid research reports published by GTM Research will be available to purchase as individual titles or as part of the annual subscription service.

What do dieting and energy policy have in common? The SnackWell effect. The name comes from those tasty little cookies that are advertised as being lower in fat and sugar. And they are–which often leads dieters to eat more of them than regular cookies and then wonder why they’re not losing weight.

It turns out there’s a SnackWell effect for energy use too–and it may make it tougher for us to cut back on carbon. When environmentally conscious consumers buy an energy-efficient dishwasher, for example, they may feel less guilty about running the machine more often and as a result may not end up saving much on their utility bills. Owners of new tankless hot water heaters consume more hot water because they can and don’t realize they’re offsetting any monetary benefit of the system’s higher efficiency. Likewise, studies indicate that people who install more-energy-efficient lights lose 5% to 12% of the expected savings by leaving them on longer.

Much like dieters eating too many SnackWell’s, we can hamstring our attempts to save energy and money. So resist the urge to raise your thermostat after you buy a more efficient furnace; lower the temperature by a degree and shave another 1% off your heating bill.

But even if we do what Jimmy Carter did and wear a stylin’ ’70s sweater all winter, we may end up spending those energy savings somewhere else–like on a plane ride to Bermuda. Although studies are scant, a 2007 report by the UK Energy Research Centre estimated that globally, this rebound effect could reduce the savings from energy efficiency by 10% or more.

That doesn’t mean energy-efficiency measures are useless–or that we should never go on vacation. But it does mean that cutting back on energy consumption, like dieting, is not an excuse to gorge ourselves on less guilty pleasures.

By: Bill McKibben

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made — that’s what Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”

If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington D.C. It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.

For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: “Al Gore’s New Home.” These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.

Why We Don’t Want to Believe in Climate Change

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to Exxon Mobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few rightwing British tabloids which validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even the New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount. He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

“…screen the entire population regularly and… quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month… all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic — and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main reason, for the success of the climate deniers, though. They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites. They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.

Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models… [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong — Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause — and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks. Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for the Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation — a world — to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen. There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: if you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.

Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be — and, in fact, should be — infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.

Why Data Isn’t Enough

I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun. One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty. That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research—we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.

But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress — cap-and-dividend, it’s called — that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80% of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right — and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.

Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miner’s kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed — just not at climate-change scientists.

But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.

There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”

There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through — a sunset, an hour in the garden — we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.

GBI Research has published its “North America Renewable Energy Market Analysis and Forecasts to 2015” report giving an in-depth analysis of the North America renewable energy market and providing forecasts up to 2015. Offshore wind and photovoltaic solar are expected to perform well, although infrastructure bottlenecks and a skills shortage could hamper growth.

The report analyses the growth and evolution of the North America wind, solar and biopower markets up to 2008 and gives historical and forecast statistics for 2001-2015. This research looks at the market scenarios for these technologies and regulatory policies that govern them. Detailed information on key current and upcoming wind farms, photovoltaic (PV) solar parks and biopower production facilities give a roadmap to this market’s development. This coupled with elaborate company profiles of key market participants give a comprehensive understanding of the market’s competitive scenario.

Boost from government support

The proposed introduction of federal RPS combined with the extension of Production Tax Credits up to 2012 in the US are expected to boost the market for renewable energy in North America. The extension of PTC has brought in financial stability to the US renewables market, which contributes to more than 90% of the North American market for renewable power. The market for renewable power in the continent is expected to grow from a historical CAGR of 2.4% in 2001-08 to a forecast CAGR of 6.85% during 2009-2015. The cumulative installed capacity in the region is expected to increase from 207,767 MW in 2008 to 325,681 MW in 2015.

Offshore wind to open up

Supportive policies by the US government are expected to open up an unprecedented market for offshore wind the region. Traditionally dominated by onshore farms, the share of offshore installations is expected to rise in the North America wind market.

According to GBI Research, the offshore wind market is expected to grow from an installed base of 0.95 MW in 2008 to a projected cumulative capacity of 4500 MW by 2015. With 18 large-scale offshore projects in the pipeline, offshore wind is expected to have an increasing share in the electricity generation portfolio in the region in the coming years. Key hotspots for offshore wind development in the continent include the north eastern part of US, the coast of British Columbia and Great Lakes in Canada.

PV market poised for geographical expansion

The PV market in North America is expected to expand geographically with the introduction of financial incentives and support mechanisms by several new state governments in the US. Establishment of support mechanisms for solar PV development by new states such as Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Minnesota and Ontario is expected to drive the geographic expansion of this market in the region and result in the creation of high-growth markets for PV within the US. According to the report, Pennsylvania, one of the potential high-growth states, is expected to post a CAGR of 77.03% during 2008-15 from an installed base of 4 MW in 2008 to 218 MW by 2015.

Infrastructure bottlenecks a problem

Insufficient transmission and distribution infrastructure in North America is expected to hamper the rapid uptake of renewable energy in the region. Utility grids in the region do not have the extensive connectivity required to pace up with the rapid growth in renewable power installations. This is expected to result in a delay in grid connectivity for solar parks and wind farms located in remote areas far from the grid. Construction and upgradation of transmission facilities are often more expensive and time consuming than building renewable power parks.

Human resource crunch

Rapid growth in renewable power installations in North America is expected to intensify the chronic talent crunch in the industry. This is expected to result in poor quality services across the value chain and delay of projects. The market does not have sufficient supply of skilled manpower to cater to the projected increase in demand in the coming decade. Acute shortage of skilled professionals is expected to be a major challenge in key segments such as manufacturing, services and technical consulting. GBI Research expects the US wind industry, which currently employs more than 85,000 people, to experience the most acute talent crunch in the North American renewable energy industry.