Part 1: The Carbon War Room starts to bust barriers in shipping
Readers are always asking what can been done to cut carbon beyond pushing for the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill. I’m launching a new series aimed at the kind of serious action people can push for at a local and state level — and even at a national and global level — without waiting for politicians. After all, the biggest, most money-saving strategies to cut carbon are already profitable (see “McKinsey must-read: U.S. can meet entire 2020 emissions target with efficiency and cogeneration while lowering the nation’s energy bill $700 billion!“)
The impetus for this new series is my interview today (below) of Jigar Shah, the uber-innovative clean energy financing guru who founded Sun Edison and now heads the new nonprofit, the Carbon War Room. The objective of CWR, founded by entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson, is to “ensure a prosperous future for all on the planet by developing a post-carbon economy.” The operational approach is to “bring together successful entrepreneurs in collaboration with the most respected institutions, scientists, national security experts, and business leaders to implement the change required to avoid catastrophic climate change.”
The Carbon War Room has “identified 25 battles across 7 theaters that are material to winning the war against climate change. Each battle accounts for over 1 billion tons (or more than 2%) of global anthropogenic CO2e emissions annually.” The figure above represents CWR’s “Theaters and Battles,” with filled in green circles representing an “Op in Progress” and the dotted circles a developing Op. For instance, one area CWR has already start on is shipping, a too-neglected sector that has huge emissions and but only medium-sized market barriers, which they are addressing with Operation Rock The Boat“:
The CWR notes that
Currently available technologies can substantially reduce CO2e. Efficiency gains could translate into an annual CO2e reduction of upwards of 250 million tons annually consumption by 2020.
Here is Shah talking about CWR and the barriers and opportunities in shipping:
You may have wondered, why don’t they put sails on big shipping vessels? Well, Skysails have shown “average fuel savings of up to 30%, according to company data from seatrials,” and they are one of the innovative technologies that the CWR is working to accelerate into the market.
The technologies and strategies we need to make the necessary emissions reductions by 2020 to stay below 450 ppm are at hand. Yes, national and global climate action that sets a shrinking cap and a rising price on carbon dioxide are crucial. But so many strategies are cost-effective today, and they require barrier-busting at every level.
Double kudos to the Carbon War Room for understanding the serious nature of the problem and pursuing an innovative approach to addressing it.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
The “Battle” of ExxonMobil
The use of ExxonMobil products alone, each year, generates well over One Trillion Pounds of CO2. That’s ExxonMobil alone. That’s in one year. That’s only CO2. And that’s only how much ExxonMobil’s products generate when they are used in their end uses — e.g., when we burn the gasoline. That figure doesn’t include the huge emissions generated by ExxonMobil’s own internal activities such as production, logistics, refining, and etc.
What does this mean?
Well, put in terms of the present thread, this means that ExxonMobil alone (including use of its products as well as its own internal operations) amounts to one of these “battles” all by itself! That’s how HUGE the ExxonMobil problem is! There aren’t many single companies, if any, other than ExxonMobil, that can claim to amount to the size of one of these “battles”, all by itself.
I hope we begin seeing that problem.
Cheers,
Jeff
Do you mean cutting carbon or carbon dioxide? There is a difference. Late comers to the discussion often say cut carbon and mean cut carbon dioxide CO2. Even the head of GE is confused. Carbon is in carbs, fats and proteins we eat for nourishment. The amouint of carbon on this planet is constant.
Herman Leben (2) — Check one of the many web sites about the carbon cycle.
Shipping has begun to move more slowly through the water, some vessels as slowly as 12 knots, mostly about 20 knots; down from 24 knots. Certainly saves fuel.
At present we do not have a war on carbon, we have wars FOR carbon fought by burning carbon. This perverse situation is evident in the quarter to half trillion dollar world subsidies for mined carbon materials we call fuels: coal, petroleum and mined methane gas (as well as uranium for atomic fission), not counting the cost in lives and dollars of war and “security.”
Maybe we should eliminate the need for supertankers (like the one damaged on the Great Barrier Reef) by building only clean energy along with agressive efficiency upgrades, and reduce trade to a level that a return to great sailing ships can handle.
It seems to me that stopping mining fatalities should be part of our main goals. People like Blankenship need to be removed from leadership until fatalities are brought to zero. Doubling the price of coal to make mining safe is a small price to pay. What happened this afternoon is yet another crime by Massey Energy.
Really like the Carbon War Room idea.
If you look really closely at what is going on you’ll see lots of inter-relationships, externalities, and complexity.
The truly amplifying actions to seriously mitigate and adapt to the environmental crisis will come from profound investments in this planets human capital.
Places like MIT’s Opencourseware project might be a good place to start. Extensive poverty reduction along with advanced education should be another.
To give some ideas of the scales:
Currently, in China alone, more than one-half billion people use extremely efficient low-emission human power and hybrid human-electric transportation.
One billion people planting 3 trees a day can plant a trillion trees in a year.
One-tenth of one percent of the world’s most capable people would be a formible innovative and disruptive force for positive change.
I can help Richard Branson fulfil his laudable wish to cut carbon/CO2 emissions. In the weekly Q&A Feature in the Guardian Weekend magazine supplement, 3rd April 2010 here in the UK, Sir Richard stated he wanted to develop a “superpower” that will enable him “to be able to save our planet”.
Funnily enough it may already be within his grasp, alonsside his Carbon War Room antics – so in the best Gilbert and Sullivan tradition of English comic operatta, here’s my little list:
• Sell or close all your airlines: Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Blue (in Australia) and Virgin America. This will save a conservative 6 million tonnes of CO2, probably more
• Invest profits from airline sales in trans-European high speed rail services
• Shut down your US private jet operation, Virgin Charter and stop encouraging pollutocrats
• No more holidays on your private Caribbean island, Necker – try Southwold instead
• Virgin Galactic space tourism – very, very silly. Stop it now, Richard, please
• Virgin Formula One racing team – carbon-intensive mobile brand advertising for petrol-headed egotists. Added benefit of not finishing at the back of the field as in races so far
• Stop claiming you are investing millions in alternative fuels or at least show us the carbon negative refinery site and real at-the-pump products instead of greenwash hype
Whilst these suggestions will only go some way towards saving the planet, any such action by Sir Richard would be significant and much appreciated.
And lastly – a vow of silence would be good too.
Sincerely
Jeff Gazzard
Coal Mine Disasters Bring New Reason to Consider Renewables
Quoted from: http://www.pennenergy.com/index/blogs/eye-on-the-grid/blogs/elp-blogs/elp-blogs/post987_3510467255787896029.html
The rather dramatic irony of this blog entry is that I thought about writing it yesterday after reading about China’s flooded mine and all the men trapped there. At that point, I was thinking about how much safer our own mines are here in the U.S., how that probably wouldn’t happen here after all the OSHA safety requirements and other issues involved. I was going to write about that, slant the article to say we can help China make mining less dangerous. Then, this morning, I read about the coal mine blast in West Virginia that has killed 25 people with four still missing.
Coal mining is a dirty, nasty business—even with our OSHA regulations, even with our laws and safety requirements. We’re not so different, at the core, from China, after all. It may, in fact, be impossible to make mining a really safe endeavor.
I come from a long line of coal miners. I’ll bet you are surprised by that revelation. My grandfather was a coal miner. And his father. And his father’s father. My family’s dug a lot of black chunks out of the ground.
My grandfather used to talk sometimes, quietly about what miners fear most—back then it was a scary term called “blackdamp.” Blackdamp is the removal of oxygen in the air, which is replaced by toxic gases. Pretty much all tight, sealed environments can create blackdamp, but it’s especially nasty in coal mines because the coal itself adds to the problem. Coal, once exposed to air, begins absorbing oxygen and giving off carbon dioxide and water vapor. My grandfather used to talk about blackdamp as if the mine itself was breathing, cutting off air from the miners inside its gullet.
You can’t smell blackdamp. You usually only become aware when you get lightheaded and dizzy, uncoordinated like you’ve had way too much to drink.
Blackdamp was what miners feared most in my grandfather’s day. But, that wasn’t usually what killed them. It did kill some, of course, but most miners were killed from the force and power of collapses or accidents, not from the creeping blackdamp. Still, the blackdamp scared them most—that slow, crazy spiral to asphyxiation that it represented. My grandfather said the scariest thing was an awareness that death is coming down that mine in bits and parcels, in small steps and strides. And you had to watch. You had to realize what was coming.
My grandfather stopped fearing the blackdamp in 1947 because he stopped being a coal miner in 1947. March 26, 1947, to be exact. He was running late for his shift at the Centralia Coal Company’s No. 5 mine on the edge of Centralia, Illinois. He wasn’t usually the type to run late—at least not as I recall. (We always made it to the movies and the circus early enough to get sodas and popcorn when I was a kid.) But, that one day in 1947, he was a bit behind. He told me the reason was something to do with a family birthday celebration that had kept him up way too late the night before.
The celebration hadn’t, however, slowed down my great-grandfather. Not a bit. He was bang on time for the mine collapse—the worst coal mine disaster that the country had seen in nearly 20 years. 111 men died in that mine disaster, including my great-grandfather Jacob Rethard. My grandfather, Raymond, would talk about digging with shovels and picks and bare and bloody hands—anything to get to his father and those other men trapped, even though they knew just minutes after the shaft fell that hope for the lives of those men was completely futile: If the force didn’t get them, the blackdamp and growing lack of oxygen certainly would. It was a race against time, and they didn’t have the equipment to win. Still, my grandfather kept digging until he recovered the body of his father. His father was no. 110—the 110th body. No. 110 out of the 111 dead men pulled from that mine.
And my grandfather walked away from that disaster dirty and bloody and done. He left coal mining behind without a second thought.
As human beings, we are incredibly resilient. My grandfather certainly was. He became a security guard, working everywhere from Vegas to Oklahoma City. He raised a family and rarely talked about that coal mine collapse that killed his father. He was funny, a great cook, and he used to build the most amazing blanket-and-kitchen-chair forts in his living room, much to the annoyance of my grandmother. He pressed on.
As a society, we often mirror my grandfather’s ability to move forward. Hundreds of men in China die, and it really doesn’t stop us from flicking a light switch. We don’t make that connection much. 25 men in West Virginia died today, and it hasn’t stopped me from using my computer or my television. We have a great capacity to accept and move on. But, maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to adapt.
I’ve thought a lot about the place of renewables in this industry in the last few years—most of it focused on the practical. I still think they are expensive and lacking in a certain economy of scale. But, perhaps I should think less about the financial cost of renewables and more about the lives they might save—not just with reducing global warming but direct human lives like those we lose regularly in coal mines around the world. [Not just the lives that might be saved, but also the improved quality of life for everyone.]
Jacob Rethard was a solid, tough family man who was proud to be a coal miner, but it cost him his life. My grandfather, Raymond Rethard, walked away from that disaster that killed his father a changed man, one who saw coal mining as not worth the risk. In the end, he died at a ripe old age surrounded by family—not by darkness and blackdamp.
Perhaps we should pay more attention to the humanity embroiled in the dangers of mining. If renewables become more prevalent, could we save more men in China and in West Virginia and in Illinois from dying in the dark? Years ago I made a definitive choice to never buy diamonds because of the human cost they sometimes require to mine. It was a change in attitude, and I know I’m not alone in that attitude or choice. Perhaps we, as an industry and as a society, also need to consider a change in attitude and adjust our social concepts and technological advances to give the advantage to renewables, even if they are more expensive. We should remember that we sometimes pay a very large, very human price for very cheap power.
And, bottom line, that human price may be much, much less if renewables were given a stronger foothold in power production. It would be a nice change if no man had to fear the dark blackdamp in our smart energy future.
Cute stuff. But transportation is the leading source of GGE, according to NASA.
And the folks who run the United States and China aren’t going to tolerate any questions in that area.
Notice you don’t even include the word “automobiles” in your graphic there, too. I guess that’s what one has to do to keep one’s “insider” status.