I was shocked when I read the news about my friend and colleague:

Alexander E. Farrell, an associate professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked closely with state government over the past year to chart a course to reduce California’s carbon emissions, died earlier this week at his home in San Francisco. He was 46.

You can read the full obituary here. You can watch a video of him discussing the California low carbon fuel standard (LCFS), which he helped develop, here. He was director of the UC Berkley Transportation Sustainability Research Center, and, as you can see, he was both passionate and analytical, eloquent and scientific.

I was doubly shocked when I found out that he “had taken his life,” as one of his recent coauthors, Michael O’Hare, blogged –

Yesterday everyone associated with the Energy and Resources Group gathered to try to make sense of it and we failed completely. The afternoon before he died he was emailing people about plug-in hybrid batteries. No-one saw it coming, no-one remembered a conversation or a hint that he was in despair or depressed about anything.

I certainly did not see it coming. Sure, this can be a tough field to work in — coming to grips with humanity’s apparent disregard for the health and well-being of future generations. But I mostly heard a lot of optimism from him, since he was a leader on analyzing solutions and providing serious policies in the one state in this country that is taking climate as seriously as it deserves.

I have known Alex for many years, since June 2003, in fact, when he coauthored an article for Science, “Rethinking Hydrogen Cars,” (subs. req’d), and I emailed him, since I was researching a book at the time. He was superb at quantifying the difficult to quantify, and I cited him in my 2004 book as follows:

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Kudos to U.S. New and World Report for publishing multiple stories on energy efficiency — “Can America Use Less Energy?” — even if all of my interview ended up on the cutting room floor, something that used to bug me a lot before I got this blog. The editors, and stories’ chief reporter Marianne Lavelle, deserve much credit for focusing on a subject that is not sexy by any journalistic definition of the term:

It’s deceptively comforting, the warm glow of the suburbs after nightfall. But a fiend lurks where the light pours from the windows of too-often-empty rooms. The monster within is America’s voracious demand for power; despite the threat to bank account and planet, we keep using more. The steps to tame electricity in the home are known but hard to manage in our technology-rich world. Workplace energy waste does nothing to bolster the economy, although creative ideas abound for battling the beast. A key move may be to give power companies rewards for efficiency. Leadership will be essential, but the politics of sacrifice doesn’t play well. Individuals must take the first steps; a starting place is unnecessary consumption by computers. And if you must have new gadgets, look at those that help monitor energy use, curb it, and even generate clean power.

The stories, with links, are:

Three Ways Businesses Can Save on Power
Factories and offices often waste energy needlessly [Be sure to read the stuff on cogen--I'll be blogging more on that later this week.]

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This Wednesday, April 16, the Bush administration took action on several fronts to show his contempt for Congress, the courts, and the planet.

Contempt for the Planet. President Bush took center stage in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, claiming he has taken a “rational, balanced approach” to climate change and calling for an “ambitious new track” of not capping greenhouse emissions until 2025 — a goal that would spell disaster for the planet. He also denigrated the Supreme Court decision mandating the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases — a decision he once called “the law of the land.” This contempt underlies actions taken by the EPA and the Department of Justice that very same day.

Contempt for Congress. Also on Wednesday, the EPA’s associate administrator Christopher P. Bliley flatly declined to obey a House Global Warming Committee subpoena for documents relating to EPA’s refusal to obey the Supreme Court mandate. This act of defiance has now “triggered a potential contempt process” against EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson.

Contempt for the Courts. In September of last year, a federal judge ruled against the auto industry’s attempt to block the 17 states who are acting to regulate tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions. This ruling hinges upon California’s petition for a waiver to regulate emissions — the waiver EPA’s Johnson denied in December. Late Wednesday, the Department of Justice sided with the American Automobile Manufacturers’ appeal, citing Johnson’s denial. However, in the EPA’s own judgment, Johnson’s decision will be overturned. With shameless audacity, the administration is now asking an appeals court to compound the error.

UPDATE: Warming Law explains that the Justice Department “is asking that the Second Circuit declare the entire case ‘not justiciable’ on ripeness grounds” — that is, arguing that the case never should even been considered in the first place.

On Tuesday, Nova will be broadcasting their “Car of the Future,” episode. You can read all about it here. And while I didn’t make the preview, they have posted online 30 (!) clips they have of me talking about climate change and cars, especially plug-in hybrids.

Here is the program description:

Tom Magliozzi has a problem. The wacky cohost of NPR’s Car Talk needs to replace his beloved 1952 MG roadster. But in today’s car market, where should he turn? Is new technology about to transform the way we drive? Tom and his brother Ray hit the road in this program for a lighthearted but shrewd take on America’s four-wheeled future.

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