Synapse

Renewable energy, green building, greenhouse gasses, conservation - all these things can appear as a tangled alder thicket when someone first comes upon them. But in reality they are just knotted together in a dense and energetically vibrating net. Even more intriguing, that net is interwoven with our communities. That's what makes this field so fascinating. These are the kinds of topics I want to explore here, subjects that are not directly related to Integrated Renewable Energy's business direction, but that certainly affect it and (I hope) are affected by it, subjects that close the synapse between technologies and communities, and form the complete thought. -- Paul Birkeland

Managing Energy for Organizational Gain

• Harnessing the Tiger: Managing Energy for Organizational Gain
  There are a number of positive reasons to include energy management in your CSR program. Let's take a look at them...
• Harnessing the Tiger: Choosing an Energy Leader
  If you are thinking that the Energy Leader position is a good place to season technical employees for management, you would be right...
• Harnessing the Tiger: Getting to Work
  The Energy Leader needs to organize four interlocking aspects of the organization's Strategic Energy Management System: People, Processes, Documents, and Hardware (or Projects)...

Energy and Emissions

• Why I Am Writing an Energy & Emissions Blog
  I once walked up the Pacific Coast of the US from Los Angeles to Seattle. I walked the highway shoulder a lot, peeling off onto dirt roads where I could, and even down to the beach where that was possible. It took five months...
• It's Oil the Same to Me
  This week it looks like the oil industry isn't really ready to keep its promise of drilling cleanly after all. Not that they aren't trying...
• Owning ALL the Emissions
  The US Department of Transportation and the US Environmental Protection Agency jointly issued new rules for automobile mileage standards... But there was an interesting aspect of the rules that didn't get much coverage in the media. Instead of counting electric cars as zero-emission vehicles, they are going to be counted as lesser-emission vehicles...
• Low Tech Clean Tech
  Not all the excitement concerning clean energy systems has to do with pushing the efficiency of solar panels, or finding the best way to produce biofuels. Some are actually pretty low tech...
• Energy Efficiency and Human Behavior
  Engineers involved in energy efficiency don't like to admit it, but there's a human behavior element to energy efficiency. In fact, there was just a whole conference on the subject organized by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, not exactly a flaky bastion of mushy thought...
• A Nominal Egg
  Here's the conundrum I see: Higher energy prices encourage conservation. But energy conservation serves only to keep electricity prices where they are...
• Clams and Red Herrings
  I wrote earlier about why we find it so easy to deny what our emissions are doing to the planet. But I just found another reason - red herrings...
• Opening the Bloom Box
  There's been a lot of news this week about Bloom Energy's just released Bloom Box....
• Carbon Emissions and Asimov's Observation
  Here's one that probably slipped your attention. The General Aviation Manufacturers Association, together with the International Business Aviation Council and a long list of its members, recently announced a series of measures to dramatically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide...
• The Right Way to Go Nuclear
  I have never been convinced that it's even possible to do nuclear power "right." I still don't think there is if you are talking about uranium fueled reactors. I never thought I'd be saying this, but I've learned a few things that make me think that we ought to go nuclear after all...
• The Wind Passeth Over It
  A new estimate of the United States' wind power potential was just released, and it is three times the previous estimate! Can this be real? ...

Climate Change

• Tangled Web of Carbon Emissions
  The UN published an eye-catching and educational graphic that illustrates society's sources of carbon emissions as well as the use that generated those emissions and the kind of emissions they are. You can pull a boatload of surprises off this one. Here are a few that surprised me....
• Cap and Trade and Massachusetts
  The gloom-and-doomers are writing the obituary for a cap and trade system in the US. Well, cowboy up! I don't think we should write it off so easily...
• CO2 Bathtub
  A simple but effective analogy applied to the level of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere each year....
• Why Carbon Reparations Don't Make Sense
  Copenhagen was a disappointment: the global chess game being played by the "Big Five", and especially the US and China, saw everyone castling to protect themselves, and unable to see the shadow of climate change threatening the board itself. Equally to blame, however, are the developing nations that demanded "carbon reparations"...
• Cap and Trade Populism
  The US has an influential "populist" center that is hard for people outside the US to understand. Hey, it's hard for a lot of people IN the US to understand...
• The Price of Energy
  The Price of Energy is nowhere near the Cost of Energy. This is perhaps the biggest market failure of all time. We are just realizing the social, health, and environmental costs of energy. But they have yet to be factored into the price...
• The Dynamics of Biofuels
  There's an insidious vision, at least here in the US, that if we just all buy electric vehicles, put up enough wind turbines, and brew enough biofuels, that we will be able to just go on living the way we are living while reducing our emissions, and not worry about the climate...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

• Climate Denial and Extreme CSR
  Human dominance on Earth is largely due to our heavily evolved brains. But our brains may be the death of us yet. Unless CSR steps up to its promise...
• Energy, Emissions, and Extreme CSR
  CSR is not about doing good. It is about survival...
• Doing Things Differently, or Doing Different Things?
  There's an invisible rift in the CSR world. It's a philosophical rift that manifests itself in how we use energy and generate emissions. It profoundly proscribes the "solution space" we allow ourselves to reduce our energy consumption. And I think it would be good for each of us, but particularly CSR directors, to articulate their positions on this one...

Sustainability

• Food Miles and the Tortilla Connection
  Food miles have come into vogue as a way of assessing the sustainability of our production systems. I thought it would be valuable to put things in perspective by converting our fossil fuel usage into a tortilla equivalent....
• Walking the Walk
  A location's "Walk Score" is based on the distance to the closest grocery store, school, restaurant, and several other places you might walk to from any address in the United States or Canada. We can press developers to design and build to a Walkscore target, to get them thinking and working as if walkability mattered...
• Peak Oil & Sustainable Development
  Before the mortgage debacle hit last fall, gas prices were already playing havoc with real estate sales as the old advice to "drive until you can afford a house" took on a different meaning, and suburban/exurban home sales slowed. So, once the economy rights itself, will that earlier trend continue?
• Let Us Buy Local
  I recently read a report that concluded that buying lettuce from Morocco in London resulted in a smaller carbon footprint than buying local lettuce grown outside London...