Since the dawn of time (well, OK, since 1979 when Michigan and Princeton Professors Ross and Williams developed the idea of a “house doctor”), energy efficiency enthusiasts have been convinced that retrofitting a residential building to save energy could pay for itself in fuel savings.  It’s been a rocky road since those days, when the prime concern was our dependence on unreliable Mideast oil rather than climate change, and in the energy price valley of 1985 – 2000, it was a lot harder to make the case.

But over the last ten years, subsidized programs all over the country have carried out hundreds, perhaps thousands, of retrofits.  Many were aimed at affordable housing, including the federally funded Weatherization programs, and state efforts like NYSERDA’s Assisted Multifamily Program (AMP, in which I was active) and the current Multifamily Performance Program (MPP). Others focused on coaxing the owners of unsubsidized multifamily buildings, including coops, condos, and market-rate rentals, to upgrade their building systems in the interest of greater efficiency, but always with the carrot of long-term savings. Similar efforts went on in many of the more progressive states.

All these programs were successful in installing efficiency upgrades:  insulate the roofs, add caulking and weather-stripping, switch to fluorescent lights, replace that failing boiler, and add better heating controls.  And because we had used careful analysis and detailed computer models, we were confident the savings were there.  But the fact is, we couldn’t present fuel and electric usage data from any of the early projects to prove that our analysis was accurate. As late as 2008, we had a grand total of 20 buildings from AMP for which we had verified savings, largely of satisfactory magnitude.

Of course this is a problem from a technical perspective – we would like to know we are telling the truth when we claim that savings will be forthcoming.  But there is another, much larger problem:  all the retrofits done under Weatherization or NYSERDA programs are subsidized, one way or another, so the owner could expect a much more substantial return on their own partial investment than they would receive in pure market circumstances. And still it was hard to get them to undertake the projects.  Further, what we need now is a truly massive campaign of energy retrofits, far larger than can ever be subsidized by either NYSERDA or the federal government. And owners rarely have the cash reserves to undertake energy retrofits on their own.  The only way to bring retrofit activities “to scale” is to make them an investment opportunity for lenders, by which I mean banks.

But you know bankers – dour, untrusting, “show me your cash flow” types who want proof that you will have the money to meet your monthly obligations. (We will omit discussion of the unfortunate events of the last few years except to note that now no one will lend any money without ironclad guarantees of credit-worthiness.) If we want bankers to lend money for retrofits based on the use of energy savings to repay the loan, we need tools to convince them that the savings will be forthcoming.  Until now, those tools were not in evidence.

Today, we stand a chance.  Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and Living Cities commissioned Steven Winter Associates and HR&A Advisors to undertake a massive study of energy retrofit activities in New York City, and to formulate an underwriting approach based on their findings. The just-released report provides both a powerful case that the savings will be realized in enough instances to justify significant investment activity, and an analytic framework that will make investments even more secure.

On the technical side, they examined 231 buildings for which pre- and post-construction data was available, and developed a strong set of useful conclusions. Just a few examples: expect more substantial and reliable savings from fuel use reduction than from measures aimed at electric usage; the more fuel your building uses, the greater the potential for savings. (Before you say “duh”, this was quantified in way that that will be very useful for underwriting, as we will see.) And because buildings are complex systems, they found that while observed savings tracked projected savings in a statistical sense, there would still be cases where the savings fell short.  How can this risk be minimized, making energy efficiency retrofits an attractive investment for our dour banker?

Here is where the team developed an exceedingly clever analytic approach.  The engineers designing the retrofit will use their models to predict savings.  But from an analysis of the 231 buildings, the team already knew that on average, they could expect savings roughly equal to half of the pre-retrofit fuel use minus a substantial constant. (See the paper for the math!)  The clever approach then is to trust the engineer’s model unless it predicts savings greater than the average found for their data set, adjusted for energy use in the building being modeled. If the model predicts savings greater than the data set average, use the data set average. If the model predicts savings less than the data set average, use the model results. Then go talk to your banker. When this approach was applied to the buildings in the data set, they found that the actual energy savings substantially exceeded these adjusted predictions, a situation that should leave underwriters satisfied.

Can this work?  Will we see a dramatic increase in capital available for energy efficiency retrofits? Only time will tell, but we have made a substantial step forward.  All the buildings in New York City over 50,000 square feet will undergo energy audits, as required by Local Law 87 of 2009, and the proposed measures and their estimated savings will be there for all to see. Now, a robust way to justify financing the measures is also available.

One of the great benefits of climate change is the opening of the Arctic, making available vast new supplies of fossil fuel, most recently highlighted by a substantial mutual exploitation agreement between Russia and Exxon.

Seriously, of course this is awful.  It won’t even lower the cost of fossil fuels significantly because it will be such a small slice of global oil production, and even that slice will take years to serve.   More importantly, when (not if) some pipe cracks open under the ice in the middle of the four-month night, they (whether Exxon, Rosneft, Shell, BP, or whoever) will be totally helpless. Well, I mean the crews on the rig will be helpless. The lads and lassies back at corporate HQ will be doing the usual bang-up job of manufacturing reasons why no one could possibly have seen this coming.

The U.S. should at least try to stop this.  Unfortunately, we don’t have much influence over either Russia or Exxon, and one major reason is that we have no serious national program for reducing fossil fuel use ourselves. We really can’t castigate Putin for their arctic adventures when we recently approved Shell poking a few 4,000-foot holes into the seabed off Alaska’s north slope), and all signs point to our imminent (and tragic) approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring very heavy oil from Canadian tar sands to Houston refineries.

If you haven’t noticed (which would be reasonable, considering the scant attention it’s paid in the mainstream media), the Keystone XL pipeline is the reason our foremost climate scientist James Hansen, agitator Bill McKibben, and activist celebrities like Darryl Hannah have been getting arrested in front of the White House. The White House?  Aren’t the good guys in charge? Why aren’t these demonstrators over at the House of Representatives, protesting climate change deniers?  Well, because we seem to have moved from an administration that denied climate change and let oil companies do whatever they wanted to an administration that supports climate science and lets oil companies do whatever they want.

There are two likely explanations for the administration’s lack of resistance to these potentially catastrophic developments.  First, the price of gasoline is heading toward $4/gallon, and anyone opposed to drilling and pipelines is attacked on that basis (no matter that neither arctic drilling nor the tar sands will have any real impact on gas prices.)

Second, in the middle of a deep recession and with staggeringly high unemployment across the country, politicians may have finally realized that voters want them to do something about jobs. Unfortunately, Keystone XL has a well-oiled publicity machine bragging about the 20,000 jobs they say they will “create.”

This analysis is wrong. Simple arithmetic shows that energy efficiency programs aimed at reducing our need for fossil fuels will create more jobs than any pipeline, since the money that will go to Canada to pay for the oil would instead stay within the country and go to workers in weatherization programs, wind turbine factories, or electric car development efforts. This arithmetic was developed by Democratic Party policy wonks over decades, but their understanding seems to no longer be operative.

If this foolishness continues, arctic seals will soon find it much easier to see the oil-soaked polar bears trying to sneak up on them.  On all other fronts, these projects are bad news in both the short and long term.  Oil spills will darken the Arctic, or even Montana, and the ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions will ensure that the ice and the food chains we all (seals, polar bears and humans) rely on for our survival will soon be irrevocably altered or gone.

Photo credits: [Keystone Pipeline] U.S. Dept. of State |  [Tar Sands Protesters] Ben Powless / tarsandsaction.org

Weather is what’s happening in the air around us, and climate is how it is, long term, where we are. At least, that’s what we used to mean, back when a location came with a climate: temperate, tropical, sunny, or moist.  Seasonal variations were part of the idea of climate – summer, winter, monsoon, mistral – but there was little room for other change within the concept.  On the other hand, the weather changes constantly, giving us a way to make conversation in elevators with total strangers or romantic rivals.

At the end of the nineteenth century,  Arhennius pointed out that man-made variations in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could alter the earth’s temperature, and the science of climate change was born.  A fringe activity until around 1990, it now attracts most of the attention of atmospheric scientists, since it is well established that if we continue our wasteful ways we will irretrievably alter the earth’s climate, and not in a good way.

But all this talk of climate change is about long term statistical quantities, like average temperature, area of minimum arctic sea ice, fraction of coral reefs bleached past recovery, or the range of altitudes over which the edelweiss can flower.  Ask a climate scientist about the severity of the rainstorm last Sunday night and she will suggest that you talk to a weather analyst, since no individual weather event can be directly tied to the slow process of climate change.

Well, for any individual event, that’s probably true.  But have you been following the news lately?  Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has, and in an astonishing op-ed piece published in the Washington Post he implicitly challenges climate scientists to deal not with individual weather events, but with the extraordinary series of floods, tornadoes, and everything but a rain of frogs that have been devastating one locality after another.  I won’t tell you his conclusion because everyone should read the entire piece for themselves. Less time than you’ve already put in, guaranteed!

Photo credit: NASA

Cheers to Vornado for having an e-recycling bin in the lobby of our office building, in recognition of Earth Day. What are you, your company or building doing to celebrate Earth Day 2011?  The list below is just a handful of the many events in NYC:

April 1st – May 22nd
Electronic Waste Recycling: 10 events at locations around NYC!
The Lower East Side Ecology Center is holding its spring electronic waste (“e-waste”) recycling events around the five boroughs to responsibly recycle unwanted or broken electronics from New York City residents. Get your spring cleaning done while protecting the environment!

April 20th – April 29th
Columbia University | The Earth Institute
Columbia’s Earth Institute has a whole slew of lectures related to environmental colloquiums, symposiums, lectures, and events going on between now and the end of April. From the Farmer’s Market Tours, a discussion on Impacts of Dams in China, and a seminar on Environmental Engineering – they’ve got it covered.

April 28th – May 1st | 8:30am – 5:00pm
NYC Green Roof Bootcamp Series
Green Roofs for Healthy Cities’ mission is to increase the awareness of the economic, social, and environmental benefits of green roofs and walls and other forms of living architecture through education, advocacy, professional development and celebrations of excellence. Join the more than 400 accredited GRPs (Green Roof Professionals) and add another green building qualification to your professional standing.

April 29th | 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Pratt Sustainable Planning and Development Lecture Series:
New York State Climate Action Plan
Alan Belensz, Director of the Office of Climate Change with NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, will be presenting an update on the progress of New York State’s Climate Action Plan. The plan identifies possible ways for state government and key economic sectors to keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, help communities and businesses adapt as the climate changes and promote a thriving green economy. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Credit: Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton, The Guardian

The Guardian has produced the beautiful graphic you see here showing CO2 emissions by country.  According to the Guardian the big story here is that China now produces more CO2 than the US and Canada combined, and that India is now #3 on this list.  But don’t be despondent, we still crush China in the category that matters, CO2 emissions per capita.  As you can see in the graphic below, each American proudly pumps 18 tons (or tonnes, to the Guardian) of CO2 into our precious atmosphere every year.  China can only manage a measly 6 tons per year per person and India only a pathetic 3+.  Note: the graphic above uses 2009 data, and the below is based on 2007 data.

Credit: Stanford Kay Studio.com

Christmas Eve, 1968. Source: NASA

Al Gore gave sustainable urbanism a plug yesterday at a Beijing conference, including a strong emphasis on energy-efficient buildings.  Glad to know the built environment is featured prominently in his talking points these days, and fingers crossed that it remains front and center when he’s not addressing the building industry (as he was in Beijing.)  Also gives me a chance to plug his book, Our Choice.  “An Inconvenient Truth” had a profound impact on our culture and helped alter the conversation around climate change.  But as a presenter for the Climate Project (Gore’s foundation that trains people to deliver his slide-show on the global climate crisis) I can tell you first hand that the piece missing from “An Inconvenient Truth” is solutions.  It describes the problem wonderfully but the gravity of the challenge can leave your audience despondent.  Our Choice corrects for this with brilliantly illustrated chapters on energy, its use, and the living systems that we depend on for survival.  It won’t change the life of an engineer already versed in these issues, but for everybody else I highly recommend it.

Jennie Hills

The London Science Museum has opened a permanent exhibit on climate change science including a real ice core on display.  (How cool is that?)  In 2009 the American Museum of Natural History, the one here in NYC, had a great interactive exhibit on climate change.  It is the exhibit that inspired my nine-year old son to come into the bathroom and turn the water off whenever I’m shaving.  Sadly, the exhibit was only temporary (though my son still hassles me about the tap.)  I see that the principal sponsor in London is Royal Dutch Shell and that some folks are not happy with their stance on the urgent action needed in response to the science, but it still seems infinitely better than the deeply watered down and, frankly, silly exhibit at the Smithsonian funded by David Koch.  Sigh.

To follow up with my post from last week, the COP 16 Meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded last weekend without any binding deal on emissions reduction, as many had predicted. They did, however, produce an agreement sufficient to allow them to announce that the process was not dead, and in doing so, included two potentially valuable steps forward.

All countries will now have to present inventories of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, developed countries annually and developing countries biennially. Although they will not have to file their data on the EPA’s Portfolio Manager web site (where it would not fit), the transparency this will promote concerning emissions mirrors that we expect for building energy consumption from the New York City Benchmarking rule (Local Law 84 of ‘09).

Further, each country must also submit reports on mitigation actions and projected emission reductions that sound remarkably like the audits required by New York Local Law 87 of ‘09. Countries are not required to take action, but must report on the actions they take or will take and estimate the savings. New York City buildings must report on actions they could take and estimate the associated savings.

All this and not a word of credit for our fair city!

In another item in the Agreement, the governments and nonprofit organizations who dominated the meeting agreed on the necessity of funding to help developing countries mitigate climate change and also adapt to it, to the tune of $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 and $100 billion by 2020. In subsequent discussions with reporters, the parties indicated that the funding would largely come from the private sector.

Found relaxing in a Cancun bar after two weeks of hard work, the Private Sector said it was unaware of any commitment, but expressed confidence that progress would be made next year in Durban, South Africa.

Following Peter Pan, we should all really, really believe that the future of climate change action will not depend on what happens at the COP 16 Meeting now unfolding in Cancun. The meeting of the “Conference of the Parties” is part of ongoing attempts to create a global response to the inexorable advance of global warming and other evils in the wake of humanity’s emissions of globally significant quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). And the COP 16 meeting is also the place where the single longest-standing conflict on climate change mitigation has boiled over in a crisis that involves tedious emissions accounting and WikiLeaks revelations.

As always, the accounting part has to do with establishing who did what to who first, and who must therefore be the first to clean up the mess. The Kyoto accords (adopted 1997, in force as of 2005, and ratified by all significant nations except the United States) were based on the fact that the advanced nations had emitted most of the GHGs and they, therefore, undertook “binding” limits on future emissions. Well, some of them did (Canada, Japan, and a good part of Europe). Others held back on numeric commitments. The US refused to sign on. Developing countries were free from obligations, since they had emitted much less and had fewer resources. The Protocol expires at the end of 2012.

The COP meeting in Copenhagen last year and the COP 16 meeting in Cancun are attempts to prepare a replacement protocol. Facts have changed. We’re no longer #1: China is now the world’s largest emitter of GHGs. (They are still responsible for far less accumulated emissions.) The atmosphere is different. Japan has announced that it will sign no agreement that does not obligate China and the US to reduce emissions. China has agreed that “we can even have a legally binding decision”, but of course only if others, like the US, join in. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell will be in charge of treaty ratification. Now might be a good time to buy a garden plot in the Yukon.

Meanwhile, Bolivia’s representative has looked at mortality from floods, droughts, and storms occurring at rates thought too high to be natural and upped the vocabulary of the discussion to include genocide. As reported by The Guardian, the origin of this testiness became more clear when WikiLeaks released cables indicating that the US showered money on small countries like the sea-level threatened Maldive Islands when they joined US-sponsored agreements at Copenhagen while withdrawing funding from states like Bolivia and Ecuador that were less cooperative. Whether this constitutes blackmail, coercion, or generosity seems to depend on where you come from. As the accusations accumulate and mistrust grows, the climate is fast becoming too stormy to see a path toward a meaningful agreement.

Check out this extremely cool graphic produced by LBNL and the US DOE.  Outlines the sources, end-uses and “ultimate utility” of energy across the US in 2009, in Quads.  On the left side you’ve got sources of energy production, from solar to coal to petroleum.  Some of these sources are used for electricity generation, the manila box at top middle, and the rest for other sectors of the economy like commercial, transportation, etc.- the pink boxes on the right.  And on the far right we have what to me are the most interesting (or terrifying, depending on your perspective) elements, the “Services” and “Rejected” boxes.  Services being energy that has been consumed by useful activities- powering an AC unit, firing a car engine- and Rejected being energy lost out the tailpipe or radiator of the car, or out the smokestack of a non-cogenerating  power plant.

Our own Director of Advocacy & Research Richard Leigh was involved in producing similar graphics in the early 80′s at Brookhaven- but back then there were no entries for solar, wind, geothermal, or biomass, and they didn’t even include the “Services/Rejected” metrics- because no one really cared how efficient our overall use of energy was, we just wanted to know how much we used and for what purpose.  Today we all shudder at the simple fact that the “rejected” energy heavily outweighs the energy that has been “used” for, well, useful stuff.  Of the roughly 94 Quads of energy this great country of ours consumed in 2009 almost 60% of it went right out the smokestack.  With dangerously unpredictable climate change approaching like a freight train, with the Gulf soaked in oil and mystery dispersant, with huge swaths of mountain ranges being leveled to extract coal, with all this we still let about 60% of that hard fought energy simply disappear to no good end.  It’s criminal.

And it points to another issue that doesn’t get enough air time but we think about a lot here at Urban Green.  Take a look at the solar bar on the upper left.  We produced one-tenth of one Quad of solar power in 2009.  Of course- over the next decade we need to figure out how to dramatically increase that number but right now, today, we don’t realistically have any hope of increasing that almost invisibly thin yellow line on the graphic into something substantial.  What we need to do, today, is take a huge chunk out of that heavy lump of “Rejected” energy on the right hand side of the graph.  As many have pointed out, and as McKinsey and many others have made unbelievably clear in several studies, by not tackling that rejected energy, by not taking the simple steps to improve the basic efficiency of many things (buildings being principal among them) we are leaving money on the table and handicapping any long term efforts to avoid dangerous climate change.  3 Quads of energy are “lost” from the commercial and residential sector in this graphic.  Equal to all the hydro power in the country.  We lose 40% more energy during electricity generation than we produce using coal (26 vs. 18 Quads.)  I know these are simplistic renditions of these scenarios but I find it clarifying to look at these numbers from such a high level.  We need to see that amount of wasted energy like an enemy.  There is a lot we can do, right now, if we only put our minds to it.  So have a good weekend, but on Monday remember how much opportunity is evident in those 55 Quads of wasted energy and do whatever you can in your working life to take a chunk out of it.