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.

Over at Hans Rosling’s incredible site, gapminder.org, you can view an animated time line of CO2 emissions by country, from 1820 to 2006.  One of the funner moments is watching the countries bubble up onto the graph in the 1800′s when only a few countries had any CO2 emissions at all.  As you can see in the above image the X data is average wealth per person, Y data is CO2 emissions per person.  Yes- the United States is the giant yellow blob on the upper right, proudly besting most every competitor for most profligate with fossil fuels.  (Tiny orange blob above and right of the US?  Luxembourg, go figure.)  To me the interesting comparisons are with places like France, orange dot right at the crosshairs of 4 tonnes and $30K.  Similar wealth to the US, but with remarkably lower CO2 emissions.  This is largely due to two factors, they generate a huge percentage of their electricity with nukes, and they mostly live in dense towns and cities where public transportation is the most viable way to move around.  Food for thought, no?

Rosling’s The Joy of Stats program will be aired later this month in the UK, fingers crossed it comes to BBC America. His now famous TED talk is here.

The New York Times has a ton of stuff on green issues today, from the sublime to the ridiculous.  There’s an Op-Ed on Climate Change by Mikhail Gorbachev and an article about Greenpeace targeting Facebook for their reliance on coal plants to power their data centers.

Greenpeace started its campaign in February, urging “ The So Coal Network” — a play on Facebook’s “social network” identity — to “Unfriend Coal,” which it calls “the dirtiest source of energy and largest single source of pollution in the world.”

Following on the data center issue there’s a great piece on European Union efforts to significantly increase the energy efficiency of their data centers. Seriously- the Europeans are cleaning our clocks on this stuff- they are way out in front of us.  While the EU works on advancing energy conservation where it counts we have to beat back attempts to eliminate one of the only clean energy laws in the US.  The Times has a nice editorial on the resounding defeat of the efforts in California to kill their enormously successful Climate Change law.

All of this is book-ended by a style-type piece on upcycling and the growing culture of seeing waste materials as a resource rather than a nuisance to be disposed out of sight, and a business section item on the many bond funds out there working to finance clean energy investments.  This last piece has a lot of great stuff on progressive bond funds but makes one of the most common and most unbelievably frustrating mistakes about the economics of climate change.  They open the piece with:

Financial experts may debate how much it would cost to shift the world to a low carbon economy, but they agree on one thing: the amount would be phenomenal.

It’s a snappy way to start but totally ignores the issue at hand, namely, our options.  Shifting to a low carbon economy might entail spending significant sums of money but it will not be “expensive” when compared to the other options.  As Amory Lovins has pointed out, “The good news about climate change is that it’s cheaper to fix than it is to ignore.”  Yes- reorienting our infrastructure to clean and green energy sources will cost money, but the repercussions of just burning all the fossil fuel the planet has to offer as quickly as possible will cost even more.  This is simple math, folks.

Check out this great video of U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu, discussing energy efficiency, both as a basic building block to tackling climate change but also as a simple measure you can take at home. He’s got some great quotes, including telling us that insulation is:

. . . like blocking and tackling, the most important thing.

2 years, 65% GHG Reduction

There’s an excellent article over at the Yale e360 online magazine describing one small businesses’ response to climate change. It’s a wonderfully detailed piece that shows the positive impact many of us can have on our energy footprint if we simply put our minds to the problem. In the absence of Federal leadership, as Bowman says:

. . . small businesses can become humanity’s first responders in the climate crisis.

An interesting proposal to increase funding for clean energy research in the absence of a cap-and-trade bill from Congress.  From David Leonhardt at the NYT, here.

These are some of the words people used to describe William McDonough’s opening keynote at Urban Green Expo last week.

I have seen Mr. McDonough speak on two other occasions but I have never seen him more passionate and energized. He spoke about how his upbringing shaped his view of the world, about his early years as an Architect in New York, and about his current work, both with his architectural firm and with Michael Braungart. He spoke powerfully about the need for us to move our thinking from “efficiency” to “effectiveness”.   He laid out how the guardian of government, though essential at this time, will never be able to move as quickly as commerce. The answer is not more and more regulations, but to put commerce at the service of the environment by creating buildings that produce energy and water and fresh air, by manufacturing products that are infinitely recyclable, compostable and, hell, edible.

I told him later how impressed I was by his presentation, even as compared to seeing him previously, and he responded that he was “really excited to be back in New York.” This is where he started his own firm in the 80′s, only leaving to run the architecture program at UVA, where his firm remains. As John Mandyck of Carrier noted in his introduction, McDonough’s offices for the Environmental Defense Fund here in NYC were completed in 1984, 14 years before LEED 1.0 hit the streets. And his talk was peppered with calls for us, the people in the room, to step up and challenge our clients and the industry to move to this new model of manufacturing products and designing buildings that are net positive in their contributions to the environment, the next industrial revolution.

Were you there the morning of September 29th to hear McDonough’s keynote? If you were we’d love for you to leave your impressions in the comments to this post.

A friend of mine, Rich Rosen of the Tellus Institute in Boston, has been involved in a very interesting exchange on Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog. I strongly recommend checking it out, but the gist of it (for those in a real hurry) is that although research is good, we understand the basic physics of energy technology well enough to know that we are not going to find renewable technologies that will be cheaper than coal. We have to make the transition to more sustainable energy sources, but we should start now, with the technologies at hand, laying out actual money, and not expect solar energy, fusion power, or the hydrogen economy to come rolling in and rescue us with painless, or even relatively painless, sustainable sources of energy.

Rich and Andrew Revkin are discussing large scale power sources, but the same physics and economics constrain the future of buildings. After we have picked up the “free” 20-30% savings that come from correcting today’s really bad practices, we get to energy savings measures that have 20 year payback periods or more. But we have to lower energy consumption much more than 20-30% – we must get carbon emissions down by 80-90% by 2050. We already know how to make buildings that use very little energy, and to some extent how to convert existing buildings: lots of insulation, not much glazing, carefully controlled ventilation, and smart controls. Research may give us more options – aerogel windows could make glazing much less lossy – but these improvements will arrive incrementally and they will cost money.

As a society, we will just have to start spending more on energy use reduction and on sustainable sources – if they were cheaper we would be using them already. Not pleasant news, but the alternative isn’t a silver bullet, it’s a nuclear weapon scale problem: the rapid or gradual collapse of the ecosystems that sustain our civilization.

Check out Andrew Revkin’s blog.

Even if the building boom had gone on forever, most of buildings standing in 2050 would be the same ones that are here now. And if they are still emitting CO2 at the rates they are today, New York City is going to be in serious trouble.

Urban Green Council has been focused on this situation for years, and it’s always encouraging when someone else also takes an interest. ClimateWire recently tackled the issue of energy use in New York City’s existing buildings, and I was one of those interviewed. The result was an interesting pair of articles picked up by the New York Times, which I recommend more for the overview than for the few words I was able to get in.

Here are links to both pieces:

“New Yorkers Begin to See How Much They Have to Lose From Climate Change”

“How to Get Prompt Payback From an Aging Icon That Guzzles Energy“