Beer Brewers Unite To Call For Action On Climate Change

You gotta love this piece (see title above).

I’m reminded of the project I did last year for a client, promoting the idea of building-integrated solar thermal hot water heating. Part of the effort was a day or so in which I spoke with key players in the largest 20-or-so U.S. microbreweries. Obviously, making beer requires a large amount of energy to heat up all that water, and my offer was simply this: the next time you extend your facilities, instead of building a roof with solar thermal on top of it, use this stuff; it IS the roof.

I went into the project feeling like a hot-shot, because I happen to know a decent amount about the subject from the standpoint of thermodynamics, etc. But guess what: these people did too. Most of these organizations have people on staff with the title “Director of Sustainability,” who carry degrees in various sciences, and who can talk about this stuff all day long. And yes, they need to heat water, but they manage that heat so carefully (for example, using heat-exchangers to heat one barrel up by cooling another down) that the whole thing is amazingly efficient. The experience for me was a bit like dumbing down a conversation about physics to make it accessible to a grade school student, and then realizing you’re talking to Stephen Hawking. A bit embarrassing.

The point here, however, is that these people are incredibly dedicated to energy conservation, as well as many other aspects of eco-consciousness. It’s an industry dominated by young, sharp, and extremely conscientious people. One can only hope that this is the blueprint for young people in the workplace.

Ironically, my next target group of potential customers was dairy farming, which makes sense as well (or at least made sense at the time), as there is an intense amount of hot water used in the production of milk. This failed too, but for a different reason: sorry to make an unkind generalization, but based on my numerous conversations, these people were not young, nor sharp, nor did a single one I interviewed appear to give a cow-flop about the environmental friendliness of their operations.

Oh well. Perhaps the truth is the way it’s described by Dr. Jason Scorse, professor of Environmental Economics at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (pictured), whom I interviewed for my second book (“Is Renewable Really Doable?”). I paraphrase: “While young people really get this, it’s very likely that the older generation will never change their viewpoints on ecology. But there is a remedy for that: old people have a tendency to remove themselves from the discussion by dying.” (He wasn’t quite that callous, but that was certainly his point.)