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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

As we bump along into a new year, perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves: What do the world’s scientists tell us about our course vis-à-vis sustainability?  Well, a lot of things, really.  For example, our oceans are over-fished and filled with mercury, and the natural mineral content of our farmland is so depleted that the chemical fertilizers and poisons we’ve chosen to mitigate the damage is crippling our environment, while leaving us with food increasingly lacking in nutritional content. 

This could be the beginning of a very long list, so I’ll skip ahead to the granddaddy of them all:  our society’s burning coal for energy.  In brief, the developing world expects to enable its huge and ever-growing populations to enjoy the fruits of cheap and abundant energy in the 21st Century, the same way the developed world did in the 19th and 20th Centuries. There’s a catch, though, as there often is.  If we pull all that carbon out of the ground and release it into the atmosphere, we’ll cause catastrophic climate change, not to mention other forms of ecologic collapse of monumental proportion.

Here’s a great article that speaks to where we are in terms of the construction and operation of coal-fired power plants. Note that in five years, the amount of coal burned around the globe every year will increase by an additional 1.2 billion metric tons — an amount roughly equivalent to the current annual coal consumption of the U.S. and Russia combined.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

As this article suggests, everywhere one looks in the new energy industry one finds references to disruptive technologies, not only in the various “flavors” of renewable energy, but in the basic ways in which electricity is delivered.  Take DG (distributed generation) as an example.  Everyone agrees that a larger number of points of generation, closer to their loads, will create less line loss and higher reliability. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

RiechesBaird is an advertising/branding agency in Orange County California with which I’ve had an extremely friendly and productive relationship, going back almost 15 years.  I happened to be on their website just now, and came across this interview in which Ryan Rieches speaks with author, business consultant and entrepreneur Verne Harnish.

Harnish notes that sadly, where the U.S. and Germany are similar in many ways, e.g., GDP per capita, Germany exports four times as much per capita as the U.S.; even Spain exports twice as much as we do here.  When the recession came in 2008, the U.S. bailed out only the largest corporate entities and paid people not to work.  Not Germany.  Angela Merkel focused on keeping everyone working, regardless of the size (and political clout) of the employer.

The point? Perhaps the U.S. can learn something from the Germans, and build products that people want outside our borders.  And here’s an idea, as if you didn’t see it coming: clean energy.  It’s true (amazingly) that we ourselves have little reach for clean energy solutions; we seem to have no problem amping up fossil fuel exploration, building pipelines with obscene environmental characteristics, etc.

But since the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way, let’s foster innovation in cleantech – renewables in particular – even if the focus is export.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I’ve referred to my friend, Jim Boyden a few times here.  Jim got his Ph.D. in high-energy particle physics from Cal Tech the same year I entered kindergarten, and generously consented to an interview for my current book project, “Renewable Energy – Following the Money.”

In response to my piece on “fiddling while Rome burns” as an analogy to our lack of interest in addressing climate change, Jim sent me the picture to the left and writes:

Craig:  If you can’t read the caption, it’s: “My God, we’re out of gin!”  I had this on my office wall when I was working on climate change mitigation.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Here’s a terrific piece by Renewable Energy World’s Jennifer Runyon explaining the need for and status of changes in the way that clean energy projects are financed.   As it turns out, master limited partnerships (MLPs) and real estate investment trusts (REITs), vehicles that are integral to the financing of traditional energy projects, due to a quirk in the law, are not available to solar, wind, and their cousins. 

Several bills are making their way through the U.S. Congress that would put an end to the unfair imbalance here, but none has come up for a vote.  Here, Jennifer explains how Richard Kauffman, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, who came out of the private sector, explains how such a move by Congress would dramatically reduce the cost of capital for large renewable energy projects, while simultaneously providing five other major benefits.

As always, this whole discussion goes back to the same old place: all we’re asking for is a level playing field. 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

In a post yesterday, I tried to tie together the work that certain humanitarian groups perform together with our need for a progressive energy policy. The connection? Both are rooted in a viewpoint of the future, along the lines of the old adages: “A stitch in time saves nine” and “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Just like preventing gang membership is a great deal less costly and deadly than mopping up after the damage has been done, a forward-looking energy policy that curtails our addiction to fossil fuels will be a far easier pill to swallow than dealing with droughts, famines, dead oceans, extreme weather events, and potentially hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

If you’re at all compelled by this logic, you may be interested in this presentation of El Nido, the Los Angeles-based organization I mentioned in that post, which looks at the world of gang membership as follows: The cost to society of the average criminal gang member is approximately $2 million. If we can spend less than that (in El Nido’s case, a tiny fraction of that) to get that kid through school and into an honest, productive life, we have a huge bargain.

You may want to check out slide #8 for some of the most shocking ROI calculations you’ll ever see.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

It’s only been a few minutes since I posted this piece on my friend Brandi Veil and her unique approach to what she calls “humanistic sustainability.”  As I’ve already gotten some positive feedback, I consider this auspicious, so I thought I’d add a bit more content.

First, here’s the introduction she wrote to her speech at the World Information Technology (WIT) Conference presenting to the United Nations on Environment and Health.

Amidst the global crisis of a dysfunctional old paradigm, a new renaissance of human culture is underway.

A blossoming phenomenon of Transformational & Music Festivals, immersive participatory realities that are having a profound life-changing effect on millions of lives.

With attendance at Festivals growing in the millions annually, many attendees have had life-changing experiences at them and are deeply passionate about sharing the culture with their friends, family and social networks. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I thought readers would be interested in a presentation that a friend of mine, Brandi Veil, made recently at the 21st United Nations Conference on Health and Environment: “Global Partners for Global Solutions.”  Brandi is a wonderful person with a heart the size of  Texas.  She bills herself as an “Ambassador for Transformational Events,” and she really does have a considerable flair for pulling people together.

Again, here’s a transcription of her talk to the audience.  If, after reading this, you’d like to get involved, please let me know.

I am here today as an Ambassador of the festival culture to present you, a new audience, with new possibilities via new systems. I am a Hollywood event producer who was influenced by transformational festivals and has now made it my life’s mission to expose the many gifts of this community! I am here to alert you to a generational shift in global society driven by art, music and dance; and, to share with you a plan to guide these individuals into your organizations and communities to create a new type of workforce with new skill sets and values along with a plan, which I call “humanitarian sustainability”. WIT has invited me to present to you a possible means of developing and sustaining resources for the programs this conference has occupied itself with for over 20 years–Health and Environment. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Here’s an article the theme of which I’ve seen before, called behavioral economics.  In essence, people’s reaction to a certain subject, and their buying behavior, is to a huge degree a function of the words used to describe it.

I’m reminded of a discussion I had with economics professor Jason Scorse, Associate Professor and Chair of the International Environmental Policy Program at The Monterey Institute of International Studies, who helped me to understand the subject in preparation for my book “Is Renewable Really Doable?”

One of the key discoveries of (Nobel prize-winning behavioral psychologists) Kahneman and Tversky was this thing called “loss aversion,” meaning that the impact of losing something is much more impactful and has greater magnitude than the benefit of gaining something. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Friday afternoon I attended the holiday luncheon of the Maverick Angels, an investor club local to me here in Southern California.  I really like these people; they’re sharp, articulate, and they move swiftly when they like what they see.

In addition to their for-profit activities, in which they’ve enjoyed fantastic success, they generously support certain charities.  I heard a brief presentation from an older fellow with a kindly smile, a PhD in electronic engineering, long since retired.  He now serves as a consultant to non-profit organizations, including this one that deserves your attention: El Nido — a group that does one heck of a good job at keeping high-risk kids out of trouble.

Btw, what would you guess to be the average cost to society (more…)

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