I’m just not smart enough to prove it yet.

Those trying to feel better by investing in capitalistic/growth enterprises should reassess. I don’t have nicer language for it yet.

The Trump-loving relative mentioned in the post below is an aunt in Jacksonville, Florida. She’s lived in the same house since she was a little girl. I lived there a couple of years myself.

I called her last week on a whim and learned that she had been a week and a half from homelessness thanks to back property taxes and a series of financial calamities. I fixed the immediate problem and will work on a permanent fix.

If we had a UBI or pretty much any kind of social safety net left in the U.S. this wouldn’t have happened. This isn’t a one-off.

While I’m at it, my mother would have lived another 20 years if she hadn’t been too goddamned afraid of the BILL to go to the doctor. None of this is right, and none of it has to be this way. I’m so fucking angry.

“…then into limits could I bind my woes.” — Titus Andronicus

I’m rewatching Julie Taymor’s excellent Titus (1999), in which Anthony Hopkins gives his best performance.

I got to ask Taymor about the use of violence in the film at a screening of Fool’s Fire at (I think) the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). She said that the amount of violence onscreen was no more than in many contemporary action movies, but that she used it pointedly, which is why it registered so strongly with audiences.

Fool’s Fire stars Michael Anderson (Twin Peaks).

I’m just catching up with Dr. Stokes’ work. She co-hosts A Matter of Degrees—this podcast—and wrote the excellent Short Circuiting Policy (2020, Oxford University Press).

”Fossil fuel companies are tapping into America’s “best and brightest” at top banks, public relations and advertising firms, law firms, and strategy consulting firms.

“These organizations supply critical services to keep the fossil fuel industry humming: creative work, strategy, legal representation, financing. They are services that oil and gas companies require to remain powerful.

“In this episode (our first of the second season!) Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and Dr. Leah Stokes explore the different ways this “prestige problem” influences America’s white-collar workforce. And they’ll explore efforts to push back.”

As the U.S. reels from gas price spikes that echo the early 1970s OPEC crisis, the transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is getting renewed attention. What type of energy future we’ll get is pretty easy to envision technologically: Sensors, middleware, machine learning, and more advances on a modernized, decarbonized electric grid, all taking advantage of region-specific generation mixes and policies. Integrated supply and demand would let us integrate mass quantities of renewable energy into the grid (Bihn, 2022). Microgrids could increase resiliency and make shelters self-powered during disasters. This energy future would put us on a path toward energy sovereignty, and away from a focus on energy security that has us working the phones with Venezuela, Iran, and other countries to secure oil supplies whenever prices soar.

It seems like we’re poised to make it all happen. State- and regional-level plans are in place to make the change. In 2020, Oregon’s governor ordered state agencies to reduce GHG by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.​ The latest Northwest Power Plan was just approved in February. The Federal government, meanwhile, having passed a general infrastructure bill, seems unlikely to pass major new legislation focused on the energy transition. Apparently it will be leading by example instead.

Those looking to kick the transition from fossil fuels down the road are running out of options. Net-zero plans using the favored cleantech tool of carbon offsets are coming in for increasing scrutiny, with tree-planting sequestration schemes going up in wildfire. In Ukraine, we’re seeing that buildings can be razed, so even sequestration involving concrete isn’t final.

After the latest COP failure last November, climate scientist and Climate Ad Project co-founder Peter Kalmus delivered the kicker: We have about five years left to lock in 1.5C above pre-industrial levels (Kalmus, 2021). We’re at 1.2C. Pacific Northwesterners who experienced last summer’s heat dome or the flooding that cut Vancouver off from the rest of B.C. understand the implications (Sweet, 2021). Most current plans consider target dates of 2040 and 2050.

We know that we’re going to need pretty much all the renewable energy we can get. The main question is how quickly we can make it happen. Theories of energy systems change increasingly see a role for the social sciences, and suggest that they might help overcome shortcomings of the dominant Physical Technical-Economic Model and Total Resource Cost approaches (Lutzenhiser, 2014). Indeed, a social science perspective on carbon raises important questions about energy demand and usage; how might social mores and licenses change around the ethics of air travel, for instance? A consumer mindset has focused much attention on economics and psychology in climate policy, amounting to an ABC (Attitudes, Behavior, and Choice) model which has obscured other possible approaches at a time they’re desperately needed. (Shove, 2010).

Based on evidence such as the five-year timeline to lock in 1.5C, known spending requirements, and long-term sociopolitical trends, I argue that the future of energy through the mid-century will take one of two paths: The first is basically business-as-usual + renewables, with private investment paying for much of the needed materiel and expertise needed to reach our energy goals. The second looks radically different, and involves social revolution to break political stalemate and open the state spending coffers.

Either elected officials represent the will of the people and shift into funding and policy overdrive in the pursuit of climate justice—redesigning the “box” from the inside-out—or people will change it from the outside-in by altering the business model under which those officials operate.

An orderly energy transition is something of a technocratic ideal, using stakeholder engagement, policies, governance, and technologies to deliver energy justice. That path is increasingly difficult to imagine. Decades of underinvestment has created a backlog of work needed to modernize the electric grid. We’re facing a shortfall of hundreds of billions, at a time when we need the benefits that a modernized grid could provide (Yonker, 2022). There’s (expensive) work to be done, as Jeff Wilson detailed in The Manhattan Project of 2009. Merely leading by example but waiting for someone else to pay for it won’t accomplish the goal. Neither will replicating our current one-car-per-person system with EVs; entrusting the future to early adopter-driven market models is not a straightforward recipe for climate justice. Yet current constraints don’t leave room for much else.

The problem is that elected officials in the current duopoly (Democrats and Republicans) have increasingly served the interest of large donors first, making representative, procedural, and recognition justice theoretical for 80% of Americans (Massey, 2021). If nothing changes, private investment will rule: VCs, “cleantech” stock indexes, and ESG funds will seek the most profitable technologies. Considering that IOUs have pared investment lethally, the profit motive may be at fundamental odds with the need for laserlike focus on serving the public.

The second path to our energy future is already taking shape. When popular policies like the Green New Deal are thwarted, people take matters into their own hands. Extinction Rebellion-affiliated protesters have blocked fossil-fuel carrying trains in Portland by planting a garden on the tracks. The group has announced plans to block U.K. oil refineries in April, bringing civil resistance tactics used at Standing Rock to bear.

If civil resistance alone doesn’t get elected officials to deliver on popular energy policies, peaceful organizing and ballot-box revolution might. Creating alternatives to the 150-year duopoly would change the business model under which Ds and Rs work; if parties had to compete for voters and earn votes by delivering on campaign promises, it would help restore representative democracy. And we might finally get the energy transition Al Gore talked about in the early 1990s but never delivered. On this second path, the future of energy might just be decided in 2028.

Of possible interest: Energy Systems Change

References

Armstrong, F. and Walker, T., Spanner Films. 2021. “Jonathan Pie: The World’s End“.

Barney, Linda. GridForward.com. May 13, 2020. “Three Microgrids, Three Approaches to Resiliency for Our Region”.

Bhatnagar, Dhruv, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Bihn, Dan. Bihn Communications. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Extinction Rebellion. March 9, 2022. “Extinction Rebellion releases plan to block UK oil refineries in April”. Press release. 

Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As long as grass grows: the indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock.

Haaken, Jan. 2021. Necessity Part II: Rails, Rivers, & the Thin Green Line, and panel discussion with Columbia Riverkeeper.

Kalmus, Peter. “The failure at Glasgow and what needs to happen next”. Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2021.

Lutzenhiser L. “Through the energy efficiency looking glass”. Energy Res Soc Sci (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.03.011.

Malone, E. L., M. Betsill, S. Hughes, R. Kemp, L. Lutzenhiser, M. Moezzi, B. L. Preston, and T. O. West, 2018: Chapter 6: Social science perspectives on carbon. In Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2): A Sustained Assessment Report [Cavallaro, N., G. Shrestha, R. Birdsey, M. A. Mayes, R. G. Najjar, S. C. Reed, 

P. Romero-Lankao, and Z. Zhu (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 264-302, https://doi.org/10.7930/SOCCR2.2018.Ch6.

Munasinghe, Mohan. “Sustainomics Framework*.” Chapter 2. In Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century: Applying Sustainomics to Implement the Sustainable Development Goals, 2nd ed., 26–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. doi:10.1017/9781108241847.002.

O’Neill, Rebecca, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory presentation, Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Rosenbluth, Weir, Massey et al. 2021. Who Gets What: The New Politics of Insecurity.

Shove, Elizabeth. “Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change”. Environment and Planning A 2010, vol. 42, pp 1273-1285.

Steiner, Mischa. Awesense. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Sweet, Rod. November 17, 2021. “Vancouver cut off as ‘atmospheric river’ devastates infrastructure in British Columbia”. Global Construction Review.

Yonker, Bryce. GridForward. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Efficiency’s an Imperative, Not a Strategy

The IT’S EVERYWHERE Energy Star logo symbolizes both the promise and pitfalls of efficiency’s role in energy system change. The promise is that something like the LED lightbulb gains widespread adoption and saves squillions—that’s a technical term—of kilowatt hours. The pitfall is in squandering those gains by using more energy more efficiently. Using Energy Star-certified hard drives for bitcoin mining, perhaps. Getting the overall energy system to change will require a mix of Energy Star’s industry standards-setting approach, a willingness to use “inefficient” energy storage where and when it makes sense, innovative policy to support regional applications like marine energy, and some out-of-the-box thinking to ensure that induced energy demand doesn’t undermine it all.

At this point, we have a general sense of the energy system change ahead and efficiency’s role in it. As Amory Lovins argued in “A Farewell to Fossil Fuels”, changing the US energy system—a system change—from fossil fuels to renewables will require pursuing three agendas: 1) Radical automotive efficiency; 2) Efficient buildings and factories; and 3) “Modernizing the electric system to make it diverse, distributed, and renewable.” The resulting system is intended to be clean, reliable, and secure.

Energy leaders recognize energy efficiency’s importance. The Pacific Northwest’s focus on efficiency has made it second only to hydropower as an energy source (Energy Trust of Oregon, 2022). But “efficiency” doesn’t always translate into improved across-the-board outcomes. We don’t really take an Energy Star approach to automotive efficiency, for example. The EPA might set MPG requirements, but (e.g.) carveouts for SUVs means that social behavior enters into the equation; maybe someone really wants to drive an H3, affecting aggregate results. Similarly, increasing building and factory efficiency is major business, with software companies like IBM wringing savings from in-building and worker data. Awesense is optimizing the grid itself (Steiner, 2022). But are they serving ever-more efficient buildings and factories in fundamentally unsustainable activity? Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon, is about three times the size of a Home Depot, and they want to build two more facilities. How many is ok? Notably, these types of power users tend to guard power and water use as “trade secrets”, so how do we know if they’re using too much? (Thompson, 2022).

Modernizing the electric system, the third of Lovins’ noted agendas, offers an opportunity to put efficiency to use in different ways. Regional approaches to increased generation, like offshore wind and marine energy in the Pacific Northwest, are efficient. Keeping generation as close to users as possible minimizes and/or helps optimize transmission and distribution, which is inherently lossy.

Based on evidence such as Energy Star’s S-curve adoption success in electrical and electronic goods, cost-effectiveness of application-specific “inefficient” energy storage, and the need to harness localized power sources like marine energy and community solar, I argue that energy efficiency is an imperative transitioning away from fossil fuels, but focusing solely on efficiency isn’t a strategy in and of itself, and can induce demand.

Energy Star offers a window into how industry has viewed demand-side management, with “conservation” replaced by ever-more efficient technologies. The technologies have been successful, gaining widespread growth in an S-curve pattern. But when the technologies increase comfort and convenience, which they have, they risk increasing demand and usage (Wilhite).

About that “inefficient” energy storage: Batteries, as efficient and flexible as they are, won’t be the only story. At ~$200kWh (Jacobson, 2021), batteries are one of the most expensive ways to store energy. Borehole heat storage is far less efficient than batteries, but when storage is $1kWh, ~58% efficiency is fine. Similarly, nighttime storage in ice runs ~$38/kWh for cooling at Stanford.

Marine energy efficiency hasn’t been in question as much as cost. LCOE for a developing—albeit increasingly viable—technology has been overly limiting in determining its total value, which also includes grid stabilization and resilience. Fortunately, renewable energy integration has shifted focus from least-cost, solely large-scale, and static generation profiles to energy equity, resilience, resource adequacy. Marine energy proponents have noted that breakdowns for installation costs and the like helped the solar market grow. With solar installation now sufficiently standardized, groups like Energy Trust of Oregon are helping communities achieve energy justice. The group is working with Verde, African American Alliance for Homeownership, and others to build out community solar projects which will (efficiently!) generate power close to its point of use. (NREL, 2022).

Image: Round 3 Solar Energy Innovation Network Team locations

An equitable, resilient, affordable, and efficient energy system will require more than an EV in every driveway. We’ll need to encourage industry to make things which use energy efficiently, as Energy Star does. Many EV makers have noted efforts to make vehicles lighter, which can make them more efficient. At the same time, there are also an awful lot of electric SUVs and pickup trucks in the works. Optimizing building and factory energy efficiency seems like a no-brainer, but the use can seem less clearly related to energy equity and justice than (e.g.) community solar for homes. Energy systems change will take policy to harness regional resources like marine energy. It will require use of “inefficient” energy storage where appropriate. It will require projects like community solar. It may also require a national conversation on needs vs. wants. A well-constructed theory of change for energy systems shouldn’t be squandered on perpetuating existing problems.

Of possible interest: The Future of Energy Depends on Who’s Paying

References

Bhatnagark, Dhruv, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Jason Busch, Pacific Ocean Energy Trust. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Geels, Frank W. Theory Culture & Society. 2014, vol.31 (5) 21-40. “Regime resistance against low-carbon transitions”.

Goldstein et al. Electricity Policy. “Are there rebound effects from energy efficiency”.

Harris, Jeff, Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

International Energy Agency. Ocean Energy Systems. “Marine Energy Framework” and “Ocean Energy: Blue Economy”.

Jacobson, Mark. February 24, 2021. “100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything”.

Kaufmann, Betsy, Energy Trust of Oregon. Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Lovins, Amory. March/April 2012. Foreign Affairs. “A Farewell to Fossil Fuels: Answering the Energy Challenge

O’Neill, Rebecca, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory presentation, Winter 2022 presentation to Portland State Energy and Society class.

Shove & Walker. Research Policy. March 19, 2010. “Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life”.

Smil, Vaclav. “Energy Transitions Coming Transitions Expectations and Realities”.

Thompson, Jonathan. February 25, 2022. High Country News. “The Digital World’s Real-World Impact on the Environment”.

Wilhite et al. Consumer Behavior and Non-Energy Effects. “Twenty years of energy demand insight”.

Evidence like the linked transcript in this 2017 Observer piece suggests that the generational plan to make the Democratic Party more progressive will be thwarted. Hope everyone’s working on alternatives.

Image: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz plans the future.

This Bonneville Power Administration film features three songs by Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”).

“I guarantee you that the people of Portland are more tired of the cops’ shit than the other way around.”

Portland from the Left is an insightful show. Every town should have something like it.