Updated: Schwarzenegger endorses McCain

Earlier today Schwarzenegger endorsed McCain for president (no clip yet). What was interesting were McCain's comments. They were brief but totally dedicated to green technology and the importance of solving the problem of global warming for future generations.

Updated with clip (McCain's comments half way through):


It appears McCain is not going to take Romney's attacks on his position on global warming sitting down. This is a good thing and could portend a positive competition between McCain (assuming he is nominated - which seems probable) and the Democratic nominee.

But there are still a lot of uncertainties about how this will play out. With the economy weakening the presidential election debates on global warming may yet go in the wrong direction.

Recycled content

Blue Man Group was here last week. I missed them. Bummer. But here's their great video on global warming. Yea, old news but it's cool.



I hear that blue is the new green after all (no this isn't serious journalism). Yea, I'm stretching the tie-in...

Make trees happy - install solar

A hubbub has broken out in Sunnyvale between two neighbors over solar access. It seems one neighbor has solar panels that have become shaded by trees in their neighbor's yard. The neighbors with the trees have refused to negotiate trimming them so the solar panels are not shaded.

This has become escalated with the involvement of the Santa Clara County District Attorney who has move to enforce a 1978 solar access law.

It affects only trees planted after 1979, and bans trees or shrubs from shading more than 10 percent of a neighbor's solar panels between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
It does not apply to trees or shrubs that were there before the solar panels were installed. But - and here's the key distinction - it does apply to existing trees and shrubs that later grew big enough to shade the solar panels. A violation is an infraction, like a parking ticket, but with fines of up to $1,000 a day.

Evidently, this is the first time the law has been enforced.

The original article in the SJ Mercury was followed today by an unfortunate column by Patti Fisher which shed more heat than light arguing that "tree-huggers should trump solar-lovers" even though what is at stake is only trimming the trees a few feet.

Everyone loves trees and by all means we should promote them but to suggest that 'tree lovers' should oppose trimming misses critical points.

An estimated 6 million acres of forest have been lost in the past decade to the bark beetle in Alaska due to reduced frost days arising from global warming. In 2006 I saw for myself when visiting my mother's home town of Cordova the formerly green mountains turning grey for all the dead trees. Not only that but huge fires have engulfed western states including California. And increasing drought conditions in California will also certainly damage trees throughout the state. These are consequence of our addiction to fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere.

This is not to mention the loss of our sons and daughters to wars in the Middle East.

Is trimming a few trees really too big a price to pay for energy security and preventing catastrophic climate change?

Trees next door and world-wide will sing with joy if they ever come to see solar panels on every roof.

Los Altos signs MCPA with some drama

Earlier this week from Margie:

Great news! Tonight (Tuesday night) the Los Altos City Council voted unanimously to support the staff recommendation to:

(i) sign the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement; and
(ii) appropriate funds to conduct a greenhouse gas emissions inventory for City operations.

They deferred staff's third recommendation to form a task force for making recommendations on a climate protection plan, though. Instead they asked for input from the City's Environmental Committee.

So Los Altos now joins 20 other Cool Cities in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties that have signed the MCPA.

After team leader Kacey Fitzpatrick's excellent presentation, there were numerous folks who spoke up at the meeting in support of the Cool Los Altos initiative, including students, residents, businesses, the Chair and other members of the Environmental Committee, a rep from Union of Concerned Scientists and me on behalf of climate expert Stephen Schneider (per a letter he sent to Council). But there was one curve ball.

One Environmental Committee member, sent a letter to Council members, in the 11th hour, asking them to defer decisions on all three items until the Committee exercised due diligence. She reiterated this request during public comments. When the Committee Chair was asked by Mayor Carpenter to respond to these concerns, the Chair expressed surprise and noted that the committee had sufficient time to consider their decision and support, which they offered in a January 14, 2008 letter to Council.

Nothing like a little drama. We were on the edge of our seats.

In the end, the Council did not see the need for delaying the first two items thanks to the leadership of Council Member David Casas and Mayor Carpenter!

(my emphasis) More in the SJ Mercury.

A somewhat incomplete action though on the part of the Los Altos council. Doing an inventory of city operations is all well and good but city operations emissions accounts for less than 3% of the city's overall emissions. It's essential for every city to do a community-wide inventory and action plan. Let's encourage them to move forward expeditiously.

Jumping the gun: Name change tomorrow to Climate at Bay

Folks,
I've decided to do the name change tomorrow. No specific reason except that I'm planning a long-ish post and it's a good one to kickoff the new name.

Just a reminder, San Mateo Climate Action (the blog) will become Climate at Bay. At that time, the URL will change! The new URL will be http://climateatbay.blogspot.comhttp://www.climateatbay.net and the feedburner RSS feed will also change accordingly.

Sustainable Silicon Valley and Sustainable San Mateo County will also begin participating on the blog! They're doing great work and it will be good to have their perspectives here.

So, mark your calendars and get your RSS feeds ready...

Updated: Turns out I can have the old name redirect to a new and better URL (the wonders of technology! -- Google makes things quite seamless). So you can find Climate at Bay at the old URL but also at the new and improved www.climateatbay.net. And miraculously, RSS feeds are available at both. However, at some point I may unplug sanmateo-climateaction.blogspot.com (both URL and feed) so I recommend switching your feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ClimateAtBay

Peak oil is here

Two years ago I had an opportunity to very briefly meet Al Gore at a screening at the then newly-released An Inconvenient Truth. In my few seconds I asked him if he thought peak oil was real and would play a part in motivating the solutions needed for climate change.

He replied by saying that "peak oil" is an argument between the geologists and the economists. Gore's point was that while there may be a point that current production capacity will be exceeded by demand, increases in costs will then make other formerly uneconomical petroleum stores more cost competitive. One such example is Canadian shale oil stores - one of the most destructive and polluting energy sources. Reaching expensive petroleum stores gets easier when - if you're ExxonMobil - you make 4th quarter earnings
of $10.37 billion - a paltry $111 million a day.

However, it increasingly looks like the geologists are winning the argument.

Green-collar jobs

Green collar jobs are garnering increasing visibility. From the CS Monitor:

On the campaign trail and during Monday's debate, the Democratic presidential candidates touted "green-collar jobs" as a solution to unemployment...

Clean energy has become a $55-billion-a-year industry worldwide, and its rapid growth is fueling a shortage of workers in emerging hubs like California's Bay Area. Advocates for the poor say there's an opportunity here to rebuild an industrial base of well-paying, low-skilled jobs, but some critics question whether they are overstating the job potential of the sector.

"Nearly every city is vying to become a hub of clean technology or green-collar jobs. Every community college that has any budget to develop a new program is looking at a lot of these new technologies," says Joel Makower, executive editor of greenbiz.com in Oakland, Calif.

The Bay Area and Northern California generally are ground zero for this trend. Green building, solar, and even plumbing are redefining what a good blue collar job is. This momentum is reinforced by where investment dollars are going.

California, as usual, scored the largest haul. Venture capitalists poured $1.79 billion into the Golden State's green companies last year, most of them in the Bay Area. That's 45 percent of all green investments in North America, according to data from the Cleantech Group, an organization that tracks and encourages investment in the field.

In 2006, California's green tech companies brought in $1.18 billion, or 41 percent of North America's green investments.

Blog rename reminder: Climate at Bay

Just a reminder, starting February 1st, San Mateo Climate Action (the blog) will become Climate at Bay. At that time, the URL will change! The new URL will be http://climateatbay.blogspot.comhttp://www.climateatbay.net and the feedburner RSS feed will also change accordingly.

Sustainable Silicon Valley and Sustainable San Mateo County will also begin participating on the blog! They're doing great work and it will be good to have their perspectives here.

So, mark your calendars and get your RSS feeds ready...

San Mateo County moving on green building

Just in from Gladwyn:

We passed a green building ordinance through the San Mateo County Environmental Quality Committee. It goes to the board of Supervisors for approval after two public hearings. The ordinance was sponsored by Supervisor Mark Church. Approval is expected. ...

The key features are a mandatory 50 points on BIG and or LEEDS and incentives like faster permit and inspection turnarounds for 75 and 100 points or equivalent, a $10,000/- bond released after green certification, and a commercial voluntary participation of LEED over 5000 sq ft with incentives of faster permitting and inspection.

In staff report to BOS we stated that the ordinance was intended to be revenue neutral. That means that as green buildings move to the top of the stack for inspections and permits, brown structures sink down and will get delayed. The cost implications are much larger on commercial structures.

Our task force will stay in place and add more mandatory requirements for 2009 as a results of this ordinance are analyzed. We will also add requirements for tenants and smaller remodels.

Regards,

Gladwyn

GreenTech investment continues to soar

Who says there isn't green in green?

Concern over climate change pushed the clean-tech sector to a record of $2.2 billion invested in 202 deals, a dramatic jump from the previous record year of 2006, when $1.5 billion went into 128 companies. The sector includes alternative energy, energy efficiencies, recycling and water purification.

More from the SJ Mercury on the overall investment picture and on the doubling of investment by Silicon Valley VC firms. And California is benefiting in a big way.

Green building momentum?

News reports have announced that Home Builders Association of Northern California have asked all 101 bay area cities to establish mandatory green building standards. Increasingly people are recognizing that there is economic opportunity in the green economy.

According to the press releases:

HBANC President Joseph Perkins also announced aggressive new goals for reducing overall energy consumption in all new homes that its member builders construct by 50 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020 and to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels in the same timeframe. Again, the goals make HBANC the first building association in California and possibly the nation to voluntarily commit to such standards.

On the face of it, this seems like a good thing. And HBANC is working with Build It Green, the green building standards organization in Alameda County that has built significant credibility in the environmental community. Build It Green's "Green Points Rated" system is seen as a model for smaller buildings in particular, such as single family homes, whereas LEED as seen as more appropriate for larger buildings like offices and multi-family homes. A number of cities including San Mateo are looking at combined GPR/LEED approaches in their plans.

But the devil is in the details. Home builders have long opposed green building standards, arguing that it makes homes more expensive. But that is debatable. With early planning many argue that it is no more expensive to build green and it is even being done with affordable housing.

The real question is what exactly is HBANC promoting. That's unclear. Will it be a meaningful standard or an effort to preempt stronger standards than many cities are implementing? After all, Build It Green's standards are about more than direct energy costs but also about sustainable wood, reduced toxics and more - all of which have other costs including energy lifecycle (many toxics are petroleum based, unsustainable logging aggravates global warming - and water efficiency is urgent). Build It Green's reputation suggests positive potential but if this is a new standard only slightly ahead of Title 24 (California's strong and continuously improving efficiency standards) that's not much. According to Build It Green, they are negotiating a memorandum of understanding with HBANC now so time will tell.

New Blog Name in Feb: Climate at Bay

By popular demand (ok, on the excellent suggestion of Rick Row at Sustainable Silicon Valley) this blog will be renamed to better reflect it's regional emphasis.

And the winner is...

"Climate at Bay"

Starting February 1st, San Mateo Climate Action (the blog) will become Climate at Bay. At that time, the URL will change! The new URL will be http://climateatbay.blogspot.comhttp://www.climateatbay.net and the feedburner RSS feed will also change accordingly.

Sustainable Silicon Valley and Sustainable San Mateo County will also begin participating on the blog! They're doing great work and it will be good to have their perspectives here.

So, mark your calendars and get your RSS feeds ready...

Hydrogen hiccup

While ebbing a bit, there's still a lot of hype around hydrogen. And California is trying to take the lead in this area by setting up some hydrogen fueling stations.

But it all looks rather desperate and even modest steps are having trouble.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's vision of a "hydrogen highway" - 100 fueling stations by 2010 that would make it practical for California motorists to use non-polluting hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles - has hit a roadblock.

Each of the last three agencies that received state funding to build a fueling station has decided not to pursue the project, including Pacific Gas & Electric's recent decision to abandon building a key Bay Area fueling station in San Carlos.

Hydrogen is rife with problems. Little discussed are the storage issues to be resolved ($ub req). Basically, putting enough hydrogen into a small tank to ensure reasonable driving distance is no simple matter.

Typical hydrogen is stored in pressurized tanks as a highly compressed gas at ambient temparature, but the tanks do not hold enoug gas. Liquid-hydrogen systems, which operate at cryogenic temperatures, also suffer from significant drawbacks. Several alternative high-density storage technologies are under development, but none is yet up to the challenge.

Those alternatives include things like hydrides and "absorbents."

The other problem is that hydrogen isn't a raw fuel, it must be produced. The lifecycle of hydrogen production - which is very energy intensive - plus transportation, plus leakage (it's a modest greenhouse gas) makes it no better than gasoline ($ub req).

So what does hydrogen have going for it that petroleum companies like so much? It mirrors the current system - centrally produced liquid fuel that needs distribution. They certainly don't want to cede fueling automobiles to electrical companies or, worse yet, distributed renewabled, which is what will happen if plug-in hybrids become the norm. But that looks nearly certain - road tests for production vehicles are in progress.

San Mateo to do... not sure what

The San Mateo city council met today to review the Sustainable Initiatives Plan. Developed in a 7 month process by the city appointed Sustainability Advisory Committee, the plan proposes:

* Quadrupling the rate of solar installation
* Meaningful green building guildlines like LEED Silver for commercial and Build It Green for residential
* Emissions reduction targets in line with California's AB32
* A pilot study to evaluate the built environment as a prelude to a retrofit program
* Water and waste reduction targets
* Transportation alternatives and improvements
* and more...

After a presentation by consultant Jill Boone, who did an excellent job, and much supportive public comment, council members discussed the plan. Council members made supportive comments but also said they would do further review as part of the budget process beginning the end of February. No concrete commitments or next steps were offered and it has been removed from the Jan 22nd agenda.

Hmmm....

Maybe hybrids aren't the future...

Check this out from some distant neighbors:



Looks excellent for many select applications and maybe a next generation small car.

Serious green through drywall

I'm finally tackling some home improvement and painting one of my bathrooms and kitchen. It's getting easier and easier to find things with less impact. We bought our non-toxic, low VOC paints at the Green Building Exchange in Redwood City. It's working out great.

And you know green building is going mainstream when something as mundane as drywall gets serious investment to become more environmental.

As widely discussed, buildings produce some 40% of the CO2 nationally through the energy they consume. Less discussed is the energy intensive production of building components.

One local company in Sunnyvale Serious Materials is looking to address a major component. Recently getting an influx of $50 million from three VC firms Serious Materials is looking to dramatically reduce the CO2 impact of drywall. Turns out it's a big deal:

Making drywall is a hugely energy-intensive process, accounting for about 1 percent of U.S. energy consumption and 25 billion pounds of CO in the air each year.

In contrast, his greener drywall, EcoRock, is a zero-emissions product. The company plans to begin selling it in summer and ramp up to full production by fall.

Zero emission is undoubtedly an overstatement since it takes energy to produce and transport but Serious does claim a 90% reduction in energy to produce it. The Mercury News has the story. More green product suppliers here.

The other huge CO2 source in construction is cement. Estimated to be responsible for 5% of total global CO2 emissions and rising.

Campbell, Gilroy initiate steps

In SVLG’s January 1st “CEO Show” podcast, Dan Furtado, council member of Campbell, reports that the city is taking “definitive steps towards addressing greenhouse gas emissions” including an emissions inventory and community outreach. He also highlighted a LEED municipal building and affordable housing. About a 1/4 of the way into the show.

Updated: Gilroy council member Peter Arellano also talks about making the city "more green, more environmentally friendly" and put it into the planning of the city. A little vague but hopefully something. Half way through the show.

Chuck Reed also talks about the San Jose Green Vision 3/4 through the show.

Many predictions that solar is going to take off in 2008.

Oil hits $100 per barrel

From the Oil Drum:

Today, someone in the NYMEX pit session paid $100.00 per barrel for front month crude oil. (Logical for it to happen during a TOD holiday short staff period). Despite the talking head rationale for today's $4 rally, the underlying reasons for the 8 year+ climb in crude are geologic in nature. $100 oil in itself is no big deal -- its 1% higher than $99 oil. But it serves as a milestone reminder that the future is likely to be less 'easy', and perhaps dictated by new rules. Questions abound: will high prices bring about more production? Will high prices begin a "hoarding" phenomenon among exporters and producers? Will $100+ oil spur energy alternatives with the scale and quality of energy dense crude oil? Is this even possible? Will society start to realize the dichotomy between natural capital and financial capital? Will $100 oil reduce demand in developing countries? Will OECD oil-importing countries (like the US) take the lead on changing the cultural carrot of consumption that drives energy use?

More on the matter in this interesting set of interviews with Vijay Vaitheeswaran (correspondent for The Economist) and Dr. Robert L. Hirsch (primary author of Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management). While Hirsch asserts that peak oil is here he argues for the worst solutions. Nevertheless, it is a thought provoking discussion:



Bottom line for us here though is that we need to do more of what we're doing - leading the charge for efficiency and renewables.