Burlingame town hall meeting Saturday on climate plan

Terry Nagel, councilwoman of Burlingame, deserves real kudos for ushering this process towards fruition.

The Burlingame Green Ribbon Task Force will hold a town hall meeting from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Burlingame Recreation Center, 850 Burlingame Ave. Those in attendance will get a glimpse of draft recommendations of the Climate Action Plan for reducing the city’s carbon footprint by focusing on small changes people can make at home or within a business. Opinions will be gathered regarding the various options to shape recommendations to be made to the City Council this summer.

“There are additional benefits to the Climate Action Plan recommendations besides reducing our greenhouse emissions. Many of the recommended climate action plan strategies we are considering can also save residents and businesses money by reducing energy waste,” said Burlingame Councilwoman Terry Nagel, who serves as the Green Ribbon Task Force chair.

The focus is on easy ways to create energy and water efficiency for both residents and businesses.

Sunnyvale passes green building ordinance

Sunnyvale passed a green building ordinance putting into place the policy established by the council late last year. It's a forward looking policy with strong targets.

Taking effect Jan 2010 it will cover:
(a) Newly constructed residential buildings;
(b) Residential alterations;
(c) Newly constructed non-residential buildings that are 5,000 gross square feet or more.
(d) New large non-residential interiors.
(e) Major alterations of existing non-residential buildings.

LEED Silver and BIG 70 serving as the baseline for a system that is differential by size and ratchets up over time. Full details of the staff report are available here.

Hopefully, this will be a standard for others to meet.

The San Jose Mercury offered this short article.

Sunnyvale approves green building ordinance
By Cody Kraatz
Sunnyvale Sun
Posted: 03/25/2009 12:58:27 PM PDT

Sunnyvale has approved a sweeping new green building ordinance that will phase in requirements and incentives for environmentally sustainable building practices in houses, condominiums and commercial buildings throughout the city.
The new standards, which the Sunnyvale City Council approved in principle in August, will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2010. After a series of meetings with homeowners, property owners, businesses and design professionals, the city delayed the rollout for a year to reduce the impact during the recession. This also allows more time to train city staff and educate the public.

The council approved the new ordinance 4-3 Tuesday night. The building standards will be updated periodically to match increasingly stringent state building codes and higher expectations of green buildings. The first phase will include lower standards — including some that are simply educational — while the third phase that kicks in during January 2013 will have higher requirements.

Barbara Fukumoto, a leader of the environmental group Sunnyvale Cool Cities, praised the program.
"Green buildings are good for the occupant, good for the owner, good for public health and good for the environment on which we all depend," she said.

Contact Cody Kraatz at ckraatz@community

San Mateo "SMART" goes door to door

Hoping to get ahead in the race to go green, the city of San Mateo put volunteers on foot throughout the North Shoreview neighborhood this weekend surveying residents about their environmental habits and household energy use.

SMART, or San Mateo Acting Responsibly Together, is a phased public outreach campaign kicked off last November. The campaign goal is to promote sustainable practices by educating people on how to change simple, daily behaviors so they can reduce energy use. By doing that, the city meets state mandates to lower carbon emissions by 2020.

The effort was a pilot doing both community education and gathering key energy use data with which to shape next steps to offer incentives for energy efficiency throughout the city. Participating residents gained the opportunity to win a free top of the line home energy audit from Sustainable Spaces (1st place, valued at almost $700) or from HomeZ (2nd and 3rd place valued at almost $300).

This is a good step in the right direction by San Mateo. And word is that development of a commercial and large residential green building ordinance is on the agenda later this year.

SSMC Awards

Sustainable San Mateo County hosted its 10th annual sustainability and green building awards at the SSF Convention Center on Wednesday night. It drew more than 450 people and it seemed to be a resounding success. This year's sustainability winners were: Yerba Buena California Native Plant Nursery; RWC's Civic Engagement Efforts; Peninsula Traffic Congestion Relief Alliance; and Webcor Builders. The green building awards went to the Skillman Residence in San Carlos and the Portola Valley Town Center.

The event was touted as a "near zero-waste event." There were sustainable and organic foods and wine (I had the Alaskan salmon -- yum!) and SSMC partnered with SSF Scavenger to recycle and compost everything. SSMC purchased three tons of offsets through CarbonFund.org.

It was another great event by a great local non-profit. Well done to the staff and volunteers at SSMC.

How Jon Stewart & Jim Cramer affect energy

And here is a fascinating discussion on the Stewart v. Cramer spectacle which seems to have nothing to do with energy until the punch line. The financing troubles affecting renewables may be even more apparent for the fossil fuel industry.

Silicon Valley knows something about boom and bust cycles of course and at least Th!nk seems to be cobbling its act together. With some support from Kleiner Perkins.

Say What?

"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right?"

--- RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

From The Daily Dish.

The problem is even bigger than it looks - exponential growth vs physical limits

It's not just climate. Exponential change


But exponential growth must meet physical system limits.


Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that system change can happen extraordinarily fast also works in our favor. Reach the tipping point and things really move.

Distributed solar applications slow

New solar applications have slowed.

"We are seeing lower numbers across the board, although it's too early to say if it's a sustained decrease," said spokeswoman Jennifer Zerwer of Pacific Gas & Electric. The utility administers the state rebates available to customers adding solar through the California Solar Initiative program.

Solar-sector players remain bullish on the long term, and hope the combination of an increased federal tax credit passed late last year and the stimulus package approved in February will persuade people to add solar. They note that more megawatts of solar power were installed in California in 2008 than ever before.

But PG&E received only 747 rebate applications for new solar projects on homes and businesses in the first two months of the year, Zerwer said. That was down 24 percent from January and February of 2008 when 985 applications were filed.

Many factors are at work here - of course the credit crunch, decline in housing starts and commercial building, but also the extensive negative press last year about whether the solar incentive credits would be renewed probably also played a role with this lagging indicator.

Carrotmobs (?)

Very clever and a good idea. I'd been wondering when the flashmob concept might be turned to something socially practical.

More PG&E SmartMeters coming

SmartMeters moving forward.

On Thursday, California's Public Utilities Commission approved a $467 million expansion of Pacific Gas & Electric's SmartMeter program. As a result, analog electric meters that have been used since the days of Edison will be replaced over the next few years by digital units with wireless communication technology that will allow PG&E to read meters remotely.

The utility said the upgrade will improve power system efficiency and let it know when power demands increase and outages occur. Eventually, it said, consumers will be able to use the SmartMeter device with a thermostat or a computer monitor in their homes to track and adjust consumption of power by their appliances and lights.

Currently, a meter reader physically visits each home and apartment building to record energy use over previous weeks. The system provides no way to monitor the energy performance of individual appliances.

Mine were installed about 6 weeks ago. More on the SmartMeters here.

Could get pricey, especially for San Mateo County

According to a new study by the Scripps Institute.

At least $100 billion worth of homes, businesses, power plants, ports, and airports in California could be at risk from extreme coastal storms by 2010, estimates a new assessment of California’s vulnerability to rise in sea levels.

Some 480,000 people living in coastal counties could be affected, according to the study.

San Mateo County is among the areas with the highest risk.

Bay Area Mayors

Touting green plans and opportunities.

Climateatbay.eco? Al Gore Likes it

The campaign to get ".eco" as a domain name on the web recently gained traction by getting an ally in Al Gore.

I learned of this from one of my former college mentors at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Mich. St. -- who's not a fan.

[H]ere’s my gripe: Just whose awareness are we increasing? This sounds an
awful lot like preaching to the choir. Like it or not, you slap “eco” onanything
- let alone something as high profile as a top level domain - and you’ve
immediately polarized your audience.It has a tremendous appeal to certain
consumers of news and information.

For others, it inspires eye-rolling disdain for yet another “greenie”
initiative - one now linked to the even more polarizing Al Gore. How many
peoplesuspicious of the legitimacy of environmental issues will turn to a .eco
domain for information? That’s why journalists who cover the environment are
neededmore than ever. I’ve chosen my words carefully here. We need journalists
who cover the environment, not environmental journalists.

I somewhat agree with his point. But I'd also add, where are the parameters for such a domain name? Could Bjorn Lomborg, notorious climate change skeptic, start a website with .eco? Can you imagine Big Coal setting up www.cleancoal.eco?

Doesn't environmentalism include social well-being as well? Poverty, malaria, world hunger have huge implications on the environment. Do those causes get tagged with .eco? Probably not, but who's to say?

Rain not enough

One of the less well understood impacts of climate change is that it doesn't simply reduce total rain. It actually changes the precipitation pattern. In California, we may get basically the same amount of overall precipitation but it will be less snow and more concentrated downpours - a recipe for less available fresh water because much more of it will be lost as runoff. After an extremely dry fall, we are now experiencing larger than normal rain for this period of time.

Not surprisingly, recent rain has not been enough to reverse the drought.

California officials say recent storms haven't dumped down nearly enough rain and snow to make a big dent in the state's ongoing drought. Wendy Martin, who leads the Department of Water Resources' drought division, says storms in the last few weeks helped bring this year's rainfall up to about 87 percent of average.

Over the next 10 days, another round of wet weather is expected to bring about 6 more inches of rain. While recent storms are helping this year's totals, California is in its third straight year of drought.

Officials say major reservoirs are at less than one-third of their capacity, and those storage supplies are critical to the water supply used by two-thirds of the state's residents and millions of acres of farmland.

This has caused the governor to declare a state of emergency.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency Friday because of three years of below-average rain and snowfall in California, a step that urges urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent.
...
Mandatory rationing is an option if the declaration and other measures are insufficient.
...
Agriculture losses could reach $2.8 billion this year and cost 95,000 jobs, said Lester Snow, the state water director.

The state has created a website with an array of resources.

California of course is not the only one with the problem.

The ministry's Web site called the current situation "grim," with 80 percent of the farmland for winter crops affected—a total of 1.1 million acres (483,000 hectares)—because of little precipitation, high temperatures and decreased river flow.

The country's worst drought in nearly five decades affected a huge swath of northern and central China, and Beijing declared an emergency at the beginning of the month after a drop in rainfall caused winter wheat crops to wither and left millions of people in eight provinces without adequate drinking water.

Large sections of the Yellow River have dried up, with only parched and cracked riverbeds remaining.

U.S. Oil Demand Hit Lowest Point in Decade

A silver lining from a climate perspective.

U.S. oil demand in December was revised down by 4.0 percent from an early estimate to a final number of 19.199 million barrels per day, bringing consumption for the year to its lowest level since 1998, the Energy Information Administration said Friday.

U.S. oil demand in December was 794,000 bpd lower than the previous estimate of 19.993 million bpd and down 1.520 million bpd, or 7.3 percent, from oil demand of 20.719 million bpd a year earlier, the agency said.

U.S. oil demand for 2008 was down 6.1 percent, or 1.261 million bpd lower, to 19.419 million bpd, compared with 2007, the lowest yearly demand level since 1998, the EIA said.

Oil in turn has dropped in price to under $45 per barrel. But this is a very mixed blessing as transportation sector renewables are now more challenged to compete. And there are further ramifications.

Currently world oil consumption is only down by a few million b/d from the all-time high levels of 2007-8. If this level of consumption holds, then the current OPEC production cuts of 3-4 million b/d seem to be on track to reduce stockpiles and force prices higher. The other side of the coin, however, is that the global economic situation is deteriorating far faster than most expected. It is possible that world oil consumption could quickly fall from a high of 86 million b/d in 2007 to 80 or even 70 million b/d simply because consumers can no longer afford and industries no longer need oil products in such volume.

In this situation, a new set of forces would come into play. While OPEC seems to be able to cut oil production by 3 or 4 million b/d, deliberately cutting production by 10 or 15 million b/d seems out of the question. The economies of the exporting nations that are already in financial trouble would simply collapse if oil exports were reduced by 50 percent. The consequences would be political turmoil and likely changes of government. The over-supply of oil would force prices lower. Analysts are already predicting that if oil goes to $20 a barrel there will be widespread reductions in oil production around the world as many fields can no longer produce oil this cheaply.

What Matters -

Here is a great site for some intelligent dialogue on climate change:

McKinsey&Company:  What Matters. There are many responses to the question: What is the most rational way to deal with the impacts of climate change? 

Berkeley solar revolution begins

This is one revolution the Che Guevara probably did not have in mind.

"I'm a guinea pig, but there's no way I could have afforded solar otherwise," said Jeanne Pimentel, an editor who has 11 solar panels on her Allston Way home. "Because of this, I can help solve our energy problem without putting any money up front."

Berkeley's program allows property owners to pay for solar panels through a 20-year assessment on their property taxes. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. rebates and new tax breaks guaranteed in the federal stimulus package reduce the cost further, so most homeowners begin saving on electric bills immediately.

Twelve states, including New York, Washington and Colorado, and 50 California cities, including San Francisco and San Diego, are following Berkeley's model and are closely watching how the program unfolds.

The assessment is tied to the house - not to the owner - and the cost benefits are immediate and significant. This is a big deal.