Perilous Times Call for Transformational Thinking, and Action

Clint Wilder, Clean Edge
October 06, 2008 | 9 Comments

For three late September days in a traffic-clogged New York City, the famous and the powerful gather at the Clinton Global Initiative annual conference to share charismatic thoughts and large-scale commitments to address issues in global health care, education, poverty alleviation and energy and climate change. Attending the conference this year as a facilitator in the energy/climate change track, I heard inspiring words throughout each day from the likes of Bill Gates, William McDonough, Lester Brown, Tony Blair, T. Boone Pickens, Michael Bloomberg, Bono, Wesley Clark, Van Jones, and no less than three of the past four Nobel Peace Prize winners: Al Gore, Muhammad Yunus, and Wangari Maathai.

?But it was a line from Rocky Mountain Institute founder and energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins that, to me, best reflected the spirit of this conference — and conveyed a key message for anyone involved in meeting the world's energy challenges in these most troubled and perilous of times. Describing Ford Motor's 2006 hiring of CEO Alan Mulally, who had spearheaded Boeing's decision to focus on energy- efficient aircraft with the Dreamliner and other projects, Lovins said Mulally had come to Ford with "transformational intent." ?

?The Clinton conference, of course, took place against the backdrop of Wall Street's financial crisis playing out just a few miles downtown. We are in a time of staggering superlatives — a US $700 billion bailout package, a 777-point stock market drop, and a 19-square mile ice sheet (the size of Manhattan) breaking loose in northern Canada one month ago. In every facet of life — population, health, education, energy, environment, and now, financial markets, we face big, big challenges. But size alone will not create the solutions. We need transformational intent. ?

?The intent of Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit pioneer and founder of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, was changing the thinking around how to assist those at the base of the economic pyramid in one of the world's most impoverished countries. "We have to get out of the mentality that the rich people will do the business, and the poor people will get the charity," he said. "Don't call me a philanthropist. I'm a businessman." For more than 30 years, Grameen has extended micro-loans to more than 7 million people, more than 95 percent of them women. It has helped transform rural economies not only in Bangladesh, but through microfinance institutions supported by the Grameen Foundation in 25 other countries, including the United States. ?

?When it comes to energy, as Albert Einstein said, the serious problems we face today won't be solved by the same minds that created them. Offshore drilling won't solve our energy challenges, nor will Senator John McCain's proposed 45 new U.S. nuclear plants by 2030. "More of the same, only bigger" will not get it done. If we're going to address climate change in any meaningful way, shift the geopolitical dynamics of imported oil, and rebuild our beleaguered economy based on clean energy, we need dramatically new ways of doing things. ?

?The good news is that transformational intent is present and moving forward in thousands of clean energy, transportation, and green building initiatives around the world. In Israel and Denmark, where Silicon Valley entrepreneur Shai Agassi's Better Place aims to create nationwide all-electric car networks in both countries, with more to follow. In China, where the Joint U.S.-China Cooperation on Clean Energy (JUCCCE) non-profit is working with Duke Energy and GridPoint to deploy smart-grid technologies on a large scale. In Abu Dhabi, where the Masdar Initiative is constructing the world's first 100 percent renewable-energy-powered city of 60,000 people. And in Denmark again, where Social Democratic Party leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt says her nation intends to be the world's first carbon-neutral country (it's already 30 percent clean-powered today). ?

?Here in the U.S., Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz is investing US $3 billion in a 900-mile transmission line to bring wind power from southern Wyoming to the populations of Las Vegas, Phoenix and southern California. In the Pacific Northwest, Clean Edge and Climate Solutions are releasing a study, Carbon-Free Prosperity 2025, that maps out a transformative vision for the clean-tech future of Oregon and Washington. Google is investing in concentrating solar power, geothermal and other technologies to fulfill its tranformative mission: make clean energy cheaper than coal. In Newark, New Jersey, 39-year-old mayor Cory Booker is working with the Apollo Alliance and others to make his working-class city a model of green-collar jobs, cleaner transportation, and green buildings. And T. Boone Pickens, dubbed "the John Madden of new energy" by Tom Brokaw at the Clinton conference because of his current media ubiquity, is proposing massive changes in the way we generate electricity and power vehicles.

??I don't agree with all of the Pickens Plan, but its dramatic scale and ambitious targets for wind energy are great examples of what I'm talking about. I'm glad he's out there, with Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, advocating a dramatic new energy direction. Like the people driving the examples cited above and so many more, Pickens has transformational intent. We need it today in our financial system, and we damn sure need it today — and tomorrow — if we're going to have any hope of building a sustainable energy future. ?

Clint Wilder is Clean Edge's contributing editor, co-author of The Clean Tech Revolution, and a blogger about clean-tech issues for The Huffington Post. E-mail him at wilder@cleanedge.com.

9 Comments

Everett Williams
December 25, 2009

I have no problem with the electric sail idea, but it will not go out and get the asteroids necessary to supply and build a network of solar power satellites in GSO. You need to look at the Australian DS4G engine being tested by ESA or the VASIMR engine soon to be attached to the ISS. Both are capable of the type of thrusts necessary to move heavy objects at a reasonable rate. I am not interested in near term trips to Mars, because they will be of the same nature that our early trips to the Moon were. If we build an infrastructure fthat produces income from GSO and on the Moon, Mars will handle itself. If space travel is merely an expense, it will die out as Earth-side needs become more and more demanding. We must move forward or we will be forever foreclosed.

Evert Ervasti
October 11, 2008

Dear Everett,

see:
http://www.electric-sailing.com/ESTEC2008/
especially the document titled "Commercial applications".

Everett Williams
October 9, 2008

The one technology that promises almost unlimited, clean, continuous power is satellite based solar power in geosynchronous orbit. I can hear the catcalls now, most of the form of pie in the sky. This is nonsense. We have the gating technologies in hand, but it will take a concerted effort to transform those into a working system. There was a recent DOD study that laid out most of the basics, but essentially concluded that the system was impractical to build because of launch costs. Of course, their launch costs were based on the shuttle, which is the most inefficient launch capability ever created. Ignoring the current flawed Ares system, we can take the parts of the shuttle system, modified only slightly, and start punching 500 thousand pounds plus into space at a time, rather than the 50 thousand the shuttle puts up and at the same or less cost per flight. Diminishing the launch cost by a factor of ten makes building the prototype units reasonable to throw into orbit, but we should not stop there. We have the ability to go out into the asteroid belt and retrieve small(less than 100 meter) asteroids that are composed of almost pure metals, and carbonaceous chondrites that have the basis of most other materials that we need, and ice balls that can solve the remaining problem of supporting a large infrastructure in space. With the latest advances in ionic, constant boost engines like the VASIMR or the Australian DS4G, which are many times more efficient than our current thruster systems, and that can move large objects(the aforementioned small asteroids) fairly quickly into Earth or Lunar orbit. From there, using the power generated by the early Earth launched systems, we can produce the rest of the system with minimal input from Earth, mostly personnel and computing and manufacturing hardware. The power is then transmitted to ground stations of approximately 10x13 kilometers at about 85-90% efficiency, there to be used as any other power. That is our future.

Everett Williams
October 9, 2008

I've spent years listening to this and while I certainly sympathize with and somewhat agree with Mr. Malik's and others' ideas, we cannot go backwards. Unless there is an almighty die-off, most of what we do here on Earth will have enormous side effects, no matter which way we go. Geothermal, as noted above is, is in some ways very attractive, but it has not been proven at the large scale and over time, and there are huge problems possible. In more than a few situations around the Earth, pumping water into formations has destabilized and caused slippage in those formations, creating earthquakes. When you put water at high temperature down into rock that is at a much more reactive temperature and pressure than on the surface, you dissolve large amounts of minerals, creating major problems with the piping and formation flow.

Ground based solar doesn't work on cloudy days, and it is not a means of base power production, only peak power, at least at the industrial level. Storage to level out the use of it and wind power is very expensive and consuming of resources. Wind cannot be a source of base power either, as, even with averaging across large areas, it is somewhat intermittent.

The various schemes for carbon recirculation through alternative fuels require large amounts of land and huge production facilities that we will not have as population increases.

Nuclear generates heat and also generates large amounts of byproducts, many lethal for thousands of years. There is technology that can effectively burn up those byproducts, but the expense is high, and the dangers manifold.

We need a clean source of power that, in the long run, does not use up large amounts of resources on this planet, and there is only one such, and that is the sun. Fortunately for us, the Earth does rotate, but unfortunately for us, that makes solar power episodic, requiring huge storage facilities if we are to depend on ground based solar of any variety.

continued -

Aman Malik
October 9, 2008

Everybody has a view point and everybody is correct. The real motive is that we realize that climate change is really happening. All the modes of energy like wind, solar that we have today are not self sufficient. Different green technologies that are even though small have to be clubbed together and an impact has to be made. The problem of global Warming has not arisen in a day and cannot be solved by a single powerful technology.

Thomas Schmidt
October 9, 2008

"If we're going to address climate change in any meaningful way, shift the geopolitical dynamics of imported oil, and rebuild our beleaguered economy based on clean energy, we need dramatically new ways of doing things. "

Get the PV industry to lower the cost of PV modues.
The cost of PV modules is the most given reason why, I cannot install more privately owned, residential PV arrays.
Everyone I talk to wants PV but, when I show them the cost of PV, even after the government asistance, you would think I had slapped them on the face by the look on their faces.

Here is a "transformational" idea for you, make RE affordable to everyone.

Russ Finley
October 9, 2008

Yeah, right.

"...Mulally had come to Ford with transformational intent ...."

Amory is probably hoping for some Ford contracts for his carbon fiber company. Ingratiating oneself is how to get things done in corporate America. The 787 has yet to fly. Mulally's big idea was to resrurect the Taurus logo on some car:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/25/143455/772

Or maybe I'm just bitter that America's incompetent leadership floating on a sea of incompetent yes men has run us aground ;-)

Mary Saunders
October 8, 2008

We're looking at critical mass and tipping points soon. It probably is the rich who will lead, because they are the ones who have dollars to burn. But it's going to be the wacky, out-of-the-box old and young rich.

My friends who travel say that people on the street want the curious, friendly, cute Americans to come back, and they plaintively ask when that is going to be. They know ordinary Americans are as frustrated with the corruption and bombast of politicians as they are with theirs. The naked, transparent cruelty of our politicians has come to rival the worst in other places.

Who got to meet Wangari Maathai? I am so jealous! Do they have I Have a Dream for old women? Maybe next year.

Dominic Jermano
October 8, 2008

Geothermal Development is by far the best choice in the energy deliberations. Wind pwr is ugly ruining landscape views, and the whirly sounds that occur at peak wind.....and a lot of times the wind doesn't blow...the same with Solar, which in my opinion also contributes to Global Warming when it becomes like a heat collector spewing heat into the air, and and reflecting light around...not to mention its inactivity when the sun doesn;t shine due to weather and day night sequences......Geothermal prevents earthquakes, and works day and night....is a clean energy resource and prevents Global Warming....You guys are wasting your time and money on 2nd rate alternative options.....

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Clint Wilder

Clint Wilder is contributing editor at Clean Edge, a research and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, Oregon, focused on the business of renewable energy and other clean technologies. He is the co-author of The Clean...