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America’s credit crisis should come as no surprise to anyone whose been paying attention. We discussed this about a year ago in our post “Inflation vs. Deflation,” and if you read that post, you will see links to discussions we’ve had on this topic that go back as far as 1998. Because this has been brewing for a long, long time. And the question still remains – inflation or deflation – pick your poison. Our belief is inflation is a far more palatable option.

Back around 2003 I remember debating economic policy with a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I still recall the shock this person displayed when I downplayed the mitigating value of the “current account” when discussing America’s trade deficit. Apparently the conventional wisdom held that since foreign investment makes up the difference between how much America pays for imports vs. how much America collects from exports, the trade deficit of some $60 billion per month that America has racked up now for years on end is of no consequence. The problem with that sanguine assessment of our trade deficit is the fact that Americans borrowed all this money to make all these purchases, and eventually there is no financial instrument left to facilitate more borrowing. Quite simply, we can no longer borrow at a faster rate than we can afford to make repayments.

America’s debt binge really began about 30 years ago, in the mid 1970′s, which is the last time Americans exported more than they imported – also about the time credit cards started to really get popular. For a long time, America’s trade deficit was relatively insignificant, and foreign investment indeed more than made up for the shortfall. And if the monthly trade deficits hadn’t widened precipitously over the last ten years or so, they might have been sustained indefinitely. After all, America provides an enduring safe haven for investors, and exports security to the world. We keep the sea lanes open, we have a democracy that works, we are stable, we are innovators. And our perennial trade deficits mean our dollars finance the industrialization of emerging nations. Almost everybody was happy.

Alan Greenspan, Chairman Federal Reserve Bank, 1987-2006

It isn’t possible to quickly summarize where things started to slip out of control, but in ticking through the factors, it is very, very important to recognize there was no single party, nor a single ideology, that ought to be held solely accountable.

The repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999, which lifted crucial restrictions on the degree to which banks were permitted to make speculative investments, combined with the refusal of then Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan to raise interest rates so as to contain “irrational exhuberance” (his words) in the stock market, probably started to accelerate the slide that has resulted in the current predicament.

When the internet bubble burst, which any financially literate curmudgeon would have seen coming for years, the damage to the economy was severe – but rather than endure a downturn, mortgage lending entered a dangerously aggressive phase to pick up the slack. Replacing the collateral of inflated internet stocks, without skipping a beat, came the collateral of inflated home equity. Some would call these loans predatory, and they would be right to say so, but these “no doc,” “introductory rate,” “negative amortization,” “fixed but resetting in 2-3 years,” loans were also permitted thanks to intense pressure from both sides of the aisle to make housing “affordable.” Since it was impossible to make home prices fall, the only solution was to make home mortgages cheap. And since there is no such thing as a cheap home mortgage, “introductory rates” were the only way left to “get people into a home.”

So who enjoyed this mess that it is so easy to blame on Wall Street? People who suddenly thought they needed a 3,500 square foot McMansion and didn’t care if they were borrowing 10x their annual income? People who thought they would borrow against their inflated home equity at a floating rate so they could drive around in a 6,000 lb. SUV? Economic planners in Washington who didn’t dare tell the American people that an economy can’t live forever on credit – that it doesn’t work that way in the real world? What about all the public employee unions who used the ersatz prosperity of the internet bubble followed by the housing bubble to negotiate pensions that have created another crippling liability for the American people – and who used their financial might to take control of our elections and politicians at the state and local level? Or who didn’t want to lobby for mortgage lending reform because that might lower home prices, which in turn would lower property tax revenues? There were a lot of pigs at the trough, and none of them apparently cared about what would happen when it was time to pay the piper. And plenty of them knew better.

For these reasons, blaming the “free market” is a futile, shallow, potentially dangerous exercise. Power corrupts equally, and if popular sentiment leads our politicians to thoughtlessly eviscerate the prerogatives of our free market while leaving big government and big labor more powerful than ever, it will be a mistake of historic proportions.

The solution is to regulate mortgage lending and derivative trading in measured, not draconian steps. And any “solution” to Wall Street “greed” is empty if done without also recognizing and attempting to regulate the greed that is endemic in all sectors. To nationalize the banking industry without merging every public employee pension fund with the social security fund – newsflash, at this point only social security is even slightly solvent – is almost as absurd as the proposed nationalization of our energy industry to supposedly fight an alleged climate crisis. In both cases the villian is the market, and the good guys – translation, beneficiaries – are the government and public sector labor. Such blind scapegoating ignores the nature of man. To embrace such simplicity would be tragic for the United States and the world.

We need free markets, and good regulations, and good deregulation. We need to recognize that inflation is our only way out of this, because only through inflation can we systematically and somewhat equitably erode the real value of these mountains of debt we’ve collectively incurred. Failure to avoid this calamity should not be another excuse to bash free markets because responsibility for this failure is shared by everyone in this imperfect world. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, free markets are the worst economic system known to man, except for all the other ones.

This decentralized treatment plant has the capacity to serve 1,500 households.

Reducers being installed for the air release valves in drip field return lines.

When six land developers wanted to build contiguous subdivisions on the periphery of Cave Springs, Arkansas, they realized one system to handle wastewater for all six subdivisions would be a more cost-effective solution than six individual systems.

Our solution, proposed to the lead developer, Brett Hash (Northwest Services LLC), required two phases: a 92,400 GPD installation, to be followed by a 320,000 GPD installation. The first installation, called “Fairway Valley Phase 1,” went into operation in January 2008 and treats water from 450 homes.

This first 92,400 GPD system was designed by Daniel Lazenby of ESI Engineering, located in Springdale, Arkansas. The major components are:

- 1,250 gallon STEP (septic tank effluent pumping) systems

- 33,000 gallon equalization tank including two 30-GPM pumps and a control panel

- Moving-bed biological reactor

- Submerged fixed-film aeration unit

- 15,000 gallon settling tank

- 15,000 gallon sludge-holding tank

- 25,000 gallon dosing tank including four 55-GPM (2 horsepower) and two 85-GPM (3 horsepower) turbine effluent pumps

- 1/2 inch pressure-compensated driplines on 2 foot centers including valves and headworks

- Four custom-designed control panels

The completed treatment plant, occupying a surprisingly small footprint, just awaits some landscaping to completely blend in.

The system has been operating now for nearly one year. Wastewater flows from the homes to the gravity fed STEP systems, where in-turn it is pumped to force mains varying from either 2″, 4″ or 6″ diameters. These force mains run to a lift station which pumps the sewage through a 10″ trunk line to the 10′x53′ equalization tank. Pumps then send timed increments of sewage into the rest of the treatment system. When flows exceed the 92,400 GPD capacity, the phase two system will be activated.

The operation of the treatment system provides a good example of how decentralized sewage treatment plants can deliver solutions not only more cost-effective than individual home or neighborhood systems, but also are cost competitive with larger scale municipal systems. From the equalization tank, the sludge is pumped into the stainless steel reactor chamber, where aerators create turbulence that tumbles the sewage, creating a moving bed. Bacteria grow on 1″ round plastic disks that are free floating and have honeycomb interiors that allow scouring and slouging. This pretreatment can reduce BOD and TSS by 50-60 percent; the moving bed also eliminates dead zones.

From the reactor chamber, effluent flows next into the submerged fixed-film chamber. Microorganisms digest more sludge, and fine air diffusers mix the effluent, allowing the sludge to settle. Sludge that settles onto the bottom of the tank is pumped into a sludge-holding tank, where liquid that may continue to rise from sludge in the sludge holding tank is in-turn pumped back into the equalization chamber.

Installed supply and return lines in dripfield.

As effluent is clarified in the fixed-film chamber, it rolls over a weir into a settling tank where BOD and TSS are further reduced to a level of 15 mg/l, which is compliant with the septic code and ready to go to the dosing tank in preparation for pumping to the dripfield. The dosing varies according to each dripfield since they have different loading rates. The largest dripfield has four zones totalling 100,000 feet of tubing, and is directly beneath a golf course driving range. The dripfield that will be used in phase two will have six zones and will lie beneath a fairway.

Our solution allowed the developers to actually build at a higher density than they would have been able to if they had constructed individual septic systems per home – they ended up building on average 3 homes per acre instead of the originally planned 1.5, and the STEP tanks were installed and connected to the phase one treatment plant as the homes were built. Although the microorganisms in the treatment plant take longer to establish themselves since the initial demands on the plant are well below its capacity, as the flow increases the microorganisms will build themselves up until the plant is at full capacity.

The treatment plant was sited across the parking lot from the clubhouse at the local golfcourse, allowing a relatively central location relative to the six subdivisions and, of course, convenient proximity to the open space on the fairways for the drip systems. The drip lines were buried 10 inches deep with an emitter every two feet. The discharge was designed to be level with the roots to irrigate the grass and enhance evapotranspiration or soaking into the ground.

Once the system was installed and operating, the developers handed the system over to the city.

Tom Bartlett is the CEO of Aqua Tech Systems, specializing in the decentralized approach to wastewater systems and management. Serving a wide range of private and public clients, Aquatech utilizes a collaborative approach with equipment companies, land planners, engineers, private consultants, utility providers, lending institutions and contractors to develop tailored solutions for infrastructure design. Founded in 1999, Aqua Tech Systems and its affiliates are professionals dedicated to providing wastewater solutions for the growing needs of today’s communities, providing the necessary resources to allow their clients to make decisions that are economically sound, environmentally responsible and socially equitable. Based in Arkansas and servicing clients all over North America, Aquatech can be reached at 479-527-9880 and Tom Bartlett can be reached directly at 479-530-7922 or emailed at tom@aquatechsys.com

There is an interesting recent report on IndianAutoBlog entitled “Introducing The Blade Runner.” It describes (with ample concept drawings) an intriguing idea – a bus that operates with two sets of wheels, one for roads and one for rails. If the bus is operating on roads, the railway wheels retract into the underbody of the vehicle, and vice versa. The Blade Runner concept is being pioneered by Silvertip Design in the United Kingdom. It is great to see new ideas, but some commentary is in order.

First of all, anything that helps to move mass transit off of urban rails and back onto roads is a good idea. Despite persuasive light rail scams that have helped – along with public employee pensions – to pretty much bankrupt scores of major American cities, there is rarely a sound justification to build light rail. A combination of roads and busses can offer cost-effective, relatively low maintenance solutions to mass transit, using one conveyance – the road – that accepts a variety of vehicles from individual automobiles to busses to trucks. No rail corridor can ever hope to match the versatility of roads, which is why rail passenger transit should be emphasized, perhaps, in fast intercity modes and within extremely high density cities, but cannot be easily justified in other circumstances.

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The “BladeRunner” road/rail vehicle concept. (Photo: Silvertip Design)

A large independently powered passenger railcar that can whiz along from city to city on rail – presumably at higher speeds than on the freeway – and can then transform itself into a bus to negotiate city streets and arrive at a variety of dispersed destinations – is a very interesting concept. It reduces the need for comprehensive rail at the same time as it helps justify the construction of new roads. Could this solution work on the same rails as freight? Another source of waste in our transportation infrastructure is that we now have three or more modes of rail corridor – high-speed, light rail, regular all-purpose including freight and passenger (this should ideally be the ONLY mode or rail), and intercity such as the BART system in the San Francisco Bay Area. If smart cars can allow us to move more cars, faster, on exisiting roads, can technology allow us to move more modes of cars and trains on fewer modes of rail? Again, versatility – you aren’t trapped on the rail – make multi-modes of transportation including mass transit and personal transportation much easier to evolve on next generation roads and freeways.

There are other concepts that could also be interesting – what about trains that have an efficient way to allow commuters to get their cars onboard? This has never been tried, other than for certain charter tourist applications where, for example, an entire trainload of cars is delivered – along with their owners – from Frankfurt to Barcelona, and two weeks later returns to transport cars and humans back to Frankfurt. But this process consumes an entire afternoon, as the cars are driven onto the train one by one. Is there a faster way to do this? Probably not.

All in all, practicality is what makes roads a wiser choice than rail in most cases. This practicality is based on additional assumptions, however, that not everyone may agree with. (Reader please note – we welcome and respect divergent points of view.) Here they are:

WHY ROADS AND BUSSES ARE A BETTER SOLUTION THAN LIGHT RAIL

(1) The war on the car is extremely short sighted – the car is becoming relentlessly cleaner, smarter, safer and greener, and soon any objections to the car based on these criteria will no longer be credible.

(2) Cars will drive themselves within a few decades at the most, allowing seniors to maintain independent transportation even after they can no longer drive. Also, once cars drive themselves, drivers will be able to multi-task while driving, taking away one of the benefits of riding a train.

(3) Cars provide security and privacy that cannot be found on a train.

(4) Most areas, California in particular, have room for more roads, and the solution to traffic congestion is to have wider roads and lower density suburbs – precisely the opposite of the conventional wisdom.

(5) The notion that “vehicle transportation miles” needs to be reduced by making taxing cars and taxing large suburban yards – effectively denying that lifestyle to anyone who isn’t wealthy – has more to do with a misanthropic socialist agenda than any alleged “science” relating to greenhouse gas.

(6) Technology is delivering new sources of energy and materials far faster than they are being depleted, and in any case, cars, busses and freeways consume less resources than a combination of light rail and freeways.

When you try to develop rail transit and roadways, neither are done well. In California, we haven’t relieved traffic congestion because we haven’t tried. California has nearly 40 million people driving on freeways designed to accomodate 20 million people. In California, money that could have been used to build more roads and freeways has disappeared instead into public employee pension funds, into the pockets of environmentalist nonprofits and their attorneys, and, of course, to construct light rail that hardly anyone uses.

Coal, a globally used fuel source, is also the reason behind most of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. GreatPoint Energy has developed an alternative method to getting the energy from coal with reduced manufacturing cost, almost no emissions, and less complicated production steps.

Traditional methane production facilities house numerous components: First, coal is burned into syngas (a carbon monoxide and hydrogen mix) inside a gasifier at 2,500F. Other machines feed oxygen into the gasifies to facilitate the process. The resulting syngas is then placed into a reactor where it is transformed into methane. GreatPoint facilities do not require the extra step in the reactor since the whole production to create their patented “bluegas” occurs in the gasifier.

GreatPoint describes the general methanation process on their homepage: “The first step in the “bluegas” process is to feed the coal or biomass and the catalyst into the methanation reactor. Inside the reactor, pressurized steam is injected to “fluidize” the mixture and ensure constant contact between the catalyst and the carbon particles. In this environment the catalyst facilitates multiple chemical reactions between the carbon and the steam on the surface of the coal or biomass. These reactions catalyzed in a single reactor generate a mixture predominately composed of methane and CO2.” The end result of the process yields 99.5% pure methane.

More details and a diagram of the process are found here.

The catalyst is the key behind the whole process: By using a catalyst to start the coal-gasification system, the temperatures needed to burn the methane out of the coal are reduced. In fact, the natural heat released by the methanation of syngas is sufficient. This is a benefit for facilities who may want to adopt GreatPoint’s methane production process since cheaper reactor components (not needing to withstand so much heat) are no problem. An added benefit is that less expensive feedstocks like tar sands and petroleum coke produce pipeline grade methane in these unique conditions.

This low cost, clean fuel source is an environmentally friendly alternative. In fact, blugas production facilities recover almost all the contaminants and “, roughly half the carbon in the coal is captured as a pure CO2 stream suitable for sequestration,” explains GreatPoint.

The Cambridge, Massachusettes company’s most recent success story involves sealing a deal with the Datang Huayin Electric Power Company, Ltd. to build and operate a natural gas production facility in Guangdong Province, China capable of processing 1500 tons of feedstock daily. Not a bad start.

Coal is still easily accessible and incredibly cheap-especially when compared to natural gas drilling. In a 2007 in-depth article written by Technology Review, CEO Andrew Perlman is quoted saying that “We can take coal out of the ground and put it in a natural-gas pipeline for less than the cost of new natural-gas drilling and exploration activities.” Clearly, methane is an attractive fuel source. If not for the environemntal benefit, then for the price.

COAL RESERVES IN THE UNITED STATES

Approximately 1,146 million tons of coal was mined in the USA in 2007, enough to provide about 23 quadrillion BTUs, or (coincidentally) 23% of the total energy consumed in the USA in that year. One “short” (metric) ton of coal, on average, contains 20 million BTUs of energy, or nearly 6.0 megawatt-hours. This figure must be adjusted downwards when calculating actual megawatt-hours recoverable from coal due to efficiency losses. (Source: Energy Information Administration)

One big problem of converting to solar generated electricity is what to do when the sun goes down. To ensure electrical current on the grid doesn’t sharply fall off, requires an industrial-scale electrical storage system to smooth out short term fluctuations. It’s a problem at the heart of realizing a renewable energy economy.

There’s an added urgency for storage systems when considering the California Public Utilities Commission recently mandated that retail sellers of electricity purchase 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2010, and the New York Public Service Commission is mandating 24 percent by 2013.

The quest for a large-scale electrical storage system is a complex and challenging proposition. Being able to stockpile electricity for later use has been an area of active research projects for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences. There are six promising energy storage technology research areas being pursued: pumped hydropower, compressed air energy storage, batteries, flywheels, superconducting magnetic energy storage and electrochemical capacitors. Because of the wide range of applications, there’s no one storage technology that’s suitable to span the power requirements from the low end of hundreds of kilowatts to ten gigawatts.

This proposed compressed air storage solution will store any surplus electricity from the grid. (Photo: Argonne National Labs)

And there are several start ups like EEStor, AltairNano and A123 trying to crack open the problem with varied approaches for industrial scale storage device that connect to the grid.

What to do now in terms of storing energy?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemist Daniel Nocera and his postdoctoral student Matthew Kanan devised an innovative, low energy approach for extracting oxygen and hydrogen from water using small amounts of electricity, common chemicals and a room temperature glass of water. Removing these elements from water is no simple feat. It typically requires lots of energy and lots of maintenance to make it work.

The beauty of the MIT scientists’ discovery is the elegant simplicity of the science at work. The researchers announced their discovery recently in the journal Science.

It’s a given that oxygen and hydrogen are energy rich fuels. So it makes sense that some research efforts have focused on using solar electricity to spit water into those elements. That would generate an energy source, which could be stored long after the sun has set.

Here’s how it works.

To generate oxygen, the researchers had room temperature water and then mixed in cobalt and phosphates. In that mixture, they inserted a glass electrode that conducts electricity. When a current was applied to the mixture, a dark film formed on the electrode and tiny bubbles of oxygen started to appear. The two researchers analyzed the film on the electrode and determined that the cobalt-phosphate mixture was present.

Nocera and Kanan think this mixture acts as a catalyst to break water molecules apart and thus creating oxygen gas. What’s especially intriguing about the water splitting effort is that hydrogen nuclei are released during the process as protons and pick up electrons which allows them to convert back to hydrogen at a partner electrode. It’s this release of hydrogen which has tremendous potential for generating one of the most abundant and cleanest forms of energy known to man.

The MIT researchers also found evidence that the cobalt and phosphates catalyst mixture seems to regenerate itself. That bodes well for a far simpler system for oxygen extraction, but needs further experimentation to confirm.

The catch is there’s still a good deal of work to do. And it will take several years to scale the bench-top science research into industrial scale systems and test them. But the researchers believe they have the right stuff to help power a sustainable energy system, green and efficient for future generations.

In 2004 author Michael Crichton published “State of Fear,” a novel that he uses as a platform to attempt to debunk global warming alarm. Whether or not one finds Crichton’s arguments compelling generally governs how someone might characterize his views on environmentalists and environmentalism. But Crichton, in his own way, is himself an environmentalist. Having obtained a transcript of a recent speech by Crichton on environmentalism, what follows is our synopsis of some of the key points he makes:

“DDT is not a carcinogen…the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people…”

“Second hand smoke is not a health hazard and never was.”

“The evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit.”

“There is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere in the 21st century.”

“The percentage of U.S. land that is taken for urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%.”

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State of Fear) by Michael Crichton

This is a lot of fairly contrarian stuff, but Crichton is correct about DDT, and assessing DDT – along with second hand smoke – rests on basic toxicology. Properly applied, DDT is a fantastic solution to malaria, and banning it instead of properly regulating its use has been a tragic mistake. Obviously second hand smoke with extreme exposure is harmful, but Crichton is saying the criteria being used to justify smoking regulations are far below genuinely harmful levels.

Our commitment to publishing skeptical analyses relating to global warming and global warming policies is well documented, but Crichton’s statement regarding low levels of urbanization is another area where we add conviction to principle. There is plenty of land in the United States, definitely including California. Declaring “open space” to be endangered is ridiculous. This fatally flawed argument – now buttressed if not guaranteed by the trump card argument of supposedly stopping global warming – is the justification to force people into ultra-dense, punishingly regulated and taxed urban bantustans inside the “green line,” or the “urban service boundary.” It is dangerous nonsense. Here’s one more of Crichton’s contrarian zingers:

“The Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing.”

We are constantly trying to get good information on this and it is astonishingly difficult, given how fundamental these two observations are towards assessing global climate change. But there is strong evidence supporting Crichton’s claim that the total ice mass of Antarctica is increasing. There is data indicating increasing or at least stable rates of snowfall in the interior, as well as data that the total surface area of the icecap is increasing. Furthermore, other than in limited areas where there is rising geothermal heat, or the waters around the relatively insignificant Antarctic Peninsula, most of the ocean around Antarctica is getting colder. In all cases this information is hard to find and often conflicting. Read our Climate page for much more.

Yet through all this, Crichton is an environmentalist – a Crichtonian environmentalist – but nonetheless someone with environmentalist sentiments. Consider this:

“It is incumbant on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved.”

Environmentalism, according to Crichton, has gone well beyond this invocation, and has become a movement that cannot admit to past or present mistakes or excesses. He believes environmentalism has fulfilled an innate urge that urban atheists find fulfilling as an alternative to religion. This may be a bit much at least insofar as environmentalists, including Crichton himself, come from an infinite diversity of faiths and personal perspectives. But Crichton is on to something when he questions the reactions he elicits from many environmentalists to, for example, his observations regarding DDT, second hand smoke, global warming, urbanization, the Sahara or the Antarctic. Why is debate closed on these issues when they can be challenged on a factual basis? Why can’t the facts speak for themselves? The intense reactions environmentalists have displayed towards Crichton are unfounded unless something more powerful than reason is involved – belief, ideology, passion, a primal inner need for meaning and mission.

Crichton’s opening remarks included compelling reminders that humanity has always adapted and humanity has relentlessly improved the collective well being, and this is continuing. In his closing remarks he warns how politicized and entrenched environmental organizations have become, stating “what more and more groups are doing is putting out lies, pure and simple, Falsehoods that they know to be false.”

Of course everything Crichton says is not true, just as everything the current environmentalist establishment maintains is not false, or unhelpful, but in his final remarks, here, he also described his state of fear, and mine – and to paraphrase Czech President Vaclav Klaus – what is at stake, our global climate or our freedom? Or according to Crichton,

“In the end, science offers us a way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race.”

Up to 300 million people die from malaria every year. A female mosquito, riddled with malaria parasites, is responsible for transmitting the disease. The malaria parasites are carried in the mosquito’s saliva, which mingles with a human’s blood once they are bitten. Now in the blood stream, malaria parasites travel to the liver and multiply until they burst out of the liver cells and migrate into red blood cells. The infected individual is overrun with symptoms, ranging from, vomiting, convulsions, anemia, renal failure, tingling skin to coma and ultimately death. The waves of fever typical of malaria correlate with the parasites exploding out of the bulging infected red-blood-cells within the host’s body. This terrible disease is one of the most common in the world.

Medication does exist, but the sad irony is that the poorer countries with the highest concentration of malaria can not afford these artemisinin-based drugs. Artemisinin, the only real effective malaria medication, is derived from wormwood. Its production is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process. With this in mind, Amyris Biotechnologies set out to engineer a microorganism to produce the drug. In a sense, Amyris is now using one microbe to kill another.

MALARIA ENDEMIC COUNTRIES 2003

In most countries with endemic malaria, the disease risk is limited to certain areas.

A visit to Amyris’ homepage gives readers more of an insight to how much potential there is with biotechnology: “Amyris Biotechnologies is translating the promise of synthetic biology into solutions for real-world problems. Building on advances in molecular, cell and systems biology, we are engineering microbes capable of producing high-value compounds to address major global health and energy challenges. We are employing these living chemical factories to produce novel pharmaceuticals, renewable fuels, and specialty chemicals.”

Amyris has found a way to genetically manipulate microorganisms into producing artemisinin. Amyris succeeded in developing these living medicine factories with the help of U.C Berkeley labs, the Institute for One World Health and with a $ 42 million grant provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Amyris is not only dedicated to fighting malaria, however. Another major venture involves the “development of a fermentation process that uses custom-designed microbes to renewably produce second-generation, high-performance biofuels that are cost-effective and compatible with current automotive and distribution technologies,” explains Amyris. These gas and diesel substitutes are produced with the same feedstocks that are used to make ethanol, such as sugar cane.

Amyris has received worldwide recognition for their innovative ideas: In 2005, Amyris Biotechnologies was named a winner at the World Technology Network. In 2008, history repeated itself when Amyris had the honor of being voted the biofuel category winner at GoingGreen 2008.

In our interactive spreadsheet “How Much Electricity for all Commuters? ” you can calculate what it would take to replace our combustion-driven automotive fleet with electric vehicles. The assumptions that the spreadsheet default to (which you can change to anything you wish) indicate that based on 4.0 kilowatt-hours per mile, and 40 miles per day of average driving per vehicle, it would take 10 gigawatt-hours to power 1.0 million electric vehicles. At ten hours of off-peak charging per night, that would be an additional 1.0 gigawatt of off-peak energy going into the grid per each additional 1.0 million electric vehicles. But if the winds come and go, and the solar peak is in the middle of the day, where will this energy come from? Intermittant renewable sources of electricity require unprecedented ability by the grid to store energy in order to flatten the transmission loads, to harvest electricity and store surplus electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and to deliver this electricity during the demand peak as well as during the night when electric vehicles are recharging.

There are two ways to solve this challenge; both well underway. At the large utility scale there are plans to develop megawatt-hour storage farms, as we report in “Megawatt Storage Farms.” But at the residential and commercial scale, there are kilowatt-hour solutions that combine electricity storage with smart systems to make each storage node aware of the activity on the grid; the availability of electricity, the price of electricity, the stress on the grid. These systems therefore are not only storage solutions, but act in concert with each other to discharge stored electricity when prices are high on the grid, and to collect and store electricity when prices are low. The combination of megawatt-hour utility scale solutions and millions of smart, virtually integrated kilowatt-hour solutions play a critical role in the development of renewable electricity as well as the mass proliferation of electric vehicles.

GridPoint’s Energy Manager (Photo: GridPoint)

One of the early leaders in kilowatt-hour scale storage solutions is GridPoint, reported on last year in our post “Gridpoint’s Storage+ .” At that time Gridpoint already had hundreds of their “Connect Series” units, storing up to 12 kilowatt-hours each, being tested all over the United States.

The market seems to be taking GridPoint seriously, since on Sept. 23rd they announced a $120 million new equity financing, bringing the total raised in that company up to $220 million. An interesting question as Gridpoint and other decentralized energy management systems emerge is to what extent they will focus on enabling centralized utilities to remotely monitor and manipulate large electrical appliances in private homes, and to what extent they will focus on facilitating abundant electricity through harvesting and storing privately owned renewable electricity. Both directions are viable, the question is which will be emphasized.

GridPoint has also just announced the acquisition of V2Green, a Seattle-based company that has developed the “V2Green System, an integrated client-server solution, [that] establishes intelligent, two-way communication between plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVS) and the power grid. The flow of electricity to and from these grid-aware vehicles can then be managed by utilities, within parameters set by vehicle owners.” If GridPoint can integrate their grid-aware onsite storage systems with grid-aware onboard electric vehicle storage systems, they will definitely maintain their lead in the race to bring to market decentralized, smart electricity storage solutions.

GridPoint is not alone in the race to deliver products to integrate decentralized renewable electricity sources with storage and management solutions. Another pioneering company in this race is Solar City, fast becoming the market leader in residential photovoltaic installations, as well as the much vaunted Tesla Motors, who are now in production with their Tesla Roadster and who have announced a more affordable “Model S” as their next product. Between Gridpoint, Solar City, and Tesla, you have an example of a company delivering a decentralized solution in all three areas of the new electric age; storage, generation, and mobility. Expect each of these three companies, as well as the countless others who are emerging, to roll-out companion products that will overlap into the other areas, blurring the lines between which solution provider is fulfilling which niche.

Most encouraging of all is the area in common between these three sectors of decentralized electricity is the smart, grid-aware integration software they are developing. This is also the area where the most unique intellectual property and cutting edge innovation is taking place. Because ultimately, Gridpoint, Solar City, and Tesla are systems integrators; like their counterparts in the PC industry, they are dependent on component manufacturers to deliver the enabling breakthroughs such as batteries and photovoltaic panels. A complex and robust business and technology ecosystem is developing as the electricity economy emerges.

Back in March 2008 we first posted an essay entitled “Rational Environmentalism,” where we explicitly stated fifteen principles that we believe summarize our editorial position on what environmentalism should be, versus what environmentalism has become. We did this because we had just been noticed – perhaps we should consider this an honor, but we don’t – by a professional PR firm whose charter is to smear anyone who questions global warming, or the radical policies being advocated to mitigate alleged global warming.

This post is to restate those principles, because we want to make certain our position is clear. We don’t consider EcoWorld to be a “greenwashing” website, because greenwashing is the process of obfuscating facts and presenting misleading information in order to further the public relations agenda of a polluter. We don’t think that’s right. We think pollution should be cleaned up. But we also believe environmentalism needs to be rational, not extreme, and our mission is to rescue environmentalism from the radicals. So here are these fifteen precepts – in brief – and if you wish to read them in their entirety, please click here to the original post:

ECOWORLD’S PRINCIPLES OF RATIONAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

(1) We believe in emphasizing limited government, free markets, and individual liberties.

(2) We believe “smart growth” is damaging the economy and the environment.

(3) We believe there is not compelling evidence that human CO2 emissions are causing potentially catastrophic climate change.

(4) We believe there is abundant land, and “urban service boundaries” are meant to inflate the price of homes to increase property tax revenues to the public sector.

(5) We believe California’s “Global Warming Act” is a tactic to reduce public entity budget deficits through fees and hidden taxes (such as CO2 emission auctions).

(6) We believe budget deficits can be eliminated by placing ALL retired workers in America on social security and medicare, including retired public employees – and NOT through global warming taxes & fees.

(7) We believe nuclear power is safe, and Yucca Mountain is a safe repository for nuclear waste.

(8) We believe the “alarm industry” is far better funded, by 100 to 1 or more, than the “denial industry.”

(9) We believe cars, busses and roads are a far, far more efficient solution to mass transit challenges than light rail.

(10) We believe CO2 is the LEAST of our air pollution concerns, and we should focus on reducing genuine air pollution.

(11) We believe if there are regional climate impacts caused by man, they are more the result of deforestation, aquifer depletion, and desertification – than atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

(12) We believe that many green entrepreneurs and green politicians have been corrupted by the fascistic urgency of the global warming message, and are unscrupulously exploiting it.

(13) We believe centralized mandated solutions to alleged global warming will inhibit innovation and undermine our ability to achieve energy independence and genuine pollution reductions.

(14) We believe the excessive focus on CO2 is slowing the trajectory of solutions to genuine environmental challenges, if not reversing them.

(15) We believe we may modify these principles at any time, based on factual evidence.

AND WE ARE ENVIRONMENTALISTS!

This is the message that needs to come through – loud and clear. There are other items that could be added to this list, but they don’t belong on it because they aren’t about the beliefs we hold or the policies we advocate, but instead are about the conversation we are having. And what of this “conversation?” Has it turned into a farce? Is conversation still possible?

We believe it is wrong – and an opportunistic diversion – to take any of these 15 points and use them as evidence we are “greenwashing,” because we aren’t. We are providing what we believe is a rational response to today’s mainstream environmentalism having lost sight of the balance between the needs of people, profit, and the planet. And we see the urgency of the global warming “crisis” not as a crisis, but as a tactic. Because we haven’t written off every informed skeptic in the world as a tool of corporate interests – rather, we’ve read their material, and found it compelling.

Alekos Panagoulis

Alekos Panagoulis, a 20th century Greek freedom fighter, a man of exceptional courage and tenacity, wrote the following:

“This is the epoch of the ism. Communism, capitalism, marxism, historicism, progressivism, socialism, deviationism, corporativism, unionism, fascism: and nobody notices that every ism rhymes with fanaticism. This is the period of the anti: anticommunist, anticapitalist, antimarxist, antiprogressivist, antisocialist, antideviationist, anticorporativist, antiunionist: and nobody notices that every ist rhymes with fascist. It is through locking oneself up in a dogma, in the blind certitude of having gained absolute truth, whether it be the dogma of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dogma of the virginity of Mary or the dogma of law and order, that the sense or rather the significance of freedom is lost, the only concept that is beyond appeal and beyond debate.”

Panagoulis, who was killed before personally witnessing the positive consequences of his courage, saw power for what it was, a mountain, a mountain with left flanks and right flanks, but more than anything else – a mountain with daunting mass; presence; power. It is those people, everywhere, who form this mountain of power who benefit if we succumb to the alarmism and the attendant policies to “mitigate” alleged climate change – not the rest of us, or this good green earth. And if your only animating ideology rests upon one wing or one flank, at the expense of the other, you are only part of the mountain, only a reflection of your reflexive adversary, you have become a puppet of power; you are no longer the patient, transformative, liberating wind of change, nor an agent of freedom.

The California legislature has approved a bill aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions through smart-growth planning. SB 375 requires that all metropolitan planning organizations in California develop plans to meet state targets for reducing auto-related greenhouse gas emissions. The bill also encourages planners to meet those targets through high-density development, improving the jobs-housing balance, and all the other usual smart-growth programs.

SB 375 has been described as the biggest California land-use bill in 30 years. It has also been called the “condos by the train tracks” bill. Legislators in other states are no doubt already drafting similar bills.

Before evaluating this bill, let’s set straight a few popular misconceptions. Despite hysteria from the San Francisco Chronicle, California is not being covered in “urban sprawl.” As the Antiplanner has previously noted, thanks to planning laws going back to 1963, California’s urban areas are the second densest of any state in America. Data from the 2000 census (which the Antiplanner has kindly summarized for you — see column U for urban densities) show that, if you leave New York City out, California’s urban areas are even denser than those in New York.

Specifically, counting all urban areas of 2,500 people or more, California’s urban densities average more than 4,000 people per square mile. Take out New York City, and no other state comes close: Nevada is second at 3,400 per square mile; Illinois is 3,000; all other states are less than 3,000 and most are less than 2,300. New York with New York City is 4,200, but New York minus New York City is just over 2,000. So efforts to apply smart growth to California urban areas will cram already crowded cities even more.

Another myth: “car-crazy California” is the 9th biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.” California emits a lot of greenhouse gases because it has 38 million people, but its per-capita greenhouse gas emissions are the second-lowest of any state. Car crazy? I don’t think so. Californians drive less per capita than people in 38 other states. California also uses less motor fuel per capita than all but four other states.

In terms of urban driving, however, California is right in the middle. Annual urban miles of driving average 7,750 per urban resident, which is 23rd out of the 50 states. That’s not car-crazy, but it is not as low as you would think if density really reduced driving. Where California is low is rural driving, mainly because only 5 percent of the state’s residents live in the 95 percent of the state that is rural.

Does urban density translate into lower greenhouse gas emissions? Not necessarily. Despite using the fifth-least gasoline per capita, California has only the seventeenth-lowest per-capita transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. While New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois produce less than California, so do Arizona, Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Many of these states have urban densities that are less than half of California’s, and they are not particularly noted for dense transit systems. This suggests that whatever travel Californians are doing when they are not driving is still emitting lots of greenhouse gases.

If you want to play with the numbers yourself, the Antiplanner has compiled a spreadsheet based on the following data sources:

1. The Energy Information Agency’s state-by-state emissions by sector for 2004.

2. Census Bureau state population estimates (to be compatible with EIS data, I used 2004). For urban populations, I used the urban proportions from the 2000 census.

3. Miles driven and highway fuel by state from the 2004 Highway Statistics.

So what do these numbers mean? First, density is associated with a moderate reduction in driving. The correlation between urban densities and per-capita urban driving is -.30. Statistically, this is modestly significant (perfect is 1.0 or -1.0, anything less than 0.12 or -0.12 is indistinguishable from random), but indicates that many other factors also influence driving.

Each red dot represents the urban areas in one of the 50 states; the green line is the average trend. The spread of the dots shows that density is only weakly correlated with driving. The shallow slope of the line shows that, if density does influence driving, large density increases will produce small reductions in driving. Clicking the chart will download the spreadsheet.

Based on the data used to make the chart above, a 1,000-person-per-square-mile increase in urban density is associated with a 395-mile-per-capita reduction in driving. That means if California can increase its densities by 25 percent, from 4,000 to 5,000 people per square mile, it will reduce per-capita urban driving by 5 percent. That assumes, of course, that higher densities are a cause of lower per-capita driving rather than being merely correlated with some other cause such as downtown job densities. To the extent that less driving means more transit ridership, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will be slight because we know that, on average, transit emits as much greenhouse gases as passenger cars (though admitted less than SUVs).

Proponents of SB 375 take it for granted that higher densities mean less driving and lower greenhouse gas emissions. But they never mention the costs. Thanks to California’s past land-use planning, the state has the second-least-affordable housing in the nation. (Affordability is slightly worse in Hawaii, the only state that has done growth-management planning longer than California.)

If California’s average urban densities were the same as in the rest of the country — about half its current densities — the state’s housing would be no less affordable than elsewhere. People might drive 800 miles per year more, or about 10 percent more than they drive today, but homebuyers would save about $125 billion or more per year on housing (see page 12).

Californians burn about 18 billion gallons of motor fuel a year, so 10 percent more is 1.8 billion. A gallon of gasoline produces about 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, so 1.8 billion gallons represents about 16 million metric tons of greenhouse gases. If it costs $125 billion to save 16 million tons, the cost per ton is about $7,800. When McKinsey says we can reduce our total greenhouse emissions by a third for no more — and often much less — than $50 a ton, $7,800 a ton is a big waste.

Housing isn’t the only cost of smart growth. SB 375 will impose costs on businesses, increased traffic congestion on shippers and commuters, and higher taxes (or lower public services to make up for the cost of compliance) on all Californians. Needless to say, what has really happened here is that smart-growth advocates jumped on the global warming issue and used it to push their own agenda regardless of the minimal benefits and high costs.

Realistically, California is not likely to increase urban densities by 1,000 people per square mile, or another 25 percent over their current levels. The state has already made housing so unaffordable that people are leaving the state for more affordable lawns elsewhere. All SB 375 will do is increase the costs of living in California still more without saving more than a handful of tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

About the author: Randal O’Toole is the author of Reforming the Forest Service, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, and The Best-Laid Plans, and edits the website The Antiplanner. This article originally was published on The Antiplanner on September 12, 2008, and is republished here with permission.