Sally Bingham (Episcopal priest)—Religion has to believe in science. Fossil fuels quite frankly come from hell. Why don’t we shift resources to those that come from the heavens?

Jan Zalasiewicz (geologist)—Defining a new epoch: the Anthropocene. The current epoch is about 11,000 years old, and thus proposing a new one is a big deal in the geological community. The new era results from the scale of change in four main areas: CO2 in the atmosphere, biological changes (extinctions), the most mixing of species in 4.5 billion years, and the acidification of the oceans.

Jonathan Foley (Director, Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota)—We’re doing this in real time without a script and a net. We’ve cleared 40% of the earth’s land for arable farmland (and that was the good 40%). Energy, food, and water are the three pillars of civilization, and they are all connected—we have to take a holistic approach. He’s worried about things like peak phosphorous and less worried about energy because we can imagine solutions, but thinking about food and water is really scary. Science is an open-source transparent iteration towards the truth. Population growth is a bit of a red herring: in the next 40 years it will rise 30% while energy and food demand will rise 200%.

Jerry Glover (The Land Institute)—10,000 years ago, nearly all plant life was perennials (95% or more). Annual planting is a relatively new concept. It has been powerful, allowing us to increase the production of seeds and fruit (since the plant doesn’t have to grow deeper roots or thicker stalks to survive the full season, its energy goes to fruit or seeds). However, annuals suffer from disease (monoculture means smaller gene pools), they require oil as an input (nitrogen fertilizers are derived from oil), and they lead to loss of soil (shallow root systems versus deep root systems). 60% of the energy inputs on a farm are to produce nitrogen. Fertilizer went from $450 to $850 in 2008 when oil spiked to $150 a barrel. The price of energy IS the price of food—this is why there were food riots in 2008 as energy prices climbed—this is a critical point. By late June in Kansas, there are 10 million acres sitting empty as the wheat has been harvested, it’s hot and dry out, and the soil runs off. Over 70% of the world’s food comes from grains. A perennial crop would allow for grain to be grown on marginal soils and allow communities to reclaim barren land. He showed a perennial plant that had a 12′ root structure. The comparable annual would soak up only 10-30% of the water.

Jack Hidary (Chairmen, Global Solar Center)—Let’s start with some perspective on where we are at on power generation: 49% coal, 7% hydro, 3% renewable (1% wind, 0.3% solar), 19.4% nuclear, 20% natural gas. The world uses 80 million barrels a day of oil; the US uses 20 million of these. Words and positioning matter. We’ve been talking about efficiency for 40 years—since Carter—but where has that gotten us? We have to consider the power and connotation of the words to turn dialogue into action. Some proposed new words and phrases for talking about these issues:

Old term -> New term

Efficiency -> Savings
Home Audit -> Home Savings Report
Decoupling -> Consumer Choice
Distributed Generation -> Local Power
Green -> Clean
Carbon Emissions -> Carbon Pollution

Alexander Karsner (Chairmen, Manifest Energy)—There is a design flaw in the way our utilities are built. The more we consume, the more they make—that is exactly the wrong incentive structure. We have to create an incentive structure that focuses on nega-watts not mega-watts. Engage the public utility commissions to rethink the structure. We also need to standardize the rules for access just like for the Internet. Anyone should be able to plug into the grid and supply power (locally, not distributed). He gave example in NYC of a building that took 2.5 years to build and 5 years to get a license to provide local power. Focus on what we can get done in the next 36 months without a comprehensive climate bill—tax changes, strengthening/enhancing RFS and RPS standards. He believes CNG in the transportation infrastructure and nonfood-based biofuels are positives.

Questions & Comments—There has to be an open fuel standard (a chip in cars that allows fuel switching). Focus on outcomes, not technologies—tailpipe reductions and pollution, not which biofuel or particular technology is viable. The public would react if they could see a roadmap of where we are going and how we are going to get there. They are concerned we are moving from a strategic liquid (oil) to a strategic mineral (lithium).

Adoption Curves, originally uploaded by Nathan Laurell.

Great chart showing adoption curves for various technologies throughout history. Notice the slope of the adoption curves. In the early 1900s, there was a slow adoption over a period of decades. Then in the 1960s the curves start getting steeper.  By 1990, we go from basically no cell phones to full adoption in less than 15 years. This shows how the rate of change is accelerating.

Jack Hidary—“The Prius got traction first through rentals—pathway for wide adoption of electric cars.” A Giga-Buck, also known as a billion dollars.

Drew Endy—Open-source biology is coming. There is a shortage of tools for bioengineering and biomanufacturing. Tools needed = Synthesis, Abstraction, Standardization. Biology is a compelling technology to build things in. Biology works not in binary but in 2^2 ATCG.

Richard Florida—Annual venture capital investing represents 0.2% of GDP but creates 11% of the jobs and is responsible for 21.0% of overall GDP. We are entering the 5th major revolution, and it is a world of “postindustrial economics.” The genius of America is that it can attract talent…when this is gone, we’re in trouble.  A good city has technology, talent, and tolerance. There is an amplifier effect around the best cities. It will be cities not companies that are the organizational unit going forward. All major economic rebalances have fundamentally changed the way we live… suburbs, cities, etc. We need to rethink the “Housing-Energy-Auto Complex.”  55% of our income goes to houses, cars, and energy, none of which provide long-term value for the world. 40 Mega-regions worldwide account for 18% of people, 66% of the output, and 90% of the ideas/creativity. Will be important for these areas to be able to integrate multi-locational people. Nationwide, home ownership is 70%; 80% in economically depressed areas; 50% in Silicon Valley. The only way to stop the red state/blue state class war is to make service jobs attractive in the US (Zappos, Best Buy, Trader Joes, Wegmans, Container Store). In the 1870s, the US focused on mass public education; the New Deal funded colleges and universities; what’s next in education?

Sir Ken Robinson—Do you work with your imagination? Do you cultivate it daily? Weekly? The state of California spends more money on prisons than schools. Is this humane? Our education system needs transformation, not reformation. A degree used to be a passport, but now it’s a visa. We view education as a linear, algorithmic program—we’re obsessed with standardization. In your element, when you are being “who you are” not what you do, you are the most authentic, genuine version of yourself. Aesthetic pleasure is defined as times or things that heighten the intensity of being alive (sight, sounds, etc.). Human life is not linear, it’s organic. Element model = 1. natural aptitude (you’re good at what you do), 2. love it (if you find what you love to do, you “never work again”), 3. attitude, and 4. opportunity.

Amory Lovins-McDonough quote: “Now that you know, negligence begins tomorrow.” China has an 11-point core energy plan to transition—will lead us out of this (Energy Secretary Chu is Chinese—smart partnership). 2007—peak US gasoline, 2005—peak industrialized oil use, 2016—peak world oil use = demand is not supply-driven. Half of all energy is pumps and fans!

Bill Gates—Germany has 1 specialist for every 1 GP where the US has 3 specialists to 1 GP…this is the incentive system of our healthcare system. The progress of civilizations is a story of cheap energy. Ways to reduce innovation in the US: raise tuition at top universities (check—rising quickly), deny high-IQ immigrants (check—limiting H1Bs into the US), don’t invest in basic education (check—failing public school system). Philanthropic pledge idea—start younger, give more, and build a network. 1946 was the height of US Relativism—what do you really care about,  the the well-being of the majority of people in the world or the power of the US?

Geoffrey Canada—“Education is a civil right.”

Miscellaneous—How can capitalism improve the human condition? For the first time we can engineer the natural world into the solution rather then just extract it. Those who waste less, win. The banking system needs to look much more like a utility. Epi-genomics = real-time genetics (epi-genome). Sits above your genome and is altered in real time based on nutrition and environment, and these changes are passed on genetically!

For much of the last decade the focus was on producing and moving data (web 1.0, networking, hardware). The next decade will be about extracting value from all this data. The amount of data being produced is accelerating and we need better tools to mine, extract, reduce and visualize these massive data sets in order to make better decisions. I’m excited to join Roger in the search for innovative companies tackling the problem of Big Data.

IF YOU are tired of hearing the word “cloud” attached to every term in the computing lexicon, you are not alone. Disillusioned tech folks are beginning to succumb to “cloud fatigue”. But the concept of computing as a basic utility delivered over the internet is here to stay. In fact, the industry is already taking the first steps toward turning computing power into a tradable commodity akin to electricity.

It took decades for electrical power to become a tradable commodity. Computing seems to be getting there faster. Standards bodies are working on rules that would make it easier to move virtual machines around, and a raft of start-ups are making this their business. Zimory’s software ties together corporate data centres so that they work as one. Cloudkick offers tools to manage virtual machines. It is the force behind libcloud, an open-source project that facilitates the development of services spanning different clouds. And RightScale is a pioneer in “cloud broking”, meaning that it helps customers switch between clouds or use several different ones so they do not have to keep all their eggs in one computing basket.

Yet it is probably Amazon that will be seen as the firm that really launched computing markets. In December it introduced a new pricing option: customers bid for the retail giant’s unused computing capacity and get to run their virtual machines as long as their bid exceeds the minimum price needed to balance supply and demand. As a result, the price jigs up and down all day like those of pork bellies or wholesale power.

Full article here

Programs that allow people to commit in advance to such actions—e.g., saving money or exercising—have proven quite popular, even when that commitment is costly (1, 2). Default (“no-action”) options strongly influence choices [e.g., when choosing between 401(k) plans], even when an alternative option is markedly better and switching appears easy (3, 4). Small changes in context (“nudges”) can affect behavior as much as large price changes (5). Such findings are striking in a cost-benefit framework; psychological cues typically cost very little compared with price changes.

This suggests a potential role for non–price-based, behavioral interventions. Many such ideas have been studied in a large body of ongoing research on social approval, consumption feedback, goal setting, commitment, and other mechanisms (9, 10). Although many of these were small-scale, short-term pilot studies on nonrepresentative populations, they do show proof of concept (11).

Recent work by a company called OPOWER, informed by academic work showing the power of social comparisons in environmental conservation (12), suggests that behavioral programs can be cost-effectively scaled to millions of households. OPOWER sends home energy-use reports to electricity and gas consumers that display the household’s energy consumption, compare it with that of similar households, and provide energy conservation tips. Using randomized, controlled trials with hundreds of thousands of utility customers across the United States, these reports have been shown to reduce electricity consumption in the average household by over 2% (13).

The same thing has been shown when firms turn on contributions to 401ks by default. It leads to a much higher participation rate among employees. One of the most interesting models recently has been the launch of Blippy. The site exposes all of your purchases on a given credit card to your social network. While interesting business models can be built around these behaviors the biggest impact could be in the form of drafting better public policy. From Science:

Our argument has three key policy implications. First, governments can provide funding for potentially high-impact behavioral programs as part of their broader support for energy innovation. A bill under consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 3247, would establish a program at the Department of Energy to understand behavioral factors that influence energy conservation and speed the adoption of promising initiatives.

Second, through market incentives, policy-makers can encourage—or fail to encourage—private-sector firms to generate and utilize behavioral innovations that “nudge” consumers to make better choices. Historically, economists and policy-makers have focused on how regulation affects relative prices—for example, how emissions caps or taxes on pollution-intensive goods affect the prices firms set. In practice, however, firms interact with consumers in many ways in addition to pricing.

Third, government agencies often provide independent information disclosure, such as vehicle and appliance energy-efficiency ratings. This helps catalyze private-sector innovation by allowing firms to credibly convey the financial value of energy efficiency to consumers.

Full article here (subscription required)

First, scale-up means learning by doing, which takes time in the energy industry. Where energy technology relies on conversion processes — as with next-generation nuclear energy, biofuels or carbon capture and storage (CCS) — historically it has taken three years to build a demonstration plant, one year to start it up and two to five years to overcome setbacks and reach satisfactory operability. So it can take a decade to reach the point where one is confident enough to build the first full-scale commercial plant. It can take another decade to build a dozen.

Leverage existing infrastructure: After reaching materiality, growth curves have historically levelled off (Fig. 1). This is our second law. Unlike consumer goods that may become obsolete in a few years, the capital goods of the energy system have a lifetime of 25–50 years. That means only 2–4% of existing technology needs replacing in a given year. These replacement rates are hard to increase because the economic barrier to replacing old technology is extremely high: industry will only consider early retirement of the existing capital stock if the total cost of the new technology (capital and operating costs) falls below the operating cost of the old.

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“First, the Internet is, for me, a kind of internal cognition combustion engine, something that vastly accelerates my ability to travel vast landscapes.”

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There are multiple problems that will make it difficult for biodiesel to ever compete without subsidies. In a nutshell the key problem is that the feedstock costs are linked to fossil fuel prices. The feedstock is generally a vegetable oil and methanol – an alcohol typically produced from natural gas. A second big problem is that biodiesel is an inferior fuel to hydrocarbon diesel (especially in cold weather). Further, the by-product of the biodiesel process is glycerin, which has limited value (especially at the volumes produced when biodiesel production is ramped up).

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The credit crisis also revealed a basic problem with the clean-energy business. Fossil fuels are, in terms of the energy they store, remarkably inexpensive to get out of the ground and sell. That makes dirty industrial processes irresistibly cheap—so long as they are not required to cover the costs of the pollution they cause. Companies cannot be expected to abandon them unless they get a clear signal from consumers or governments that it is in their financial interest to do so. And they are not getting such a signal.

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Richard Newell, head of America’s Energy Information Administration, a carbon price is around twice as efficient as a renewable portfolio standard (which requires power companies to generate a certain proportion of the power they sell from renewable sources) and about two-and-a-half times as efficient as a renewable-energy subsidy.

According to Dimitri Zenghelis, one of the authors of the Stern Review and a senior adviser to Cisco and the Grantham Research Institute, a $40 carbon price now, doubling by 2050, and combined with non-price policies such as appliance standards and R&D support, is needed to hit the 450ppm target.

Thanks to a combination of recession and lack of political will, most estimates of the future level of Europe’s carbon price have been revised sharply downwards this year. And if America gets a carbon price, it is unlikely to be high enough to make much difference. According to America’s Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation Congress is now considering would set it at $12 a tonne in 2012, rising to $20 in 2020.

Globally, New Energy Finance reckons that only $24 billion of green-stimulus money will be disbursed this year, with another $58 billion to follow in 2010 and a further $56 billion in 2011. So it looks as though the money will come too late to temper the recession of 2008-09, and may instead fuel another inflationary boom in a couple of years’ time.

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