clean energy

President Obama gives his State of the Union address tonight, and some supporters of the shift to clean energy worry that the troubled U.S. economy and high unemployment will overwhelm any attention he might want to give climate change.

Sen. John Kerry, who has been leading the Senate drive for climate legislation, urged the president to underscore that climate and energy reform remain priorities for 2010.

"The president has a good story to tell, having personally gone to Copenhagen last month and negotiated an agreement with all the major countries of the world to address climate change," Kerry told E&E. "He can remind Congress that he's invested."

But even if the U.S. president eases off his public drive for climate-protective efforts, the nation’s governors are not.

Industry leaders, politicians and other stakeholders gathered Friday on Capitol Hill to rally support for a move to a renewable energy-based economy.

The tone was largely optimistic and painted a picture of the U.S. at a crossroads where, if the right path is chosen, numerous challenges can be addressed at once – including energy security, unemployment and climate change. But speakers warned that a failure to act would put the US at a global disadvantage.

“We've got a Kennedy-esque moment to attract the boldest and brightest to the renewable energy sector,” said Cathy Zoi, Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, as she mentioned workers in industries like steel and manufacturing who, she says, would be eager to transition to green energy sectors.

Saying unemployment is even worse than current numbers, United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard said, “this is either a crisis or an opportunity."

“If we electrify our railways...and say all that [goes into the project] is going to be made in America, all our workers go back to work,” he said. “The next industrial revolution is going to be the clean energy revolution.”

The American Council on Renewable Energy Conference was titled “Phase II”, as in the second phase of renewable energy development and deployment in the U.S. The first phase, according to ACORE, was from 1975 to 2000, when wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, ocean energy, biomass and biofuel technology was developed with the help of federal funding.

There’s an electric current rushing through our nation’s capital today, and it’s not from the future stimulus-funded smart grid.

Right now, more than 11,000 young people from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and 16 other nations are barnstorming Washington, D.C., for Power Shift 2009 – the largest youth summit on climate and energy policy in history.

In the massive D.C. Convention Center, student organizers are partaking in an extended weekend of workshops, training sessions, speeches, concerts, rallies and even a huge direct action slated for Monday. With big shots showing up like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Congressman Ed Markey, activists Majora Carter, Van Jones and Billy Parish, and musicians like Adam Gardener of Guster and the hip-hop group The Roots, Power Shift feels like a mix between Kyoto and Woodstock.

Students are here, in essence, to take the message of bold, comprehensive and immediate federal climate action directly to Capitol Hill. 

They are leveraging the momentum the youth movement has built locally through the Campus Climate Challenge, their first national mobilization, Power Shift 07, and their recent electoral engagement campaign Power Vote to pressure political leaders to take the action their generation's demands.

“It’s our future,” they proclaim – and they’re going to fight for it.

Scientists at the University of Michigan are beginning the first large-scale test of a new technology that takes a common problem for oil platforms and turns it into a method for reliably generating clean electricity from ocean and river currents. They are working with the U.S. Navy to build a prototype in the Detroit River this year with the capacity to power a 20,000-square-foot building.

When word first surfaced of the VIVACE Converter (short for Vortex-Induced Vibration for Aquatic Clean Energy Converter), it sparked a flurry of pop-sci articles struggling to explain the fluid dynamics with anything remotely accessible to the public.

The concept—absorbing energy from a phenomenon called vortex-induced vibration (VIV)—has been likened to Leonardo Da Vinci’s research into “Aeolian Tones,” the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, and the device’s own sexy aquatic biomimetics: It imitates fish. Like fish, whose muscular power alone could not propel them at the speeds they travel, the invention harnesses forces created by a disrupted current.

Previous methods for collecting energy from currents, like turbines and water mills, required an average flow of five or six knots, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots.

VIVACE promises to generate power from these much slower flows.

The EPA is poised to yank the strings on another Bush-era loophole for dirty coal.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson announced today that she will officially review a memorandum, scribbled out in the final days of the Bush administration, that protects new coal-fired power plants from having to answer for their future greenhouses gas emissions.

She also issued this warning for officials who are now considering new permits for coal plants:

Permitting authorities should not assume that the memorandum is the final word on the appropriate interpretation of Clean Air Act requirements.

Peter Barnes, senior fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, has been the tireless champion of the "cap and dividend" approach to national climate legislation, an idea he first proposed ten years ago in a book called Who Owns the Sky?  Now, his idea is finally gaining traction in the nation's capital as the new administration fast-tracks climate action as a policy priority.

The cap and dividend idea is arguably the most elegant, simple and equitable variation of the "cap and trade" mechanisms currently under consideration. In the current economic crisis, it also now seems to be the most politically plausible. Here's why.

Cap and dividend makes every American an equal owner of the sky. Under this plan, when the government caps emissions and sells permits to polluters to release carbon dioxide, it collects the funds on behalf of American citizens. Each month, the government sends everybody a dividend check from the proceeds and thereby protects families from rising energy prices.

We caught up with Peter Barnes who spoke to us in detail on camera about this idea. He was joined by Michael Noble of Fresh Energy, who sees cap and dividend as the best idea for squeezing carbon out of the economy without squeezing family finances. As Barnes asks, what politician is not going to want deliver a monthly check to each and every constituent back home? Not only that, as you will see, cap and dividend promises to deliver what President Obama promised on the campaign trail.

A bit of background is important to keep in mind. Barnes' formulation of cap and dividend is part of a larger body of thought, spelled out in another book he wrote called Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. In it, he analyzes how capitalism has overtaken democracy and suggests with great persuasion that the path to correcting the imbalance is by protecting and strengthening a sector we usualy ignore -- the commons. The atmosphere is the commons under consideration in Barnes's cap and dividend proposal, a subset of a vision he has developed for a new operating system to better drive capitalism. His formula: Corporations + Commons = Capitalism 3.0.

Barnes writes with the clarity of a former journalist and from the bedrock of success he has enjoyed as a businessman. He also brings a keen and prescient eye to history and political opportunity:

An old friend of mine used to say that at a certain stage in political campaigns, dead cats start flying through the air.  I’ve never understood what he meant by that, but I think the cat-flinging has begun.

Both candidates are doing their share, but one exchange deserves special analysis: John McCain’s attack against Barack Obama’s comment about tire gauges. In one of his recent energy speeches, Obama made the point that acts of conservation by individual Americans can have an impact on rising oil prices. He used tire pressure maintenance as an example.