Here are five recommended reads for today (11/7/14).
Michael Kanellos writes at Forbes about “A New Way To Finance Solar And Storage: The LOPPA.”
Climate Progress reports: “122 migratory birds have died this week at three tar sands operations in Alberta. The birds landed on the operations’ tailings ponds, the large pits that store the water, sand, clay, leftover oil, and toxic contaminants that are produced in the tar sands mining process.”
According to Gigaom, “This week was monumental to the energy storage industry, including companies building big battery farms.”
Sustainable Energy Coalition Steering Committee Chair Scott Sklar explains at Renewable Energy World how “US Midyear Elections Offer Opportunities and Challenges for Renewable Energy.”
Tina Casey reports at Clean Technica: “Solar energy costs are already dropping faster than you can say ’solar energy costs are dropping,’ and along comes a new development that could accelerate the trend even more. The project, out of Sandia National Laboratories in partnership with the University of Colorado-Boulder, aims at working around the efficiency limitations of dye-sensitized solar cells.”
According to the U.S. government’s latest long-term forecast, the country can expect a “56% increase in total natural gas production from 2012 to 2040,” with shale gas production “the largest contributor, growing by more than 10 Tcf” through 2040; and with “tight gas” production also growing sharply over that time period.
As for “tight oil,” the official U.S. government forecast has it growing through 2021, after which it gradually falls through 2040, at which point it is still nearly 1 million barrels per day higher than it was in 2012. In sum, the official U.S. government forecast for the U.S. oil and natural gas “fracking” boom is most definitely bullish, particularly for natural gas but also for oil. But is this actually true?
Not according to the Post Carbon Institute (PCI), which is out with a new study called “Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check on U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom.” A few key points from this report are:
“Rosy expectations of future [U.S. oil and gas] production,” due largely to “widespread use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’)” technology, are “influencing climate policy, foreign policy, and investments in alternative energy sources.”
Those “rosy expectations” are largely unwarranted, as “the current boom in domestic oil and gas production is unsustainable at the rates projected by the EIA.”
The problem is that current U.S. energy policy, which is based heavily on the false “expectation of domestic oil and natural gas abundance far into the future,” is therefore “badly misguided and is setting the country up for a painful, costly, and unexpected shock when the boom ends.”
Specifically, PCI finds that “[t]ight oil production from major plays will peak before 2020,” and that “[b]arring major new discoveries on the scale of the Bakken or Eagle Ford, production will be far below EIA’s forecast by 2040,” possibly even “less than a tenth” of what EIA projects.
As for natural gas, PCI finds that by 2040, production from the “top seven plays” will be just “one-third that of the EIA forecast.”
PCI argues that EIA’s optimistic forecasts are based on several “false premises,” including that “there will be always be new discoveries and production from emerging plays to fill the gap left by declining production from major existing plays,” and that “technological advances can overcome steep decline rates and declining well quality as drilling moves from sweet spots to poorer quality rock.”
PCI makes a persuasive case that, given the “false premises” of abundant oil and natural gas “fracking” for decades to come, the U.S. public and policymakers have been led to believe “a number of false promises.” Those include: “a domestic manufacturing resurgence and millions of new jobs;” ” fast-tracking approval of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals; relying on natural gas for major reductions in carbon dioxide pollution “as a result of natural gas replacing coal as the primary source of electricity production.”
Finally, PCI gets to the gist of the problem with all this. In sum, if the oil and gas fracking boom really has been overhyped, and if U.S. energy policy really is based heavily on false premises, then we’re heading down a potentially costly, even dangerous, blind alley. That’s a big mistake.
Instead, in PCI’s (and our) view, what we really should be doing right now is “harness[ing] this temporary fossil fuel bounty to quickly develop a truly sustainable energy policy—one that is based on conservation, efficiency, and a rapid transition to distributed renewable energy production.”
Here are five recommended reads for today (11/6/14).
Climate Progress reports, “According to new numbers published by WWF Scotland this week, wind turbines generated enough electricity in October to power 3,045,000 homes in the U.K. — more than enough for all the homes in Scotland.”
EcoWatch asks, “Will GOP Try To Fast-Track Keystone XL Pipeline?”
According to Greentech Media: “Yesterday’s third-quarter earnings call was one of NRG’s first efforts to ‘pull back the curtain’ on the company’s strategy in this highly competitive space, said CEO David Crane. The thrust of it: NRG’s retail solar business is going to be about much more than just solar panels.”
BloombergBusinessweek reports, “As the world’s largest emitter of carbon, China has decided that one of the best ways to clean up its polluted air is through solar power…Now the idea is to distribute solar panels in urban areas, putting them on top of office buildings and factories and connecting them to the grid without building miles of costly transmission lines.”
According to NRDC’s Switchboard blog, “Environmental Standards Will Help Reduce Consumer Electricity Bills.”
Here are five recommended reads for today (11/5/14).
RenewEconomy reports, “Germany is looking to achieve exactly what Australia says is not possible – and wean one of the world’s largest manufacturing economies off coal – as well as shutting down nuclear.”
According to Climate Progress, “Lots of poorer countries may be gearing up to largely skip fossil fuel reliance in favor of renewables, if a report released last week is any indication.”
Greentech Media reports, ”According to a new report from ICF International, ‘Utilities, investors, and markets are missing out on optimal strategies to price assets, lower costs, and mitigate risks, because they lack a consistent and accurate approach for determining the true value of solar.’”
According to The Guardian, “Despite advice from Desmond Tutu to divest from of coal, oil and gas, the Church of England is choosing to delay a decision until late 2015, says climate activist Bill McKibben”
The Wall Street Journal reports, “Voters in Denton, Texas, voted strongly in favor of a ban on hydraulic fracturing in the city, the first such restriction in energy-friendly Texas.”
The other day, the New York Times broke a fascinating story of a secretly-taped speech by Richard Berman (we’ve included the audio, edited to include video, images, etc). Berman is a consultant who has, among other things, worked to “undermine his opponents, like labor unions or animal rights groups that have tried to spotlight the treatment of animals at meatpacking plants” – to the Western Energy Alliance, a “Colorado-based oil and gas drilling trade and lobbying group funded by 400 independent natural gas and oil producers, service and supply companies, banking and financial institutions and industry consultants.” Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times story, followed by a few lessons the clean energy industry might gather from this.
The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.
“Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”
Berman went on to advise the oil and gas executives that they needed to aggressively “reposition your opponent’s brand,” “take away [their] moral authority,” “undermine [their] credibility,” “minimize or marginalize” your opponents, and play “hardball” via heavy use of opposition research and “mak[ing] it personal.” Berman referred to this as “endless war,” in which “fear and anger” should be used heavily as “the two [emotions] that resonate best with people.”
That’s tough, even nasty stuff, no doubt. And yes, Rick Berman is clearly an amoral, utterly cynical man, apparently in this business first and foremost for the money. However, that doesn’t mean he isn’t talented at what he does, or that he doesn’t have a few smart things to say about framing and winning the battle to define one’s opponent. It’s sort of like when Tigercomm President Mike Casey interviewed former “super lobbyist” Jack Abramoff about what he did and how he did it. Again, you don’t have to think what Abramoff did was ethical – and we certainly don’t believe that it was – to learn lessons from him that might be helpful for the cleantech industry in its battle with the fossil fuel folks. Same thing with Berman. For instance:
Both Abramoff and Berman agreed on the need to be “aggressive,” and that — as Mike Casey wrote in late 2010 – the fossil fuel industry understands its competition with cleantech is a “full-contact game” and is playing that “game” accordingly — to win. The question today, as Casey noted in his introduction to the Abramoff interview, is whether clean energy is ready to “play for keeps… because your opponents are.” We certainly believe that cleantech leaders should hear what Abramoff and Berman are saying and respond accordingly.
While Berman’s focus on “fear and anger,” and his vow that “we’re not going to tap into the sympathetic,” is both harsh and off-putting, we believe he’s onto something here. Specifically, we agree with him that “Emotions drive people much better than intellectual epiphanies.” We’ve previously written about Guy Kawasaki’s view that the key to selling anything is to “enchant” people. We’ve also discussed research into the importance of reaching people at a “gut,” even “moral” level. The point is that, while the facts certainly matter, it’s also crucial to reach people at an emotional level, to create “a compelling frame, or overarching perspective, that has the potential to tap into consumer emotions.” In his own, crude way, that’s what Berman seems to be getting at.
We also certainly would not discount the importance of “opposition research,” such as the great work Rolling Stone did in exposing the Koch brothers and their “toxic empire.” Same thing with the excellent job the Checks and Balances Project has done in identifying fossil fuel front groups and the ways they masquerade as innocuous “think tanks” or “experts.”
We’d add that the huge advantage cleantech has in diminishing the credibility of pro-fossil-fuel propagandists is a powerful one: the truth. Unlike the fossil fuel industry’s fallacious arguments against the cleantech industry or climate science, we happen to have the vast majority of the facts, science, and public policy arguments on our side. Which means that Berman’s advice about establishing ”common knowledge” — where people have heard something “enough times from different places…that you reach a point where you have solidified your position” – should, at least in theory, be a lot easier for us to do than for them.
Same thing with going on offense, as Berman recommends. The fact is, there’s no reason for cleantech to be on the defensive, certainly not on the merits, given that we have all the arguments – empirical, environmental, moral – on our side. Now, we just have to marshal those arguments effectively – and budget accordingly – to win the “war” Berman and his fossil fuel funders are waging against us, and to make sure it isn’t “endless” after all.
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