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by Donald Carr.

In a move that USA Today says
“could be
regarded as economically motivated as well as environmentally aware,”
NASCAR will adopt an ethanol blend of fuel beginning with the 2011 Daytona 500.
This bit of news was welcomed heartily by the corn ethanol lobby,
which is facing the prospect of the ethanol tax credit subsidy expiring at the
end of the year as well as consumer confusion at fueling stations across the country, as ethanol blends increase only for specific model-year vehicles.

Like the ethanol
industry, NASCAR is struggling, USA Today reports, and chasing “green” dollars looks like a crowd pleaser:

NASCAR has put
an emphasis on recycling (all tires, oils, fluids and batteries used in
competition are recycled, and sponsors have helped expand programs in campgrounds)
and achieved LEED certification for new office buildings in Charlotte and
Daytona Beach.

But the switch
to ethanol might be the most important step in achieving an ancillary benefit—attracting new sponsors in the green economy to cash-strapped teams hurting for
funding since the onset of the recession.

The only
thing green in this deal is the money changing hands.

NASCAR CEO and Chairman Brian France was vague about NASCAR’s environmental
motivations for embracing ethanol. The move would reduce the carbon footprint
of a race, he said.

How, exactly? “We’re not exactly certain, but there is
a benefit,” he told USA Today.

Here at the Environmental Working Group, we are
certain that using corn ethanol as an alternative to gasoline is hardly a sustainable
solution to our energy needs. We know that between 2005 and 2009, U.S.
taxpayers spent $17 billion to subsidize
corn ethanol blends in gasoline, an outlay that produced a paltry reduction in overall oil
consumption equal to a 1.1 mile-per-gallon increase in fleetwide fuel economy.

We’re sure that
corn ethanol production pollutes fresh-water sources in the Midwest. We know that
there are serious concerns about
ethanol plants and their impact on the environment. We know corn production for ethanol expands the dead zone in the
Gulf. We also know it has led to obliteration of wildlife
habitat.

NASCAR might want
to ask its fans whether they’d rather watch races or be able to fish in clean
water or hunt in abundant habitat.

It gets worse. According to this news release, all the ethanol supplied
by NASCAR sponsor Sunoco will be produced by a plant in Fulton, N.Y., and blended
with gasoline at another facility in Marcus Hooks, Pa. Which means that the fuel powering
NASCAR’s racers will have to be shipped by truck to far-flung racetracks all over the country.

The result will
be multiple ethanol tank trucks traveling to multiple tracks almost every week
of the year. Will these huge semis be burning soy biodiesel? Doubtful.

The “green” benefit
of burning thousands of gallons of diesel to haul a fuel with dubious
environmental benefits to a location where hundreds of cars and trucks drive furiously
around in circles, combined with the energy it takes to grow and haul the corn
around in the first place is … less than zero.

If
America is truly going to wean itself off its addiction to oil and fight the
specter of climate change, then conservation and efficiency must be part of the
solution. Promoting excessive consumption of greenhouse gas-belching fuels is a
blatantly hypocritical admission that corn ethanol is about getting people to
burn more corn ethanol, and not about protecting the environment.

Related Links:

Biofuels Reduce The Biosphere’s Capacity to Absorb Carbon

Obama’s riding the (cellulosic) ethanol pony—here’s why he should buck the trend

Renewable Fuels Association not happy with E85 labels on pumps

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• water climate

by Jonathan Hiskes.

Biodiversity doesn’t get
as much attention as it should now that climate change has become preeminent among
environmental quandaries. But it’s important! Species extinction isn’t some
boutique issue that’s distinct from the needs of humans. And building
successful human dwellings isn’t disconnected from providing natural areas, as
a delegation of international mayors said at Convention on Biological Diversity
in Nagoya, Japan, this week. From
Reuters:

While green groups at a U.N. environment meeting in Japan
focused on the need to save rainforests and oceans, mayors at the talks said
conserving nature in cities was equally vital.

“We must work on two levels. First, the preservation
of ecosystems but also the integration of biodiversity in the city and in all
policies,” Evelyne Huytebroeck, the Brussels’ region minister for
environment, told a news conference.

“Biodiversity must be seen as part of the solution for
the city, for sustainable urban planning, not as a problem.”

… U.N. studies during the talks in Nagoya have highlighted
the value of ecosystems to livelihoods, such as insects that pollinate crops,
trees that clean the air and plants that are the source of food.

”Carbon
blindness” is the fallacy that we can solve the greenhouse-gas problem
while ignoring the other ecological limits our planet is bumping into. A
seminal study last fall in Nature put
climate in perspective of 10 biophysical systems crucial to human health—and it found biodiversity loss more troubling than any other:

To put it another way,
the latest IUCN Red List, an annual
checkup on the health of the world’s vertebrate species, reveals that about one
fifth of them are threatened with extinction. Good times.

The mayors in Nagoya
argue that cities have a role to play in response. Huytebroeck notes that
Brussels requires flat roofs of a certain size to plant rooftop gardens. A
nifty program in Vancouver, British Columbia, invites
citizens to adopt traffic circles and median strips and turn them into
gardens. And cities help simply by fitting a lot of people into small amounts
of land—although the food and resources they consume can still come from
threatened areas.

Regarding the rest of
the biodiversity summit, Earth
Journalism Network writer James Fahn reports that the 193 participating countries are largely taking a “No, you go first” approach to conservation,
putting national interests ahead of natural ones and echoing the mentality that
sank the COP15 Copenhagen climate talks last fall.

It’s probably also a
preview of the attitudes that will prevail for the COP16 talks in Cancun this
December, which has already been treated to a flurry of obituaries. High-stakes
environmental summits are not the most heartening displays of nature, human or
otherwise.

Related Links:

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Angela Glover Blackwell talks about the connection between transportation and social justice

Strickland finally talks up energy and transit in Ohio guv race

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Confidential/Houston, TX

To establish a network of Electric Vehicle Chargers in metropolitan areas that will establish confidence in the NRG fueling subscription program.
Identify and recruit Retail Properties, Employer work-places, Commercial outlets, Multi-family dwellings, and other locations to serve as Hosts for the eVgo Charging Infrastructure
Position Responsibilities:
• Identify location-specific properties that are suitable for eVgo locations within the “Texas Triangle†of Dallas/Ft. Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Houston
• Understand and communicate the vision and dynamics of the host ecosystem
• Recruit Property Owners/Landlords of target sites to provide host locations for the EV Charging ecosystem in Houston
• Present and negotiate a Hosting Agreement
Expectations of the position:
• Ability to develop a compelling business case for the target audience
• Skilled at adapting the business case to unique requirements of the target property
• Develop offers and messaging to re-enforce motivators and address barriers with host partner
• Build and deliver community and business education packages about EV to stakeholders throughout the targeted community
• Have the range to create entry-level relationships and close “C†level executives
• Able to overcome objections and continue momentum with the partner
• Diplomatic enough to negotiate an agreement that works for both the partner and NRG
• Adaptable and able to thrive in a fluid and dynamic environment
• Represent NRG with the highest STRIVE standards of ethics and quality
Deliverables
• Signed Host Agreements with targeted properties
• Adequate Charging Station coverage in each of the target cities
• Regular reporting/coordination with management
Education:
• Bachelors degree from an accredited four year college or university
• MBA or relevant graduate degree is preferred but not required

• 5+ years of commercial real estate sales experience
• Proven and consistent record of successful revenue production in commercial property sales
• Track record of building awareness and sales in a new market
• Experienced working with small teams
• Excellent initiative and interpersonal communication skills
• Applicable sales and business development experience at strategic and tactical levels
• Outstanding networking and relationship management skills
• Focused on managing to measurable outcomes on specific timelines
• Capable of building and growing a community network
• Ability to communicate and interact effectively at all levels of the organization
• Able to manage competing interests and drive to a resolution
• Ability to execute multiple projects at a high level of quality
• Excellent quantitative and analytical skills including framework and execution
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Ability to synthesize analysis into recommendations and management presentations
• Performs well with ambiguity and incomplete data
• Strong knowledge of automotive and/or electricity markets is a plus
• Comfort working in a fast-paced environment with minimal supervision
• Ability to travel as required


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by Sean Casten.

The new natural gas conventional wisdom says that “shale changes everything.” Access to these large volumes of relatively low-cost gas will raise U.S. natural gas prices and decrease price volatility. That’s why prices are low now, and why they’ll stay there in the future.

This narrative has caused significant shifts in U.S. capital flows. Many industrials are now deferring gas-conservation projects, given reductions in projected future savings. Trouble is, the narrative really doesn’t hold water. Maybe gas prices will stay low in the future, maybe they won’t. But whichever the case, it won’t be because of shale.

The narrative fallacy

Nicolas Taleb has written at length about the “narrative fallacy,” which he describes as “our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts.” Taleb can be insufferable at times, but this observation is supported by lots of neurological research; the part of our brain that makes us prone to superstition (we won because I didn’t wash my socks yesterday) gets co-opted when we analyze historic economic data. The overpaid banker is no more likely to ascribe his success to undeserved lucky breaks than the poor single mom is likely to chalk up her struggles to the well-deserved outcome of her poor judgment.

Energy price forecasting is a veritable museum of narrative fallacies. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t get an email offer to attend a $5,000 conference or buy a $15,000 report that will tell me how energy prices will react to economic growth, wellhead counts, regulatory reform, infrastructure condition, currency fluctuation, new technologies … you name it. I’ve bought a few, and often learn something useful, but when it comes to price forecasting—their raison d’etre—they are spectacularly lousy.

A friend at ACEEE is fond of saying that economic forecasts would be more accurate if economic forecasters were required to eat the shards of their faulty crystal balls. Unfortunately, they don’t save the balls. A notable exception is the Department of Energy. Every year, the DOE releases their Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) which includes 20-year energy price predictions. Helpfully, they also publicize their past predictions. While it’s a bit unfair to pick on the one forecaster that actually provides its past data, it’s the only one we’ve got—so let’s look:

The dashed line is the actual (inflation-adjusted) price paid for natural gas by all consumers in the year shown. The colored lines represent the forecast provided by the AEO in the year on which the first point appears.

Much could be said about this chart, but note two quick points:

From 2002-2009, there are no AEO forecasts that come remotely close to predicting the actual price movements during the same period.
The actual gas price in 2009 was best predicted by the 2004 forecast and worst predicted by the 2008 forecast. A forecasting tool that gets more accurate as one goes farther back in time is hardly one that we ought to rely on to provide us with a reliable view of the future based on near-term fundamentals.

Given such a lousy track record in our prognostication skills, why do we continue to put so much stock in energy price forecasts?

The shale narrative

Now let’s look at shale—the narrative that underpins most of today’s gas price forecasts.

First, the facts. Huge shale fields are now—thanks to technological development—changing the mix of U.S. natural gas supply. A fuel that was thought to be increasingly international just a few years ago (remember all those stories about LNG terminal constraints?) is becoming reassuringly domestic.

Unlike conventional natural gas, we know where the gas is in the shale beds, so exploration risk goes away: instead of sinking a lot of money in a hole that might come up dry, our risk is only that the well might cost a bit more than we thought. Finally, because shale produces gas more quickly and in smaller “batches” than conventional gas, drillers can make more discrete decisions to drill or hold back, allowing quicker reaction-time to supply and demand imbalances.

Those points are factual. Now the narrative comes in. Big untapped domestic supply + lower risk + smaller per-well investments = cheaper, less volatile natural gas in the future. The story certainly seems logical—but then, we’ve always had logical stories about the future. Why should this one be accurate?

I am not a gas expert, but it doesn’t take gas expertise to poke holes in the shale narrative. Its problems are economic. Consider:

Price is set by supply and demand. The shale gas narrative is based only on supply. Might demand rise in response to low prices, pushing prices back up? The narrative doesn’t say.
Once supply and demand are in balance, the price is set by the marginal cost producer—which shale is not.

Consider just the first problem for a moment. As I’ve written previously, low gas prices will start to shut down the coal fleet, just by shifting the dispatch of existing natural gas assets. That has the potential to increase total U.S. natural gas demand by 71 percent without any new investment in gas-fired assets or distribution infrastructure. Which means either that (a) the U.S. is about to stop burning coal or (b) natural gas prices will rise. Where are you placing your bets?

Warren Buffett has made contrarian investing famous: figure out where the herd of opinion is stampeding, bank on them overshooting, and invest the other direction. I don’t know where gas is going, but I do see a herd getting spooked by all this shale gas noise. It seems as good a time as any to be contrarian.

Here’s one voice suggesting the same thing: Seeking Alpha describes natural gas as the “best energy investment of the decade,” noting that future gas price forecasts are low “as they usually are after a steep economic downturn.” Maybe the right narrative is much simpler: the economy collapsed and commodity prices fell accordingly. All the rest is so much storytelling.

Related Links:

China takes the wind out of the U.S.

Environmentalists Need to Reclaim Economics

Thumb on the scale in the comparison of fuel taxes and efficiency standards?

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by Bonnie Azab Powell.

Highly processed candy and junk food like this and this gives me the shivers for a number of reasons. (Mainly, because it’s not
actually “food” as any other mammal would recognize it.) Highly
processed fast food scares me, too—care for a
Happy Meal that looks the same after sitting out for 6 months, anyone?

But you know what? Sometimes even a foochebag like me is stranded in an airport, hungry. Like last week, when I’ve never
been happier to see a Chipotle Mexican Grill. Chipotle’s tagline is “Food with Integrity,”
and the company buys
its meat from humanely raised sources and its produce from organic and
local farms “when practical.” (One cloud over this integrity halo has
been Chipotle’s
refusal to sign an agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for
fairer tomato prices, but that
stalemate finally ended.)  

This Halloween, Chipotle is inviting you to scare them—for a very good cause. CEO and founder Steve Ells has partnered with British chef and healthy-food activist
Jamie Oliver for a Boorito
special. Visit a Chipotle outlet after 6 p.m. on Oct. 31 dressed as any of the countless
terrifying processed food products out there, and you’ll get one of Chipotle’s
burritos or other entrees for only $2. (They’re normally around $6.) Chipotle
will donate the sales, up to $1 million, to Oliver’s Food
Revolution, a campaign to improve the food in America’s schools.

Seems like a frighteningly good idea to me.

Related Links:

Droves of confused, well-meaning kids giving candy back this Halloween

What a ‘sweet surprise’! HFCS contains more fructose than believed

Ask Umbra on apples for halloween treats and costumes

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Confidential/Houston, TX

Manage the design, development and execution of corporate events and EV special events to support EV Services goals and objectives
Position Responsibilities:
• Plan, develop and execute all elements required for approximately 15-20 EV Services events annually. Develop program structure and elements based on key brand initiatives and marketing objectives.
• Work cross-functionally to define the implementation of various marketing events to promote Houston and other target cites.
• Collaborate, communicate and interact with stakeholders including all corporate and retail management, marketing partners, retailers, etc.
• Develop and manage budgets for all event programs through forecasting and monitoring of all expenditures to fully leverage event potential.

• Bachelor’s degree required, and two or more years of event planning/marketing experience
• Strong project management skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including ability to capture details and communicate accurately and completely, verbally or in writing.
• Ability to multitask while maintaining high degree of attention to detail, accuracy and poise under pressure
• Social media and public relations background is a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to set priorities and to respond to changing demands from multiple sources.


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by Jonathan Hiskes.

Ben Lowe is a
25-year-old first-time candidate getting whomped in a suburban Chicago congressional
race. He’s being outspent 16-to-one by Republican incumbent Peter Roskam. The biggest publicity the
campaign drew came when Lowe, who is half-Chinese, claimed
racial profiling after a Cicero, Ill., police officer pulled over him and
three friends. The Democrat has, by Nate
Silver’s calculation, a 0.2 percent chance of winning. Thank you, come
again.

But Lowe’s an intriguing
candidate, coming from the nearby evangelical bastion of Wheaton College. He
speaks in the evangelical language of restoring a “moral compass” in Congress,
but his moral compass points
toward clean-energy investment, compassionate immigration reform, “restraint
in military spending,” and scrubbing corporate money from politics. He refused campaign
donations from corporations, lobbyists, and interest groups (whether or not
they were offering).

Last year, he published
Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care
for Creation, an account of the growing “creation care” movement on
Christian-college campuses that links environmentalism with Biblical
stewardship values. It’s a passionate if slightly scattered story of Lowe’s
coming-to-conscience, written with an enthusiasm that suggests he’ll be making
a mark one way or another after the election.

Here’s one more
exchange from the campaign worth calling out: Lowe deliberately sought out
local vendors to print his campaign materials. Roskam, in contrast, “spent
almost $300,000 for direct mail and telemarketing services with firms in Utah
and New Hampshire. Another $57,000-plus went to a Florida-based accounting firm
for financial services,” according to
the Daily Herald. Roskam’s
spokesperson defended the out-of-state purchases by saying “Congressman Roskam
practices the same frugal budgeting for his campaign that he expects the federal
government to follow with taxpayer dollars.”

For the Republican, the
price tag is the only factor that matters. He wants the federal government to
take the same singular focus. Lowe seems to have a broader understanding of
“value,” even though he’s running on a shoestring budget.

Lowe told the Herald he stands by his decision to
scrape by without money from special interests: “I live in a low-income part of
Wheaton and it’s very hard for me to think about raising and spending $3
million on a campaign when I walk out of my front door and see my neighbors
struggling to find money to pay for groceries.”

Related Links:

Biodiversity is an urban concern

The Climate Post: Pre-election maneuvering marked by fits of climate skepticism

Strickland finally talks up energy and transit in Ohio guv race

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Lisa Hymas.

This is the latest in a series of Saturday GINK
videos about population and reproduction (or a lack thereof).

The culture war raging in the U.S. over abortion and
reproductive rights isn’t confined within our country’s borders—it’s gone
global. American Christian conservatives
have teamed up with Islamic fundamentalists, the Vatican, and other religious traditionalists
around the world to fight efforts to bring contraception, abortion rights, and
basic equality to women everywhere.

As Michelle Goldberg puts it in her 2009 book The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and
the Future of the World, “All over the planet, conflicts between
tradition and modernity are being fought on the terrain of women’s bodies.” It’s one of the best books you’ll read on the evolution of the population movement
and the current state of the battle for reproductive rights. Her emphasis is on women’s well-being rather
than the health of the environment, with the understanding that the two are
inextricably tied up together.

Here’s Goldberg talking about the book last year:

The video cuts out at 10 minutes, but you can
watch the rest at pdxjustice.org.
 

A choice bit from 19:45:

[W]omen’s rights and particularly reproductive rights are really at the heart of development, they’re at the heart of the answer to almost every pressing problem that we’re facing, whether it be environmental devastation or the persistence of global poverty or the AIDS pandemic. You can’t begin to address any of these problems until you address the oppression of women. When you start looking at these issues, you see that all over the world there are forces that are very much desperate to keep women from making any progress because they see, and I think rightly, that changes in women’s status and autonomy and power and earning capability and role within the family, all these things are the ultimate harbingers of modernity, of urbanization, of globalization … [S]o fundamentalists all over the world, whether we’re talking about here or in Afghanistan or in India or in Africa or in South America, in their hatred of the modern world, in their desperate desire to restore some kind of lost paradise that probably never existed …, they see the key to that as restoring women to what they see as their proper place.

Or, as she writes in her book:

[T]he conflation of women’s rights with globalization or Westernization, and the concomitant desire to limit them in the name of national or cultural integrity, is nearly universal. … women’s rights are perhaps the most visible sign of modernity and thus an obvious bête noire for flourishing fundamentalist movements.

Environmentalists don’t talk about population much these days, but they talk about women’s rights even less. As American right-wingers team up with Islamic fundamentalists to push their retrograde agenda, isn’t it about time that the green movement and women’s movement collaborate and push their progressive causes jointly?

Have a video on population or GINK thinking to recommend? Post a link in comments below.

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Bellingham’s biking nurse

Eating GMOs as a form of protest [VIDEO]

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

Sequence Systems/San Diego, CA (Southern California)

Sequence is seeking an Environmental Planner / Project Manager to oversee the preparation of CEQA/NEPA environmental documentation projects throughout the California marketplace.

The ideal individual will have 8+ years of CEQA/NEPA compliance and permitting experience within a consulting firm environment, in relation to master planning and infrastructure development. Candidates must possess a strong track record in managing projects from $100,000 to $1,000,000 in size; preparing budgets, scopes of work, schedules, overseeing technical work and mentoring staff as needed.

Individuals with strong regulatory federal, state and local agency contacts, client management and relationship building experience will be given preference to consideration.

Requires a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Planning, Environmental Science, Biology or related discipline. Masters degree and/or AICP registration is desired. Must have excellent written and verbal communication abilities.

For consideration please submit a resume online or contact directly:

Sequence Systems
2008 Opportunity Drive #150
Roseville, CA 95678
Phone: 916-782-6900
Fax: 916-782-6307
Email: Jobs (AT) sequencestaffing.com
www.sequencestaffing.com

Should your background not match up to the above job requirements exactly, please feel free to forward your resume or contact us directly, as we have many positions available that are not actively advertised.

Keywords: Environmental Compliance, CEQA, NEPA, Regulatory
Compliance, Land Planning, Land Development, Urban Planning, Environmental Planner, Planner, Project Manager, Biologist, Biology, Natural Resources, Environmental Permitting, Permitting, San Francisco, Sacramento, Northern California.


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SRC and SRCTec/Syracuse, NY

Position Description

SRC is currently seeking a radar systems engineer.

SRC is currently developing multiple radar systems, including airborne and ground-based systems, for air and ground surveillance, and weapon system location applications. One of SRC’s recent projects, the LCMR, was identified as one of the U.S. Army’s Top 10 Inventions in 2005.

Responsibilities

- Will participate in interdisciplinary teams in our Syracuse office
- Responsible for the design, analysis and testing of advanced radar systems
- Perform architecture development
- Provide analysis through integration and test
- Perform trade studies
- Creating requirement and design specs; performing simulations;
- Support customer presentations

Position Requirements

- Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, math or physics is required
- Two to five years of experience with radar system engineering is required
- Must be familiar with digital signal processing algorithms, techniques and related technologies
- Experience with Matlab is a plus
- Superior analytical skills, excellent teamwork skills and strong technical writing ability are all preferred
- Must be willing to travel up to 25 percent to various test sites in the U.S.

Security Requirements

Must be a U.S. citizen. Applicants selected will be subject to a government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information.

EEO/AA Employer. Female, minority, Vietnam-era veteran and disabled candidates are encouraged to apply

Nearest Major Market: Syracuse
Job Category: Engineering, Electrical, Scientific, Engineer, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineer, Science, Physics

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