Working For Jobs

by Claire Thompson.

Anyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 crops they pollinate — from almonds to apples to blueberries — in peril.

Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial
beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year
since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the
organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental
groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.

“We are inching our way toward a critical tipping point,” said Steve
Ellis, secretary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a
beekeeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that
he’ll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA).

In addition to continued
reports of CCD — a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee
colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their
dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and
experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while
parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research
increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit.

“In the industry we believe pesticides play an important role in
what’s going on,” said Dave Hackenberg, co-chair of the NHBAB and a beekeeper in Pennsylvania.

Of particular concern is a group of pesticides, chemically similar to
nicotine, called neonicotinoids (neonics for short), and one in particular
called clothianidin. Instead of being sprayed, neonics are
used to treat seeds, so that they’re absorbed by the plant’s vascular system,
and then end up attacking the central nervous systems of bees that come to
collect pollen. Virtually all of today’s genetically engineered Bt corn is treated with
neonics. The chemical industry alleges that bees don’t like to collect corn pollen,
but new research shows that not only do bees indeed forage in corn, but they also
have multiple other routes of exposure to neonics.

The Purdue University
study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found high levels of clothianidin
in planter exhaust spewed during the spring sowing of treated maize seed. It
also found neonics in the soil of unplanted fields nearby those planted with Bt
corn, on dandelions growing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive
entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives.

Evidence already pointed to the presence of neonic-contaminated pollen
as a factor in
CCD. As Hackenberg explained, “The insects start taking
[the pesticide] home, and it contaminates everywhere the insect came from.”
These new revelations about the pervasiveness of neonics in bees’ habitats only
strengthen the case against using the insecticides.

The irony, of course, is that farmers use these chemicals to protect
their crops from destructive insects, but in so doing, they harm other insects
essential to their crops’ production — a catch-22 that Hackenberg said speaks
to the fact that “we have become a nation driven by the chemical industry.” In
addition to beekeeping, he owns two farms, and even when crop analysts
recommend spraying pesticides on his crops to kill an aphid population, for
example, he knows that “if I spray, I’m going to kill all the beneficial
insects.” But most farmers, lacking Hackenberg’s awareness of bee populations,
follow the advice of the crop adviser — who, these days, is likely to be paid
by the chemical industry, rather than by a state university or another
independent entity.

Beekeepers have already teamed up with groups representing the almond
and blueberry industries — both of which depend on honey bee pollination — to
tackle the need for education among farmers. “A lot of [farm groups] are
recognizing that we need more resources devoted to pollinator protection,”
Ellis said. “We need that same level of commitment on a national basis, from
our USDA and EPA and the agricultural chemical industry.”

Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself that green-lit clothianidin
and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own
scientists’ clear warnings about the chemicals’ effects on bees and other
pollinators. That doesn’t bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the
market now, even in light of the Purdue study’s findings.

“The agency has, in most cases, sided with pesticide manufacturers and
worked to fast-track the approval of new products, and failed in cases when
there’s clear evidence of harm to take those products off the market,” Towers
said.

Since this is an election year — a time when no one wants to make Big
Ag (and its money) mad — beekeepers may have to suffer another season of
losses before there’s any hope of action on the EPA’s part. But when one out of
every three bites of food on Americans’ plates results directly from honey bee
pollination, there’s no question that the fate of these insects will determine
our own as eaters.

Ellis, for his part, thinks that figuring out a way to solve the bee
crisis could be a catalyst for larger reform within our agriculture system. “If
we can protect that pollinator base, it’s going to have ripple effects … for
wildlife, for human health,” he said. “It will bring up subjects that need to
be looked at, of groundwater and surface water — all the connected subjects
associated [with] chemical use and agriculture.”

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by Ask Umbra.

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear
Umbra,

Generally speaking, sustainability advocates seem to be a serious crowd. Have
you got any jokes or one-liners that can bring some levity to our work?
Especially ones related to recycling?

Robert D.
Jefferson City, Mo.

A. Dearest
Robert,

Have
you heard the one about the aluminum recycling plant? It smelt.

Have
you heard the one about the recycling bin with a sign that said, “Empty water
bottles here”? Pretty soon the bin was full of water.

Know
why environmentalists are bad at playing poker? They avoid the flush.

Chortle,
chortle, chortle. Robert, you have touched upon a serious gap in our cultural lives,
and I’m hoping your fellow readers will weigh in with some good jokes to keep our
spirits up. To be honest, we at Grist have struggled with this since our
founder got the oh-so-brilliant idea to launch an environmental news site
infused with humor in 1999. Because it turns out “environmental humor” is
not that funny, at least in the
form of the classic jokes and one-liners. Please do not tell our auditors.

Others
have found this a tricky topic, too. Bill Maher, for instance, once said the
environment is “one of the hardest subjects to do in comedy.”
British comedian Marcus Brigstocke has called climate change “far and away
the most difficult comedy subject I’ve ever dealt with.” Some will be eager to blame this on the perceived
earnestness of the movement and its members — but shouldn’t that make it all
the funnier?

Back
to our quest for one-liners. A few chestnuts from stand-up comedians might elicit a titter, depending how free you are with your titters: George
Carlin remarked of national-park camping reservations that “when you have to
wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.” Robin Williams compared
clean coal to “wearing a porous condom — at least the intention was there.”
Stephen Wright eschewed cars with his typically profound observation that
“everything is within walking distance if you have the time.” And Sam Levenson
offered this take on overpopulation: “Somewhere on this globe, every 10
seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and
stopped.”

If late-night TV is
your thing, you will find plenty of lukewarm climate gags in the collected
works of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Fallon. Here is a
compendium of somewhat dated examples. My favorite (and I use the term loosely):
“According to a new U.N. report, the global warming outlook is much worse than
originally predicted. Which is pretty bad when they originally predicted it
would destroy the planet.”

If you lean more
toward literature, you might like this Mark Twain musing: “Learn to ride a
bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.” Or how about some Ogden Nash? There’s
this classic: “I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree./Indeed,
unless the billboards fall,/I’ll never see a tree at all.” And the produce-averse
“Further Reflections on Parsley”: “Parsley/Is gharsely” (yes, that’s the entire
poem). And “The Purist,”
which unintentionally offers a wee bit of insight into why scientists have a
hard time speaking passionately about climate change:

I give you now
Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist …
Camped on a
tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”

I would also point you to The Onion, which offers some of the most incisive environmental humor around. (A couple of classics: Consumer product diversity now exceeds
biodiversity and Suburban recycling program now accepting broken and discarded dreams .)

And needless to say, our very own Grist List is an
insanely wonderful source of good guffaws, each
and every day.

I encourage you to keep your quest
alive, with the warning that your average “environmental joke” search on the
interweb will give you scintillating results such as this: “Your so hot you
must’ve started all of globle warming.” Sic.

Finally, because I care, Robert, I
have come up with an Umbra Original: A recycling joke just for you. Are you
ready?

“What’s the worst way for glass to
get around town?  By downcycling.”

You may now toss rotten tomatoes in my
general direction. Or leave a better joke below in comments.

Yukkily,
Umbra

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by Andrew Leonard.

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a
more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about
before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you
probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

For Ximena Prugue, being “young and naïve” is a strength, not a weakness.

“It makes you that much more powerful,” says the 21-year-old. “You don’t have all those years of experience deterring you from thinking that you can do something.”

To support this thesis, Prugue offers herself up as Exhibit A. Born and raised in Miami, Fla., the daughter of Peruvian immigrants, she had no idea what she was getting herself into when she decided to attempt to alleviate “energy poverty” in rural India by distributing solar-powered flashlights.

She didn’t know about the hassles involved in setting up a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, or how Indian customs officers would react to a girl whose luggage was stuffed with $3,000 worth of lights. She didn’t know how difficult it would be to fundraise, or make connections with on-the-ground aid workers in India who didn’t understand why an American teenager was badgering them. She underestimated the difficulties inherent in simultaneously holding down a part-time job, attending full-time community college, and running her own nonprofit. Perhaps most daunting of all, she knew nothing whatsoever about India.

Before her first visit, she says, “I literally had not even eaten Indian food. I hadn’t even seen Slumdog Millionaire.“

All she knew, she says, is she wanted to “make a difference.”

By the time she was a 19-year-old studying mechanical engineering at a community college in Miami, she already boasted a resume filled with socially meaningful work. In high school, she made a documentary about homeless sex offenders living under a bridge in southern Miami. She also helped raise money to support the construction of tilapia farms in Haiti. But she was looking for a project that would go beyond just fundraising — something that she could sink her teeth into.

“I’ve always been into art and design,” she recalls, “so I read a lot of design blogs and I stumbled across this article about the world’s most affordable solar-powered light.”

She proposed to one of her professors that the lights might be useful in Haiti. He told her to do some more research and encouraged her to apply for a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative University, a three-day conference that brings together thousands of young people interested in doing progressive work.

The conference was a life-changing event.

“There were people that were my age who already had their 501(c)(3) status,” recalls Prugue. “That had already had gone to all these different places and done amazing things. I was just like, wow, I have absolutely no excuse to say, ‘Well, oh well, I’m young. Oh well, I still have school.’ There was absolutely no excuse for me to not be doing something.”

She ultimately decided that Haiti didn’t have a big access-to-cheap-energy problem. Rural India, she determined, was where conditions were worst — where the lack of electricity was a major obstacle blocking people’s escape from deep poverty. She won a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative, built a website, set up Giving the Green Light as a nonprofit, and started emailing. A year and a half later, she was headed to India with her bag of lights. And now she knows exactly what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

“I am studying mechanical engineering,” says Prugue, “because I want to be the type of engineer that designs products that you can implement into developing countries to solve all sorts of problems.”

Looking back, Prugue doesn’t downplay the difficulties she faced.

“It doesn’t come easy. It definitely doesn’t come easy,” she says. “But if you work hard and you are really doing it with genuine good intentions — you’re not doing it because you just want to put it on your resume and get into a good college — it will come. It will happen. I believe in positive energy, and that that energy will come back to you, and all the karma will work out. And I really hope that other young people try to change the world too, because I feel that that is where the change is going to come from.”

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by Dana Gunders.

Have you ever considered what that rotten food in your refrigerator
costs? The average American family of four throws out an estimated
$130-175 per month in spoiled and discarded food. That’s real money going
straight into the garbage or compost bin instead of paying off your
credit card bills.

Don’t get me wrong—I love compost. It’s just not the best use of the staggering amount of resources that are needed to grow all the food that never even gets eaten,
including the money you spent to buy it. If you don’t eat half of that
$10 fish, that’s $5 you’re throwing away.  

Collectively, we consumers are responsible for more wasted food than
farmers, grocery stores, or any other part of the food supply chain.
We’re also wasting far more food than ever before, as the average
American today wastes 50 percent more food than 40 years ago. The truth is the implications of our wasteful
habits with food are just not on most of our radars.

However, our
British friends across the pond have demonstrated that with some basic
public awareness, we can make big strides in food waste reduction. A
public awareness campaign in the United Kingdom has been stunningly
successful in reducing household food waste by 18 percent [PDF] in just five years. Doing the same here would mean hundreds of dollars in savings for the average family.

There are many steps we can take to turn this food waste trend around, but one of the first is to understand just what we’re wasting. 

Using USDA data, a recent report by Clean Metrics [PDF] provides estimates of the retail value of all the food we Americans
waste, broken down by categories of meat, dairy, and fresh produce. Note
that these numbers summarize the retail value of avoidable wasted food—that is, they do not include bones, peels, and fat that burns off during cooking.

The
winner? Vegetables by a long shot. In 2009, U.S. consumers spent a
whopping $32 billion on vegetables they bought, never ate, and ended up
throwing away. By volume, tomatoes and potatoes are the most common
culprits, but that’s partially because they’re also the most commonly eaten
vegetables in the U.S. If we look by percentage, greens, onions, peppers, and pumpkins (Halloween?) are tossed at the highest rates. 

You know your own food habits best, but here’s a peek into the average American kitchen garbage bin:

(If you’re like me and want to totally geek out on the percentage of eggnog and hazelnuts that go to waste, see this recent USDA report [PDF].)

Take a moment to think about the products on this list that most
often go bad in your household. When you go to the store, are you
realistic about how much you actually cook and eat? Do you know the
best way to store food items, or how to tell when they’re actually bad?
(Hint: It’s not necessarily  the expiration date. See my previous blog here.) Do you take the time to freeze food you won’t eat in time?

The Love Food Hate Waste site has excellent advice for how to store many different foods and fun recipe tools to help use up specific foods. They also have a portion planner to help you cook just the right amount. NRDC’s new food waste fact sheet [PDF] has tips on what to think about when buying and storing food. And
there’s a wealth of knowledge out there in the form of friends, family,
and cookbooks. I like The Use-It-Up Cookbook or The Frugal Foodie. 

Awareness is the first step, so you’re already well on your way. Now
it’s time to take action. Observe your habits, educate yourself, try a
new recipe or freeze something you haven’t frozen before, and get on
the journey to reducing your food waste, food bills, and food print all
at the same time.

A version of this post originally appeared on Switchboard, the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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by Lionel Foster.

Forty-four years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot
dead while supporting sanitation workers in Memphis, his legacy is
indisputable. Because of the way he mobilized the poor and the powerful,
state-sponsored racial discrimination, a prominent factor in American life for
nearly 200 years, is no more. As a result, it’s now hard to imagine a position
of prominence in this country, including the presidency, that an African
American could not obtain.

But Dr. King’s work is not complete. Today, we face continued
attempts at voter suppression, attacks on collective bargaining rights, income
inequality, a racially inflected discussion of illegal immigration, and one of
the last great bastions of state-sponsored discrimination: the denial of
marriage and other rights on the basis of sexual orientation. If Dr. King were
alive today, I believe he would speak out about these issues. I believe, too,
that in this era of globalization, he would talk about climate change, the
North/South divide, and our moral duty to preserve the natural resources that
are fundamental to human wellbeing.

Dr. King would be an environmentalist, but I think he would talk
about the natural and man-made worlds in a way that resonates with everyone,
especially the poor. Let me explain.

I spent most of my childhood on the eastside of Baltimore,
part of a black family living paycheck to paycheck in the shadow of one of the
world’s great medical research institutions, Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Unfortunately, the health and prosperity of Hopkins rarely spilled over into
the surrounding community. On our side of the invisible line, urban decay and drug-related
crime defined the landscape. Three out of every ten houses in my neighborhood
were vacant.

These two very different communities viewed each other
warily. I attended Johns Hopkins University on scholarship as an undergrad,
worked part-time as an office assistant in the department of anesthesiology and
critical care medicine, and was there when a division chief within the
department was robbed and assaulted on his way home. I can’t remember speaking
to anyone else in that office who lived within the city limits, let alone near
the hospital, and I think that attack reinforced the idea that Hopkins was by
necessity a fortress, a place apart.

The fear ran both ways. My grandmother summed up many
residents’ concerns about the hospital down the street. “I have friends who go
into Hopkins,” she once told me, “but they don’t come out.” There was a lot to
this statement. For people with little or no access to healthcare, an acute
illness left untreated for years can become chronic and eventually
irreversible. Add this to glaring disparities in wealth and cultural barriers,
and it becomes plausible for a 70-year-old woman from the segregated South to
believe that white men in lab coats might kill her if they had the chance.

After years of trying to solve the problem of the
surrounding community, the hospital settled on a solution: They tore much of it
down. Hopkins and the City of Baltimore formed a partnership called East
Baltimore Development Inc., used eminent domain to relocate my grandmother and hundreds
of other families, and cleared 88 acres to make room for a biotechnology park.

What does all this have to do with the environment? In 2006,
when a local magazine asked me and a pair of artists to fill two pages of a
special issue with anything we wanted, the story of my troubled neighborhood
was on my mind. Why was the city so racially divided, we asked, and was there
anything we could do about it? Our attempt to answer that question became a
small environmental campaign called Black + White = Green. The idea was that
even though the most outspoken proponents of environmentalism were white and
the victims of environmental degradation were disproportionately black and
brown, the environment could give us lots of common ground, especially if we
expanded its definition to include the material and non-material factors that
shape life everywhere, from untouched mountain tops to the streets of inner
cities.

I don’t think any of us had much experience working on
environmental issues, so we embarked on this project with no knowledge of people
who were already doing what we had in mind in much bigger and better ways.
There’s Will Allen, a
Milwaukee-based MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner who’s turning young
people into urban farmers; former Obama administration green jobs advisor Van Jones, connecting
environmentalism to community development and economic opportunity; and Majora
Carter, another MacArthur “genius,” busy greening New York’s South Bronx.

Tactically and philosophically, these are some of the
descendants of Dr. King. As if reading from King’s playbook, Jones in
particular has made a point of empowering young people; fighting for economic
opportunity; using collective action; helping those who might otherwise be written
off as powerless turn their hands and feet into assets; and paying close
attention to the way America thinks and talks about itself. In his latest
project, cslled Rebuild the Dream, Jones
is encouraging environmentalists, community activists, and average citizens to
demand economic fairness. His timing was perfect. Rebuild the Dream was up and
running as the Occupy movement kicked into full gear, and it soon became clear
that Jones, the urban environmentalist, already spoke the demonstrators’
language.

Last October, when occupiers were making news daily, I
attended a forum in Washington, D.C. A new monument to King had been erected in
the National Mall and civil rights veterans gathered to remember King and his
work. The speakers repeatedly drew connections between their departed friend’s
push for economic equality and the Occupy movement. The parallels were striking.

King spent his last months organizing a Poor People’s
Campaign that, just weeks after his death, saw the erection of a settlement in
the capital full of people demanding an end to poverty. It’s impact was small.
King was killed before the march took off on Mother’s Day 1968, the assassination
of Robert Kennedy dampened spirits during the encampment’s third week, and in
mid-June the Department of the Interior forced the demonstrators to leave after
their permit expired.

Dr. King has now been dead for several more years than he
ever spent walking, teaching, and preaching, but lots of people of different
colors and backgrounds are still looking for a way forward. Now, as then,
progress in some areas is still elusive, but the events of the past year show
that thousands are willing to work for change.

Forty-four years after his death, Occupy, people like Van
Jones, and the resonance with which King’s voice still reverberates through
current events, all suggest that a movement that can unite people who care
about patches of soil with those who know how cold and unforgiving a swath of
concrete can be, could bring us that much closer to something that looks like
justice.

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by The Climate Desk.

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently by Climate Desk.

Emails
contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible
threats,” Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director
of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said in an
interview. “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails
nobody would like to receive.”

“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into
it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I
didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said. “I thought it
was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”

Climate Desk has seen a sample of the emails and can confirm they are
laced with menacing language and expletives, and contain personal threats
of violence.

Emanuel began receiving emails “almost immediately” after the video
was posted on Jan. 5, and the volume peaked at four or five emails a
day. The threats have now petered off.

Threats are nothing new in the world of climate science. But Emanuel
was surprised by the viciousness of the emails. “I think most of my
colleagues and I have received a fair bit of email here and there that
you might classify as ‘hate mail,’ but nothing like what I’ve got in the
last few days.”

“This was a little more orchestrated this time,” he said.

The video — “New Hampshire’s GOP Voters Speak Out About Climate Change” — documented a
climate change conference run by a group of Republican voters upset by
their party’s anti-science rhetoric. Emanuel was a keynote speaker,
along with former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who, incidentally, has not received any threats since the video.

In one clip, Emanuel says, “It makes me feel to some extent
disgusted with politics and to some extent ashamed to be an American.”

The comments were seized upon, Emanuel suspects, by “bloggers bent on
distorting that message and amplifying it.” One website, Climate Depot,
posted Emanuel’s email address.

Emanuel notes that in the full video, he went on to explain that the
Republican candidates “have either been misled, in which case it’s not
great to be part of the political system where candidates for the
president of the United States could be so misled on such an important
issue, or they were dishonest, which [is] equally bad in my view: How
could we live in a country where candidates are being dishonest about
an issue of such importance?”

Another website, Junk Science, raised questions about his wife’s anti-war feelings in the 1960s.

“Somebody came to the conclusion that back in the ’60s she was a Marxist — which she was back then,” Emanuel said. He notes that “conservative heroes of today
like Norman Podhoretz [and] Jeane Kirkpatrick” were also socialists in
the ’60s. “So I don’t quite know what the problem was there!”

In June 2011, top Australian climate scientists said they had been targeted by death threats and menacing phone calls, including threats of sexual attacks on family
members. Australian National University in Canberra reacted by
tightening security, and the police began investigating. U.S. researchers received a torrent of hate mail in the wake of “Climategate,” in which a trove of emails was stolen and released at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.

Emanuel decided not to alert police.

Emanuel says climate scientists are not used to the intensity of
political debate around climate change: “We scientists are usually not
in any kind of heated public debate, as is the case in climate; we’re not
used to this, we’re not trained for it.”

“I’ve done a lot of public speaking, and I’ve spoken to many types of
audiences, including audiences that are very conservative, and while I
certainly have people push back — which is understandable and encouraged,
and people debate; that’s all part of that, that’s fine — I’ve never
ever encountered in direct contact with the public any behavior that I
thought was bad or threatening or vile or anything like that. So I don’t
have any trouble communicating directly with the public. I think it’s
the distortions that occur sometimes in certain formats that are the
root of the problem.”

Emanuel asked me to publish the full audio of our interview, which you can listen to below.

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by Daniel Klein.

Our videos are often inspired by whatever it is I’m in the mood to eat. Such was the case with this short trip we took along the Rappahannock River in Virginia, where oyster farmers are helping clean the Chesapeake Bay and replenishing the native oyster population (now down to just 1 percent of what it once was). These bivalves are a remarkable, sustainable food and if you are in an oyster-growing region, I recommend you partake as soon as possible. Winter is oyster season! (Just make sure your cameraperson isn’t prone to seasickness.)

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by John Farrell.

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project.

Solar
grid parity is considered the tipping point for solar power, when
installing solar power will cost less than buying electricity from the
grid. It’s also a tipping point for the electricity system, when
millions of Americans can choose energy production and self-reliance
over dependence on their electric utility.

But this simple concept
conceals a great deal of complexity. And given the stakes of solar
grid parity, it’s worth exploring the details.

The cost of solar

For
starters, what’s the right metric for the cost of solar? The installed
cost for residential solar ($6.40 in 2011), or commercial solar ($5.20),
or utility-scale solar ($3.75)? Even if we pick one of these, it’s
difficult to compare apples to apples, because grid electricity is
priced in dollars per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity, not dollars per
Watt.

Enter “levelized cost,” or the cost of a solar PV array
averaged over a number of years of production. For example, a 1-kilowatt (kW) solar array installed in Minneapolis for $6.40 per Watt
costs $6,400. Over 25 years, we can expect that system to produce about
30,000 kWh, so the “simple levelized cost” is $6,400
divided by 30,000, or about $0.21 per kWh.

But people usually
borrow money, and pay interest, to install solar power. And there are
some maintenance costs over those 25 years. And we also use a “discount rate”
that puts heavier weight on dollars spent or earned today compared to
those earned 20 years from now. A 1-kW solar array that is 80 percent paid for
by borrowing at 5 percent interest, with maintenance costs of about $65 per
year, and discounted at 5 percent per year, will have a levelized cost of around
$0.37.

That means that “solar grid parity” for this 1-kW solar
array happens if the grid electricity price is $0.37 per kWh. But this
calculation is location-specific.

In Los Angeles, that same 1-kW
system produces 35,000 kWh over 25 years, lowering the levelized cost to
$0.31. The time frame also matters.

If we look back at the
Minneapolis project with a levelized cost of $0.37, but look at
the output over 20 years instead of 25 years, it increases the levelized
cost to $0.43, because we have fewer kWh of electricity over which to
divide our initial cost.

We choose 25 years because solar PV panels have a good chance of producing for that long.

We also use a lower installed cost than the U.S. average. Residential solar projects may average $6.40 per Watt, but there are some good examples of aggregate purchase residential solar projects costing $4.40 per
Watt. The levelized cost of solar at $4.40 per Watt in Minneapolis is
$0.25; in Los Angeles it is $0.21.

The following map shows the
levelized cost of solar, by state, based on an installed cost of $4.40
per Watt, averaged over 25 years.

This
map shows half our grid parity equation, the cost of solar. But what
about the other half, the grid price? It’s another complicated
question.

The grid price

Utilities like to compare new
electricity production to their existing fleet, which means comparing
new solar power projects to long-ago-paid-off (amortized) coal and
nuclear power plants that can produce electricity for 3-4 cents per
kWh. But this is apples to oranges, because utilities can’t get any new
electricity for that price, from any source.

A more appropriate
measure of the grid price is the marginal cost for a utility of getting
wholesale power from a new power plant. In California, this is called
the “market price referent,” and it’s around 12 cents per kWh. The
figure varies from state to state.

But while the market price
referent provides a reasonable comparison for the cost of utility-scale
solar, it’s not the number that matters for solar installed on rooftops
or near buildings. In those cases, the power is used “behind the
meter,” and depending on the type of state policy for net metering,
the customer can essentially spin their electric meter backward when
their solar panels produce electricity. That means that solar power is
really competing against the energy cost on a utility bill, known as the “retail price.”

The following map shows the average retail
electricity price by state across the U.S. It ranges from 8-10 cents in
the interior to 15 cents per kWh and higher on the coasts.

In
general, the residential retail electricity price is the generally
accepted grid parity price. With this price and our previous map of the
levelized cost of solar, we can assess the state of solar grid parity.
The following map shows the ratio of the levelized cost of solar to the
grid parity price in each state. Only Hawaii has reached solar grid
parity without incentives.

As
time rolls ahead, and grid prices rise while solar costs fall, the
picture changes. In five years, three states representing 57
million Americans will be at solar grid parity: Hawaii, New York, and
California.

There are other considerations in the grid parity calculation.

Time-of-use rates

Some
utility customers pay “time-of-use” rates that charge more for
electricity consumed during times of peak demand, such as when a hot
sunny day has everyone using their air conditioners. Under these rates,
a solar project can be replacing electricity that costs upwards of
$0.30 per kWh. Over a year, time-of-use rates can (on average) boost
the cost of electricity—at peak times, when solar panels produce a lot
of power—by about 30 percent.  Assuming every state implemented
time-of-use pricing (and that it was equivalent to a 30 percent increase
in grid prices during peak times), solar grid parity would be a reality
in 14 states in 2016, instead of just three.

Solar vs. grid over time

There’s
one other calculation. Let’s say that in 2011 solar still costs just a
bit more than the grid electricity price, but that the grid price is
rising at a modest rate each year. In this case, solar may still be the
right choice, because the lifetime cost of solar (at a fixed price) will
be less than the rising cost of grid electricity. We can use an
accounting tool called net present value to estimate the savings from
solar compared to grid power over 25 years, and we find that for every
percentage point annual increase in electricity prices, solar can be about 10 percent more expensive than grid power today, and still be at “parity.” We
find that with electricity price inflation of 2 percent per year, solar grid
parity shifts up two years using this method.

To further explain
the concept of solar grid parity, I’ve also created this slideshow. You can view more of my presentations here.

Solar
grid parity has enormous implications for the electricity system, and
the time is drawing very close for many Americans. I hope this post
(and slideshow) helps illustrate the complexity of the concept, and I’d
appreciate your feedback via email (jfarrell@ilsr.org) or in the comments below.

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by Mary Anne Hitt.

When my husband and I decided to put solar panels on our West Virginia home last year, we thought we might make some waves in our small town, since we would be the first family in the historic district to go solar. Well, it turns out we were right — the panels quickly increased our profile in many ways.

Not only have we produced 2 megawatts (MW) of solar energy (often producing more than we use and therefore feeding back into the grid to power our neighbors’ homes), but we also managed to start a bit of a solar power frenzy in our town.

Inspired by us, one of our neighbors soon installed a solar system three times bigger than ours. Then another neighbor was denied permission to install solar panels, because the town determined they would violate existing historic preservation guidelines. That sparked a larger discussion, still going on today, about whether those guidelines should be changed. The whole town has started to notice and ask questions. The issue created such a buzz that it made the Shepherdstown Chronicle’s list of “10 news stories that characterize Shepherdstown in 2011“:

Historic districts go solar

In April, the Shepherdstown Planning Commission approved a permit for resident Nathaniel Hitt to place photovoltaics on his garage, making Hitt one of the first residents to have solar panels in the historic district. Since last spring, conversation has continued with regard to amendment of rules associated with the allowance of solar panels on Shepherdstown’s historic buildings. Currently the town’s ordinances ban solar panels on the street facing portion of homes, limiting options for residents looking to go solar. In November, the HLC held an informal discussion about the future of solar panels in the historic district, concluding that the Planning Commission and Town Council should take a closer look at the issue.

I can’t tell you how happy this makes me — people are talking about solar power, and nationwide, both solar and wind energy continue to expand as we move beyond coal.
Some recent news on that front, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association:

The U.S. solar industry installed a quarterly record for new solar electric capacity in Q3 (2011) with 449 MW. More U.S. solar electric capacity came online in Q3 2011 than all of 2009 combined, and Q4 2011 is predicted to be even larger.
Today, U.S. solar is an economic force: employing more than 100,000 Americans at 5,000 businesses across all 50 states.

Here are three recent examples of solar power installations continuing nationwide:

The largest active solar project in Texas just came online this month, when Austin Energy powered up a 30-MW solar plant in the village of Webberville, Texas.

Fort Bliss, a U.S. Army base in Texas, will install a solar energy system expected to save $39 million in energy costs over the next 24 years.

The public schools in Clinton, Tenn., will install solar panels that will generate not only clean electricity, but also an estimated $118,000 in revenue for the school system every year.

And from the American Wind Energy Association’s review of 2011:

Both Iowa and South Dakota reached the important milestone of 20 percent of their electricity coming from wind power, a first for the U.S. …

According to the latest edition of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Technologies Market Report, turbine prices decreased by as much as 33 percent or more between late 2008 and 2010. …

When more than 50 power plants totaling 7,000 MW unexpectedly went offline in Texas due to unusually cold weather early in the year, wind power was there to help stabilize the system and keep the lights on. Wind energy played a critical role in limiting the severity of the blackouts, providing enough electricity to keep the power on for about three million typical households.

Clean energy is powering more homes and businesses every year, and it’s energizing our economy with new jobs. If we want to keep these trends moving in the right direction, we’re going to have to join together in 2012 to remove obstacles to clean energy.

As just one example, in Virginia, utility giant Dominion has convinced state regulators to approve a surcharge on homeowners with rooftop solar systems between 10 and 20 kilowatts, and they have actively tried to block a large solar project at Washington and Lee University. Removing outdated and misguided barriers like these will be a priority for the Sierra Club and our allies in the year ahead.

As I said before when talking about my own solar panels, it’s an amazing feeling knowing that I am making clean electricity on my own rooftop that does not blow up mountains, cause asthma and heart attacks, spew mercury into the air and water, or leave behind toxic waste. Americans nationwide are feeling the same way as they install solar and wind power at record levels, and 2012 is shaping up to be even better!

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by Eric de Place.

Cross-posted from Sightline Daily.

Here are three pictures that help explain why American railways seem
to be supporting coal export proposals in the Northwest. It’s because
railways are very closely connected to the coal industry. Consider:

Coal so dwarfs every other rail-hauled commodity that it is almost as
important as all the other commodities combined. (Note: This picture
excludes “intermodal” freight.)

But while coal is a huge component of rail freight, it declined noticeably in 2009 and 2010:

Presumably, a good deal of the recent decline is related to a lousy
economy and the attendant reduction in demand for electrical power and
industrial uses of coal. Yet the recently depressed coal rail volumes
are not entirely driven by the economic downtown. In fact, coal
fired-power is on a long-term downward trajectory:

Going forward, that downward trend is likely to continue, and perhaps
accelerate. Regulators are tightening pollution standards; other power
sources like natural gas and renewable energy are becoming increasingly
competitive in the marketplace; and communities across the country are
averse to coal-fired power for its deleterious health effects.

Power plants are not the only customers that railways service with
coal shipments, but they easily constitute the lion’s share. So given
the ongoing decline (and dismal future prospects) for domestic coal use,
it’s no wonder that railway companies support big new coal export
facilities. As Americans are increasingly uninterested in buying coal,
railways will want to find consumers — no matter how far afield they may
be — who will pay coal to be moved by rail, whether it’s to a power plant
or an export terminal.

Notes: I created the first chart using data from the table on page 8 of the American Association of Railroad’s “Rail Time Indicators”
report for Jan. 2011. (The AAR data does not combine commodity
carload data with figures for intermodal freight, which amounted to 11.3
million trailers and containers in 2010.) The second chart comes
directly from page 13 of that same report. The third chart is taken from
the most recent rail indicators report [PDF], which was published in Dec. 2011.

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