Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells — Our Ride to a Renewable Future
Recently I walked down to 255 Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, a couple miles south of where I live. I turned onto Wall Street, passed the New York Stock Exchange, and then proceeded to circle the same short block until a parking attendant confirmed that the address I was looking for no longer exists. A clothing store now stands roughly where the world’s first power plant once did. In 1882, at a time when Thomas Edison was being chastised by impatient investors and scoffed at by the press, he finally threw the switch here, illuminating hundreds of light bulbs along Wall Street. Within a decade, the early foundations of our modern-day power grid had been laid, and more than a million bulbs shone across the country. My walk was inspired by Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells — Our Ride to the Renewable Future by journalist Amanda Little . It’s the kind of book that makes sense of events and inventions you didn’t even realize belonged in the same story. From shipping crates to electric cars to silicone breast implants, Little elucidates a topic as complex and tangled as the wires now running beneath New York City. I’d be tempted to insert a pun here about how Little has pulled off something big, if I were into the kind of quippy subheadings found throughout the book ("It’s a Sprawl World," "Big Butz," "The Writing is on the Wal-Mart"). But I think Power Trip sells itself short with this cutesy packaging. It’s a friendly, but not a faddish, book — an expansive, impressively well-researched history that explains how we came to live in the world that we do and where we might go from here. Beginning with a long look at fossil fuels and the infrastructure they’ve generated, Little takes us to an "ultradeep" offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, an enterprise she finds "doggedly ambitious, but also seemingly desperate — like an addict forcing a syringe into the earth’s innermost veins." She recalls a time when the United States was "the Saudi Arabia of the world" in terms of supplying petroleum, then traces how oil "evolved from a fuel for war machines to a catalyst for war to a lethal weapon" on September 11th. One of the best scenes in the book is her fond rendering of the 1945 maritime meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, during which the two men forged an alliance that would shape the modern world. (Ibn Saud brought along a herd of sheep, slept under the stars, and, having a lame leg, bonded with FDR over his newfangled wheelchair.) Much of the narrative is cast as a personal quest for understanding. This works well at times, such as when we descend with Little to inspect the electrical grid beneath New York City, where "hot flashes" have been known to fuse contacts to eyeballs. But it seems contrived in other spots — at Talladega in Alabama, for example, where Little has an epiphany that NASCAR is "more universally American — more me — than I’d ever realized." Even though Little catalogs the contents of her office, her home, and her salad in greater detail than necessary, her message about the astonishing ubiquity of petroleum is a powerful one. Our dependence on oil goes far beyond fuel. We touch more plastic than we do skin. And thanks to fossil-fuel-based fertilizers — arguably the most significant invention of the last century — we even eat oil. In the end, Little argues that the same ingenuity that got us into this mess can get us out of it. The last part of the book canvasses alternative energy technologies, including Scotch Tape-thin batteries made of viruses and "nanoink" that can be printed on any surface to convert sunlight into electricity (think pants that charge your cell phone while you wear them). To glimpse what the future might look like, she visits the new Bank of America skyscraper in Manhattan (where the rooms can tell if they’re occupied by measuring CO2 levels) and a zero-energy housing development in Tennessee — "an experiment that could have implications for American daily life almost equal to those of Edison’s Pearl Street dynamo." It’s heartening that the great inventor himself anticipated the end of fossil fuels. "This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of it — it is so wasteful," Edison told a visitor to his laboratory around 1910 (not 1931, a minor error in the book*). "You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. "Do we use them? Oh no! We burn wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property." * On page 252, Little quotes Edison as saying this in 1931. The source in her notes, however, is Little Journeys by Elbert Hubbard, a book published in 1913. If you have a look at the chapter on Edison, you’ll see that the quote is actually from an interview that took place when Edison was 63. Since he was born in February 1847, that would make the interview in 1910, unless it’s very early 1911.
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Home, Sweet Home
When American Municipal Power announced last fall that it had canceled plans to build a new coal-fired power plant in southeastern Ohio, NRDC and its allies rejoiced. For senior attorney Anjali Jaiswal, who had helped devise the legal strategy to fight the proposed plant, it was a particularly meaningful victory. She spent much of her childhood in Ohio — "I love Cleveland!" she readily exclaims — and the battle over the power plant represents what she values most about environmental law: the ability to make real change in her own backyard. Jaiswal’s affinity for protecting the places she has called home bodes well for the planet: she’s had a lot of backyards in her 35 years. Jaiswal was born in India, but her family moved to the United States when she was just 3 years old, first to Dallas and then to Akron, Cleveland, and San Diego. By the time she was in high school, the Jaiswal family was settled in the Los Angeles area. Since joining NRDC in 2001, Jaiswal has fought and won many local battles. First based in the organization’s Southern California office, she worked to protect and improve water quality in rivers, streams, and coastal areas, waging battles that yielded immediate, tangible results. Jaiswal and other members of NRDC’s California staff have also successfully advocated for upgrades to a sewage treatment plant on the central coast, where sea otters in Morro Bay were being sickened by the discharge of dirty water. She waged legal battles to strengthen water pollution controls and to stop dairies in Southern California from dumping waste into the Santa Ana River. In the Sacramento area, she helped win the fight to require that irrigation projects leave more water in ecosystems, shielding endangered fish populations from further degradation. "We said, ‘This is the law, this is the science. You have to rule for us,’" she remembers. "It was a lot of sleepless nights and hard, hard work, but we won." Last year, as Jaiswal was immersed in state and local legal offensives, a colleague approached her about trying international work. "I was conflicted," she says. "I really like working on local issues as a litigator." But as she heard more, her choice became clear. NRDC was looking to start an initiative in India, through which it hoped to bring clean energy and efficiency technologies to a country undergoing tremendous development and modernization. As the country of her birth, it was a place full of import for her. She said yes. Jaiswal had visited India several times as an adult. In 2005 she took a leave from NRDC and spent three months in New Delhi working on pollution control through the Nehru Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program. She was gratified by how easily her knowledge transferred to a new setting, allowing her to help with a campaign to improve sewage treatment near the Ganges River. "I knew what sewage plants looked like, their operation, their energy issues," she says. "I knew about compliance and enforcement." She also knew the country on a personal level, having visited relatives in her father’s village in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, which shares a border with Pakistan. Her experiences there gave her a snapshot of the broad challenges India faces. One evening, she and a cousin walked out into the tobacco fields surrounding the village. Her cousin wanted to show off the village’s new power plant — a sign of progress. Jaiswal couldn’t help but see the environmental repercussions of the emissions spewing from the towering smokestacks. India and the United States have two important things in common: they have large English-speaking populations and are democracies, making collaboration easier than in other rapidly developing countries, such as China. Though NRDC’s work in India is full of potential, Jaiswal says, the challenges that lie ahead are significant: some 80 percent of the infrastructure the country will need by 2030 has yet to be built, and the number of motor vehicles on the road is expected to quadruple by 2020. The environmental ramifications of India’s path forward will be felt around the world. Jaiswal and Jacob Scherr, director of NRDC’s international program, launched the India initiative last June. Their goals include fostering U.S.-India cooperation on clean energy and climate, strengthening environmental compliance and enforcement, and incorporating energy-efficiency standards into building codes to reduce carbon emissions. "One of the great challenges in India is that there are laws on the books that are not implemented or enforced," Scherr says. "Anjali is in an excellent position to explain how we handle these problems in the United States and to translate her experiences to meet the needs in India." Jaiswal sometimes thinks back to her father’s village in Gujarat. The memory she recalls is a hopeful one — that of a relative proudly leading her up to the roof to show off a new possession, the village’s first solar cookstove.
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Home, Sweet Home
China and Us
Seven years ago, the lights went out across vast swaths of China. Massive blackouts, like those in California in 2000 and 2001, left residents and businesses without power. Among the regions hardest hit was Jiangsu Province, a growing industrial center north of Shanghai, whose skyrocketing — and inefficient — industrial and residential energy use was overtaxing its power grid. Barbara Finamore, director of NRDC’s China program, recalls Jiangsu’s initial response to the energy conservation measures proposed by NRDC. "Ten years ago, they laughed," she says. But then the blackouts hit, and Jiangsu’s leaders recognized pretty quickly the role that energy efficiency could play in stabilizing the province’s power grid — and its economy. Jiangsu, with a population of 76 million, and California still have much in common. Each is a major economic engine in its country (Jiangsu’s economy accounts for 10 percent of China’s gross domestic product; California represents 11.5 percent of the U.S. GDP), and both are interested in developing cleaner sources of energy. Last October California and Jiangsu signed a formal agreement to promote cooperation between their governments, industries, and universities to boost energy efficiency and renewable energy use and to curb emissions. This is the first time that such a deal has been struck between a Chinese province and a U.S. state with the specific aim of tackling climate change. NRDC’s China program helped design the agreement’s basic framework and will continue to "help ensure that both California and Jiangsu stay on the right track," says Mona Yew, the new director of the China energy-efficiency program.
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China and Us
Big Wind, Small Space
Starting your own wind farm but lack the backyard space? Try vertical-axis windmills. When grouped properly they’re more efficient than the more common propeller-style, horizontal-axis type, says Robert Whittlesey of the California Institute of Technology. In the right arrangement, vertical-axis turbines benefit from drafting, much like fish swimming in a school, making it possible to pack vertical turbines into just 1 percent of the space that would be required by an equivalent number of horizontal-axis turbines. And the faster they rotate, the more visible their cylindrical shape appears, making them safer for birds than traditional windmills.
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Big Wind, Small Space