Blame it on Hollywood?

“So the world ends Wednesday?”

That was a colleague’s snarky rejoinder to my explanation of the oil export crisis and the implications for our energy future. Perhaps my explanation was off. Or perhaps we’re all suffering from a Hollywood-induced relevance deficit. Human response systems are really good at spotting and dealing with near-term problems. If it’s not a clear and present danger, it’s not relevant and therefore not motivating. Hollywood understands this and formulates its films to capitalize on it – particularly the action and disaster ones.

In a typical Hollywood disaster flick, the world crisis is glaringly apparent – and personally relevant – to viewers within the first 10-15 minutes of the opening credits and will be resolved within about 120 minutes. The real world doesn’t work that way, of course. However, our media-mediated lives often create a bleed-over of Hollywood-style expectations. No category five hurricanes raking the East Coast flat on a weekly basis? Well then, no climate change, obviously. Plants and animals shifting their ranges in response to climate changes is a subtle thing, ill-suited for hardy action heroes like Bruce Willis and Vin Diesel.

This lack of near-term urgency makes it tough to change behavior on important issues like climate change and carbon-intensive lifestyles. People tune out long-term problems. Clearly your warning to them has no relevance to their particular life.

That is the challenge for those in green tech seeking to motivate people. Rather than reflexively grabbing for a “Save the Planet” positioning, stop and look closer for angles that make what you’re offering relevant to issues your target audience is grappling with.

Have an all electric car that makes polar bears want to hug people who own one? Great, but I’m pretty sure that’s not relevant to anyone concerned about rising gas prices and the fact that increasingly complex internal combustion engines and their drive trains are making regular maintenance an expensive proposition. Electric cars are also kinda cool and hip. People like to be cool and hip, even if it costs more. Just ask Steve Jobs.

Find what’s relevant, match it with what you have on tap and then sell. Maybe even get Vin Diesel to star in the commercial.

Are green buildings killing birds?

How green can green buildings really be if they kill billions of birds per year? That’s the premise Chicago Tribune’s Sheryl DeVore floated in article last week, citing frightening Audubon Society bird death statistics and linking the avian genocide to more than 33,000 LEED certified buildings whose facades make heavy use of glass.

But Treehugger quickly pointed out the flaw in DeVore’s logic, countering that the birth deaths aren’t a green building problem, but rather a universal building problem.

And, in fact, LEED-certified glass buildings tend to use advanced glass technologies such as fritted glass or tint-changing glass like Brodeur/Beaupre client SAGE Electrochromics that do a far better job at repelling bird collisions.

You can read and follow the debate here.

A green job jewel in the spending bill dust heap

A little-known provision in the compromise spending bill signed into law this weekend will help some threatened Recovery Act-funded clean technology projects breathe a sigh of relief and move forward in bringing green jobs to their respective regions.

You’d think that cleantech projects that received loan guarantees, tax breaks and other funding from the DOE would be churning along nicely by now. But an arcane rule in the Energy Policy Act – and how narrowly the DOE interprets it – cast a cold chill on many DOE award recipients.

To put it simply, cleantech companies that receive DOE loan guarantees must first pay a risk-based credit subsidy fee, which can amount to a whopping 20% or more of the loan amount… unless their projects actively generate renewable energy or produce biofuels.

In other words, solar, wind and hydro energy companies get a free pass, while energy efficiency and waste heat recovery companies get stuck holding the bill. Section 1705 of the Energy Policy Act waives subsidy fees for companies that manufacture renewable energy products that generate electricity or thermal energy. The loosely defined criteria in the bill provided the DOE broad flexibility to extend fee relief to many more loan recipients. But they didn’t, and as a result some projects were suddenly in jeopardy.

At a time when the Obama administration is strongly promoting energy efficiency technologies as the fastest, most cost-effective path to U.S. energy independence, this rule is not only counterintuitive, it is economically stifling for many of our most promising new cleantech companies. You can’t float them a loan guarantee, charging them tens of millions in subsidy fees for the “honor,” and then expect them to become the new engines of our green economy. Some award recipients have already withdrawn from the loan program, and countless potential applicants have chosen not to apply for participation in the program.

The good news is that, despite all the cuts to energy efficiency programs in the compromise spending bill, the bad policy was upended.  Thanks to hard-fought negotiations by Minnesota’s legislative delegation in particular, the spending bill now includes terms that allow energy efficiency technology companies to avoid payment of those subsidy fees.

A smart policy rewards – not penalizes – our best entrepreneurial cleantech companies, which are those that will help us reduce reliance on fossil fuels, increase the use of renewable energy, cut carbon emissions and generate urgently needed jobs.

{DISCLOSURE: A Brodeur/Beaupre client benefited from the spending bill provision}

Carbon negative, cactus positive, and other hopes for a solar future

I found myself sympathizing with former Gov. Schwarzenegger frustrations when I came across an article about the push to build solar energy facilities in the sun-drenched deserts of southwestern California.

The issue that got Schwarzenegger upset was a delay in permitting solar energy facilities in the Mohave desert region due to the presence of endangered species, the Mohave ground squirrel among them. Who would have guessed that solar power, the fair-haired child of the environmental movement, actually has an environmental price tag? Yes, those acres of sleek, shiny solar panels, which emit no carbon-laden smoke or radioactive steam as they diligently turn sunlight into wattage, can actually harm their host environments. The two poles of the California debate can be summarized thusly from press coverage:

Gov. Terminator: “I’m trying to clean up the environment and wean us off coal and imported oil, and you’re talking to me about freakin’ squirrels?”

Donna Charpied (Mohave desert resident and organic farmer): “Squirrels rock. You’re not screwing up my environment to clean up your mess.”

Caricaturing aside, it’s easy to see the legitimate points on both sides. Renewable energy is a huge part of our future – but not our whole future. Biodiversity and resource consumption have to weigh in the environmental equation as we seek alternatives to fossil fuels. For instance, conventional solar plants use tons of water per hour – between 500 and 1,100 gallons per megawatt hour – for cooling. Water is not a casual topic among people who live in deserts. Diverting huge amounts of it to solar plants can seriously stress local environments.

Part of the solution to disturbing vast tracts of desert landscape is mounting solar panels on already developed urban property. The roofs of warehouses and industrial facilities are the most frequently mentioned locations, and they doubtless have a role in closing the renewables versus carbon fuels gap. But think of it. How big is a coal-fired power plant? Really big, because it takes a lot of “big” to produce a lot of electricity. We aren’t going to replace that kind of output with solar panels on roofs alone. We need utility-scale solar facilities, and like it or not that means making environmental trade-offs to make long-term gains.

Wider use of solar technologies like concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) and dry cooling can shrink a solar facility’s physical footprint and eliminate its water consumption. Technology can’t however, shrink solar facilities down to nothing, or magically pop them onto a site without disrupting local species. Energy production, renewable or otherwise, has a price. It might cost money, or water, or land, or species displacement, but it’s going to cost. Wind, solar, biomass and biofuels are a better long-term energy solution than fossil fuels, but we have to get Zen about the fact that they’re going to consume resources. Differently from fossil fuels, and at a different cost to the environment, but they’re going to consume. Solar and wind farms take up a lot of land, as do the new power lines for carrying energy to market. Wind turbine blades will inevitably kill some birds and bats.

Complex problems seldom have simple solutions, and developing a new energy economy is about as complex as it gets. As a society, if we want the benefits that renewable energy sources offer then we have to expect to pay for them, if not in CO2 emissions then maybe in squirrels and desert vistas. The trick is using all the technology tricks we have in our bag to keep the price as low as possible.

Oh behave! Why environmental sustainability needs a new brand of communications

Hybrid vehicles have gotten more press over the last year than almost anything other than Charlie Sheen’s public implosion. Google the term “hybrid vehicles” with any major media outlet name – The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, CNN, etc. – and you will find anywhere from 250,000 to 1.2 million hits for 2010 alone. PR industry journal The Holmes Report says the Chevy Volt’s 2010 “Volt Unplugged” launch tour helped the General Motors plug-in hybrid generate more than 5 billion media impressions last year. New players like the Chinese government and a Russian investor marketing a Soviet-era technology jumped into the market in 2010, creating even more interest.

And what did all of this hype deliver? A ten percent drop in 2010 hybrid sales, according to hybridcars.com, attributed partly to the Toyota Prius’ woes, but still surprising considering the launch of new hybrids like the Volt and the Nissan Leaf hybrid.

In a similar vein, the death of the McMansion – oversized homes that waste space, energy and materials – was another media favorite last year; I chimed in myself on this very blog. The reality in the housing market? Not so hot for us small-is-beautiful types. Home buyers have become more environmentally conscious, according to a recent report on the public radio business show MarketPlace, but not at the expense of a three-bedroom house with two baths.

So are the lackluster sales of hybrids and construction of smaller homes a harbringer of long, bleak years for those industries? I’m going to say no, because there were sub-texts in both markets that point toward a promising future, albeit on the other side of a hard reality. The hard reality first: no one is going to get rich quick manufacturing hybrids or selling smaller homes. Shiny, happy press notwithstanding, electric cars and smaller homes strike at fundamental behaviors and habits that won’t change quickly. If the contrast between glowing media attention for hybrids and smaller houses and their mediocre sales is an indicator, then there are few fast bucks to be made in either industry. But there is profit out there for companies who identify their markets carefully and stay in it for the long haul.

Take General Motors. It isn’t booking too many Volt sales yet. However, on the “Unplugged” tour, the company laid the groundwork for success down the line. The tour emphasized Volt’s practicality as a family vehicle and let more than 6,000 potential customers test drive it. Family vehicle = daily routine = habit = something that fits into consumers’ lives without being forced in. Give it a few years, after the Volt graduates from the “science project” phase, and that marketing effort will pay off in higher sales among people who never thought they’d be plugging their car into their house to charge overnight.

In environmentally friendly housing, developers are tapping into a ready-made societal change – Baby Boomers downsizing their homes in retirement – to market cottage communities of small homes built around common areas and within walking distance of stores and other necessities. Just last week, USA Today recently reported that cities in Washington’s Puget Sound region have adopted ordinances to accommodate cottage housing. Washington architect Ross Chapin has already developed 40 “pocket neighborhoods” of homes under 1,300 square feet across the country.

For us in communications, the lesson in this contrast is that media coverage can sell a lot of non-essential products – computer games, electronic gadgets, Miley Cyrus concert tickets, etc. However, media coverage on its own does not move substantial goods like vehicles and housing. So as we try to help our sustainable technology clients succeed as businesses and not just as media creations, what should we do differently?

We need to practice a brand of communications whose end game is changing behavior, not just minds. An economy built on environmentally sustainable technologies starts with behavioral changes, like plugging cars into electrical sockets overnight. Successful communications campaigns in the coming years will be measured not by volume of media coverage, but by how visibly they helped shift behaviors toward a sustainable lifestyle.

Communications and public relations have traditionally been about changing peoples’ intellects – what they think and believe. Changing a person’s behavior means engaging their senses, their personal values and their community ties as well as what goes on in their minds. To promote renewable energy clients, maybe a smart phone app that tells the average consumer how many pollutants they save by walking a quarter mile to the store instead of driving is as good as the coveted Wall Street Journal hit in the long term. Maybe organizing environmental fairs with community groups and letting people see and touch sustainable products is more productive than spending a week sweet talking a CNN producer for a few minutes of air time. How many parents would get religion about scrubbers on coal-fired power plants if you showed them a transparent model of a child full of all the dioxin they’ll absorb by the age of 10?

Okay, maybe I don’t always know the difference between advocacy and scaring the hell out of people, but you see where I’m going with this. As an industry, are we up to providing our clients a new model of communications services? I say yes – and I have a feeling it’s going to be a ton of fun figuring it out.

So, are we done with nuclear? Follow-up post

Last week, we looked at nuclear energy from the risk perspective, i.e., deaths per terawatt-hour compared to other energy generation technologies. Given the deadliness of coal (mining and air pollution), this perspective positions nuclear as a safe and rational choice for our energy mix. But what about nuclear’s financial cost?

That alone is enough to table nuclear power indefinitely, suggests energy researcher Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in a new column. After nine harrowing paragraphs documenting nuclear’s physical risks comes the money passage, which begins:

Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2-10 times less carbon savings, 20-40 times more slowly, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings (“cogeneration”), and renewable energy.

He makes a strong case to back this up, contrasting the flows of private and public money. (Spoiler: of 66 nuclear plants listed as under construction, “zero were free market purchases.”) Read the column here.

So, are we done with nuclear?

As we pray for Japan – and their food and their water – nuclear power’s renaissance is halted in its tracks. Can the world continue to believe nuclear is cleaner than coal and more reliable than renewables?

Seven in 10 Americans have become more concerned since the earthquake about a nuclear disaster occurring in the United States, according to a Gallup poll taken four days after the catastrophe. Thirty-nine percent are now “a lot” more concerned.

It was just a year ago that support for nuclear power reached new high, with 62 percent of Americans surveyed favoring the use of nuclear energy for electricity. Last week, amid the specter of “meltdown” at Fukushima Daiichi, a mere 44 percent favored the construction of nuclear power plants in the US.

Quick caveat: this is a clean-tech communications blog, and for the purposes of this post, we’re going to remain neutral on whether nuclear is a clean technology or a blight on the planet. The label doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s both.

What is certain is that electricity demand is high. As you can see, per capita electricity use has tripled since 1960.

I don’t know anyone who loves nuclear power. Accidents are potentially cataclysmic, nuclear waste is a big issue, and now we’re hearing about tainted water in Tokyo. But I do know folks who are attached to their TVs, microwaves, stoves, refrigerators, battery chargers, toasters, and that creature comfort we call electric light. Mobile phones and computers are necessary evils, and the Internet, where we see some of the shrillest anti-nuke rants, generally works best when plugged in.

So let’s admit nuclear power is here for a reason that we consumers have created. Now let’s ask ourselves, do we really want to kill nuclear? And to what extent are we scapegoating nuclear out of sympathy for Japan’s suffering, in reaction to the wall-to-wall coverage, and in light of the potential for a nightmare?

More importantly, how many of us have the tools, time and analytical power to evaluate the risk objectively? What should be the yardstick?

Looking at the risk

The smartest comment I’ve heard on this subject comes from James Acton, a physicist with the Carnegie Endowment’s nuclear policy program: “[Y]ou’ve got to realize that all forms of energy generation carry risk,” he said on CNN last week. “Nuclear carries risk as we have dramatically seen in the last couple of days. But fossil fuels also carry risk: The risk of catastrophic climate change. Renewables, which I absolutely support a lot of research and development and funding for, right now carry the risk of not being able to produce enough energy.”

Acton expounds on his comments in this even-handed opinion piece on the Foreign Policy website. Despite increasingly robust plant designs, he says the nuclear industry needs to reassess to earn the public’s trust.

“Even after the ongoing disaster in Japan, the nuclear industry is unlikely to welcome such an exercise,” he writes. “It is almost certain to argue that a whole-scale reassessment is unnecessary because existing standards are adequate. But after two earthquakes in less than four years shook Japanese reactors beyond their design limits, this argument is simply not credible. It is also self-defeating.”

The unfolding story in Japan notwithstanding, nuclear is relatively safe if history and the Next Big Future website are to be believed. Nuclear power generation kills 0.004 persons per terawatt-hour (TWh) compared with 161 for coal, according to the site’s quasi-viral March 13 post. Citing a variety of sources, it goes on to say rooftop solar (!) is 11 times more dangerous than nuclear (again, measured by the death per TWh) because roofing is one of the top 10 most dangerous occupations. Here’s Seth Godin’s chart on the Next Big Future data.

The flyspeck on the far left is nuclear. Slate offers similarly lopsided figures, saying “you’d need 500 Chernobyls” to match a year’s worth of premature deaths caused by fossil fuel-related air pollution. (But visit Huffington Post and read that Chernobyl’s horror has been vastly underplayed.)

Could it be that nuclear power is being scapegoated because of the recency of Japan’s troubles but simultaneously embraced because, well, Chernobyl is so last century? Is there something about death by nuclear that’s more fearsome than slow death by coal-related air pollution?

I don’t know. I do know I don’t want to shill for the nuclear industry. I’d prefer not to have a plant down the road in Seabrook, N.H., looking for all the world like it’s floating in the estuary. I can certainly relate to James Carroll’s poignant observation in Monday’s Boston Globe: “More than 500 nuclear power plants are in operation or under construction around the world today, with every one of them being viewed with new skepticism,” he writes. “What have we done to ourselves?”

But what if the sheer complexity of nuclear ends up quashing a worthy component of our energy mix? I guess I come down on the side of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: Don’t rush to judgment. At least not before we unplug.

‘Don’t call it global warming. Call it climate change’

I’ve always thought this admonition a little pedantic, a cheap, phony way to separate those who supposedly truly care about the planet from those who like to speak plainly. I mean, it’s not as if the planet isn’twarming.

But I’m rethinking this. A new study out of the University of Michigan proves the words really matter. For some reason, more Americans buy into the reality of climate change than global warming.

Online survey respondents were asked the following question, of which there were two versions as indicated:

“You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up [changing] over the past 100 years, a phenomenon sometimes called ‘global warming’ [‘climate change’]. What is your personal opinion regarding whether or not this has been happening?”

When referred to as climate change, 74 percent thought the problem was real.

When referred to as global warming, only 68 percent thought it was real.

Global warming’s tight conceptual linkage to temperature might be one reason for the disparity, a study author said, since “an unusually cold day may increase doubts about global warming more than about climate change.”

Researchers also found a dramatic difference in answers depending on political affiliation. On the Republican side, 60 percent said they think climate change is real, though only 44 percent said they believe in global warming. About 86 percent of Democrats thought climate change was serious no matter what it was called.

The US Environmental Protection Agency uses the more credible term. Google global warming and, though you get 32 million results, the third result is “Climate Change |US EPA.”

Climate not changing? Tell it to tsunami victims

There’s nothing a climate change denier likes better than a good cold winter. “Hey, how’s that global warming working for you,” they’ll chortle as the sides of your nose freeze together in the latest Arctic blast.

First of all it’s not global warming, it’s climate change, and the changes are coming faster and faster with each passing year. If you want to know how “well” it’s working, take a look at what the earthquake and tsunami did in Japan the other day. The early death toll was 350, with more expected. More than 500 people are still missing, 1,800 homes have been damaged or destroyed, billions of dollars worth of property lost. The earthquake the caused the tsunami was 8,000 times stronger than the quake that leveled vast areas of Christchurch, New Zealand, just a few weeks ago

It was just seven years ago that an Indian Ocean tsunami killed an estimated 150,000 people. See a pattern here? Extreme environmental events are on the rise. The most damaging tsunami on record before 2004 was the one that killed an estimated 40,000 people in 1782 following an earthquake in the South China Sea. There were a few more significant tsunamis before 2004, but they were spaced decades apart. In 1883 some 36,500 people were killed by tsunamis in the South Java Sea, following the eruption of Indonesia’s Krakatoa volcano. In northern Chile more than 25,000 people were killed by a tsunami in 1868.

The Davos, Switzerland-based Global Risk Forum specializes in identifying risks of any kind to society. The group’s president, Walter Amman is convinced that climate change will lead to more disasters due to extreme weather. He told German’s Deutsche Welle that he believes that we no longer can or should argue that we merely register events more quickly and accurately than 20 years ago. “If you look at the number of those events over the last 10 years, then it is clear that they have increased in number,” he said.

Some people won’t believe the climate is changing until they see a polar bear raiding their backyard bird feeder. Hopefully, however, the majority will take events like the tsunami to heart and realize that things they do every day – what they buy, drive, burn, throw away – have a bearing on the life of the planet and everyone on it.

Coal is cheap, except when it costs $500 billion

Coal is the cheapest fuel for electricity – if you spin it right and ignore the costs of coal-related waste, health problems and environmental damage.

That’s the gist of a new report saying coal really costs the U.S. public as much as half a trillion dollars annually. If true, that is equivalent to adding 27 cents per kWh to the market cost of coal-fired electricity (2008 dollars). This perspective strengthens the case for renewables.

“Accounting for the damages conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated, making wind, solar, and other forms of non-fossil fuel power generation, along with investments in efficiency and electricity conservation methods, economically competitive,” says the report in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences titled “Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal.”

Hidden costs of coal-fired electricity include mining deaths, climate damage, cleanup, health-care, rail fatalities, acid rain, harmful algal blooms, retardation, subsidies, abandoned lands and the “energy penalty” of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Coal is the predominant fuel for electricity generation worldwide, generating 40 percent of electricity (2005) and responsible for 30 percent of worldwide CO2 emissions.

Perhaps this information could somehow help the behavioral scientists, neuro-economists, environmental scientists and others at the Climate, Mind and Behavior Symposium. They are trying to figure out how to take our intellectual understanding of the climate threat and get people to actually change their behaviors.

Part of the challenge “has been the assumption that science and logic will suffice in making the case for changes in human behavior,” blogs the New York Times. In the real world, gut instincts, friends and personal passions also play a role. (Treehugger.com has a nice overview of day one here.)