Last year, the House of Representatives came together and said enough is enough. Passing historic clean energy legislation (The Waxman-Markey, American Clean Energy & Security Act) that invests $190 billion into clean energy like wind, solar, geothermal and other advanced technology. Plus another $20 billion in advanced fuel efficient vehicles like plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars and trucks.
When Waxman-Markey is combined with the fuel economy and renewable fuel standards Democrats successfully put in place, America will save more than 5 million barrels of oil a day, more than we already import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined.
We need a declaration of independence from foreign oil. It’s time to encourage a new generation of minutemen and women to deploy solar, wind and geothermal power. Stamping this renewable revolution with the words “made in the USA.”
The video clip is crisp, accurate and timely. We must act now.
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p>Thank you, Representative Markey, for posting this.
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p>Now if we can just make it an affordable option for working/middle class families living paycheck to paycheck. At $10,000 – $20,000 per installation (widely varies), it’s still a little too expensive for many people to afford. If we can fix the cost problem, people will be flocking to it. I know I would. I would be so happy to never receive a National Grid
notice of monthly pillagingbill again.You do not need 10-20K for an installation of solar on your roof.
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p>Look up “Commonwealth Solar” and “SunRun”.
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p>Once upon a time it took an investment of $2000 or so to get the SunRun lease program into your property…but it looks like they also do a monthly fee lease program now too. Cool. What’s more, with both programs you lock in your electricity rate for 18 years (the up front cost version means a lower locked rate). You can sell the lease with your home to the next homeowner. I looked into it when I was in a competition for energy efficiency in Lowell (we were finalists but did not get the 25K prize!)
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p>Shit man, I gotta call them again. I would rather get solar on my roof sooner than later and I don’t have the spare $2000, but with the $0 down program, we could do it tomorrow! Bet there’s a waiting list!!
Direct link.
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p>Don’t call them yet. Wait til I do so I can get on the waiting list first. đŸ˜€
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p>http://www.sunrunhome.com/why-…
Is goddamned WHY we need to reelect Deval Patrick!!! Without him, SunRun wouldn’t operate in MA. They came up here because of the rebate program.
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p>http://www.sunrunhome.com/sola…
(or anyone else) on being independent from oil. But anyone who knows the energy business would tell you that the low hanging fruit is CONSERVATION! I like the idea of alternative energy sources but they just don’t cut it yet. What we do need and could use are government sponsored conservation programs. The current home energy audits from MassSave are great starts but let’s do it better. We have massive unemployment so maybe there is a way to combine getting some of these people back to work AND conserving energy. How many public buildings could have their light switches replaced by motion sensitive so school buildings aren’t lit up like beacons at 10:00PM while they are empty? How many older municipal buildings could use some mortar to fill holes in brick walls which let the sun shine thru them and energy leaks out? How many oil fired furnaces could be replaced with clean burning and efficient natural gas burners so New Englanders wouldn’t be beholden to oil imports vs. US produced natural gas? And let’s do something about encouraging car pooling to not only reduce the gasoline by using 1 car instead of 2 (or more) but also reducing the amount of cars on the road and thus reducing the gasoline we burn in morning traffic.
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p>And yes geothermal is a wonderful idea, but let’s find out how efficient it is here in New England and then encourage it with incentives.
JohnD is 100% correct. If Markey is serious, he should spend a week-end at a weatherization barnraising in his district. He can find the requisite contacts at http://www.heetma.com and he should make damn sure that it gets wide media coverage.
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p>Somehow, I don’t think the dapper Congressman is going to get his hands dirty.
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p>If we want to be independent from oil, it isn’t our houses that we should be starting with either. Most of the oil we use is in transportation not heating or electricity. Currently, it takes between 12 to 15 years to turn over the fleet of cars now on the roads. That means if we have a 100% improvement in vehicle efficiency today, it will still take over a decade before most of our traffic comes from those high efficiency vehicles with business as usual. How do you change that timeframe? Not by ignoring it and repeating the same refrain we’ve heard since the first Energy Crisis way back in the Nixon administration.
First of all, efficiency is important — but there is not, I repeat there is not, a “most important” anything with respect to energy. There’s plenty of room to be doing more of all strategies — creating new renewable, energy efficiency programs, charging for externalities, R&D, increasing gov’t standards no new products, etc.
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p>Frankly, Mr. Markey is perfectly capable of understanding the concept without spending a weekend at a weatherization barn raising, and this idea that (a) one must do it to get the concept, and (b) that he won’t because he is “dapper” is doubly offensive.
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p>This isn’t quite right for two reasons. Firstly, lots of New England homes use oil for heat. 5.3 million of ’em according to EIA. Surely you’d agree that if every one of those 5.3 million were 30% more energy efficient that we’d be saving an awful lot of oil, no? Secondly, it’s worth noting that energy is fungible. Oil is used to generate electricity, heat homes, and of course the majority of it is used for autos. If you reduce the amount of nat gas used in homes, you free it up to be used instead of oil in power plants or even in autos. Cutting out energy use anywhere has the effect of slicing a bit of oil use too, because the markets are fungible, particularly the electricity generation markets.
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p>Have you got a source for this, because the conclusion is a bit strong even if your first bit is right. Obviously there are cars on the road which are 25 years old, but also there are cars which are on the road 2 years before totaled. The number I’ve seen is 7, not 12-15. Furthermore, your analysis ignores that many households have two cars, and that it’s not uncommon for the driver with the longer commute to take the car that gets better mileage — and furthermore, that folks who buy higher MPG vehicles on both the new and used markets tend to be the ones driving more. Of course, the higher the price for gasoline, the greater this effect.
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p>But even if your numbers are correct, you ask how that time frame is changed. I’d point out that “Cash for Clunkers” clearly changed that time frame. Was it worth the financial cost? Dunno. It seems to me that changing the time frame isn’t the right goal. Rather, if you’re interested in cutting oil use by autos, you do any/all of
* require still higher CAFE standards
* increase the gasoline tax, tolls, or other driving fees
* implement a feebate
* increase the price of downtown parking in cities
* increase the frequency and comfort and timeliness and breadth of routes for mass transit
* decrease the price for mass transit
* increase HOV or HOT lanes
* modify zoning to allow for higher density near transit and lower density away, for mixed use in sidewalk-areas and little use elsewhere, for more multi-family homes and lower parking lot minimums
* R&D on alt fuels, which also makes it essential to push for electricity efficiency and electricity renewables since autos running on coal isn’t much better than running on oil
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p>At the end of the day, every time someone who is worried about climate change and wants the government to influence our society says “we should do this instead of that”, he or she isn’t really helping. Instead, consider “Hey, that would help — we should do that, as well as also do this, and the other thing too.” There’s simply no reason to pose an either/or.
A performance-based contract of efficiency in Lowell public buildings, etc etc, I’d say MA is focusing on efficiency too while also focusing on renewables.
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p>In fact, this is the only strategy that will work. Bring down energy use, bring up renewable use, and they will someday meet in the middle somewhere.
http://www.census.gov/compendi…
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p>2007 – 247,265,000 motor vehicles registered in the USA
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p>http://www.bts.gov/publication…
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p>Median age of vehicles is increasing steadily in the US. By 2007, it was 9.2 years for automobiles, 7.1 for light trucks, and 7.3 for all trucks. This means that half of the vehicles on the road are older than that.
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p>I would suggest that your figure of 7 years for replacement of vehicles on the road is false and that my figure of 12-15 years is a reasonable estimate.
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p>I say that efficiency is first because it is the biggest bang for the smallest buck, is an immediate improvement in comfort, and reduces the load so that any alternative energy sources can be correspondingly downsized to fit that smaller energy load. This can also work on the commercial and industrial scales with cogeneration and energy services management as Thomas Casten of Recycled Energy will be more than happy to tell you (see http://www.dailykos.com/story/… for details).
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p>”Cash for Clunkers” is over. It was an interesting program, a variation of something that Amory Lovins suggested over 20 years ago, and you can read about the results at http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog…
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p>It increased turnover and car buying over the few months in which it was in operation and may have had some effect even after it was finished. But it was not an ongoing program to improve vehicle turnover rates or to improve overall fuel efficiency for vehicles on the road. It was a blip in the data not a consistent and long-term program.
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p>NE uses fuel oil for heating but we are, essentially, the only region that does. The vast majority of oil in this country is used for transportation and for petrochemical stocks. To ignore this fact is counterproductive or to be stuck in parochial regionalism. The fuel oil dealers recognized their declining future back during the 1970s and even established a training program for solar hot water and heating installers so that they could expand their business into that field. That program shut down over 25 years ago, if my memory serves. Perhaps it could be revived.
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p>We’ve been around and around the energy problem since at least 1973 and we keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. I’ve heard the same rhetoric from politicians like Mr Markey, someone I’ve not trusted since at least the 1995 Telecom Act which he still considers a triumph and I consider a fiasco, since 1973. I don’t want to hear this comforting boilerplate any longer. I want to see action.
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p>Three or four years ago now James Hansen of NASA said that we had about a decade to turn the corner on greenhouse gas emissions. That means we have maybe six years now. Nobody, I repeat, nobody in elected office is talking within that timeframe. Almost nobody in the business sector is talking within that timeframe either as it takes at least a decade to get a product to market.
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p>Wake up and smell the methane clathrates. Do something for yourself, your family, and your neighbors. Don’t wait for the politicians, the media, or business to solve the problem because they ain’t gonna do anything substantial in time. The only one who can do something concrete is you. I like weatherization and solar barnraisings. I think they should sweep the nation as a viral activity and hope that 350.org’s international climate work day on 10/10/10 will help make that happen.
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p>Waiting for fatally compromised legislation to pass is not gonna make much difference. Except symbolically.
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p>I say Solar IS Civil Defense and that we can change US energy in one growing season if we really want to. I’ve laid out those plans here and at dailykos.com and my own website, solarray.blogspot.com. All that I’ve learned from 30 years of playing with solar is online at youtube under “gmoke” if you want to watch.
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p>Work for legislation and candidates, sign petitions, go to rallies and demonstrations. We need to use everything, of course. My particular contribution has always been direct action – weatherization, barnraisings, public demos of energy tech (I used to be part of a solar energy show that traveled throughout the Northeast), small scale solar (I have had one room off-grid in a rented city apartment for over five years and a home-brew solar backpack which provides my lights for biking after dark), and a solar civil defense which is affordable and applicable not only to us wealthy Americans but also for the 1.6 billion who don’t have access to electricity now.
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p>We can solve this problem if we want to but Markey of Obama aren’t going to do it for us. We have to do it ourselves and we have to do it based upon the actual facts, practical experience, and realistic time constraints. Hell, a weatherization barnraising on the White House with the full participation of “This Old House,” “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” and all the other TV carpentry shows could make a real difference tomorrow if anybody had the imagination to make it happen. Unfortunately, nobody in power has that imagination.
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p>Technically, you can’t use median to estimate mean in this case (and generally). It’s hard to know how fat the tail is, nor how many cars are killed in the very short time frame (0-3 years). Still, I’d buy that it’s more than 7. Still, I’m not sure why you think that the mean is 150% larger than the median, given that the failure rate is certainly not Poisson-related. Call it 10. Doesn’t matter much, since we don’t know the MPG (or, rather, gallons of gasoline used per year in the class) of cars being ‘retired’ in any given year. Really large error bars. As for C4C, the WH page reflected on the stimulation of the program, not so much the impact on MPG to the fleet of vehicles in tUSA. Total impact on the fleet? Maybe 1%. Note that the page also suggested that the fleet turnover for C4C participants was about 2.5 years faster than it would have been otherwise… and now we’re back in my range of 7 years. Go figure.
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p>I’m ignoring nothing. My entire thesis is to ignore nothing; your comments have suggested that everything that isn’t “the big thing” should be ignored. About 3% of oil used in tUSA is for residential heating. We could therefore shave perhaps 2% — pick up 1% in efficiency and 1% in conversion to natural gas. Why not? We can walk and chew gum at the same time. More to the point, since different regions have different carbon reduction opportunities, linking it to federal legislation which leverages the opportunities in each region (NE: oil heat; SE: biomass and cooling efficiency; SW: solar; MW: wind; NW: wind & hydro) is a way to grab a few percent in each region… and now we’re at 10% or more. I understand that we’ve got to cut transportation oil consumption… but there’s no reason to ignore the rest of the stuff.
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p>There’s all kinds of action at the state and federal level. Enough? Nope.
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p>With due respect, doing (just) this guarantees failure. The fact is that there simply isn’t enough interest or expertise or willingness to change without external stimulus. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve sliced my own carbon footprint to what may be amongst the most efficient 2 or 3 percent of households in the country. I do work barnraisings, and do Low Carbon Diet style outreach and support. It’s ironic that you’re pushing this sliver of the solution — which simply can’t solve the problem by itself — and arguing against other slivers because they’re merely slivers. Yeah, do barnraisings. Do lots of personal actions. But know that personal actions aren’t going to get it done in a nation of fast food and fast cars and big houses and tax writeoffs for all of ’em.
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p>If by fatally you mean it won’t pass, then compromise is irrelevant. If by fatally you mean weakened but still having some impact, than I say bollocks. Take what you can get, then work for more. Why are you opposed to both private and public action?
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p>I don’t know how much change you think counts as “change” — but you couldn’t cut carbon emissions by much more than 5% in a single year, and that’s with huge government investment or substantial government regulation (when controlling for external factors like the price of oil and the weather). With an auto turnover of 10 years, if everybody got TWICE the MPG of their old auto, you’ve cut transit carbon by 5%, which is roughly 2% overall. Power plants? They don’t change quickly, and so even if everybody cut their electric bill by 20%, you’re shaving maybe 0.5% of the nations carbon emissions. So we’re left with buildings — and there’s a finite amount of building materials in the supply chain and qualified contractors/engineers/architects etc. With a massive push, you might be able to touch 1 out of every 20 square feet of space, and cut it’s energy use by 50% (really optimistic). That’s 2.5%. Total: 5%. That’s one year, where there is enormous push in all sectors — doubling the efficiency of new cars as compared to the current fleet, and cutting HVAC emissions in half for all spaces touched, 5% of all building space in tUSA.
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p>You simply can’t get that kind of action without substantial federal push. You might not even get that kind of action with federal push.
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p>Finally! We agree. So why argue against any of the long list of bullet points I list? Why not simply write “Yes! Do that! Also, do these….” and include more items?
“Finally! We agree. So why argue against any of the long list of bullet points I list? Why not simply write ‘Yes! Do that! Also, do these….’ and include more items?”
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p>Because I’m not your clone.
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p>We are talking past each other to little or no purpose.
Bernie Madoff Global Cleanup Fund
Save us from Climate CHARGE
Google Superfriends+Eugenics
But there IS no future without global warming. The earth already has warmed, will continue to do so, even if we stopped today. There will be changes, permanent, in our lifetime (and way beyond) unless, of course, we find a way (which takes energy itself) of locking carbon back into the earth again…
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p>There’s also that little bugaboo about how global dimming from the same pollution that brings us global warming (which also causes particulate pollution) might be masking some of effects of global climate change thus far, meaning it’s actually worse than we think it is, and as we move to renewables and less pollution in the air, we’ll see exactly how far past the tipping point we’ve gone already…