Friday Frolics

The New York Times stepped up with a brand new Energy & Environment section.

Nigeria needs between 30,000 and 40,000 megawatts of power but President Yar'Adua will still not declare an emergency as he had promised in his inaugural address.

For those who want to match to Washington, PowerShift is organizing the biggest lobby day in front of Congress this coming Monday, March 2 (It is March already!). More information: Power Shift 2009. The Youth Summit runs from today (Feb 27) through Monday (Mar 2nd).

We reached the bottom: I am not a fan of this: Reusable toilet wipe

The reality coalition, that has been running ads against the notion of "clean coal" has recruited the Coen Brothers' off-kilter sensibility to the campaign:




CO2 Famine: This is an interesting Senate hearing...this scientist is slumped, claims the world is short of CO2 gases and even more some of his paychecks were from Exxon-Mobil

Is Water the New Oil ?

Definition:
Virtual Water
Virtual water is the amount of water used in the production of food and fibres. Our external water footprint is the total amount of virtual water we use in other countries when we import their goods.

Facts:

• Two thirds of the water needed to produce the UK's food and clothes is used in other countries.
• Pacific Institute: Droughts "attributable in significant part to climate change" are already causing "acute water shortages" around the world, and pressure on supplies will increase with further global warming and a growing world population.

My thoughts:
In 2008, when Crude Oil futures ramped up to a record-setting $147, I read an extensive research report that explained the rise of crude oil prices in a very macro-economic sense.
In sum, a growing world middle-class (BRIC nations, South Africa) demanded more oil for their newly-acquired vehicles and demand for power. But there were financial "technicals" that also showed that the levels could not hold.

However, the facts about an increased global demand for commodities holds and one of the things that cannot really be speculated upon is water. As the developing world becomes more urban and as the West requires more goods from these nations, water is definitely going to be a scarce commodity.

Question is... will it be the new oil? Causing economies that have it to boom and those that need it to wage war?

Hidden Costs

Don't we all hate those hidden costs/fees on our telephone contracts that suddenly bump up our payments to some undisclosed level?
Apparently, so is the true cost of climate change. One can look at my post below to see the study done by Tufts University. But there are some other numbers that I have been reading up on and thought that I might share. All these numbers are American and I can only imagine what the real cost is for the rest of the world. (Courtesy of the Environmental Defense Fund)

According to a University of Maryland study, costs already accrued include:

• $1.3 billion – the amount of damage associated with crop loss as a result of Georgia’s drought in 2007
• 300 million – reconstruction costs for the damage caused to rail transportation by Hurricane Katrina
  
• $272 million – insured catastrophic losses in 2007, as a result of increasing flood damage
• Four global warming impacts alone – hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs – will come with a price tag of 1.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today's dollars) by 2100, according to the same study.
  
• Losses will be massive to state economies. The impact of global warming on three sectors – tourism, electric utilities and real estate – together with hurricane damage would shrink Florida’s GDP by more than 5 percent by the end of the century.
  
• Delaying just two years will require twice the effort. An analysis of 2008 climate legislation shows that waiting just two years to tackle global warming would require more than double the annual cuts in emissions to achieve the same cumulative goal – 4.3 percent in annual cuts versus 2 percent
  
• We should not delay investment and job creation. Companies are waiting for new rules before they invest billions in new power plants and other projects. A cap is necessary to unfreeze this investment. A cap will also create new manufacturing jobs, like making steel for wind
  

Cutting Emissions is A Bargain: Check the %-ge of the GDP a cap-and-trade system would have.

Cap and Trade it is...

Obama's speech tonight highlighted the climate and the budget, and a 'sneak preview' of the budget tells us that the carbon emissions system that will be in place will be the cap and trade system.

This was obviously the way that things were going. When I attended the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative meetings here in the Northeast, everyone was fussing about what system the Federal Government was going to adapt.

Tufts University put out a publication showing the costs of global warming and it really tells one story: It is imperative for the US (+ China) to act immediately. The Environmental Defense Fund also releases some interesting numbers that I am going to write about tomorrow.

The New Co-op Capitalism

This is an article that I found interesting, especially in light of the times we are in now and as we think of the next step:

Paradigm Shift from The Daily Beast

The question I have is:

Are these global 'watchdogs' going to be responsible for the developed world watching over the developing world?

Uganda to be among top 50 oil producers

Courtesy of Sam Rugunda - From Uganda's New Vision Newspaper.
Will research on the sentiments this week... but should be good for Uganda and the larger Eastern Africa in economic terms.

Read story here.

Map-py Friday

1. Purdue University has used the brilliance of Google Earth to map CO2 emissions (plug-in needed) in the United States. The scalability of Google Earth has certainly not been fully utilized. In my former job, I recall it being employed to display real time power prices in the Northeastern US, which is useful for basis trades. I'm just thinking of the potentials and what comes straight to mind is actually: Ushahidi.com
2. Credit Crunch much? It seems that the heftiness of the lack of capital is eating up on the West's pledge of $18billion to developing nations to combat climate change. Only $1 billion has been paid out.
3. Today is Map Friday so here is another map from the Environmental Defense Fund that shows the effect of caps on Global emissions reduction.

Happy Friday!

Quantifying Energy Efficiency in the Developing World

CAFÉ standards and Energy Star labels in the United States are beginning to look weak in comparison to Indonesia's adoption of UN auto energy efficiency regulations, for example, and Ghana's household appliance standards (Dear Africa, Ghana seems to be setting precedences that maybe we should emulate?)

Report from McKinsey Global Institute finds that efficiency gains are inhibited by:

• Market Failures
• Informational barriers

The report suggests ways in which these barriers could be overcome.

Is "Green" Dead ?

There is much debate as to what extent the word green should be used and what it should mean.

To me, it bothers me when green is slapped everywhere for the sake of it. Instead, I think the paradigm needs to shift as to how we think of this word and instead just build energy efficient / sustainable things and call them by the name that we call them now.

Thomas Friedman summarizes it this way:

Ultimately, he said, the word "green" should disappear.
Instead of a small number of energy-efficient buildings and cars, he said, all should be built that way -- eliminating the need for a "green" designation.
"It won't be a green car, just a car," he said.

You can read about Friedman's speech here.

Wishlist

The profligacy that became en vogue among my peers in the past few years has left a peer group close to naked following the economy going belly up.

But as in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, life is always about sojourns away from, and back to, where we began.

In my sojourns, always in unfamiliar and new surroundings, growing older has always left a familiar emotion within me. An emotion that has led me to turn reflection into therapy enabling me to look back in order to stay grounded while also looking forward in order to be bold in my steps.

Turning 26 years of age today, these are some of the things I look forward to doing in the better half of my 20s:

1. Looking at this long list and recalling Salman Rushdie's words, "Always try and do too much..."
2. Advocating and championing the case of creating out of the box solutions when it comes to capital transfer to Africa and development of energy sources in Africa.
   
3. Building a framework to transform some of the learning in Africa from rote learning to critical analysis.
4. Contributing to a better election year in Kenya's 2012 General Election in whatever way or form I can.
5. Trying to publish an overdue African food cookbook whose recipes sit idle on my hard drive.
6. Employing my passion in the creation of more positive African media - news, music, video.
7. Moderating more open discussions on tribalism & ethnocentrism in Kenya.
8. Learning about and how to play more American sports.
9. Mentoring more at-risk kids in the inner cities.
10. Making better use of my passport.

"Why Rockstars Aren't Africa's Solution to Poverty"

I am a fan of Bono. Not that I am just an avid U2 fan but I like that he gave voice to millions of voiceless people. I am not so sure about the extremes of the argument below:

"So what of the rock and Hollywood stars, who have appointed themselves advocates of making poverty history? She is withering: “Most Brits would be irritated if Michael Jackson started offering advice on how to resolve the credit crisis. Americans would be put out if Amy Winehouse went to tell them how to end the housing crisis. I don’t see why Africans shouldn’t be perturbed for the same reasons,” she replies, exhibiting a feisty side that occasionally accompanies a chatty, self-assured style."

This comes about 2 weeks late, but Zambian-born Dambisa Moyo outlines the failure of Western Aid in Africa and calls for alternative forms of capital, especially bonds. Her book, Dead Aid, is $16 on Amazon.com and you can also read her FT interview from two weeks ago.

Global Ministerial Environmental Forum

Happening in Nairobi, 16th to 20th of February: http://www.unep.org/gc/gc25/
- A call for 1/3 of the global stimulus mullah to be spent on 'greening' the economy.
- Maybe the only thing that President Kibaki has said and makes sense this year.

Friday 13th

So much for superstition, a lot more is happening:

- Dell is nailing the intersection of everything I could possibly care about: Education, IT & Energy. Dell YouthConnect is working in India, Brazil and Mexico (Did I hear Africa, anyone?)

- No more money for Clean Coal in the Stimulus Bill. Grist has more details on the Stimulus' stimulus on energy.

- More power to the Internet. A green start up that is profitable in today's environment?

- Videos:

Charity Water



- A match to Washington anyone? Susan Sarandon wants to bring Global Warming to the forefront:

The Demise of the Corn Fields

W pushed for Ethanol production, especially to fend off the Brazilian ethanol machinery that has been running for years.

What we saw in the past 18 months or so was a rise in food prices globally (with food strikes in some parts such as Egypt). But now... despite the capital that went into building all these plants, E85 remained constantly at a premium to petrol.

What is even more sad is the fact that many of the plants are being shut down because the plan did not factor in the fact that with an economy that is going tits up, less people will drive and even those who drive will not be driving cars that run on E85.

My thought is that going for the tough scientific possibilities should be done gradually and as long-term undertakings instead of getting excited and being way too short-sighted.

More on the failure from the New York Times

The Saudi Oil Minister has It all wrong

Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, said Tuesday evening at an oil industry conference in Houston that a push to develop more renewable fuels might jeopardize investments in conventional fuels.

al-Naimi might have a point, but I don't think that the argument should be as simplistic as he puts it. He has gone ahead and argued that the Western views will hamper their long-term investments in oil and oil infrastructure. I beg to differ.

What al-Naimi and his cronies should be looking at is providing leadership, not hiding behind sand dunes and crying wolf. What the oil industry needs to do is to use it enormous capital (both social and monetary) and show some leadership as so where the business of fuels is going. Instead of b*tching consistently about the leadership of the Western nation, al-Naimi needs to show some leadership and let us know how Saudi Arabia is going to deal with the fuel question.

The same applies to other energy companies. The developed world is drunk on oil and for it to get weaned off this fuel, the energy companies themselves are the ones who are going to have to show some leadership and use their clout to move things to a new direction. I am not expecting a start up to come and and immediately influence things. But if the big energy companies continue slacking and complaining, I will not be surprised if they really run out of business.

Article on al-Naimi.

Google your hair dryer

I hold the view and bare the philosophy that the lack of development in the third world is actually a good thing. Not to be insanely optimistic, but I think that the mistakes of the Western world when it comes to energy, education and infrastructure could actually be reversed on the plain canvas that is the third world.

I am obsessed with the development of a new electricity grid in the US. And now good is at it with PowerMeter. Currently, dishwashers have all this computing power that cannot be exploited, which could be exploited in this way:

- You could communicate with your dishwasher to run a cycle at 2am instead of 2pm. Or you could just check the power prices of the day and tell the dishwasher to run when electricity is at its lowest.

I am fawning over this and perhaps having a technological orgasm, but what I am more enthused by is that with smart grids, we will be able to communicate with our home on how it consumes electricity and this could also enable us to off load our homes from the grid when we least need electricity.

But more relevant is that this could be huge when new grids are being built in the developing world. Just the same way that mobile telephony by-passed landlines, smart grids need to be the new thing in the third world. The connectivity that people have already provides the data platform for this.

So far in my chain: Clean/Renewable Energy + Mobile Telephony + Smart Grid = ?

Foreign Policy, Book Bags and Google

- The new spirit of governance in Washington should definitely engulf the Foreign Relations Committee. I applaud John Kerry and Dick Lugar for taking up environmental policy as a key tenet of foreign policy. Africa already has some of the worst democracies and the worst rates of deforestation.
But the questions is: How do you stop deforestation in a country where the very livelihood of its people depends on forests for lack of a better economic option?

- Growing up, my parents often complained why they had to bother buying books that I would finish on the trip between the bookstore and the house. I have since really come to read most of my books on the computer (it is painful at first, but since I juggle up to 3 books at a time, it is useful) and I just discovered the Netflix of books, Book Swim.

But could the future be towards the Kindle? The reason why I mention the kindle is that it could actually be a solution to the perennial problem of schools in the developing world: Outdated & expensive books plus carrying 30+ books in your book bag everyday to and from school.

The government funds could be used to buy updated curricula and machines. It would actually be neater if the $100 latops went towards this direction.

Correlation does not imply causality. So, climate policy might not necessarily guarantee reduction in emissions... it spurs more clean-tech innovation.

Interesting article from: Environmental Econ

Boxer's Brief

Some criticism from the Wall Street Journal on Senator Boxer's (D-CA) "principles for global warming legislation".

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/02/03/boxers-brief-california-senator-sketches-global-warming-principles/

League Tables

Certified Emissions Reductions, the project-based offsets traded under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), hit record lows this week, pushed lower by tumbling European Union carbon prices.

Benchmark CERs trading on the European Climate Exchange fell to 9.30 euros a tonne on Wednesday, down 62 percent from an all-time high of 24.38 euros in July 2008. EU Allowances for delivery in Dec. 2009 also set a record, dropping below 10 euros for the first time.

The CDM pipeline still shows the disparity that exists between countries (& contintents) that are involved in CDM. You can find this table from the UN's Risoe Center: Table (MS Excel File)

A Push for Jatropha

Some good news especially now that the feedstock from Jatropha seems to not be as toxic...

http://biofuelsdigest.com/blog2/2009/02/04/deg-to-back-11-jatropha-research-plantations-in-kenya-tanzania-and-uganda/

Californication

It is my thought that it is the Californian lawmakers that are going to bring something as drastic as a climate change bill to Washington.

California already dances on its own flow when it comes to environmental regulation and I am of the thought that some of that push needs to be brought to Washington.

This is encouraging news because Madame Clinton's first trip to China is somewhat heavily bent on climate change.

Kenya & The Carbon Markets

As home to the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and also as the home to Prof. Wangari Maathai, it has always been in the back of my mind that Kenya needs to be a leader in Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) in Africa.

This has especially been the case because of:

- The 7-folk sisters that provide most of the Hydro power in Kenya;
- The Sondu-Miriu Hydropower Project;
- The Ol-Karia Geothermal Project;
- The sugar factories (Mumias, SONY, Muhoroni, Miwani) that produce enough biodiesel to produce electricity;
- The very existence of the Mau Forest and how preserving the forest as a catchment area could actually draw points in how the downstream product is preserved.

Well, my prayers have been answered by Alice Kaudia.