welcome

The potential for energy use reductions in old and new buildings is significant, according to a report from KPMG. The study finds that energy consumption in buildings can be cut by 30 to 50 percent and still produce a positive return on investments. Plus, real estate groups can get a business boost from green buildings by attracting the best deals, strategic investors, and marquee anchor tenants, according to the report.

The report, “Climate Change: Risks & Opportunities in the Canadian Commercial Real Estate Market,” reveals that direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from the on-site combustion of fuels for heating and cooling, and the use of refrigerants, while indirect emissions come primarily from the GHGs released from fuel combustion related to producing construction materials and electricity used in the buildings.

The commercial building sector in Canada is estimated to account for 13 percent of Canada’s carbon emissions and 14 percent of end-use energy consumption, according to the report. The report also cites the International Energy Agency’s estimates from 2005 that reveal that buildings account for 20 to 40 percent of the world’s energy use, depending on a country’s climate and economy.

Similarly, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) finds that buildings account for 40 percent of the world’s energy use with the associated carbon emissions substantially more than those in the transportation sector. WBCSD’s study on energy efficiency in buildings (EEB) indicates that the global building sector needs to cut energy consumption in buildings 60 percent by 2050 to help meet global climate change targets.

The KMPG study cites several benefits to a “green” building. These include easier facility zoning and permitting, reduced tax burdens, and potentially lower insurance premiums.

The study also points out that a Canadian national market for carbon offsets related to building efficiency is under discussion. Researchers say forward-thinking companies will have long-term real estate agreements in place to address development, ownership, and sale of all environmental attributes accrued from their commercial properties.

The study suggests a GHG emissions assessment should be the start of all carbon management strategies for any large commercial real estate holding. The assessment should also include several information management elements ranging from organizational and operational boundary conditions to auditing and verification.

ATLANTA, GA, and CHICAGO , IL — Seventy-four percent of corporate real estate executives now say they would be willing to pay a premium to retrofit the office space they own to achieve sustainability goals, a new survey has found.

That figure compares to the 53 percent last year who said they would make such an investment, according to results of the 2009 CoreNet Global and Jones Lang LaSalle sustainability survey.

The survey findings released today showed that despite persistent tough times, corporate real estate execs continue to embrace and act upon sustainability values -- and some do so more strongly than ever.

Sixty-seven percent of the respondents conceded that securing funds to carry out sustainability strategies is a "difficult" or "extremely difficult" challenge. However, the research also found that:

• 70 percent (up from 69 percent in 2008 and 47 percent in 2007) consider sustainability a critical business issue,
• 89 percent consider sustainability whenever making decisions about selecting office locations,
• 41 percent always consider green building certification when administering their corporate real estate portfolios,
• 46 percent consider energy labels, and
• 60 percent said they are adopting workplace strategies to meet sustainability goals while also reducing occupancy costs, compared to 54 percent last year.

With growing knowledge about green real estate and the increasing demand for it, fewer corporate real estate execs said they would be willing to pay more for environmentally friendly space:

• 37 percent said they would consider paying a premium of 1 percent to 10 percent,
• 21 percent said they would be willing to pay a rent premium if it were offset by lower operating costs,
• 8 percent said they expected to pay less, and
• 34 percent said they expected to pay the same.

In contrast, 42 percent said they were willing to pay a premium of 1 percent to 5 percent to lease green workspace in 2008, and 77 percent of those surveyed said they'd consider paying a premium in 2007.

This year's findings are in keeping with Jones Lang LaSalle's and CoreNet's expectations.

Following the release of last year's survey results, CoreNet and JLL leaders said they expected that development and implementation of workplace strategies -- to address employee concerns, enhance 360-degree engagement in sustainability efforts and better manage energy costs with more immediate results -- would be a growing factor in the greening of office space.

They also anticipated that the market would be more savvy about green real estate, have greater expectations about its availability and, because of that knowledge, be less inclined to pay a premium when renting or leasing green space.

"These results clearly show that sustainability as an issue is here to stay, but companies are increasingly aware of the commercial realities," said Dan Probst, chairman of Energy and Sustainability at Jones Lang LaSalle, in the statement announcing the survey results. "It is no longer enough to simply be green; organizations want to see the benefits to the bottom line."

In scrutinizing that bottom line for real estate portfolios, energy costs were ranked as the most important metric and cited by 37 percent of the respondents. Employee health and productivity followed with 29 percent naming those concerns as important indices.

Forty-five percent said they are "highly involved" in providing sustainability performance data to their companies. And with companies increasingly seeking targeted investments and tighter ROI windows, more than 50 percent said that doing so presents a "difficult" or "extremely difficult" challenge. The reasons cited included a lack of tools to more exactly calculate ROI and collect performance data. Respondents also said insufficient industry metrics contributed to the problem.

This year's research involved 231 corporate real estate executives, who were surveyed in September and October. Their portfolios span billions of square feet of real estate worldwide, JLL and CoreNet Global said.

Commercial real estate services firm JLL oversees a global property and corporate facility management portfolio of 1.4 billion square feet. CoreNet Global is the leading international trade group for corporate real estate and workplace executives.

A summary of this year's survey findings is available from JLL at www.joneslanglasalle.com/pages/SustainabilityResearch.aspx and from CoreNet Global at www.corenetglobal.org.

By Robert Konerman, Schneider Electric -- Plant Engineering, 11/18/2009 11:39:10 AM

Energy in all its forms (i.e., electricity, water, compressed air, gas and steam) may be the lifeblood of manufacturing, but information - and more specifically, the ability to turn information into results - is proving to be the linchpin for managing energy costs.
Why? The old adage is true: Information is power. It can help an industrial facility manager make real-time energy decisions, and compounded over time, those decisions can have a dramatic effect on a facility's bottom line and help it become more profitable.

Information gathering, analysis
There are many ways information can be gathered on a plant floor, but without an integrated energy management system consisting of a business intelligence layer - through a manufacturing execution system (MES); a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system; and a robust network of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) - turning that information into results-driven action simply isn't possible. That also means benefits such as increased energy efficiency, cost savings and improved productivity won't be realized.
Thus, energy-usage analysis within the context of production enables decision-making that results in a greater opportunity for energy savings. That means it's crucially important for the information-gathering infrastructure to display energy usage data in a meaningful way, so it can be distributed to the personnel that can actually take action to better manage a plant's energy usage (i.e., department heads) - with appropriate follow up if action is delayed.
Such analysis is also a key part of a comprehensive strategic energy management action plan, which includes four steps:
1. Measuring energy usage through power metering and monitoring, and energy audits.
2. Fixing the basics, or employing measures such as installing low-consumption devices and power factor correction.
3. Automating where appropriate, or optimizing energy usage through automation and regulation via measures such as HVAC and lighting control.
4. Monitoring and controlling through monitoring services, enterprise energy management (EEM) and energy analysis software.

Passive vs. active approaches
Consider a manufacturer that sets a goal of saving 10% on utility costs per year. A facility manager may spend the first year making a number of basic fixes such as installing low-consumption devices or improving the plant's power quality. While those tactics did save on utility costs, the goal wasn't met.
There can be many reasons for this, of course, but the manager chose to focus on Step 2 above, or a passive approach. For example, a new energy-efficient transformer has a useful lifecycle of two decades or more, so while the energy efficiency value is theoretically accrued over that entire time period, the greatest cost savings impact will be felt initially. The same can be said for energy-efficient lighting, or purchasing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ENERGY STAR-rated appliances.
The next year, the facility manager takes a different approach: Installing power meters that are connected via Ethernet, with information delivered to his desk through the integrated SCADA and MES user environment. The SCADA system turns that information into readable data, while the MES business intelligence layer allows the facility manager to examine energy information and understand consumption patterns, and realize what production events created the largest energy demand, placing energy usage within the larger context of production.
For example, the facility manager may find that raw material from one supplier uses more energy in processing than raw material from another, or one shift runs the plant with less overall energy than others, all of which provides a guide in ongoing energy efficiency decision making, an important part of an energy management action plan. This information can be delivered to individual department heads, who are then made responsible for instituting changes that better manage energy. Each department may receive an energy bill, along with the requirement to fashion a plan to increase energy efficiency by 10% within a specified time window, and milestone dates for implementation.
Those department heads can rely heavily on automation to accomplish their stated objectives. Networked PLCs within a given department could execute changes directly from the SCADA system such as slowing motors during the lunch hour (but not stopping them) to avoid peak demand charges, or automatically turning lights off in an area, and then back on again after lunch. With this approach applied, energy is managed at the device level and the plant's original goal of a 10% reduction in utility costs is not only met in the second year, but exceeded.
It's important to note that this encompasses an active approach to energy management, or Steps 3 and 4 above, because it allows for adjustments based on new energy-efficiency opportunities that arise in the future. For example, a department head could realize that the same energy management strategy used for the lunch hour - slowing motors and automatically turning lights off in an area, and then on again when lunch is over - could be applied during mid-afternoon coffee breaks, which last 15 minutes. While the energy efficiency impact from one instance may not be vast, it will be substantial over the course of an entire year. It could also be expanded to events such as quarterly all-company meetings.
Best of all, the strategy doesn't rely on human interaction to complete the task. Power meters collect the data within the SCADA system, which creates documents such as pie charts or Gantt charts, that become deliverables to department heads. The appropriate actions can then be programmed into networked PLCs so they automatically occur.
An active approach can help change the maintenance department's approach to its work from reactive to predictive. The SCADA system can collect status information about individual motors to allow the system's business intelligence layer to predict when they will require maintenance, and can prompt the maintenance manager to have his team attend to the issue immediately, to avoid unscheduled downtime. For example, a motor management controller could alert the SCADA system that the current draw on a motor is rising. A message is sent to the maintenance manager, who will schedule actions such as greasing bearings, tightening belts or possibly even replacing the motor. Obviously, any method that can be used to avoid unplanned downtime is valuable to the maintenance department.

Next step
Finally, it's crucial to note that while networked PLCs, SCADA, MES and other solutions can be powerful means to better manage energy, unless it is truly part of a robust energy management action plan, their effectiveness will be limited. An energy action plan takes that crucial next step toward ongoing improvement because it recommends a roadmap that inculcates ongoing energy planning, which can create an environment of accountability.

One type of vehicle is always within sight on Yemen’s roads: the water truck.

The brightly coloured, dilapidated tankers, often driven by Kalashnikov-wielding tribesmen, travel winding mountain roads and cross deserts to bring Yemenis a commodity more precious than petrol. It is one that increasingly only the rich can afford, with supply through the water mains regularly cut off. Others must rely on scarce rain, charity or crime to stave off thirst.

Yemen is set to be the first country in the world to run out of water, providing a taste of the conflict and mass movement of populations that may spread across the world if population growth outstrips natural resources.

Government and experts agree that the capital, Sanaa, has about ten years at current rates before its wells run dry but the city of two million continues to grow as people are forced to leave other areas because of water shortages.

In Yemen, which is fighting three insurgencies, the battle lines of tribal wars have traditionally followed the lines of the wadis, desert valleys that become rivers when the rare rains fall. Amid one of the world’s highest rates of population growth — 3.46 per cent last year — the water shortage has become critical and is driving civil unrest.

Hannan, an 18-year-old mother of one from Lahej, near Aden, said that only the comparatively well-off could plan for cuts in supply. “In a good week we’ll have a water supply all week but then the following week there will be water only for a day or two,” she said.

She and her husband, a factory worker, pay 3,000 riyals (£9) for a week’s supply of water from a touring water truck when the taps run dry. With an income of only 20,000 riyals (£60) per month, this means the family often spend half their income on water.

“There are a lot of people who can’t afford it and they have to rely on their neighbours to help,” she said.

Her neighbour, Anisa, 40, said: “When the water goes, it’s a sign of trouble in the community.”

Water available across Yemen amounts to 100 to 200 cubic metres per person per year, far below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic metres.

Groundwater reserves are being used faster than they can replenish themselves, especially in the Sanaa basin, where water once found 20 metres below the surface is now 200 metres deep, and despite the rainwater tanks on the roofs of most houses.

In desperation some citizens have dug unlicensed wells, compounding the problem. In Taiz, in the south, tapwater is available only once every 45 days. In the mountainous Malhan district in the north, women and children climb a 1,500m mountain to collect water from a spring, often in the small hours to avoid long queues.

Hosny Khordagui, director of the water governance programme in Arab states at the United Nations Development Programme, said: “If they do not find a solution we will see people encroaching on big cities, the formation of slums, a rise in crime, venereal disease, violence, even fanaticism. Fanatics will find very fertile ground to recruit and develop their infrastructure.”

Yemeni citizens have lived on scarce water supplies for thousands of years but the problem has been exacerbated by widespread production of the local drug of choice, qat, which consumes up to 40 per cent of water. About 70 per cent of Yemeni men chew the leaves each day, and bushy qat trees are often the only spots of green in the dry landscape.

The Deputy Planning Minister, Hisham Sharaf, admitted: “We have a water shortage which reflects itself in fighting between the people . . . If we continue spending this much water on qat Sanaa has ten to fifteen years.”

The Government is considering a desalination plant for seawater, but this is an expensive solution and may come too late. The only other option is to cut down on the agriculture industry, importing even more food.

WASHINGTON, DC — The United States is using less water than it did 35 years ago, which is a good thing given the rising concern about water issues among investors and stakeholders worldwide, new information released this week shows.

According to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey (pdf), researchers found that the country apparently was using less water in 2005 than it had during peak years of 1975 and 1980, and has been relatively stable -- even though the population had grown 30 percent in the past 25 years, Science Daily reported.

In 2005, Americans were using 410 billion gallons a day, slightly less than in 2000. The drop was attributed to increased use of more efficient irrigation systems and improved alternative technologies at power plants, because during the same period the amount of water tapped for the public supply had steadily increased -- as it had since 1950.

Forty-nine percent of the 410 billion gallons was used to produce electricity at thermoelectric power plants. Thirty-one percent for the irrigation, 9 percent for public supply and 9 percent for self-supplied industrial, livestock, aquaculture, mining and rural domestic use, the USGS report said.

Water-related topics are "rising fast to the top of the list of current or potential longer-term risks posed to corporations in the view of a growing number of global investors, their coalitions and the asset managers they hire," the Governance & Accountability Institute posted Tuesday in its online newsletter, Insights-edge. 

"Expect water to be among the topics addressed at the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference (December 8 - 18 in Copenhagen)," the newsletter said.

The newsletter also recapped efforts, which initially made news this past summer, by the Food Ethics Council and the health and food advocacy group Sustain for labels on product packaging that shows the water footprint, the "hidden" amount of water used in the manufacture of foods and beverages.

GreenBiz has reported for some time that water is fast becoming the "new carbon."

A number of initiatives to scrutinize water use and determine ways to reduce it emerged this past summer in the weeks surrounding World Water Week.

For example, SABMiller, a leader in water footprinting and sustainability efforts in recent years, declared September a stewardship month to promote responsible water use in its plants and beyond. Yesterday, the company provided an update on its

SABMiller is working further with the World Wildlife Fund to launch Water Futures, a partnership that intends to address water scarcity in several key operating countries, such as Peru, Tanzania, South Africa and Ukraine.

SABMiller also will work with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), a German agency for technical cooperation that acts on behalf of the Federal German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. The ministry seeks to provide solutions for political, economic, ecological and social development.

California Governor Schwarzenegger went to the Friant Dam near Fresno Monday to sign the Safe, Clean, and Reliable Drinking Water Supply Act of 2010. If approved by the voters next November, the measure would authorize the issuance of bonds in the amount of $11.14 billion to finance a safe drinking water and water supply reliability program for California.

Fresno, a city in California's agricultural Central Valley, is suffering from water scarcity, as the governor said just before he signed the bill.

"Today a system that was built for 18 million people now is crumbling under the pressure of 38 million people," the governor said. "The Central Valley is the epicenter of this crisis. Fields lie fallow, communities are devastated, fathers and mothers are unable to provide for their families. I have heard the pleas of the people here from this valley and I've heard the pleas of the people from the state of California and I think the legislators have heard those pleas as well."

Surrounded by state of local officials, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs a water infrastructure bond measure on the shore of Millerton Lake, formed by the Friant Dam. (Photo courtesy Office of the Governor)

Last week California legislators approved a comprehensive, historic water agreement, including the $11 billion bond measure.

Governor Schwarzenegger said the $11 billion bond will leverage another $30 billion in federal and in local funds, so all together this is a $40 billion infrastructure package.

"It's the biggest infrastructure package in the history of California," said the governor. "This money will fund a variety of different projects which will fix the Delta, it will restore its ecosystem and it will go and build a better conveyance system. And we will have, once and for all, below and above the ground water storage, which we have been fighting for and I wouldn't have signed this without that water storage."

In Washington, Monday Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar took note of the signing ceremony in Fresno and pledged that the Obama administration would help California to solve its water problems.

"Today, Governor Schwarzenegger is signing milestone water legislation in Fresno County, one of the counties hardest hit by California's water crisis – a crisis caused by the brutal combination of a three-year drought, the collapse of native fisheries in the Bay Delta, and the fact that California's investments in water conservation and infrastructure have not kept up with its growth," said Secretary Salazar.

He said the federal government is committed to being a full partner "with the state and stakeholders" in laying a foundation for California's water future, providing a sustainable water supply, and helping those hardest hit, including in the Central Valley.

Salazar said that in its meeting today, the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council Governing Board is expected to approve the request of the Department of the Interior and Department of Commerce for "an independent scientific review of key questions relating to the California Bay Delta, and how to both protect the ecosystem and provide a reliable water supply."

The first of two reports from the National Research Council is expected by March 15, 2010.

"If approved, the first NAS report will direct particular attention to the water delivery restrictions in the biological opinions and whether there are available alternative actions that would have lesser impacts on water deliveries while still providing equal or greater protection for the species and their designated critical habitat.

The NAS report will also look at the extent to which factors other than water pumping are contributing to the collapse of the Bay Delta ecosystem.

"In addition," said Salazar, "the administration is fully committed to funding and moving forward with the construction of the Delta-Mendota Canal/California Aqueduct Intertie, pending the completion of a Record of Decision on the project, which we anticipate within the next 60 days.

"The administration is also continuing to pursue the Two-Gates Fish Protection Demonstration Project through the required permitting processes, on an expedited basis," the secretary said. "Other potential projects that could supplement water supplies for the Valley include the Patterson Irrigation District Fish Screen project and related Pipeline Project."

As announced in October, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Commerce and other federal agencies are working together under a Memorandum of Understanding that commits the federal government to produce an integrated work plan to address California water issues by December 15.

Governor Schwarzenegger said the new era of cooperation to resolve California's water problems is long overdue.

"Mark Twain once said that whiskey is for drinking but water is worth fighting over. Well, he must have been talking about California, let me tell you, because for decades Californians have been fighting about water," said the governor. "It's like a holy water war that has taken place over the last few decades here. Everyone was fighting everybody. It was north versus south, rural versus urban, Republicans versus Democrats, business versus labor, farmers versus environmentalists and the list goes on and on, fighting, fighting, fighting. And because of this division it blocked California from investing in its water infrastructure."

That hostility may be easing with the help of the Obama administration. Salazar said, "The administration is also working closely with the state on a variety of important fronts including, in particular, the development of a Bay Delta Conservation Plan. We will continue to pursue all of these efforts, in close tandem with the state and other stakeholders as we address both the short-term and longer-term water needs for California."

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2009. All rights reserved.

Women have a lower carbon footprint than men but are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of global warming, according to the United Nations’ State of World Population report.

Women drive and fly much less than men and purchase fewer carbonintensive goods. The research found that women in industrialised countries were more likely to buy ecologically friendly and organic foods, were more likely to recycle rubbish and more interested in efficient energy use.

The report quoted a US research finding that women responded more positively than men to advertising for products that companies claimed were less detrimental to the environment. Women were also generally less likely than men to trust governments and corporations to solve environmental problems and more likely to want to take action personally to address these. The difference in attitude to environmental problems was more pronounced at higher income levels.

Last year in Sydney a survey of suburban residents about environmental sustainability found it was easier to attract women to co-operative and socially focused initiatives. Men were less likely to get involved in sustainability and were more drawn to technical and business solutions rather than personal action when discussing environmental issues.

The report also found that dietary differences contributed to women’s lower carbon footprint. It said: “Not only do women eat less in proportion to their body size but at least in some countries they consume a more vegetable-oriented and less meat-based diet.”

Men tend to eat much more meat. In Denmark, men eat 139 grams of meat daily on average compared with women, who eat 81 grams.

The report concluded that climate change “threatens to amplify the inequities between women and men.

“Women — particularly those in poor countries — are affected differently from men. Women are among the most vulnerable to climate change, partly because in many countries they make up the larger share of the agricultural workforce and partly because they tend not to have access to as many income-earning opportunities as men,” it said.

“Women manage households and care for family members, which often limits their mobility and increases their vulnerability to sudden weatherrelated natural disasters.”

The report also found that drought and erratic rainfall forced women to work harder to secure food, water and energy for their homes. Girls were more likely than boys to drop out of school to help their mothers with these tasks.

The report concluded: “Because of greater poverty, lesser power over their own lives, less recognition of their economic productivity and their disproportionate burden in reproduction and childraising, women face additional challenges as climate changes.

“Marginalisation of and discrimination against women and the lack of attention to the ways gender inequality hampers development, health, equity and overall well-being, all undermine a country’s resilience to climate change.”

At the Net Impact conference last week, a waiter stopped by before lunch to ask if anyone at our table wanted a vegetarian meal instead of chicken. Just one or two people did.

This, as it happens, is typical. When a meat-based entrée is being served, and people are offered a vegetarian alternative, about 5 to 10 percent will request it.

But what if the choices were reversed? Organizers of the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, which began Monday in Washington, tried an experiment: They made a vegetarian lunch the default option, and gave meat eaters the choice of opting out.

Some 80 percent went for the veggies, not because there were lots of vegetarians in the crowd of about 700 people but because the choice was framed differently. We know that because, at a prior BECC conference, when meat was the default option, attendees chose the meat by an 83 percent to 17 percent margin.

More than lunch is at stake here. “Omnivores contribute seven times the greenhouse gas emissions, when compared to vegans,” says Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, the conference chair, who works for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

Might there be broad-based ways to promote a vegetarian diet, while giving people the freedom to choose what they want? How can smart-grid technology be designed to encourage people to conserve energy? Which green marketing messages work, and which don’t? Can the insights of behavioral economics help fight climate change?

Those are the questions that engaged the policy makers, academics, and business executives at this BECC event, which differs from most conversations about climate change. Typically, when politicians, environmentalists or corporate executives discuss the issue, they focus on technology (solar, wind, electric cars) or regulation (cap-and-trade, the UN climate talks). The BECC crowd focuses on another powerful lever, albeit one that doesn’t get as much attention: human behavior, and in particular the irrational, emotional, self-defeating, short-term, inconsiderate and plain old silly human behavior that most of us engage in every day.

Like keeping incandescent light bulbs burning, when we know CFLs are cheaper (and most work very well). Or looking at  the price tag of an appliance, rather than its lifecycle costs. Or buying things -- like over-sized homes -- that we can’t afford.

As Erhardt-Martinez notes, personal choices have a huge collective impact on the climate crisis. Home energy use and the use of personal vehicles -- that is, the way we live -- accounts for about 38 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Behavior change could generate energy savings of 25 to 30 percent over the next five to eight years, she said.

There’s no need to wait for technology breakthroughs. “We already have much better choices,” she said. “People aren’t making them.”

Dan Ariely, professor of behaviorial economics at Duke and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (!) -- gave the opening keynote at BECC, and he left no doubt that most of us are not nearly as rational in our decision-making as we would like to think we are. (I blogged in June about Ariely’s entertaining book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. If this topic interests you, I can also enthusiastically recommend Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard  Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein has since joined the Obama administration as a shaper of regulations.) Ariely, Sunstein, Thaler and others have all brought the insights of psychology to the study of economics, helping explain how we humans actually behave. Hint: we’re not always the dispassionate, rational, self-interested, utility-maximizers of Econ 101.

“We wake up every morning with an incredible sense of agency,” Ariely says, meaning that we see ourselves as masters of our own fate. But evidence suggests that emotion, not to mention the people who design user interfaces -- from the lunch menu to the choices presented by our 401-K plans -- play a large role in our lives.

The climate crisis is a particular challenge for behavioral economists. It’s a long-term problem, and we tend to focus on the immediate. (That’s why Americans can’t resist dessert, and had a negative savings rate for many years.) Greenhouse gases are invisible, unlike other pollutants. Measuring the impact of individual actions is all but impossible. Global warming will harm other people, mostly poor people in the global south, before it damages the U.S.

“If you said, I want to create a problem that people don’t care about, you would probably come up with global warming,” Ariely says.

Still, there’s creative work being done to change behavior. Check out the Energy Smackdown, a community-based competition to excite people about saving energy. Some utility companies put smiley faces on bills of efficient consumers, promoting friendly neighborhood rivalries. Speakers at the conference addressed such topics as “Consumption-Based Carbon Footprint Accounting Tools,” “Pay as You Drive Insurance” and “Framing Matters: The Impact of Policy Context on Willingness to Change Energy Consumption Behavior.”

Call me a geek, but I’d like to know more. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend most of the conference. So if you presented, or want to offer insights on how behaviorial economics can mitigate climate change, feel free to comment below, send me an email or propose a guest blogpost on the topic.

GreenBiz.com Senior Writer Marc Gunther maintains a blog at MarcGunther.com.

Image CC licensed by Flickr user SpecialKRB.

There was some hope recently that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the organization charged with managing the Atlantic tuna fishery, would listen to its own scientists and ban commercial Atlantic bluefin tuna fishing so that the species might survive. Nope:

Environmentalists on Sunday warned bluefin tuna was on its way to extinction after a international meeting of fishery ministry officials trimmed catch quotas but upheld continued hauls of the fish, prized in sushi dishes.

“After meeting for 10 days, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) refused to end fishing for Atlantic bluefin tuna,” the Pew Environment Group, a U.S. organization that sat on in the meeting in Recife, Brazil, said in a statement.

“Instead, ICCAT set the catch limit for bluefin, considered the most valuable fish in the sea, at 13,500 tons,” it said.

...Yearly quotas set up by ICCAT are systematically exceeded by industrial fleets. That and illegal fishing have caused the population to decline by more than 85 percent in the eastern Atlantic and by more than 90 percent in the western Atlantic.

ICCAT “has failed once again to act beyond the interests of a few tuna fishing and farming industries,” Greenpeace said in a statement. “Again it has approved recommendations which fail to ensure the recovery of Atlantic bluefin tuna.”

The ICCAT has a long history of putting commercial interests ahead of the fishery. It was about this time last year that I discussed the “Tragedy of the Commons” debate regarding the bluefin tuna. So when news broke the other week that ICCAT’s scientists had called for a total ban—while others were hopeful—I was skeptical that the ICCAT as a group would follow through.

At the time, their own scientists observed that the bluefin tuna technically qualified as an endangered species, at least by international standards. And now that fact may be the only thing standing between the tuna and extinction—as Barry Estabrook pointed out, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) will consider a proposal at their next meeting in March 2010 officially to list the Atlantic bluefin tuna as an endangered species and ban international trade in the fish. Of course, even that ban needn’t be permanent. Other threatened fisheries have recovered and scientists expect bluefin tuna could come back within a decade, if properly managed. At this point, however, international groups have shown no ability to “properly manage” the fishery. Keep all that in mind next time you go out for sushi.

Toyota has created a new plant species designed to offset the CO2 created by its Prius assembly operations. By RICHARD BLACKBURN.

Photo: Max xx via FlickrSPAIN—With the Copenhagen climate change summit looming, the world of wine convened on Spain’s Rioja region for a conference in which global warming emerged as the industry’s top concern.

“All over the world, alcohol levels are going up,” said British wine critic Jancis Robinson at the WineFuture conference, citing just one problem producers are facing as a result of rising temperatures.

“Champagne alcohol levels are becoming embarrassingly high,” she added, meaning that the heat which is raising the alcohol content changes both the texture and personality of a wine.

Robinson said there were some “benevolent effects” of climate change—the slight increases in temperature currently benefiting certain wine-producing regions like California or Germany, as well as more ominous global implications.

“Even in England, the grapes are ripening more,” she said. “Someone even planted a vineyard in Norway. Can you believe that?”

Less benevolent effects, added Robinson, are being seen in warmer wine producing regions around the world such as Australia where water shortages are contributing to the demise of many wineries.

“Farmers in Spain don’t have nearly enough water,” she continued, “Spanish wine has always been pretty dry and concentrated, but the last few vintages have reached a crisis point.”

In the short to medium term, however, what might drive producers to go green has nothing to do with conscience or desire to save the world. For many, it’s about money and marketing.

“I want to find new markets, particularly for export. I want to be the first winemaker who eliminates direct CO2 emissions. Nobody does that,” said Manuel Garcia of Rioja’s Bodegas Regalia de Ollauri. “As a commercial argument, it’s very important.”

Potentially, there’s also money to be saved by going green. At Garcia’s new vineyard, he installed a geothermal system that takes advantage of the constant temperature underground to cool his cellars in the summertime and heat them in the winter, a game changer for wineries whose power bills are often referred to as “astronomical.”

“My summertime cooling no cuesta nada (doesn’t cost anything),” he said, making a “0” in the air with his thumb and index finger. “We paid 250,000 euros to install the system, but we’ll recuperate our investment in four or five years.”

“You might not get vineyard owners to want to save the Earth, but they’ll want to save money,” concludes Garcia.

Winemakers are also being encouraged to rethink how they ship their wines and how they make their bottles.

At the WineFuture conference last week, speaker Nicola Jenkins, drinks category expert for the Britain-based environmental agency WRAP cited a Chilean winery which used a “lightweighting” process on its bottles, reducing their weight from 485g to 425g (17 to 15 oz.) and encouraging others to ship overseas in bulk using giant vats known as ‘flexitanks’—both processes that result in CO2 emissions reductions and shipping cost savings.

But it’s still a slow process getting winemakers on board.

“People go to a climate conference and get all excited then go back to their company and say, ‘Let’s buy solar panels!’ and their boss says ‘What?!?!’” said Miguel Torres, president of Bodegas Miguel Torres.

Yet Torres, who heads up a generations-old wine company has become something of an Al Gore for the wine industry, traveling the world with a climate change PowerPoint presentation, showing what his company is doing to go green and why he’s trying to lead by example.

At the new Torres winery in the Rioja town of Labastida, the facility is built into the earth, has a fleet of electric vehicles, and special water collecting reservoirs.

“We won’t be able to make the same quality of wines if we don’t do anything,” he said, addressing the particular sensitivity of grapes and the winemaking process to temperature changes other crops could endure.

Some producers who want to continue to produce the wines they’ve made historically are adapting by simply changing physical location.

“You can work with latitude or altitude, or switch grapes,” he said. The latter has particular consequences in Europe, as a switch to grapes that are better adapted to higher temperatures could signal the end of the appellation system as a whole. “It’s going to change the map.”

“In 10, 15, or 20 years there’s going to be a frightening change with consequences,” he concluded. “If temperatures in Europe go up by five degrees, we won’t be able to grow grapes and I don’t want to have to explain to my grandchildren why we did nothing.”

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab are betting $3.5 billion in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet that could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. For some, that's hard to swallow.

This target chamber is 10 meters in diameter and weighs 287,000 pounds. )

It doesn't look like much from the outside—just a drab, 10-story building on the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco. But as I'm walking across the parking lot on a sunny day in October I can't help thinking that someday I might be telling my grandchildren about the time I came to this lab and met Edward Moses and saw the technology that was about to change the world.

Maybe this means I'm an optimist. Or even a sucker; a fool. All I know is that when I meet Moses, the 60-year-old scientist who runs this place, and he shows me a tiny pellet, about the size of the multivitamin I take every morning, and swears it will provide an endless supply of safe, clean energy, I want to believe him. It seems so ridiculously simple, so utterly doable. The pellet Moses holds is a model, but the real version will contain a few milligrams of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from water. If you blast the pellet with a powerful laser, you can create a reaction like the one that takes place at the center of the sun. Harness that reaction, and you've created a star on earth, and with the heat from that star you can generate electricity without creating any pollution. Forget about nuke plants, coal, oil, or wind and solar. "This is the real solar power," says Moses.

What Moses is talking about is controlled nuclear fusion—fusing nuclei rather than splitting a nucleus, as happens in ordinary nuclear-fission power plants. In a fission reaction, the nucleus of a uranium atom is split into two smaller atoms, releasing energy in the form of heat. The heat is used to make steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity. In fusion energy, the second half of this process (heat makes steam makes electricity) remains the same. But instead of splitting the nucleus of an atom, you're trying to force a deuterium nucleus to merge, or fuse, with a tritium nucleus. When that happens, you produce helium and throw off energy.

Scientists have been trying to produce energy with fusion for decades. So far, they keep failing. It's not that fusion itself can't be achieved. Fusion takes place in every hydrogen-bomb explosion. The trick is controlling fusion so that instead of a one-time blast you get a series of tiny, controllable explosions. The joke is that fusion energy is only 40 years away, and will always be only 40 years away.

Moses believes, however, that his lab, which is called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, has cracked the problem. The big challenge fusion has faced is lack of power. Even the biggest lasers in the world could not generate enough energy to smash nuclei together and make them stick. But the reason the building we're in is so huge—it covers the area of three football fields—is that it contains an enormous laser, or actually a system that combines 192 identical lasers and zaps them into a round chamber, about 30 feet in diameter, where the tiny pellet of fuel awaits the blast. NIF's laser, which took a decade to build and was completed earlier this year, can produce 60 times more energy than any other laser ever built. Right now it's still being tested. But next year Moses and his scientists will fire it up with a full load of deuterium-tritium fuel, and Moses feels confident it will achieve "ignition," meaning a controlled burn in which you get out more energy than you put in. Moses, an award-winning laser scientist with a wry sense of humor, explains the whole thing as he leads me on a tour through the NIF facility. It's a vast, beautiful, awe-inspiring machine, mind-blowing in its complexity, with miles of metal tubes—all part of a system that starts with a tiny pulse of light, channels that light through machines that amplify its intensity and rocket the beam along using specially grown crystals and thousands of lenses and mirrors, and finally focuses these beams down to hit a target that is the size of a peppercorn—all in one millionth of a second.

Beijing traffic. Click on the image to see a photo gallery of different cities' responses to climate change. (Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

But other scientists warn me that this is all just a high-tech fantasy. They say Moses is full of a certain kind of non-nuclear fuel, and that I should not believe anything he and his colleagues tell me. "They're snake-oil salesmen," says Thomas Cochran, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has tracked the NIF project from its inception in 1997. Cochran says the NIF laser is still not powerful enough. Even if it were, he says, "these machines are just going to be too big, and too costly, and they'll never be competitive." Other critics, like Stephen Bodner, a Ph.D. physicist who was director of laser-fusion research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., until his retirement in 1999, say Moses's team has downplayed such technical problems as its inability to focus NIF's laser on a tiny target.

Moses says NIF has already demonstrated the ability to focus onto the target. He's aware of the skepticism but says he's confident that his team, which consists of 500 scientists and engineers, will succeed. His boss, George Miller, the director of Lawrence Livermore, holds a doctorate in physics and is well aware of the difficulties Moses must overcome. "Nothing is a sure game until you've actually done it," he says. But he makes the case for trying. "You have to build NIF to find out whether or not this is going to work."

He's got a point. Big technological breakthroughs require taking big risks. They always seem hopeless and expensive—until they work. Sequencing the human genome seemed impossible until thousands of researchers around the world got it done—in 13 years, with $3 billion in government funding, plus investments by private companies. Like the genome project, fusion energy is something that requires a long-term sustained effort. This isn't like creating the next version of the iPod, or a new application for Facebook. These are scientists operating at the very edge of our knowledge about how to manipulate tiny particles of matter.

If fusion works, it's the ultimate green energy source. But NIF has other goals, one being to help scientists gain greater understanding of the universe itself; for example, they will be able to study conditions that exist inside stars.

Given all that, even if NIF fails—if the whole place turns out to have been a $3.5 billion fiasco—it seems to me that the risk will have been worth taking. The NIF team still will have made lots of smaller breakthroughs in laser design, optics, and materials science. They will have advanced the state of laser science. Then they will go looking for money to build an even bigger laser so they can try again.

And if Moses is right, and NIF succeeds, well, the scientists at NIF will go down in history. That is why labs in Japan, France, the U.K., and China are all pursuing fusion energy too. For his part, Moses really seems not to harbor any doubt. Yes, there are lots of big technical challenges; but one by one, his team is ticking them down, he says. "If someone offered me the job to build a commercial prototype fusion plant and they said, 'You've only got 10 years,' I'd take that job," Moses says. He and a colleague have already branded the product they're building—they call it Laser Inertial Fusion Energy, or LIFE, a name that at least indicates that some scientists also know a bit about marketing. Moses believes that by 2020 utility companies could be building prototype power plants called "LIFE engines." By 2030, he says, real fusion plants could be up and running, and by 2050 they could be common. By 2100, as many as 1,000 fusion reactors could be operating in the United States, if utilities embrace the technology and invest in it.