Boing Boing » Saul Griffith

Energy Literacy 4. How to gauge whether your politicians are faking it on climate change commitments

Saul Griffith — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:01:36 +0000

Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including Optiopia, Squid Labs, Instructables, Potenco, and Makani Power.

On the day before Thanksgiving, while everyone was distracted buying (or pardoning) turkeys, the Obama team announced that the president will go to Copenhagen and promise to try to commit to a carbon reduction schedule for the United States.

(More links if you want to see the news repeat it over and over again: 1, 2, 3)

On one hand, I want to be excited about this because unless the US makes a commitment to CO2 reductions, it's exceedingly unlikely that the rest of the world will bother. On the other hand, no one should be jumping in the aisles till we look at the numbers more carefully.

It's probably useful to first update yourself on the climate science. Here's a well-written, critical, and objective summary of recent scientific results released a few months ago. It was prepared as an update between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of 2007, and IPCC AR5, which will not to be completed until 2013. The PDF of the full report is well worth reading.

In summary, the science news isn't so good. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased nearly 40% between 1990 and 2008. The temperature has been increasing at a rate of 0.19 degrees C, (0.34 F) each decade for the past 25 years. Ice-sheets, glaciers, and ice-caps are exhibiting accelerated melting. The existing sea-level rise predictions look to be underestimates by at least a factor of 2. Delaying action risks irreversible damage and we must peak in emissions soon, preferably between 2015 and 2020, if not earlier.

Those who claim recent cooling trends are ignoring the fact that we are currently at a solar minimum, a period of low solar activity that is partially offsetting the long term global heating trend. This is a bit like saying you don't need to change your eating habits because you lost weight while having the flu.

So, in light of this science, how can we understand what Obama's pledge means?

For starters, any public dialogue that talks about "percentage reductions in emissions" by a certain date is misleading. Because of the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere, it makes far more sense to talk about the amount of CO2 remaining to be released before we hit a peak CO2 concentration. Let's call this the "remaining cumulative carbon emissions" method. After those emissions, we essentially need to emit zero carbon. This way of looking at the climate was first popularized by Krause, Bach, & Koomey, in an excellent book called "Energy Policy in the Greenhouse" (1992). It was revisited as a tool of understanding the climate challenge in two great Nature magazine articles this year. (Nature magazine is probably the most prestigious, and rigorous, of all the academic journals.) In one of those, Meinshausen et al., used this method of analysis to look at how you would limit the planet to 2 degrees C of warming.

Two degrees is what most industrialized nations see as the upper limit of tolerable climate change, and it has become something like the default target before we see "dangerous levels of climate change." (Incidentally, the least-developed nations and the 43 small island nations of AOSIS are calling for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.) The Copenhagen Diagnosis Update referenced above summarizes: "Meinshausen found that if a total of 1000 Gigatons of CO2 is emitted for the period 2000-2050, the likelihood of exceeding the 2-degree warming limit is around 25%. Between 2000- 2009, about 350 Gigatons have already been emitted, leaving only 650 Gigatons as the emissions budget for 2010-2050. At current emission rates this budget would be used up within 20 years."

The remaining cumulative carbon emissions is a useful framework by which we can now assess the pseudo-commitment (meaning unratified by Congress) that Obama will present in Copenhagen. According to the New York Times, "Mr. Obama will tell the delegates that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 'in the range of' 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said."

The first problem here is that most nations, including Europe, are committing to reductions based on 1990 levels, but the US is basing its reductions on 2005 levels. Here's the historical US data.

And I've put it into a public spreadsheet for you to see. This spreadsheet assumes meeting these targets with a linear fit between 2010 & 2020, and the same from 2021-2050. That is very likely an optimistic assumption.

As you'll note, a 17% reduction over 2005 levels means only a 0.3% reduction over 1990 levels.

What you'll also see is that Obama is making a commitment to emit 59 Gigatons from the US alone from 2010-2020, and a further 88 Gigatons from 2020-2050, for a total of 147 Gigatons of CO2. This is 22.7% of the 650 Gigaton limit implied by Meinshausen. This helps to see why it's hard to get an agreement in Copenhagen. In order to avoid "dangerous levels of climate change" the US is committing to reduce its output to "only" 22.7% of global emissions, despite having only 4.5% of the global population. The other point to note is that even these reductions don't satisfy the "emissions go to zero" aspect of this CO2 budget, as the US would still be emitting a gigaton of CO2 per year in 2050 under this plan.

There are a few things we might hazard a guess at when we look at these numbers:

a) The US government doesn't think that we should bother aiming at even a 25% chance of staying below 2 degrees C.

b) The US government believes the rest of the world won't notice the disproportionality of its emissions based on population.

c) The US government believes that we'll invent a magic technology for sequestering atmospheric CO2 at some low cost powered by a magic new energy source.

d) The US government has lost its ability to make hard choices, and to rise to the urgencies of the moment in a way that is required of a great nation.

I like to think of the modern era as "the age of consequence." We are starting to understand the consequences of our individual and collective actions. Although it's early in the modeling revolution, we are learning to model the results of our actions now as the play out in the future. The upside of the age of consequence, and having the internet out there for lots of people to look ponder it (the age of transparency), is that the general public can analyze policy such as the announcements Obama is making in Copenhagen, and critique it. Perhaps we'll even be able to use this elegant framework of "total CO2 emissions" to quite frankly say, "this is not good enough, your words and commitments don't match up".

I don't think public policy alone, whether from individual government or the entire international community, will meet the climate challenge. Individuals will need to lead by example and make personal reductions by demanding products and services that will meet the real climate challenge. Fundamentally, that means massive installation of zero carbon energy generation technologies, and likely quite large reductions in personal energy use. It would be fantastic if we re-defined the climate challenge in terms of how we do both of those things while increasing the quality of our lives. Unless individuals do this, it is unlikely that governments will see the demand for action and act appropriately.

The main criticisms and resistance to climate action are often because we frame it as a challenge of denying ourselves and negatively impacting our lives and economy. By framing it instead as a "how do we improve our quality of life?" question, more people are engaged in the debate and the actions we need. It's no longer a purely technological fix; we can more accurately frame the problem for what it is: a challenge for us all, where we can win if we think clearly about what we are trying to achieve. That's a better quality of life for all.

ref: Meinshausen, M. et al., (2009) Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C. Nature 458, 1158-1162.

Energy Literacy 3: Energy, Power, Carbon. The basic concepts of energy literacy.

Saul Griffith — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:35:59 +0000

Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com.

How do we measure energy and power?

If you would like to quantitatively understand the relationship between your lifestyle, global energy use, and climate change, you need to establish the language with which you can translate between these things. There are many different ways we use energy, many different ways we produce energy, and many different consequences environmentally. Power and energy are being measured around us all of the time. You get your electricity bill in kilowatt hours (kWh), your gas bill in Therms or British Thermal Units (BTUs), your car's performance is measured in horsepower, and your lightbulbs are rated in watts. To compare these things you need a common set of units, and we've already encountered 4 different units (kWh, BTU, Hp, W), and two different concepts - energy and power -- and we've only just started.

The first problem with comparing these things is that some of them (BTUs and kWh) are measures of energy consumed, and some of them (horsepower and watts) are measures of power. To add to this confusion, some of them are measures of primary energy (barrels of oil equivalent, or metric tons of coal), some are measures of net electrical power at your outlet (W), some are measures of thermal energy or heat, and some are measures of net mechanical power (Hp at the wheels of your car). To wade your way through all of this, you need an intuition for the difference between energy, and power. Energy can actually be an abstract concept, while people often have a more intuitive understanding of power-- "my car has 200 horsepower!˝

Energy is required to do work. Work is the exertion of a force over some distance. You perform work on an apple when you lift it from the ground to a table. It takes roughly 1 joule of energy to lift an apple from the ground to the table. It takes 1 watt (1 joule / second) to lift that apple from the ground to the table in one second. Energy is the measure of how much work can be done, whether it be moving apples, heating your house, or driving your car. You transform energy from one form to another when you do work. For example, you convert the chemical energy contained within gasoline to mechanical energy of rotating the crankshaft when it is burnt in an internal combustion engine. The energy that doesn't make it to the crankshaft is converted to heat. That's why your engine gets hot.

Power is the rate at which you consume energy or do work. Lifting the apple onto the table quickly requires more power than doing it slowly, but the same amount of work is performed. A more powerful car engine can accelerate you to 65 mph faster than an engine with less power, but they both get you to 65mph.

If I were powering the laptop I was writing this on by lifting apples from the floor to the table, I'd have to be lifting a crate of 40 apples every second to do so. That's quite a lot of work. Energy is a quantity, whereas power is a rate.

Quantitative comparison of aspects of your life (or 7 billion peoples' collective lives) could be made in terms of energy or power (or even carbon). If you use energy, you are bound to ask questions about the time period: is it the amount of energy in a month? Or over a lifetime? It was those questions that convinced me to start thinking in terms of power rather than energy. The rate at which your lifestyle uses energy is a convenient measure that gives you a single number to think about your energy use, power consumption, and ultimately environmental impact.

But having decided to talk about power, we still needed to decide upon the right units to talk in. Should it be kilowatt hours per day? Horsepower? BTUs per month? Watts? Kilowatt hours per day measure the use of electricity well. Horsepower measures the use of mechanical power well. BTUs per month describe the use of heat well. Watts, however, are universal, and are in fact the scientific standard as defined by the Système Internationale, so we decided to use them to measure our lives. Even though I'm talking in Watts, you'll still need to think occasionally about energy, especially in the embodied energy of objects. It isn't easy, but it is necessary. At least we are down to only two units, and they are fundamental: Watts (Power - rate), and Joules (Energy - quantity).

Trying to understand the global energy system requires understanding power use on many different scales. Billions of people each use thousands of watts of power, and the way they use that power and get that power varies enormously. It's very difficult to have an intuition or understanding of all these different units and numbers. We all have a rough understanding of the amount of power in a light bulb. We have a sense of the power of an automobile. We speak of powerful winds. Many people have stood at the side of Hoover Dam or Niagara Falls and have been awed by the raw power in front of them.

Wikipedia nicely lays out the power consumption of various activities at different orders of magnitude.

Wikipedia provides examples of the energy required to do different things at different scales.

This Wikipedia page contains an excellent converter between various energy and power units.

Now, everyone else talks about "Carbon Footprint." Carbon dioxide is the problem, isn't it? If so, why am I talking about energy and power, joules and watts, instead of CO2 and PPM?

The best answer to this is that calculating their "carbon footprint" merely makes people want to reduce their carbon footprint. Yes, the carbon is a problem, but let's imagine that it wasn't (perhaps even wish that it wasn't!). Calculating my lifestyle in 2007 on Wattzon, I needed 18kw of power. If 6.6 billion people used that much energy, the world would use more than 100TW. Global world energy production currently is 15-18TW. It is extremely unlikely that we are going to be able to make more than 100TW of power, fossil-fuel-based, green, nuclear, or otherwise. On top of reducing carbon footprint, people are going to have to simply use less energy -- hopefully while improving their lives.

As I'll explain later, the production of non-carbon emitting energy, say by using solar panels, requires a very large area of land. By talking about power instead of carbon, we will help you understand the trade-offs of all the various methods of producing humanity's power -- even the renewable energy hopefuls aren't perfect. If there is a not so subtle subtext to my blog posts, it is that the energy challenge is a game of trade-offs and compromises. It's actually a design problem; the analogy I like to use is that we are designing the garden that is earth, and we are choosing where to put the rose beds, the organic veggies, the compost heap, and the irrigation system. The choices we make in the design will effect the quality of the garden, and its variety.

There's another, less obvious reason why I talk about power instead of carbon. The carbon footprint thing leads to a shell game: "I drive a lot, so I have a large footprint. I buy an electric car so now I've reduced my footprint." Well, maybe ... it depends on where the energy came from and how big your electric car is. If you got the power from a coal power plant and it is an electric SUV, you are still using about the same amount of power and producing about the same amount of CO2. If you drive a 6000lb SUV at 75 mph, you're going to burn a lot of energy. (This is also ignoring the embodied energy required to build your shiny new electric car). The hope is that if you do your accounting in energy and power, then there's a better chance of being grounded in a number that's not process-based and so doesn't tempt you just to switch the process (eg. from gas in your tank to coal at a power station). We'd like to inspire people to solve this problem by making intelligent consumer choices, not trying to buy things to solve the problem that ultimately exacerbate it. The solution is as much about more efficient and lower-energy ways of doing things as it is about making carbon-free power.

For reference, here is a table of the amount of CO2 produced making 1 million joules (1 MJ) from different processes:

Natural Gas - 53 g/MJ
diesel - 69 g/MJ
gasoline (petrol) - 67 g/MJ
coal - 83 g/MJ

These emission ï¬gures are taken from DEFRA's Environmental Reporting Guidelines for Company Reporting on Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

This Wikipedia page contains an excellent converter between various energy and power units.

To begin estimating your own power consumption, you can use Wattzon.

Energy Literacy part One: Energy is invisible

Saul Griffith — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:09:51 +0000

Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com.

You might have just driven home. When you filled your car with gasoline, most likely you didn't even see the fluid as it was pumped into your gas tank. Once home, you probably turned on some lights, some music, your computer, and maybe even heat, so you could read this web page. You can't see the power running through the electrical lines that lead to your light bulb, and you don't feel it, but you do enjoy the results. Our society has made energy invisible. This invisibility makes energy convenient to use -- and the modern age is arguably wonderful as a result -- but it also makes it easy to take it for granted. Here we try to make our appetite for energy visible.

Climate change is a phenomenon we now recognize as one of the most important challenges to ever confront humanity. Like energy use, it is also mostly invisible to us, and in two important ways. Firstly, the enormous volumes of green-house gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, CFC's etc, are quite literally invisible to our naked eyes. Secondly, the changes in climate progress so slowly that they seem invisible amidst the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. Because these consequences accumulate over decades, generations, and centuries, it is easy to not see them as pressing and urgent. Here we try to make visible these complicated and largely invisible things.

The global energy and climate conversation is about choices, both individual choices and collective choices. By choosing the amount and type of energy we consume, we are choosing the look and feel of our future. Everyone is involved in that choice. Don't be fooled: individual choices collectively have enormous effects. A large coal power plant has a power output of 1GW (GigaWatt) which is 1 billion (1 000 000 000) Watts. If 1 billion people reduced their power needs by just 1 watt ( About what is required to keep a compact fluorescent burning for just 1 hour a day), that's a coal fired power plant you don't need to build.

This material tries to help you make those choices in a more informed manner. We also hope this material influences the governments, organizations and corporations who make the decisions about our energy future on a macro level.

These posts are about energy, climate change, finite resources, and the future. Unfortunately, the creation of this material is implicated in the very climate change and energy challenges we wish to avoid. You chose to read this, which means you chose to use some energy. These posts are not "carbon free" or "carbon neutral". At the time of its publishing there was practically no way that it ever could have been. Nearly every choice you make involves energy and all those choices have implications for the environment.

Two people wrote this stuff. We both ate food produced by modern industrial agriculture to power ourselves while writing. We used at least five computers at different times to do the calculations, write the words, and edit the layout. After we had done our work, editors and designers used computers to further refine the text and images. Each of those computers ran for many hours, consuming somewhere between 20 and 200 watts of power each as they did so. The computers themselves were made in factories in China and Japan with chips produced in the United States, and cases probably made from bauxite mined in Australia and processed in Argentina.

If you print this out, the paper it is printed on was probably made from trees that were cut down in Canada. The chainsaws that cut the trees ran on two-stroke gasoline. The trees were lifted onto a truck with a crane powered by diesel fuel. The truck drove the trees to the sawmill using diesel. Before the trees from which these pages were made had even been pulped, three internal combustion engines had been fired up, burned a fossil fuel and emitted some carbon dioxide. How much CO2? Not a lot. But all the little pieces add up.

If you are just reading this on the web, there are disks and processors in data centers in numerous places running from coal plants, gas plants, even hydro and solar plants where the production of the cement and silicon was itself done using fossil fuels. The point is, it's a really complex system.

As these paragraphs show, the global supply chain for energy is complex. This was in small part inspired by the pamphlet "I, Pencil - My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read." (1958). A piece that highlights just how interconnected our modern world is.

We fill our cars with gas regularly, but don't even see the liquid go into the tank. If we were to imagine that we had to fill a backpack with the fuels required for a day of our lives, what would we be filling our energy back-pack with each day?

Each day the average American sets out with:

OIL = 10.81 L/Person/day (2.9Gallons) 

COAL = 9.54 kg/person/day (21 pounds) 

NATURAL GAS = 5.88 m^3/person/day (208 cubic feet)

Which roughly converted to those other units is around 22 Pints of oil per day (one per hour!), 21 pounds of coal (another per hour) and 200 cubic feet of natural gas.

I used the annual consumption of coal and natural gas, and the daily consumption of oil, and converted it to the daily average by dividing it out by the population of the US.

The data is here.

Guest blogger - Saul Griffith's "Energy Literacy Series"

Saul Griffith — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:21:27 +0000

I'm very happy to introduce our new guest blogger, Saul Griffith. He's a friend and a long time contributor to MAKE, where his Making Trouble column and Howtoons comics are reader favorites. A visit to Saul's workshop is a mind-boggling treat -- home-made bikes, giant kites, modded dune buggies, cheap eyeglass making machines, hand-held human-powered generators, and other wondrous prototype devices are all over the place. He comes closer to being a real-life Professor from Gilligan's Island than anyone I know. Saul was named a McArthur Fellow in 2007.

I'm looking forward to what Saul writes for Boing Boing over the next two weeks. I promise it will be very interesting. -- Mark

I'm guest blogging at Boing Boing! I'm excited, not only because I've long been a fan, but also because you, as readers here, are out there at the edge thinking about the future and how to build it and participate in it.

I'm failing at finishing a book (with my colleague Jim McBride who will hopefully join me in the postings) that we've been writing on climate and energy issues for what seems like forever. As we are approaching the Copenhagen UN Climate Change conference (http://en.cop15.dk/) on December 7th, I thought I may as well summarize the contents of my book in a 12(ish)-part series here at Boing Boing. Sadly it already appears the world has given up hope on reaching any sort of agreement on targets at Copenhagen, which is unfortunate, but lucky for me, because the entire book is about how you might choose such a target, and how you would plan appropriate responses, personally, locally, nationally, and globally. It also will help you call bull$#!+ on people at dinner parties who espouse some fantastic new perpetual motion machine.

If you want to just read it in a book you can wait for us to get our act together, squint at pieces at www.energyliteracy.com, or simply read David J.C. MacKay's wonderful "Sustainability without the hot air" instead, as he is more highly functional than myself, and already got his book covering similar material for the UK out there and published.

Before the climate change deniers and skeptics run to their keyboards to write long-winded diatribes in the comments section, I'll try to ward you off by saying that you can just consider the posts as a thought experiment. "If this climate stuff were actually true in some parallel universe, what could we do to address the problem, and what might the resultant world look like?"

Naturally a lot of that is going to be pretty serious stuff with lots of graphs and charts. I'll do my best to make the graphs and charts pretty (thanks to Kirk Von Rohr), but as that's not enough to compensate for the seriousness of the matter, I'll also be posting about the things I'm working on at otherlab.com, passionate about, or random things that are interesting to me right now. A lot of that will be energy generation technology stuff, bicycles, programmable matter and computational geometry, origami, cool ways to make things, and science education.

I'm an enormous fan of the engineering methodology of figuring out your goal or target, then working backwards from there to figure out what you have to do to achieve that goal. That's the basic structure of the argument. I'm also a big believer in energy literacy and having more people really understanding what's up and what the options are. So briefly, here's an outline (and i reserve the right to change my mind about the order in coming days) of the Energy Literacy series here at Boing Boing. Hopefully it will give you a much deeper understanding of what's behind the scenes and headlines of the Copenhagen conference, and just how far the public conversation about energy is from the public's concept of climate targets.

1. Energy, Power, Carbon, population. (entropy, exergy, the whole 9 yards). A primer on all of the key definitions and buzzwords and players with an emphasis on giving an intuitive understanding of the problem to non number nerds.

2. Personal Energy Use. (or How to obsessively compulsively measure the level of your own energy use)
a. Flying.
b. Driving.
c. Heating & Cooling.
d. Eating.
e. Stuff.
f. Society. (your tax dollars at work).

3. Global Energy Use demographics. (Or how to put your lifestyle into the larger global context, this is a global challenge after all)
US, current, historical.
Global, current, historical.
Breakdown per capita and by nation.

4. The need for a global climate target.
a. how might you choose that target?
b. climate models. scenarios. impact studies.
c. why +2 degrees celsius seems to be the target.
d. two ways of looking at climate. % reductions. total carbon left to burn.

5. Where can you get the power (energy) from that is not carbon based?
a. global energy balance.
b. solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, wave, nuclear, etc.
c. power density of the different options in terms of land. The nation of Renewistan.
d. how much industrial effort would that actually take?

6. By now you should have an idea of how challenging this energy supply game is, and why, perhaps, it's unlikely that we should imagine an infinite energy future. How do you live "conscious" of this. What is a lifestyle that "adds up?" My New lifestyle: Living knowing what I know now. (Or how can i figure out how to live the way I'd like everyone to live)
Flying.
Driving.
Heating / cooling.
Eating.
Stuff. (Heirloom products)
Society. (A hair-brained argument for not paying your taxes)

7. Other ideas, Crazy ideas, Why efficiency is rarely what people call it, Get out of jail free cards and other optimistic hype.

8. Climate change can be seen as an aesthetic issue. We are designing the world we live in. How do we do that well? What could it look like?

Oh yeah, there'll be data too. I love data.

And because we all love images I can't resist posting this drawing by the son of a friend of a friend's father, Marco Ahluwalia, who I think is 9 and lives in Jakarta (so much for fact checking). We'll need inventors like him, and the optimism and spirit inherent in his master plan.

Bio: Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com. For the past 3-4 years he has focussed all of his efforts on energy issues relating to climate change, including working on high-altitude wind power at Makani Power, and starting www.wattzon.com, a website for understanding and quantifying personal energy use. Most recently, he has formed www.Otherlab.com with Jack Bachrach and Jim McBride to focus on energy solutions, working on new generation technologies, and the design and engineering of low-energy solutions to life's high-energy consumption products and services. For sanity, and to satisfy his passion for education in science, he works on www.howtoons.com with Nick and Ingrid Dragotta. Howtoons are comics with hands-on science and engineering projects embedded in illustrated adventures. Saul spends a portion of his time as an EIR at www.foundationcapital.com learning about the venture capital business and advising on their clean-tech portfolio. Saul blogs when prodded at www.energyliteracy.com.