March 15, 2006

Yesterday morning’s mail brought a solicitation from Earth Policy Institute for its (Lester Brown’s) new book “Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and A Civilization in Trouble.” My first sighting of Lester Brown was in 1994 in Washington, DC at a large meeting on sustainability. I had, by then, purchased and read several of his Worldwatch Institute reports, and Flavin and Lenssen’s “Power Surge, Guide to the Coming Energy Revolution,” and I respected Mr. Brown to the level of a deep bow. In 2002, I spoke with (at) him at a DOE Green Power Marketing Conference, effusive with admiration and awkward – a self-immolating and embarrassing habit.

“Dear Reader,” (begins the solicitation) “In his book ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,’ Jared Diamond describes how earlier civilizations moved onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable.” Ah, too early in the morning for Jared Diamond and his depressing tome. I skim on, but think about my work for the day: writing an article on renewable, clean energy for an energy training company in California which has an interest in biomass…

“The competition for oil is already altering the relationship between oil and food. We have long been concerned about the effect of rising oil prices on food production costs, but now we can see its effect on the demand for food commodities. Since virtually everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel either in ethanol distilleries or in biodiesel refineries, high oil prices are opening a vast new market for farm products. Fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other foodstuffs. With high oil prices, more and more ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries are being built to convert food into fuel. As a result, supermarkets and service stations are competing for the same commodities. In essence, the affluent owners of the world’s 800 million automobiles will be competing with the world’s poor for food.”

Maybe these commodities are better suited as fuel anyway, I speculate…all that genetic modification and chemical fertilizer. Maybe the competition from fuels will egg on the slow-food and relocalization movements. It’s all too dreary before a second glass of tea, and I gravitate to the jazz radio station, only to hear NPR, sponsored by none other than Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM): “ADM is a global leader in biofuels and is helping to meet these growing demands [for energy].”
…

ADM plans to fuel the cars of the world and feed the people of the world (tofu to the Chinese from American soybeans, in fact).

Their recent ad campaign splices images of hardworking, healthy American farmers with images of healthy Asian consumers. A background of eastern Indian music fades. Highway traffic flows in double-time. Trains and trucks zip alongside cornfields. There are more vibrant images of American farmers. And vivid landscapes of city lights. And acres of gentle waves of green crops. And wide open clear blue skies. Their ads are fashioned similarly across all product lines. For corn-based ‘plastics,’ food and transportation fuel, it’s the same smooth, soothing male voice-over, same visual treatments, same repetitive copy format, same kind of assured message:

“The world’s demand for energy will never stop. Which is why a farmer is growing corn and a farmer is growing soy. And why ADM is turning these crops into biofuels. The world’s demand for energy will never stop. Which is why ADM will never stop. We’re only getting started. ADM. Resourceful by Nature™.”

“Somewhere west of Topeka someone’s getting out for a breath of fresh air. Which is why a farmer is harvesting corn. And why a train is transporting corn. And why ADM is turning corn into ethanol, a renewable, cleaner-burning fuel. Somewhere west of Topeka someone’s getting out for a breath of fresh air. And lots of us are helping make sure that fresh air is actually – fresh. ADM. Resourceful by Nature™.”

This particular someone, sporting red hair and lime-green scoop-neck, is way, way west of Topeka, and she’s at the wheel of a sweet, grey, vintage convertible, cruising alongside a silver lake with mountains off in the distance. She’s definitely not in Kansas. Like ADM, she’s got full tank (money’s not a problem). And she’s on a roll. This ad – the woman, the open air, the notion of carefree escape – gave me goose bumps. Please forgive me, Mr. Brown.

That’s the motto for Cleveland, it being the home of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

For those of us who care about the clean tech arena, Cleveland also rocks because the area is making bets on advanced energy technologies. Many local constituencies recognize that the clean energy sector represents a tremendous opportunity for the region to pursue a new front for economic growth.

And so it is that I have decided to move to Cleveland and attempt to make an impact there. Effective last week, I have accepted a role at The Cleveland Foundation to lead regional efforts to build and catalyze economic activity in advanced energy technologies.

Press Release

I suspect that many of those in clean tech would be surprised at Cleveland’s interest level and current activities in developing commercial activity in advanced energy. With this posting, I invite you to contact me at the Foundation to learn more about what’s going on in Northeast Ohio. Who knows? Maybe you will find out, as I have, that Cleveland is a land of great opportunity.

Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman has informed Congress that the $1 billion Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) will be pushed back five years. The massive superconducting accelerator was intended to be the world’s leading facility for exploring the fields of nuclear structure and astrophysics in areas that are central to applied fields such as energy, security, and medicine.

Regardless of one’s political, ecological, economic, or philosophical perspective, nuclear energy will continue to be a very big piece of the energy puzzle for the next several decades, at the very least. While the bulk of this will come from fission, there is considerable effort being made to develop fusion energy as well. Given the importance of fission and fusion, it is strange that R&D on atomic nuclei—the part of the atom that produces nuclear energy—is being put on the back burner by the DOE.

“The main sources of energy in the universe, and on earth, are fusion and fission,” commented Witek Nazarewicz, Scientific Director for Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility at Oak Ridge National Lab. “If we say that we are not interested in how fusion and fission work, we are giving up an important, strategic area of knowledge for human civilization.”

As it stands, President Bush’s proposed 14% budget increase for the DOE’s Office of Science reportedly does not provide enough funding for continuation of the program in 2007, and it is possible that Congress’s final budget will be lower. Hence it is hoped that, at best, R&D on RIA will continue with $5 to $6M budgeted per year until a preliminary engineering design could be prepared, hopefully by 2011.

Politicians and Physicists Miffed

Despite RIA’s troubled past (see Superconductor Week, issue 1904), many in the physics community expressed surprise at the announcement. One official working closely with the DOE on the project commented: “We got very mixed signals from the DOE. One day we were being told that we needed to finish our proposal quickly to get RIA in the FY07 budget, and the next day Bodman announced pushing the project back.”

Even insiders such as U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) seem to have been taken off guard. Only days before Bodman announced the decision to slow development of RIA, Durbin had met with Bodman and issued a statement that the DOE was in the process of finalizing the decision for the placement of RIA—Argonne National Lab and Michigan State University have been competing to host the experiment.

Durbin has often stressed the importance of funding RIA, and he expressed “serious concern” in early February that the Bush administration had yet to provide funds to move forward with the RIA site selection process. Indeed, many in Congress are increasingly disappointed with the Bush administration’s mixed support of basic research in the FY2007 budget (see Superconductor Week, issue 2003). The Ranking Democrat of the House Science Committee, Bart Gordon (D-TN), remarked: “The good news in this budget request is the proposed increase in Federal R&D. The bad news is that that increase is less than the projected rate of inflation.

“Once again, we are investing less than the rate of inflation at a time when many of our international competitors are increasing their investment in science and technology research faster than ever before. Even more alarming is the fact that the Administration’s Science and Technology investment is actually decreasing.” The Federal Science and Technology budget is a good method to evaluate research funding because it represents the amount of funding directed towards the creation of new knowledge and technologies as opposed to development activities.

Basic Research Key to Energy Independence

The U.S. has both the greatest energy needs and the greatest budget to spend on R&D—a fact which prompted an official close to the RIA project to comment: “It is absolutely ironic that everybody in the world can see benefits to building this kind of physics—which has considerable potential benefits to society—and the U.S. cannot.”

President Bush has stated that the U.S. must pursue technology development as a central pillar of our national energy strategy. Yet it would seem the federal government is unwilling to pursue key research initiatives needed for U.S. leadership in the basic research at the heart of energy technology. Indeed, in some areas, U.S. leadership is already diminishing, or has been lost outright.

It is indeed ironic that the major reason given by the President for pursuing energy-related technology was based on the strategic need to loosen our dependence on other nations for energy, yet the future may hold another form of energy dependence in store for us—only this time it will be on foreign technology, foreign intellectual property, and foreign researchers, rather than foreign oil.

Mark Bitterman, Executive Editor, Superconductor Weekhttp://www.superconductorweek.com/