Someone pointed me at this end of year article at get realist.  Quite sobering.  The general conclusion is that government, or cap-and-trade, or international agreements are not on track to succeed in the face of climate change, and that individuals need to take more personal responsibility in making change.  I agree.  As a friend of mine said “we are all trying to learn how to live the life we need everyone else to live”.  We need many innovations, some technical, most social.  We need to expand the people working on solving these problems to a group that includes everyone.  Every small business owner, every individual.

http://www.getreallist.com/investing-in-an-empire-of-illusion.html

Good magazine asked me to write something about Heirloom Products.  I must have said the words too many times publicly.  If you want to read the article at a fancy website with nice pictures and good design layout go here:

http://www.good.is/post/built-to-last/

Or, here are the words:

As an inventor, Saul Griffith has spent a lot of time thinking about how to make useful things. Griffith developed innovative designs for low-cost prescription glasses and energy-producing kites, founded the DIY website Instructables, and created a comprehensive carbon calculator called WattzOn. He was also awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2007. Recently, onstage at high-profile conferences such as TED and PopTech, Griffith has been arguing that we need to stop buying things and then throwing them away so quickly. In short, we need more “heirloom design.”

GOOD: What do you mean by “heirloom design?”

SAUL GRIFFITH: An object with “heirloom design” is something that will not only last through your lifetime and into the next generation, but that you also desire to keep that long because it’s beautiful, functional, and timeless.

G: Why is it important that we design stuff to last longer?

SG: An enormous amount of the energy we use [industrially] is locked up in “embodied energy.” It’s trapped, or embodied, in the materials our stuff is made of. It’s the energy that we use to mine materials and process them into products. While we can choose materials that have less embodied energy for any given product, it’s much better to choose objects that last two or three, or preferably 10 times, longer.

As I see the climate change and carbon dioxide problem, it is one way of figuring out how to live the best quality of life while using much less energy. Heirloom products are one way to make a significant contribution. It probably means you will end up owning less junk, your life will be less cluttered, and your stuff will be more beautiful and serve you with more joy.

G: How do you design an heirloom product? Do you have to think about function, materials, and aesthetics differently?

SG: The principal and only way to make an heirloom product is to design something that people will need not just this year, but for the next 50 or 100 years. Choose good materials that will last that long; but in essence, don’t even bother making fad products. If you have to design something, choose things that we need as opposed to frivolous things that we might just want for a month or two for bragging rights. In many respects, designing heirloom products means saying no to designing consumer crap that you know will not last very long.

The hardest challenge is in electronic goods or mechanical goods. With electronics, think long and hard about how to make the firmware upgradable, or perhaps even how to have the same functionality without any electronics (electronics are notoriously short-lived and toxic). With mechanical products, think about supplying repair manuals and designing the product to be repairable or customizable from the start, such that in 13 years, when a bearing fails, it will be easy for the customer to find and replace that bearing with a similar one. Choose the timeless and standardized over the faddish and esoteric.

G: What makes an object something a consumer actually wants to hold on to for generations? Its cost? Its craftsmanship?

SG: Probably both. I don’t think this is an easy question to answer, and the answer is different for different people. I would, however, posit that a key ingredient is functionality. If an object performs its function beautifully, efficiently, and intuitively, it is likely an heirloom product. If not, you shouldn’t
make it.

Think about the beautiful timeless objects: Le Creuset pots and pans, Bialetti or Bodum coffee makers, Iittala glassware, Vespa motor scooters, the Citroën 2CV, the Volkswagen Beetle, Lego toys, Zippo cigarette lighters, Montblanc pens, the Land Rover (the old aluminum ones before the queen bought one), the older KitchenAid products…

I don’t want to be called elitist. These typically sound like high-end products. But the reality is we need to figure out how to help people pay for higher-quality things up front, and have them last longer. This is a solvable problem with new business models.

G: There’s the design challenge, but isn’t there also a psychological challenge? Don’t we have to disabuse people of the attitude that most things can be instantly discarded?

SG: Absolutely. It’s either that or accept a very ugly climate future for your children. Or perhaps you should look at it this way: If you are 30 now, you either make these changes to how you shop, or you should expect your children to not pay for your health insurance
when you are 80 because you screwed them over so badly on climate change.

G: What about the dictates of fashion? I have some old clothes I still like, but styles change. Isn’t there an aesthetic imperative to update what you own?

SG: Suck it up. We have to change. That’s the gig with climate change. We have to do things in new ways and think differently. That’s an opportunity for people with their eyes open. Planned obsolescence and fashion seasons are new and constructed problems. There is no reason why we can’t do things differently. In fact, if you care about the environment and climate change, we sort of have no choice. You can ride this wave to success, or you can stick with your current mental model of the world and fail.

G: But don’t companies make more money if their products need to be replaced frequently?

SG: Maybe, in the short term, but the companies that last a century typically make things that last a century. Think about that for a minute.

G: Some businesses would have to make big changes to incorporate heirloom design. How do they do that?

SG: You figure out business models that are profitable when you also supply the repair service. You have more sustainable business models that mean you’ll be around for a while.

Perhaps we should think about heirloom companies too. Companies that you can give to your children because you make something beautiful and well designed that the next generation will want. I used to love the brass plaques on 100-year-old machines made by “Schmitt and Sons.” I’d like to have a company that makes the perfect heirloom coffee grinder. I’d call it “Griffith and Daughters,” maybe (though I don’t have any daughters yet—just a son).

G: Do you think major companies like Nokia and Nike will get onboard?

SG: They will either get this in the next 10 years or go out of business. I don’t mind if they go out of business. It’s their choice.

G: Are any companies bringing heirloom design to new products—items other than pens and watches? Who’s putting this idea into action?

SG: Sadly, very few. That’s why I talk about this stuff. You can’t make a solution for climate change add up unless you address this issue. If you are a young designer today, it might be hard; it might go against the grain. But the only way you will win in the long run, the only way you will design for the world we all want, is if you design heirloom products. Thumb your nose at the establishment.

Lego blocks, which last for generations and have infinite permutations for continued use, are an excellent example of heirloom design. The images in this post are designs that were submitted with the Lego patent application.

Inhabitat asked me to give my design predictions for 2010.

Here’s the link:

http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/01/04/green-design-predictions-for-2010/3/

Here’s my words, and yes, I was fairly depressed by Copenhagen result, and it might have tainted my writings:

Green Design 2010:

Given that no binding agreement was reached in Copenhagen, there will likely be no national or international pressure to do real green-house reductions, and hence it is very likely that 2010 green design will be an undertaking of those trying to greenwash their companies. Very likely we’ll see many people misusuing terminology and physical units to overmarket products that aren’t really going to cut the mustard. Remember that a climate friendly world means a reduction in carbon of 80%, that means 5 X less carbon that we produce today, by 2050 or probably even earlier. Given that, we’ll see lots of designs begging you to buy this or that thing because it’s twice as good, or 25% better than some consumer thingy that it replaces. Well, that’s not good enough. It has to be 5 or 10 times better, or 500-1000% better, to really be a good green thing. If we are lucky a few companies will start to realize that the only way to make truly green consumer products will be by making them heirloom products, things that will last for multiple generations, be repairable without a magnifying glass or a PhD, and made from lasting materials like wood, stainless steel, copper, & aluminum. I predict a huge number of car companies will claim 100mpg plug-in hybrids, and all of them will be lying, because they are only counting the energy in the gasoline, not the energy required to produce the electricity that charges the batteries that most likely came from a coal fired power plant. Yes, 2010 will be like 2009, only probably worse, with a whole lot of very ordinary design sold to us as green. We still don’t have a generation of designers who are literate in climate and energy issues, so they’ll spend their time writing marketing spin instead.

So, what might be the best of green design for 2010 are the things that don’t get designed. Don’t design me a new iPhone, figure out how to make my old one last. Don’t design me a new “green house”, figure out how to make the one I have more efficient. Don’t sell me physical objects, help me re-purpose the ones I have or otherwise give me digital tools for a higher quality of life that don’t require Chinese injection moldings.

Peak Cars, or Just a Car Sales Trough? New vehicles vs. scrappage 1991-2009 http://bit.ly/6YKD79

Although with BYD and TATA doing their thing, this is probably only a local, (US) effect.

This Onion article wonderfully represents the sociological challenge to an heirloom product culture where we make things that last longer, such that we don’t use the extra energy every time we re-make them (or their replacements).

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_device_desirable_old_device

While some people claim victory in Copenhagen with an “accord” (as far as i can tell an agreement to agree about something we might agree upon at some time in the future) I’m pretty saddened by the Copenhagen result.  At times like these I turn to comfort foods.  In this case a beautiful photo series on a chinese bicycle factory.  Bicycles are still the highest technology in low emission vehicles.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cargocycling/911579868/in/set-72157601030739985/

http://openpv.nrel.gov/

They are seeking more data on PV solar installations for this map.  It’s fascinating to see the progression over time of installations, and I was startled at just how active California is compared to the rest of the nation.

578.5 MW to date !  only another 500GW to do !

I love this, and couldn’t resist posting it.  The future could be beautiful.

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2009/10/tezuka-wind-turbine/

This is really quite lovely.  Congratulations to Raymond T. Pierrehumbert for using reason, good logic, and real numbers to refute some of the insanity around regarding climate issues.  A lovely example of numbers in defense of sanity.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/

I think the solar power area numbers he uses might be a little optimistic, but only by a factor of 2 or so, and not that it would drastically change the conclusion of the article.

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
COAL = 9.54    kg/person/day
NATURAL GAS = 5.88    m^3/person/day

Which roughly converted to those other units is around 22 Pints of oil per day (one per hour!), 22 pounds of coal (another per hour) and 180 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: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tEXpAv8VzEvgO5lNqze0JNw&output=html

The president’s speech:

http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/amps/webcast/2009/obama-2009oct23/ondemand.html

And even better, my friend Alex Slocum’s post visit interview:

http://cleanskies.com/videos/mit-demonstrates-offshore-renewable-energy-systems

In the summer of 2001, The National Environmental Education Foundation conducted a survey of 1,503 American adults about energy. Although 75% of those surveyed said they knew “A Fair Amount” or “A Lot” about energy, only 12% could correctly answer 7 or more questions on a 10 question energy quiz. The quiz is on pages 4 and 5 of the report (pages 15 and 16 of the PDF). So what’s your “energy IQ”?

The discussions about a carbon tax, or a cap-and-trade system, tend to revolve around “putting a price on carbon,” which is to say, charging polluters money for dumping carbon into the atmosphere. But how should that money be used? Here’s a graph from Vattenfall, the Swedish power company, showing which solutions become cost-effective at a price of €40 per ton of carbon dioxide.

The yellow section has improvements that pay for themselves, since they’re generally based around not burning fuel to begin with. The green section has the improvements that will be cost-effective at the €40 price, and the blue section has the more expensive solutions.

I haven’t verified any data that went into this graph, which is based on McKinsey’s greenhouse gas abatement cost curves, so I can’t comment on how realistic the numbers are. But from an energy literacy point of view, it gives a nice graphical depiction of how a price on carbon would make certain options more economically feasible.

This list of action items for individual energy savings is the most focused and quantitative I’ve seen. It comes from an October 2008 article in Environment Magazine by Gerald Gardner, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Paul Stern from the National Research Council.

The actions in the list are grouped by whether they’re for transportation or inside the home, immediate or longer-term, and no-cost/low-cost or higher-cost. Each item also includes an estimated percentage savings of total energy use. Here’s an example of an immediate, no-cost action for everyone:

Space conditioning:

Heat: Turn down thermostat from 72°F to 68°F during the day and to 65°F at night

A/C: Turn up thermostat from 73°F to 78°F

Energy saved: 3.4 percent

Compare that to the language from the Department of Energy’s “Tips to Save Energy Today: Easy low-cost and no-cost ways to save energy,” from their Energy Saver’s Booklet (full PDF):

Install a programmable thermostat to keep your house comfortably warm in the winter and comfortably cool in the summer.

The DoE’s language sets up two barriers:

1. getting and installing the programmable thermostat (which might be fairly low-cost, but probably won’t happen “today)”, and
2. learning how to use the thermostat in an effective way (even later in the booklet recommended temperatures settings are not given).

Perhaps more important, the DoE’s list doesn’t give any sense of how effective one action is compared to another, and scatters the “Long-Term Savings Tips throughout this booklet” — another barrier for readers.

Gardner & Stern’s list emphasizes relative impact of a mix of action types. People need to feel empowered to make big improvements quickly and easily, and The Short List of Effective Actions is a step towards that goal.

In earlier years of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s spaghetti diagrams, such as the above example from 1976, the ends of the swaths were more like the simpler energy flow diagrams. On the above diagram it’s easier to see that the height of the lines on one side would end up around the height of the lines on the other side than it is on some of the newer versions with oversized boxes that serve as labels. But the boxes are a useful tool, and can let us think about embedding another diagram form — box diagrams — into the spaghetti diagram.

Box diagrams are used for teaching electricity, and were developed by Peter Cheng and David Shipstone in the UK. The picture below is from part 1 (Word doc) of their introductory paper (here’s the Word doc part 2). Since power is the voltage across a bulb multiplied by the current through it, for a simple circuit like that shown in figure a, two boxes of equal size as shown in figure b can represent the power from the battery (the left box) and the power used by the bulb (right box).

Below is a figure from a 1981 article by Howard Hayden (pay article) in The Physics Teacher. If you tilt your head to the right, you can imagine this diagram integrated with the spaghetti diagram. You can also think of is as a box diagram, where the energy sources on the “left” (top) are matched up with the end use loads on the “right” (bottom). This figure includes the electric utilities, just like the spaghetti diagram. And while it doesn’t graphically allocate that 21% “low grade heat” from electricity generation, it does say that industry would go from 27% to 37% of total energy use if “corrected by utilites’ waste heat,” and residential/commercial would go from 25 to 37%. (Those numbers are for 1978). Transportation is unassigned, and not grouped by vehicle.

If we “zoom in” on the Residential & Commercial box we can break it down further into how energy is used in each place. These figures are from the 2008 American Physical Society report Energy = Future: Think Efficiency.

Residential Energy End Usage

Commercial Energy End Use

If we show the lost heat and CO2 for each of these individual pieces, perhaps we can motivate people to think about their actions more as part of a much larger whole. We can also show the benefits of taking Effective Actions for saving energy.

The interesting thing about stacked bar charts versus pie charts is that the bar charts have an added layer of quantification — we can compare bars to one another by making them quantitative. Here’s a graphic from the National Academy of Science’s What you need to Know about Energy booklet that gives a feel for the difference between the two types. The pie chart is for fractions of 100%, while the bar chart can be scaled as needed.

Once we quantify that bar chart, we can start to compare it to other bar charts. In fact, we could localize American data to compare with the diagrams in David MacKay’s great book, Sustainable Energy — without the hot air. MacKay methodically stacks up all of the UK’s potential renewable energy sources (right green stack in diagram below), and compares it to all of the UK’s energy use (left red box), looking at both on a per capita basis.

To really drive the comparison home, we can look at the energy budgets of the developing world versus the developed world, as done in the image below. The question is: How much energy for how many people? It’s a nice presentation of world poverty and wealth scenarios. (This image, and the spaghetti diagram at the top of this post, are from a 1985 paper by Robert Socolow.)

If we mix spaghetti diagrams with box diagrams, we might call them “spaghetti box” (or “Sankey box”) diagrams. It gives us a chance to see the big picture in a visual, semi-quantitative way for a conceptual overview, and become quantitative, especially when zooming in on personal energy use (the idea behind wattzon.com). The spaghetti follows where energy’s coming from, how it’s being used, and areas where we might “reject” less energy. This is a refinement of Saul’s electricity grid stacked bar diagram that could help demystify circuits and make power a much more central quantity in electricity education.

This “spaghetti diagram” (aka Sankey diagram, or Energy Flow Chart officially) is the 2008 version. Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) has been making these things since the 1970s. It’s more detailed than a simpler national energy flow diagram because it includes “rejected energy.” It’s also more complex — it actually includes within itself the electricity flow diagram. It’s a pretty cool visualization.

The main thing I dislike is that it doesn’t split up transportation or electricity generation “rejected energy” by sector. Since these are really the two biggest sources of “rejected energy,” you can’t see which group is the biggest “rejector.”

Below, in an undated but funkier design, they’ve not only split up transportation into light duty vehicles, freight/other, and aircraft, they’ve also added domestic and net imports to petroleum and natural gas. They still haven’t split up “Electricity Generation, Transmission & Distribution Losses,” so we don’t know who “loses” the most energy.

LLNL has used flow charts to show possible future scenarios, such as the example below for 2050 where we use 145.5 Quads of energy (4.86TW power) but have “a) 50% efficient electricity generation, and b) 318 million “80 mpg” H2 fuel cell vehicles.” (Taken from this 7.8MB PDF.) It’s a nice depiction of how hydrogen is just a way of making energy more convenient, similar to electricity. Hydrogen is not itself an energy source (there are no hydrogen mines); hydrogen is a way of storing energy, and it takes energy to produce hydrogen.

LLNL has also made diagrams showing the carbon emissions from our energy sources. There’s no separation of “Useful CO2 Emissions” and “Rejected CO2 Emissions” — it’s all rejected. Alternative energy sources are shown with zero emissions, but that ignores the not-insignificant CO2 emissions that would result from the manufacturing massive quantities of those alternatives.

There’s another type of diagram that might be tied in to these spaghetti diagrams. More about that in part 2.

I like the general concept of motivating behavioural changes for the low energy option by using fun, beauty, or good design.  The larger message here is that personal changes for climate change really need to be better, either more beautiful, more fun, or more healthy, than the other choices.

Here’s a picture from What You Need to Know about Energy by the National Academy of Sciences. It shows 100 energy units of coal being used by an incandescent bulb to produce light that has only 2 energy units:

Reprinted with permission from "What you need to know about energy," 2008, by the National Academy of Sciences, Courtesy of the National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.

Incandescent bulbs get hot because only 2/36 (about 5%) of the energy coming into the house to power the bulb comes out as light — the rest of the energy produces heat. If you trace the energy back to the power plant, it turns out a mere 2% of the energy from the coal is doing the desired lighting job! The power plant itself loses 62% of the coal’s energy! Compact fluorescents use about 5% of the coal’s energy — better, but not much.

It’s important to think about how well our devices use energy to do what we want (such as providing light), and why a compact fluorescent is better than an incandescent bulb. But given how big the energy loss is from simply producing electricity in traditional power plants, it’s also important to think about where that energy comes from. Fossil fuel power plants waste a lot of energy, which makes all electrical devices powered by them relatively wasteful. This can help frame the debate about our energy options by getting people thinking about energy sources (like power plants) and the relationship to energy loads (like bulbs).

This also illuminates some of the confusions about the word “efficiency.” Compact fluorescents and LEDs are more efficient than incandescents in that they use less energy to do the same job, but the majority of the inefficiency in the overall system is at the power plant.

This cartoon pretty much sums it up.  Let’s plan on the stuff we know works, and invest in the research we know might lead somewhere.  Not hold out for alien finger’s crossed we don’t understand it technology.

“you want 3 TW of new nuclear.

that’s a 2.3GW plant every week for 25 years…

you have 1X 3GW plant a week for 25 years which would overshoot your goal.

am i missing something?”

Raw data – Google Spreadsheet of EIA data

I love a hot shower in the morning. While it’s not a human right just yet, occasionally it feels like one.  So how much energy does it take to have a hot shower?

The simple version looks like this:

First we establish the conversion units…

• liters_in_gallon=3.78541178

• H2O_heat_capacity=4.18   (J/g/K)

• seconds_in_day = 60*60*24

• density_water = 1 (g/cm^3)

Now assume 2 gallons per minute of shower from my low flow shower head and assume 5 minute hot showers at 40 degrees celsius (about 100F).

• showers_per_day =1

• gallons_per_minute =2

• minutes_per_shower =5

• liters_per_shower = liters_in_gallon * gallons_per_minute * minutes_per_shower

• grams_per_shower = liters_per_shower * 1000 * density_water

• shower_Temperature=40

• ambient_Temperature=8

• shower_heat_Joules=showers_per_day *(grams_per_shower * H2O_heat_capacity *(shower_Temperature-ambient_Temperature))

• daily_shower_Watts = shower_heat_Joules/seconds_in_day

shower_heat_Joules = 5063400
daily_shower_Watts = 58.6038
Which is of course just the energy or power that my water heater consumes.  The above estimate is probably low because I assumed 100% efficient water heater, and no losses in the piping.  One might call each of those 10% losses (or 90% efficiencies) which would make it around 70 watts.  If it is a natural gas heater or a solar hot water heater, then that value is correct.  If however it is an electrically heated water heater powered by the mix of fuels that supply grid electricity you probably need to multiply that number by 3 (because the grid only converts primary energy to usable energy at about 33% efficiency)

Energy is measured in Joules (J)
Power is measured in Watts (W).
1 Watt = 1 Joule / second

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.
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 understand the rest of this book, you need an intuition for the difference between energy, and power. Energy is 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. 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.
Energy is a quantity, whereas power is a rate.
Quantitative comparison of aspects of your life could have been made in terms of energy or power. 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 us to start thinking in terms of power rather than energy.
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.
Having decided to write the entire book in Watts, we will still require the reader to think occasionally about energy, especially in the embodied energy of objects.  It isn’t easy, but it is necessary.

Power = Energy / Time.

When we talk about energy we are talking about a quantity.

When we talk about power we are talking about the rate of using energy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_energy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_units#Energy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt

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.
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 understand the rest of this book, you need an intuition for the difference between energy, and power. Energy is 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. 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.
Energy is a quantity, whereas power is a rate.
Quantitative comparison of aspects of your life could have been made in terms of energy or power. 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 us to start thinking in terms of power rather than energy.
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.

Power = Energy / Time.

When we talk about energy we are talking about a quantity.

When we talk about power we are talking about the rate of using energy.

1. Your energy consumption is a result of your lifestyle choices.

2. Global energy consumption is the result of everyone’s choices.

3. Energy can be generated from many sources.

4. Different energy sources have different environmental effects.

5. We are collectively choosing the global climate by choosing how we generate this energy.

6. Our climate choice (PPM) determines how much carbon dioxide we can emit using fossil fuels.

7. Producing enough energy for humanity while solving the climate problem is an enormous engineering challenge, but within the limits of what we can do today.

I’ve cut and pasted in the chat room chat below from today’s webcast.  Blue is who.  Black is what they asked/said.  Red is answers and pointers from me.

from O’Reilly Media to All Participants:
Hi Everyone, thanks for joining us today. We’ll begin at 10 am PT. There will be silence or faint music until then.
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for the streaming audio: should I be hearing background music of any sort or any other noise at this time?  or is silence correct at this point?
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If you’re a twitter user, we’re using the hashtag #energyliteracy for this webcast
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thank you
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I can hear faint music. When I increase the volume the hiss is high as well.
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from saul griffith to All Participants:
you may also follow the energy literacy (energyliteracy.com) blog on twitter at energyliteracy

You can also go to www.wattzon.com to do similar estimates and pie charts of your own energy consumption.

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Why use QDesign Music codec for this live webcast ? I can’t use this audio codec under GNU/Linux
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We use the music that WebEx provides. I’m sorry it’s not better!
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oof, 9.1kbps
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Can’t justify transatlantic dial-in so that will have to do
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Hello !
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Where is everyone from today?
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palo alto
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Audio is loud and clear to Ithaca, New York
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Colombia, South America (Audio is OK)
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This proprietary QDesign audio codec is Available for Mac OS and Windows. I’m not using neither of those so Have Fun!. Adios.
from nicole minor to All Participants:
is there video to this, or only audio?
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
there is video, also
from nicole minor to All Participants:
how do you access it? i am streaming the audio, but no video
from nicole minor to All Participants:
oh, i see the slides
from Juan Correa to All Participants:
vdeo is OK
from nicole minor to All Participants:
did they say this would be archived somewhere?

A similar talk is archived at : http://www.energyliteracy.com/?p=24 and more similar talks and presentations are there.  you can use the slides if you wish.  All CC.

from Raju Varghese to All Participants:
Yes
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Yes, Nicole. You will be able to watch this presentation online, in a few weeks.
from nicole minor to All Participants:
great!
from Andy Turudic to All Participants:
nicole – please stop being so high maintenance and sit back, relax and LISTEN
from Pat Walsh to All Participants:
I like the apple plug….smooth

This was not an apple plug.  They greenwash with the best of them, and are not transparent about their supply chain and energy use and carbon.  This was merely an analogy for understanding power consumption.

from Yuwei Lin to All Participants:
How do you measure how much power individual devices consume?

Devices like the tweet-a-watt, kill-a-watt, etc will all log the data.  You can also just use a plain old volt meter if it also does current.  There are lots of these smart devices now.

from kol peterson to All Attendees:
When you say 8K watts for flying, is that the total plane energy use, divided up by all passengers on the plane?

The energy calculation is the number of miles I flew (from my records of my travel) multiplied by the number of Joules of energy per passenger flying mile.  This can be estimated at 1.4MJ/passenger km, and is similar to the data published in airline reports that tell you how much jetfuel they burnt and how many passenger miles they flew in a given year which can be divided out to give the energy / passenger km.

from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
Lin, there are a number of devices you can use – the easiest plug into the wall and you plug in the device to it, and it gives you a real time reading in watts.
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Seth, are you eating more meat and fish than vegetables, or are vegetables more energy efficient  than meat and fish production?

Vegetables are about 20 -100 times more efficient than meat.  chicken is better than pork is better than beef.  I don’t have the exact numbers at the top of my head, but people are working on that.

from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
his numbers seem of by a factor of 100
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
off

I’m pretty sure they are close to accurate.  Some are off by a factor of 2 or 3, but I know it is not 100.  It is hard to measure all of these things.  If you find mistakes please let me know.
from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
That sofa and futon take a TON of energy

The important thing to note about the embodied energy of “stuff” like sofa and futon is that if you make it last 10 years instead of 1 year, then it uses the same amount of ENERGY (Joules), but uses much less POWER (Watts) because the Energy is amortised over a longer time period.  It is hence easy to think these numbers are inaccurate – they are strongly dependent on how long you assume the useful lifetime of the stuff is.

Power (Watts) = Energy (Joules) / Time (Seconds)

from Pat Walsh to All Participants:
wow, the work it took to make all of this….
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Very impressive. I couldn’t even tell you what I ate for lunch yesterday.
from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
Probably why he hasn’t updated it since 2007.

Untrue.  I keep all of the data at www.wattzon.com and keep a running average for myself.  Slowly we are developing the tools to keep a constantly updating measurement, but as you can see it is complex and hard with many components.

from Liz Pulen to All Participants:
This would be nice to see in detail.
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
once you see all this laid out, imagine the economic impact that occurs when you attempt to significantly curtail energy consumption…and the embedded resistance to such change.
from Pat Walsh to All Participants:
wow – look at Qatar
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
why is Qatar so energy intensive?
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
Why is Qatar so high?

Energy is cheap in Qatar (oil producing nation) and hence air conditioning is free (in an economic sense).  Also, without knowing the intricacies of how every country reports the data to the IEA (international energy agency) it’s hard to know if everyone measures things exactly the same way…
from Scott Ulrey to All Participants:
UK looks like half of U.S….
from Lucas Vogel to All Participants:
a/c ain’t cheap
from Dan Hanks to All Participants:
Hmm, That’s in 2003 – what’s usage like in 2009?
from Yuwei Lin to All Participants:
that data was in 2003

2009 might be lower than 2003 due to the economic crisis and people buying less stuff and using less fuel….  a nice side effect of a bad thing.
from Bobby Zimmerman to All Participants:
Wow Qatar!
from Andrew Gonzaga to All Participants:
WOW!!!
from Pat Walsh to All Participants:
great image
from O’Reilly Media to All Participants:
All the slides are available at energyliteracy.com
from Tom Roberts to All Attendees:
Is the country consumption data normalized per capita?

YES.  I also have the data in total, without per capita.  Unfortunately these data sets (like census data) are not updated as often as you would like.

from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
Is inefficiency included in this flow diagram?

The inefficiency of the combustion processes for generating electricity (heating water to make steam to run turbines) are in the flow diagram.  Inefficiencies at the user end, like your refrigerator, are not.

from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
this image looks like a whale
from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
there it is
from ryn Longmaid to All Participants:
Ryn Longmaid, Sebastopol CA down the street from O’Reilly’s Corporate Offices…
from O’Reilly Media to All Participants:
Hi Ryn! I’m in the Sebastopol office today.
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
this IS depressing…

Knowledge is not depressing.  This should be seen as uplifting.  Once you know the scope of the problem you can engineer a solution.  We must be positive not defeatist.

from Jane Doe to All Participants:
Maybe he’ll give us some hopeful messages!
from ryn Longmaid to All Participants:
Hi Nils-Michael, GreenMBA is in the (hot)house
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
India is low, considering its population
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
one man’s depression is another’s opportunity
from David Daza to All Participants:
what does GtC means?

Giga Tons of carbon – which is 1 Billion tons of carbon.
from Dan Hanks to All Participants:
Energy flow looked like a whale…so much energy lost in transmission/conversion…energy FAIL whale?
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
GtC = Gigatons of Carbon?
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
GtC = giga-tons of carbon
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
Giga Tons of carbon
from David Daza to All Participants:
tks
from Todd Spraggins to All Participants:
Tonnes or Tons?
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
Time to get the heck out tof Europe
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Global warming is undeniable. … Yet many politicians still deny it.
from pedro martinez to All Participants:
look at the blue!
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
with so much heat rise in the Siberian area the permafrost will release massive amounts of methane…23x as bad as co2
from Kurt G to All Participants:
not just politicians
from Ed Parker to All Participants:
as long as politicians are taking handouts from industrial megacorps, they will continue to deny it
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
Will this be available on energyliteracy.com with the host doing the vo?

Maybe, but you will find other videos with voice-over of the same material there.
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
no…he said just slides
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
too bad
from O’Reilly Media to All Participants:
Hi Kay, we’ll have a recording of this available afterwards. You can view it either as a high quality video on YouTube in a few days or through the WebEx viewer, which lets you view the chat room also. And Saul has the slides on his site.
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
regular people don’t want to give up their conveniences…businesses want to maximize profits/maintain status quo…no significant change until critical mass cross section of humanity is willing to act against their own immediate self-interest
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
pessimists believe no change until some of the catastrophes happen/become visible
from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
Jim Hansen in 2012!
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
problem: the “golden” billion doesn’t want to give up its lifestyle to the other 5 billion…
from Greg Miller to All Participants:
Bravo on well-designed images and materials.
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
how about the whales living on krill ONLY as the most recent headlines in the Chron
from Martin Haeberli to All Participants:
another way of looking at what Bill Sandreuter says is that if we immediately allocated something like the NPV cost of our carbon contribution to energy (with perhaps a transition time of 5 – 10 years where it is discounted so people can adapt) we would be forced to immediatly pay more attention.  We could even arbitrage it by letting people take current cash benefit for reducing carbon but not charge them as much now as they should pay for it…
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
Nils-Michael has the right of it
from Jeff Belina to All Participants:
getting garbled speech…
from Chingtai Wong to All Participants:
Will this webcast be available on demand later?
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Jeff, If you’re having audio problems, try stopping the audio broadcast and restarting it. That will help.
from Allen Noren to All Participants:
Yes, it will. We’ll notify all participants when the recording is available.
from Jeff Belina to All Participants:
that worked.  thanks.
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
this presentation is incredibly rich…amazingly well done!!!  BRAVO!
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
Clearly fat people are the problem – ag is one of the biggest energy users

Actually Ag isn’t one of the biggest uses.  That is Cars and transport, electricity generation from coal, and heat and refrigeration.  Food is probably less than 5%.  That said the data for food is among the hardest to get, estimate, and be confident of.

from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
yes to Martin also
from Yuwei Lin to All Participants:
how about wind power?

wind power is indirectly solar power generated by the differential heating of the atmosphere.  Some from spinning of the earth too.
from Yuwei Lin to All Participants:
is that included in the gravity generated power?
from Scott Ulrey to All Participants:
Martin: exactly. Start building in “true cost” and people will make better decisions
from Pat Walsh to All Participants:
hyrdoelectric?
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
80% of energy to produce solar is waste heat…
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
problem is getting the politicians to do the right thing, we know what we need to do.
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
Wish Saul could present this at the UN and/or copenhagen
from pedro martinez to All Participants:
its not just about politicians there are technical issues with renewable energy

All of which have been overcome or are possible to overcome.  The issues are cost we are prepared to pay for clean energy, not technology.

from james Caldwell to All Participants:
How about ground source (shallow) geothermal with heat pumps?

This is definitely the most efficient way to heat a house.  The temperature of the ground not too far down is a relatively constant 50-60 degrees fahrenheit, all year round.  The energy to heat or cool something is proportional to the difference between the high temperature and the low temperature.  Using the ground temperature as a source means the “delta T” or difference in temperature is lower, and therefore less energy is needed to heat or cool the house/building etc.

from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
pedro – i meant more along the lines of “true cost”. e.g. removing agriculture subsidies, etc.
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
Apart from nukes, you cannot extract energy from the earth without messing it up
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Can we reduce our power consumption ?
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
reduce population = reduce need for power
from Lucas Vogel to All Participants:
what about energy ‘offsets’ from natural disasters?
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
What about fusion???
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
2TW solar is 1.6TW of heat….

No.  These numbers are 2TW of electrical energy of solar.  There will be 6 or 8 TW of heat lost somewhere, but it was coming into the atmosphere anyway.

from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
oops sorry – it’s 2TW solar is 10TW heat

But there is 80000-120000 TW of heat already coming in.

from pedro martinez to All Participants:
increase efficiency = reduce waste = reduce consumption
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
wonder if this factors in the costs of building and maintining high capacity transmission lines?

No, but that is a very small component, probably less than 1%.

from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
algae make CO2…
from pedro martinez to All Participants:
also have to figure out energy storage with renewables for elec gen; eg. it is not windy every day nor sunny every day

Storage can be done with pumped hydro, flywheels, flow batteries, regular batteries, isotropic heat, other heat storage, or compressed air.  Storage is a hard piece of the problem, but not impossible.  Most storage technologies are 50-80% round trip efficiency, meaning you lose 20-50% of the energy in the conversion in and out of storage.

from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
yep…storage & transmission are key components…along with reducing consupmtion
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
Time to move to the Indian Ocean?
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Greece: please volunteer to supply the world’s solar power …
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
hyroelectric power from melting glaciers is the answer
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
You could grow algae in Lake Mead and get hydro too perhaps?
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
overlay energy
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
I’ve heard that wind turbine technology is close to optimized…but there is a lot more potential for improvements in solar panel efficiency

High quality wind turbines extract 50% out of a theoretical upper limit (Betz limit) of 59.6%.  They are excellent, elegant machines.  Solar record is around 40%, they might get to 80% if we do everything perfectly, but I suspect 50% is more realistic.  Commercial cells are more typically 10-20% efficient.

from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
My question is: is that the world we want to be living in where we are devoting so much space to energy production? why not reduce population and reduce requirements? we could do that if we all decided to (globally)
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
Advancing Fusion quickly is looking a lot more appealing
from Scott Ulrey to All Participants:
gl with that Elisabeth
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
i know
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
we are consuming ourselves to extinction…
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
We can’t wait for many of these solutions
from james Caldwell to All Participants:
However, if we build traditional homes and cars, we generate more ppm than building green homes and cars.
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
i really wish the world’s leaders could see this presentation, it’s the most compelling articulation of the problem that I’ve ever seen
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
the answer to Elizabeth’s question encompasses all the issues – no meaningful change until enough people “get it”.
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
In 1950, Aldous Huxley warned about the over-population problem. The world population then was only 2.5 billion
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
Its just not realistic to ‘decide’ to reduce the population as a solution
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
lol…all the speculative fiction my parents told me not to read is becoming eerily “real”
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
with tidal power he’ll be giving   up his surfing hobby

Yes, this is a danger, though waves are generated from wind, not tides.

from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
I’d need to surf, sail, and drive a dune buggy too, to deal with what I knew if I was Saul.
from nils-michael langenborg to All Participants:
WWSD?  What Would Saul Do?
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
vegan conspiracy at work here….
from jon cross to All Participants:
How are you going to determine reducing population, Just telling people not to breed, or education doesnt stop natual biology, Most western countries already have low to no population growth
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
right, Kay…the decision is made by each individual (or pair of individuals)
from pedro martinez to All Participants:
thank you jon
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
This is like the health care issue — a few of us making the right decision will not resolve the millions that will do nothing
from pedro martinez to All Participants:
yes the west should force contraception, etc on the developing natinons
from Todd Spraggins to All Participants:
Longevity of goods, there goes shopping at Walmart
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
Not that I’m bored, but what time does this finish?
from ryn Longmaid to All Participants:
Need more info on the energy effeciency of the local farm vs agri-business–did he say the local farm may be less effecient?

I did say that agro business might be more “energy efficient”, but the data is not good, and like many of things the relentless pursuit of energy efficiency can ignore other things like water use, land use, soil depletion, ecosystem destruction etc. etc….  this is what makes this a uniquely hard problem.

from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
i am not seeing the new slide.
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
neither am i
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
got it now
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
yay, bottle
from Don Barthel to All Attendees:
There!
from Jeff Belina to All Participants:
so, which is greener… for me to use my 3 year old laptop, or buy a new netbook?

Keep your laptop as long as possible is probably the answer… depends on how frequently you use it, and the difference in their power consumption during use.

from Don Barthel to All Attendees:
Yes, amazing.
from Jeff Belina to All Participants:
great presentation, thanks!!!
from Jim Harvey to All Attendees:
Great presentation, Saul!
from Ed Parker to All Participants:
Thanks, Saul!
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Yes, thank you, Saul !
from pedro martinez to All Participants:
jeff- netbook
from kol peterson to All Attendees:
Thanks Saul.
from Zakariyya Mughal to All Participants:
Thank you for the informative presentation.
from tarikh Korula to All Participants:
Thanks Saul
from Valerie Zahorski Schmidt to All Participants:
Fabulous presentation!
from Kathy Capkovic to All Participants:
thank you
from nobu Saito to All Participants:
this drink contains a lot of sugar. have you read the label?
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
it will take EVERYTHING, COMBINED to make a dent in this issue and start to change our course.
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
Excellent, Saul – Much appreciated!
from Raju Varghese to All Participants:
Thanks Saul for educating us on the magnitude of the problem.
from Marsee Henon to All Participants:
http://www.energyliteracy.com/
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
How do we get this presentation out?
from Elisabeth Robson to All Participants:
how can we get Saul to Copenhagen to present this to the world’s leaders?
from max tite to All Participants:
SAULs – the new  measurement unit of Energy Awareness!
from ryn Longmaid to All Participants:
Hopenhagen–good idea
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Saul can webcast to Copenhagen …
from Yuwei Lin to All Participants:
Brilliant idea – max tite
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
the more people who see this and get more concerned than they are now, the better…use FaceBook, Twitter, Blogs, all the viral marketing channels you all have access to…still a tiny drop in the bucket but…something we CAN do
from Jeff Belina to All Participants:
what’s the conversion rate from SAULs to ppm?
from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
Please ask Saul about thoughts on fission and fusion

Fission = conventional nuclear energy.  We need to have a much more nuanced debate.  Very likely it is a big part of a “solution”, but it will be hard fought due to interest groups.  It isn’t rational for someone to say they want to prevent climate change, they want to continue their existing lifestyle, and they don’t accept fission or nuclear energy.

Fusion = combining light atoms and producing energy instead of splitting big atoms.  This is not a fantasy, but we do not yet have a working solution at scale.  i would devote significant funding resources to this if I had the power to do so.

from KAY Voyvodich to All Participants:
Will we have the audio?
from Philip Reid to All Participants:
fascinating and disturbing
from Marsee Henon to All Participants:
The next O’Reilly Radar Global Issues Series webcast “Nuclear Energy: Future Directions” by Per F. Peterson will take place on Thursday, October 15. Please join us. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1400
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
And don’t forget about Al Gore’s film and book, An Inconvenient Truth
from Jeff Belina to All Participants:
united nations and other worldly organizations need to hear this
from Gary Sorin to All Participants:
where on energyliteracy.org can i find the things he refers to?
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
Thanks for the webcast. I’m off in my Range Rover Sport to burn some puffins before I jump off a cliff.
from Ben Ward to All Participants:
Srsly though, it was very interesting and gives me a sense of urgency and impotence all at once.
from Raju Varghese to All Participants:
Gary it is http://www.energyliteracy.com/
from Don Barthel to All Attendees:
We forgive your travel, Saul, its important for you to get the word out.
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
I will stay home, so that Saul can travel far.
from pedro martinez to All Participants:
Saul – how about clean coal; how big an impact

Depends on what people mean.  Clean coal can just mean lower emission of SOx and NOx (nitrous and sulfurus oxides) which doesn’t have any impact really on CO2.  Clean coal could mean fully sequestered CO2  (CCS) but we don’t really KNOW if that works at full scale.

from Michael Vinogradov to All Participants:
Thanks Saul
from Martin Haeberli to All Participants:
thanks, Saul!
from Gary Sorin to All Participants:
thank you Raju
from David Daza to All Participants:
tks, great presentation
from nobu Saito to All Participants:
thank you saul. hope see you in the water.
from jon cross to All Participants:
thanks
from Bill Sandreuter to All Participants:
GREAT STUFF, Saul!  Thank you, O’Reilly also
from Yuwei Lin to All Participants:
Thank you, Saul. Thank you everyone.
from Andy Turudic to All Attendees:
thanks – good stuff o’reilly
from Phil Worrall to All Participants:
thanks much!
from ryn Longmaid to All Participants:
Thank you!
from Michael Vinogradov to All Participants:
w00t
from Michael Pastore to All Participants:
Bravo !
from J Shelby to All Participants:
Where is Sauls Blog???

You are at it if you are reading this.  Also bloggin here are Jim McBride and Joel Rosenberg.

from adrian delisser to All Participants:
Impressive presentation.