Efficiency: How to Save Energy, Money, and Jobs

The New York Times has a great piece today on C&O Conservation, a Maryland non-profit that weatherizes homes to make them more energy efficient through simple and cheap weatherization improvements:

Call it CSI: Thermal Police — energy experts armed with mostly low-tech tools but strong sleuthing skills, finding flaws that let the air inside a house go through a full exchange with the outdoors twice an hour, instead of once every two or three hours.

Correct those flaws, and heating and cooling costs are typically cut by 20 percent to 30 percent, a saving of more than $1,000 annually in some households. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions and the strain on the national electric and gas systems are reduced.

About 140,000 houses will be weatherized with public help this year, a total that President-elect Barack Obama has promised to raise to one million, to reduce energy consumption and cut energy costs for households and taxpayers, who often absorb those costs for the poor. This would represent a historic shift in emphasis for the federal and state governments, reducing poor people’s energy bills instead of helping to pay them.

Weatherizing a million homes annually would also create about 78,000 jobs for a year, according to the federal Energy Department’s weatherization project director, Gil Sperling.

So much emphasis is placed on the creation of “green collar jobs” in wind, solar, and other sexy renewable energy sectors. Meanwhile, wonderful programs like the one described above sneak under the radar. It’s wonderful to see a major paper like the NYT point out the great work C&O does.

The Optimist’s Guide to the Year in Clean Tech

For those of us feeling a bit depressed by the coming Depression, it’s helpful to read this post from Earth2Tech. It’s a good run down of the good news the clean tech industry saw over the past year:

1. The Renewable Energy Investment Tax Credit Passed…Finally
2. Obama Won, Promises Cleantech Support
3. Record Level of Cleantech Investing
4. Massive U.S. Solar Plants Moved Forward
5. First Solar’s Panels Reached Grid Parity?
6. Mainstream Tech Went Green
7. Better Place Struck Deals
8. U.S. Wind Market Blew Strong
9. The Year of Plans
10. Electric Vehicles On the Horizon

Let’s hope the momentum continues in 2009.

White Christmas? Keep Dreaming

As an Atlanta native, I’ve only seen snow on Christmas one time in my life. I’ve moved further north, yet climate change will make a white Christmas an increasingly rare event:

The odds of a “white Christmas” in temperate parts of the northern hemisphere have diminished in the last century due to climate change and will likely decline further by 2100, climate and meteorology experts said.

Ernst & Young: Clean Tech Business (Was) Booming

The accounting firm Ernst & Young has just released its latest study of clean technology funding. Before the financial crisis and credit crunch hit, the industry was an increasingly desirable target for venture capitalists looking to invest:

Venture capital firms have poured a record $4.6 billion into greentech companies in the United States, Europe, China and Israel through the first three quarters of 2008 – but with the economy in freefall, don’t expect that record-setting pace to continue. [...]

The $4.6 billion figure represents 13 percent of all venture capital investments in the regions the report covered, and growth of 82 percent compared to the same period in 2007.

But here’s the bad news–clean tech will suffer like everyone else in the economic slump:

“However as the global financial crisis continues and the time from initial investment to exit gets longer, venture capital investors will likely moderate the pace of investment across all sectors, including cleantech,” wrote Gil Forer, Ernst & Young’s Global Director of Cleantech, IPO and Venture Capital Initiatives.

More California Love

More great news out of the Golden Green State, via Science Insider:

California regulators yesterday laid out a plan to cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 15% over the next 12 years. That blueprint is the most ambitious greenhouse gas–reduction plan in the United States and could serve as a model for the incoming Obama Administration. The move is designed to combat the effects of the state’s fast-growing population, which is expected to cause by 2020 a spike in greenhouse emissions by 30% over 1990 levels. Among the plan’s hallmarks: producing at least one-third of all electricity from renewables, the most of any state.

Improved Energy Efficiency: The First Plank of Obama’s Stimulus Plan

Grist’s Kate Speppard reports:

In his Democratic radio address today, President-elect Barack Obama laid out the first three steps of his economic recovery plan – the first of which, he said, will be making public buildings more efficient.

“First, we will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world,” said Obama. “We need to change that.”

“We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs,” he continued. “That won’t just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work.”

Recycling’s Down Cycle

Demand for recycled materials has fallen off a cliff along with the rest of the economy, the New York Times reports:

The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.

Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life. [...]

There are no signs yet of a nationwide abandonment of recycling programs. But industry executives say that after years of growth, the whole system is facing an abrupt slowdown.