Carbon-neutral electric generation

In a major speech last week Al Gore called on the US to switch to zero carbon-emission electric generation within 10 years. It was a big idea and a big speech. Not too surprisingly, it was called impractical by many, but in a sign of how things have changed, the dominant media narrative seemed to lean more to "visionary" than "pie-in-the-sky".

Writing at TPMCafe, former Federal Communications Commission chair Reed Hundt described the speech as

[N]ot only a bold statement. It is also quite ingenious, in at least three dimensions: selection of target, legislative and regulatory implications, financial possibilities.

What attracted him was not just the vision, but the practicality. Gore chose to focus on things that are practical and achievable. Switching the entire automobile fleet to plug-in electric cars would be a wonderful achievement, but it won't come in a decade and it won't come without social costs. And when it comes down to it, switching to a plug-in electric automobile fleet depends on manufacturers to build them and consumers to buy them. While there are a lot of areas where government regulations can be effective in that arena (seat belts, for one, drunk driving laws for another, unleaded gas for a third), people buy cars and keep them on the road for a variety of reasons.

Electricity generation, on the other hand, is heavily regulated. And it's a public utility - there's far less room for personal choice. Over the next decade a large proportion of power plants need to be replaced.

Once again, it begs a gut-wrenching comparison with Bush. Bush keeps talking about magic wands and tax cuts, and his only idea of a "solution" is additional drilling - or rather, additional leases. Bush who set a vision ("invade Iraq") without any vision for how to achieve his aim. It's a great lesson in contrasts...

Farms in the Sky

Tuesday's New York Times ran a story about Dickson Despommier's Vertical Farm Project, a plan to build urban farms. The plan seeks to bring agriculture into the cities, in the form of high-rise farms. (Have a look at some of the designs.)

It's a fascinating idea, but I didn't quite get it at first. It isn't, as I first read it, a plan to put farming on the outside of city buildings. Instead, it's a plan to create purpose-built high rise building for farming. That's pretty revolutionary. Surely the cost of land in cities is prohibitive, as is the cost of putting up one of these structures (the article says $20-30 million to build a prototype, hundreds of millions to build a structure capable of feeding 50,000 people).

Certainly it's an interesting idea. But apart from cost, there's a question of energy budgets - these designs are supposed to be self-sustaining in terms of energy inputs and grown without chemical inputs, but someone will probably figure that you can make more money using fossil fuels and the idea that you can avoid pest outbreaks sounds like someone who has never run a greenhouse. That said, I'm opining based on a New York Times article. I need to actually read what people involved with the project have written.