Sweden’s new experimental labeling system will begin listing carbon dioxide emissions associated with food production on grocery items and restaurant menus.

Mon, Oct 26 2009 at 12:07 PM EST

Sometimes what’s bad for the economy can be good for the planet. Or so argued Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, yesterday. This environmental trend spotter pointed to several developments that may have escaped our attention as the global economy alternately sputtered and entered periods of freefall throughout the past 18 months.

Trend one: U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, have taken a tumble. They’re down 9 percent since 2007, Brown notes, fueled in part by a couple other developments.

Such as trend two: Americans are buying/keeping fewer cars. During the mid- to late-1990s, automakers sold more than 15 million cars a year. “Then, in 1999, [sales] jumped up to 17 million a year, and remained there for about eight years or so,” Brown says. This year: Those sales slumped to a measly 10 million. Meanwhile, U.S. motorists are on track to scrap about 14 million cars this year. So the U.S. fleet could shrink this year by nearly two percent.

Trend three: New cars tend to have a smaller carbon footprint than those now being scrapped — a trend that will only continue. There is already a rapidly expanding population of gas-sipping hybrids on the roads, and some moderately affordable, super-efficient electric and plug-in hybrids are slated to roll off assembly lines in about a year. (To help consumers find out how various cars compare in their fuel economy, the Environmental Protection Agency today released its 2010 passenger-car mileage guide.) And by 2016, thanks to a new White House policy issued in May, new U.S. cars must get an average 35.5 mpg. That’s four years earlier than the 2007 Corporate Average Fuel Economy law would have driven such a 40 percent boost in average mileage.

Trend four: The weight of U.S. cars has been diminishing as increasing amounts of steel have been replaced with lighter-weight structural materials. The result: “The amount of steel in the cars being retired is at least 40 percent larger than in the new cars being sold.” That’s contributing to a “steel surplus,” Brown says. Virtually every gram of steel in a retired car is recycled, he explains. Because it requires only about one-third as much energy to reuse steel than to produce it from scratch, pre-owned steel not only costs less but also contributes far fewer carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

Trend five: Phasing in considerably lighter, fuel-efficient cars might help the United States ditch its reputation as the world’s marathon gas guzzler. Currently, Brown notes, “the United States consumes more gasoline than the next 20 countries combined.” Already, the smaller, lighter U.S. fleet and recent reductions in annual driving distances per household have contributed to a drop in U.S. oil consumption. It fell five percent last year, Brown notes, and another five percent this year.

Trend six: Also contributing to the downturn in U.S. carbon emissions has been a drop in domestic coal consumption. This fuel is plenty dirty as it’s burned today, spewing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Increasingly, communities have been rebelling at the idea of a new soot-belching generating station being sited in their backyards. The result, Brown reported yesterday, coal use fell one percent last year and another 10 percent this year. Another telling stat: “In July,” he says, “the Sierra Club — coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign — announced the hundredth cancellation of a proposed [coal] plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants.”

Brown acknowledges that most of these trends reflect America’s sour economy. But he also sees signs that some of these trends might continue, if not quite at the same dramatic pace. Many utilities are investing in renewable energy sources for an increasing share of their electricity generation and many companies are choosing to make their production processes less carbon intensive and polluting.

Concludes Brown: “For years we’ve been hearing that it’s difficult, if not almost impossible, to substantially cut carbon emissions. In fact, it’s not all that difficult.”

Ummmm. I think millions of out-of-work Americans and huge numbers of companies in receivership would argue otherwise. It’s been a very painful and difficult transition.

And the worst is yet to come, Brown and others concede.

In December, formal negotiations commence on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, that ill-fated blueprint for limiting the release of carbon dioxide and other climate-warming pollutants. The new treaty’s crafters face a tough challenge.

On Sept. 29, White House science adviser John Holdren noted that the best available data from Earth and atmospheric scientists indicate that to prevent wholesale havoc as the planet warms, “global emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants should level off by about 2020 and shrink thereafter to something like 50 percent of the current levels by 2050.”

Brown, in his new book — Plan B 4.0 (W.W. Norton: New York, released Oct. 5) — argues that what Holdren outlined constitutes an anemic goal. Earth is already running a small fever, and to prevent it getting dangerously higher, nations “need to cut net carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020,” Brown contends.

If carbon emissions dropped only 10 percent — despite the help of the worst economy since the Big Depression — how is the world going to average changes eight times that big over the next decade? “Turning this situation around will take a worldwide, wartime-like mobilization,” Brown predicts in chapter 10 of his new book. That sounds like it’s going to be pretty difficult and painful.

Unfortunately, nature is increasingly suggesting that dramatically cutting energy use and pollution may also be non-negotiable.

David Chandler, MIT News Office
April 16, 2008; updated April 25, 2008

Abu Dhabi is a tiny nation with huge reserves of oil and, as a result, a lot of wealth. But this Persian Gulf emirate is taking the long view, and planning right now for a future beyond oil.

The most dramatic piece of Abu Dhabi’s futuristic planning is its creation of a whole new city from scratch, centered on an institute of technology modeled after, and created in collaboration with, MIT. The new city, Masdar, is perhaps the most ambitious attempt in the world today to create a community with a total net energy use of zero–without sacrificing any of the amenities of modern technology. Carbon emissions and waste output are also intended to be kept at or near zero.

The city, designed to house 50,000 people with the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology at its center, will be completely car-free, with walkways and personal transportation systems instead of roads and parking garages. Some of the walkways will be topped with solar panels, which will offer shade from the blistering tropical sun while also providing electricity for the city.

“Every building will be designed and constructed to provide a model for sustainable living and working,” the Masdar Institute’s web site declares. Power will come from photovoltaic panels and surrounding wind farms. And the city will be built with the “fullest use of innovation in energy-efficiency, sustainable practices, resource recycling, biodiversity, transportation and green building standards,” they say.

“It’s a pretty exciting project,” says MIT’s Charles Cooney, professor of chemical engineering and a member of the Masdar Initiative’s executive committee. “The university will be living inside many of the experiments it is conducting.”

And that will provide a unique opportunity both for education and for research on a full-scale, integrated approach to energy efficiency and sustainability, Cooney says. “There are a lot of things going on around the globe in the way of future energy projects–alternative fuels, energy efficiency, alternative energy devices. But they’re not typically all going on in the same place at the same time.” Masdar, he says, is “bold, it’s big and it’s quite unique.”

The whole could be much greater than the sum of its parts, he suggests. “You not only get to do experiments around the individual alternative energy ideas, but you get to do experiments around the system as a whole. One of the biggest challenges is the systems engineering. People underestimate how difficult it is to get everything working together.”

MIT will maintain a close association with the Masdar Institute, whose faculty will spend a year here before beginning their teaching there. But the involvement with the creation of the new city and campus is more limited.

Some of the initial ideas for the zero-energy plan came from the MIT collaboration, says Leon Glicksman, professor of building technology and mechanical engineering and director of MIT’s Building Technology Program. “We did work with them when they were evaluating proposals for the architecture,” he says, but now “they’re on a really fast track for construction,” so the British architectural firm, Foster + Partners, which did the principal design work, is taking the lead.

Once the project is built, MIT will have an ongoing role in monitoring the actual energy performance of the city, Glicksman says. And that could provide an extraordinary opportunity for students to learn about the potential for such large-scale integrated approaches to innovative energy production and use.

The Masdar Institute itself, at the heart of the new city, is being modeled very closely on MIT, says Fred Moavenzadeh, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Systems Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering. “MIT is really a research-driven institution. The education here is highly interactive with the research,” he says. “That style of education is very much missing in most countries,” but plays an important role in fostering innovative ideas that can spur a nation’s economic development, he says.

Moavenzadeh says that “energy and environment are at the frontiers of research,” and so it makes sense for the new institute to put those at the center of its program–and its setting. But while the program is modeled on MIT, he says, it is also essential that its programs be oriented toward the local environment and local needs.

While details of the long-term relationship remain to be determined, Cooney says, once it is up and running, “it hopefully will become an incredibly significant opportunity for MIT faculty and students.”