New York Chapter

Association of Energy Engineers

New York Chapter

August 2009 NewsletterPart 2

Meet Generation ‘E’

By Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes, Aug 10 09

THE OTHER DAY, AMAR RAMROOP, one of this summer’s Times Scholars, filled me in on his educational and career plans. He appears to be precisely what President Obama is looking for in calling for an energy revolution that includes classrooms (even if Congress has not yet agreed to pay for that part of the revolution). I invited Amar, who’s 18, to explain for Dot Earth why he thinks really small things can make a big difference in a world seeking new energy options. He’s clearly part of what I’ve taken to calling Generation E — people building lives focused on the environment, energy, equity and enterprise.

Hi. I was born in Guyana and grew up in Queens, N.Y. I’ve spent part of this summer as a Times Scholar and I’m headed to the University of Pennsylvania in the fall to begin studying chemical engineering and nanotechnology. I hope to fight pollution and fossil fuel dependence with an emphasis on the small. Snag a strand of hair and divide the width of the hair 100,000 times… that small. Amazing things can happen at the scale where things are measured in nanometers, billionths of a meter. That’s the world of nanotechnology.

Whoever said “bigger is better” is probably unfamiliar with nanotechnology because, in my opinion, bigger is boring.

Materials behave differently as you zoom in on the constituent particles. Take an aluminum can and break that mass down to nanometer-size particles and you can cause a massive explosion.

By adding and subtracting atoms from nanoscale complexes, the function of the complex changes with its size and shape. Such manipulations at the molecular level are what make nanotechnology a force of innovation in the world of sustainable energies. With the advent of nanotechnology, one can increase the surface area of solar cells to capture more light at a variety of wavelengths. In addition, nanotechnology can make solar panels cheaper by replacing heavy expensive silicon with engineered plastics. Further, we may see the day when photovoltaic “paint” covering our cars, homes and buildings generates electricity during the day while miniature batteries inside wall panels store the energy at night.

Fuel cell technology is also subject to refinement via nanotechnology. Penn, for example, is developing solid oxide fuel cells as a more efficient alternative to hydrogen fuel cells. Internationally, universities are experimenting different applications of nanotechnology from medical imaging and drug distribution to engineered fibers and adhesives. Countries are joining in on this new technological movement. Egypt proudly opened its first nanotechnology research center while Spain is using nanotechnology to fight tumor cells.

In the realm of the small, big things can happen.

Home

Current NY Chapter AEE Sponsors:

The New York Chapter of AEE would like to thank our corporate sponsors who help underwrite our activities. Please take a moment to visit their websites and learn more about them:

Duane Morris LLP
Constellation Energy
Innoventive Power
Association for Energy Affordability
R3 Energy Management

If you or your firm is interested in sponsoring the New York Chapter of AEE, please contact Jeremy Metz at .

The Superintendents Technical Association (aka the Supers Club) is

the first technical society of multifamily building maintenance

personnel. For free e-mail edition of monthly newsletter, visit our Web

site: or ask

Dick Koral,

Zero Net Energy Buildings: Reality or Fiction?

Check out this four-part series featuring engineers and architects in the field of green building design at the NY Academy of Sciences..

Green architects and engineers are working to balance energy consumption and generation at the level of individual buildings. But how do we define "zero" energy, and how can we reach this goal?

Can Intelligence Sustain Humanity’s Planet?

By Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes, Aug 7 09

JAMAIS CASCIO HAS AN INTERESTING ESSAY IN THE ATLANTIC pulling together threads on the role of intelligence in getting humanity through the pinch points that are anticipated as we head toward more or less nine billion people seeking a decent life on a finite planet. His preferred name for the epoch resulting from the spreading global (and orbital) nexus of brains and servers and data-transmission devices is the Nöocene — a mashup of the Anthropocene and Nöosphere.

From Darwin through Havel, there’s been a hopeful vision that a knitting of minds and information could lead to what M.I.T. researchers have (perhaps wishfully?) called “collective intelligence.”

I’ve proposed here before that technological advances could simply greatly boost the carrying capacity of the planet — leading to more environmental losses — unless human values shift along with our intellectual and technological potency. So is this evolving worldwide web of intelligence, on its own, sufficient to do what Mr. Cascio proposes?

For those who want more, I’ll shortly post a version of “9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ?,” a talk I’ve given off and on about this moment on an increasingly human-shaped Earth, which reminds me of the juncture between adolescence and adulthood. The punch line? What do we want to be when we grow up?

Below I’ve added some initial reactions to Mr. Cascio’s essay from others probing this question.

Braden Allenby, Arizona State University:

Andy - not as bad as some I’ve read, but a difficult area to try any kind of coherent essay. First, I think there’s serious issues about how one defines intelligence these days, given that we’re dispersing cognition across a number of information and communication systems. Memory, for example, used to be considered the sin qua non of human intelligence (as it remains in oral cultures); now Google has become an extraordinary mass memory. “Computers” were humans before they were machines; now, of course, “mere computation” isn’t considered indicative of naïve intelligence. So the concept of intelligence is not only complicated by our usual arguments about whether it’s unitary or there are different flavors (”emotional intelligence”). It is a contingent concept that changes depending on our technological context, and because that’s changing rapidly, so is our definition. And it’s not clear how yet. Second, notice how he tends to fall back on the individual - that Cartesian worldview is awfully embedded in Western thought, and it may well be obsolete. Straws in that wind might include Google, which networks memory, and the augcog systems that the military (and companies like GM and Ford on the civilian side) are developing that network perception and consciousness (what military augcog does is scan battlefield environments, identify potential threats, prioritize them, and feed information to the soldier as (s)he is able to comprehend it. It doesn’t get more real than that.). The question, then, is what intelligence means when cognitive systems evolve into networks, rather than individuals (this has always been the case with a social species like us; it’s a question of degree and accelerating rate of evolution of networked cognitive systems). Also, I think he’s too gentle in suggesting that either individuals or cultures will be able to choose not to enhance. Folks in places like BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China] are well aware that these are potent technologies in terms of cultural authority and power over time, and those who eschew cognitive enhancement at any level are likely to fall behind. And the social phenomenon that arises when large groups of people become unable to engage with rapid rates of change is fundamentalism of all stripes, from religious to environmental.

Effect on sustainability? Simply that the sustainability discourse generally has a really, really hard time engaging with emerging technologies and their implications, not to mention the inherent complexity of these systems, which means that, in some very important ways, it’s obsolete. The sustainability discourse is an Enlightenment phenomenon in a post-Enlightenment world, and one hopes it grows up before it becomes totally irrelevant.

Jesse Ausubel, Rockefeller University:

Performance Enhancement is a mega-subject, spanning modafinil, steroids, breast enlargement, botox, Viagra, eyeglasses, hearing aids, and external memory (books and libraries) and search engines…

This article is pretty good, but not pathbreaking or especially insightful. Phil Campbell had a good series on Performance Enhancement in Nature last year. The E.U. financed a good U.K.-based project on it. In the U.S.A. the DoD among others has done a lot.

There is the converse hypothesis promoted by the late William Hamilton, about the Planetary Hospital, in which we all will harbor lethal or debilitating mutations (poor eyesight) and survive by continual intensive medical intervention. Humanity has replaced selection-after-birth (infant mortality), which tended to get rid of weaker genes, with selection-before-birth (abortion), which, unless one does a lot of genetic testing, makes the surviving pool of humans potentially more needy - including of performance enhancement.

In any case, the drive for performance enhancement is relentless.

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security

The conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is partly a result of drought in Darfur.

By John M. Broder, NYTimes, Aug 9 09

WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.

Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.

Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided senators on the matter.

He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control program.

“I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too.

Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going to be repeated many times and on a much larger scale,” he said.

The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs and other government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.

Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.

A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.

Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level.

Arctic melting also presents new problems for the military. The shrinking of the ice cap, which is proceeding faster than anticipated only a few years ago, opens a shipping channel that must be defended and undersea resources that are already the focus of international competition.

Ms. Dory, who has held senior Pentagon posts since the Clinton administration, said she had seen a “sea change” in the military’s thinking about climate change in the past year. “These issues now have to be included and wrestled with” in drafting national security strategy, she said.

The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide intelligence analyses, finished the first assessment of the national security implications of climate change just last year.

It concluded that climate change by itself would have significant geopolitical impacts around the world and would contribute to a host of problems, including poverty, environmental degradation and the weakening of national governments.

The assessment warned that the storms, droughts and food shortages that might result from a warming planet in coming decades would create numerous relief emergencies.

“The demands of these potential humanitarian responses may significantly tax U.S. military transportation and support force structures, resulting in a strained readiness posture and decreased strategic depth for combat operations,” the report said.

The intelligence community is preparing a series of reports on the impacts of climate change on individual countries like China and India, a study of alternative fuels and a look at how major power relations could be strained by a changing climate.

“We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the Central Command, wrote recently in a report he prepared as a member of a military advisory board on energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research for the Navy. “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind.