Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Adventures in energy-audit land

About a year ago, I went to a meeting sponsored by our local councilperson about saving energy. Frankly, I expected it to be the usual pablum - put in CFLs - but in fact it was fascinating. I was especially entranced by a Con Edison official who'd done his own green retrofit and took us through all the tax credits, rebates and tax deductions that made it practically free.

This summer I finally decided that it was time to put our money where my mouth is and try to make our 140-year old brownstone at least somewhat energy-efficient. So last month we got an energy audit. Somewhat to my surprise, it turns out our house is in pretty good shape, and our appliances are pretty green. The big exception (no surprise): our oil-fueled boiler, a noisy, smelly hulking black monster that once upon a time burned coal.

The surprises have come since, and the biggest one is that getting all these tax breaks is by no means a simple business. Our energy audit was conducted by a contractor licensed by NYSERDA (New York State's energy department), which hands out the state's 25% rebate for green improvements...but only if the work is done by a NYSERDA-licensed contractor. Unfortunately, there are very few NYSERDA-licensed contractors in the New York City area. There are, in fact, even fewer than NYSERDA thinks there are, as I discovered when I started calling them and discovered that several had gone out of business. Most of those left - like the company that did our energy audit - specialize in insulation.

Our contractor knew of only one NYSERDA-licensed heating contractor, so we called him for an estimate on replacing our boiler, either with another oil-burning boiler or with a gas-burning one.

First surprise: the most energy-efficient heating systems use forced air or forced hot water. They do not use the system endemic in New York City (as well as, presumably, in the Iowa city where The Pajama Game is set): steam heat.

Second surprise: if you want a NYSERDA rebate, gas is out: there are no gas-fueled steam boilers efficient enough to meet NYSERDA's standards. (Of course we could install a whole new heating system, but replacing all the radiators and much of the plumbing in a four-story brownstone is stratospherically beyond our budget.)

It is, however, possible to buy an oil-burning boiler that just scrapes by. So I had the contractor come over to give me an estimate.

It was when I got his seven-page contract, two copies, all ready for me to sign and return, that I realized this really wasn't going to be simple. To replace the boiler, he wanted $20,500. To replace a single radiator valve, he wanted $600. (There are 15 radiators in our house, and they probably all need new valves.)

I knew it was going to be expensive to replace the boiler - why else hadn't we done it in the 30 years we've lived here (at 62 degrees in wintertime - with plastic on the windows - to keep the oil bills under control)? But $20,000? Sure, the NYSERDA rebate would cover roughly a quarter of that. And since getting NYSERDA certification takes time and trouble, I'm willing to pay a slightly higher price. But $20,000?

I called up Heat USA, the highly-to-be-recommended (if you use heating oil) coop that's helped us keep our oil bills at a manageable level, and asked what one of their plumbers would charge to replace a boiler. The answer? Even if we bought the most efficient boiler made, we would be hard-pressed to spend as much as $10,000.

Armed with that information, I called up National Grid (formerly Keyspan and before that, Brooklyn Union Gas, and stuck forever in my memory as BUG) and got them to send a plumber out to give me an estimate on the cost of switching to gas (which is what I, an at-least-halfway believer in peak oil, wanted to do all along). That estimate? $7,000, give or take - and a $500 credit from National Grid.

As I talked to all these guys, I discovered that there's an oil vs gas battle raging in New York, and right now the gas forces have the oil army on the defensive. Oil won't explode! the oil guy says. You can't get a service contract for a gas boiler! You have to install a chimney liner! It costs thousands of dollars!

Well, actually, said the gas man, you do have a steel lining. (I suspected as much, because we'd paid a small fortune some years back to replace the damn thing.) You can get a service contract - but when was the last time you had problems with your gas water heater?

What about price, I asked? Oil has generally been cheaper, said the oil man. Gas was cheaper last year, said the gas man. No help there. Faced with a decision whose results will likely outlive me, I consulted my son, who will inherit them. Since future prices are a mystery, he advised, go with the option that's cheaper to install.

So gas it is (ta-da!). And just one step into what's obviously going to be a long and painful road, here's realization number one: whoever wrote the rules for NYSERDA's program lived in the suburbs. Closely followed by realization number two: there's at least one NYSERDA contractor out there who doesn't expect customers to figure out that 75% of $20,000 is a hell of a lot more than $10,000.

Next problem: asbestos. Stay tuned.




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Saturday, August 8, 2009

Transition towns and evangelical churches, or what do Rick Warren and Rob Hopkins have in common?

If you follow green blogs and tweets, as I do, it's hard to miss the ongoing slanging match between Climate Progress and the Breakthrough Institute. And I'm not, at least in this post, picking a dog in that fight. But I have been reading Breakthrough - the book that birthed the institute - and it seems to me that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the book's co-authors, have at least one insight that all of us should pay attention to.

It answers a question I've always had about my own history as an environmentalist: if I do believe in this cause - and I do - why have I seldom contributed to, and never volunteered for, any environmental group? I did once work - for pay - for a couple of environmental groups, but that's another story. (Though perhaps not entirely unconnected to the question at hand.)

It also goes a long way to explain the exponential growth of the Transition Town movement.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger make two related points. First, that for most of its history, the environmental movement has been almost entirely dedicated to stopping things. And second, that about all it has asked from its supporters is their money and their votes. The result, they argue, is that while an enormous number of people say they support environmental causes, when push comes to shove - when they have to put their money or their convenience on the line - their environmental concerns fall by the wayside. (They're not alone in noticing this: a sure way to make green business guru Joel Makower testy is to send him a survey reporting that some huge percentage of Americans buy green, when all the evidence indicates that they don't.)

All this made sense to me, but where they really caught my attention was when they compared the success, or lack thereof, of the environmental movement with the growth of evangelical churches. Unlike environmentalists, they argue, members of evangelical churches will turn themselves inside out to support their church. Why? Because their church is more fun.

Well, I spent quite a lot of time at an evangelical megachurch while I was researching The Word, my book about how people read the Bible, and the Breakthrough guys are right: it's much more engaging, exhilarating, and satisfying to be a member of an evangelical church than it is to be a member of, say, the Sierra Club. It's not just that evangelical church schedules are packed full of meetings, clubs, groups and activities, though they are. It's also that their members are convinced that, through all these activities, they are helping to build a better world. Yes, there are things they want to stop. But there is much more that they want to create.

And suddenly a light went on: that's why the Transition movement is growing so fast. (If you're not familiar with the Transition movement, go here, or here, to find out more. Better still, get ahold of a copy of Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook.)

Transition isn't a church, or in any way religious, but but the Transition movement is more like an evangelical church than any other group I've ever come across. Rob Hopkins has grasped what most environmental activists seem to have missed: if people are going to be engaged over the long term, they have got to be building something, not stopping something. And they have got to enjoy themselves.

There are a lot of Transition Towns in the US - and around the world, for that matter - but the one I'm most familiar with, because I've spent some time there, is Totnes, the first in the UK. This summer, according to their July bulletin, you could attend a solstice picnic, go on an edible garden crawl, or go to a meeting about direct action on climate change. There were activities for bikers and photographers, a kids' event at a local estate, a bunch of lectures and movie screenings. And no matter what aspect of our climate crisis grabs you - housing, the economy, jobs, energy, food, health, the arts, politics - they've got a group for you.

The other genius of Transition is that the task of a Transition Town group is not to stop climate change. It is to imagine how their town could not just survive, but thrive, in an oil-constrained and warmer world, and then to do everything they can to make that imagining a reality. But the very process of working towards that goal, of course, also deepens their commitment to doing whatever they can, personally and politically, to address climate change. The two feed, and feed on, each other.

So, though it's hard to think of two people more different in almost every way than Rob Hopkins and Rick Warren...

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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

If growth is the measure of all things, why aren't we 20 feet tall?

The question of the juncture - or is it disjunction? - between sustainability and economic growth is being raised all over the place right now. Over on Rob Hopkins' Transition blog, there's a lively debate on the UK's low-carbon transition plan and its emphasis on economic growth. Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, responds -- with a mordant logic worthy of Jonathan Swift -- to arguments that global warming won't be so bad because it will only cut GDP by 5% over the next 100 years. Hey, look, he says, we could wipe out almost half the world and drop GDP by only 4.4%, so why worry? And Dennis Pacheco, on Chelsea Green, asks whether California's IOUs are really a cleverly disguised alternative local currency.

It's a huge topic, and while, after decades as a financial reporter, I know something about the subject, there's a lot more that I don't know than that I do. But it does seem clear to me that there's something perverse about the way that economic growth has become the fundamental measure of the health of our society. Or any society.

If you watch financial news, you've noticed that the very first question out of any interviewer's mouth is "When is the economy going to start growing?" The very definition of a recession is negative financial growth. We are taught, over and over again, that the test of our well-being is how fast our economy is growing, and the first argument raised against any attempt to curb greenhouse gases is that it will hurt economic growth.

So when peak oil folk talk - and they do - about a steady-state economy, it's kind of scary, even to me. Can we thrive - all of us - in an economy that does not grow? Where everything stays pretty much the same?

Of course, it's not that there's not enough to go around. Just as there's enough food in the world to feed us all - if it could be gotten to the people who need it - so there's enough money in the world for a decent, if not extravagant, lifestyle for all, if some of it could be taken from those who have a ludicrous excess and given to those who have almost nothing.

The trouble is, I can't think, off the top of my head, of a single even slightly developed society that has succeeded in doing that. The human desire to hang onto what you've got is very, very strong.

On the other hand, to argue that economic growth is the only way to bring even a modicum of wealth to the world's poorest people is - essentially - to claim that it's necessary to make some obscenely wealthy in order that others may have the barest necessities of life. Does that make sense?

I certainly don't know the answer. But if climate change and peak oil are the overwhelming and intertwined emergencies of this century - and I believe they are - then it's a question we're going to have to tackle, and soon. Journalists and economists and politicians -- and all the rest of us -- are going to have to find a new way of defining social well-being. Growth won't cut it.

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©2008, Ann Monroe