Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Friday, February 20, 2009

Nearly everyone with a serious interest in environmental stewardship in this country knows the work of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), headquartered in Old Snowmass, Colorado. On Wednesday, I journeyed down the road to Salisbury, North Carolina for an advisory meeting of the Catawba College Center for the Environment, eager to catch up on Catawba’s plan of work and, as an added bonus, meet RMI staff and hear their after-lunch presentation about an alternative energy paradigm.

Over lunch with such friends and long-time supporters of the Center for the Environment as Phillip Blumenthal, Linda Rimer, Missy Rankin, Fred Stanback, Cathy Holladay and others, we heard from Center director John E. Wear, Jr. about the work of the Center, along with its surprisingly robust financial prospects. Wear treated us to a power point presentation covering Center events and programs in 2008, including its imaginative annual fund-raiser, The Ugly Bug Ball, as well as its hugely successful Faith and the Environment Conference held last May.

After lunch, RMI’s Stephen Doig and Lena Hansen addressed a capacity crowd of businesspeople, students and community members about “Opportunities for Businesses in the Development of a New Energy Paradigm.” RMI is a “think and do” tank with a staff of 85 that is at once a non-profit organization and entrepreneurial business incubator the aim of which is to foster “the efficient and restorative use of resources” to help put government and industry on the path to energy independence through renewable energy.

Doig told us that as a UC Berkeley grad student back in 1984, he and his colleagues had seen “irrefutable evidence that the level of CO2” in the atmosphere had gone up, signalling profound climate change; that information had been accepted among his peers for at least ten years. “CO2 is like a down comforter we’re putting on around the world and seeing it get warmer,” Doig said. Climate change is having — and will continue to have — profound and little-understood effects on our world. Rising CO2 levels are already rapidly changing the acidifcation of the ocean, he said. Currently, 40% of carbon emissions arise from the production of electricity. Our nation and world faces “security threats” from an increasing number of natural disasters — connected to climate change — as well as from nefarious acts by humans. The air in the Pacific Northwest, for example, is polluted by coal produced in China, he said. Doig pointed to the economic advantages of alternatives and with that introduced his colleague Lena Hansen to discuss solutions.

Lena Hansen — who grew up in Asheville, NC — said that innovative new technologies are not so much needed as are ways of making existing technologies of wind and solar “cost effective.” Solar, she noted, is experiencing 45 percent growth per year. Currently, fossil fuels account for 70 percent of energy used in this country. In the future, Hansen said, it can be 5 percent. “The rest of the demand can be met by renewables. Solar has got to be a cornerstone of energy efficiency.”

The Center’s well-versed audience asked lots of good questions, questions about storing solar power, tax credits for upgraded homes, the role of decoupling utilities’ profit performance from their sale of kilowatt hours. Hansen emphasized the importance of collaborating with industry, government and technology providers for a greener future. “No one can do it on their own.”