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[ Silence ]
>> Our speaker today is Andy Friedland and he is the Richard
and Jane Pearl Professor in Environmental Studies.
And he is also a professor in Environmental Studies.
He just stepped down from the Chair position after 11 years.
He teaches introductory environmental science
and energy courses and has taught courses in forest,
biochemistry, global change, and soil science.
For more than two decades, Andy has been researching the effects
of air pollution on high elevation forest
of the northeast United States.
And recently, he's been examining the impact
of increased demand for wood as fuel, and the subsequent effects
on carbon stored deep in forest soils and you'll hear more
about that today in his talk.
He received a BA in Biology and Environmental Studies in 1981
and a PhD in Earth and Environmental Science in 1985
from the University of Penn.
And he's been at Dartmouth since 1987.
He's co-authored or authored
over 60 peer-reviewed publications and three books.
These include Environmental Science: Foundations
and Applications, and that's a textbook,
and Environmental Science for Advanced Placement,
and the last piece is Writing Successful Science Proposals
which he co-authored with provost Carol Folt.
His talk today is why should we worry about carbon emissions?
Please help welcome Andy Friedland.
[ Applause ]
>> Hear me okay?
Great. I really like the end
of Roberta's [phonetic] introduction
because she read my title: why should we worry
about carbon emissions and I was tempted to make that the title
of this talk and Roberta asked me maybe four months ago what
would you, you know, what would you like your title to be?
And I realized afterward, I made it short:
why worry about carbon emissions?
It might be interpreted why should you worry
about carbon emissions?
But it might also be interpreted, eh,
why worry about carbon emissions?
We have nothing to worry about.
So, I plan to explore that difference, those differences
of opinions of interpretation and in fact hot topics
in national politics is the subtitle of this lecture series.
And you could ask I think rightly so,
"Why is this subject up here?
It's not a hot topic."
There was at least discussion in the 2008 presidential campaign
about global change and there was some legislation
that was maybe appearing like it might go somewhere,
ultimately, it didn't.
But I'd say there's been very little discussion
of global warming and global climate change
and we'll make a distinction of what the difference is
between those two in a few minutes.
But I'd like to talk about this subject today and I'd
like to show you first of all
where we stand amongst our peers in other countries.
This is a Nielsen poll conducted in 60 or 70 countries.
I'm not a big person with expertise in interpreting polls.
You can't see the names of the countries.
The point is, these are 60 or 40 different countries in the world
and the United States is down here at the bottom.
Are you concerned about global climate change?
With only 48 percent of the responders saying yes.
Furthermore, if you look from 2007 to 2009 to 2011,
assuming it's a similar poll and we thing with Nielsen,
it probably would be comparable data,
it looks like the concern has been falling
over this time period.
So, it doesn't look like our country,
if this is representative, is very concerned
about global climate change and it doesn't look
like we are very concerned as a nation compared
to great many other nations.
What I'd like to do is go through a little bit
on understanding climate change and one owns personal impact
on climate change processes.
And I'm only going to review that briefly.
And I think if you're not a believer, I respect you,
but the majority
of the scientific evidence doesn't support your disbelief,
but you can have it, that's fine with me.
But we won't spend a lot of time today debating that.
What I'll do is I'll review for you what I think are five
or six slides to remind you of the story
that you've probably heard before.
And now, what I want to do is show that there is role
for individuals, for business,
and for higher education institutions
to take action while we're waiting,
will this ever become a hot topic in national politics?
I don't know.
But I believe there are plenty of things that we can do
if we want to right now and not wait for a legislation.
So, what is climate change and if we wish
to act, what should we do?
So, this is what we'll do.
Understand climate change and then doing something if you
so choose to slow the increase
in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit about the research
that I do with undergraduates and graduate students here
at Dartmouth and collaborate with others
from other institutions.
And then tell you about some of the activities
that Dartmouth is doing on the issue of sustainability
and climate change and it's part
of the larger strategic planning process
that Dartmouth is going through right now.
So, if you have any questions that are brief
or you think I haven't explained something and you
like a clarification, by all means, let me know
and we'll take a short break from my prepared talk today
to answer a question if you have something that's broader
or larger, we'll have time at the end to discuss it.
The first thing I want to do is point out this basis
for the concern about global greenhouse gases.
This is commonly referred to as the Keeling Curve named
after David Keeling who until five years ago, was responsible
for collecting the data from about 1959 'til
when he passed away in about 2005.
So, this shows the concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere and this is one continuous highly reliable
data set.
So, we know that from 1959 to the present, and I updated this
in September and I think the October data are probably
online, but they weren't a few days ago when I checked
or about a week ago, showing that there's been a steady
and gradual increase in carbon dioxide overtime.
This is from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii,
so it's a Northern Hemisphere observation,
but it's been observed elsewhere.
So, point number one: carbon dioxide has increased
in the last 50 years with a very high level of certainty.
We know a lot about the carbon processes and I think
with the lights on, this is a perfectly viewable
from the back of the room.
But I want point out that carbon dioxide goes from the atmosphere
to the oceans and it goes from the atmosphere into vegetation
and there's a major pump that is human extraction of fossil fuels
that takes carbon stored in fossil fuels and pumps it
up into the atmosphere.
And that is the primary cause of this increase,
but there's also changes in vegetation, land use changes
from people clearing land for agriculture,
people clearing land for houses, any activity
that would clear land and not allow it to return
to a vegetative state or maybe even changing land from forest
to a less productive vegetative state would do the same thing.
So, we know that story and I don't want to show you--
I just want to show you the idea that we know
that carbon transfers from the atmosphere to trees and plants.
And those trees and plants eventually die
and the carbon becomes part of the organic matter in the soil.
And this is more or less in steady state
if you go back thousands or tens of thousands of years.
But human beings have perturbed that in two ways: one,
the combustion of fossil fuels, and two,
the net destruction of vegetation.
And notice I've ignored the oceans
and I've really simplified this in a lot of ways
and there are other stories going on.
But today, I'm going to mostly talk about fossil fuels and talk
about storage in soil and storage in vegetation.
So, the basics of the greenhouse gas
or greenhouse effect are talked about by lots of people.
And it is also fairly well-known; it's been understood
for 120, 140 years that people hypothesized
and I'll show you briefly the idea that sunlight comes
through the atmosphere and is more or less not exactly,
but more or less transparent.
The atmosphere is transparent and most
of that sunlight hits the Earth's surface
and then it radiates out in the infrared.
And the Earth's atmosphere has greenhouse gases
in it including water, a natural greenhouse gas
and including a number of human, either human created gases
or gases that have increased in concentration due
to human activity that has thickened up this blanket
or made this atmospheric layer that absorbs infrared energy
from the Earth to be thicker, it absorbs more and then sends most
of that radiation back down to the Earth.
So, that's the basic principle of the greenhouse gas and again,
very few people argue or question that general principle.
So, the CO2 concentrations are going up
and there is something called the greenhouse effect
that allows this planet to have a more
or less regulated temperature as opposed to, for example,
some of the other planets.
So, I showed you the carbon dioxide before is the blue line.
And I showed you that carbon dioxide from 1950 to 2011
which is this part of the line here
and I said those were direct measurements
from one continuous study.
We have other ways to estimate and we have other measurements
that are not as good, but it appears that probably,
carbon dioxide concentrations were 280 part per million.
And then starting with human activity, land clearing,
combustion of wood, and then combustion of fossil fuels,
we see this increase in carbon dioxide concentrations.
Another thing that we know fairly well, but it gets worse
and worse as we go further and further back
in time is what temperatures were,
and we know that there's a fairly close correlation,
not perfect, but a fairly close correlation
of temperature increases that coincide with carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gas concentrations.
So, there are people who are questioning how do we know
which causes which and there are lots of reasons to suggest
that the greenhouse gas concentrations are the driver
of the increase in global Earth surface temperatures.
There could be other interpretations
and those are certainly getting some attention,
but I'll show you what more or less a consensus
of scientist has agreed about these patterns.
But you can see here, we can go back even more.
We can go back thousands of years and hundred of thousands
of years using different surrogates for temperature
and surrogates for carbon dioxide concentration.
But that's the immediate pattern.
Carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas.
So, the major greenhouse gases that are introduced
into the atmosphere through human activity are carbon
dioxide, but also methane
and chlorofluorocarbons and nitrous oxide.
Those are the four big ones.
So, I'd like to point out that each one of these is increasing
from human activity of different sorts.
And for example, methane comes from anaerobic respiration
in flooded areas that human beings have flooded
for one reason or another, perhaps agriculture;
methane also comes from landfills and so on.
CFCs are synthesized human manufactured gas used
in refrigeration and air conditioning,
so all of these contribute to the greenhouse effect,
but we'll focus mostly on carbon dioxide today.
And so, when you look at the story even more closely
and you look at meteorologic stations around the globe,
you can spread out this story
and very often people use some people of time from maybe 1920
to 1940 as a baseline and then they talk
about deviations from that baseline.
And there is both an annual mean which is the black dots
and the red line is a running five-year average of smoothing.
Yeah, question?
>> Yeah, when you said carbon emission,
are you talking about carbon dioxide?
>> Thank you.
Yeah, I think probably sometimes I blur that.
And for the most part,
I'm talking about carbon dioxide emissions
and sometimes I shorthand it and call it carbon.
Thank you.
But we will be talking a little bit about carbon stored in soils
and that's not carbon dioxide.
But it then might get converted to carbon dioxide.
So, thanks for that question.
So, if this is the baseline, we're seeing
that we've had a steady increase,
the temperature anomaly, or the deviation
from this zero baseline that continues
to go up and up and up.
And the average now is up above 0.6 degree centigrade
or roughly a degree Fahrenheit.
So, that's how much the temperature is warmer today
than this period of time arbitrarily perhaps chosen
as the 1920 to 1940 period which is--
to which current temperatures are compared.
Oh, I should mention that these are coming
from Goddard Space Institute.
These data are like the other data I showed you are updated
monthly and anybody can go and obtain the graphs
and obtain a lot of the raw data if they wish to look
to look at these numbers.
So, they are fairly public, they are fairly accessible.
And I want to point out that the mean temperature change
on earth is not necessarily
as representative of what's going on.
And if you're familiar with the term polar amplification,
the phenomenon that for a variety of reasons,
temperature extreme seem to be greater in the northern poles
and in the southern poles.
This shows that temperature deviation and you're seeing
that this orange and red and dark red, brown,
these are showing up in the Northern Hemisphere
and they're showing up in the Arctic region.
And the story there is there's a lot more evidence of warming,
and so to people living there and politicians
and government officials there, they tend to say,
"Climate change is not a theory,
to us it's something that we're seeing.
We're seeing warming and we're seeing variable temperatures
and we're seeing it now."
And this is the topic of great interest
of Professor Ross Virginia
in the environmental studies program who is also the director
of the Institute of Arctic studies in the Dickey Center.
So, what is the warming on Ross Virginia who just--
it's really nice when professors,
we give guest lectures and Ross Virginia just gave a guest
lecture in my introduction to environmental science class
and he used this slide and I asked him if I could borrow it
for my talk this morning because he summarized the
intergovernmental panel on climate change,
working group summary.
And this is 600 authors from 40 countries
who have worked together as teams, by committees
to write consensus statements and write synthesis documents.
And they have documents for policy makers
and they have documents for scientist where they look
at all the credible data from around the world
and they put it together.
And they have come up with some statements.
And remember that they don't say we know with certainty
because in science really, there is very little
that you can know with certainty.
But this group in 2007 and there's another report actually,
an excerpt, a report was just
in the newspapers you might have seen it just yesterday,
there was a press release about a new working group.
But the 2007 is the most recent working group
on the physical science basis and they said it's unequivocal
that global warming is occurring,
one degree Fahrenheit warming in the last century.
So, that's statement number one.
And it used to be 5 or 7 years.
Before that, it was very likely or before that, it was likely.
Now, it's unequivocal, so greater and greater levels
of scientific certainty are coming out of this story.
The probability that this is caused
by natural climatic processes is less than 5 percent.
The probability that this is caused by human emissions
of greenhouse gases is over 90 percent.
So, that's the current state of the science and I'm well aware
that there are people in the national press
and radio talk shows who've questioned the credibility
of this group, but I would say that for the large number
of natural scientist who are working in a broad base
of areas, this is a very acceptable process.
This kind of work happens all the time
with the National Academy of Sciences with mostly people
from this country or the EPA,
Environmental Protection Agencies,
Science Advisory Board.
So, it's a very common practice.
It goes on all the time for lots of discussions.
Are cellphones safe?
What should the air quality standards be
in cities and so on?
And in very similar albeit international process took place
with this group, the commonly referred to as the IPCC.
So, that's the summary from this group.
And so, when you look at it and if you are willing
to accept that, you perhaps should then be moving
on to the next step which is
if human beings are altering the climate
and it doesn't mean just warming, but it means changes
in the chemistry of the atmosphere.
And in some places, that results in cooling.
In some places, that results in more or less precipitation.
You can look at all that and then perhaps say, "Well,
if we do believe this is taking place, what can I do
about it if I so choose?
And I bring this up in my classes and in a class,
I'm teaching this intro
to environmental science right now to about 90 students.
And I never in class tell people what they need to do.
I never tell them you must do something about it.
But I find learning environmental science,
it's really good to learn about your own energy use.
Not that I'm trying to change how someone uses energy,
but I ask my students as a way to understand energy units
and how to put gallons of gasoline and miles flown
on an airplane and so may terms of natural gas, how to put them
into common units like perhaps joules and understand something
about your energy use as an individual.
So, this is the energy use of the United States.
This is the entire 310 million or so people.
And it shows that we use fossil fuels for 84 percent
of our energy demand and those are oil, coal,
and natural gas in that order.
We use nuclear fuels exclusively to generate electricity.
And renewable energy makes up 7 percent
of our current energy pie.
So, 40 percent of this energy is going to generate electricity
and 60 percent is used more directly for things
like transportation, home heating, and so on.
All right, and the United States uses quads
which is quadrillion BTU, that's the official unit of energy
of the US-- sorry, of the US Department of Energy.
And it's not used anywhere else in the world.
The rest of the world uses exajoules.
But it works out nicely, they're both around hundred.
The conversion is fairly close.
So, you can look at these and without too much exaggeration,
you could also be calling these the percentages of energy.
So, the United States gets over a third of our energy from oil,
a quarter from natural gas,
a quarter from coal, roughly speaking.
And 9 percent from nuclear
and only 7 percent is from renewable fuels.
Okay, and furthermore, you can talk more and I could go on
and I really like this graph a lot.
But just the electricity, we just talked
about the electricity, our electricity comes
as a nation, 50 percent from coal.
So, for example, the northeast, that's not true
and in fact Dartmouth is even more unusual.
I'll talk a little later about the Dartmouth Power Plant so--
but if you were in, say, Ohio, 50 percent or more
of the lighting electricity would be coming from coal.
Here, because we have a power plant that burns oil
and co-generates electricity while it's making steam,
probably a good fraction of the lighting
in this room is coming from oil.
But that's maybe something we'll get into a little bit later.
My point is to show you this is our current energy picture
as a nation.
And I didn't put in a slide, but I was tempted to put in a slide
to say that we're 5 percent of the population of the world
and we're using a quarter of the world's energy,
not a value judgment, not making you--
trying to make you feel bad, but that's a factual accounting,
fairly representative.
We're 5 percent of the world's population
and we use approximately 25 percent the world's energy.
But what you could do if this is your nation
and this is your profile, this is your portfolio of energy use,
the first thing you could do if you wanted to
and you are concerned about carbon dioxide,
greenhouse gas emission is you could switch from oil
to natural gas whenever you can.
And the reason you should think about doing
that is this is showing the carbon dioxide emission relative
to an amount of energy release.
And it's showing you that coal has the most carbon dioxide
released per gigajoule or unit of energy.
Oil has slightly less than that
and natural gas has approximately half of the coal.
So, for a given amount of work, coal releases the most CO2
and natural gas releases the least.
So, if all things were equal and the price was the same
and you were making a decision about, well,
not too many individuals burn coal anymore.
We used to in houses but nowadays, coal is mostly burned
by electrical utilities and some industrial processes.
But let's say oil and natural gas, if you were--
and we don't have if you live close by or right here,
we don't have a natural gas pipeline
which makes it less convenient.
But if you were perhaps in an urban area and you're trying
to decide, should I heat my home with oil or with natural gas?
There are many things to consider.
But if you are considering carbon dioxide emissions,
you would see that kind of a decrease
with the same amount of energy provided.
So, that right there is something
to take into consideration.
However, you've probably been reading the headlines
about fracking in Pennsylvania
and New York and out in the west.
And then all of a sudden, increased demand
for natural gas has increased this process of pumping water
with chemicals down into various geologic strata and sending out,
pushing out natural gas which is then used
for various activities including heating homes
and industry and so on.
So, everything, every choice has a consequence,
very choice has a cost.
And so if you were to say, "I'm going to reduce my coal
and oil usage, I'm going
to increase my usage of natural gas."
You would then, by extension,
have to at least be considering more of this fracking,
more of these what many people are calling destructive
activities on areas of land to drive the natural gas
from the underlying beds out.
So, there's-- in each of these considerations,
there's tradeoff's and that's perhaps one of the major points
of the intro class that I teach.
And I don't always use such nice language,
but all energy choices are undesirable.
And actually, I sometimes say it a lot more strongly than that.
But all energy choices have consequences even reductions
in use and conservation and increasing efficiency
which we will be talking about
and I bet some of you would know.
But I guess the other thing is I try to say,
"I just did it for the country."
Let's just imagine you're somebody living
in Northern New England, perhaps around here a little north
of here, and you have an old leaky farmhouse
and there's two adults in the family that drive,
this might be what your energy profile looks like.
You might heat with a thousand gallons of oil.
I rounded that up.
I think really it might be 900, it might be an average.
But there are many households around here
that use a thousand gallons of oil a year.
And you might have two cars.
One that gets 20 miles per gallon, maybe a light truck
or minivan or SUV and that might get driven 12,000 miles a year
and another one that gets 30 miles
of gallon that's driven a little less
and you might get an electrical bill that has 500 kilowatt hours
of electricity use per month on average.
So, these are not average, but these are somewhat typical
of a certain kind of family and household.
And if you add that all up, one of the points that I make
in my intro class and also when talking
to the public is it's really hard to--
which one of these is more?
You have to convert these all to a common unit of energy
such as the joule or the BTU or it's really hard to know
when you look at this diagram and you say, "Okay,
this is the country's picture.
Well, what's my picture, what's my individual picture?"
So, when you take this and you convert each of these to joules
of energy, these quantities, you might get something like this.
So, this hypothetical family, more than half
of their energy is go to heating.
And as you can see perhaps--
well, over a third is going to cars.
Now, this family, let's say they were living in a house
and they heard about compact fluorescent light bulbs
and they are all excited
about converting every single light bulb in their house
to a compact fluorescent.
Now, I personally don't like compact fluorescents very much
and I know probably some of you love them.
But I find they take a few minutes to come
up to full brightness.
So, when I'm walking around and I also know
that they contain mercury and if they're not disposed
of properly, they're going to contribute
to global mercury pollution in various ways.
I also know that some of them hum and I don't
like the color of them very much.
But certainly, in a lot of instances,
compact fluorescent bulbs are great.
But if I were doing a profile of this family
and not considering their food
and not considering their air travel
and not considering their public transportation,
I'd certainly say, "Let's focus on the heating
in the cars before we focus on the electricity,"
which doesn't mean I'm saying, "forget about the electricity."
But lots of times, people like to go for the low hanging food
or the biggest piece of the pie.
And so-- and you may come back and say, "Well,
I want to do everything.
I want to do the compact fluorescent bulbs
and I want to improve."
The reason I bring up this example is sometimes,
I meet people who ask me,
"I'm really concerned about my energy use."
And maybe they live somewhere
where they don't drive very much.
But they're really committed
to getting a Toyota Prius 'cause it turns their fuel efficiency
from 30 miles per gallon to 48 or 50 miles per gallon.
Great idea, but what happens
if they only drive 2,000 miles a year in their car?
That may not be the best decision.
So, what I'm easing my way into and we'll do more of this,
is there are decisions that you can make if you want to,
no governments forcing you and they might prove to pay back.
They might prove to save you money.
But the important point is that you look at your energy usage
and you make some decisions based on the data.
So, this example here, yes,
if the person has a 25-year-old oil boiler system
and a very leaky house with lots of drafty windows
and drafty doors, they should certainly be looking
at that 'cause there might be some things that could pay back
in two or three or four years.
Now, you may just want own a Toyota Prius 'cause it feels
good and that's perfectly fine.
But I would say you're paying a 4,000-dollar premium 'cause I
haven't driven thousands of miles in a Prius,
but they're a lot like a Toyota Corolla which you can get
for a lot cheaper, but they're more efficient.
So, what I'm saying is you can make some decision much
as you might make decisions if you're trying to decide
which of other financial purchases you can look
at environmental decision making and energy decision making
with the same kinds of pros and cons
and include cost into that discussion.
Sound okay so far?
Here's a busier pie diagram.
This is an example of what I asked my students
to put together, in fact ENVS students--
ENVS 2 students right now are putting together their pie
diagrams, they're due after the Thanksgiving break.
And this student had a nice story.
This is James Lee [phonetic], class of 2011 in Texas
who gave me permission to share this
with other classes and others.
And notice, he's got automobile transportation; Texas is spread
out state, so he's got a big piece of the pie.
Transportation to and from Dartmouth each year takes
up a big chunk of his energy usage and then he broke
out his energy usage by different kind of appliance
and you can do that by estimating it,
by looking at the manufacturer's estimate
of how much you would use,
or you could use something called the kilowatt meter.
I don't know if you've ever seen a kilowatt meter.
But a kilowatt meter is something that you plug
into the wall and then you plug this.
You plug your item into this
and you can readout instantly how many watts it uses while
it's turned on and you can even just leave it there for a day
or two like a refrigerator which turns on and off
and learn how much electricity it's using.
I have students who come back after the Thanksgiving break
that say things to me like, "My mom says thanks a lot."
I go, "Oh, that's nice.
What did I do?"
"Oh, we plugged that thing in," 'cause I lend them out
and students take them, "we plug that thing in and we learned
that that old freezer, chest freezer we have in the basement
of our house, that's 25 years old,
was costing us 600 dollars a year and we're going
to unplug it and save 600 dollars
and save a certain number of kilowatt hours."
And depending on where they live, save the emissions
of coal combustion and carbon dioxide or maybe the demand
for nuclear fuel or even the demand for if it's wind
or hydro, it's still-- so this is the kind
of thing you can do by exploring.
Now, I realize not everyone likes to do this
and not everyone would find this enjoyable, but presumably,
there'd be enough of us to share the abilities
to do home energy audits and blower-door test and--
so that's part of what I'd like to say.
I always do this with my own house
and I thought this was the more colorful one,
but I show my students what happens in my household as well
and I don't own the Toyota Prius
and I don't have any solar panels,
the roof in my house isn't facing in the best direction.
But I'm not sure even if it did, that I'd spend money
on solar panels 'cause I'm still working on leaks in my house
that I think are hard to get into knee walls
and New England cape and I think I have a lot to do
to seal my envelope before I go into something like solar.
But I just wanted to show you that there are other things
that we've added to this--
over the years as I give out this energy audit,
I ask students to talk
about their transportation including air or a bus
or a train and then also talk about the energy that goes
into the food that they eat because depending on what kind
of diet you have and whether you eat from foods that come
from very faraway or not, there may be 10 calories
of energy going into every calorie that you ingest and most
of those 10 calories are fossil fuel,
mostly oil and electricity.
So, these are the kinds of things that I do
and I wanted now to sort of transition over
and show what kinds of things could we be thinking about
or what could we do differently.
So, I mentioned before that in US energy consumption,
40 percent is used to generate electricity
and I showed you this renewable piece of the pie is 7 percent.
Well, that's what it is, that's what the seven percent is
and a lot of people think that, "Oh,
we've got solar panels everywhere."
Well, right now, that's making up 1 percent
of our energy supply in this country
and wind is making 7 percent, biomass is--
it changes from year to year depending on some prices,
but we could say biomass is roughly half
and hydroelectric is a third.
When you think of biomass,
do you know what we're talking about?
What do you think biomass might be?
Well, it's biological material that has mass and has energy
that we can then burn in one way or another,
but do you know what I'm--
what that biomass refers to, any guesses?
Ethanol, somebody said ethanol.
And it depends, but some years, it's ethanol and when the price
of corn goes up, maybe then more of it is wood chips,
but it's a combination-- biomass is a combination of ethanol
and wood chips and ethanol is on a lot of people's minds,
but remember that when we use land to grow a fuel,
we're changing the dynamics of people
who use land to grow food.
So, in fact, there is-- when there were few food rights 2,
3 years ago around the world and corn prices went up really high,
a lot of people said that was because of the increased demand
to take corn away from being either a human food product
or an animal feed and using it to make an alcohol,
ethanol, to add to gasoline.
So, there's a whole story there as well, but I want to show you
with this question of: well, if fossil fuels are bad,
and maybe that's a judgmental term there,
fossil fuels are great, they keep us warm,
they provide electricity,
but they adverse environmental consequences.
And if wood is plentiful in New England,
I opened up with a shot, I know there's often hikers
in the room, the shot that I opened
up with was Camel's Hump looking north and west from the sum
of the Camel's Hump, and this is Bog River Flow in the--
near the Raquette River, in the Adirondack.
From last summer, I went there with my son canoeing
and you look at this and you go, "We've got a lot
of trees in New England.
Let's burn some of them and let's use them
for heating our homes or we can't power a car with it,
but we can do a lot of other things, let's think about it."
So, forest harvesting in New England, it has a lot
of attractive ideas, energy independence,
we can get the energy from a local region,
we can replace fossil fuels and we certainly,
I think we'll improve the local economy
and there's question of, is it carbon neutral?
That is, does it have an impact
on the carbon dioxide concentrations
in the atmosphere?
And there's a long history and debate,
I gave you that one slide saying that for a period of time,
the atmosphere, the plants, the bio--
the atmosphere, the plants, and the soil were more or less
in a steady state and as long as you allowed trees to regrow,
I mentioned that if you clear land
and let other things grow back in it's place.
Over time, that is more or less in steady state
over time the theory is that you won't change carbon
dioxide concentrations.
So, the person, the individual who says, "Well,
I burned one quart of wood in my wood stove
and I burned 500 gallons of oil," let's say,
"I'm a recreational wood burner a little bit more than that,
but I'm not really aggressive about it.
Well, if I'm worried about carbon dioxide,
maybe I should burn two quarts per year, double my demand."
Now, if everyone did that,
we'd put a significant increased demand on the forest around us.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, this is some work that I do with Rachel Neurath
who graduated from the Earth Sciences Department
at Dartmouth just this part year and is now teaching Geology
And Environmental Science in Massachusetts
and she made this diagram showing that the effects
of forest harvesting in a undisturbed forest, CO2 is taken
up by trees and CO2 is given off by soils
and by plant respiration and that most undisturbed forest
or at or near steady state which means the carbon flocks
in is equal to the carbon flocks out.
So, as long as you don't change the dynamics of that forest,
they're not necess-- they're not contributing anything
to carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
And if you allow them to do their thing,
maybe they'll even draw down a little bit of the carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere or certainly, they're not going to contribute.
But what happens if you cut the forest?
Well, we know that the carbon nest in the
above ground vegetation, the leaves and the needles
in the wood that you're burning, that's going
to be released to the atmosphere.
We know that.
But overtime, the thinking is that more
of that you leave this land alone and trees come back, well,
first or herbaceous vegetation and then saplings--
seedlings, saplings and then mature trees
and it takes back all that carbon
and that's considered preferable to when I showed you
that early diagram where we're pumping oil from the ground
up into the atmosphere and there's no opportunity
for that carbon dioxide to be reclaimed.
So, in theory, it would make sense to leave the oil
in the ground and burn wood, but there are some things going
on that a few scientists in Canada and here at Dartmouth
and elsewhere are looking and that is the idea of disturbance
at the surface is changing the amount of activity going
on below the surface leading
to greater carbon dioxide losses from the soil.
And this hasn't been fully explored,
this hasn't been fully understand--
understood, but there's some suggestions
that we probably shouldn't call biomass carbon neutral.
That's what the IPCC, the international panel
that I told you about and that's what the EPA says.
So, if you go from burning oil to burning wood
in the EPA accounting system when you burn oil,
you would count that as a carbon dioxide emission
to the atmosphere and if you burn wood, you would not.
And it really is more complicated than that.
It depends on what happens to that land afterwards,
it depends on how the logging was done.
There's a lot of variables.
So, I'm making the story a little bit more complicated.
So, if you're thinking, "I'll stop burning oil
and I'll start burning wood," the conventional wisdom from 5
or 10 years ago is burning wood is carbon neutral
and I don't have to worry about it.
In fact, it might depend on how that wood is obtained.
And so, what I'd say is sorry, but not all the answers are
out right now and let's have a longer discussion
if you're getting ready to stop burning oil and you're going
to start burning 3 or 4 cords of wood per year.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple
as saying that's absolutely a great idea.
It could be a good idea depending on how
that wood is logged and so on.
So, the story that we're seeing is here is a soil
that might have held this much carbon in the mineral horizons.
So, this is under the duff
or the organic horizon, the forest floor.
But we're seeing using chronosequence studies
that there may be losses occurring for up
to 80 years afterwards and only then does it recover.
So, you might say, burning the wood
on a hundred-year cycle is really--
it appears to be carbon neutral, but if you're worried
about changes in carbon dioxide concentrations over the 10
or 20 years, the work that we're doing and the work
that a group is doing in Nova Scotia and a few others,
is suggesting we really got to ask if we lead
to some government policies or other actions
that rapidly changed that, we would want
to ask some questions before we did that.
So, if fossil fuels are bad and wood is plentiful,
why not burn more wood.
John Tierney said, "Just because an idea appeals to a lot
of people doesn't mean it's wrong."
But that's a good working theory that you could say
about the carbon dioxide discussion at the beginning,
and so healthy skepticism
and being a contrarian is a good idea.
I like a lot of ideas that John Tierney puts
out in the New York Times and elsewhere, but I guess I'd want
to say with wood, we should continue to ask some questions,
but we should maybe proceed and proceed cautiously.
So, what does that do?
The last part I want to tell you is what does Dartmouth do?
Or actually, I want to tell you about Dartmouth
for a few minutes and then about the role of business.
So, Dartmouth generates, as I mentioned,
steam to heat the buildings and heat hot water
and co-generates electricity with that steam before it goes
out to the buildings by letting it pass through a turbine
and that's generating probably half of the electricity
in this room right now.
It's number 6 fuel oil which is not a pleasant substance.
Its thick and gooey, it doesn't flow at room temperature
and it contains plenty of toxic metals like mercury and lead
and arsenic and that's what we burn right behind New Hamp Dorm
and right over and behind the Hopkins Center
and that's what we've been doing for,
I think about a hundred years.
So, that's the story and we have had a committee that's been
meeting with a bunch of working groups over the last year
or so looking at and defining sustainability.
So, let's say that sustainability, one definition
that we've used is meeting the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their needs and you might hear
about it also referred to as worrying about the planet,
the people, and the profit.
And that's the idea that we're concerned
about the biogeochemical cycles and other processes
on the planet and the health of organisms.
We're worried about the people; we certainly don't want
to exploit people or cause them to undo harm,
breathing in toxic chemicals, whatever it might be.
And we also have to pursue ideas that are going
to pay for themselves.
Maybe they're not in 1 year or 2 years, but certainly, in 5 years
and no more than 10 years.
We cannot be investing in things that are going
to have a hundred-year of financial payoffs,
although maybe we'd want to consider it
if it had some drastic environmental payoff.
But we're really talking about things
that are a good investment for any company
which might be 4 years and maybe stretching
that a little further to 8 or 10 years.
On different plat-- campuses around the country,
you also might hear it as the climate action plan.
What are we going to do to halt this seemingly human cost change
in the climate?
So, we have a Sustainability Steering Committee here
on campus that was chaired by--
sorry, that was convened provost Folt and I'm one
of the Co-Chairs, Vice President for Facilities and Planning.
Linda Snyder is another Vice-- is another Co-Chair.
We are working actively with Sustainability Director,
Rosi Kerr of the class of '97, she's been on campus working
for the past year and there are many working groups;
one is co-chaired by Professor Anne Kapuscinski
who is the current Chair
of the Environmental Studies Program and is here today.
I didn't know that she was going to be here.
Good thing I put her name up on the slide.
And there are many others, there are students
and there are graduate students and there are faculty
and there are various employees of the college
in different capacities working in a number of ways
and a deeper shade of green,
Dartmouth will build upon our unique strengths and traditions
to become a model of sustainability practice
and leadership by 2016.
That's what we're proposing to put forward
to the Strategic Planning Committee that's working
under that direction of the provost and president to look
at all sorts of activities for Dartmouth
and we're making the case that we believe
that sustainability learning
and sustainability action are a vital part of the future
of Dartmouth and Rosi,
aside from being the Sustainability Director,
is a very good-- instant, she does this like in a second
about 10 seconds, 30 seconds, she'll draw one of this
and this is Mount Sustainability up here
and this is what we want:
Dartmouth in green leading the pack.
And we are doing many things
that I would say are leading the pack right now.
But collectively, I don't think we are and our goal is
in five years to be up here.
So, that's something that you can ask about
and keep your ears open about and you'll be hearing about it,
but I want to tell you that we are looking
at energy alternatives for Dartmouth.
So, right now, we get out electricity from the grid,
from various power companies that provide electricity.
We're looking at things like offsite wind which we could buy
or maybe we should own it.
I'm not sure we should get in to the wind farm business,
but we do have an organic farm,
so maybe we could farm wind as well.
Solar vault-- photovoltaic or solar thermal and we're looking
at different choices for fuel supply.
Things like right now, we use number 6,
but should we use wood chips or wood pellets?
Should we use waste vegetable oil?
Should we use liquefied natural gas or propane gas?
What if we could get a pipeline to be run
to hand over in Lebanon.
Given the difficulty of running electrical transmission lines,
as you might know from various-- that might be a challenge,
but nevertheless, we should look at these things.
And if you know about a portfolio, you know,
don't put all your eggs in one basket.
You're planning your retirement, nobody would have a portfolio
that looks like that where that stacks or that's one company,
but that's our current portfolio.
80 or 85 percent of our energy on campus comes
from number 6 fuel oil.
Not a wise thing for an institution for the future,
we don't what's going to happen to oil supplies
or even just temporary interruptions in oil supply.
Grid electricity is 17 percent and we use a little bit
of diesel and gasoline.
So, could we get to a place someday
where we're a hundred percent renewable
and this is just an optimistic grid renewable increasing our
energy efficiency by reducing demand
and doing things more effectively with the same amount
of energy, alternative fuels, student projects
of various sorts, on-site renewables, could we get there?
How would we get there?
That's some of the things
that our Sustainability Steering Committee Working Groups are
looking at and we want student classes and student projects
and community groups to work and give us input on this.
And the last thing I want to show you about is the whole idea
of smart meters, everyone is getting very upset
about smart meters now that are being installed in this area.
And just recently, some people have had them for years
and I always find it interesting,
when we have wireless everywhere
and this contains electromagnetic field that puts
out light, everybody doesn't worry
about it 'cause they love their wireless, they go have coffee
in a place that is free wireless.
Now, we're talking about putting meters that might allow you,
this is a Goggle software product that uses TED,
The Energy Detective, but it's the idea
that you could instantaneously find
out what electricity is being used in your house
from your handheld laptop or iPad or a smartphone
and you could look at it from a TED monitor
and it would tell you.
And so if you're sitting around the dinner table
and you just have one light on and there's big spike like that,
you might say, "Well, what is going
on in this house that's using so much electricity?"
And perhaps you didn't realize that 3D humidifiers were running
or you left on five television sets, I'm kind of exaggerating,
but the idea is it would make you a lot more aware
of your electricity usage.
So, if we know the energy usage of the country,
this is a different kind of pie, a spaghetti diagram
that the Department of Energy puts out, but here it is: coal,
25 percent and our different petroleum from imports
and domestic, but we know where it goes, residential,
commercial, industrial transportation.
The last thing I want to show you is the idea
that there are people working on it in business as well,
they're not getting government mandates to do this
and that group that I am really fascinated by is--
has anybody heard of Nest?
The Nest Learning Thermostat?
A group who developed the iPhone left Apple
and they've been working secretly, more or less secretly
for the last two years.
And just this month, they launched they're product.
They knew very much that residential use
of energy is 23-- call it one quarter of our energy usage
in the country and they knew that half of that is heating
and air conditioning controlled by you.
Well, not entirely true if you live in an apartment building
or you live in some kind of community housing, you may not,
but most individual,
single-dwelling homeowners have a thermostat or more than one
that they can control.
And these people at Nest, these offshoots
of very creative people from the iPhone said, "Let's go ahead
and target that 10 or 12 percent of the energy in this country
and let's see if we can lower it."
So, they came out with this thing called the Nest Learning
Thermostat and they have a very glitzy advertisement
that sounds a lot like an iPhone commercial.
It's got the ukulele in the background
and it has all this beautiful images
and what they are saying is that this is a learning thermostat,
so you can set it and tell it to lower the temperature
when you go to sleep, but it has a motion sensor and it knows
when you're in and out of the house.
And it starts to learn your patterns
and lower the temperature of your house
when there's no motion for more than 30 minutes.
You can log in from offsite over the web because it has a--
it's wireless, it's connect to the network over a wireless
and you can know you're coming home
and you've set the temperature down to 50 and it's the middle
of the winter, so you're going to bring it up to 62 before--
an hour before you get home, but that might be using some energy,
but it allows you to have had the temperature set down to 50
for the last 12 or 24 or 36 hours that you've been away.
It's a really clever thing.
I was thinking I would show you the commercial,
but you can go find it on YouTube,
Nest Learning Thermostat.
The release date was November 14--
I showed it to my class the day they announced it
on November 7th and there were 3,000 hits on YouTube.
I think there are now 500,000 hits on YouTube
for this commercial and the whole unit,
it's made by people using the model of the iPhone
and I'm sure it's made in China and they're all sorts of issues
about the resource used for that, it's going to retail
for 250 dollars which is probably five times the cost
of a typical programmable thermostat
or certainly twice the price.
But it's already sold out,
I don't know how many units they originally thought they'd sell,
50,000, 100,000, it's backordered through I think now,
February 2012, and I don't even know
if you could get one although I saw one on eBay the other day.
So, I bring this up is-- this is business.
This is business knowing about that
and saying we can do something about it.
So, I just want to suggest that's the other thing.
So, getting back to the point of, you know,
hot political issues in the election
or in the primary that's going on in a debate right now.
There is certainly a role for governments to encourage,
I don't know about require carbon emission reductions
or carbon dioxide emission reductions, but until then,
knowledge about how to reduce carbon emissions can be used
by individuals, institutions like Dartmouth, and business
by Nest Learning Thermostats.
Individuals can make their own choices
and as I have alluded to, all choices have consequences.
So, you know, even wind turbines out far away
from anybody can generate a lot of adverse reaction
for a variety of reasons and I-- while you are in here,
they started constructing the three wind turbines on the green
that will be-- actually, that would be a very bad place,
it's not windy enough to put,
but I think it would have some other problems, just a few.
But those are the things that we need to be thinking about and I
like the kind of ideas that probably some of you had heard
at one point from Noel Perrin who I currently spend half
of my time teaching at Dartmouth, half farming
and half writing that this adds
up to three halves I am all too aware.
Noel Perrin who I taught with and is a colleague of mine,
he published a book in 1992 about an electric car
that he had built in California and he drove across the country
and had to give it up because he just--
he was charging at hotel by running chords
through the windows of his hotel room.
And he says in the introduction, these project started
when a Dartmouth undergraduate raised her hand
after he had been bemoaning all these people
who used fossil fuels and she said to him, "Professor Perrin,"
very respectfully, "how did you get here today?"
And he drove a gasoline car to work that day.
And that was the start of this book
which is 20 years ahead of the time.
You now can get electric cars and plug in electric cars.
And so, those are the kinds of things that happen
when you have the practical and the academic
and really talented students all mixing together,
and we have right now an organic farm.
We have a sustainable living center with solar panels,
these are solar thermal panels on the roof making the hot water
for this building and a neighboring building.
We've got the big green bus that runs
around the country every summer on waste vegetable oil.
So, there is plenty we can do.
I think there is lots we can do and it's--
as Dana Meadows [phonetic] used to say, "It's not too late
if we start right now."
So, I am interested in your observations and your thoughts.
I think there is reason for optimism.
I don't think the political arena is the place that's--
and anything is happening in this country,
but there are plenty of interested people
and institution and business and I'd love to hear your thoughts
or comments or questions.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
[ Silence ]