The economics of climate change, sustainablity, veganism, health and then some

"There is, however, a moral basis for the vegetarian diet for which the indeterminate value of an animal’s life takes on irrelevance. And that moral basis is a concern for the environment, a value as absolute as the value we all place on human life, since humanity will not long survive on a poisoned planet. To be an environmentalist who happens to eat meat is like being a philanthropist who doesn’t happen to give to charity."  (Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat" by Howard F. Lyman, Glen Merzer")

Rational capital allocation is not our forte as a society. Indulging human foibles is more like it. The dialog about climate change is a case in point. If 51% of GHG-emissions is due to animal husbandry and the self-destructive habit of eating meat, and moreover the our nastiest health problems (heart disease, osteoporosis, cancer, CJD, antibiotic resistant bacteria et al.) are partially or wholly attributable to the same self-destructive habit, then why is it not on the agenda for serious discussion?

For me, there is a personal side to the story, I was raised vegetarian, as in lacto-vegetarian, and though I realized a long time ago that milk was for baby cows and not for human consumption, I loved cheese. From my late teens to my early twenties I became more of an omnivore, but after age forty, I simply noticed a tendency to vegetarianism, ever so slowly, but without any particularly strong commitment. I simply drifted towards a more vegetarian lifestyle. In the last ten years health issues made me gradually more and more interested, and I got briefly interested in the Esselstyn diet that was made famous when former President Bill Clinton switched from Mickey D's to veganism. The first time I read the Esselstyn book, I was half-hearted about it. An old friend and I were both experimenting with this diet for a while, and kept some ideas from it, without necessarily going through with it, but the drift continued, aided by the growing realization that even if I did not have any symptoms of hearth disease, why wait till I did? In the last two years all dairy was permanently phased out. For Christmas a giant apple-pie came along, and while I enjoyed it, I also informed Santa Claus that this would be my last apple-pie until after my funeral. Who needs all that white flour and sugar? Most importantly the last year especially, I found myself enjoying food more as I discovered more and more vegan recipes that I really liked.

Meanwhile I am into planning the energy economics for some real-estate developments, and looking into vertical agriculture options in an urban setting, while at the same time I am listening to feedback from my community, Community Board #9 in the Bronx, where a young mother of two stated0 in a recent planning session that she did not want another fast food restaurant in our district, and a young man in the same session was polling people on the idea of establishing a food co-op in our area. But a local supermarket just lost their lease, and that neighborhood is screaming for a half-way decent supermarket to fill the vacuum.

Against that personal backdrop, I have been reading Howard Lyman's Mad Cowboy book, and watching some documentaries on YouTube, including:

• Cowspiracy, a brilliant documentary of our collective economical and environmental and nutritional insanity from 2014, which included an appearance by Howard Lyman, the Mad Cowboy.
• Then came Earthlings, another brilliant piece on the gruesome realities of  the animal husbandry system.
• Next was Gary Yourovsky, who verbalizes it all brilliantly, here, including the most viewed speech in Israeli history here.
• And finally, I had to revisit the whole Howard Lyman story, which I was only vaguely aware of when Oprah and he got sued in 1996, but now it was time to refresh that experience, and this documentary about the Mad Cowboy just his the spot.
• Since I first wrote this post, it got even better, see the story of the Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, yet another rancher to vegan story.

And at the final end it is the economist in me who basically realizes that economics will prevail in the end, and we are well on our way to veganism. It will take a few generations, but choices are multiplying now, with more and more vegan food choices, and now even fast food restaurants, it is clear that change is on the agenda. The group of people who turn vegan and get off their meds is growing - the perfect answer to our out of control healthcare system, so not only can the planet not afford animal husbandry, we cannot afford the health consequences of eating all that meat and dairy. I had a home visit from a nurse practitioner from my health insurance provider, and the guy fell of his chair, for just the week before the doctor had taken me off all meds, or rather confirmed that I was doing great without them - not that I was taking that many but still... On top of that, I know I feel more stamina at the gym.

One of the big things I am realizing about net-zero development is that moving combustion out of residential spaces is one of the biggest things we can do for indoor air quality, and this in turn adds to real estate values. Insights like that are pretty potent if you live in the asthma capital of the world, the Bronx. So there is a straightforward connection between economics, environment and health. 

The same goes for vertical agriculture: it is now economical to grow fresh vegetables in an urban setting, and eliminate chemical agriculture, and thousands of miles of transportation, to get better, fresher, healthier vegetables, as you can see in this little video from Terrashpere. 

And the transition to more and more vegan living will eliminate the most obvious food safety problems, a vast array of health problems, as well as unsustainable agriculture in the service of animal husbandry. Again, economics, environment and health all go hand in hand. And the forces that drives us towards a more sustainable economy are absolutely inexorable. Veganism is a new idea today, or so it seems to many, but it is unavoidable economically. We are literally at the point of realizing that we are feeding the pigs at the expense of human beings, and wiping out the rain forests to raise cattle, which is the most insane misuse of land that ever was. It is that inexorable force of economics and sustainability, that is driving us towards a more sustainable, and therefore increasingly vegan, lifestyle.

Since I originally wrote this post, I have also started a blog on vegan living in my hood.

Greenwashing Galore, in Energy and Otherwise

Greenwashing is a derogatory term which is gaining some currency because of all the marketing hype. Even the FTC has recently beefed up its marketing guidelines to prevent greenwashing, and who knows, may go after offenders. The criteria are interesting, and should be grounds for some rethinking of certain business strategies. Greenwashing lawsuits are on the rise.

If you call your product or service "green" you need to be able to back it up with specific benefits and verifiable claims. There goes the ConEdison GreenTeam. There is nothing green about them that I can tell. On this blog I have discussed in-depth how energy efficiency and green energy are not synonymous, and even often mutually exclusive, even if green energy must incorporate energy efficiency in its own right. Clearly, the implied claim rests on the more general confusion that 'energy saving' is somehow green, let alone interchangeable with green energy in achieving sustainability.

The implicit assumption in many programs is that renewable energy and energy savings will add up to create sustainability, but that is only the case in very limited circumstances, and requires proper economic analysis and engineering. In most cases, the opposite is true. Does it make any difference if the Titanic goes down in 5 minutes or 10? Do you want to invest in that proposition? This is about rearranging the deck chairs on the good ship and it has no relevance to any meaningful concept of sustainability. This approach is all about appearances, it is a mere marketing ploy, because energy savings merely increases demand, so it expands the franchise. If in doubt, check out the recent book by Steve Hallett: The Efficiency Trap: Finding a Better Way to Achieve a Sustainable Energy Future. This book is the behavioral corollary to the problem of diminishing returns with "investing" in energy savings, which arguably is not an investment at all. It is unclear why property owners should foot the bill for becoming better customers of their energy providers if they have other options.

Energy Savings do not add up

The confusion generally starts from the top, for even at the highest levels the confusion that all energy savings and energy efficiency is 'green' is nearly universal. Besides Steve Hallett's behavioral argument that efficiency expands demand, the sad economic fact is also that energy savings is a dead-end street from an investment standpoint, because of diminishing returns. On top of that, because of good engineering reasons, energy efficiency and renewable energy are often mutually exclusive. In many cases, the energy savings incentives reduce the adoption of renewable energy, and are thus anathema to sustainability. Accordingly, for the most part, institutions like NYSERDA are often really a customer retention program for the energy industry.

• Energy efficiency of a fossil-fuel burning energy infrastructure prolongs the use of fossil fuel by extending its economic attractiveness.
• Energy efficiency is only green in the context of renewable energy.
• Incentives based on energy efficiency are a waste of money, for they postpone the switch to renewables, and subsidize energy companies and equipment manufacturers at the expense of property owners. Energy companies could legitimately offer incentives for investments in efficiency on the basis of customer retention, but public moneys should not be used, nor levies on customers, like the NYSERDA funding through the SBC.
• Energy savings in a fossil fuel context may arguably be green, if there is no feasible alternative, then it's simply the best alternative. But as long as economically viable renewable alternatives exist, any semblance of a green claim for any energy savings that displace viable investments in sustainability are a patent lie.
• Any financing or tax incentives that promote specific equipment or equipment standards (such as Energy Star) as prerequisites for qualification for subsidies, or even financing at all, should be outlawed if they distract from the overall project and force property owners to make sub-optimal decisions. However well intended, this type of tokenism amounts to greenwashing.

Greenwashing: falsifying claims

• Tankless hot water heaters are nearly always a bad idea, and certainly should not qualify for an energy star program. Domestic Hot Water storage is one of the cheapest and most affordable energy storage solutions in renewable installations. Both with solar thermal and with geothermal, heat can be stored, for geothermal in pre-heated water, and for solar thermal as process heat, or also as preheated water for consumption. Tankless hot water heaters should only ever be used where we are unable to access either of those two technologies.
• Solar PV PPAs, are nearly always a bad idea, and a gross consumer swindle. A nice shiny solar array on your roof saves you pennies on your electric bill, and shows the neighbors your house is "green," but it deprives you for 20 years of valuable real estate, which could have been put to better use with either wind power, which in many cases has better energy yield, or solar thermal which has 700% higher efficiency (because of 500% higher output and the ability to store energy). Property owners are simply getting bamboozled by would-be energy efficiency experts, aided by various incentive programs.
• Generally any program, such as most PACE programs, NYSERDA MPP, (and equivalent programs in other states), and special, subsidized financing for energy retrofits, which mandate energy savings to trump renewable energy really lure property owners into making substantially bad decisions, without ever considering better alternatives.

How energy savings kills renewable energy

Green Fools Only

Energy savings claims, and the appeal to "green" mainly trade on emotional appeal, but they are simply a sales tool for equipment manufacturers and for energy companies. In the selling process, there is a whole energy savings and energy efficiency industry that has sprung up, some contractors, but many of them posturing as consultants, who in essence posture as if they are helping building owners, but between employing the false objective of energy savings, and the high school level financial modeling based on the payback of equipment, the economic decisions that property owners should make are dumbed down to the point that owners sacrifice the potential for property appreciation by embracing ineffective programs.

As long as we are modeling energy savings as a one time objective at a given point in time, and employ equipment payback as the criteria, and falsify the decisions further with incentives,  we are bamboozling property owners into inferior economic decisions, which limit the potential for property appreciation. The simple fact is renewable energy is not an energy savings technology, but an investment in generating capacity, and a permanent upgrade of the asset, which would require a proper capital budget. It is a proper investment decision. Energy savings is not really an investment but an operational expense, so it is bizarre that in effect energy vendors are getting owners to be liable for investments to ensure that they continue to buy their energy, as in solar PPAs. In other words, by using payback as a criteria, presentations are always handicapped in favor of quick energy savings fixes, and the more capital-intensive renewable energy choices drop to the bottom of the list, because the 25 or 30 years of no energy bills do not enter the equation, and people are fooled by the fact that it takes a few years more to pay off the equipment.

The methodologies that are used handicap renewable energy and are backhanded subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

Conclusion

Energy savings does not add up to sustainability. It has green pretensions but it cannot deliver. It may or may not technically violate the FTC's rules for green marketing claims, but it does the opposite of what it claims. Prioritizing energy savings in existing fossil fuel based infrastructure serves to postpone sustainability, and is de facto a form of greenwashing, and deprives property owners of superior options.