Press Clipping(s): Nations, States, Provinces Announce Carbon Markets Partnership Targeting Global Warming

Nations, States, Provinces Announce Carbon Markets Partnership Targeting Global Warming

Green Car Congress

A coalition of European countries, US states, Canadian provinces, New Zealand and Norway have formed the International Carbon Action Partnership to fight global warming.

ICAP will provide an international forum in which governments and public authorities adopting mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cap and trade systems will share experiences and best practices on the design of emissions trading schemes. This cooperation will ensure that the programs are more compatible and are able to work together as the foundation of a global carbon market to boost demand for low-carbon products and services, promote innovation, and allow cost effective reductions so as to allow swift and ambitious global reductions in global warming emissions.

The international and interregional agreement was signed today by US and Canadian members of the Western Climate Initiative (Arizona, British Columbia, California, Manitoba, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington); northeastern US members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York); and European members including the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and the European Commission. New Zealand and Norway joined on behalf of their emissions trading programs.

The new partnership supports the current ongoing efforts undertaken under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which all ICAP members agree has a central role in fighting global warming.

ICAP proposes to facilitate global solutions to warming by:

•  Rigorously and accurately monitoring, reporting and verifying emissions and working to determine reliable sources appropriate for inclusion in a globally linked program.
• Encouraging common approaches and furthering partners´ability to link together to expand the global carbon market, helping to prevent leakage.
• Creating a clear price incentive to innovate, develop and use clean technologies.
• Encouraging private investors to chose low carbon projects and technologies, generating the flow of money needed to support a shift to a low-carbon future.
• Providing flexible compliance mechanisms that ensure reliable reductions at the fastest pace and lowest cost.

Pakistan: A Nation Struggles - A Page from History

A good friend had found this (Jan 5, 194 Life magazine issue on a street hawker’s blanket while coming out of the Hynes Convention Center ‘T’ stop in Boston. I have a copy of it in my records. There are some very interesting cuttings that can be shared here…The following seems appropriately interesting to share here.

Another MIT Hack … and Harvard again on the receiving end!

MIT does it again to Harvard.
Rob and I (R&B as one just called us) often jest with each other about the MIT Harvard rivalry, esp who adds more value. I tell him about the entrepreneurship spirit among MIT grads, and how we have contributed hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy, and then he tells me how Harvard grads make great bosses of MIT alums. Damn it! We clearly make an interesting team at the same time

In recognition of the release of Halo 3, a highly anticipated video game by Microsoft and Bungie, MIT hackers adorned the John P. Harvard statue, in Harvard Yard, with a Spartan helmet. The back of the helmet, which is worn by the protagonist of the game, Master Chief, was labeled with “Master Chief in Training.” The statue was decorated with an assault rifle (bullet count of 2E), as well as a Beaver emblem on the right shoulder.

Source: The Tech

What’s Wrong With Energy Investments?

As I indicated before, I have become a big fan of the reporting and writing on Xconomy.com. Bill Aulet has posted several articles on xconomy and two recent ones are just simply must read. He titled them “What’s Wrong with Energy Investing” Parts I&II.

In “What’s Wrong with Energy Investing? Part I“ Bill articulates well the need to not lose sight of finding efficiencies in a largely hydrocarbon-based economy as we work on renewable energy sources:

While there clearly used to be a shortage of private equity capital for energy ventures (and rightly so because of their highly cyclic nature), that problem has gone away. Money is now gushing in. By my simple calculations, the amount of money available to energy ventures from dedicated private-equity funds quadrupled from 2005 to 2006, soaring from approximately $5B to $20B. I believe this is even understated. The point is that the money is flowing in at an amazing rate. But where is it going? Energy as a sector is almost as non-specific as technology or transportation. We have to peel back the label and take a closer look.

The lion’s share of the money that is dedicated to energy is earmarked for renewable or alternative energy. Renewable or alternative energy is a fantastic thing and it is necessary, but wholly insufficient, to deal with the energy problem. The biggest part of the energy riddle that needs to be solved resides—and will continue to reside for the next 50 years—with the hydrocarbon side. How do we find more to meet the booming demand? And, how do we find ways, through technology, process, and/or business-model innovation, to reduce the environmental impact of hydrocarbon usage? Renewables is a rounding error when compared to the 80 to 90 percent of the demand that hydrocarbons (i.e., oil, gas, coal—ah!, there it is the four-letter word of energy) fill and will continue to fill for the foreseeable future.

We should and must invest in renewables and alternative energy for the future and there will be some big wins there relative to investing. But with all the new money and attention rushing into this small part of the sector, we are majoring in minors. The major focus should be how do we deal with the continued need for hydrocarbons and how do we make this cleaner energy. Just to put this in perspective, the world would be dramatically better off from an energy-supply standpoint if we could find a way to improve recovery rates at oil and gas wells by 1 percent than if we built a million new wind turbines. If we could find a way to reduce CO2 emissions from automobiles by 1 percent it would be, from a quantitative and practical point of view, thousands of times more positively impactful than increasing solar energy production by a hundred times.

Here is a comment I left on his website:

I did a quick back of the envelope calculation based on your point that without tackling the hydrocarbon economy’s efficiency problems, we would be “majoring with the minors”. In the near term, you are quite right!

US population traveled roughly 3 trillion miles last year that emitted 984 million tons of CO2. If we went the direction of Europe and used ‘clean diesels - for even just 50% of our transportation usage - a conservative estimate would show us gaining 12-13% reduction in CO2 emissions. If we also chose to follow EU that is recommending 120g/km of CO2 emissions in 2012, then we will observe a conservative estimate of 20-22% reduction in CO2. That is more than 200 tons of CO2 from just the transportation sector alone. And this technology is available now! Not tomorrow, and not dependent on improvements in battery technologies or massive changes in our infrastructure.

Press Clipping(s): Chef Bilal - Bringing a new kind of kitchen to Woburn?

Wade Roush, a fellow MIT alum and a star journalist (of MIT Technology Review fame) just covered GEO2 Technologies at Xconomy.com. I love his writing style, but let me tell you this. I am amazed how quickly he understood the intricacies of not just our materials processing capabilities, but also the product performance metrics that are of importance in the emissions control industry.

Check out Xconomy.com, a Boston based technology/startup blog that has a very high quality of reporting.

Here’s an excerpt from the xconomy post on us:

What’s the common thread between the space shuttle’s thermal tiles, log-cabin mansions in Aspen, Play-Doh, pasta makers, and diesel engines? There is one—really—but to find out what it is, you have to pay a visit to GEO2 Technologies in Woburn. The clean-energy startup has turned an industrial warehouse just off I-95 into a giant kitchen-laboratory, complete with giant microwave, for baking advanced diesel-exhaust filters.

Most exhaust filters are designed as honeycombs of interlocking tunnels made of conventional ceramics. Zuberi and Lachenauer say the company spent more a year on an ultimately futile attempt to make these honeycombs by boring holes in big blocks of microfiber-based ceramics. The holes were too large and imprecise, and the process was wasteful, since more than half of the material in a bored-out microfiber block would have to be thrown away.

That’s when it occurred to Zuberi and Lachenauer that the process normally used with conventional ceramics, extrusion, might work better. But nobody had ever figured out how to blend ceramic microfibers into the Play-Doh-like consistency needed for the extrusion process, in which the material is squeezed through holes in a die, similar to the extruding discs used in pasta makers but with much more complicated geometries. So GEO2 experimented with different kind of microfibers and binding agents until it found the right blend. The company ultimately bought a whole assembly line of industrial-strength kitchen gadgets to make the filters, including a giant mixer, a torpedo-sized extruder, a 15-foot-tall microwave oven (to dry the extruded filters) and a large sintering oven (to fire them).

Thank you to New York on Eid!

Despite all that has been wrong with American foreign and domestic policies, I give a lot of credit to Americans for this. Muslim hijackers brought down the tallest buildings in their largest city - and what do they do (eventually)? They light up the next tallest building in the same city (Empire State Building) in green lights to mark the most important Muslim festival of Eid. Thank you, New York! Thank you, USA!

US Electricity Data Sheet: MIT Energy Club

I attended the 3rd MIT Energy Night yesterday. Great event, well organized, and one could literally feel the passion that the students displayed in putting it together. I consider myself fortunate to be invited.

MIT Energy Club has put together this fact sheet on US electricity production and consumption that is quite handy. I share it here for the Energy buffs….

Some interesting high level features:
Total Capacity: 1000 GW
Total Generation: 4×10^12 kWe-hr
Total CO2 emissions:2.5 gigtons (metric)

Link here: electricityus.pdf

Eid ul-Fitr Mubarak - 2007

A good bye to the wonderful month of Ramadan:

and Eid Mubarik to all of you:

Eid in Space: A great day for Malaysia

EID IN SPACE: BAIKONUR (Kazakhstan): Malaysian astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor (top), Russian Yury Malenchenko and Nasa’s Peggy Whitson wave before boarding a space capsule at the cosmodrome here on Wednesday. The capsule, Soyuz, later thrust into a clear evening sky over the Kazakh steppe towards the International Space Station. Muszaphar has said his trip, paid for by the Malaysian government, is a great step for his nation. Arriving near the end of Ramazan, he will celebrate Eid on the space station and plans to treat the other crew to festive Malaysian food. The 35-year-old doctor who has spent a year training for the flight in Russia, is one of very few Muslims to have travelled to space. In Kuala Lumpur, his parents recited prayers and were tearful as they watched the rocket carrying their son streak up into the sky.—Reuters

Earthquake in Pakistan: 2nd anniversary

It is the 2nd anniversary of the terrible earthquake that hit the northern areas of Pakistan. Much has been said about the earthquake, the lack of warning systems, the tragedy that struck victims living in poorly constructed homes, and the chaos after the quake that left many homeless and in desperate need of external intervention.

I recount below what ATP posted exactly one year ago in terms of the devastation that was caused by this massive earthquake. There is no other point in recounting this human tragedy but to remember and reinforce the necessity that the victims still need help. International aid agencies have all but left the region and the rebuilding effort is slow, plagued with charges of corruption, and philanthropic efforts slowing down.

But then I see the photo above (originally posted on ATP) and I think it says it all. The pain, the need, and the hope in her eyes. As a human being and as a fellow Pakistani, she deserves more than we as a community have been able to do so far. So the only thing I can do is to ask you to give more, and to give such that it reaches people like her quickly and efficiently.

Total dead in Earthquake = 80,000 - 90,000
Estimated proportion of children amongst dead = 80 percent
Estimated houses destroyed = 400,000
Early recovery assistance pledged by international donors = US$ 255 Million
Early recovery pledges that have NOT been received yet = US$ 94 Million
Original estimate of long-term reconstruction costs = US$ 3.6 Billion
Current (updated) estimate of long-term reconstruction costs = US$ 4.4 Billion
Current estimated shortfall = US$ 800 Million
Total displaced by Earthquake = 3,500,000
Affectees still living in tents in camps = 35,000 - 40,000
At-risk families without permanent shelter = 60,000 - 100,000
Additional people who might need shelter this winter = 30,000 - 60,000