Note: Boston Green Drinks will be discussing the provisions of the Boxer/Kerry bill, and its impact on the environment, with Ben Wright, the Global Warming Advocate at Environment Massachusetts, on Nov. 3 at 7 pm.  I hope to see you there!

Last week, Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act in the US Senate.  This is the Senate's version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman/Markey bill, which passed the House in June.  The legislation would, among other things, set a nationwide renewable energy portfolio and create a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Although I write a lot about ideas for renewable energy and energy efficiency which can be pursued by individuals, organizations, and businesses with minimal governmental support, the fact is that major governmental action is needed to stop catastrophic climate change.  The problem is simply too huge to leave to the private sector.  Moreover, current government policies encourage the unsustainable practices, including dirty fuel energy production, excessive driving at low mileage, and deforestation, which are the main factors in catastrophic climate change; the government should reverse this destructive path.  With regards to Congressional action specifically, climate change will have massive impacts on interstate commerce and national security, and it is therefore Congress's constitutional responsibility to take action on this issue.

The immediate task before anyone who wants to avoid catastrophic climate change is to push the Senate to pass the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to push the Congress to merge the two bills and to pass the final legislation.  Ideally, the final passage would be accomplished before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, set for Dec. 10.

If you've paid any attention to the debate on health care reform, you're no doubt aware that passing major legislation in Congress, and especially in the Senate, is not a piece of cake.  There are dozens if not hundreds of hurdles, amendments, votes, procedural questions, and sundry sub-plots to track.  There are massive, and in some cases very wealthy, interests who want to have a say.  There are lines in the sand, and it's often quite difficult to tell when they have been crossed, who is acting in good faith, what's just a feint, and what is going on behind the scenes.

With regards to the Boxer/Kerry bill, it appears that there will be at least a few major issues with the bill:

• Will the bill, in its final form, allow the EPA to continue regulating greenhouse gases?
• Will the bill encourage green collar job creation, thereby spreading renewable energy prosperity broadly?
• What numerical targets will be set for renewable energy creation and emission reductions, and how aggressive will the timetables be?
• Will the bill rely on carbon capture, or support natural gas as an intermediary solution, in emission reductions?
• When will the bill pass, and how will the Senate bill be merged with the House bill?

Clearly, the debate on this bill will be just as complicated, if not more so, than the debate on health care reform, and a great deal of work needs to be done to track the progress on these issues, and to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.

Luckily, there are plentiful tools available to organize this massive and complex stream of information, and there is already a decent-sized body of practice in tracking legislation and holding leaders accountable, particularly within the progressive blogosphere and other social media forums.  But it seems to me that blogs, wikis, social media streams, and Twitter feeds, for all their power, are not really sophisticated enough to capture the complexity of the climate change debate.  All of these sources have the main weakness that they are mainly suited to highlighting one thing at a time, whereas the climate change debate requires us to keep track of multiple things at once - the five questions I listed above, and perhaps a few others.  It would be nice to have a site where a visitor could get a quick glimpse of the status and recmmended action for each of these issues.

The best infrastructure for creating such a complex site, in my opinion, is Drupal, the content management system used in almost every Lightbulb First project.  As it happens, there is an excellent distribution of Drupal targeted specifically at supporting online newspaper sites, called ProsePoint.

I'd like to see someone create and maintain a ProsePoint site whose main focus is to track stories on the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to organize civic action to push legislators to vote the right way on the bill.  Now, Prosepoint is mainly intended as a tool to manage news sites, not to oragnize civic action, but it's not hard to imagine extending the basic software a bit to incorporate activism.  One approach would be to add a "Suggested action" field to the Store content type, and then to extend the theme to highlight actions alongside the story body in some way.  Another approach would be to create a separate "Action item" content type, and to allow those content items to be attached to stories.  This latter approach might work better, as it would enable the creation of different types of actions - e.g. signing a petition, calling Senators, donating to an activist group or to a Senator who helped push the legislation along, etc.  It would also allow the site editors to highlight important actions over the course of several stories.

What I like about ProsePoint is its native support for multiple channels, which is vitally important for the climate change debate.  Channels are found on almost every news site these days; the channels at the top of the ProsePoint demo site include "National", "World", and "Business".  To track the questions I listed above for the Boxer/Kerry bill, it would be easy enough to create channels with titles like "EPA authority", "Green collar", "Renewable energy standard", "Carbon capture", and "Legislative calendar" (although I'm sure that someone with more experience managing online news sites could come up with something a bit snappier.)

Moreover, the software includes personalization capabilities, which appear to be focused around allowing visitors to easily access the stories most interesting to them through a "My Magazine" page.  Unfortunately the documentation for these features is not too clear, but these features could be a good foundation for giving visitors the tools to focus on the stories and actions most interesting to them, and also to recruit their friends and personal networks to support the elements of the bill they are most passionate about.

The biggest challenge in running such a site would be time and money.  If (and this is a rather big "if") the bill is indeed passed by Dec. 10, then the time frame for launching, stocking, and marketing a major new site focused solely on the Boxer/Kerry bill is indeed quite short.  And don't forget that we need to account for the time to incorporate or find an existing organizational home, untangle legal issues, put together a decent design, etc.

On top of that, such a site would require at minimum a part-time contributor, and probably more like one or two full-time staff.  Even for a couple of months, at a decent salary for each staff person, the costs for the site could run into the $30-40,000 range.  Unless the site manages an exceptional amount of traffic, online advertising certainly won't cover those costs.  Instead, I would suggest corporate or organizational sponsorship.  There are certainly no shortage of public interest groups for whom passage of the bill would be priceless, and there are now several major corporations lobbying for aggressive passage of the bill.  Beyond these big-name brands, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of nascent renewable energy and energy efficiency companies for whom the bill is a major boon, and who should be willing to kick in a little money to promote passage of the bill.

Even if it's not feasible to launch such a site in time to catch the major part of the debate on the Boxer/Kerry bill, it's still worth thinking about the idea of for-profit news/action sites that rely on sponsorships.  The Boxer/Kerry bill will not be the last piece of legislation dealing with catastrophic climate change.  At a minimum, the Senate will have to ratify the Copenhagen treaty once it's negotiated, and Congress will probably revisit the issue at some point in the next few years.  Moreover, states and cities are sure to continue to take action on any number of green issues, including green job initiatives, building codes, transportation policies and food system reforms.  Preparing for these debates now will only strengthen the hand of ordinary folks who want to protect the environment, and will help create the structural reform necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.

I've written before about the importance of supporting do-it-yourself weatherization projects, and the possibility of creating a simplistic do-it-yourself smart grid at home using the Tweet-a-Watt.  If do-it-yourselfers can reduce and measure their own demand for energy and electricity, how about creating some, too?

A pair of interesting stories making the rounds today are the inspiring story of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, via Change.org, and the Cambridge Energy Alliance's post on do-it-yourself solar.  As a big believer in renewable energy, and particularly in reducing the barriers to renewable energy solutions, I find these stories fascinating and very exciting.

Ready-made commercial solutions for harnessing the wind and the sun to create electricity or provide heat are fairly expensive.  Even rooftop wind turbines sold at hardware stores can cost up to $6,000, before tax incentives kick in (at which point the cost drops to around $4,200).  The CEA blog post above points to a commercially available solar hot air panel which costs "only" $1,500.  That's not chump change!

The good news is that there are lower-cost options available for intrepid hobbyists with a bit of spare time, the Change.org and CEA blog posts suggest.  What we need, I believe, are resources to distribute this knowledge more widely, and to make it easier to find and to put into practice.

The tools to do that online are well within reach.  There are already a handful of web-based resources which already compile information about DIY renewable energy projects - including Discover Solar Energy and Got Wind.  These sites are a great start, but there's still room for improvement.  I'm thinking of a comprehensive interactive website which includes how-to videos, detailed instruction manuals, an online store for the raw materials, a question-and-answers discussion forum, and Digg-style voting to promote the best resources.  Such a site could even incorporate advice for hobbyists who'd like to "go professional" and sell their services to others who would like to purchase low-cost renewable energy, but don't have the time or know-how to take on such a project themselves.  The site could be supported through affiliate sales for raw materials and premium memberships purchased by hobbyists wishing to advertise their services to other enthusiasts.  There's even an opportunity for the site's owners to sell consulting services or run workshops for real estate developers, municipalities, or other entities who wish to deploy low-cost distributed renewable energy on a wide scale.

Large-scale investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency, together with government policies which put a price on carbon, are certainly necessary to make a big difference in solving global warming.  At the same time, there is plenty of room for everyone, from do-it-yourself hobbyists to web developers, to chip in as well.

One thing I find fascinating about the renewable energy industry, in its current incarnation, is that it seems to be founded on the notion that we are living in the late nineteenth century.

That may come across as a bit harsh, and I don't intend to throw spit-balls at people who are trying to do important work.  But we do need to re-evaluate the way the renewable energy industry does business, and the core assumptions embedded within many renewable energy businesses.

In particular, I'm referring to the assumption that renewable energy should be a functionally equivalent alternative to dirty energy.  That is to say, the renewable energy industry currently strives to replace (or in some cases to augment) things like coal-fired power plants with solar arrays, wind turbines, and geothermal plants.  The operative notion, at least for the US renewable energy industry, is that we are living in a time when electricity is not already widely available and affordable.

Of course, in the industrialized world, electricity is widely available and affordable.  It is so affordable, that renewable energy is too expensive to compete effectively with coal and natural gas.  The solution, it appears, is to ask government to incentivize renewable energy in one way or another, to spur scale-up investment or to increase the cost of dirty energy, leaving renewable energy more competitive as a result.  I support this solution whole-heartedly, for a number of reasons - dirty energy generates far too many externalities to be borne by those who can least afford them, and, at least in the United States, government at every level has done more than enough, for far too long, to boost dirty energies.  It's time to give renewables a fair shake.

Beyond government action, the renewable energy industry also needs to rethink its product.

What if renewable energy was not just functionally equivalent to dirty energy?  What if it was a superior product, that made life easier and better, on top of the benefits of electricity?  Then the issue of price might not be so important - many consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a service that provides "renewable energy plus".

For example, suppose that it were possible to install a special kind of rooftop solar panel on a consumer's home, which would not only provide the consumer with renewable energy, but would also automatically clean the dishes, sweep the floor, and wash the clothes.  That's a pretty far-fetched scenario, but it's easy to see how a consumer might sign up for an installation, even if the electricity was a bit more expensive than the stuff hawked by the local coal-fired plant.  This new product would make life easier and more hassle-free!  I know I'd pay a bit extra for that.

Although this idea may sound like something straight out of The Jetsons, progress is already being made on similar, more realistic, concepts.  Earlier this week I was at an event with New Generation Energy, and spoke with Warren Anderson, the founder of Hydrolosophy.  He is part of a team working on an innovative new approach to renewable energy; the idea will be presented as a business plan in the Ignite Clean Energy competition next summer.  While I don't want to give too much away, the basic idea is to develop an commercial-scale renewable energy system which also provides a number of other services, and thereby garner a number of additional revenue streams.  The resulting service will therefore have significantly more profit potential than traditional renewable energy systems.

Power generation is certainly not my specialty, but my guess is that the most likely candidates for add-on products to come out of a renewable energy system are going to be things like clean water, fairly basic motive force, and beneficial chemicals or simple life forms.  With the right kind of engineering, those basic outputs can be turned into very valuable end products for the consumer, resulting in a dramatically more competitive renewable energy industry.

Last week was Intersolar 2009, so I thought I'd devote some space here to a solar energy idea.  For all the talk about thin-film solar, solar-powered cell phones, and so on, solar power is actually a very mature renewable energy source.  The technology is predictable; installation and maintenance are well-understood problems.  The problem is financing.

In order to be cost-effective, solar power projects generally rely on the federal tax credit, which was extended this year in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  Using this credit, developers can effectively knock 30% off the cost of a solar power project.  Combined with state and local incentives, as well as potentially lucrative provisions for selling power back to the local utility, the up-front cost for a solar panel can be effectively off-set by lower electric bills in the future.

However, the federal tax credit isn't available for entities that don't have what's called a "tax appetite", i.e. entities which don't have to pay taxes in the first place.  Consequently, non-profit organizations, schools, and other government buildings are not directly eligible for the federal tax credit.  That is a real problem, because in many cases such entities are precisely the ideal location for a solar project - they have a long-term presence in a single physical location, are responsive to their surrounding community, and have a vested interest in reliably cheap power.

Typically, non-taxable entities with a suitable installation site get around this problem by entering into a power-purchase agreement with a private solar developer with a tax appetite.  The agreemnts are fairly complicated, but the basic idea is that a private entity leases the installation site, installs solar power, takes the federal tax credit, and sells the solar power back to the non-taxable "landlord", at a lower rate than the local utility.

The difficulty with power purchase agreements is that they require a lot of hand-holding and trust, on both sides.  As a developer, it can be difficult to find a suitable landlord. On the other hand, a lot of potentially good solar "landlords" don't take the initiative to go looking for a developer, particulalry if environmental action isn't directly related to their mission.

It might be possible to streamline the process a bit, and to lower the barriers for creating new power purchase agreements.  A lot of the data on municipal buildings, and in some cases non-profit buildings, is readily available in government databases.  Using satellite imagery and GIS systems, these databases could be scoured for entities with good prospective solar installation sites.  A bit more careful cross-referencing with the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency, along with local utility rates, could also help streamline some of the intial financing work.

The end result would be a high-quality database of prospective solar installation sites for buildings owned by entities lacking a tax appetite.  Selling database access to solar developers should offset the cost of operations.  Ultimately such a database would reduce the cost of the solar power development process by streamlining power purchase agreements, and would encourage the development of more solar power.

Today I'm excited to announce the launch of Green Lights! Green Lights is our new blog about green ideas, which will focus on ideas for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other solutions to environmental problems.

Global warming, threats to the food supply, water shortages and other environmental problems are daunting and fundamental problems. They will require the cooperation and concerted efforts from all corners of the globe, and I hope that our blog will be Lightbulb First's own unique contribution to the solution.

I have been a dedicated environmentalist for many years. On a personal level I've sought to reduce my own environmental footprint by bicycling and taking public transportation; not eating meat; participating in my local CSA; purchasing recycled products; and, whenever possible, making environmentally responsible decisions. I've also sought to be active in community organizations focused on structural environmental change, ranging from Students for Environmental Concerns at University of Illinois, while in graduate school, to Green Decade Cambridge, more recently.

There's more than I can do, though, and that's what this blog is about. I deeply believe in the power of ideas to spark action and change - indeed, that's why I founded Lightbulb First. With this blog, I hope to spark discussion and action around ideas that will help create renewable energy, reduce demand for energy and electricity, and solve other environmental problems.

I've spent the last several months thumbing through books, following key blogs, attending local meetings, and otherwise trying to learn as much as I can about solutions to global warming and other environmental problems. It turns out that many of the most important solutions are already near at hand. We've known how to weatherize a home, install renewable energy, provide low-impact transportation, and farm sustainably for a long time. What's needed is a new approach to delivering these goods and services, so that they can replace their old, environmentally damaging counterparts.

Those are the kinds of ideas I'll explore on this blog, and the kind of actions I hope to incite. Stay tuned for more!