This story by Allen Best appeared on BigPivots.com on November 29, 2024. We are sharing it in four parts.
Comments of Clay Stranger, the managing director of RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute), also stood out at the conference , but he spoke with a global perspective, describing the energy transition as being a marathon toward a climate-safe finish line.
We’re about a fifth of the way there.
That puts us at 5-mile marker, a long ways from the ribbon at 26.2 miles. About a fifth of global energy now comes from renewable sources and about 20% of all vehicles sold globally have no tailpipes. China skews that number higher, and on a smaller scale, so does Norway.
The next segment, from 20% to 50%, Stranger called the political chapter.
“We know what to do. It’s reasonably cost-effective, but we have to leverage the political will, the social will to sort of bring to bear what we know how to do and overcome a lot of the opposition and resistance.”
Beyond that, the segment from 50% to 80% of the way, will be more difficult. “We roughly know what needs to happen, but it’s not cost-effective yet,” he said. “So we need to compress the cost for that section of the race.”
The final leg, from 80% to 100%? Think of it as the innovation leg. “We don’t really know exactly what do,” he said. “There’s still a lot of discovery, imagination and innovation that needs to happen.”
Then Stranger shared a sobering statistic, new from a Cambridge University study: every degree Celsius of warming will displace a billion people.
(For reference, the combined populations of Mexico, Central America and Venezuela total 341 million).
The study authors also concluded that in 2023, for the first time in history, climate displaced more people than conflict.
No doubt, Stranger could have talked for hours. He kept his remarks to two components. One is the challenge of providing cooling in the face of extreme heat that will be arriving.
This year, two billion people were exposed to extreme heat, he said.
One ray of hope is that very targeted design innovations are occurring in urban green spaces. Think town centers in small places as well as the megacities. Pilot projects are underway to reduce the urban heat-island effects by 40%.
RMI founder Amory Lovins may have grown bananas in his private office in the Snowmass Valley without fossil fuels, but the RMI headquarters along the Roaring Fork River in Basalt has demonstrated how to maximize energy in an office building.
A specific building technology also is relevant. It can be found at the RMI building in Basalt. That building has no central heating or cooling system, a feat achieved through many techniques, including super-insulation and orientation for passive design, enabling the winter sun to be part of the heating system.
Passive daytime radiative cooling materials, or PDRCs can help with heat. He described them as tiny, microscopic rods that can not only reflect light but also radiate 100 watts of energy per square meter back into deep space with nothing but paint.
“Imagine a 100-degree Fahrenheit day outside,” he said. “These paints have been proven to keep the indoor air temperature in a modestly insulated building at 82 degrees.”
This technology has global applicability.
Then Stranger asked an absorbing question. It pivoted on transportation but has applicability across other realms: how to work backward. Instead of thinking about the early adopters and moving ahead, why not start thinking first of those who are usually the last adopters but who would have the most to benefit from low-cost, clean transportation?
- RMI, he said, has partnerships with municipal governments in Phoenix, Atlanta, and Portland, Ore., in a quest to figure out how to enable low-cost, zero-carbon mobility. The work has yielded four lessons.Prioritize community needs and community engagement.
- Foster affordability for charging infrastructure. “How can we think about local incentives for panel upgrades, for charging at a multi-unit dwelling,” he said.
- Explore shared ownership and pay-per-use models. “How can we think about folks who aren’t ready to own a car or don’t have the means? How can we think about new business models to get low-cost and low-carbon miles accessible?”
- Climate goals really should be seen as a secondary or at least a co-benefit when working with decision-makers and communities to implement new energy technology to reduce emissions.
“That’s true for the work I do in India. It’s also true for the work we’re doing with low-income communities in the U.S. as we think about what drives decision-making,” said Stranger.
“Think about the affordability and the accessibility of these solutions as primary and climate as a really important co-benefit.”
What does this all say for our rural resort regions?
CLEER last held a major conference in 2017. It was in Carbondale, and the most notable speaker was Ed Mazria, the architect from Santa Fe (who played basketball well enough to be drafted by the New York Knickerbockers, as they were then called, in 1962). For the last couple decades he tried to encourage more thoughtful, energy-wise architecture through a project called Architecture 2030, the effort to reform how we do buildings.
Coming out of that conference was the impetus for the work at Basalt Vista, the 27-house complex designed for teachers and others in the Roaring Fork Valley. It employs air-source heat pumps — and no gas. It became a must-see for this early stage of Colorado’s efforts to reform buildings.
Instructive was the title for this conference: “Energizing Climate Solutions: Rural, Resort and Energy Transition Communities.” That’s a sweep of the landscape – and it also happens to describe the valley from Aspen to the oil and gas fields of Rifle and beyond. That’s the area where CLEER focuses.
Alice Laird, the executive director of CLEER, had hoped to deliver a message in this conference that the playing field for rural areas of Colorado needs to be leveled to provide more uniform access to grants and other assistance in cost-effective heating and cooling for residential housing. Currently, members of Holy Cross Energy have access to high levels of support. Other areas? Maybe not so much.
Looking across all of Colorado, she hopes to see that same level of support for all households, no matter where they are.
Evidence is abundant across the nation that rural areas don’t have the same access to energy efficiency measures. Colorado is better than most places, she said, but not as good as it should be.
Alice Laird, the executive director of CLEER, says rural Colroado communities need to have the same access to grants and other assistance for cost-effective heating and cooling for residential housing as exist in more affluent resort communities and larger cities. Above, a new housing project at Rifle.
Francesca Santos, program officer with the Rural Climate Partnership, made that point at the conference. Only 2% of funding goes to rural communities, which lack the resources to access what is available. She said 36% of emissions come from rural America, but rural American lacks the workforce and other means to ratchet down emissions.
In resort valleys of the Western Slope, where I lived for many years, there always was – and it appears to me still is – a certain schism between the wealthier resort towns and their down-valley siblings. They don’t see the world the same way. Can they work in greater concert?
I mentioned other speakers were on the agenda. One of them was Emily Gedeon, who represented Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resilience. Denver voters in 2020 approved a small sliver of a sales tax that yields $40 million annually for climate and energy work. Might something similar be done in other locations, say Eagle County or Summit County?
And then we have the Denver Regional Council of Governments, which is getting $200 million from the Inflation Reduction Act for building reform. It’s still early, in the set-up and hire stage. Actual results are months away. Will this provide valuable lessons?
Allen Best publishes the e-journal Big Pivots, which chronicles the energy transition in Colorado and beyond.