The paper (pdf) argues that the Nobel Prize winning IPCC assumed too much “spontaneous” technological innovation in their studies of how to reduce the carbon intensity in the atmosphere. At the same time the rise of the developing world (read: China and India), and the coal power driving it, has fundamentally altered the baseline for emissions scenarios. Thus, they argue, more public policies are necessary to drive innovation in energy efficiency and decarbonization.

“Dangerous Assumptions,” as it is titled, has been covered extensively by the mainstream media as a warning about ‘underplaying’ climate change. The environmental press, however, has attacked it for blandly pushing technology investment without taking into account the current technologies that could be deployed to fight climate change. Joseph Romm, over at Grist, for example, calls for more deployments of existing technologies over more R&D.

What he, and a lot in the environmental movement miss, is that clean technologies, especially new energy tech, require a lot of development long after they are conceived or patented. Take the majority of industries that E2T follows–cellulosic ethanol, algae biodiesel, thin film solar PV–and it becomes clear that much of this technology still exists in journals and papers, not in the marketplace yet.

Saying that the next generation of solar concentrating power plants are available now is like saying that cellphone technology existed in 1983. Sure it did, but not in the right form to drive adoption.

The real question is: how should government funds be generated and directed to help get these technologies in their early stages to market? While a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with the government picking winners, how else can big money be directed to the right places?

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The company seems to be striking a cord, and they are in the process of scaling up. Since Matt Golden, the CEO of Sustainable Spaces founded the company in 2004, they’ve grown to several dozen employees, and took seed capital from angel investors Blueshift Partners earlier this year. They’re already a profitable company and now they are looking for several million dollars of venture capital to build out their labor-intensive business.

They’ve also found some surprising results. For one, those fancy Energy Star windows? They’re not worth much without a properly insulated house with an efficient heating and cooling system.

It’s not often that you hear someone advocate the low tech cleantech solution that simply a better HVAC systems can offer a solution for climate change, but that’s exactly what Golden does. In fact, the way Golden figures it, with houses responsible for about a quarter of US emissions, leaky heating and cooling ducts account for a staggering 2-3% of electricity used in the US.

That’s because the HVAC system, which he calls the heart and lungs of a home, is responsible for a lot of a building’s energy usage. Any problems in it are directly reflected in the overall efficiency of the house. In that way, a home’s HVAC system is like a micro transmission grid. All in all, Golden says his company can reduce an existing home’s energy expenditure by 10-50 percent. (Imagine if we could retrofit cars to generate those kinds of energy reductions?)

The problem is that fixing a home’s HVAC system can still cost thousands of dollars, and even if the payback is measured in months, not years, many homeowners don’t have that kind of excess cash sitting around. To fix that, Golden would like to see solar-style incentives for gains in energy efficiency. (We would too!)

Even without government help, fixing all those leaky ducts is going to take a lot of “green collar” workers.

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In the greentech world, we see the ‘problem’ as carbon dioxide emissions leading to climate chaos and the ‘solutions’ as wind, solar PV, solar thermal, plug-in electric vehicles, and a variety of energy efficiency technologies. So, a little biofuel in a jet doesn’t really send our hearts racing. It’s fine, but it’s also, well, beside the point.

But not everyone is inside the Silicon Valley bubble. This weekend, the AP wrote up a story about the idea rising in military circles of transforming coal into jet fuel, and diesel for long-distance trucking. The idea is that such a coal-to-liquids setup would reduce the need to import oil from unstable regions, while allowing the US to use the several hundred years worth of coal in American reserves.

“We’re going to be burning fossil fuels for a long time, and there’s three times as much coal in the ground as there are oil reserves,” the Air Force Assistant Secretary William Anderson tells the AP. “Guess what? We’re going to burn coal.”

From an economic perspective, and no sustainability lens, the $5 billion price tag of a coal-to-liquids plant sounds like a great idea. But from an environmental perspective, this sort of technology makes no sense.

Unfortunately it’s not just the U.S. military that is interested in coal-to-liquid plants. At a recent cleantech investor conference, a big investor in China predicted that coal-to-liquids could be a hot play, considering the Chinese government is concerned with rising oil prices.

Just last week, we wrote about Chinese and American efforts to convert coal into feedstock for chemicals, another environmental disaster. This coal-to-liquids race between two nations with huge coal reserves is bad news.

Image courtesy of AP.

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“If the price of oil stays above $50 or $60, I think that within 10 years, using coal as a chemical feedstock will be a very big industry in China,” says Zhang Yuzhuo, a Shenhua Group vice president and chairman of China Shenhua Coal Liquefaction.

Running directly counter to “green chemistry” companies like one funded in November Novomer, some in the chemical industry are exploring gasifying coal into methanol, which is a step away from the building blocks of bulk chemicals, ethylene and propylene. The economics seem to indicate that crude oil over $50 a barrel will make coal an economical option.

The problem with the process is that it generates a lot of CO2. While the article doesn’t go in-depth on coal-to-liquids technology, environmental groups, and the National Resources Defense Council, are convinced that CTL is a disaster, if the point is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s too bad, too, as the chemical industry has actually been one of the better industries from an emissions perspective. While US businesses have essentially held their absolute CO2 emissions steady since 1990, they are still pumping around 77 million metric tons (PDF) of CO2 into the atmosphere. (For comparison, California’s total emission are about 500 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.) Not bad for an enormous industry that in the US alone produces more than $600 billion a year worth of products that appear in 96% of manufactured goods, according to a chemical industry presentation (PDF).

What this highlights for me is that even with green technology steadily gaining ground and funding, we still need to make emitting carbon dioxide more expensive through regulation. Right now, the risk of CO2 regulation is all that is keeping some of these dirty responses to the rising cost of oil from becoming established.

As Dave Witte, executive vice president of strategy consulting for the Houston-based consulting firm Chemical Market Associates Inc, told C&EN, “One of the big disadvantages of coal is that you make CO2… Even if it isn’t a hit today, it could be at some point in the future if carbon taxes are enacted.”

Still, the distress of the chemical industry could be a big opportunity for a biogas company. Methane is a major feedstock, and isolating it, say from agricultural waste streams, could be an immediate business if it can gain the scale needed by such a huge industry.

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We’ve been following some news out of the conference this week like the launch of Wal-Mart’s green-innovations web site, and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s aggressive cleantech rhetoric over local carbon legislation. The meeting’s organizers, the Cleantech Group, claim that $1.1 billion worth of deals have stemmed directly from previous iterations of the event.

India got special billing at the conference because Vinod Khosla, perhaps the world’s best-known alternative energy investor, will be chairing the Cleantech Group’s first Indian forum, slated for October 2008.

As we’ve noted in the past, Indian power generation isn’t particularly green at the moment. Not only is the economy coal-heavy, but Indian coal is known as some of the dirtiest stuff around. Right now, it’s clear that just getting power to citizens of the country is a higher priority than generating that power cleanly, big nuclear power plant plans notwithstanding.

China, the world’s other massive developing economy is beginning to receive enormous amounts of attention from cleantech investors. They see the opportunity to build greenfield clean power for a country that needs it desperately, and to sell solar water heaters, home PV, and other distributed generation technologies to new huge urban populations.

Given the similarity of the situation in India, it was only a matter of time before green capital sought out the subcontinent. The new Khosla announcement could be a sign that 2008 will be for Indian cleantech what 2006 was for ethanol.

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Researchers at Iowa State have pieced together the genome of maize and will announce it Thursday at the oh-so thrilling-sounding Annual Maize Genetics Conference in Washington, DC. Mapping the corn genome is actually remarkably complicated, as it contains about twice the number of genes as our own DNA and the act is being hailed as a milestone. The researchers even got their school’s president, Gregory Geoffroy, to opine, “Understanding the corn genome will accelerate efforts to develop crops that can meet society’s growing needs for food, feed, fiber and fuel.”

But oddly enough, the press release doesn’t mention genetically modifying crops at all. And genome mapping, of course, is a step towards enabling genetic modifications of various kinds to a species of plant or animal.

We’re all aware of the arguments against genetically modified crops both in terms of genetic spread and also consumer resistance to them. And whether you agree with them or not, if you had a choice, you would likely naturally choose a bred crop. So, it left us asking, what’s the upside to genetically modifying corn?

The answer: corn subsidies. From 1995 to 2005, the US government doled out $51 billion to the corn industry. By continuing to use nominal maize with some new genes (say, some draught resistance and overall hardiness from jatropha), farmers could continue to get subsidies while producing what could eventually, in effect, be a different plant.

Researchers like those with Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a unit of DuPont, are already trying to charge up corn’s oil output by locating a key gene in corn that controls oil yield.

In the greentech world, we might all be over corn, but the subsidies remain, and genetically modifying corn for biofuels is a great example of how that spending ends up impacting research priorities.

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While even this event might have been cause for rejoice just six months ago, in a sign that the environment around biofuels has changed dramatically, environmental groups armed with a new Nature study criticized Branson’s flight.

Kenneth Richter of Friends of the Earth told the Guardian:

“Biofuels are a major distraction in the fight against climate change. There is mounting evidence that the carbon savings from biofuels are negligible.”

That tone reflects the sentiment we heard last week at the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, where a half-dozen panels were dedicated to the mixed blessing of biofuels.

For those who merely want to cut our oil imports from the Middle East, biofuels are a clear answer. But as an increasing amount of scientists agree, they might end up being almost wholly tangential to the fight to slow or stop climate change. The reports are so varied, the cleantech industry is splintered over the debate.

A report out in Science magazine earlier this month says the use of cropland for biofuels actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. Then there’s rebuttals like this one from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) last week claiming those author’s findings are not supported by their data.

And at the same time that we’re all starting to become aware of the problems with first-generation biofuels, technologies that offer a happy middle ground are also emerging.

Some people think algae-based biofuels could turn out to be more eco-friendly than many first-generation biofuels. Others think marginal land crops like jatropha could work. And then we have the fuels that are derived from waste streams, like Coskata’s vision of turning tires into fuel, that seem to make a lot of sense.

Even though the prevailing green wind has clearly turned against biofuels, we can’t completely give up on them. And neither has Richard Branson.

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The hybrid paper was lead authored by Jean-Jacques Chanaron, research director within France’s version of the National Science Foundation, the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Chanaron writes that the growth in hybrids across US car manufacturers, “is based more on customer perception triggered by very clever marketing and communication campaigns than on pure rationale scientific arguments.”

European policy debate tends to be farther ahead of the one in the US, so it’s not a surprise that French researchers are behind the paper. As one VC put it to us recently, “If you told everybody [in the U.S.] that they could replace their car with an electric car, they’d think it was great, but in Europe, they might say, ‘What are you going to do with all the batteries?’” Though we have been hearing hybrid skepticism from Silicon Valley VCs like Vinod Khosla, who likes to frame that thought in a more controversial way (his favorite “hybrids are toys” line.)

Chanaron and co-author Julius Teske of Grenoble School of Management also note that the adoption of hybrid electric vehicles might slow the adoption of fuel cell technologies that would offer truly sustainable fuel solutions. Although they also admit that fuel cell vehicles are unlikely to be produced at scale until a good 2025.

The bottom line is that electric cars haven’t been able to scale. Biofuels can scale, but in that process lose most of the sustainability benefits of small-scale recycled oil fuels like old-school biodiesel. (Algae or synthetic biology based supercrude, possibly excepted).

Hybrids, these authors argue, are, at best, a sustainability wash. And fuel cell cars are more than a decade away. So, where does that leave green personal transport?

Until something better comes along, it leads us to a major redesign of the car. And just a very simple design change, to make cars smaller, much closer to the size of a human being.

For a glimpse into the (hopefully near) future, we could look at the SmartForTwo microcar, which is experiencing a successful, if small-scale, launch here in the US. Or we could take a look at the three-wheeler companies like the Aptera.

By simply making cars smaller, and in Aptera founder Steve Fambro’s formulation, “less like furniture,” we could go a long way towards making our cars and cities more sustainable. Combined with any fuel system, the tiny car would be a more sustainable model for personal transportation than large-scale biofuels or hybrids can currently offer.

It might not seem like small cars are a great cleantech investment thesis, but there are two reasons that green VCs should care about them. First is that smaller cars, overall, will use less energy. That’s good for the world, and good for investors trying to drive any vehicle that uses batteries.

Second, there’s a major and underappreciated role for cleantech in finding the types of sustainable materials that can enable entirely new ways of living (call them “life models”). That’s where to look for breakthrough technologies that will get people to change their behaviors, and in so doing, open up a new market.

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The researchers have developed a material that can mechanically trap gas at high densities without using high pressure, which often times has safety concerns. According to Shimizu “this is a proof of concept that represents an entirely new way of storing gas.”

Shimizu’s group had been primarily studying the use of the material for fuel cells, with only a secondary focus on gas storage with compression. But fellow University of Calgary professor and a co-author of the paper, David Cramb, believes that their latest nanovalve material could provide a boost (and we would hope, a price cut) for carbon capture.

Cramb wrote:

“These materials could help push forward the development of hydrogen fuel cells and the creation of filters to catch and store gases like CO2 or hydrogen sulfide from industrial operations in Alberta.”

How does it work exactly? The team takes advantage of the crystalline structure of barium organotrisulfonate. Through dehydrating and rehydrating the material, he can toggle its gas permeability back and forth. Insert the gas, heat it up, and it’s sealed inside. If you want to release the gas, you simply add water and the gas comes bubbling out. Shimizu’s method is described in the early online addition of Nature Materials.

Shimizu’s gas storage material is another promising commercial candidate from the class of substances known as metal-organic frameworks. They’re not exactly new, as this 2003 FuturePundit post writes about MOFs capability to store hydrogen highlights, but they are being put to a variety of new uses.

A prominent professor in the field is UCLA’s Omar Yaghi, who published the landmark paper in Nature back in 2003, and whose work continues at the leading edge of using metal-organic frameworks to store gases.

For now Shimizu and Cramb do not appear to have made any attempts at commercializing the new material — yet. But a simple, low cost way to sequester and store gases that we don’t want ending up in the atmosphere, could surely capture a lot of money.

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The power plant, and others like it that combine renewable feedstock with coal, present a new dilemma for green contemplation. The all-investment, all-the-time arm of the green movement believes that we should be throwing money at all viable technologies that could reduce greenhouse gases. So, Vinod Khosla invests up and down the line in ethanol companies because he believes the intermediate steps will help us get to the end goal of second- and third-generation biofuels that are not as bad as corn-based ethanol.

Dropping some biomass into our coal plants, just like ethanol doping our gasoline, will get us a reduction in coal mining and emissions, but raises the question: Will these small steps actually put off the more drastic steps that we’ll need to take to keep our climate on the rails? Or do we need to do something with coal for the next decade, until some type of carbon capture and storage system?

The last president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science had a brilliant state-of-the-world article adapted from a speech he gave last year in this week’s Science, in which he argued for a truly sustainable approach to the use of land:

We need more studies that combine projected land requirements for food and feed, fiber, biofuels, and infrastructure — rather than pretending that each use can be analyzed separately–and that attempt to reconcile the combined demands with the requirement for enough land covered by intact forests and other native ecosystems to provide the carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services society cannot do without.

Just like with biofuels, we have to ask of biomass for baseload generation: Which feedstock? Where is it grown? How is it grown?

Over at Biopact, a cleantech group lobbying for a green energy pact between Europe and Africa, they run the numbers on one example of a good cofiring feedstock, palm kernel shells grown by Nigerian palm farms. “Palm kernel shells are a waste residue from palm fruit processing; they are easy to ship, don’t need to be densified and can be readily co-fired with coal,” they wrote.

Coal cofired with biomass grown for the purpose might not be a clear winner, but coal burned with waste biomass seems like a pretty good idea. Clearly, technologies like these aren’t going to solve our problems, but by engaging with their design, we can ensure that these intermediate steps are the longest strides possible.

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