Editor’s note: Once a month, we are bringing back the “Shades of Green” column, and are delighted to announce it will be written by one of Chattanooga’s most active environmentalists, Sandra Kurtz. If you have questions or suggestions for this column, e-mail them to us at jhashe@chattanoogapulse.com.

Numerous questions can precede the actual writing of a column entitled “Shades of Green”. For starters, what is meant by “Shades” of Green? It sounds like Code Orange for air pollution danger or terrorist attacks. I suppose a light green person would be worse than a dark green one. Who does the profiling anyway? Further, what subjects ought to be addressed, given the vast array of possibilities?

Reader, do you want to be informed about current sustainability and environmental issues on a local or global scale? Maybe you prefer ecology or birds and bunnies. How about paths to a greener quality of life or philosophical discussions on humans’ spiritual and physical responsibilities for our species and the planet? Perhaps you just want tips on how to be more Earth friendly in your home or business, a sort of advice-for-the-greenless column. I’ll be interested to hear your preferences.

For now, my first time as an official columnist, I’ll share my views about a sustainable future—the one where there is still a great diversity of life, humans included, living in harmony with the rest of nature on the planet. It may come as a surprise to some, but our species cannot live without the Earth’s interwoven support systems, resources and free services. The movie Avatar showed how much trouble it causes to use up all your resources and think the answer is to get more on another planet.

That brings us to thinking about energy and the amount of space and stuff we use. The approach to date hasn’t been to encourage using less stuff, but instead to promote demand for more. That stance leads us to ask how deep to drill, how many mountains to remove, and how many fragile spots to mine so we produce all we demand. In an ever-widening tornado of consumption, we want bigger and bigger places that take up agricultural land even as we live more isolated high-tech lives, travel further for work and for daily supplies while we suffer from illnesses caused by our modern lifestyles.

Moreover, the very Earth support system we need is diminished. Carry that process to the ultimate conclusion. We could be like disappearing dinosaurs dealing with catastrophic weather events, extreme temperatures, too much carbon dioxide, polluted water, air, and land, not enough food, and too many people demanding stuff. It’s a result we won’t like.
Here’s a better Earth-driven outcome. Like it or not, we are transitioning to a no oil/no carbon/no nuclear energy platform. It’s required because we are running out of oil. Our tragic attempts to find more are not worth the environmental and economic risk or expense. We already have the low-hanging fruit. Coal has turned out to be a community plunderer with its destruction of mountain scenery, water quality, and forests.

Even if industrialists figure our how to make coal clean by storing emissions in a hole somewhere, mining still destroys mountains. Some say we should replace coal with nuclear and solve climate change problems. Oh—let’s just trade dirty air and water from coal for radioactive air and water, plus a radioactive waste site so we can ensure a legacy to future children, should they survive.

Someone said, “The Rock Age didn’t end because we ran out of rocks.” The Industrial Age is slowly transforming into a Sustainability Age. Get ready. Shut the door on outmoded ways of getting energy. Smart people have figured out how we can do it using numerous energy alternatives. Meanwhile, reduce your demand for energy through efficiency and conservation. Use less stuff to be a shade of green.

We were told by oil industry executives and their acolytes and enablers in government that deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would not cause the kind of catastrophe that we’ve been watching with an acute and painful sense of helplessness for the past three months. Advances in technology, they said, would ward off the worst-case scenarios. Fail-safe systems like the blowout preventer a mile below the surface at the Deepwater Horizon rig site would keep wildlife and the environment safe.

Americans are not particularly good at learning even the most painful lessons. Denial is our default mode. But at the very least this tragedy in the gulf should push us to look much harder at the systems we need to prevent a catastrophic accident at a nuclear power plant, and for responding to such an event if it occurred.

Right now, we’re not ready.

Nuclear plants are the new hot energy item. The Obama administration is offering federal loan guarantees to encourage the construction of a handful of new plants in the U.S., the first in decades. Not to be outdone, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a certifiable nuke zealot, would like to see 100 new plants built over the next 20 years.

There is no way to overstate how cautiously we need to proceed along this treacherous road. Building nuclear power plants is mind-bogglingly expensive, which is why you need taxpayer money to kick-start the process. But the overriding issues we need to be concerned about, especially in light of our horrendous experience with the oil gushing in the gulf for so long, are safety and security.

We have to be concerned about the very real possibility of a worst-case scenario erupting at one of the many aging nuclear plants already operating (in some cases with safety records that would make your hair stand on end), and at any of the new ones that so many people are calling for.

The problem is that while the most terrible accidents are blessedly rare, when they do occur the consequences are horrific, as we’ve seen in the gulf. With nuclear plants, the worst-case scenarios are too horrible for most people to want to imagine. Denial takes over with policy makers and the public alike. Something approaching a worst-case accident at a nuclear plant, especially one in a highly populated area, would make the Deepwater Horizon disaster look like a walk in the park.

“We are way, way behind when it comes to the hard work of preventing accidents and responding to these catastrophes when they happen,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “With the deep-water oil drilling, we allowed the technological advances to drive the process at a rate that was unsafe, and we got really badly burned. The potential of a nuclear catastrophe is a major disaster in waiting.”

There are already plenty of problems on the nuclear power front, but they don’t get a great deal of media attention. David Lochbaum, the director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me last week that there have been 47 instances since 1979 in which nuclear reactors in the U.S. have had to be shut down for more than a year for safety reasons.

“We estimated, in 2005 dollars, that the average price tag for these outages was between $1.5 billion and $2 billion,” said Mr. Lochbaum.

People of a certain age will remember the frightening accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, a partial meltdown that came dangerously close to a worst-case scenario. As Mr. Lochbaum put it, “In roughly two hours, conditions at the plant rendered it from a billion-dollar asset to a multibillion-dollar liability. It cost more to clean up than it cost to build it.”

Another frightening accident occurred in 2002 at the Davis-Besse plant at Oak Harbor, Ohio. A hidden leak led to corrosion that caused a near-catastrophe. By the time the problem was discovered, only a thin layer of stainless steel was left to hold back the disaster.

The potential problems with nuclear power abound. No one knows what to do with the dangerous nuclear waste that is building up at the plants. And no one wants to have an extended conversation in polite company about the threat of terrorists who could wreak all manner of mayhem with an attack on a plant.

For many very serious people, our overreliance on foreign oil and the potential dire consequences of global warming make the case for moving more toward nuclear energy a compelling one. But if this is done without a whole lot more serious thought given to matters of safety and rigorous oversight, it’s a step we’ll undoubtedly come to regret.

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Originally Published in the New York Times,  July 20, 2010

Article provided by the Sierra Club Cherokee Chapter

By DIANA S. POWERS

PARIS – Solar photovoltaic systems have long been painted as a clean way to generate electricity, but expensive compared with other alternatives to oil, like nuclear power. No longer. In a “historic crossover,” the costs of solar photovoltaic systems have declined to the point where they are lower than the rising projected costs of new nuclear plants, according to a paper published this month.

“Solar photovoltaics have joined the ranks of lower-cost alternatives to new nuclear plants,” John O. Blackburn, a professor of economics at Duke University, in North Carolina, and Sam Cunningham, a graduate student, wrote in the paper, “Solar and Nuclear Costs – The Historic Crossover.” This crossover occurred at 16 cents per kilowatt hour, they said.

While solar power costs have been declining, the costs of nuclear power have been rising inexorably over the past eight years, said Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis at the University of Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and Environment.

Estimates of construction costs – about $3 billion per reactor in 2002 -have been regularly revised upward to an average of about $10 billion per reactor, and the estimates are likely to keep rising, said Mr. Cooper, an analyst specializing in tracking nuclear power costs.

Identifying the real costs of competing energy technologies is complicated by the wide range of subsidies and tax breaks involved. As a result, American taxpayers and utility users could end up spending hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars more than necessary to achieve an ample low-carbon energy supply, if legislative proposals before the U.S. Congress lead to adoption of an ambitious nuclear development program, he said in a report last November.

The report, “All Risk, No Reward for Taxpayers and Ratepayers,” was a response to a legislative wish list developed by the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. The institute has called for a mix of U.S. subsidies, tax credits, loan guarantees, procedural simplifications and institutional support on a large scale.

At the state level, the industry has also pressed the case for “construction work in progress,” a financing system that requires electricity users to pay for the cost of new reactors during their construction and sometimes before construction starts. With long construction periods and frequent delays, this can mean that electricity users start to pay higher prices as much as 12 years before the plants produce electricity.

The institute’s Web site says the financing system “reduces the cost rate payers will pay for power from the plant when it goes into commercial operation,” by lowering interest payments on capital costs and spreading the costs over time.

Mr. Cooper said, “the utilities insist that the construction work in progress charged to ratepayers also include the return on equity that the utilities normally earn by taking the risk of building the plant – even though they have shifted the risk to the ratepayers. If the plant is not built or suffers cost overruns, the ratepayers will bear the burden.”

History suggests that the risk of this is not negligible. In 1985, Forbes magazine dubbed the construction of the first generation of U.S. nuclear plants “the largest managerial disaster in business history.”

The first round of plants resulted in write-offs through bankruptcies and “stranded costs” – investments in existing power plants made uncompetitive by subsidized new ones – which essentially transferred nearly $100 billion in liabilities to electricity users, said Doug Koplow, an economist and founder of Earth Track, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which campaigns against subsidies it considers environmentally harmful. “Although the industry frequently points to its low operating costs as evidence of its market competitiveness, this economic structure is an artifact of large subsidies to capital, historical write-offs of capital, and ongoing subsidies to operating costs,” Mr. Koplow said.

Between 1943 and 1999 the U.S. government paid nearly $151 billion, in 1999 dollars, in subsidies for wind, solar, and nuclear power, Marshall Goldberg of the Renewable Energy Policy Project, a research organization in Washington, wrote in a July 2000 report. Of this total, 96.3 per cent went to nuclear power, the report said.

Still, these costs pale in comparison with the financial risks and subsidies that are likely to accompany the next wave of nuclear plant construction, Mr. Cooper said.

A November 2009 research paper by Citigroup Global Markets termed the construction risks, power price risks, and operational risks “so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility to its knees.”

Those risks were mentioned in a 2009 report by Moody’s rating agency. “Moody’s is considering taking a more negative view for those issuers seeking to build new nuclear power plants,” the report said. “Historically, most nuclear-building utilities suffered ratings downgrades – and sometimes several – while building these facilities. Political and policy conditions are spurring applications for new nuclear power generation for the first time in years. Nevertheless, most utilities now seeking to build nuclear generation do not appear to be adjusting their financial policies, a credit negative.”

Adding to the risks facing any reactor construction program, only one of five proposed designs under consideration by U.S. utilities has ever been built, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

Stephen Maloney, a utilities management consultant, said, “No one has ever built a contemporary reactor to contemporary standards, so no one has the experience to state with confidence what it will cost. We see cost escalations as companies come up the learning curve.”

Market risk has been heightened by the recent recession.”The current crisis has decreased energy demand even more than the 1970s oil price shocks,” Mr. Cooper said. The recession “appears to have caused a fundamental shift in consumption patterns that will lower the long-term growth rate of electricity demand.”

Meanwhile, most of the projects that have created the increase of license applications to the regulatory commission have already experienced difficulties. “About half of the projects that have been put forward at the start of the next generation of reactors have been delayed or canceled,” Mr. Cooper said. “Those that have moved forward have suffered substantial cost escalation and several have received negative financial reviews.

“Of the 19 applications at the N.R.C., 90 percent have had some type of delay or cancellation, run into a design problem, suffered cost increases and/or had the utility bond rating downgraded by Wall Street.”

Despite the economic challenges, the nuclear power industry remains unfazed.

“This is not a hospitable environment in which to commission any large base-load power plant,” said Marvin Fertel, president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, in a briefing to the financial community. Still, he said: “Fortunately new nuclear plants won’t be in service until 2016 or later, so today’s market conditions are not entirely relevant.”

Mr. Cooper said the industry’s equanimity was based, at least partially, on the supportive cushion provided by loan guarantees and work-in-progress financing. “With such financing the utility is making a one-way bet, allowing it to make a profit even when the project fails,” he said. “The people bear the risks and costs; the nuclear utilities take the profits. Without loan guarantees and guaranteed construction work in progress, these reactors will simply not be built, because the capital markets will not finance them.”

Without public guarantees, nuclear projects often cannot get financing. AmerenUE, the Missouri utility, suspended in April 2009 plans to build a $6 billion, 1,600-megawatt reactor at its Callaway County nuclear site, after trying unsuccessfully to get the state legislature to repeal a longstanding ban on work-in-progress financing. The continued existence of the ban “makes financing a new plant in the current economic environment impossible,” the utility said.

Similarly, Florida Power and Light said in January that it would not proceed beyond licensing with plans to build two new reactors at its Turkey Point site, after the Florida Public Service Commission rejected its request to pass on a $1.27 billion cost increase to its users.

Yet, despite episodic resistance at the local level, financial support for the industry at the U.S. government level has been increasingly evident in successive versions of climate and energy bills before the U.S. Congress, including the most recent, the American Power Act, which is delayed in the Senate until after the summer recess.

Nuclear subsidies in the Senate proposal include five-year accelerated depreciation; tax credits for investments, production and advanced energy, an increase in U.S. government insurance against regulatory delays, access to private activity bonds and an increase in U.S. loan guarantees of $36 billion, bringing the total to $56 billion.

That remains less than the Nuclear Energy Institute’s goal of $100 billion, an amount it describes as “a minimal acceptable loan volume.” Still, Mr. Fertel said in his financial briefing that “’strong political support’understates our position.”

U.S. loan guarantees reduce nuclear construction financing costs by allowing the utilities to sell bonds at a lower interest rate. But at the same time the guarantee means that “the U.S. Treasury, and therefore the taxpayers, are on the hook for the value of the loans should they go bad,” Mr. Cooper said.

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the average risk of default for such Department of Energy loan guarantees is about 50 per cent, which is the historic rate for the nuclear industry.

Mr. Koplow of Earth Track said two of the other subsidies in the Senate bill, the investment tax credit and five-year accelerated depreciation, would together “be worth between $1.3 billion and nearly $3 billion on a net present value basis per new reactor.

“This is equivalent to between 15 and 20 percent of the total all-in cost of the reactors, as projected by industry.”

Over all, Mr. Koplow said, the proposed subsidy package would undermine the equity requirements of the nuclear loan guarantee program, designed to ensure that investors have a strong interest in the long-term success of the venture. “Although investors will get all the profit if the reactor project is successful, they will bear virtually none of the financial risk if the project fails,” he said. “This is a disastrous incentive structure.”

By distorting energy markets, these subsidies would “effectively make the government the chooser of which energy technologies will be winners and which will lose,” he said. The American Power Act “does not build a neutral policy platform on which all energy technologies must compete.”

The tax breaks for nuclear would “greatly impede market access for competing energy sources,” Mr. Koplow said.

He said handing out huge subsidies would also cloud the transparency of decision-making. “This approach,” he said, “which replaces price signals with decisions by a handful of often unnamed individuals within the U.S. Department of Energy, plays to none of the inherent strengths of the U.S. market system to spur innovation and effectively allocate risks and rewards. Further, the basis, and sometimes scale, of these subsidy decisions is largely hidden from the public view.”

For Mr. Cooper, the core issue at stake is one of cost. “While the cost estimates of nuclear power continue to rise, the potential for energy efficiency measures to reduce the need for energy are far cheaper,” he said.

Lower-cost, low-carbon technologies are already available, and cost trends for several others indicate that a combination of efficiency and renewable technologies could meet projected power needs while also achieving aggressive carbon-reduction targets, Mr. Cooper said.

In a June 2009 report drawing on several earlier studies, Mr. Cooper said that energy efficiency and low-cost renewable sources could meet power needs at an average cost of 6 cents per kilowatt hour, compared with a cost of between 12 cents and 20 cents per kilowatt hour for nuclear power.

Choosing the nuclear route, and constructing 100 new reactors, would translate into an extra cost to taxpayers and electricity users of $1.9 trillion to $4.4 trillion over the 40-year life of the reactors, compared with the costs of developing energy efficiency and renewable sources, the report said.

Mr. Cooper said it would make sense for policy makers, standing in the place of the market, to choose the least costly alternatives first.

“In an attempt to circumvent the sound judgment of the capital markets, nuclear advocates erroneously claim that subsidies lower the financing costs for nuclear reactors and so are good for consumers,” he said. “But shifting risk does not eliminate it. Furthermore, subsidies induce utilities and regulators to take greater risks that will cost the taxpayers and the ratepayers dearly.

“The risks that have dismayed Wall Street should be taken seriously by policy makers because they would cost not just hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on reactors that are canceled, but also trillions in excess costs for ratepayers when reactors are brought to completion by utilities that fail to pursue the lower-cost, less risky options that are available.

“The frantic effort of the nuclear industry to increase federal loan guarantees and secure ratepayer funding of construction work in progress from state legislatures is an admission that the technology is so totally uneconomic that the industry will forever be a ward of state, resulting in a uniquely American form of nuclear socialism.”

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Originally Published as  “Special Report: Energy,” New York Times, July 26, 2010
This Eco Topic was brought to you by Sierra Club Cherokee Chapter.

Earth Day is a holiday marked by a lot of talking about awareness. It’s a day on which we reflect how badly our planet needs stronger environmental regulation, enthusiastic stewardship, cleaner business and more efficiently heated and cooled buildings.

And when the day ends, you hope that someone is recycling all the paper those messages were printed on.

I don’t mean to insinuate that Earth Day is without merit. First celebrated in 1970, the same year the EPA was created, Earth Day was meant to bring attention to the rampant environmental degradation going largely unnoticed by many Americans. Founded by a concerned senator from Wisconsin, Earth Day helped bring about change. Groups championing different causes had a holiday on which to unite, bringing individual battles for clean water, clean air, endangered species, land conservation, and regulation for polluting industry under a common banner. That strong, revolutionary attitude seemed to soften throughout 1980s and 1990s, but I am glad to say that on this year’s Earth Day in Chattanooga, there was an event that took place in that same strong vein.
The Community Commitment event, sponsored by Chattanooga Green, was a different sort of Earth Day celebration. This celebration was not centered on awareness, but on action, and offered people the chance to better the city’s environmental future every day of the year.
The event was designed to give interested citizens the chance to commit to the Chattanooga Green Committee’s Climate Action plan through volunteering for an Action Team.
This all started about a year ago, when more than 500 people attended the Chattanooga Public Input meeting to address Chattanooga’s “green gaps”. Mayor Littlefield appointed the Chattanooga Green Committee to advise and assist Chattanooga’s long-term sustainability. The Committee took suggestions from the public, research from different programs, and advice from subject-matter experts to create the 47 recommendations that make up the Action Plan. This plan is geared toward putting Chattanooga on a sustainable path in several areas: energy efficiency, natural resource protection, building healthy communities, and growing education and policy. Under these titles, there are about 100 Action Team topics for the public to commit to. From creating incentives for sustainable industry and greening city buildings to integrating local food into schools and preserving trees, this plan has a team for everyone.

Mayor Littlefield prefaced his support of the plan with stories of Chattanooga’s past environmental neglect and his signing of the Mayor’s Climate Action Pledge. It is worthwhile noting that Littlefield is one of only six mayors in Tennessee to have signed the pledge.

A UTC environmental group set up a booth about their recycling and other efforts. EPB had a booth with energy-efficiency tips and Green Power Switch information, while Take Root was there offering the public a chance to ask questions, track the initiative’s progress and donate. The Habitat Re-Store was also supporting the event. The Re-Store recycles building materials that would have otherwise been buried in a landfill. I had not heard of the Re-store before the event, so I was excited to find out about it. The store stocks appliances, wood, hardware, light fixtures, furniture and insulation—not only friendly for the planet, but good for bargains.

The diverse crowd of people who attended seemed genuinely excited to be there. In the sign-up room, I heard people discussing the teams, eagerly exchanging ideas. One green builder I spoke with doesn’t allow one piece of the building process to end up in the landfill. Surely this same principal can apply to how we as a community operate. Another couple discussed their research on installing wind turbines on their home with me. “We just need batteries now,” she mused. “That’s where the future of renewable will be! How can we implement this type of thing here?” Everywhere you turned, people were more than aware of the problem—they were doing something about it.

If you missed the event, but are interested in signing up for an Action Team, contact Brad McAllister at mcallister_b@mail.chattanooga.gov or (423) 668-2274 to sign up or to get more information. You can also visit the city’s site (www.chattanooga.gov/chattanoogagreen) and click on the “get involved” link. The Climate Action Plan is available free online at www.chattanooga.gov/ChattanoogaGreen or a “deluxe version” can be purchased at Image Works for $62. Chattanooga Green is also now on Twitter and Facebook if you are more of the social networking type.

I plan to be involved in greening buildings around town, but there are so many important areas in this movement, it is really hard to choose. One person can devote only so much time, so I feel that it is important to pick only what you can manage. People are going to really have to commit if this movement is to gain the sort of momentum that it needs. But the enthusiasm is heartening, as is the unified direction it is all going in. An Earth Day ending with a real plan for the rest of the year is a welcome change.

Elizabeth Crenshaw is LEED accredited and works for EPB in Strategic Planning. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to Chattanooga after graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2007.

As the idea of mandatory cap-and-trade is argued on Capitol Hill, many people remain unaware of the current voluntary carbon market. There are offset solutions for almost anything that emits CO2; however, not all offset products can be trusted.
The carbon offset industry saw a surge of growth from 2005 to 2007, but as the economy grew more unstable, people began to worry less about their carbon footprint and more about keeping their jobs and paying their bills.

But not all the news is bad for the carbon market. After the 2008 presidential election, carbon offset sales rose significantly, helping the worldwide market end the year with $118 billion dollars worth of emissions transactions. According to SBI analysts, the worldwide carbon market is expected to grow 68 percent annually until 2013 to $669 billion dollars. This calculation assumes that the United States will adopt a federal cap-and-trade program, so this level of success is dependent on American action.

In the 1990s, there were no concrete standards to guide the research process. One had to do a lot of digging. Today, consumers have “green-e certification” to issue a stamp of approval, making the buying of offsets more comfortable.

Green-e certification is a stamp of approval from the Center for Resource Solutions, a nonprofit organization that makes sure that offset customers get what they pay for. Specifically, they ensure that companies do not over-sell their renewable generation capacity, and that sellers disclose more information about their offset projects. It keeps the sellers who choose this third-party certification honest.

Buying offsets is easy. Most offset companies have the same process online. You choose what you’d like to set off–the emissions from your car, your air travel, your home’s electricity usage or even specific appliances. You plug in your miles traveled or kWh used, and the site generates an offset solution for you. The whole transaction takes less than 10 minutes.

Many businesses and institutions advertise that they are “carbon neutral”. Most of these claims are backed up not by massive investments in on-site renewable generation, but by massive quantities of carbon offsets.

My college went carbon neutral my senior year. We had an array of solar panels, but it was not enough to supply all the school’s power needs. So, the rest of the college’s usage was offset. The decision was expensive, but most everyone supported the measure—even if we couldn’t get completely off traditional power, we could support emerging sustainable technology. So, the school bought enough wind power to cancel out the carbon emissions the institution was responsible for.

Many people have criticized carbon offsets as being little more than a penance made by lazy environmentalists who are not willing to appropriately change their lifestyle. But, try as we might, very few of us can lead a truly zero carbon life style. Modern life has certain demands that require a ride in a car, power for a computer and a trip in an airplane. A voluntary offset market has its place: It prepares consumers for a system in which pollution has real costs, and natural resources are given additional and concrete value.

Culturally, we are all dependent on convenience. The root of our addiction to dirty fuel is ease of use: The infrastructure is already set up, and the system works well in that consumers get what they need without having to put in much effort. You flip a switch. You pull a lever. You swipe your credit card. Only the most prudent among us track our individual miles and kWh. So, offsets present themselves as being very agreeable to the American lifestyle. Just plug in your usage, enter your credit card number, and hit submit. That’s it.

The convenience also draws some criticism, as some people think it’s misleading to call something or someone carbon neutral when behavior has not been completely changed. Some reporters have written that we cannot ignore that when polluting in one place, planting trees or building clean electric generation somewhere else doesn’t fix the problem. Others have said that whether or not these projects really mitigate climate change is difficult to prove. These dissenting opinions should not be discarded. It’s important to recognize these shortcomings when building the future of green business.

Leaders in several respected institutions endorse carbon offsets. The USGBC’s LEED standards incorporate offsets into its credits system. The EPA offers advice on how to choose offsets, and even the Harvard Business Review sees strategic value in offset early adoption. But offsets are not a long-term, silver-bullet solution.

The scientific community has told us that in order to mitigate climate change, we must slash emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. We will not be able reach this goal through voluntary carbon offsets alone.

Put simply, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that buying an offset washes our hands of any other responsibility. However, offsets can help in ushering in the emergence of the real goal: a viable, self-sustaining eco-economy that won’t need donations to succeed. The transition will be tricky to plan, and not without some difficult changes. But in time, it will just be the way we do business. We just need to get there sooner rather than later.

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Elizabeth Crenshaw is LEED accredited and works for EPB in Strategic Planning. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to Chattanooga after graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2007.

The campus is one of the few LEED for Core and Shell buildings in the state. To date, there are only 20 LEED Core and Shell registered projects in Tennessee, and 2 Northshore is on the only LEED project of its kind in Chattanooga.

LEED standards’ popularity is increasing. Several major cities now require that new buildings be built to LEED standard or better. LEED standards are facilitating an important transition in the way buildings are built and maintained.

But the bigger picture is holistic. 2 Northshore is not only an example of a group of green buildings, but also a functioning model of sustainable urban development. What makes it sustainable? People want to spend time there—which is good for growing local small business and a sense of community.

“As soon as they broke ground here we knew this was going to be a great fit,” said Sara Mingus, co-owner of the Northshore Yoga studio. Mingus also indicated excitement at being so close to other environmentally friendly businesses like Greenlife. “What better location to promote health and wellness through yoga and meditation—just being here makes you feel healthier,” Sara concluded.

That feeling of health and the connection to other nearby stores is what LEED AP architect Thomas Palmer had been hoping for. At the time, Palmer worked for River Street Architecture, a sustainability-focused design firm that just celebrated its own building’s LEED EB certification.

“Sustainability is more than energy efficiency and using certain materials,” he told me over lunch on Greenlife’s patio. “It’s about creating public spaces that people want to be in. It’s about promoting local business and local living through thoughtful design of natural and built environments.”

When Greenlife owner Chuck Pruett was looking to expand his business, he teamed up with CS & Associates’ Stephen Arnsdorff to create an environmentally friendly shopping center. The site had been home to an old manufacturing plant. Only certain parts of the brownfield were fit for construction, so the rest of the site remains open. On some weekends, you can find a makeshift farmer’s market in this area with homegrown fruits, vegetables and original art.

“We wanted the center to look and feel like a city block,” Palmer explained. “2 Northshore is a part of a larger vision of what urban development can be.”

Most modern shopping centers in suburban areas run like a playlist on replay. In a typical shopping center, stores are placed one next to the other in a sprawling square, with little or no natural space. Occasionally, a desolate tree rises from the pavement, an oasis of life in a hot, steaming swath of black asphalt. This disconnect between people and the natural world feeds environmental degradation.

One of the most visible green attributes of the complex is Greenlife Grocery’s green roof and living walls. Leafy green vines climb up the store’s brick walls, and spring blooms hang lazily from the roof. Some people might think that these buildings cost a fortune to construct, but building green is not necessarily more expensive. Often, especially when considering energy usage, it is a “pay now or pay later” situation.

The owners and architect insisted on what is called a “state of the shelf” approach— meaning that all the materials used to construct these buildings can be found on the shelves of most building suppliers. The greenery, while beautiful, also serves a utilitarian purpose. Green roofs and living walls serve as natural UV protection. A green roof can reduce cooling costs 25-to-50 percent for the floors directly beneath it.

The buildings’ efficiency varies, but Greenlife Grocery’s building is 30 percent more efficient than other typical buildings of its size. The owners worked with a tight budget, and still have the gorgeous, modern green complex they wanted. Amazingly, 81 percent of the construction process was diverted from landfill, making creation of the complex as green as its buildings.

2 Northshore is an example of one path the country can take. We can build our new shopping centers and neighborhoods sustainably, embracing a future of promise—or we can continue to push forward as we always have, promising to fix things later. As the nation tries to rebuild and improve, I can only hope that we choose success built for the long term.

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Elizabeth Crenshaw is LEED accredited and works for EPB in Strategic Planning. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to Chattanooga after graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2007.

But despite their widespread availability, there are still issues surrounding CFLs. Many people I speak with are confused about the bulb’s proper disposal, and some have complaints of bulbs burning out early while some flicker and smoke in certain applications. Buying and properly disposing of the bulbs takes some research and some thought.

Additionally, CFLs are a double-edged sword in energy-efficient technology. On one hand, they undoubtedly conserve energy. One bulb can save half a ton of Co2 from the atmosphere over its lifetime. On the other hand, the bulbs contain a significant amount of mercury, a substance potentially toxic to humans and wildlife.
So here are some facts and figures on CFLs:

• CFLs consume about 1/3 of the power traditional bulbs do and generate 70 percent less heat, keeping cooling costs down in the summer. Some bulbs can last as long as seven years and replacing just five regular bulbs with CFLs can save about $156 over their lifetimes.

• Buying CFLs is not as straightforward as buying traditional bulbs. It’s important to buy high-quality CFLs to make sure that you are getting what you pay for in terms of energy savings. “Energy Star” labeled bulbs are a safe bet because these bulbs have been tested to perform to a certain standard. Consumer Reports issued a study on CFLs and gave positive reviews to Philips Marathon bulbs and to Feit Electric Eco Bulbs. Scoring less than glowing reviews were outdoor CFLs from GE and soft white bulbs from Sylvania.

• Since 1998, China has been the world leader in manufacturing CFLs, shipping over one billion bulbs per year and capturing 75 percent of the world’s CFL market. Chinese bulbs have been reported to contain more mercury than bulbs manufactured in other countries, but most manufacturers have committed to keeping the mercury content below five milligrams per bulb.

• Equally as important as a CFL’s quality is its application. Where are you planning on putting the CFL? You should know the answer to that question before you purchase the bulb.
CFLs created for indoor use have subpar performance outside. Indoor CFLs are specially crafted to perform best at around 77 degrees, so choose bulbs meant for outdoor use if that’s where you’re putting them.

• For three-way dimmer fixtures or lamps on a timer, it is important to choose a bulb specifically meant for that application. At worst, not doing so could result in a smoking bulb or in the bulb flickering out immediately, at best, the life of the bulb will be significantly decreased. Bulbs meant for these purposes will be marked on the packaging.

• If you don’t have a specialty use like the applications listed above, you’ll get the most for your money by placing the CFL in a lamp in a frequently occupied room.

• Some people have complained CFLs are not as bright as traditional bulbs. Make sure to check the Lumen rating on the box. The higher the rating, the more light the bulb will provide. Also, wattage is relative to size: the bigger the bulb, the greater the light output. Another reason people avoid CFLs is that some bulbs emit an unflattering, cold light. CFLs come with a “K” rating that indicates the shade of light a user can expect. If you like softer, more romantic light, look for ratings less than 3,000K. If you prefer brighter, whiter light, check for ratings over 3,500K.

• CFLs contain mercury, and though it’s a small amount, just three-to-five milligrams, it’s still enough to cause harm, so you should avoid exposure. Unlike a traditional bulb, when a CFL breaks, certain precautions must be taken. If you break a bulb, leave the room for 15 minutes. It’s best to pick up the pieces with a mask and gloves on, and be sure not to vacuum or sweep, especially on hard floors. Open a window when the clean up is complete.

• The best way to dispose of your CFL is to recycle it. Home Depot now offers free CFL recycling at all its locations. I wait until I have five or so before making a trip, wrapping them in old newspaper to avoid breakage.

Many industry experts believe that CFLs are ultimately a transition product, paving the way for superior LED technology. LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) have been falling in price lately. Today, you can find a pack of three at Sam’s Club for $14.86, though the bulbs are admittedly pretty dim. Higher-quality LEDs are still pretty expensive, but the technology certainly holds promise. With this technology, people will not be forced to weigh environmental benefits and consequences to such a large degree. But as with any environmentally friendly technology, affordability is the first step toward sustainability.

Elizabeth Crenshaw is LEED accredited and works for EPB in Strategic Planning. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to Chattanooga after graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2007.

Environmental art is another means of communication, one the green community often overlooks. According to academics, the Environmental Art movement started in the late 1960s, but one could argue that environmental art has always been around. Artists have always tried to capture the beauty of the natural world, but what I find interesting is art with an emphasis on man’s impact on nature. Art can also be a means to an end in getting things done.

In 2004, Xavier Cortada addressed deforestation in Florida by painting native trees on the concrete columns that hold up bridges along I-95 though downtown Miami. By 2006, the images had triggered an effort to restore a mangrove colony on South Florida’s Biscayne Bay.

Betsey Damon creates large-scale sculptures to bring awareness to water pollution. Damon’s piece, the da Vinci Water Garden, is a sculpture that redirects storm water from rooftops and a parking lot at a Portland, Oregon school. The artist is able to bring attention to the issue of contaminated water through something beautiful, transforming a problem into an opportunity.
Environmental art can also help you see issues and possibilities in obscure places. I have found that seeing issues illustrated through various mediums helps me think about them in new ways.

Local artist Michael Jenkins’ work advocates sustainability, though often not directly. You can find his art all over town: Winder Binder Gallery, at the Chattanooga Market, and in Greenlife, to name a few. His paintings’ subjects are usually man-made and utilitarian—pieces of infrastructure so common, they blend in. Images like streetlights, water towers, power lines, smoke stacks, and nuclear cooling towers are common in Jenkins’ work.

Michael had a class in high school that changed how he thought about the environment. The program was called SAVE (Students Advocating Vital Environmentalism). “I noticed every little thing after that class,” says Michael.

Much of Michael’s material is green. He routinely uses discarded scrapes of wood as canvas. If he sees a pile of scrap on the side of the road, he’ll stop and take what he can use. He also prefers the texture, which gives his pieces unique character. “It’s cheaper, sure, but I like seeing things that are thought of as trash and making them into something interesting,” he says.
During the day, Michael uses his degree in horticulture to cultivate orchids for Lines Orchids in Signal Mountain. But you won’t see any flowers in his art.

“It’s just not what I want to communicate,” he says, looking thoughtfully at one of his pieces. “Some people say my work is dark. But I don’t think so. It’s just there, you know?”

I can see why some people might come to that conclusion. But I get a completely different message from his art. The subject matter is bleak, if that is how one chooses to view industry and modern life. One of his pieces features a section of vibrant power lines bathed in moonlight, a lone bird perched on the pole, illustrating how nature and the man-made work intersect. Another piece is of a brightly painted manufacturing facility—deep pinks and purples set against a blazing orange sky, while yet another features Alabama’s old Sloss Furnace in bright green.

Seeing objects usually thought of as polluting in a different light instills in me a sense of hope.

Modern life does not have to be inherently bad for the environment. We can change. Power can be clean. Manufacturing and industry can be revamped for the 21st century with new technologies; new technologies will help us live more efficiently and in harmony with our surroundings. We can develop processes that reuse waste from industry; economic development can work with the environment, not against it.

We can make a new beginning using what we have learned and applying it to what we already have. The sheer magnitude of what we have built in this country—all the metal, cable, and steel, and the technology that is integrated into everything we do, can be given new purpose. We were smart enough to build all of this. We are smart enough to build it cleanly.

Art can be one vehicle for this message. Another should be what we do.

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Elizabeth Crenshaw is LEED accredited and works for EPB in Strategic Planning. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to Chattanooga after graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2007.

What hasn’t been getting as much attention is a resolution sponsored by Franklin senator Jack Johnson, declaring that Tennessee will not participate in a federal cap-and-trade program. The resolution passed along party lines. The fact that this bill was introduced is premature at best, and most poignantly, it is a step backward for the entire state.

The resolution works on the assumption that climate change is a hoax, and that the “liberal agenda” has spawned the program in hopes of gaining some backdoor tax dollars.

The resolution is premature in that a federal cap-and-trade program is still being fleshed out; it’s not even ready for rejection—not that rejection should be an option.

Essentially, a carbon cap-and-trade program would regulate Co2 in a free-market environment. The government would “cap” carbon, and carbon-emitting businesses would “trade,” by buying and selling credits.

The United States has had an emissions cap and trade program for years. The largely bipartisan Clean Water Amendments of 1990 created a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide in an effort to reduce acid rain. The program is regarded as successful, in that So2 has been reduced by about 40 percent. There was no wave of American business failures as a result of this progress.
Tennessee is doing great things to prepare for an economy in which the environment is given concrete value. The governor and others are doing their part to secure green jobs for the state, beginning with the $62.5 million solar institute in Knoxville. This type of forward thinking, progressive action is what we need not only for the environment—but also for the economy.

It is unclear what legal bearing, if any, this decision will have if Congress does move forward with a federal program. However, some think that this rejection could affect Tennessee’s ability to secure recovery funds; funds the state needs to order to compete in the emerging green market.

This resolution’s backers claim that any cap-and-trade program will hurt families, while forcing American businesses to relocate to countries without such programs.

Johnson and his supporters fail to mention key points, such are that there are progressive lawmakers and economists figuring out provisions for vulnerable businesses as I write this column, like short-term free credits and incentives. And it’s misleading to claim that the program will “hurt” Americans. Naysayers aren’t discussing how all of this money is going to be used. From reading some commentary, you would think that the money is being used to pave Washington D.C.’s streets with gold. The truth is that the money from this program will go toward building a sustainable future for this nation, protecting our national security and pulling us out of a devastating recession. Americans will be getting this money back, in the form of ingenuity, clean power, and better infrastructure overall. Society is already paying the price for carbon in air pollution, stagnant technology, and unsustainable business practices. A federal program could present a solution.

It should be noted that cap-and-trade has had some problems. Our progressive European friends have had trouble perfecting the system. Issues range from charging too much for credits at the programs’ start to planning for rising oil prices. American policy makers should pay close attention to these lessons learned when creating a US program.

Ultimately, cap-and-trade may not be the complete answer, but we must think it through before we throw away its promise. America and the world must find a way to integrate the true cost of pollution into our financial system sustainably. Cap-and-trade is a compromise and a start.

States that embrace an economy in which the environment is valued will overcome this economic downturn; states that ignore this future risk being left behind. We always have a choice.

Elizabeth Crenshaw is LEED accredited and works for EPB in Strategic Planning, but her views are her own. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to Chattanooga after graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2007.

This perception asks a question: Why care about certain plants or obscure endangered animals when there are real, important issues affecting real people?

The first time environmental degradation showed up on my radar, I was five years old. A chemical company in my hometown called Columbia Organic Chemicals had operated a facility in a residential area for decades. By the time people discovered the extent of the company’s lack of environmental oversight, they had long since relocated.

COC was known as a “specialty batch” chemical company, meaning they manufactured special made-to-order chemicals. They’d also run a chemical recycling business, but instead of recycling the toxic substances sent to them by other chemical manufacturers, COC had just dumped the waste on site. There is no evidence that in the years they operated this business they ever disposed of this waste properly. It was not until the early 1990’s that people began to take action.

However, there was pushback from not only the company, as one would expect, but also from some residents. These residents, though they were being affected, chose not to see the issue as being important. But most of the neighborhood did, and, ultimately, two COC executives were sent to jail.

Who were their crimes committed against? Certainly the local plant life was affected, as were the salamanders and frogs that lived along the contaminated stream. But it was the people made ill, some irreversibly, that demanded attention. I lived in this neighborhood, which made the issue very real and very important to me.

The story of Love Canal is another example of how environmental issues directly affect people, a particularly moving case because so many of the victims were children. Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, where in the 1970’s, a school and surrounding neighborhood were located directly on top of 21,000 pounds of toxic chemical waste. These families suffered unexplained illnesses and miscarriages. Between the years 1974-1978, 56 percent of children born to parents living in Love Canal had birth defects. Blood tests showed that a “disturbingly high” amount of people in the area showed signs of developing leukemia and had chromosome damage—meaning that their children’s children’s children could be affected.

The homes in this neighborhood were demolished. New laws were created to keep degradation on this scale from happening again. But the damage was done, and thousands of people’s lives were changed. The impact to healthcare in this area was undeniable.

When people think of the massive Exxon Valdez spill, images of oil-soaked animals being combed with toothbrushes come to mind. But what some people don’t remember is that entire industries in Prince William’s Sound dependent on the water were wiped out. This one incident created economic devastation that has yet to be cleaned up. The economy is tied to the environment in more ways than most of us ever truly understand. But when an event alters our environment, the connection between it and our livelihoods becomes apparent.

There are so many examples of environmental degradation affecting people, governments, and markets, it would be impossible to list them all. From the 1984 gas leak in India that killed 4,000 people instantly, to the 2000 Baia Mare spill in which over 55 tons of cyanide were dumped, to the current Gulf of Mexico’s Dead Zone, fighting for environmental issues is bigger than tree hugging. Environmental degradation hurts people, cripples economies, and threatens our security.

Environmental issues aren’t “soft green-washing opportunities” when they affect you and your community. And the truth is that these issues do affect you—the air you breathe, the ground beneath your feet, the food you eat: It’s all fair game for pollution.

It’s about more than the polar bears and the rain forests. The issues they face are the same issues we face. Caring for the environment is synonymous with caring for each other.

Elizabeth Crenshaw is LEED accredited and works for EPB in Strategic Planning, but her views are her own. Originally from South Carolina, Elizabeth moved to Chattanooga after graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2007.