Yesterday I attended a daylong, academy awards-style event in San Francisco that was doling out cash prizes to green tech entrepreneurs who’ve been competing all year for the funds. Given we’ve been talking about multi-million dollar ARPA-E projects, the prizes were comparatively pocket change, in the neighborhood of $50,000 with a grand prize of a quarter million, and the companies tiny. The whole experience brought to bear the phrase “small is beautiful,” but maybe not in all the ways I’d hoped.

The winner of the Cleantech Open was EcoFactor, a start-up company that produces a smart thermostat for the home that raises and lowers the temperature as needed moment by moment. They claim a 20-30 percent reduction in home energy bills. Their pitch to the audience included a slide of a typical family home with the caption “House before EcoFactor” and then a second slide of the identical photo whose caption read “House after EcoFactor.” The larger point being that the software system not only has minimal installment requirements, but users really don’t have to do anything on a day-to-day basis. That’s a pretty big (yet seemingly obvious) step in our advancement toward a smart grid.

This is the kind of idea that would appeal to economist E.F. Schumacher, who authored the book of essays titled Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered that came out in the 1970s and became a mantra for the nascent environmental movement. Among many things, he argued that the aim of human economic activity should be to maximize wellbeing through the least amount of consumption. Invisibly turning down my thermostat a notch when the sun emerges from behind the clouds meets Schumacher’s criteria, at least technically speaking.

Twelve small green tech companies were dubbed finalists at the Open, two of which were runners up to the big winner and deserve exposure. The company Micromidas uses microbes found in nature to convert the carbon in raw sewage into biodegradable plastics. The bacterial polyesters (polyhydroxyalkanoates or PHA) can be manipulated to form plastics with different characteristics—a flexible beverage bottle or harder plastics—and will biodegrade within months if composted, or otherwise exposed to the elements (no more giant seafaring garbage patches).

The other runner up, Alphabet Energy is a small company started by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that turns wasted heat into electricity using thermoelectric materials (their breakthrough is a material that they say is 50 times cheaper than those available). Think of all the mechanical processes that lose energy as heat and what it would mean to capture some of it to be used as electricity (and not just hot water). They say they’re targeting big manufactures such as steel and cement companies.

Individual companies aside, what was remarkable about the Cleantech Open was to watch, more than three decades after Schumacher’s death, men of his privilege finally embrace his ideals, at least in part. I’m not convinced the VCs, entrepreneurs, or CEOs at the Open are pursuing clean tech for any reason other than money, but the coming climate legislation and shrinking resources have changed what a successful business will look like, and Silicon Valley gets that. If inventing ways to use waste will make a fortune, these businessmen (and they were 99 percent men) will chase it like a Wall Street banker does a mortgage-backed security. Schumacher on the other hand espoused Buddhist economics, which championed a sort of spiritual growth through work that would look down on the big egos Silicon Valley glorifies. After all, the full sentence from which his book title comes is: “Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.”

By Victoria Schlesinger

Photo credit: seanaes’ photostream

Alien

Back in the 1980s when the US and the USSR had intercontinental missiles pointed at each other, the world seemed uncomfortably close to realizing one of the dumbest imaginable outcomes. One finger pushing one button somewhere would set off a sequence of events that assured total destruction everywhere. It was a game no one could win, and, in retrospect, maybe that’s why no one ever really played.

A common trope among those bemoaning this weird frozen state of affairs, in which absolutely everything was at stake, was, “If only aliens would invade, we’d stop this nonsense.” If we just had a common threat, the thinking went, we’d see our respective grievances as the small potatoes they really were. We’d stop linking the continued existence of civilization to arguments about the relative merits of communism and capitalism.

So when the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, there was a collective sigh of relief. We seemed to have transitioned from a politics structured around mutually assured destruction to… whatever we call this. The point is, the “if I can’t have it, I’ll nuke it all” option seems to have been (mostly) taken off the table.

But we got our alien invasion anyway — the threat posed to all by human-induced climate change. And, like it or not, we’re now testing the soundness of the reasoning behind the scenario so many wished for. Will a new kind of threat (climate change) lead to a new kind of cooperation?

At this point, hopes for progress at the upcoming meeting on climate in Copenhagen meeting aren’t exactly high. Part of the problem: As far as alien invasions go, climate change is just not quite sexy or dramatic enough — at least not yet.

And yet, sociology has some encouraging things to say on how an over-arching threat, even rather dull-seeming ones like climate change, can quash inter-group squabbling and quibbling, and lead to greater harmony for all. In other words, in a world of soon-to-be 9 billion people, the threat of climate change may be just what the doctor ordered for lasting peace and prosperity.

A classic study called the Robbers Cave Experiment illustrates this coming-together tendency nicely.

In the 1950s, psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 boys from middle class families, all around 12 years old, divided them into two groups, and then, for six days, let them cement their group-ness as they saw fit. Each group spontaneously created its own hierarchical structures. And without prompting, each group named itself: the Rattlers and the Eagles.

Now came phase two. The psychologist overlords arranged various competitions between the groups over the course of 4 to 6 days. They explained that trophies would be awarded according to an accumulated team score. Other prizes, like medals and pocket knives, would go out to members of each group when it won a given competition.

Things got ugly immediately, before the competitions even began. The groups started heckling each other in the dining hall. They launched raids on each others’ cabins. They burned each others’ flags.

And when the Eagles actually won a contest, the Rattlers raided them and stole the prize knives and medals. Food fights then broke out in the dining hall, which threatened to erupt into full-scale riots. Hostilities between the groups had gotten so bad that the psychologists decided to cut phase 2 short.

They began phase 3 — reconciliation — early.

Here’s the part bears on an alien invasion and, by extension, climate change. We now have two groups with deep-seated hatred for each other — a rather nice microcosm of the human condition. What would it take to make them get along? A new type of problem did the trick.

The psychologists presented both groups with new challenges.  They claimed that the water supply for the camp had been vandalized, ruined. No water for anyone. But while looking into the problem, the two groups discovered a full water tank on the property. Only, the faucet, which was clogged by a cloth, didn’t work.

What did they do? Members from both groups worked together to unplug the faucet. And when the water finally flowed, they rejoiced together. A second “superordinate” problem then arose: a movie they could all watch if they helped pay the cost of showing it. The boys solved that one together, too — each group put $3.50 toward the $15.00 total cost, and the camp administration paid the rest.

And, rather miraculously, when they dined in the mess hall, a few shenanigans involving chewing gum aside, the mutual group animosity was gone.

So maybe there’s something good to be said about the climate predicament, a problem on a scale humanity has certainly never faced before. Maybe it’s just the push we need to realize peace, harmony, and a truly global civilization.

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff

In my last post I lamented ARPA-E’s total emphasis on hold-in-your-hand gadgetry, and the absence of research on less tangible energy innovation. Of course, in classic blogger tradition, I didn’t have a very clear idea of what that might involve — just some vague notions about alternatives to GDP and social experiments, whatever those are.

So I bounced the notion off my fellow Wired Science writer Alexis Madrigal, whose book on the history of green technology is coming out next year. He pointed me at Ryan Wise, an electricity market expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who in turn sent me to Ed Vine, an LBNL energy analyst. And Vine had a message: there’s indeed a great deal of non-tech-based energy research out there.

“We’ve traditionally focused more on the widgets,” said Vine. “But now the other side is getting more attention.”

Vine referred me to a study that came out in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on the superficially unsexy subject of energy-consuming behaviors and how they can be changed. The researchers estimated that small, eminently achievable changes in everyday behavior — carpooling, sealing windows, and so on — could reduce U.S. carbon emissions by more than seven percent.

That might not sound like much, but it’s equivalent to the yearly emissions of France, or of the U.S. iron, steel and aluminum industries, with petroleum refinement thrown in to boot.

But there’s a catch: changes that seem simple, easy and obvious — carpooling is one great example — aren’t always adopted. Riding to work in the most convenient way possible isn’t a “plastic” behavior, in research parlance. Other decisions seem to be affected by psychological dynamics like those described earlier by Moises, in which performing some minor act of environmental decency makes us feel like we don’t need to do anything else.

Vine also guided me to a collection of white papers produced on behalf of the California Public Utilities Commission. Back during the 2001 energy crisis, when blackouts rolled across the Golden State and saving energy was imperative, the CPUC had the good sense to study what people were doing, and why. The papers are an example of the sort of behavioral research that needs to be conducted in tandem with the technological.

Some of the research is methodological, intended to find better ways of measuring the effects of changes to personal behaviors, as well as the motivations. The latter is both important — if you know why some people do better, maybe you can figure out why other people don’t, and how to convince them — and deceptively complicated.

“There are different energy-saving messages out there, and different programs. People are doing lots of different things for different reasons, and nobody’s been able to do a systematic study on what those reasons are,” said Vine. “Measuring how much energy people save is the easy part. But if there’s a reduction, then what caused it?”

CPUC-funded researchers are looking at behavioral trends in different demographic groups, and also at how models of individual behavior used to guide policy and program decisions need to be updated. Many of those models assume that people are “rational economic actors,” always using available information to make choices in their best interests. That assumption originated in the world of economics, where it’s been largely discredited; it’s not always be applicable to energy use, either.

Then there’s meta-level work on what sort of experiments should be run to test new types of energy efficiency, how to change the behaviors of administrators and policymakers, and so on.

It’s exciting stuff, and all this is just a piece of it. (For more, see this excellent Science feature package. It was published in August, and is probably the most comprehensive general-audience look at energy efficiency and behavior out there.) It also touches on some of what Sandra talks about in her last post: the real-world social and economic environment in which energy innovation takes place.

Sandra refers to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who described the whole social-economic-technological system as following an essentially biological, evolutionary model. This type of interpretation is very tricky — more on that next week — but suffice it to say that “evolution” isn’t some magic process that always provides the best possible solution, much less what we want it to. It’s shaped by many parameters, many of them hidden or subtle or even counterproductive, depending on one’s perspective. In the case of energy innovation, human behavior is one of those parameters, and an important one.

To be fair, the U.S. Department of Energy seems to get this. In the Science article, energy chief Steven Chu says that energy efficiency “isn’t just low hanging fruit; it’s fruit lying on the ground.” The article’s author also notes that “the biggest challenge is not inventing new technology but persuading more people to adopt technology and practices that already exist.”

And as the California example makes clear — heck, as the incandescent light bulbs that are probably in your home make clear, and the way many offices are so air conditioned that workers wear sweaters in the summer, and how many of those workers crank up the heat at home in winter, rather than donning the sweaters they wear at work in the summer — we just don’t understand persuasion, even when it seems obvious. When it comes to energy behavior, we’re still clunking along in an age-of-carbon mentality. Behavioral research is just as exciting, and just as necessary, as any new solar panel or algae fuel.

Posted by Brandon Keim (Web/Twitter)

Image: Semaphoria

Maybe it’s because I am writing this from the west coast, far from the cynical lens of my adopted home of New York City. Maybe a few days of drinking the water out here and seeing the sun has me thinking positive. Whatever it is, I am going to side with Victoria on the ARPA/American obsession with technology question, which Brandon brought up: I think ARPA is an indication that the administration is using technology for the right reasons (for the most part).

Sure, I take some issue with giving 10 percent of its monies to algal biofuel projects, which many reports find will be difficult to scale up. But, to Victoria’s assessment of ARPA’s first round of investments (that it’s targeting projects that are already well under way, but may need a funding boost to get past a particular obstacle): She’s right. At this point, these are the bets with the best odds.

Warning, gross oversimplification to follow: I see our pursuit of technological innovation to be two-pronged. We are either striving for convenience (gadgets, informational technology) or reversing problems that crop up in natural systems (like, biotech). Most projects within the climate change space fall into these two broad buckets: they seek to make fundamental changes to human processes (by producing less waste that’s noxious to the planet) or they seek to put a band-aid over the problem.

This summer, several sources seemed to indicate that the bogeyman of geoengineering was beginning to fade, (not necessarily that the idea was gaining favor, but that there was reluctant acceptance).  Geoengineering is the active gaming of the earth’s natural systems to cover up the effects of climate change. The American Meteorological Society endorsed research into these sorts of schemes, such as flooding the atmosphere with sulfate particles to reflect the sun’s rays or bulking up clouds by having ships on the ocean shoot water into the sky. In the U.K., the Institution of Mechanical Engineers suggested geoengineering as a way to buy time (pdf) to solve our energy problems and polluting ways, and the Royal Society concluded these options should be researched, at least at a small scale, alongside more efforts aimed at “mitigating or adapting” to global warming.

Mitigation and adaptation, however, is where the Obama White House is focusing its efforts, and that’s a good thing. The work its funding, as Victoria points out, has the ability to bring about both infrastructural change–which in turn will force the hand on social change. It also has the potential to create new industries, something a geoengineering solution would not do; it’d be more along the lines of a bridge construction project. Back in April, Obama’s science czar said the administration was not ruling out geoengineering, but it’s nice to see that ARPA and the government, in general, is not yet squandering its money on these sorts of efforts. Maybe that’s because, as an Atlantic article this summer indicated, one rich entrepreneur/renegade could fund and implement one of these band-aid solutions without the cooperation of actual nations.

As we turn the corner toward Copenhagen and hear rumblings that a meaningful consensus to fixing our climate change ills is unlikely to happen, I wonder how far we are from ARPA going from E (for energy) to G (for geoengineering). I’m happy we didn’t just throw our hands up prematurely and go for convenience. With any luck, one of these projects just needed a few million dollars to get on the fast track to market.

Typing that last sentence felt good. This glass-half-full stuff ain’t so bad.

By Nikhil Swaminathan

Geoengineering photo by illuminating9_11

From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner we got the line " Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."

OK, I’ll bite. I’ll tell you what’s good about ARPA-E, and counter the arguments of my Hive Mind brethren who lament the addictive high of technology, the flawed nature of human beings, and our entrepreneur-unfriendly system to point out the many deficiencies of APRA-E solutions. I’d argue that by way of technology, ARPA-E is funding life-changing concepts that could be the path to social and psychological improvement.

ARPA-E projects aren’t just about swapping hydrocarbons for photons, there’s a recipe for social revolution tucked inside some of those technologies. And while I am aware that almost every technology-fundamentalist argument holds out this glittering carrot (social change) while ignoring the umpteen narratives of social destruction spawned by technology (the atomic bomb pretty much topping that list), frankly, as Sandra duly pointed out, none of the funded ARPA-E technologies are as novel as nuclear fission (which exposes another set of problems, as she discusses).

Most of the APRA-E projects are devoted to removing roadblocks impeding ideas that have been kicking around for a long time. We haven’t given up on these ideas because their promise is so tantalizing, so revolutionary. While none of the ARPA-E projects are going to overhaul science, the incremental breakthroughs they could produce would overhaul the resources and restrictions we currently work within. They are societal game-changers if not scientifically radical.

Imagine if we could turn seawater into freshwater. That’s a quest that goes back millennium, and for good reason. Some 97 percent of the Earth’s water is salty and undrinkable, a fact that is coming increasingly into focus as our fights and fears over limited freshwater supplies mount in the face of climate change and a growing world population. There’s no question that people will go to war over water, which makes it hard to capture in a phrase how drastically an inexpensive, durable desalination technology could change the world.

ARPA-E is funding a California company called nanOasis whose co-founder, Dr. Jason Holt, discovered that carbon nanotubes can filter saltwater much more efficiently than other membrane materials. This company’s idea could reduce the energy demands of reverse osmosis by 30-50 percent, making the freshwater it yields potentially 40 percent cheaper than most desalinized water.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t conserve water, that we wouldn’t face the pollution issues brought on by desalination, but I would rather see us fight over these issues than a scarce, essential resource—we all know who gets the short end of the stick in that battle.

How about something a little more mundane, like batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have rapidly changed our day-to-day lives by putting iPhones and other mini-computers in our hands (I know, this arguably has many downsides). ARPA-E is investing in numerous battery technologies that could hook into the grid and enable us to store intermittent wind and solar power—one the primary obstacles to replacing coal with renewables. And there’s no need to rehash the importance of weaning ourselves from coal.

Obviously ARPA-E can’t solve all our problems, but given the pittance it’s working with—compare ARPA-E’s $400 million to DARPA’s proposed 2010 budget of $3.25 billion and the bank bailout estimated at nearly a trillion dollars—and the greedy culture we inhabit, the DOE has made some prudent, reasonable investments that just might change the problems we’re fighting from dire to manageable. And those—rather than war over resources and besieged storm/drought ravaged cities—are the grounds from which positive social change grows.

By Victoria Schlesinger

Darpa, the original advanced research arm of the government, was founded on the credo of “preventing technological surprise” in the sphere of national defense. Its directors referred to their mandate as “creative destruction,” enlisting the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s term for the type of innovation that he argued enables capitalism to thrive. The stagnation of radical innovation is what has propelled the American government to create Arpa-style agencies to force a faster evolution of ideas.

In his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter writes that entrepreneurs are the engine of economic growth—new ideas drive old technologies into obsolescence, producing better and cheaper products that cumulatively revolutionize the economic system from within. It’s an inherently biological model, where mutations within a system proffer a competitive advantage on the system as a whole, in this case an expanding economy. But Schumpeter goes further to argue that large corporations and government agencies will eventually stifle entrepreneurship. In other words, capitalism eventually chokes on its own success. Large companies at the top of the heap become entrenched in supporting existing product lines and existing manufacturing techniques, and their innovations become incremental. Government laboratories, where radical research might otherwise take place, are insulated from market forces, removing the sense of urgency that can propel true innovators to keep fighting, thinking, and clawing for results. Of course there are exceptions—Apple comes to mind—but a systemic drag on the development of disruptive technologies may be at the heart of what’s impeding a true energy revolution.

The kind of economic climate that supports radical innovation won’t spontaneously sprout from the soil of government grants for several reasons. In a recent comment to a Harvard Business Review blog post on Darpa, Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar Animation Studies, makes the following remark:

Investing in R&D… is only part of the answer. We also have to invest in the K-12 educational system. In addition to math and science, we also have to invest in teaching shop and art, which unfortunately aren’t considered relevant anymore in a lot of schools. Richness in our society is dependent on a complex interplay of service, creativity, thinking, and design, as well as the ability to make things.

The point relates to what Brandon and Moises have written recently, and it illustrates the fundamental challenge to forcing innovation. In another comment on that HBR Darpa post, a reader writes:

We do not have the rich ecosystem of interactions between academia, national labs, start-ups and established companies that is necessary for out the box thinking to happen and to be successful. I hope that DARPA will take responsibility for recreating this missing ecosystem.

Finding a balance between benevolent lightning bolts of government funding and independent sources of venture capital, as well as hundreds of fountains from which constructive ideas can spring, will be critical to forcing through the energy revolution that peak oil, climate change, and ecological forces will soon demand.

As we hobble away from fossil fuels, I wonder whether our current pseudo-depression has exposed, rather than carved, a hole in the fabric of our innovation infrastructure. If American companies have become less daring, we can ask ourselves a few more critical questions about the approach that Arpa-E has taken to forcing innovation. For example, in Darpa’s half-decade of existence, one main question asked of applicants was whether their ideas were indeed “Darpa-hard,” or perhaps just underbaked. I wonder, as I consider the list of Arpa-E projects, whether these ideas are all truly revolutionary new technologies, or whether we are just speeding up the plodding march of new ideas into the marketplace. And if it’s the latter, is it actually healthy that the government has become the major enabler of innovation? Would we even need Darpa and Arpa-E if we had a healthier ecosystem of innovation-driving institutions–and if not, what would it take to create that environment?

Posted by Sandra Upson

Image Credit: mcmrbt/flickr

Buddha under the Bodhi Tree where he attained enlightenment

So we’ve got this new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program which may produce a technology that saves us from Carbonized Doom, and that radically alters the way we live. We hope so, anyway, even as we worry that ARPA-E is somehow missing the point. Because, as Brandon points out, maybe the root problem has less to do with what technology we may or may not possess, and more to do with our over-reliance on technology to begin with. No doubt, technology is marvelous and life-improving, but it’s also directly implicated in our out-of-control addiction to consumption.

Which is why, following Brandon’s lead, but forging my own trail across the minefields, I recommend an ARPA whose focus is not a new M16 assault rifle or energy, but Enlightenment.

As Obama says, Let’s be clear: I’m not talking satori awakening-to-the-oneness-of-all-being enlightenment, although I’m not ruling it out either. I’m referring to a more American-style awakening, one that’s filled with the sort of common sense that’s really not that common these days, but which could, in the right quantities, help us through the next 50 – 100 years. That’s what we need — not biofuels from algae so we can keep commuting from the suburbs, or another Internet so we can watch more porn.

You might say that there are two mutually exclusive theories of history, both of which are true. One holds that things change as history progresses, and observes that they’ve changed radically even since our grandparents’ time. The other holds that things never change, because human nature, the primary dynamo, is a fixed entity. And that’s why, although we’ve all got iPhones and such now, we’re still basically the same jealous, dastardly, sometimes-loving apes we were 50,000 years ago. (That’s not entirely true, I know, just see my own arguments on the expanding circle of moral consideration, and fish.)

But does it have to be that way? How about an ARPA that tests the written-in-stone-ness of the second theory of history? How about an ARPA that tries to advance us in that area in which we never seem to advance: the successful management of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride — a.k.a. the seven deadly sins of yore.

Don’t get all queasy. I’m not talking religion; I’m talking science. And the science of not-being-miserable has made remarkable advances in recent years. It all started when a few psychologists stopped asking what messed people up, and began asking what made them hale and healthy. Thus was born the field of positive psychology — the “science” of happiness.

Here’s what positive psychology says: First, and somewhat obviously in retrospect, in study after study, consumption that’s far beyond the basic necessities — food, shelter, a beer on Saturdays — doesn’t bring lasting happiness. In fact, it seems to lower happiness levels. One becomes like a drug addict, having to consume larger and larger quantities of stuff to feel the same high.  The new Gucci watch makes you happy for a week. Then you sink back down. This time you buy two Gucci sunglasses, plus a Dolce & Gabbana bag. Giddy and high for a week. Then you sober up. Next time, tack on a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. And so on. They call it the “hedonic treadmill.” The cost-per-high keeps growing, but you get nowhere.

What does make us happy? They say: purpose greater than ourselves, meaning (whatever that means), community, and other things that — yes — sound suspiciously like a Vermonter’s description of utopia, or the village where s/he lives. (Are all positive psychologists white males? Not all, but lots. Hmmm…)

You may think, as I do, that misery is part of being healthy, and that if you’re not somewhat miserable, then something’s probably wrong. (You’re hooked up to the Matrix.) It’s also true that positive psychology deserves much skepticism, not least for the reasons Chris Hedges points out on the jacket of his new book, The Empire of Illusion. The very notion of a teachable science of happiness is, in some respects, the pinnacle of self-indulgence, part of what got us in this mess in the first place. (For perspective, remember, though, that Hedges also wrote a book called “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”)

But what if you defined happiness not as euphoria and bliss — a constant orgasm of oneness — but rather as being content with what you’ve got, and not constantly, compulsively craving what you don’t have?

Yes, we certainly owe Craving a large debt for getting us this far. Look at it this way: Those individuals who weren’t greedy enough when the bananas were ripe probably passed on fewer genes. But while natural selection designed us to crave (sweet tooth), we seem not-at-all designed to have the wherewithal to meet our cravings (obesity and diabetes). Worse, the world doesn’t seem capable of supplying all that we crave without degradation. Therein lie our problems.

This is NOT where I say “human greed is killing the planet,” however. Because, whatever we do, the planet and life as a whole will continue along just fine for several billion more years, until its appointment with our then-red giant sun. (That’s barring a catastrophic meteor strike, getting knock out of orbit by Jupiter, or a physics experiment gone awry that swallows earth.) I won’t even claim that our existence as a species is at stake. We’re too wily and tenacious. Someone is always left standing.

But I will posit that the relative grace with which humanity proceeds is definitely an open question. It can be easy, or it can be hard. And it all depends on our learning to control ourselves before Nature does it for us. The ARPA that helps in that endeavor is the one we need.

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Bodhi Tree picture from this tapestry

Whatever the problem, we can build something to fix it: locked up in that sentiment is frontier self-reliance, immigrant work ethic and the elbow-grease egalitarian ingenuity of a million garages and basement workshops. We’ve made robots to wash our dishes, fixed blown-out hearts and turned desert to garden.

But technology also satisfies our darker sensibilities. We crave dominance and control; we’re reluctant to confront problems at their root, in all their uncomfortable complexity. We’re lazy and short-sighted, and love shiny objects. So we make those dishes from toxic plastic, blow out our hearts by eating so badly, and turn desert to garden with water that someone else needs to drink.

Which brings us to ARPA-E, the Department of Energy’s new skunkworks, and the darling of green techies everywhere.

Now, I don’t intend to disparage the intentions of ARPA-E. We need those algae fuels and ultracapacitor batteries and carbon-gobbling goo. Anyone who doesn’t think Mad Max looked like fun knows that change is needed, and the agency’s $400 million budget is the federal equivalent of a third-grader’s diorama spending. It deserves a hundred times more.

But something about the agency and all the gee-whiz adulation makes me uncomfortable. I wonder about what’s not being funded, at what’s overlooked because it it doesn’t fit in our hands or look nice on film or let us keep living exactly as we are now, but with new gas stations. After all, it’s not just energy’s technological infrastructure that needs to be replaced. It’s social infrastructure, too. That seems like it’s being ignored in the federal push for sustainability. It’s a shame, possibly a tragic one.

I ran that hypothesis by Gil Friend, the CEO of environmental consultancy Natural Logic, and sustainable design strategist Jeremy Faludi.

“We’re culturally oriented to seeing things, not pattern,” wrote Friend in an email. “And we’re economically oriented to IP-protectable things, which is why we see venture capitalists pouring capital into the latest solar gadget, but not into urban planning & zoning, design for access, etc.”

Faludi opined that “it’d be great to have a behavioral/infrastructure ARPA, too.” But the absence is understandable, especially in a governmentally-funded project.

“It’s a lot easier to objectively measure and repeat the success of tech than the success of social experiments. Hence the bias,” he wrote. “And it won’t only be gadgets” that emerge from ARPA-E — ”remember, the original ARPA invented the internet.”

Faludi added that ARPA-E is asking for feedback on what to fund. “If you have suggestions, tell them,” he said.

Image: Come As You Are Cooperative

Posted by Brandon Keim (Web/Twitter).

Foolish House, Ontario Beach Park in 1910 by Charles C. Zoller

As the world’s economic woes stumble along and concerns mount that climate talks in Copenhagen will produce few results, Secretary Chu’s recent injection of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) funding for ambitious science is a bright spot amid some gloomy times. Institutions and companies in states throughout the nation will benefit from the $151 million doled out and the $249 million still to come. But establishing a new department within the DOE and pouring lots of money into special, risky projects has had its foes in recent years—primarily members of the GOP.

When the ARPA-E bill was first introduced in 2007, Republican leaders such as then- Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Texas Congressman Ralph Hall agreed in theory that America should be the leader in new technology (their Commander in Chief’s stance, too), but in essence they didn’t like the price tag attached to it. The initial ARPA-E bill proposed in the House’s Committee on Science and Technology slated $4.9 billion over five years for projects, and Republican members wanted to whittle that down to $750 million.

Debates went round and round, and ultimately ARPA-E made it out of the committee on a party line vote, apparently a first for the members:

“Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Ranking Member Ralph Hall (R-TX) began and concluded the hearing by speaking warmly of each other, Hall saying that there were “bound to be some times we are going to disagree.” Gordon remarked that “every bill that has come out of this committee has been unanimous,” and despite extensive consultation between Members and staff before the markup, he concluded, “At the end of the day, we are going to have our first disagreement.”

That summer APRA-E was folded into the America Competes Act [H.R. 2272; S. 761], an omnibus bill for fostering science, math and technology, which allowed for $33.6 billion in spending between 2008-2010. The bill passed with a sweeping majority, but in opposition were 57 members of the House (56 Republicans and Dennis Kucinich) and eight republican senators.

Nonetheless, the program languished. Congress allocated $300 million for FY2008 to the new idea, but the money was never appropriated. And Bush didn’t request any ARPA-E funds in 2009. Finally, last spring, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Obama made $400 million available and Chu has until September 2010 to give it out.

In this first round of project funding, a few states whose congressmen in the committee argued and voted against establishing ARPA-E are coming out pretty well, particularly Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Judy Biggert (R-IL), and Frank D. Lucas (R-OK). Almost $21 million is going to California-based projects, roughly $4 million to Illinois, and some $3 million to Oklahoma. No complaints from those representatives so far.

By Victoria Schlesinger

Photo credit: George Eastman House Collection

Next-generation ultracapacitors, also known as supercapacitors, got a huge boost when the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, set aside $5.3 million for a small Boston start-up called FastCAP. The company, an MIT spin-off, began in the labs of Joel Schindall and John Kassakian at MIT, and it aims to commercialize a nanotech-based replacement for batteries.

A capacitor, which is a pretty rudimentary energy storage device, has always been good at the things that batteries don’t do well—it can provide quick bursts of power, it can recharge in an instant, and it doesn’t wear out from repeated charge and discharge cycles. FastCAP is one of several groups pursuing a carbon nanotube-enhanced capacitor design.

In a capacitor, energy is stored between two plates that are separated by a thin insulator (check out the diagram above). The inside is filled with an ionic solution. When a voltage is applied to the plates, the ions in the solution are attracted to the plate with the opposite charge, and that’s where the capacitor’s energy is stored.

But the device’s ability to store energy is limited most of all by the surface area of the plates. So one way to soup up a capacitor is to coat the plates with activated carbon—that’s a thin layer of carbon that’s been pocked full of holes so that its interior looks more like a sponge. That increases the surface area, but the unpredictability of the interior structure and other material problems with the carbon made it harder to control the performance of the final device. A much more promising avenue, and one that would increase the surface area even more, is to grow a dense forest of carbon nanotubes onto a plate. Here, many long, skinny tubes of carbon stand side by side on a plate, sort of like the hairs of a toothbrush. Ions could attach themselves all along the nanotubes in a more even, predictable manner. If FastCAP can nail this technology, they’ll have the world of energy storage sitting at their feet.

The reason that ultracapacitors are perhaps one of the less-crazy of ARPA-E’s crazy gambits is that the ultracapacitor market, at $208 million in 2008, is already fairly established, and the devices have gained acceptance in a wide variety of fields. That will make their adoption more straightforward than, say, retrofitted carbon-capture devices. Here’s just a sample of the broad array of industries that ultracapacitors have already infiltrated. Ultracapacitor maker Maxwell Technologies, for one, says that millions of its devices are used in large wind turbines. When the power output of a 500-foot-tall turbine gets too high, its blades can spin out of control and damage the structure. An ultracapacitor, however, can release a quick burst of power to turn the turbine slightly out of the wind, sort of like applying the brakes. More commonly, ultracapacitors are known for their use in hybrid buses and garbage trucks (vehicles that stop and start a lot), where the devices deliver oomph for acceleration but also can recharge frequently by siphoning off the energy released during braking. They also have popped up in cameras to power the energy-intensive zoom, so as to lengthen the life of the battery. There are numerous applications in ordinary cars—locking the doors, moving the seats, raising and lower windows, in addition to uses in the drive train—that are beginning to show up in electric vehicles, reducing their dependence on batteries.

FastCAP (which has a truly skeletal web site) was only formed this year, so the company hasn’t had a chance to gain any momentum. But the research has solid underpinnings (described in detail in this article written by Schindall in 2007) and they’ve made swift, measurable progress in growing homogenous carbon nanotubes, shown here:

For a beautiful graphic interpretation (almost to scale, no less) of ion-clad carbon nanotubes, check out this striking illustration by Bryan Christie, who also produced the top image.

Posted By Sandra Upson