Segregated proms

A week ago, The New York Times published a slide show on one of the last bastions of open segregation in the US: prom night at a school in Georgia. I won't comment on the content there: see it for yourself.

But I will say that this example is yet another one that shows how privatization has been effectively used as a means of perpetuating segregation in the US since segregation became practically impossible by state means some 50 years ago. While Europe is full of public swimming pools, university libraries that are open to any member of the public (not only students), and all kinds of community sports facilities, in the US we find country clubs which restrict membership not based on race, but based on who you know, which is perfectly legal. If you want to join a country club, you generally have to be recommended by a few current members. If they happen to be privately racist and don't want to recommend a person of color, that is their prerogative under the law.

When outdoor public swimming pools open over here, everyone rushes out to them. I cannot imagine the kind of invective you can read here in the comments on this article announcing that public schools are opening in my hometown of New Orleans last summer. When segregated public facilities were ruled illegal some 50 years ago, southerners responded by railing against taxation and moving their hard-earned money to private facilities. You can still feel all of that two generations later in the insipid comments above. Imagine how poorly funded those swimming pools must be if they do not open until June. Swimming pools in Freiburg open in April, when temperatures are still freezing by the standards of New Orleans.

When I visited my alma mater, Tulane University, back in 2004, I was neither allowed access to the library (I wanted to check my bachelor's thesis), nor was I allowed to swim in the university pool. In Freiburg, I can check out a book from the university library anytime I want, though I am not sure about university sports facilities -- the facilities for the general public are closer and suffice, so I have never tried.

Anyway, hang in there, Georgia. With any luck, your grandchildren will have as much of a hard time imagining segregated proms as you have imagining segregated public schools.

Power from Africa

In a recent post, I mentioned a video about a German study on a future 100 percent renewable supply of electricity. One of the researchers mentioned in the comments to that video (though not in the video itself) is Gregor Czisch, who used to be a researcher at the University mentioned. I covered Mr Czisch in a German article a few months ago, and he was not happy about the coverage. Here is his response in German, if you can read that.

Essentially, he is proposing a gigantic grid to support large wind farms of the size that T. Boone Pickens would be interested in. These fields of wind turbines would be located in the best locations in Africa and would supply power to Europe and Africa. His proposal is that this wind power would be cheaper than the kind of distributed power many renewables proponents envision. Jobs would be created both in Northern Africa and in Europe, and the power from these intermittent wind sources in Northern Africa would complement water power in Switzerland and Scandinavia, for instance. Hydro dams could switch on in Europe when not enough wind is coming from Africa.

In principle, this approach is quite interesting. But as I explained in my German article, there are a number of problems. First, his figures for economic feasibility are based on the assumption that large companies will forgo their profit margins. These central wind farms are so big they could not possibly be set up by community projects. If we are to set up thousands of turbines in Morocco and Egypt and run high-voltage DC lines under the Mediterranean (forget about the tricky issue of whether "Arab electricity" is going to run through Israel or not), you are going to need not only consent from the King of Morocco, but also from Spain and Electricité de France. The project is perhaps best thought of as something for Sarkozy's Mediterranean project; it is even beyond the mandate of the EU.

Czisch often expresses his disappointment that German utility companies are not more interested in his project, but let's face it -- none of them have a branch office in Africa (to my knowledge). And these companies do not enjoy having a researcher calculate that their profit margin might be as high as 20 percent. I am not saying that Czisch's figures are not accurate, but just that it is politically inopportune for him to point the accusatory finger at the utilities his projects cannot do without.

Second, even assuming, as he does, that European governments could finance these projects with low-interest loans, allowing private companies to get a reasonable profit margin (say, 10%) on at least part of the deal, it is unclear that these sites will actually perform as well as some studies suggest. The Energy Ministry of Morocco told me personally in January when I visited them that they cannot confirm Czisch's statistics; they merely stated that "a German study has come to these conclusions, but the price of wind is currently twice as high." In addition, I understand that part of the site he is talking about in Egypt has been declared off-limits for wind because it is a major migratory path for birds.

Third, we should be asking ourselves whether we want to switch our current dependence on foreign supplies of fossil fuels for a future dependence on imports of renewable energy. I would certainly argue that power produced within political borders that we can influence is worth more than electricity different parts of the world outside our scope of influence. If Czisch can get me electricity from northern Africa for six cents per kilowatt-hour or less, I would be willing to pay 10 to get it from within the EU. I have nothing against northern Africa, and I have nothing against getting some of our electricity from them, but if the political situation ever worsens, leaders in northern Africa could threaten to cut off the supply of electricity to Europe. Do we want that? How does that differ from what is currently going on between the Ukraine and Russia concerning gas?

Fourth, I do not believe that Czisch sufficiently takes the current electricity situation in Northern Africa into account. At present, Europe is a net electricity exporter to Morocco, for instance. And while electricity consumption seems to be more or less stagnant at the moment in the EU (the current economic crisis makes it difficult to forecast), it has been growing by leaps and bounds in Morocco -- by some eight percent per annum, which means that consumption doubles every decade. In light of those figures, the question is whether Morocco will ever be able to export a significant amount of electricity, or whether most of it will be devoted to domestic consumption -- which is fine by me, but then you have to design the project as such, and not as primarily for export to Europe.

This blog entry is quite long already, so I will leave it at that -- maybe I will have time soon to come back to the particular comments that Czisch makes in German on his website.

Carbon from tea kettles

How much carbon do you emit per day? A ton per day or a ton per year? That's one of the problems I have with all of this talk about carbon -- few laypeople have any idea how much carbon they produce.

Everyone knows how much gasoline they put into their car how often, however, but nonetheless we seem to be switching to a system of carbon emissions. I suppose people got tired of hearing that they had to improve fuel consumption. Now, we get to deal with something more abstract -- something we cannot understand as well because we do not actually purchase carbon and do not actually see it when we produce it.

The problem with carbon emissions from cars is that we are essentially counting fuel consumption; carbon emissions go hand-in-hand with greater gasoline consumption. If we had a "carbon scrubber" that would remove carbon from the exhaust pipe (God only knows what would happen to it then -- would it be dropped off in little sugar-cube-size packets on the side of the road?), then we could truly say that we are reducing carbon without reducing fuel consumption, so it would make sense to count carbon emissions from cars rather than fuel economy. But there is no such thing as a carbon scrubber for cars, so counting carbon emissions instead of gas mileage makes no sense.

I am brought to this topic because of an article in Die Zeit about what the future will look like without economic growth. The article is really fantastic; I have never seen such a succinct synopsis of all of the imperatives for economic growth before, and the presentation allows the author to show the real challenges ahead of us if the age of economic growth is truly over. The author writes, listing the conventional wisdom he wishes to debunk, that we need economic growth because:

1. Economic growth leads to prosperity and therefore greater happiness
2. We need economic growth to create jobs (I love this sentence: "Einst war der Kapitalismus ein großer Wohlstandserzeuger, heute ist er, zumindest in den Industrieländern, eine große Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme." [Capitalism was once a great generator of prosperity, but today, at least in industrialized nations, it is a major job creation program.])
3. At the microeconomic level, companies themselves need to grow because they have borrowed capital at interest, and they cannot pay the interest without posting greater returns, which leads to number four:
4. At the macroeconomic level, countries need to grow; they do so simply as a result of number three.

It is interesting to see how the concept of what the French have been calling "décroissance" for some two decades now and other Vanguard economists have called "de-growth" in English is now entering the foreground. As the article in Die Zeit shows, we desperately need economists who can come up with viable solutions that do without constant growth.

Now back to carbon: unfortunately, the Zeit author uses some pretty bizarre figures in illustrating his case (this is my translation, parts left out for brevity are marked with an ellipsis):

People have been working on solar cars for decades, and there is no indication that they will be able to replace gasoline cars.... The Internet already produces more carbon emissions than the entire airline industry.... A single query at a large search engine consumes as much energy as a 60-watt light bulb left on for an hour.

It is unfortunate that the author uses such weak arguments in an otherwise spectacular article. I consider myself a solar insider, and I can tell you that I have never met anyone who believes that solar cars are going to replace combustion engines ever. It's not because solar does not work, but because electricity cannot be stored as easily as gasoline, and you cannot recharge batteries as fast as you can refill your gas tank. So let's be fair: we are not going to have solar cars or nuclear cars anytime soon because electricity does not work as well for motive transport.

I then tried to figure out how much electricity that search query uses. I found this blog entry citing a number of sources from 2007, but the figures are much different there: an 11-watt lightbulb running for one hour -- less than a fifth of the figures cited above. That blog entry references another article in German, which actually debunks the idea that the Internet consumes more energy than the airline industry.

I'm not going to pretend to be able to calculate how much energy a Google search consumes, but I was able to calculate how much electricity we are talking about based on the figure from Die Zeit, which seems unrealistic once you do the math. First, I tried to find how many searches Google handles per day, and the figures on the web vary widely -- from "1,200 million" to 293 million; I'll use the latter figure because it is more recent (from March 2009) and probably more conservative (note the US flag as the favicon ;-)).

At 60 watt-hours per search, that would mean that Google searches consume 6416.7 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year -- roughly 12 times the electricity consumed in Germany in one year. In fact, that is even more electricity than is consumed in the United States. How feasible is it that Google searches consume that much electricity?

Incidentally, it is interesting to see how cultural factors play into these assessments: the British talk about two Google searches needing the same amount of carbon as a kettle of tea. Of course, not even that is accurate because all of these figures are based on our general electricity figures. If we switch to 100 percent renewables, those figures drop considerably. Petite Planète has been running on 100 percent renewable electricity since 2003.

Smart meter at iGoogle

Reuters reports that Google will be making a power consumption chart available as a part of a smart-metering campaign in the US. You then check your iGoogle page (you do have an iGoogle page, right?) to see when you consume how much power.

The solution seems quite simple and cheap. Similar pilot projects have already been conducted in Germany, with consumption charts shown elsewhere on the Web. And of course, Italy has had blanket smart metering for years, so we are all dragging our feet on this crucial future issue.

Can Germany go 100% renewable?

Critics of renewables say that renewables cannot provide 100% of our electricity because they are intermittent, i.e. the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow all the time. The result, they say, will be blackouts.

Germany has more wind and solar in its electricity than the US and far fewer blackout minutes, and now a video has been released in English about research at the University of Kassel (Germany) showing what a 100% renewable future may look like - by mid-century. See for yourself.

Tuition or subsidy?

There are few areas in which Germans and Americans differ more than in the question of whether college should be free. Since I first arrived in Germany some 21 years ago, German students have repeatedly gone on strike. I remember them blocking my access to classrooms in Hamburg in 1988, and I was not happy because I was borrowing loans to get through college in the US and did not have a semester to wait on a one-year exchange program. When I came back as a graduate student in 1992, students in Freiburg were once again striking; in both cases, chairs were piled up at entrances, making it difficult to enter the building.

I then became a lecturer, and found myself dealing with the student strikes as a teacher, if memory serves me correctly, in 1994 and 1997. I once came to a class and found a group of students I did not know sitting on desks. They informed me that my English class would not be held that day, but we could talk about the strike if I wanted. I said that would be fine -- as long as we did so in English.

I then surprised all of my students by expressing all kinds of reasons why it does not make sense for universities to be free. If you read German, you can get some of this in an article I published a few years ago. Essentially, the way things work in Germany, universities -- where the prodigy of the upper class go -- are free, whereas all sorts of vocational schools, etc. are not, nor are simple daycare centers and kindergartens. The original idea was, of course, to attract students from lower classes, who might be discouraged by high tuition fees, but that did not happen. Most German students today are still the offspring of former German students. Free universities are a gift to the wealthy.

I seem to be very American in this opinion. I see that Mother Jones, a leftist publication, has just written the following:

...college is valuable. It generally attracts people who already have a lot of advantages, and then provides them with a degree that enhances their earning power even more. Why should they be subsidized at all?

The MoJo writer cites that line of thinking as "compelling," but adds that tuition should include waivers for the poor.

German libertarians go green (again)

At its party conference on May 17, the FDP, Germany's Libertarian party, gave up its opposition to the country's Renewable Energy Act (EEG). A majority of party members voted to discontinue opposition in light of the jobs created by this law. The original version of the law was adopted under a CDU/FDP coalition (Helmut Kohl was chancellor), but when the SPD/Green coalition under Schröder expanded the law in 1999, the FDP decided they no longer liked it. They have since been calling for a quota system, like the one in the UK that has stifled renewables. The German policy is the clear model worldwide.

Little info is available in English about the FDP's new stance, and the FDP itself does not seem eager to publicize its change of heart in German either. But the website of the party member who put the motion to a vote, Horst Meierhofer, proudly proclaims (in German):

Germany's Renewable Energy Act is based on the Feed-in Act, which Hans-Dietrich Genscher [the FDP’s highest ranking member at the time] helped design. Internationally, this system has set the standard.

I have never before read that Mr Genscher was a chief designer of the law, but whatever - we'll let them have their mention if they will finally be proud of it.

Since May 17, there has been no opposition to the EEG in the Bundestag. All other German parties always supported the EEG.

The FDP's about-face comes at an interesting time. Libertarians in Spain and Germany have been publishing some rather poorly researched attempts at proving that these policies do more harm than good. It is interesting to note, therefore, that German Libertarians have now said they disagree -- and admitted that the idea originally came from them.

The policy in question, commonly referred to as "feed-in rates," creates a market for a slew of technologies that need to be ramped up. It does not "pick winners," as the British Economist has complained -- that is what the British quota system (and the RPS in the US) does. Feed-in rates simply say that if a country wants to have renewables, utilities have to actually pay (people like you who invest in them) what they cost.

Germans usually think of the Democratic Party in the US as the American version of the SPD and the Republican Party as the CDU. I always say that the Democratic Party in the US is closest to Germany's FDP, and that the Republican Party in the US is also closest to Germany's FDP. The kind of anti-government rhetoric common in the two major US parties is really only consistently found in the FDP over here. The SPD and CDU both believe that the government has a crucial role to play in designing rules for the market, which they do not believe can be left up to itself. That is exactly what the EEG does: design a market, and leave the technology issues up to the market. It seems that German Libertarians are also closer to the Freiburg School of ordoliberalism than American libertarians are, even though the Cato Institute has a Hayek lecture hall. Wikipedia describes ordoliberalism as:

a school of liberalism that emphasises the need for the state to ensure that the free market produces results close to its theoretical potential.

So the state has to step in. That's German neoliberalism. Not even the most radical libertarian party in Germany will go further than that.