In the spring of 2019, residents of eastern California’s Owens Valley were on the fight. As is usual in that part of the world—where a century of aggressive water extraction by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has left the valley dry—they were angry about a water project dreamed up by some Southern Californians.

But this was a new kind of fight. Premium Energy Holdings LLC, a small, Walnut-based energy company, had filed for a preliminary federal permit to explore the development of an enormous pumped energy storage facility to be built in the mountainous terrain near Bishop for the benefit of Southern California utilities. The facility’s complex of dams, pipelines, and hydroelectric generation would have flooded sizeable sections of the John Muir Wilderness, destroying critical habitat of several endangered species and beloved recreational landscapes in the process.

After locals submitted scathing feedback during a mandated public comment period, Premium withdrew the federal application associated with the project. But in the three years since, the company has filed for preliminary federal permits for three similar, billion-dollar energy storage facilities in other remote sections of California. Additional pumped storage projects are moving forward near Joshua Tree National Park and in northern San Diego County. Meanwhile, other types of energy storage installations are also being developed across the state, such as compressed air storage facilities near Morro Bay and Rosamond and lithium-ion battery arrays in multiple desert locations. Beyond the state’s borders, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is flirting with the concept of a pumped hydro facility at the Hoover Dam, and Daybreak Power, a private energy developer, is pursuing federal permits to build the 3.6 billion dollar Navajo Energy Storage Station near Lake Powell, a pumped hydro installation that they envision providing electricity to markets in California, Arizona, and Nevada. And these are only a few of the projects currently underway. Electricity storage infrastructure is quietly transforming the rural U.S. West.

Pumped storage facilities consist of two (or more) reservoirs that are sited next to one another, but at substantially different elevations and connected by pumps and a hydroelectric generation facility. They depend on landscape, requiring steep grades, safe sites for reservoir development, and abundant water. When electricity is plentiful and inexpensive (such as around midday, when solar production is peaking), they pump water uphill, only to release it downhill through the hydroelectric generating station to produce power when the sun isn’t out.

The technology isn’t actually anything new. While companies such as Premium tend to frame their projects as cutting edge, several large-scale, utility-owned facilities have operated within and beyond California for decades. Because of their scale, however, the facilities are extremely expensive to develop and cumbersome to permit. These obstacles have meant that no new utility-scale facilities have come online in California since Pacific Gas & Electric’s Helms Power Plant, located east of Fresno in the Sierra Nevada, in 1984.

Why are they back on the table now? The new need for storage infrastructure is a side effect of California’s aggressive embrace of wind and solar electricity generation. Since 2002, the state’s Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), a policy geared at expanding clean electricity generating capacity via binding targets, has set continuously escalating renewable energy procurement requirements for its load-serving entities (the industry term for a utility). This transition accelerated in 2018, when the California legislature passed SB100, a bill requiring that 100% of the state’s electricity be produced by “zero emission energy sources” by 2045.

But renewable sources have a reliability problem: unlike fossil fuel sources, which can provide a constant stream of electricity, windmills and solar panels can’t produce when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. This means that the state needs on-demand, zero-emission electricity generating capacity—typically referred to as energy storage—to use during those times. It also means that this storage will only become more important for the state’s grid as renewable energy development increases.

To achieve this, the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) has included electricity storage targets in the energy procurement orders it has issued in support of meeting the RPS, including dramatic increases in 2013 and 2021. So far, this has mainly resulted in a rapid expansion of lithium-ion battery storage facilities, usually connected to renewable energy generation sites. Many of these installations are concentrated amid the desert scrub of eastern Kern County and look like unexceptional clusters of smallish beige outhouses to the untrained eye.

But a detail of the 2021 procurement order has ensured that other technologies will be part of the new storage rush. The new target of 1000 MW of long-term electricity storage creates a need for facilities capable of holding the energy in reserve past the typical four-hour maximum of lithium-ion batteries—like pumped storage. So, with political will on their side, energy companies are rushing to permit possible pumped storage projects. (And though the RPS is specific to California, the storage rush isn’t: Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada also all have their own tax incentives in place designed to encourage the development of energy storage infrastructures.)

Cheerleaders tout these storage projects as essential to the transition from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy. But—as the resistance from the residents of the Owens Valley shows—the installations can also bring serious negative impacts to local environments. In eastern Riverside County, for instance, locals have been fighting the Eagle Mountain Pumped Storage Project for thirty years, arguing that pumping desert groundwater to power the system will disrupt the fragile desert ecosystem, threatening its flora and fauna.

Given the urgent need for climate mitigation, it’s easy to cast local resistance to such projects as selfish NIMBYism. But many rural residents have already lived through the negative effects of extractive infrastructure on their home landscapes, and don’t want a repeat of those destructive experiences. While these pumped storage projects won’t spew much carbon, they would use enormous volumes of scarce water in ways that will desiccate some habitats and inundate others. Some of the projects also threaten homelands and sacred sites of Native communities, making them only the latest in long histories of violent dispossession. For rural communities, storage projects, despite their sustainable branding, are just more of an old pattern: abusing hinterland terrain to preserve urban consumption.

More difficult, but more equitable, would be to work to develop a grid that doesn’t treat rural areas as sacrifice zones. Incorporating more robust local consultation requirements into the permitting processes for utility-scale storage would help to halt or amend destructive projects. Prioritizing the development of smaller, more distributed renewable energy generation and storage infrastructures that can be sited within metropolitan areas will also help to redraw the lopsided geography of the state’s energy networks—and help city dwellers better understand the impact of their energy consumption. Such a fundamental reconsideration of the grid and its uses is intimidating, but necessary if we want the state’s pursuit of climate justice to be anything more than a branding exercise.

The post The Rural Price Tag of California’s Clean Energy Transition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Or California can close its last operating nuclear power plant.

But it can’t do both.

Under a 2018 agreement, Diablo Canyon Power Plant, on the San Luis Obispo County coast, is scheduled to close when its operating licenses expire in 2025. Whether it actually shuts down—a loose coalition of plant employees, heterodox environmentalists, and federal officials seeks to save it—is emerging as a major test for Californians and our stated commitments to transform ourselves in the face of a scary future.

Do we have the courage and imagination to take smart risks in response to climate change? Or are all our promises of transformational change little more than hot air?

Right now, our fears are winning—and framing the debate about whether to go forward with plans to cut short Diablo’s expected life span by decades.

The fears that support shuttering the plant are understandable. There is the fear of the nuclear plant’s location near earthquake faults. There are fears among politicians of challenging the powerful anti-nuclear groups that want the plant closed. And there are fears that involve the plant’s owner, PG&E: The faltering utility fears the high operating costs of the facility. Its critics fear that the utility, infamous for mistakes that killed people in wildfires and a gas explosion, might screw up at Diablo Canyon, too.

Unfortunately, those who want to keep the plant open are also rooting their arguments in fears. They fear what the loss of a plant that produces 9 percent of the state’s electricity portends when California’s grid is already failing to meet demand. They fear that Diablo Canyon’s power, which is carbon-free and does not depend on the weather like renewables, will be replaced with natural-gas plants that contribute to climate change. And this threat, in turn, raises fears that, without Diablo, California will fall short of its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.

Turning the debate over the plant into a contest of fears has fueled conflict—but no real leadership. Neither side is looking at Diablo as what it really is—an underperforming asset. When viewed through the practical prism of possibility rather than apocalyptic angst, Diablo should be seen an opportunity for smart, creative energy development that could address many complicated problems in 21^st century California.

Luckily we have that prism, thanks to an extraordinary new study of Diablo from Stanford and MIT. Its argument, in brief: Instead of rushing to shut Diablo, let’s keep the plant open and ask more of it.

The study starts by noting that extending Diablo’s operations might reduce carbon emissions, and save money for everyday Californians, who pay some of the nation’s highest electricity rates.

A 10-year extension of Diablo Canyon’s operations beyond the planned 2025 closure—until 2035—would reduce carbon emissions from the state’s power sector by more than 10 percent annually and save ratepayers $2.6 billion, the analysis finds. Keeping the plant open until 2045 (the end of its planned lifespan) would save $21 billion. Using the plant for power would also save about 90,000 acres of California’s land—land that might otherwise be kept as open space—but which would be needed for solar or other renewables to compensate for the loss of Diablo’s nuclear power.

The benefits of keeping the plant open could grow from there if Diablo were adapted for uses beyond electricity. Intriguingly, the study suggests adding a desalination plant to the site to address water shortages in our drought-prone state. The study suggests a desalination plant powered by Diablo Canyon could produce as much fresh water as the controversial project to build a tunnel under the Delta, but at a lower investment cost.

Diablo’s nuclear power also could be used to produce more of the hydrogen-based, zero-carbon fuels the state will need to transition to carbon neutrality. Stanford and MIT found that hydrogen produced by Diablo could cost up to 50 percent less than hydrogen produced via solar and wind power, and would require much less land.

The most exciting idea in this study is that Diablo Canyon could do all three things simultaneously—provide electricity, desalinate water, and produce hydrogen. The authors predict that this “polygeneration configuration” would make the plant much more valuable—thus reducing the incentive for PG&E, or a successor owner-operator, to shut it down.

Such possibilities were not part of the public discussion back in 2018, when the state approved the 2025 closure of the plant. Other realities have changed as well. Drought conditions and water shortages have increased, blackouts have become more common, and California and the world have learned more about the value of reliable nuclear energy in stabilizing the electric grid during the shift to renewables.

The study is clear-eyed about the widespread opposition to nuclear power, and the political and regulatory obstacles keeping Diablo open. The plant would need to go through a federal relicensing process, and to obtain new approvals for desalination plans, hydrogen production, and a new system to reduce the amount of water it takes in from the ocean.

But risk-taking is never easy. Neither is global leadership. And a nuclear-free California will have little to model to the many countries where nuclear is part of the shift away from carbon.

The good news is that we will have allies if we shift course and reinvest in Diablo Canyon. Leading federal officials, including current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her predecessors (notably the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Californian Steven Chu) are pushing to keep the plant open.

It would be good, before Diablo closes, to have a public debate that is based not on fears, but on figuring out the best plan for the future. Any practical assessment of Diablo must acknowledge that the plant is already there and operating safely. Even if the facility closes, nuclear material, with its attendant risks, will remain on the site.

So why not use this small piece of California land, less than 600 acres, for all it’s worth? Let’s roll with the Diablo we know, and give it more to do.

The post Keep California’s Last Nuclear Plant Running appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Brower, once head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, is a towering figure in the late 20th century environmental movement—and in my own life. One crucial moment in our relationship came at my parents’ annual holiday party in December 1964. I was 22 and about to graduate from Berkeley and join the Peace Corps for a stint in a Turkish village. We knew the Browers because my mother, Beth, had been friends with David’s wife since the 1930s. I have no recollection of what we were talking about, but Dave interrupted to say, “You have a nice speaking voice. Would you be willing to narrate a film for the Sierra Club?” I gulped and said, “Sure.”

Brower was the first executive director the Sierra Club ever hired, beginning in 1952. He led successful campaigns to block two dams proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, helped spark the creation of Point Reyes and Cape Cod National Seashores and Kings Canyon National Park, and launched the Sierra Club into a successful book-publishing program with oversized word-and-photograph volumes celebrating special places the club was working to save. He increased the membership of the Sierra Club nearly ten-fold and was a familiar figure on Capitol Hill, a skilled lobbyist and publicist for nature.

By the time of that holiday party, Dave was approaching the midpoint of his career and was embroiled in a new fight to the death over two proposed hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon, a venture spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

Brower was giving no ground on these dams, especially after he and his conservation allies had acquiesced to the government’s plan to dam Glen Canyon, just upstream from the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. The move had been a tradeoff to save Dinosaur National Monument, and it was a decision Brower would regret for the rest of his life. Glen was nearly 200 miles long with only the gentlest of rapids, dozens of side canyons of soaring Navajo sandstone, more beautiful than the Dinosaur canyons it was sacrificed to save. The film he asked me to narrate celebrated Glen Canyon, and mourned its loss.

After narrating the film I did my stretch in the Peace Corps, ending in the summer of 1967 with a $5-a-day tour around Europe. From London, I wrote Brower a letter offering my services to the Sierra Club, but claiming no relevant education or experience. Just enthusiasm.

Brower seldom answered his mail. He was, however, known for his long memory, and kept nearly everything on paper for future reference. One of his tenets was that a phone call is nearly always better than a letter, because letters take too long to reach their destinations and get put into piles to be acted on later.

Upon my return from the Peace Corps, I got a job at Head Start. I met a talented young photographer who, when he learned I knew Brower, asked if I’d see if Brower would be willing to look at his work. I phoned, and Dave asked me to drop by his house up the hill in Berkeley later that evening.

The house had been built in 1947 after Brower returned from the war in Italy. River-polished rocks covered most of the horizontal surfaces, and photos and maps adorned the walls. A macaque monkey named Isabelle, rescued from the psychology department at UC Berkeley, roamed the house along with two or three black lab mixes.

Around the dinner table that evening, with plenty of scotch under our belts, Brower asked me to craft a book manuscript from journals and magazine articles written by Norman Clyde, a legendary octogenarian Sierra mountaineer, who also happened to be visiting the Browers. I gulped again, and said, “Yes.”

I went to work for the Sierra Club in May 1968. This turned out to be Brower’s final year at the club, as he had gotten into trouble with his board of directors for various faults, some real, most political. After a vote by the members of the Sierra Club, Dave resigned the following spring and I was fired along with several other partisans.

Dave immediately put the unpleasantness behind him. The rest of us refugees could complain for hours about the injustice we’d just lived through, but Dave had more important things to spend his energy on. He would bravely say that what had just happened was a mitosis, as when a cell doubles itself by dividing in two.

Midway through 1969, Dave, along with a handful of former Sierra Club staffers and volunteers, started Friends of the Earth. It was meant to complement the Sierra Club and other existing organizations, to do the work the club didn’t want Brower to do in its name. This would include a vigorous international program, expansion into campaigns involving energy policy, the protection of public health, pollution abatement, and other concerns beyond forests, parks, and wildlife.

The organization was small and scrappy, and made noise by defeating federal subsidies for a Boeing-built supersonic transport aircraft, delaying construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline for several years (resulting in a far safer pipeline), and leading the crusade against nuclear power, aiming its fire first at the Diablo Canyon reactors on the central California coast.

The Sierra Club board had agreed not to oppose the Diablo proposal in order to save the Nipomo Dunes nearby. A minority on the board thought this a dreadful decision, given Diablo Canyon’s remoteness and beauty. A fierce internal battle erupted within the club. Brower’s opposition to Diablo, in fact, had been one big reason he was chased out of the Sierra Club, the old guard arguing that the club had given its word; others arguing that the club was duty-bound to oppose despoliation of precious stretches of pristine coastline.

At the time, the Sierra Club’s opposition to Diablo was simply because of where it would be built. Later, Brower and many others came to oppose nuclear power altogether because of the plants’ vulnerability to terrorism and natural disasters.

Things went well for a long spell, but in 1986 Friends of the Earth, with finances in bad shape and a deeply divided board, closed up shop in San Francisco, forcing Brower off the board and laying off the staff, leaving only a small operation in Washington, D.C. He must have been discouraged, but again he refused to dwell on the past.

Instead, Dave and several others went to work building Earth Island Institute, which Dave had started a few years prior in case Friends of the Earth decided to dispense with his services. Earth Island is an umbrella that shelters and nurtures dozens of small organizations working on a wide variety of projects in every corner of the world.

I, for my part, took a job with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and stayed in touch with Brower, who by then was approaching 80 years of age. We’d meet occasionally for lunch or drinks; he was always full of ideas and suggestions for new projects.

As I neared retirement in 2008 I was casting about for a big project and Brower influenced my life again. Dave had written two ramshackle autobiographical memoirs as well as a borderline manifesto titled Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. However, at the time of his death in November 2000, no one had written a proper biography about him. More distressingly, he was being forgotten. When I talked with young environmental lawyers they only vaguely recalled his name. “I really must do this book,” I thought, “And I hope that it helps keep his story alive.”

The post Sixteen Years After His Death, a Renowned Environmentalist Won His Longest Fight appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Los Angeles, we’re going to find out. UCLA, where I’ve spent almost 50 years on the faculty of the business school, has issued a Grand Challenge: “achieving sustainability in energy and water while enhancing ecosystem health in Los Angeles County by 2050.” And more than 150 faculty members, researchers, and other scholars making up an entity called Sustainable LA Grand Challenge have committed to helping the university—and our city—succeed.

That is a huge goal. Today, the city of L.A. imports nearly 90 percent of its water, and the county imports more than half from distant sources. Renewable resources such as wind and solar provide less than one-quarter of the county’s electricity, and one-third of the city’s energy comes from coal plants. And climate change is already on its way to producing increases in temperatures, sea levels, and the frequency of wildfires in L.A.

My expertise is neither the environment nor energy, but in my research I’ve learned how information can be used to scale up businesses and how to structure networks of organizations to achieve goals. These are the principles I’ve used to design engagement models between universities and communities in other parts of the world.

When universities engage successfully, they create a nexus for partnerships of all kinds—between a university’s scholars and other academic institutions, government agencies, private-sector managers and innovators, tribal leaders, civil society organizations, and other entities that have the expertise, experience, and resources to complete the research and other projects necessary to reach a goal.

Such partnerships also need the active engagement of students. The advantage UCLA has is that its students, via capstone projects they undertake at the end of a course of study, are prepared to work in teams with outside partners to take on real-world problems. I have witnessed teams of MBA students partnering with Conservation International in analyzing the business ecosystem for ecotourism in Suriname, helping the Conservation Action Research Network support the World Bank Carbon Fund project in Cameroon for an area the size of Maine, and developing the shade coffee industry in Peru, business infrastructure in Kenya, and sustainable grazing in South Africa.

The state of California has identified such project-oriented experiences for students as a core strategy for improving economic development in California. And practically, there is no shortage of important questions that students can help answer that would serve regional goals of energy and water independence.

Just look at the questions addressed by projects UCLA seniors conduct via UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, in Los Angeles and the broader region. Do industrial poultry and livestock operations increase antibiotic resistance to critical drugs? How serious is the threat to California groundwater supplies posed by spills at hydraulic fracturing sites? How do we prevent bobcat and other free-ranging wildlife mortality from urban pest control poisons? Can spectral light be leveraged to reduce numbers of malarial insects, protecting millions through a simple shift in light-bulb type?

The hard question about such projects is: how do you scale these efforts to meet a goal as big as the Grand Challenge and to serve the growing appetite of students for these experiences?

One major ingredient is creating an intelligent information system that simplifies the creation of the parts of these efforts that are now laboriously custom-made—attracting partners and monitoring the progress, matching students to projects, facilitating their processes, communicating within projects and with relevant outside constituencies.

Such a system enhances communications within and between networks of students, faculty, project partners, and relevant outside audiences. It tracks elements that are central to project management, and archives results.

This is how a university engagement project can create the scale to make the necessary impact. Other ingredients to creating scale for these projects come from what we’ve learned about hypergrowth in high-technology markets. Geoffrey Moore, author of Inside the Tornado (1995), emphasized two basic components of hyper-growth: providing a whole-product solution (in other words, one entire product that solves the problem) and a compelling reason to buy the product.

In our context of the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, this means creating student teams tailored to the specific needs for expertise and manpower to advance each project at each stage, organizing these action-research efforts on the teaching side of the university where overhead costs are smallest, and using information technology—specifically good project management—to allow projects to span across student teams as project needs migrate over time. Success will add to the challenges of the Grand Challenge; more than one million student hours per year at UCLA already go into capstone experiences, and student demand will increase when faced with opportunities as compelling as the Grand Challenge.

Once the information infrastructure is in place, we can transform more parts of the regular classroom education into the project-oriented learning the Grand Challenge needs and for which state educational officials have called. Survey research classes could help design the assessment instruments needed for many elements of the GC work plan. Other classes could help with fielding these questionnaires. If we knew when survey results would be available, analytical classes could help with these stages of projects. Lab classes could help with sample testing. Policy classes could help think through the implications. (This could be the university analog of the corporate effort in the 1990s known as Efficient Consumer Response, which involved using information technology to get the right product at the right price to the right place at the right time and quantity to satisfy consumers’ needs.)

This may sound like a dramatic departure for a university. It isn’t. UCLA is building its Center for Action Research, with a mission that fits this. And in a world of complex problems, great public universities must be part of the solution.

The post Can a Public University Fix a City’s Achilles Heel? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Such a statement would have been politically unthinkable 10 years ago.

Until fairly recently, the dominant idea was that current-generation wind and solar power, coupled with energy efficiency, would play the lead role in stabilizing the climate. This cornerstone of thought among liberals and greens was summed up in Al Gore’s oft-repeated dictum that “we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming … we have all the technologies we need.”

Much of the rest of the conventional wisdom on climate flowed from the insistence that no new technology would be needed: The size and scope of the challenge was defined not by realistic projections of energy demand or what could be accomplished with efficiency, but by the amounts of energy renewable technologies might be able to produce. The belief was that putting a modest price on carbon could tip the market balance between dirty fossil fuels and readily available clean renewables. Corrupt vested interests were said to stall the dawn of the new energy age.

With all of the talk of cheap solar, Tesla Roadsters, and nuclear startups, it might be easy to miss the massive shift that has taken place in the climate conversation. But make no mistake: A decade ago, climate change was seen far more as a moral and political problem than a technological one. Obama’s framing of the problem sits in stark contrast to Gore’s, and points the way to a new, more constructive era of climate politics. It may even draw conservatives back into the conversation.

Like all paradigm shifts, this one didn’t happen overnight.

In the late 1990s, Martin Hoffert of New York University led a scholarly exploration into the need for innovation and “breakthroughs” in zero-carbon energy. His initial paper in 1998 and a follow-up in 2002 established the breathtaking size of the climate challenge. Hoffert and dozens of well-credentialed co-authors drove home the point that to scale up clean energy sufficiently, the world needed to complete at least one new industrial revolution in half the time it took to complete the first one. We simply, they wrote, don’t have the technology to make that happen.

Science—physical and social—backed this message up. Scholars at Oxford and the Pacific Northwest National Lab wrote convincingly about the need to focus on technology, not regulatory caps and timetables, throughout the 1990s. Physicists and engineers at Caltech and elsewhere popularized the immensity of the “terawatt challenge”: the idea that the world needs to at least double our energy production while reducing fossil energy consumption to zero.

Political scientists argued consistently for “pragmatic” climate policies: goals that could be pursued from multiple motivations and ideologies. Cultural cognition researchers showed that environmentalists’ moralizing, apocalyptic framing of climate change was doomed to failure.

While we think of climate change as the most partisan of issues, the new innovation consensus gathered influence in support of investments in clean energy technologies through an unlikely affinity between liberal, centrist, and conservative think tanks ranging from Brookings and the Breakthrough Institute (where I am a senior writer), to the conservative Manhattan Institute, as well as Republican senators such as Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander. The cross-partisan appeal resonated with the business community, and the American Energy Innovation Council—headed by Lockheed’s Norman Augustine and Xerox’s Ursula Burns, among others—advocated a manifold increase in U.S. public and private investment in clean energy technologies, from renewables to energy storage to carbon capture to nuclear power.

All this talk had an impact. President Obama has been busy enacting the recommendations made by innovation advocates for years. Between 2009 and 2015, the federal government invested over $150 billion on clean energy. And while 2009’s Copenhagen talks failed to produce much, this year’s climate talks in Paris have adopted a much more bottom-up, technology-focused approach to emissions reduction strategies.

Still, despite laudable progress in wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles, Hoffert’s warnings sadly ring true: We still do not have all the technologies we need to address climate change.

Fortunately, as the world watched the climate policy happenings in Paris this week, Bill Gates announced the formation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of individual and institutional investors determined to fund the R&D needed for next-generation energy technologies. In parallel, world leaders announced Mission Innovation, a commitment by 20 national governments around the world to double public spending on clean energy R&D. In context of the two decades of progress on energy innovation, this is tectonic.

But we must be sure to not simply throw more money at the narrow, moralistic set of solutions that has been dominant for two decades. Progress will be achieved when we admit we don’t have all the technologies we need, and embrace a broader, more pragmatic portfolio of approaches. The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Pritzker Innovation Fund in particular have been consistent in supporting a more diverse set of solutions. That means more than just renewables and efficiency: Nuclear power, supercritical fossil power plants, fracking, and carbon capture are a few of the less popular technologies that must be on the table. It also means more than just mitigation: Adaptation to climate impacts and perhaps even geoengineering (deliberately engineering the climate to counteract human-caused global warming) must be considered.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition and Missions Innovation recognize something that climate partisans and environmentalists have often denied: We are headed towards a high-energy future. As Gates wrote this month, “in 30 years the world will consume much more energy than it does today.” In order for all the world’s inhabitants to enjoy Western lifestyles by the end of the century, global energy consumption will need to at least triple if not quadruple. Such an imperative implies that environmentalists’ laser focus on wind, solar, and energy efficiency is not enough; nuclear power, carbon capture, and other less-chic technologies will be required, and perhaps even form the backbone of this century’s energy systems.

Decades of sustained effort went into building today’s energy innovation consensus. It’s nice to see how far we’ve come.

The post The Dramatic Shift in Our Climate Thinking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We now know that cities are responsible for 70 percent of the globe’s greenhouse gas emissions. We know that 60 percent of those urban GHG emissions comes from cars, trucks, and other forms of transportation, with the remaining 40 percent coming from building energy use—electricity and natural gas to heat and cool.

But we don’t know many of the particulars about energy use in buildings. How much do different types of buildings, or different aged buildings, or various other social and demographic factors contribute to energy use? How much does each building, and how much do different parts of the building, use energy? Even with modeling to give us some data, we don’t know energy use down to the meter-by-meter, building-by-building level. While we know that car emissions reporting has been fraudulent, we at least have a sense of emissions by make and by year. That’s not so for buildings, and that leaves a gaping hole in what we know; it’s like not knowing the difference between the emissions of a diesel truck compared to a hybrid car.

The County of Los Angeles and UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, which I direct, are determined to fill this void. We need to understand building energy use so that we can make the right investments to reduce building energy use, and the emissions. After four years of technical, scientific, and legal efforts, and after participating in California Public Utility Commission proceedings to enable greater data access, UCLA obtained address-level data under a non-disclosure agreement with the PUC. UCLA and the county have developed an interactive web energy atlas as a result.

It’s the first such interactive atlas in the country. (New York City built a map prototype at the zip code level in 2012, downscaling data to determine building energy use.) Our atlas provides an innovative platform to build and share knowledge of the actual energy use of buildings by neighborhood, city, building type, use, age, size, and demographics of residents.

Such an atlas was overdue. Some $13 billion in investments in energy conservation and efficiency have been made in California since 2002, paid for by private utility ratepayers through their bills. Taxpayers, utilities, and the government need to know what efforts have been effective in changing the amount of energy used in buildings, and what has not worked; local governments also needed a way to account for greenhouse gas emissions in a precise manner—which buildings are the most significant in energy use? The website has a contact address where users can send in their own discoveries in investigating the website—patterns across the landscape, some unexpected correlations, or other insights.

This had to be a highly collaborative effort. A UCLA graduate student in urban planning got the ball rolling by mapping LADWP data. Address-level data alone revealed a great deal about energy use—but we realized we could learn so much more by coupling that data with county assessor and demographic data. We then expanded our team to include a mix of professionals and graduate students from different disciplines, from ecology and computer science to geographic information systems and web design.

Then we analyzed and aggregated all of the data, and came up with a number of surprising findings.

For example: Malibu residents use 10 times more energy per capita than residents of Bell, in southeast L.A. County. But the buildings in Bell are far less energy-efficient, using more energy per square foot than those in Malibu. And Compton actually has the highest median per-square-foot consumption in the region. The atlas also shows energy use by building-age categories. The highest energy-using buildings were uniformly built before 1950, and the lowest from 1990 onward, perhaps proof that our building standards are working.

Those findings have major implications for interventions at a building and neighborhood level that could generate big and rapid energy efficiency gains. Knowing the specifics of buildings makes it possible to target investments where and when they will make the most impact. The atlas also points out that existing efforts to improve efficiency—like smart meters with time-of-use pricing that changes depending on the time and season—might be useless if your building has massive structural inefficiencies.

But the implications are still broader. Why, for instance, should we force individuals to decide between turning off their refrigerator or their air conditioner when their buildings themselves are energy hogs?

The Regional Energy Network of Southern California is going to use the results of the atlas to create their next round of energy efficiency and conservation target programs, and local cities will use the atlas’ greenhouse gas emissions to improve their reports to the state and their own communities about their energy use. Cities will also be able to use the atlas to develop guidelines for building managers for disclosing energy use that are appropriate for their city’s building stock and comply with state reporting requirements. Atlas findings can help communities develop projects for cap-and-trade exchanges that can turn energy savings into dollars, and help developers apply for state funds for energy efficiency. And, of course, there are more ideas for how our atlas analysis can be used.

Making more progress will require more cooperation of the kind we saw from the county of L.A., municipal utilities, and UCLA (which has a “grand challenge” to make Los Angeles 100 percent reliant on renewable energy). But it is well worth the time and resources. Buildings are going to become more important in reaching climate targets, and should be included in December’s Paris climate change talks.

Gov. Jerry Brown has just signed SB 350, a new law that requires California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The only way we’ll get to that goal is by looking more closely at individual buildings. It will also will greatly improve the well-being of people who live, work, learn, and play in them.

The post How Much Energy Do Buildings Use? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before a full house at the Heard Museum, New York University historian Andrew Needham, author of Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, suggested that Phoenix had an advantage when it comes to questions of urban sustainability. The city couldn’t have grown as it did after the Second World War without reckoning with its desert environment.

“Phoenix has thought about these issues longer than other cities have,” said Needham. “One of the reason why people ask the question, ‘Should Phoenix Exist?’ is because of the interaction between the built environment and the natural environment here.”

Needham and the other two panelists—former Phoenix Mayor and Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, and Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy at Morrison Institute—emphasized that Phoenix’s record of sustainable design is mixed, depending on whether the topic is power or water.

Because water was so scarce, and because Arizona was in competition with other places (like California) for it, Phoenix did better in building sustainable structures. “Arizona… created a water system that has several reinforcing infrastructures that can mitigate for failure. That can make Arizona a resilient place,” said Needham.

But power was plentiful, and so Phoenix came to rely on coal and coal-fired plants from the Navajo nation hundreds of miles to the north. That power has had all kinds of costs—for the environment and for the Navajos, who, Needham argued, haven’t gotten the full value of the energy they provided. It also fueled energy-intensive suburban development in Phoenix—and the idea of a growth that could continue forever.

That said, the panelists argued that Phoenix is, in many ways, “a marvel,” as Needham called it. Goddard, the former mayor, said, “we created an entirely new type of urban living.” But he added that the city needed to be more mature—with everything from new sources of energy (“the era of coal and the long-distance transmission is just about at an end,” he said) to landscaping that is more appropriate for a desert.

“We’re just now beginning to mature,” he said, adding. “Do we make a prototype of what a city is going to be? I think we do, so we better do it right.”

Porter, of the ASU Kyl Center for Water Policy, said that, “in comparison with other Western cities,” Phoenix got water right. She noted two timely anniversaries this year: the 30th anniversary of the very first Central Arizona Project water delivery, and the 35th anniversary of Arizona’s groundwater management act. (California, by contrast, only regulated groundwater for the first time last year).

Those two acts made the water of Phoenix and Tucson secure, but change is necessary to deal long-term with drought, Colorado River water shortages, and the impact of growth, panelists said. Porter said cities need to include water plans as part of their economic development plans; the city of Chandler, Arizona, has recent taken steps to create a tiered water system that gives the city the power to limit high-water users.

She said the changes in water and sustainability would require more engagement from people in Phoenix, from changes in their own behavior to pressuring elected officials. “When was the last time you asked a candidate for council his thoughts about the city water plan?” she asked the audience. “We’ve tended to leave water up to the experts, but we can’t do that anymore.”

Goddard said that legal standards for water would have to be rethought; water rights are tied to using water, which discourages conservation, he said. He added that Phoenix has an opportunity—provided by its transportation system—to rethink its land use policies that have encouraged low-density housing and sprawl.

“You don’t have to have a half acre backyard and a pickup truck to be happy,” he said, pausing for laughter. “I know that’s revolutionary in this community.”

The event’s moderator, Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb, took that moment to pose what Phoenix scholar-lawyer-author Grady Gammage, Jr. has called “The Bob Robb Question”: Given that outdoor water usage is half of water use, and that projections of shortage over 25 years show excess demand, why not raise water prices until you eat up that excess demand?

Porter called that a good question. But Goddard noted the political peril; when Tucson raised water prices dramatically to encourage reductions of usage, “I think the entire council was recalled.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, many of the queries focused on the particulars of water, water conservation, and the practice of banking water in the ground. Is water spiritual? one questioner asked (It is, especially in a desert, said Goddard).

The panelists suggested that people should appreciate the wonders of the desert more. “We do not honor the most biodiverse desert in the world often enough,” said Porter.

“The Sonoran desert is very beautiful,” said Goddard, while the hills in New England are “redundant—they have all that extra green on them. We take our mountains pure.”

The post Phoenix Is a Survivor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I will not compare thee to a summer’s day. I cannot say you smell like a rose.

But make no mistake: I love you.

You are unaccustomed, I know, to getting letters like this. Love is usually reserved for younger, sexier companies–Google, Apple, or Twitter–across the bay from your San Ramon headquarters. You and other oil companies are villains in today’s California: polluters, price gougers, perpetrators of climate change. In this fall’s gubernatorial debate, Jerry Brown disapprovingly noted your $21 billion in profits last year and blamed you and other oil companies for forest fires and rising sea levels. And I’m not going to get into the ongoing fights over the 2012 explosion at your refinery in Richmond that caused thousands of people to seek medical treatment.

I forgive you none of your sins. Still, I can’t help loving you.

What I love most of all is that you’ve always been what’s most important in any relationship: fully present.

In California, a state of relentless change, companies come and companies go, many of them rudely complaining about the state’s business climate on departure. But not you. You’ve stayed, for 135 years, making you one of our state’s oldest firms. And while you’re aging, you’re still potent. You’re number one among all California companies in revenue. You’re the state’s top oil producer–with the state’s two largest refineries–fueling one of every five cars on California’s roads.

But I’m not just a gold digger. I love how your facilities–including 1,000 miles of pipeline and more than 1,500 service stations–connect the state in a way that few institutions, other than our universities and our prisons, have managed. Your operations bridge north and south, coast and inland, with refineries in the Bay Area (the aforementioned Richmond) and L.A. (El Segundo, a small city named after your second refinery) and oil fields and other facilities in Kern County.

You also connect us to a past too many Californians have forgotten. Your story reminds us of the first quarter of the 20th century, when we were the leading oil-producing state in the country. You were incorporated as the Pacific Coast Oil Company in 1879, became part of the Standard Oil empire in 1900, then struck out again on your own after the 1911 breakup of Standard. In those years, oil attracted millions of people here and kept them employed (including my grandfather, who reported on the wells around Long Beach for a publication called the Munger Oilgram). You can take credit for being early to adopt an eight-hour workday for employees (though you’re no friend of organized labor) and for advancing women in the workplace (in the ’40s, your 56 schools around the state taught women to operate service stations).

Then in the 1980s, you bought Gulf Oil to become the mega-company Chevron. Even as other companies, most recently Occidental Petroleum, departed California, you stayed and served as a stabilizing force in a volatile state. When it seemed no one could get a job in L.A. during the Great Recession, advertisements for your job fairs still played on Southern California radio stations.

Now, despite all these ties, California and Chevron have grown apart. For all your slick publicity about your alternative energy investments, you’re fundamentally a global oil and natural gas company, and California’s political leadership is committed to moving the world away from carbon. I sometimes wonder if you still love us. On a recent trip to Texas, it didn’t escape my notice that you’ve been messing around with Houston, relocating hundreds of jobs there and becoming the title sponsor of the Houston Marathon.

So let me say this now, since I doubt anyone else in California will: Don’t betray my love.

Please don’t go. I know we don’t make it easy on you, but you and California are still better together.

It is precisely because you and California are so different now that we remain useful to each other. And you seem to understand that. Your CEO John S. Watson–while acknowledging “no energy-intensive business would choose to locate” in California today–did tell Forbes: “There are some pluses in being here. It gives you a window on what a non-oil community thinks about our industry. That helps prepare us for what we see around the world.”

And this dynamic cuts both ways. (Although I’ll get killed for saying this,) the armies of lobbyists and consultants you employ in Sacramento and during California elections are a very healthy check on our tendency to adopt restrictions on energy production. You won’t be able to derail our environmental movement and its rush to export carbon-based jobs out of California, but you do slow us down. Your role is essential because California still runs on oil, and will for quite some time.

While our environmentalists will never admit it, your wholesale departure from the state would be bad for the environment. The void you would leave would be filled by smaller companies that aren’t as responsible as you, don’t have the resources you have to mitigate your impacts, and don’t have your history with California.

I do have one request of you, beyond acknowledging my love. (Even for this love letter, none of your current employees would agree to be interviewed.) I wish you would give yourself a human face, preferably of a powerful Chevron executive who is a Californian and can become a constant, recognizable presence in the state’s debates over energy.

Yes, you run ads with California-based employees, but because it’s always somebody different doing something different, it’s hard to get a fix on who and what you are. You’re not unlike California itself in offering so many faces that you’re faceless.

This state needs an oilman with whom we can talk and argue, and who can point out our folly. Sure, activists will continue to protest you, but many Californians would appreciate sharing in your knowledge and perspective.

You may be a big ruthless oil company, but we shouldn’t forget that you’re our big ruthless oil company.

Very truly yours,

Joe Mathews

The post Why Californians Should Love Chevron appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As curator of the electricity collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, part of my job involves documenting and preserving the history of electric lighting so that future generations can study original objects and learn about that aspect of our everyday lives. The pace at which LEDs have come to dominate the market surprised everyone, both inside and outside the lighting profession. When we revamped our Lighting A Revolution exhibition in 2000, we left out LEDs because we lacked both gallery space and items to display. Little did we realize that most of the lighting technologies we explored in that exhibition, like tungsten halogen and compact fluorescent lamps, were about to become obsolete.

These days, electric lighting serves as a mostly invisible technology. But only a century ago, people accustomed to trimming candles, cleaning kerosene lamps, and smelling the odor of gas jets stood and gazed in awe at the steady glow of incandescent lamps developed by Thomas Edison and his contemporaries in the 1880s and 1890s. Clean, easily controllable, and simple to replace, incandescent lamps appeared in a host of applications, from deep sea diving to aviation. As electric power grids reached ever more people, lighting costs fell and reliability rose. Consumers adopted electric lighting to gain control over their interior–and ultimately exterior–environments. By the 1930s industrialized nations were awash in light. As one illumination engineer later noted, incandescent lamps were the perfect light source, except for one little problem: poor energy efficiency.

The constant search for improved energy efficiency has influenced the story of every lighting development since. During the 1930s, lamp makers introduced discharge lighting, which involved getting an enclosed gas or a vaporized metal such as mercury or sodium to produce usable amounts of light. Fluorescent tubes, introduced to the American public at the 1939 World’s Fair, were widely adopted by commercial and industrial users during World War II and quickly made their way into homes after the war. Engineers measure the amount of light output in lumens; fluorescent tubes could provide up to three times more lumens per watt than incandescent lamps, but many users objected to the artificial quality of the light. In most American homes in the 1960s, incandescents still reigned supreme.

The introduction of a new type of phosphor coating in the late 1970s addressed some of those concerns and allowed for the development of compact fluorescent lamps, which could be screwed into the same sockets as incandescent bulbs. By the early 2000s, steadily rising energy costs and a decrease in the cost of compact fluorescents created an incentive for replacement. Still, many users objected to the unfamiliar color and strange physical appearance of compact fluorescent lamps. Others were uneasy about the small amount of mercury present in compact fluorescents. There seemed little alternative for small, energy-efficient lamps until Akasaki and Amano’s, and especially Nakamura’s, breakthroughs in LEDs.

LEDs actually trace their history back to the invention of the transistor in 1947 and research on solid-state lasers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Historians are still sorting out exactly who contributed what and when, but the published literature shows that in 1962, Robert Rediker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated LEDs that glowed just below the spectrum of visible light in the infrared range, and Nick Holonyak at General Electric demonstrated red LEDs. Later that decade, GE’s miniature lamp department introduced a line of yellow-orange LEDs. Early LEDs were not very energy-efficient, and only a few colors could be reliably produced. Despite that, over the following 30 years, LEDs found a niche market as indicator lamps on circuit boards and for displays on digital clocks and pocket calculators. As more people adopted small electronic devices, producers gained more experience in the design and manufacture of LEDs.

Manipulating elements like gallium, phosphorus, arsenic, aluminum, and nitrogen on the molecular level in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in bright red and green LEDs. But white light requires a combination of red, green, and blue—and blue remained a problem. Building on work by Akasaki and Amano from the mid-1970s to late 1980s, Nakamura demonstrated the first bright blue LED in 1993. These breakthroughs have made LEDs near ubiquitous–now they appear in traffic signals, hallway exit signs, table lamps, computer and television screens, cell phone photo displays, and flashlights. Combined with digital controllers, LEDs can generate a spectrum of colors that actively changes in response to programmers’ needs. Most importantly, LEDs’ energy efficiency continues to rise while costs for manufacturing, materials, distribution, and design begin to fall.

Last month I attended a lighting trade show in Baltimore sponsored by the Illuminating Engineering Society where 30 or so vendors displayed a wide range of LED fixtures–for everything from accent lighting to large stage projectors. Similar to the way automotive engineers measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon, lighting engineers have been looking for the maximum lumens per watt so they cost less to operate and are better for the environment. I learned that energy efficiency for LEDs has improved to around 140 lumens per watt and that experimental lamps giving 300 lumens per watt have been demonstrated in the lab. At best, incandescent lamps give about 30 lumens per watt and compact fluorescents about 90, while improved discharge lamps like metal halide and high-pressure sodium streetlights give around 130.

Unlike LEDs, incandescent lamps and discharge lamps are mature technologies without room for much improvement, so virtually no one, I learned, is now investing research and development money in them. Anyone who recalls the blackout during the 2013 Super Bowl will be pleased to learn that manufacturers are working on LED projectors suitable for use in large sports stadiums. The long interruption in the game came in part from the fact that the metal halide lamps being used to light the field had to cool off before they would relight. The issue with them reminds me of what Chief Engineer Scott once said to Captain Kirk on Star Trek: “I can’t change the laws of physics!” There are versions of these lamps that can restrike almost instantly, but they are very expensive and need special installations to operate. LEDs use a different physics. Because they cost much less per unit, they’re also much more economical for giant displays.

Of course there are problems still to be resolved. LEDs remain sensitive to ambient temperatures and don’t last as long when it’s hot out. Pilots and drivers alike complain about the sheer brightness of LEDs. The speed of innovation means that a given lighting product may only be available for about one year before being upgraded. Contractors on large installations that take a long time to complete may find that suppliers no longer stock a product they want by the time they go to install the lighting. Safety standards, design standards, and electrical codes governing the use of LED lights are still being developed; no one wants to lock something down today if that precludes something far better tomorrow.

Since Edison’s day, every time a novel light source was unveiled, commentators declared that the end of his incandescent lamp was at hand. This has never turned out to be the case in the past—but we may now actually witness that declaration coming to pass. I expect we’ll be seeing more and more applications for LEDs, especially since they’re already being integrated into smart environmental systems in buildings and homes. Long life spans, already 10 years and better, may mean that changing light bulbs becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience–or a job for an electrician. LEDs may make lighting technology even more invisible than it is already.

The post A Future Awash in LED Light appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Eventually, the newspaper decided enough was enough. Instead of having drug violence bleed throughout the entire newspaper, El Heraldo created a separate new section, “Justicia,” which contains all the gory violent news.

“Now it is up to the reader: You can revel in the latest violence and follow it closely, or you can choose to do this,” Contreras said, as he slipped the “Justicia” section out of that day’s edition on his desk and tossed it in the garbage can.

That conversation stuck with me, and El Heraldo’s new approach parallels how the broader Mexican society has dealt with the drug violence ever since President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came into office a year ago: by putting things in perspective and moving onto other things.

Peña Nieto, a former governor of the state of Mexico, has proven masterful at walking a fine line between continuing the war on the cartels and ceasing to seem consumed by it. His predecessor, Felipe Calderón, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), seemed able to focus on little else besides the drug war in his six years in office, making the struggle look all the more daunting to the public.

Peña Nieto understood that Mexicans desperately wanted to change the subject, to place boundaries around the issue much like El Heraldo has done. This hasn’t meant an abandonment of efforts to take on the drug cartels, but simply a decision to treat this as a subject properly delegated to security and law enforcement officials, while the president focuses on bigger topics like education, energy, and the economy. Peña Nieto has conveyed this to Washington, too, and on separate trips to Mexico City this year, both President Obama and Vice President Biden went out of their way to avoid the subject, talking instead about the importance of the two nations’ economic relationship.

Peña Nieto’s shift hasn’t just been cosmetic. The change of subject has been substantive as well. Defying the conventional wisdom that presidents should focus on one or two priorities at a time, Peña Nieto has unleashed an ambitious reform agenda, allying with opposition parties in Congress to push hard for an education reform that diminishes the power of the national teachers’ union, new antitrust laws that threaten the power of telecom and media monopolies, and a political reform to make elected officials more accountable.

And now, this week, the Mexican Senate has passed the administration’s most important proposed reform—constitutional amendments aimed at allowing significant private and foreign investment in the oil industry for the first time since it was nationalized in 1938. The measure still requires approval of the lower chamber of Congress and a majority of the states.

To call the energy reform an effort to boost Mexico’s economic competitiveness is both accurate and a massive understatement. For decades, Mexico’s oil has been almost sacred, a substance to be extracted only by Mexicans—all under the umbrella of the country’s state-owned oil monopoly, Pemex. Changing this is only the latest step in a far larger project of tackling the national neuroses standing in the way of Mexico fulfilling its potential.

This is no small matter for the United States, culturally, demographically, and economically tied to Mexico to a degree most Americans do not begin to appreciate. Mexico’s underlying potential as our North American partner is enormous. Our southern neighbor, with its 110 million people, is already the second-largest buyer of U.S. goods, our third-largest trading partner overall, and an important source of imported oil. As the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, turns 20, Mexico exports more manufactured goods than the rest of Latin America combined. The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute has found that 40 percent of all Mexican exports heading north across the border include value-added content from the United States (the equivalent figure for China is only 4 percent), a testament to how integrated the two economies are as a single manufacturing base. Goldman Sachs predicts that, by 2050, Mexico will be one of the world’s five largest economies (it currently ranks 14th), with a GDP of nearly $10 trillion.

Peña Nieto’s proposed energy reform, much like the education reform that preceded it, has triggered demonstrations on the streets of Mexico City, orchestrated by Pemex’s powerful unions and elements of Mexico’s demagogic left, which view any tinkering with the status quo as a betrayal of immutable principles of Mexicanidad.

Peña Nieto’s approach has been a surprise to the many who viewed the president’s party, the PRI, as the reactionary guardian of the status quo. After all, the PRI ruled Mexico in authoritarian fashion for most of 20th century, and it cynically opposed many of the current proposed reforms when it was in opposition. But Peña Nieto, a telegenic politician consistently underestimated by the nation’s chattering classes, is fond of comparing his reforms to Nixon going to China.

The energy legislation is more ambitious than many expected, allowing foreign oil companies to partner with the Mexican state on a profit-sharing basis, along the lines of what Brazil’s Petrobras and other more modern state-owned oil enterprises do around the world. The trick is finding a framework that will attract foreign capital, desperately needed to expand deep-sea exploration and production, without appearing to cede sovereign control over the nation’s mineral resources. Mexico’s oil production peaked in 2004 but has gone down 25 percent since, in part because the federal government treats Pemex as a piggy bank to balance its books rather than as a capital-intensive business that needs to reinvest a healthy share of its profits into its operations. Mexico has also slipped from second to third in the list of foreign suppliers of oil to the United States.

Prospects for changing the energy status quo are not bad. Mexico has changed dramatically since the passage of NAFTA two decades ago, abandoning a closed, socialist orientation to become one of the most avid free traders on earth, and its proximity to the United States is starting to reap greater dividends, as China loses its competitive edge as an alternative manufacturing base.

The country still has its share of formidable problems, including the ongoing drug violence, underperforming schools, regions of persistent poverty, and, worst of all, endemic corruption at all levels of government. But its deepest psychological challenge may be to close the gap between what the country has become and how it sees itself. The most common nationalistic instinct is to cling to the identity forged during Mexico’s early-20th-century revolution, that of a victimized Latin nation forever forced into a defensive crouch against the colossus of the north. But that is just one anachronism among many. As Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote, Mexico has a dysfunctional commitment to the preservation of all historical periods, so that “no one Mexican time is completed … but can remain a subverted Eden to be alternatively returned to and forgotten.” It’s a narrative of a colony exploited by Cortés and all who followed him.

Whether Mexico can tackle the necessary educational, political, and energy reforms to meet its challenges is a test of whether the country is ready to align how it governs itself with its new reality as a prospering democratic member of the North American community. The fate of the energy reform in coming days will say a great deal—not only about the fate of its oil production in years to come, but also about the extent to which our neighbor can get over its historical hang-ups, and take its rightful place in the world.

The post Is Mexico Finally Getting Over Its Hang-ups? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.