Mark Jacobson brings 100-percent solution to Sonoma

The debate over the world’s energy future comes to Sonoma next week, when Stanford professor Mark Jacobson speaks on transitioning to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2050.

That’s a date he has proposed in a number of state and even country studies, and it’s a date he believes is not only attainable, but crucial – if global warming is to be slowed or arrested.

His proposal? To focus on WWS – wind, water and solar – energy sources that are not only “cleaner” than nuclear energy, biofuels, coal and carbon capture sequestration in the energy menu for the future, but technologies that are easier to implement, and more readily achievable.

“My interest driving these is finding solutions… to global warming, air pollution, and energy security,” said Jacobson, when the Index-Tribune spoke to him last week in advance of his Jan. 4 Praxis Peace Institute lecture at Vintage House.

He’s found allies in his mission – including actor Mark Ruffalo, film producer Josh Fox (“Gasland”) and economist Marco Krapels (of Tesla and Solar City), in forming the Solutions Project, which presents 100 percent WWS proposals for all 50 states and 139 countries on its website.

The first one they developed came in 2011, when New York governor Andrew Cuomo was trying to decide whether or not to allow fracking in the state – the extraction of underground gas by pumping water into bedrock. He didn’t want fracking, said Jacobson, but needed to propose an alternative.

Ruffalo and Fox were working on “Gasland II,” a sequel to Fox’s award-winning documentary critiquing hydraulic fracking, and they had heard about Jacobson’s 2009 Scientific American article, “A Plan for a Sustainable Future: How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030.”

“They wanted to know if I could help develop an energy plan for New York as an alternative to fracking,” said Jacobson. “I said ‘I’ll give you a paragraph and you can start with that.’ But then I got really inspired, and ended up writing 21 pages.”

What resulted proved the model for a number of studies proposing similar clean-energy solutions to economies world-wide – plans that eschew such industry-friendly projects as nuclear power, biofuels and “clean coal” (an oxymoron locked in a contradiction).

Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist, started studying the issues in the 1990s, and soon found that industry-centric solutions created crippling problems that argued against their suitability as solutions at all. For instance, it can take 20 years for a nuclear power plant to come online, but comparable solar and wind farms can be developed on a much quicker time-scale, and avoid the future health uncertainties of radioactive waste.

By focusing on wind, water and solar – from both on-land and off-shore wind farms, hydraulic turbines from existing dams and proposed tidal turbines, and solar power in either rooftop arrays or large photo-voltaic plants – Jacobson is intentionally focusing on energy solutions that don’t contribute to the problems they’re trying to solve.

The 100 percent plan he developed for New York “was actually pretty effective,” said the scientist. “It’s one thing to be against something, and it’s another thing to actually be for something else. This gave them something to be for, to support.”

The 100 percent roadmap became part of the policy dialog, and a number of jurisdictions have chosen to endorse or even write energy goals into law.

“The thing has taken off,” said Jacobson. “All of a sudden in the last three or four years, all these climate activists have really jumped on this, saying let’s call for 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.” (The Scientific American 2030 date was, he said, pushed on him by the magazine’s editors.)

He claimed that over 50 cities in the U.S. are signed on to the goal, including Atlanta, Madison, Atlantic City, Portland Oregon, and more – including “14 towns and counties in North Carolina that have committed to 100 percent renewable energy.”

Less ambitious plans have been endorsed, as well, including in California. “We met with (Gov. Brown’s) office and two months later the governor proposed and got a law passed for 50 percent renewable energy for electricity by 2030,” said Jacobson. He also cited a new proposed law, SB100, that would move that 50 percent goal to 2026, and call for 100 percent by 2045. “Our California energy plan served as the scientific basis for SB100.”

Sonoma has yet to adopt a 100 percent renewable energy roadmap, though at the Dec. 13 Community Services and Environment Commission it was voted to propose a more limited Solar PV Ordinance to the City Council.

The model of growing social solutions to global energy problems outward, from small jurisdictions to states or even countries, seems promising.

“We’ll take it any way we can,” said Jacobson, “but that’s the way it’s turning out to be.”

But Jacobson is no populist crusader – he is, after all, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering, with a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences. His arguments tend toward the mathematical, focusing on computer modeling and equation calculations, and his work has attracted critics as well as supporters.

A February article in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issue with his proposals, finding “significant shortcomings in the analysis. In particular, we point out that this work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.”

Jacobson responded with a $10 million defamation lawsuit, which created its own firestorm of academic squabbling.

“The lawsuit was necessary because PNAS refused to investigate or correct and the authors refused to correct inaccurate misstatements of fact that they were informed about ahead of publication,” Jacobson told the Index-Tribune. “They (the authors of the February critique) were factually wrong and were informed of this ahead of time, but they and the journal still published this factually erroneous information.”

“I think it’s also important to note,” said Georgia Kelly of the Praxis Peace Institute, which is sponsoring Jacobson’s Jan. 4 appearance, “that journalists were focusing on the disagreement instead of the facts… It’s much easier to denounce a lawsuit than to do due diligence and find out why the lawsuit is happening in the first place.”

Jacobson remains firm in his numbers, steadfast in his conviction that finding a 100 percent renewable energy solution is not only smart, but attainable. Ultimately, it’s worth making the effort to find that solution.

“If nobody agrees to do it, nothing’s going to happen,” he said. “Things become possible when people want to do it.”

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.