California

Beyond the Haze

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:14:00 -0500

Even as my plane was landing in Jinan, the capital of China's heavily industrialized Shandong province, I could see cranes. By the time I got to the city center I'd counted 76 more construction cranes along the way. There were probably more, but in the city proper the smog was so thick I couldn't see any farther than the sidewalk. When I visited, just a few weeks before last summer's Olympic extravaganza kicked off, Shandong had just been named to the Chinese EPA's "green blacklist" for its

Start-Up U

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 05:59:00 -0400

Venture capitalists are not known to haunt Sproul Plaza, with its drummers and dreamers, but last spring Silicon Valley’s financiers showed up in force. On March 21 they filed across the flagstones and into the Student Union auditorium to hear such scintillating discussions as “Carbon Regulation and the Impact on Innovation,” and “Energy Storage: Hydrogen, Batteries, and Beyond.” The draw was not the topics, but rather the 400 people sitting in the folding chairs. They encompassed the entire energy universe of California -- researchers in architecture, chemistry, biology, engineering, and economics from Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; influential state regulators; the governor’s main man on economic growth; and corporate types representing companies ranging from Dow Chemical to solar entrepreneur SunPower.

The takeaway was obvious: With global warming breathing down our necks, energy is hot. And Berkeley, where brainpower is mingling with government power-brokers to implement the state’s greenhouse gas legislation, is even hotter. Having just announced a $500 million ten-year deal with oil giant BP to found a new Energy Biosciences Institute on campus, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winner and head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), made a pitch for more: “We are seeking industry partnerships ... We seek solutions. We don’t seek, dare I say, science papers anymore.”

Across campus, green ideals are teaming up with the other green -- money. Typical of the new “double-greens” is the group that organized the March symposium, a multidisciplinary club of grad students called the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative, or BERC. In just two years, BERC’s 300-plus members have presented dozens of events and inspired the creation of a new Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation at Haas business school.

Unlike previous generations of environmentalists, who saw capitalism as “part of the problem,” the new greens see it as part of the solution, if not the solution. Take the event’s organizer and BERC co-chair Merrian Fuller, a first-year MBA candidate at Haas. She spent her early 20s working in an environmental nonprofit, but had a conversion. “After being frustrated by the politics of NGOs, lack of money, and slow speed, I see business as an efficient way to make changes,” she said. To her, climate change is urgent and requires new rules. “We have to experiment much more and be willing to fail,” she said. “We have to realize some policies and initiatives might not work out.”

Thriving in this atmosphere requires global awareness and specific knowledge, which is what BERC provides -- a network of curious experts eager to break out of their “silos.” During a night out with a few BERC members at Jupiter, the local watering hole, the conversation skitters among disciplines -- from battery chemistry to climate law, to nanotech, to hedge fund priorities. Henry Stern, a Boalt law student who’s spending the summer working on greenhouse gas regulations for a judge at the California Public Utilities Commission, said he views his friends as a strange new hybrid generation. Its members combine tech savvy with business skills in pursuit of a “triple bottom line” of social change, environmental benefits, and profit. But everyone acknowledges that this will not be easy. At the moment, high-carbon energy is simply too cheap.

If BERC members are optimistic, it’s because big money is finally starting to follow the carbon. “Clean tech is nonpartisan,” remarked one student. “Even the big energy guys think there’s money in it.” Clean tech seems to offer something for everyone -- especially in a country that’s tired of thinking about big problems such as the war in Iraq. “The only people who don’t like clean tech are the people who don’t like money,” joked another student.

BERC is a telling part of a large universe of energy initiatives at Berkeley. They range from hundreds of millions in new funding for biofuel research at both the university and LBNL to less-publicized work on solar energy, nanotechnology, battery technology, and ener- gy efficiency, as well as multidisciplinary energy policy, law, and market analysis. There’s also the Cal Climate Action Partnership (CalCAP), a campuswide program for greenhouse gas reduction. Although the $500 million research grant from BP to found the Energy Biosciences Institute has drawn the most attention and controversy -- Chancellor Robert Birgeneau called it “our generation’s moon shot” -- the university’s involvement in alternative energy is deep and complex. Berkeley has always been a place that talked about changing the world. Now that it has an opportunity, it first has to face change here on campus.

Seventy-six years ago, Ernest Orlando Lawrence explored the mysteries and potential of the atomic nucleus with his cyclotron on the hill above Berkeley. This past June, an overflow lunchtime crowd squeezed into an auditorium on the same hill to hear Chris Somerville, the likely head of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), explain why the world’s next big mystery is the cell wall. In a hesitant and somewhat old-fashioned style, Somerville described his radical mission -- to create “disruptive technologies” for remodeling plants, enzymes, and organisms to produce fuels from plants. He gave the crowd a PowerPoint tour of the unstudied structures of the cell and the technological challenge that lies ahead, reminding his audience of the urgency at hand. “We’re not running out of fossil fuels, we’re running out of climate,” he quipped. “Climate is the sole driver for biofuels, in my opinion.”

The story of how Berkeley became the hub of a would-be biofuel boom reveals not only the formidable power of the university’s labs, but also the extraordinary influence its professors have on state leaders regarding what many see as a climate change emergency. The desire for speedy technological fixes is driving unprecedented collaborations among the university, government, and industry.

Long before there was much interest in investing millions of dollars to produce fuel from green plants, Berkeley academics were intimately involved in creating California’s pioneering greenhouse gas regulations. In late 2006, Goldman Public Policy professor Michael Hanemann and Energy and Resources Group professor Alex Farrell released an influential multipart report that contradicted conventional wisdom, arguing that California’s economy could benefit from greenhouse gas regulation. “California has a different culture,” says Hanemann, pointing to the gonzo-creativity of Silicon Valley and the state’s innovative regulations on smog and energy efficiency, which stimulated better emissions control and appliance efficiency. “Nationally, the first instinct is to preserve the status quo. In California the feeling is that greenhouse gasses are a challenge and we’ll rise to the challenge by using innovation. As a bonus, we might also get industrial and economic growth.” Convinced that early regulation could avoid environmental disaster and benefit the state’s economy, the governor and the California Legislature passed AB 32, the greenhouse gas legislation. These regulations, which could eventually allow expensive new technologies to compete with cheap, entrenched fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal, made the very idea of a green tech “moon shot” feasible.

LBNL director Steven Chu looked at controlling greenhouse gas emissions as a grand physics problem, the way he might calculate the potential output of a Carnot heat engine. The challenge, he felt, was to figure out which low-carbon energy sources had the greatest theoretical output and the fewest barriers to production. If we wanted to meet all of the world’s increasing electricity needs with nuclear fission, he calculated, we’d need to erect a reactor every ten days and we’d have a terrible nuclear waste problem. He searched for technologies that were in their infancy, where improvements might make a big difference. That eliminated wind turbines, which -- according to Chu’s calculation of the “Betts limit” -- are already close to their theoretical efficiency of 59 percent. “When you start with a problem like energy, you have to look at what are the ultimate limitations. And then you work back from those.”

By process of elimination, Chu arrived at two promising avenues for research: energy efficiency -- a field pioneered by Berkeley physicist Art Rosenfeld -- and harnessing the power of the sun. Sunlight can be captured by both technology and plants, which led him to identify the fields of photovoltaics, nanotechnology, electrochemistry, artificial photosynthesis, catalysis (producing hydrogen from water using sunlight), batteries (to hold energy produced by solar cells), and biofuels. Chu imagined a spectrum of biofuels, ranging from ethanol -- which requires modest leaps in innovation -- to more technically challenging fuels, such as butane and octane, that could be used by both airplane and conventional auto engines. Chu dubbed these sun-related projects Helios.

In Chu’s view, the magnitude and speed of climate change calls for a close partnership between research institutions, government regulators, and industry. By setting standards and establishing incentives, smart regulators can push industry, setting in motion big technological changes. “Getting technology deployed is best done in a business space,” he says. “You can develop technology at research institutions, as has been done in the past, but there’s a time delay. I don’t think we have a time luxury,” he asserts. “We want to partner with industry early because industry’s strength is that they can make technology scalable.” Chu understands that not everyone shares this view. “A small segment doesn’t understand that moving fast is better than maintaining purity,” he says. “Monasteries are good places, but they’re not good for science.”

When word went out in 2006 that energy giant BP was soliciting applications for a major project, the university and LBNL began writing a proposal (based on Helios initiatives) at what research vice chancellor Beth Burnside describes as “warp speed.” Although the initiative was to be a ten-year project funded by BP at $50 million a year (roughly three times the $16 million the university received in corporate funding for research in 2006), Burnside later described the plan as “an ordinary though a little bit oversized industry-sponsored research project.” At the news that Berkeley had won the contest, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates quickly applauded it.

Reactions on campus came at warp speed, as well. Graffiti decrying “bperkeley” went up overnight. At a March faculty senate forum, Ignacio Chapela, an outspoken critic of an earlier deal between the Novartis Corporation and the university, described the agreement with BP as “Faustian” and compared it to “prostitution.” Scientists involved in the project bristled. A group of faculty requested a blue-ribbon oversight panel for the deal, but that was tabled when a vote in the faculty senate endorsed the idea that corporate funding is an issue of academic freedom. Bad feelings, and many questions, remained.

“Some of the rhetoric was silly,” says Haas professor Severin Borenstein, “but people had legitimate concerns. The question was: Is this being done in a way to protect the free flow of information and independence of the university? The protestors served a good function of reminding people to watch the details. And if the protestors do derail the agreement, it will have been for a good reason -- because more discussion was needed.”

For some proponents, the whole purpose of the arrangement was speed. “It would have simplified things if the money to do this research came from the government,” Somerville stated, “but if you really want to change the energy sector, you have to be partnered by big energy companies.” He says the relationship would give academics at EBI “a reality check,” shorten the path to commercialization, and offer the university an opportunity to influence BP by changing its decision-making processes. “I think that’s the biggest return BP will get on its investments -- knowledge is empowering to make good decisions,” he said. According to Somerville, if the deal is signed, BP would like to spin out private start-up companies as an efficient way of commercializing the basic knowledge developed in the lab.

For Berkeley, which has seen public funding for research fall for decades, EBI would be an opportunity not only to get hold of private funding, but also to collateralize the university’s knowledge on par with Stanford, which has contributed commercial ideas worth incalculable amounts to Silicon Valley’s economy. “UC has recognized that they’re perceived as unfriendly to business,” declares Sean Randolph of the Bay Area Economic Forum, who terms Berkeley’s biofuel initiative “game changing” for the region’s economy. In alternative energy, Somerville said, “The university is ahead of the game and has the chance to be the center and hold it for a long time, maybe forever.”

Californians have lived through booms in gold, aerospace, computer hardware, software, the Internet, and biotech industries, so we’re willing to believe in the next one, even if it’s a complicated bet on clean tech. Now, the federal government is also willing to back the bet. In June, the Department of Energy awarded a $125 million, five-year grant for research on making ethanol from cellulose. The lab receiving the grant, called JBEI (Joint BioEnergy Institute), is a collaboration between Berkeley, UC Davis, Stanford, LBNL, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Lab. It will be headquartered somewhere around Emeryville and run by Jay Keasling, the Berkeley scientist who pioneered synthetic biology. JBEI is being described as a “start-up” to EBI’s think tank.

More money is probably on the way. Asked about funding for Helios, Chu declined to say what was in the pipeline but suggested that more announcements will be coming soon. Meanwhile, Professor Dan Kammen has proposed a California Climate Institute that would have a budget bigger than EBI’s. He describes the Institute as a “do tank,” where state regulators would work side-by-side with campus researchers to solve greenhouse gas issues quickly. There is talk of soliciting foundations for funds to set up another institute to study the social and environmental impacts of biofuels. And the newly proposed Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation hopes to become a formal pipeline between university researchers and area businesses. It’s impossible to know the eventual sum of these formal and informal, state and private initiatives, but it’s already larger than anything in the university’s history.

On the day the Department of Energy announced its grant, the press was given a whirlwind tour of Keasling’s laboratory in Emeryville. The space was crowded with large gas chromatographs, incubators, and dozens of young scientists methodically moving test tubes and tallying charts while music from portable radios played. A news crew asked one of Keasling’s lab scientists to explain how a bioreactor works (it’s essentially a highly calibrated still -- something like the ones used to create moonshine), and after three tries the scientist was still caught in a technical discussion about what this smallish device means for the future of the planet. “Imagine you’re explaining it to a child,” said an exasperated TV reporter.

For all the hopes placed in the biofuels initiatives, most of us understand relatively little about the science behind biofuels -- never mind the commercial relationships, or the impact of their innovations on farming communities far from the Bay Area. When Chris Somerville gave his presentation at LBNL, he described green plants as giant solar collectors, working doubletime to turn sunlight into chemical energy to power transportation while storing carbon. Somerville surmised that the world could meet its need for transportation fuels with 1 percent of the world’s land planted with miscanthus, a perennial that converts energy from the sun at 2 percent efficiency and doesn’t appear to require much water, fertilizer, or cultivation.

Although 1 percent sounds like a modest amount of land, in global terms it’s nearly three times the land area of Spain. In short order, land could replace oil as the world’s most valuable commodity, quickly sending the greatest impacts of Berkeley’s homegrown “disruptive technology” to the farthest, poorest corners of the earth. “I can’t tell you with certainty that we can afford 1 percent,” Somerville said. “It will be something we’ll look at deeply and broadly here at the Institute -- is there enough water and enough land, and what are the consequences to the societies that are sitting on that land?”

Can Berkeley troubleshoot the ecological and political consequences of a global transformation on this scale? “The biofuel initiative is important, good for the campus and good for society, but I’m concerned about how much they’ll pay attention to the potential impacts,” says Boalt professor and director of the Environmental Law Program Daniel Farber, reflecting the opinion of many I talked with on campus. “Every problem began life as a solution. Will we solve our problems and create new ones?”

The university’s difficulty in assessing these potential impacts is personified by the hyperhybrid work/life of Dan Kammen, who is on the EBI project’s executive committee. Trained in physics and now a professor of nuclear engineering, Kammen first became interested in alternative energy in the late 1980s. He later started an interdisciplinary study of energy technology, policy, and development, a history reflected in his office bookshelf, where an English-Xhosa dictionary sits near Plutonium, Power, and Politics and Biomass Energy Policy in Africa. A professor at the Energy Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the nuclear engineering department, as well as the founder of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Kammen, perhaps more than any other faculty member at Berkeley, has adopted multiple public roles: climate change analyst, policy wonk, technological innovator, and consultant to high-profile green tech investors such as British tycoon Richard Branson.

Kammen’s media savvy and upbeat enthusiasm for green tech give him the air of a friendly host on the Discovery Channel, but he is frank about the gamble the university has helped California take. “We need to make good on our commitment to AB 32, which we really don’t know how to do. We need to actually do what we said we could in our op-ed pieces.” He describes California as a guinea pig for new technologies, markets, and regulations, and a magnet for investment in new industries. And risks? “History is strongly on the side that it’s more important to make a decision than to make the globally optimum decision.”

Early in this new history, Kammen’s life is already “hectic beyond sensible.” During a half-hour interview in his office, he receives phone calls from reporters, a state official, and a documentary crew as he prepares to take the red-eye to Washington, D.C., to promote Berkeley’s energy initiatives. If this sounds impossibly taxing, it’s further complicated by Kammen’s dual roles as one of the most visible supporters of the initiative and as an influential critic of its implementation. “So far, unfortunately, our administration has sent the wrong message and has acted like this is a battle to be won against protestors,” he says, adding that what’s needed are mechanisms to monitor the university’s relationship with EBI, and a degree of transparency.

To that end, one afternoon a week Kammen meets with a group of grad students who have questions and some deep reservations about the project. On the day I attended, for more than two hours the students aired their worries, many concerning basic questions of transparency. The administration has said that once the contract is signed it will be posted on the Internet. Henry Stern, the Boalt student from BERC, who has met with the administration as a representative of the Graduate Assembly, was drawing up a public memo asking the administration to make good on the promise. Concerns about the contract include the role of the 50 or so BP researchers who will be doing proprietary research at EBI facilities; the licensing for intellectual property; and the relationship between the EBI and JBEI, Keasling’s federally funded “start-up” project. Kammen, still upbeat, coached the group on how to press their cases. “It’s not clear where JBEI begins and EBI ends,” he conceded, and suggested that one of the students ask the administration.

The students also worry that the university does not have policies and institutions in place to disseminate information and process problems that arise about the many new initiatives. “The policies we have in place might not scale well,” says a molecular biologist, warily eyeing the crowded walls of Kammen’s office, as if wondering how this ad hoc institution could handle the enormity of the slated projects. The students questioned how the university will balance commercial funding with its public mission. For example, if biofuels could be made from either an unpatented mixture of native grasses or a patented crop such as miscanthus, will researchers feel pressure to endorse the patented crop because it’s more likely to reward funders?

On the integrity of the project over time, Kammen is less upbeat. “This issue won’t come to a head until a patent says that one approach is better,” he says, suggesting that the result could be decided because of money or some vague mix of financial concerns and analysis. “That’s where we’ll know. Over the next ten years there will be an ongoing battle over open and transparent research. We have the ability to police this. Will we use it or cop out?” But like Somerville, Kammen thinks Berkeley may have a greater influence on BP than the reverse. “BP picked Berkeley because of its social consciousness. Combined, Berkeley and BP could enforce good decisions better than either could alone.”

Social science students fear that the EBI will not award grants to study the wider impacts of the project, although the EBI’s assitant director says that a percentage of funding is earmarked for social sciences. Kammen mentioned that fully a quarter of EBI’s first-round grant proposals were for social science research, but he doesn’t know how many will be funded. The executive committee, which gets the first look at the proposals, is entirely trained in the physical sciences. Further, Kammen acknowledged, “The process is clearly biased against people who are against the project.”

At this, the students begin arguing among themselves, revealing a deeper fault line between disciplines. One social scientist describes the companies owned by Somerville and Keasling as a conflict of interest (Sommerville has already divested from his start-up, Mendel). The plant molecular biologist is surprised by the criticism. “It’s standard to let scientists make start-ups,” he says in a tone suggesting that outside funding is as important as test tubes for biologists today. The social scientist, scandalized by that response, says, “I think it’s a good time to ask how money is changing the scientific questions that are getting answered.” Kammen suggests the student might look into how corporate funding has influenced medical research, to see if there are potential parallels with biofuels. He says it’s time for students and faculty to pursue outside funding from foundations to investigate the social impacts of biofuels.

The exchange speaks to a deeper rift on campus. A few decades of pursuing commercial funding have left a gap between the entrepreneurial sciences and those with nonprofit funding from government and foundations. It’s possible that hashing out the EBI project will bring about more moments like this one, encouraging the entrepreneurial sciences to look more critically at the relationship between their work and their funding, and perhaps leading the social scientists to more aggressively seek funding for critical studies. “Maybe we should say we want a slice of the EBI pie,” muses one of the students, “and then criticize the pie.” But it’s also possible that the social sciences may follow the physical further into the corporate domain, simply because traditional social science subjects (such as rural ethnographies or studies of traditional farming practices) will suddenly have commercial value to companies hoping to start large biofuel businesses abroad.

The stress of dealing with climate change is even changing academic disciplines themselves. “There’s a breakdown happening, a disciplinary crisis about what our ‘knowledge’ is,” a chemical engineering student explained to me later. “The chemistry we grew up on was distillation columns, but now it’s Keasling and synthetic biology.” Students worry that the rigid criteria for academic success in a single discipline may be poor training for the kind of interdisciplinary studies they’ll need in order to understand the energy revolution that’s growing here.

If the initial issues in the biofuels project seem largely procedural, they quickly cut to compelling questions about the proper role of the university in public life. “If you’re setting out to change the world, the institution has a responsibility to examine how to incorporate and digest a relatively large group of people and activities,” says political science professor emeritus Todd LaPorte. LaPorte investigated the campus reaction to the Novartis deal in the 1990s for the National Academy of Sciences, and he sees parallels to the current initiatives. “Technology inevitably produces surprises. A public university has a wide range of obligations to society, and as an organization you ought to know what those surprises could be.”

How do you find those surprises in advance? LaPorte’s work on aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants suggests that organizations that successfully manage mistakes have deliberately developed cultures encouraging self-criticism and rewarding employees for owning up to errors quickly. They also set up structures to preserve institutional memories from one generation to the next. Successful organizations institutionalize checks and balances and encourage rigorous debate, rather than relying on ad hoc groups to police themselves. “It doesn’t mean you don’t trust those who are doing the work,” he says. “But the institution needs early warning.”

LaPorte is hopeful that the university can manage its green tech initiative carefully. He proposes a joint faculty senate-administration special task force that would continue for several years. He imagines a large institutional effort to study the effects -- large and small -- of the project, both as a way of teaching other institutions and as a means of identifying potential problems at an early stage, before they affect the mission or reputation of the university, or the world. “We should treat this project with the same level of rigor and examination that we devote to all our work,” he says.

Whatever its labs produce, Berkeley’s most valuable commodity for California will always be debate. This June, the UC Energy Institute (UCEI) held its “camp,” a yearly affair at which energy economists gather to discuss unpublished papers, eat pizza, and wear T-shirts reading “I blacked out at UCEI Electricity Camp.” The weeklong camp takes place in the Institute’s offices, in a smallish, stuffy room furnished with mismatched chairs and whiteboards. High on the main whiteboard, above some mathematical formulas, are the words “Climate policy must be free.” It’s less a rallying cry than a reflection of the economists’ beef that the public wants greenhouse gas regulation to come to them free of cost, or at a net gain. To economists, the most efficient way to change personal and market behavior is to tax the heck out of carbon. The clash between the politics of climate change (free, free, free!) and the economics of it (without cost it means nothing) is the subject of hourly debate at Camp UCEI.

Under pressure to address climate change, energy economics is evolving quickly. Speaking with me before the camp, Severin Borenstein said that purely economic models don’t explain how energy markets work, so economists are starting to use ideas from marketing, psychology, and anthropology. “We spend a lot of time looking at costs, but what people see is more emotions or perceptions. It’s tangible to put solar panels on the roof, but replacing windows (which would save more money and cost less) is a ‘so what?’ More and more, a chunk of our work is trying to figure out incentives and structures to get people to change their behavior.”

This afternoon, Energy Camp is packed to hear a presentation by Alex Farrell, a rising star in the Energy and Resources Group. Formerly an engineer on nuclear submarines, he was drawn to an interdisciplinary study of energy issues because he was “trying to identify the hardest problems around.” Farrell’s work on a low-carbon fuel standard for biofuels is being followed with interest by policymakers in Washington and Europe. Today several regulators have come down from Sacramento to see his presentation.

The fuel standard speaks to the extraordinarily fast pace of regulation in California, and Berkeley’s key role in creating it. In January of this year, the governor’s office asked Farrell and a team of researchers to study how to reduce greenhouse gasses from transportation while encouraging growth of a “green fuels” industry. Four months of frantic work produced part one of a report on what is called the Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, which helped the California Air Resources Board decide to adopt a similar policy as an “early action” strategy on June 21.

The fuel standard falls somewhere in the middle of a long-running debate over whether the interests of the public are best served by market-based programs or regulations. After its success with smog and electrical efficiency, California tends to favor careful regulation. Farrell’s plan combines regulation and a form of credit trading. It includes a way to label every fuel by its carbon content over the fuel’s life cycle. Labels allow regulators and consumers to compare the total carbon emissions of a gallon of gasoline made from tar sands, for example, with a gallon made from a mixture of conventional crude oil and cellulosic ethanol. For an even better carbon profile, a consumer could choose a plug-in hybrid car, because the fuel standard allows regulators to compare different fuels and engines. The standard requires that fuel sold in California contain 10 percent less carbon by 2020, but includes a market mechanism so that firms exceeding their targets can trade credits to those who don’t.

The idea is fairly complex -- and it takes Farrell nearly 40 minutes of PowerPoint slides to get it across to the audience. The exuberant economists keep interrupting him. “I can’t help myself,” says Borenstein, “This is not the best approach. The realistic thing to say is that a carbon tax is not politically feasible, so this is a good approach.” Farrell’s military training prepared him well for this kind of onslaught, but the fact is that he brought his idea to UCEI Camp specifically to see it challenged.

Since the California electricity crisis in 2001, economists at the Institute have devoted more time to figuring out how companies might “game” regulations -- much the way software companies hire hackers to find security problems in their products. “You always have to figure out how people will make money from policies,” observes Borenstein.

And so, as the afternoon wears on and the chairs become increasingly uncomfortable, UC Davis economics Professor Chris Knittel lays out a case for unintended consequences of the fuel standard: Namely, very high gas prices or increased carbon emissions because oil companies might have a perverse incentive to sell more fuel. But when Knittel ran simulations, he discovered that a more likely outcome would be lackluster carbon reductions at high prices for consumers. Happily, he also saw a potential fix: Set a “cap” on each company’s carbon allowance. Farrell found some of the criticisms flawed because the models couldn’t measure how the standard would spark innovation. He described his role as supplying information in a changing world: “Given what we know, this is what’s possible.”

This kind of rigorous debate in the public interest could be the university’s finest hour. Making policies that work is a delicate dance between good plans and necessary politics, between ideals and execution, between technology and markets. The point of the exercise was not to determine whether the fuel standard was a winner or a loser, but to hash out its potential strengths, weaknesses, and pitfalls. To paraphrase Todd LaPorte, it was a search for “predictable surprises.”

The university’s service to society, and its influence in state government, depend on its ability to stay above the fray. “A pipeline to talk with the government -- that’s a great thing -- you have the great minds from Berkeley giving suggestions,” says Borenstein. “What makes me nervous is when we become part of the political economy and hesitate to criticize policies. People may not say what they think in public because it would affect their relationship with the governor’s office, the PUC, etc. It’s really important that the UC faculty has independence -- we do not want to go in the direction where UC becomes confidential advisors to state government. We need to spread the information more widely.”

Borenstein’s caution underscores the fact that changes wrought by climate change now extend beyond melting glaciers and anxious polar bears to Berkeley itself. As it prepares to take on the greatest challenge of our time, the university will require not only new technologies and industries, but also new institutions, new disciplines, and new ways of communicating its expertise around the world. Although the science and policy of limiting greenhouse gasses have yet to be invented, the university already knows how to build upon its culture of debate and optimism. And as the university’s ideas attract more political and financial backers, Berkeley will have to invest in its own integrity with as much deliberation as any venture capitalist.

Can the City Save the Farm?

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 31 May 2007 06:32:00 -0400

Even if you’re only the slightest bit familiar with California’s $30 billion-plus farm economy, you may have heard the lament: urban development is steamrolling the state’s agricultural belt. Every day, bountiful fields surrender to big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and residential sprawl. More than 100,000 acres were paved over in the Central Valley alone in the 1990s, and experts estimate that nearly 1 million more could vanish within a generation. Today’s Country Mouse is tomorrow’s City Mouse (or, more likely, a critter skittering across a cookiecutter suburban subdivision).

But while this threat is real and not to be taken lightly, it tends to obscure another phenomenon that is, in its own quiet way, gaining traction: cities up and down the state -- and, indeed, across the United States and around the globe -- increasingly are championing agriculture and forging beneficial bonds between urban and rural locales.

These links can take many forms, some more commonplace than others: bustling farmers’ markets, "buy locally grown" campaigns, urban-to-ag water recycling programs, agricultural greenbelts and parks nestled in and around densely populated areas, city educational and recreational initiatives that regard the farm as a valuable asset. In each case, the key to success is getting people to recognize that the places furnishing our fruits, vegetables, milk, and meat are not separate from the regional metropolitan framework but, rather, an integral piece of it.

"It’s really important that cities begin to embrace the countryside because that’s what they’re based upon," says Sibella Kraus, director of Berkeley’s Program for Agriculture at the Metropolitan Edge, which is exploring ways to encourage urban planners to incorporate farmland into their blueprints. "The food system is the base of civilization."

In effect, this nascent movement marks the bridging of two trends that many know by the buzzwords "smart growth" and "sustainable agriculture." The former involves organizing cities around compact neighborhoods with a lively array of residential, retail, and leisure-time choices. The latter refers to cultivating food in a way that, without sacrificing profitability, promotes environmental health and socio- economic equity.

Put them together and you have what Kraus calls "New Ruralism" -- a model beginning to generate considerable interest from a variety of quarters. Early last month, more than 200 people gathered on the Berkeley campus for a two day symposium on the subject, and it wasn’t just academics, farmers, and foodies who attended. City planners, developers, architects, and others who have the ability to literally reshape our landscape are beginning to take heed of New Ruralism’s precepts.

Previously, "a master-planned community would be put in, and it would just swallow up all the agricultural land right up to the farm on the other side of the fence," says Renée Robin, a land-use attorney in San Francisco. "Now, people are asking, ‘Why not have the farm be on our side of the fence?’ It makes the whole community more desirable."

In some ways, the basic notion behind New Ruralism is quite old. In his 1898 book, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, Ebenezer Howard called for seamlessly merging urban and rural environs into what he termed the Garden City. "There are in reality not only, as is so constantly assumed, two alternatives -- town life and country life -- but a third alternative," he wrote. This is one "in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination." Howard’s aim was to counteract the poverty, squalor, and overcrowding of 19th-century urban England.

These days, different drivers are at work: a focus on eating things that are fresh and good for us (and, in the wake of a recent string of E. coli outbreaks, not mass produced); a desire to be conscientious stewards of the land by, in part, endorsing small-scale agriculture as opposed to factory farming; and a push to alter the ways we grow, process, and transport our food so that they’re more energy efficient.

As with many young movements, it’s easy to get caught up in the promise of this one and forget that the various concepts falling under the rubric of New Ruralism probably strike most people as utterly foreign -- even a little wacky. So although it may seem as if everybody you know in the Bay Area would just as soon slit their wrists as feed their kids a piece of fruit that has been sprayed with pesticides, keep in mind that as of 2005 -- the most recent data available -- a mere 0.5 percent of all U.S. farmland was organic. Likewise, some 4,300 farmers’ markets may have sprung up around the nation, but that pales in comparison with nearly 14,000 McDonald’s. The golden French fry still reigns over the purple potato.

Nor is the credo to purchase locally grown applicable year-round across much of America, with many farms freezing over in the fall and winter.

"There are a lot of pieces" to making New Ruralism a widely accepted reality -- "and a lot of things still to work out," says Wayne James, who tends 20 acres in Santa Rosa. Recently, James and I stood beside his operation, Tierra Vegetables, where my tongue tingled from a taste of his chile jam.

His farm couldn’t be woven any tighter into the fabric of urban Sonoma County; a row of homes abuts his fields, their second-story windows and rooflines peering down upon his carrots and kale. Just across Airport Boulevard, where Tierra’s farm stand is perched, a new housing development went in last year to accommodate Santa Rosa’s ever-expanding population (now at more than 157,000).

James has been farming in the county for 27 years, and he’s committed to this type of agriculture -- following the best growing practices, catering to a loyal group of local customers who want to feel closely tied to the land. But making a go of it is tricky. Buying or leasing property in these parts can be prohibitively expensive. And being able to pay farm workers enough so that they can find housing in the city is extremely difficult. Wayne wonders, too, whether most farmers’ markets are destined to stay the province of the privileged. After all, how many poor people, or people on fixed incomes, can afford yellow cluster tomatoes at $4.99 a pound?

Looking around at Tierra’s setup, it also occurred to me that it’s going to be tough to replicate this idyllic little vegetable patch in the Great Central Valley. There, individual farms unfurl over tens of thousands of acres, and the politics at the local coffee shop run far more red-state than blue. Property rights are sacrosanct in California’s heartland -- especially for those wanting to trade in their tired old cotton ranch for a fat check from a homebuilder. Just try persuading these people to keep their land in agriculture. "The farmers are holding out for the big bucks," says Danny Espitia, the mayor of Wasco, a town 26 miles north of Bakersfield.

As you peel back these challenges, most come down to one thing: scale. How can New Ruralism achieve enough momentum so that farmers who’d like to be closer to the city are able to find an ample amount of good, reasonably priced land? When will consumers curious to try out seasonal, locally produced, organic fare find cheap and plentiful offerings? How can devotees of New Ruralism ever truly compete with Monsanto Co. and other corporate giants touting genetically modified crops -- food grown in a way that’s anathema to those in the movement?

"What we need is a huge proliferation of farms to ring our urban areas," says Joseph McIntyre, executive director of Ag Innovations Network, a Sebastopol-based nonprofit group that is trying to help foster a sustainable food system. But at least at this point, he concedes, "there’s not the political will for it or the social demand for it." Similarly, while ever more progressives in the real-estate industry are becoming conversant with the ideas of New Ruralism, the vast majority "don’t think about these things," says Michael Dieden, a principal at Creative Housing Associates, a development firm that has worked with Kraus on a farmers’ market project in downtown Santa Rosa. "All they care about it is how many units can I get onto the property and how much money I can make."

And yet for all of this, James and others sense that a genuine transformation is under way -- that more city folks are starting to think about where their food comes from and what goes into it. "Attitudes are steadily changing," James says, especially in the past five years. And, indeed, as much of a mistake as it is to be Pollyannaish about New Ruralism, it’s equally foolish to dismiss it as totally pie-in-the-sky. There’s too much happening out there to ignore.

In Ventura County, Farm Bureau officials, environmentalists, and civic leaders are engaged in a continuing dialogue over the way that land gets developed so that agriculture is preserved. In Santa Cruz and Davis, UC researchers are studying how to hook up small and midsize farms with city hospitals, schools, and old-age homes, presenting new markets for the growers and a better diet for those dependent on institutional cafeterias for their meals. In Napa County, Triad Communities is constructing a village that, in addition to a number of eco-friendly and socially conscious features, is slated to include an agricultural conservancy that will deliver fruits and vegetables to those living in the 391 homes being built there.

And all over the state, big-city denizens are sending advance money directly to small farms and, in return, receiving boxes of whatever is being harvested that week. Called Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, this approach represents "a small revolution" in the way cities and rural areas interact, McIntyre says. In 1990, there were about 50 CSAs around the U.S.; currently, more than 1,000 are up and running, as more and more farmers have discovered devoted urban customers willing to pay upfront.

Seeds of New Ruralism have been sprinkled from New York to Texas, from Great Britain to Cuba to China. But California -- the nation’s biggest farming state, as well as one of its most heavily urbanized -- is, in many respects, the ideal place to see the movement emerging. And so I decided to set out across the Golden State, eager to get a little country mud caked on my city shoes and, just maybe, steal a glimpse of the future.

Full Belly Farm lies in the verdant Capay Valley, down from the Indian casino along Highway 16, where cell-phone reception instantly evaporates -- poof! -- and a big S-curve forces you to slow your car. Of course, everything slows down out here. A list of nearby amenities includes a mini-mart, Mexican restaurant, sub shop, burger joint, snow-cone stand, and not much else. Though Full Belly is only about 50 miles northwest of Sacramento, it seems as if the city couldn’t be farther away.

Yet Judith Redmond, one of the farm’s four owners, stays closely attuned to the rhythms of urban life.

That’s because Full Belly boasts hundreds of customers in Sacramento, Berkeley, Oakland, and other cities. Making them feel intimately involved with what’s happening here (which is to say marketing to them in the most sophisticated fashion) is what allows Full Belly to thrive at 250 acres when so many farms its size are going, well, belly up.

"It’s about building connections," says Redmond, 50, who grew up a city kid herself in Santa Barbara and found her way to farming through environmental activism. She has been working this land since 1989, four years after Full Belly was founded.

The day I arrived, a handful of Full Belly’s 30-member crew was packing broccoli, beets, carrots, chard, cilantro, dill, garlic, wild mustard greens, potatoes, oranges, and much more. Some of the stuff -- all of it organically grown -- was destined for a farmers’ market in Marin. Some was headed to a Whole Foods in San Rafael and some to Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s famed restaurant in Berkeley (which, through its Edible Schoolyard urban-gardening program and other efforts, is itself a New Ruralism adherent). And some of the produce was being prepared for Full Belly’s CSA participants, many of whom love to visit the farm and keep up with its goings-on through a weekly newsletter.

Spreading the message -- no herbicides or chemical fertilizers; using "good bugs" to get rid of bad ones; providing medical coverage for many of Full Belly’s farmhands; steady pay raises that mean longtime laborers earn nearly $20 an hour -- is as essential as spreading compost.

"Having a direct relationship with the customer makes for an economic model that works better," Redmond says. "We know the demand is there, that there are consumers who want this food and are willing to pay more for it."

Among them is Berkeley resident Suzanne Marr, whose family invariably refers to Full Belly as "our farm." They fork over $686 annually for their weekly Full Belly box -- one of about 900 shipped out regularly -- and Marr doesn’t mind that this constitutes a premium over what she’d plunk down in the supermarket. For starters, the fruit and vegetables are so fresh, "you can totally taste the difference," she insists.

During January and February, she notes, it can be challenging to cook with what Full Belly sends along. But she uses that as an opportunity to teach her daughters, ages 7 and 10, about seasonal eating. When they ask for a Chilean plum in the grocery store, Marr tells them, "Sorry, girls. It takes a lot of energy to bring that fruit here." Then it’s home to whirr up some Full Belly greens in the blender and make soup. The way Marr looks at it, "I’m paying for the whole system," not just a package of produce. Included in that, she says, is the true cost of respecting the environment and compensating workers decently.

Full Belly is determined to further its philosophy by having a group of interns always living on the farm, many of them twenty-somethings from the cities, who relish the chance to play a role in a burgeoning social movement. They may not have heard of New Ruralism per se, but they are among its foot soldiers.

The day we ate lunch together -- miso, rice, and a tasty mélange of kale, red mustard, garlic, leeks, red pepper, and tofu -- I pressed the five interns on whether places such as Full Belly were at the leading edge of a mass cultural stirring, or whether this kind of farming would remain relegated to a small niche.

The most optimistic of the bunch was Erin Bullock, 26. She was raised in Rochester, N.Y., and after college became a landscape architect in San Francisco. But she didn’t like "divining things for the land" from a downtown office building. "I wanted to get my hands dirty," she says. So she went to Florida to work in organic farming, later moved back to the Bay Area to become an urban gardener, and recently joined Full Belly to learn more about agriculture.

Bullock is convinced that "we’re on the brink of something that’s going to take off” and reach well beyond a narrow subculture. She sees "clues," she says, not just among her friends in the Haight-Ashbury with their community gardens and their chickens in the city. Even her parents -- "conservative Republicans" -- are paying more attention to environmental concerns and have started buying organic food.

Up Highway 16, at Capay Fruits & Vegetables, Thaddeus Barsotti is intent on turning many more people on to this way of thinking -- and eating.

Just 26, he and his siblings inherited this 240-acre farm from their mother, Kathleen, who died in 2000 after a long struggle with breast cancer. She was a pioneer in organic farming -- more commonly called "alternative agriculture" when she began to experiment with it in the mid-1970s. She and her first husband, whom she later divorced, helped establish the farmers’ market in Davis, and she started a CSA here in 1992.

Today, Thaddeus oversees the growing. An older brother handles the marketing. And a younger one runs two tony retail outlets at the Ferry Building along San Francisco’s Embarcadero -- a vital nexus between city and farm -- where $9.50 will get you an organic Cobb salad.

Like those at Full Belly, the Barsottis are keenly aware of how to peddle "pure, unadulterated nourishment," as a sign at their Farm Fresh To You store puts it. Thaddeus, too, writes a newsletter about the farm for his 3,000 CSA customers, as well as a blog. "People like to know when the peaches blossom or what the dogs are up to," he says.

The afternoon that I met him, though, he was looking way beyond this level of customer contact. In fact, what he suggested as we strolled past his asparagus crop was nothing less than a complete revamping of the food distribution system in America.

Barsotti envisions selling an incredible selection of organic food from all over the western U.S. on the Internet -- sort of like an Amazon.com for produce. "I can do what grocery stores are doing a heck of a lot cheaper," he says, glancing over his fields from under a Harley- Davidson cap. Already, he has tweaked his CSA so that it has some characteristics of an online supermarket. The boxes ready to go out when I was there included not only five kinds of crops grown at Capay Fruits & Vegetables but also apples from Washington state and grapefruit from San Diego.

Ultimately, Barsotti says, he can foresee enlarging this strategy so that customers have a tremendous range of seasonal buying options. A computer database tracks their fruit and vegetable preferences, and a network of farms will dispatch trucks right from farms into nearby cities -- no warehousing required. A lot more money, he believes, will wind up in the pockets of growers -- small growers like him -- if he can remove the wholesalers from the equation.

If it sounds quixotic, Barsotti doesn’t care. He’s in no rush. "What we’re talking about will take another 30 years," he figures. He’s got the time. And, besides, movements like this take a while to gel, to reach a tipping point. Thirty years ago -- long before the Prius hit the road and An Inconvenient Truth hit the theaters -- who would have guessed that being green would become so mainstream? Why, then, not Barsotti’s vision? Why not New Ruralism?

For the movement to flourish, it’s going to require more than the diligence of experienced farmers such as Redmond and even more than the dreams of an ambitious young man like Barsotti. It will take public policies that nudge things in the right direction.

Searching for some, I tacked toward the coast, 100 miles from Fully Belly Farm, and made my way to a bucolic stretch of Sonoma County called Two Rock Valley. There I met Bob Camozzi.

When I first shook hands with him, Camozzi seemed to have little in common with his Capay Valley counterparts. He didn’t come to farming in the ‘70s or ‘80s as a social cause. His family has been in the dairy business for four generations. At 42, he’s refreshingly old-fashioned, chatting about going to church on Sundays and how he expects his five kids to acquire "a love for their parents and a love for the land," the same way he and his brother and sisters did.

But like Judith Redmond and Thaddeus Barsotti, Camozzi is committed to organic food and to understanding how his dairy fits into a larger rural-urban context. He has gotten to this stage thanks in large measure to a program that’s intended to keep land like his in farming forever.

It is funded by a countywide quarter-cent sales tax, first authorized in 1990 and now yielding $15 million to $20 million a year. The Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District uses the money to buy up property (including 17 acres leased to Tierra Vegetables at a discounted rate) and to create conservation that restricts the type of development allowed on the land. In other words, every time somebody buys a latte or a LoJack in Santa Rosa, it helps keep agriculture alive at the city’s fringe.

The arrangement grew out of a plan to put green space -- buffer zones -- between cities in Sonoma County, so that one wouldn’t just bleed into the next, a la L.A. "The thought was, ‘Hey, we can turn this into edible green space,’" says Andrea Mackenzie, the district’s general manager. Today, the district also assembles greenbelts, wildlife refuges, recreational areas, and agricultural parcels, having set aside some 33,000 acres of farmland so far.

Camozzi purchased his 800-acre ranch for $3.9 million; $1.5 million came from the Open Space District. In exchange, Camozzi agreed that the land won’t be subdivided, helping to ensure that it remains a working farm. The previous owner had contemplated opening the way for high-end housing. The deal gave Camozzi the cash necessary to convert into an all-organic outfit in December 2002. By doing so, he says, he has been able to defy the trend in which most dairies have become supersized and highly industrial -- or gone bust. "Before I got into organic, I thought, ‘They’re a bunch of nuts. All they want to do is come in and regulate me," he recalls. "But now I believe."

Camozzi pays about $350 a ton for organic grains to feed his 400 milk cows and their 440 offspring, as opposed to $200 for conventional fodder. To make the finances work, he then sends his herd out to graze a lot more than they used to. Because they’re not just "lying down and making milk," he says, his cows don’t produce quite to the extent that they once did. But he thinks their output is more nutritious and his animals are in better shape. And people are willing to shell out for it: $6.29 for a gallon of organic whole milk compared with as little as $2.50 for regular milk.

The bottom line: it’s all penciling out for Camozzi. But it’s also penciling out for the public.

Area residents "want their food to be produced here," he says. And because his cows spend more time in the pasture, not as much feed is being trucked in, leaving the roads less clogged and saving energy.

Last November, Sonoma County residents voted to extend the sales tax, which had been set to expire in 2011, an additional 20 years. The proposition passed easily, with more than 75 percent of the vote. "I like to think that it’s part of a larger consciousness-shifting, from a little environmental niche to something broader," says Kathleen Marsh, the Open Space District’s interim stewardship manager. "It speaks to people waking up."

It isn’t just land that’s being preserved in Sonoma County, either. At another dairy on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, the Beretta family has tapped into a regional government program that takes wastewater from homes and businesses, treats it with filters and ultraviolet light, and then redistributes it through 500 miles of underground pipes. Some of the recycled water winds up being sprinkled on parkland and school ball fields. But most of it is sluiced on agricultural land -- about 6,000 acres of hay, vegetables, wine grapes, and other crops. The price to the farmer: zero.

"It’s been helpful to keep us in business," says Doug Beretta, who runs the dairy with his father and his wife, Sharon. Back in the 1960s, it became so expensive for the Berettas to pump water from their wells that they let their fields lie fallow. But since signing on with the city’s water reuse program in 1981, they’ve been able to keep their pastures irrigated and their 600 cows well fed on homegrown silage. In turn, that has helped them, like Bob Camozzi, go organic as a means of survival.

"I think that market is going to work," says Beretta, citing a recent deal to supply an organic yogurt company. "The cash flow is there."

Just how big a business it will become is unclear, though Beretta is pretty certain that it has its limits. "I don’t see the people who shop at Wal-Mart as the kind who are going to buy organic," he says over a chorus of mooing cows. But who knows? Much to the consternation of its many critics, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is now preaching sustainability, and the corporate behemoth stands as the world’s biggest seller of organic milk.

A hundred miles down the interstate, there was one more stop to make on my New Ruralism road trip: a 290-acre lot in San Jose.

If all goes according to plan, this property will in the next five years become a showcase for what Berkeley’s Sibella Kraus is advocating -- an agricultural park smack in the middle of California’s third-biggest city.

Walter Cottle Lester, whose family has farmed this land since 1864, has been bent on this idea for decades, and, if nothing else, he’s a man of conviction. All around him, thousands of houses have sprouted up over the years. A shopping strip now sits just across Branham Lane to the north. But the octogenarian has never given up his farm.

"He’s the last holdout," says Mark Frederick, planning and real estate division manager for the Santa Clara County Parks & Recreation Department. "He could have sold for a lot of money -- and I mean a lot."

Lester’s land still grows tomatoes, melons, peppers, corn, and other row crops, and includes a small fruit orchard -- cherries, apricots, and plums. "Up until a few years ago, you’d see him out there on his tractor," says Marilyn Rodgers, president of the local homeowners’ association.

But Lester’s goal has always been much grander than keeping his own farm chugging along. He wants a park where kids can congregate, play, and learn about agriculture. So he made a gift to the county of about 153 acres and sold the state the remaining 137 or so acres for a relative pittance -- $5 million.

Lester "thinks that today’s children don’t have an understanding of where our food comes from," Frederick says.

Actually, they do. Just across from the Lester property, where scores of white egrets were frolicking in the empty fields, I watched a girl cruising on a skateboard past a Subway, a High Five Pizza, and a McDonald’s. Before long, though, families around here will have another choice.

Preliminary plans for Martial Cottle Park (named for Lester’s grandfather) are just being hatched, but this much can be counted on: Organic food will be grown, and neighborhood residents and others in San Jose will be able to enjoy what comes off the land, possibly through an on-site farmers’ market.

For Lester, it’s a way to make sure that the county’s agricultural heritage isn’t lost.

But for others, this project is about looking forward, not just backward. Among those advising the county are Kraus and several organic farmers, including Paul Muller, one of Judith Redmond’s partners at Full Belly. "You’re pulling something right into the city," says Jacob Tobias, a landscape architect at Wallace Roberts & Todd, a design firm working on the park. "It seems to be right on the cutting edge."

The Power of Less

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:48:00 -0500

Early one November evening, 1973: Gasoline supplies have been cut by the month-old Arab Oil Embargo and people wait in long lines to buy gas. Inside Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, particle physicist Art Rosenfeld’s office is lit by 12 dazzling 60-watt fluorescent lights, which allows him to make a startling calculation. The light bulbs in his office are burning the equivalent of .05 gallons of oil per hour, and if he leaves them on all weekend, as nearly everyone does, his empty office will have burned the equivalent of four gallons of gasoline by the time he returns on Monday morning. "So this was the funny thing," he says, "There are 20 lights filling the rooms between my office and the door of the building, and I figure it’ll save 60 gallons of oil if I switch them off." But he can’t -- bookshelves and posters hide the switches. Forty-five minutes later, having rearranged the furniture and turned out the lights, he exits the building thinking "there’s something wrong."

Rosenfeld has spent the past 33 years trying to fix what’s wrong with the way we use energy, becoming, in the process, the invisible finger on light switches all over California and even the world. Considered "the father of energy efficiency," Rosenfeld left physics to lay the intellectual underpinnings of the new field at the Center for Building Science, which he founded at LBNL. The tools, technologies, and policies produced at the lab spread into the state of California, so that residents here now use 30 percent less electricity per capita than the rest of the country. When Rosenfeld received the Fermi Prize for lifetime achievement in physics last year, the EPA credited all the efficiency initiatives adopted between 1973 and 2005 -- the "Rosenfeld Efficiency Factor" -- with saving an amount of electricity equivalent to 21 percent of U.S. consumption last year, or $228 billion. "I got seduced by success," says Rosenfeld, now a commissioner at the California Energy Commission. "In the beginning, I had the romantic notion that I’d go back to physics, but with each new technology we were saving another $5 billion annually!"

Along the way, Rosenfeld and the people he’s trained have remodeled much of what we think of as home. He’s changed the windows to conserve energy, made the roofs reflective, and stuffed the walls with insulation. Researchers at LBNL did work that paved the way for the invention of the compact fluorescent light bulb, and efficient air conditioners, furnaces, water heaters, and, of course, refrigerators.

When Rosenfeld first looked at a fridge in 1973, he saw oil reserves hidden in the crisper drawer. Figuring out how to save energy on the refrigerator -- which used a whopping 1,800 kilowatts of electricity a year then -- was as good as finding an oil well in your kitchen. Better, actually.

The fridge of 1973 was an energy hog -- with thin walls and doors that didn’t stay shut. Its hot, inefficient motor worked only because it was submerged in refrigerant. Heat exchangers skimped on copper. Grad student David Goldstein, who’s now at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the recipient of a MacArthur Award, went to appliance stores and found that there was no difference in price between an efficient fridge and an inefficient one. "We’d grown up in a world where energy was dirt cheap, and what’s cheap gets treated like dirt," observes Rosenfeld.

Rosenfeld approached then-Governor Jerry Brown and told him that if California instituted standards allowing only the most efficient refrigerators to be sold in the state, we could save the electrical equivalent of a nuclear power plant. Brown, who wanted to ban nukes, agreed, and California instituted the first standards in 1974. During the 1980s, the U.S. took California’s lead and adopted standards -- with the result that today’s refrigerator uses just a quarter of the electricity it did in 1973. Chances are it’s also bigger and much cheaper. All in all, the newer models are saving the U.S. $17 billion in electricity a year. In China, they’ll save half the electricity generated by the Three Gorges Dam.

Energy efficiency has proliferated since that November evening as hundreds of grad students and scientists have gone from LBNL to elsewhere -- Washington, Beijing, Moscow -- carrying ideas with them. Still, the U.S. is far less efficient than Europe or Japan, so there is more "oil" remaining in our walls. "People worry that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked," says Jim McMahon, head of LBNL’s Energy Analysis Department. "But efficiency is a moving target. You pick the fruit this year and there’s more the next."

Changing the world a billion light bulbs at a time is an idea whose simplicity belies its power. Conventional wisdom says that as the Third World gets richer and uses more energy, all of us will simmer in greenhouse gases. But calculations by Rosenfeld and Berkeley graduate John Wilson of the California Energy Commission suggest another future entirely. If the world maintains a 3 percent yearly improvement in efficiency through the year 2100, all 10 billion of our grandchildren will be able to live at a European standard of living using just half the total quantity of energy we use now, and emitting half the greenhouse gases.

Today Rosenfeld has already moved on to the next challenge. He points to a sparkling metallic contraption (an ultraviolet water purifier) in the foyer of his house, explaining that it can purify 10 tons of water a day, enough so that a large village can avoid boiling water with scarce wood, avoiding about seven tons of CO2 per day with every single device. He’s recently started a fund to spur the adoption of this and other technologies around the world, using money from his Fermi Prize. He pulls out a photo of three African teachers struggling to grade papers by the light of a single kerosene lantern: "Replace a billion kerosene lanterns with LED lights and you’ll save more than 1.3 million barrels of oil a day," he says. "It’s like taking every SUV in America and turning it into a Camry."