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Speaking of vampires in need of slaying, the AP reports:

A force as insidious as Dracula is quietly sucking a nickel of every dollar’s worth of the electricity that seeps from your home’s outlets.

Insert the little fangs of your cell phone charger in the outlet and leave it there, phone attached: That’s vampire electronics.

Allow your computer to hide in the cloak of darkness known as “standby mode” rather than shutting it off: That’s vampire electronics.

The latest estimates show 5 percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power, a phenomenon energy efficiency experts find all the more terrifying as energy prices rise and the planet warms. That amounts to about $4 billion a year.

The percentage could rise to 20 percent by 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Everything you could possibly want to know about standby power is here.

Eleven years ago, I wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly with various predictions and warnings on oil and energy technology and climate. Since those subjects remain hot today — concern over oil prices and peak oil is at a three-decade-high and Shellenberger and Nordhaus have reignited the technology debate with a variety of historically inaccurate claims about the clean energy R&D message — and since this is probably the best thing I wrote in the 1990s, I am going to reprint it here. It is a long piece so I will divide it up into several posts.

“MidEast Oil Forever?” (subs. req’d), coauthored by then deputy energy secretary Charles Curtis, became the cover story for the April 1996 issue (click on picture to enlarge — yes that is a lightbulb, the sun, and a windmill about to go over the edge of a sea of oil).

The back story is that the Gingrich Congress had come in with its passionate hatred of all applied energy research, and the Clinton Administration was desperately trying to save the entire clean energy budget from being zeroed out. I wrote most of the piece in the summer of 1995 and revised it in January 1996. The title was a warning that the U.S. would be stuck with its dependence on MidEast Oil if that happened. Hence the subhead for the article:

Congressional budget-cutters threaten to end America’s leadership in new energy technologies that could generate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, reduce damage to the environment, and limit our costly, dangerous dependency on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region.

[Note: The original online article had active links, and I have kept those that still work. In the interests of space, I will not indent the whole article, as I normally do for extended quotations.]

Imagine a world in which the Persian Gulf controlled two thirds of the world’s oil for export, with $200 billion a year in oil revenues streaming into that unstable and politically troubled region, and America was importing nearly 60 percent of its oil, resulting in a $100-billion-a-year outflow that undermined efforts to reduce our trade deficit. That’s a scenario out of the 1970s which can never happen again, right? No, that’s the “reference case” projection for ten years from now from the federal Energy Information Administration.

Imagine another world in which fossil-fuel use had begun a slow, steady decline; more than a third of the market for new electricity generation was supplied from renewable sources; the renewables industry had annual sales of $150 billion; and the fastest-growing new source of power was solar energy. An environmentalist’s fantasy, right? No, that’s one of two planning scenarios for three to four decades from now, developed by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the world’s most profitable oil company, which is widely viewed as a bench mark for strategic planning.

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No, I don’t mean cost, safety, waste, or proliferation — though those are all serious problems. I mean the Achilles heel of nuclear power in the context of climate change: water.

Climate change means water shortages in many places and hotter water everywhere. Both are big problems for nukes.

… nuclear power is the most water-hungry of all energy sources, with a single reactor consuming 35-65 million litres of water each day.

The Australians, stuck in a once-in-a-1000-years drought, understandably worry about this a lot:

Operating a 2,400 Watt fan heater for one hour consumes 0.01 litres of water if wind is the energy source, 0.26 litres if solar is the energy source, 4.5 litres if coal is the energy source, or 5.5 litres if nuclear power is the energy source.

Hotter water is another serious worry:

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Climate Progress is happy to introduce Auden Schendler as a guest blogger. Auden is Executive Director for Community and Environmental Responsibility at Aspen Skiing Company. Named a “Climate Crusader” in TIME magazine’s 2006 special issue on climate change, Auden once worked for Amory Lovins at Rocky Mountain Institute (as I did). You can read his full bio here. Auden has unique insight into the difficulties of corporate sustainability in the absence of government leadership and a price for carbon. Welcome, Auden!

Recently, Businessweek covered Aspen Skiing Company’s work on emissions reduction as part of an article titled “Little Green Lies.” The article has received considerable coverage in the blogosphere because it addresses the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to business claims on the environment.

Joe asked me if I’d like to clarify that story, and I jumped at the opportunity.

My main point, which probably didn’t get across in the article, is that even at a remarkably progressive company like Aspen Skiing Company, which has strong support from ownership, management, and staff, cutting CO2 emissions is very difficult. Imagine how hard it must be in most standard businesses that don’t have this level of buy-in! This statement may seem obvious, but it cuts against conventional wisdom. Most entities involved in emissions reduction have a stake in saying it’s profitable, relatively easy, and sometimes fun. The NGO community makes its living on this perspective. The government needs its own programs to look good. And corporations have a stake in their perceived success as well.

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The legendary Internet technologist Bill Joy has found a better place than the Internet to put his venture capital dollars: green technology.

Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, joined the famed venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 2005 (more proof, if needed, that the rich get richer). In a recent talk, Joy said:

“Eugene Kleiner, the co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, said there is a time when panic is the appropriate response. And I think we should go into a panic–not only (because) the scale of the problem but also the economic opportunity that becoming more efficient in our use of energy gives to us.”

What does this technology guru — and sometimes techno-dystopian — think is hot in clean tech?

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