Lots of (obscure) ink: Meet the Rosenfeld, a unit named while its eponym still lives
Tuesday night I drove to UC Davis for a dinner celebrating the career of Lawrence Berkeley Lab physicist and one-man army Arthur H. Rosenfeld – a pint-sized man at that – who almost single handedly sweet-talked and bludgeoned California lawmakers and regulators into demanding serious energy-saving measures from the state’s residents and industries. His influence is international. The immediate reason for the gala is that he is stepping down from the state’s energy commission. He’s the main reason that California, through governors of all stripes going back well over thirty years, and despite lacking a coherent, consistent energy policy, uses far less electricity and saves billions of dollars annually in utility bills compared to the national norm. You got an Energy Star fridge or electric oven? That started here. And if your town or state one day puts pressure on you to put a white roof on your house or biz, Art Rosenfeld is a big reason why.
The Grist below and these stories have more details. It was a big party and symposium recounting the past and potential of non-sexy conservation as still the lowest hanging and biggest fruit for the harvest of ways to promptly reduce carbon emissions and the direct costs of energy, mostly electricity.
The news peg is that scores of friends and admirers of his from two dozen institutions slipped into a refereed journal, Environmental Research Letters, a proposed new physical unit, the Rosenfeld. It is to be applied to measures that avoid energy demand through conservation and efficiency (one hopes while leaving the general economy and production of other needed stuff perking along). It’s taken as the equivalent in CO2-relief of taking one 500 megawatt coal-fired plant off line or avoiding a new one. This comes to about 3 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.
He even got a handsome Lucite desk trophy with a chunk of coal inside it, safely sequestered and equivalent, somebody calculated, to one pico-Rosenfeld (ie, one trillionth or 10-12 R ). References were made to other units – Watt, Ohm, Volt, Curie, Tesla, etc. Art said he had mixed feelings about the notion he’d joined the club. Maybe it’s that, usually, a physical unit gets a person’s name after he or she is gone. He’s pretty old guy but definitely neither dead nor done.
The pretext for doing this somewhat self-indulgent post on a man who has also been a friendly source for reporters is that a few specialty pico-outlets and blogs did write up the news of this unit:
Stories:
- PhysicsWorld/Environmental Research Web – Michael Banks: Measuring Energy Savings ; Read this for word of other new, specialized units.
- Salon (blog) -Andrew Leonard : The energy efficiency guru gets his 15 minutes ; He got more than 15 ;
- Greenbang (blog) : How to cut energy use, carbon? One Rosenfeld at a time.
- PhysicsCentral (blog) Alaina G. Levine: New unit of energy from a ‘godfather” ;
- Berkeleyside (blog) Lance Knobel: Welcome the Rosenfeld ;
Grist for the Mill:
CA Energy Commission Press Release ; UC Davis Press Release ; UC Berkeley Press Release ; Rosenfeld Symposium Program ;
