The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010

by Tim Folger

  Czinger, who by now was heading up a sister company called Coda Automotive, added components from America and Germany and a chassis licensed from Japan. If all goes as planned, the Coda will become the first mass-produced all-electric sedan for sale in the United States next fall, with a price tag, after government rebates, of about $32,000. The Coda looks normal to the point of banal, a Toyotaish family car indistinguishable from anything you would find in a suburban cul-de-sac. And that's the point; its tagline, "A model for the mainstream," is a jab at more eccentric and expensive alternatives.

  The race to make the first successful electric car may hinge on what engineers call "the pack"—the intricate bundle of batteries that is the most temperamental equipment on board. If the pack is too big, the car will be too pricey; if the pack is too small or of poor design, it will drive like a golf cart. "Batteries are a lot like people," Phil Gow, Coda's chief battery engineer, told me when I visited the Tianjin factory, a ninety-minute drive from Beijing. "They want to have a certain temperature range. They're finicky." To explain, Gow, a Canadian, who is bald and has a goatee, led me to one of Lishen's production lines, similar to the car-battery line that will be fully operational next year. Workers in blue uniforms and blue hairnets were moving in swift precision around long temperature-controlled assembly lines, sealed off from dust and contamination by glass walls.

  The workers were making laptop batteries—pinkie-size cylinders, to be lined up and encased in the familiar plastic brick. The system is similar for batteries tiny enough for an iPod or big enough for a car. Conveyor belts carried long, wafer-thin strips of metal into printing press-like rollers, which coated them with electrode-active material. Another machine sandwiched the strips between razor-thin layers of plastic and wound the whole stack together into a tight "jelly roll," a cylinder that looked, for the first time, like a battery. (Square cell-phone batteries are just jelly rolls squashed.)

  A slogan on the wall declared VARIATION IS THE BIGGEST ENEMY OF QUALITY. Gow nodded at it gravely. A bundle of batteries is only as good as its weakest cell; if a coating is five-millionths of a meter too thin or too thick, a car could be a lemon. The new plant will have up to 3,000 workers on ten-hour shifts, twenty hours a day. "When you get down to it, you can have ten people working in China for the cost of one person in the U.S.," Mark Atkeson, the head of Coda's China operations, said.

  It was easy to see China's edge in the operation. Upstairs, Gow and Atkeson showed me America's edge: their prototype of the pack. For two years, Coda's engineers in California and their collaborators around the world have worked on making it as light and powerful as possible—a life of "optimizing millimeters," as Gow put it. The result was a long, shallow aluminum case, measured to fit between the axles and jam-packed with 728 rectan gular cells, topped with a fiberglass case. It carried its own air conditioning system to prevent batteries from getting too cold or too hot. Rattling off arcane points, Gow caught himself. "There's hundreds of things that go into it, so there's hundreds of details," he said. "It's really a great field for people with OCD."

  Czinger, in that sense, had found his niche. By November he was crisscrossing the Pacific, leading design teams on both sides; in the months since we first met, he had grown only more evangelical in his belief that if Americans would stop feeling threatened by China's progress on clean technology, they might glimpse their own strengths. Only his American engineers, he said, had the garage-innovation culture to spend "eighteen hours a day for two years to develop a new technology." But only in China had he discovered "the will to spend on infrastructure, and to do it at high speed." The result, he said, was a "state-of-the-art battery facility that was, two years ago, an empty field!"

  America has a tradition of overestimating its rivals, and China is a convenient choice these days. But, as with Japan's a generation ago, China's rapid advances in science and technology obscure some deeper limitations. In 2004 a group of U.S.-based Chinese scientists accused the 863 Program of cronyism, of funneling money into pet projects and unworthy labs. (A proverb popular among scientists goes, "Pavilions near the water receive the most moonlight.") When critics published their complaints in a Chinese-language supplement to the journal Nature, the government banned it. Less than two years later, Chen Jin, a star researcher at Shanghai Jiaotong University, who had received more than $10 million in grants to produce a Chinese microchip to rival Intel's, was discovered to have faked his results. It confirmed what many Chinese scientists said among themselves: the Chinese science system was riddled with plagiarism, falsified data, and conflicts of interest.

  After the Chen Jin scandal, the 863 Program made changes. It began publishing tenders on the web to invite broader participation, and to cut down on conflicts of interest, it started assigning evaluators randomly. But those measures couldn't solve a larger problem: the system that allowed China to master the production of wind turbines and batteries does not necessarily equip China to invent the energy technology that nobody has yet imagined. "Add as many mail coaches as you please, you will never get a railroad," the economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote. Scale is not a substitute for radical invention, and the Chinese bureaucracy chronically discourages risk. In 1999 the government launched a small-business innovation fund, for instance, but its bureaucratic DNA tells it to place only safe bets. "They are concerned that, given that it's a public fund, if their failure rate is very high the review will not be very good and the public will say, 'Hey, you're wasting money,'" Xue Lan, the dean of the school of public policy at Tsinghua University, told me. "But a venture capitalist would say, 'It is natural that you'll have a lot of failures.'" Financing is not the only barrier to innovation. As an editorial last year in Nature put it, "An even deeper question is whether a truly vibrant scientific culture is possible without a more widespread societal commitment to free expression."

  The Obama administration is busy repairing the energy legacy of its predecessor. The stimulus package passed in February put more than $38 billion into the Department of Energy for renewable-energy projects—including $400 million for ARPA-E, the agency that Bush opposed. (It also allocated $1 billion toward reviving FutureGen, though a final decision is pending.)

  In announcing the opening of ARPA-E in April 2009, Obama vowed to return America's investment in research and development to a level not seen since the space race. "The nation that leads the world in twenty-first-century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the twenty-first-century global economy," he said. "I believe America can and must be that nation."

  An uninspiring version of that message is gaining currency in Congress; it frames American leadership as manifesting not so much the courage to seize the initiative as the determination to prevent others from doing so. Senator Charles Schumer, one of several lawmakers who have begun to cast China's role in environmental technology as a threat to American jobs, has warned the Obama administration not to provide stimulus funds to a wind farm in Texas because many of the turbines would be made in China. ("We should not be giving China a head start in this race at our own country's expense," Schumer said in a statement.) Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham, in an op-ed in the Times, vowed not to "surrender our marketplace to countries that do not accept environmental standards" and suggested a "border tax" on clean-energy technology.

  The larger fact, however, is that no single nation is likely to dominate the clean-energy economy. Goldwind, Coda, and the Thermal Power Research Institute are hybrids of Western design and Chinese production, and no nation has yet mastered both the invention and the low-cost manufacturing of clean technology. It appears increasingly clear that winners in the new-energy economy will exploit the strengths of each side. President Obama seems inclined toward this view. When he visited Beijing in November, he and Hu Jintao cut several deals to share energy technology and know-how, which will accelerate progress in both countries. This was hardly a matter of handing technology to China; under one of the deals, for instance, the Missouri-based compan
y Peabody Energy purchased a stake in GreenGen so that it can obtain data from, and lend expertise to, a cutting-edge Chinese power plant.

  More important, the two presidents reignited hopes that climate negotiations in Copenhagen, which had been heading for failure, might reach a meaningful compromise. Days after the Beijing summit, China and the United States provided specific targets for controlling emissions. Their pledges were far from bold and left both sides open to criticism: China's emissions, after all, will continue to grow over time, and cuts pledged by the United States still fall far short of what scientists say is required to avert the worst effects of warming. Yet the commitments, for all their weakness, serve a crucial function: they prevent each side from using the other as a foil to justify inaction.

  For the United States and China, the climate talks boil down to how much money the rich world will give poorer nations to help them acquire the technology to limit emissions and cope with the droughts, rising sea levels, and other effects caused by those who enjoyed two hundred years of burning cheap fossil fuels. Without sharing costs and technology, it is not at all clear, for instance, that China will invest in the holy grail of climate science: funneling greenhouse gases underground. The process, known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is so difficult and expensive that nobody has yet succeeded in using it on a large scale. Like electric cars and coal gasification, CCS would be cheaper to develop in China than in the United States, but China is not interested in paying for it alone. As long as a Chinese citizen earns less than one-seventh what his counterpart in America earns, China is unlikely to back down on the demand that it should be paid to slow down its economy and invest even more in energy technology. And on that point the sides remain far apart.

  In November I was spending much of my time at Tsinghua University, a center of clean-tech research, seeing a string of new energy projects that might or might not succeed someday. (My favorite, science aside, is a biofuel based on the process of producing Chinese moonshine.) In a giant, bustling convention hall across town, models in slinky evening gowns and white fur stoles arrayed themselves around mockups of wind turbines as if they were hot rods. Beijing was so overrun with visiting MacArthur geniuses and Nobel laureates and Silicon Valley eminences, all angling to influence China's climate-change policy, that I had to triage conferences.

  Traffic alone made it hard to get around. This year China overtook the United States as the world's largest car market, and much of Beijing is gridlocked every day. (Impossibly, the number of cars in the city is expected to double in seven years.) In desperation, I decided to buy an electric bicycle. China has put 100 million of them on the road in barely ten years, an unplanned phenomenon that, energy experts point out, happens to be a milestone: the world's first electric vehicle to go mass market. The 863 Program noticed, and last year it added a program to build a micro-electric car, inspired by bicycle components, for commuters. Researchers at Tsinghua did just that, by attaching four electric-bike motors to a chassis. "We call it the Hali," Ouyang Minggao, the Tsinghua professor in charge of it, told me. They took the name from the Chinese translation of "Harry Potter." The car is tiny and bulbous and is being road-tested near Shanghai.

  Hunting for an e-bike, I ended up at a string of shops near the Tsinghua campus, where each storefront offered a competing range of prices and styles to a clientele dominated by students and young families. I settled on a model called the Turtle King—a simple contraption, black and styled like a Vespa, with a 500-watt brushless motor and disc brakes. Built of plastic to save weight, it was more akin to a scooter than to a bicycle, and it ran on a pair of lead-acid batteries, similar to those under the hood of a car. The salesman said that the bike would run for twenty to thirty miles, depending on how fast I went, before I would need to plug its cord into the wall for eight hours or lug the batteries inside to charge. With a top speed of around twenty-five miles per hour, it would do little for the ego, but, at just over $500, it was worth a try.

  The manager rang up the sale, and I chatted with two buyers who were students at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. 'You must have tons of these in the U.S., because you're always talking about environmental consciousness," one of them, an industrial-design major wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, said. Not really, I told him; American drivers generally use bikes for exercise, not transportation. He looked baffled. Around his campus and others in Beijing, electric bikes are as routine as motorcycles are in the hill towns of Italy.

  I eased the Turtle King down over the curb and accelerated to full speed, such as it was. I threaded through an intersection clotted with honking traffic, and the feeling, I discovered, was sublime. The Turtle King was addictive. I began riding it everywhere, showing up early for appointments, flush with efficiency and a soupçon of moral superiority. For years people had abandoned Beijing's bicycle lanes in favor of cars, but now the bike lanes were alive again, in an unruly showcase of innovation. Young riders souped up their bikes into status symbols, pulsing with flashing lights and subwoofers; construction workers drove them like mules, laden down to the axles with sledgehammers and drills and propane tanks; parents with kids' seats on the back drifted through rush-hour traffic and reached school on time. Before long I was coveting an upgrade to a lithium-ion battery, which is lighter and runs longer. (Lithium-ion batteries have sparked interest in electric bikes in the West. They are a high-minded new accessory in Paris, and more than a few have even turned up in America.)

  As a machine, the Turtle King was in desperate need of improvement. The chintzy horn broke the first day. The battery never went as far as advertised, and it was so heavy that I narrowly missed breaking some toes as it crashed to the ground on the way into the living room. Soon the sharp winter wind in Beijing was testing my commitment to transportation al fresco. And yet, for all its imperfections, the Turtle King was so much more practical than sitting in a stopped taxi or crowding onto a Beijing bus that it had become what all new-energy technology is somehow supposed to be: cheap, simple, and unobtrusive enough that using it is no longer a matter of sacrifice but one of self-interest.

  GEORGE BLACK India, Enlightened

  FROM OnEarth

  AT SEVEN O'CLOCK on a late February morning the scene is much as you'd imagine it, much as you've seen it, perhaps, in a score of earnest documentaries or in the highlight reels at this year's Oscars. In the slums of Delhi, a man pedals a bicycle laden with milk cans along a narrow, dusty lane swarming with people. A family of five squeezes into the back of a green-and-yellow autorickshaw meant for three. Somnolent cows lie in a field of garbage beside the railroad tracks, where an endless line of rusted coal cars rolls past, off to fuel some factory or power plant south of the city. Half-naked children squat among the discarded plastic bags and food wrappers to do their morning business. No one really knows how many people live here in the hutments of Okhla; 80,000 perhaps. And not a slumdog millionaire in sight.

  Up on the footbridge that crosses the tracks, an old man in a filthy dhoti and turban shuffles past a torn notice advertising jobs for "marketing and tele-calling executives." The ad is a dispatch from another India, the new India, which lies, both literally and figuratively, on the other side of the tracks. You can't see it now, but it's out there somewhere in the smog, which is backlit to an opaque yellow-brown by the rising sun. As the day progresses and some of the haze burns off, shapes will start to emerge: the forest of cranes, the towers of blue steel and reflective glass, the billboards with words like Vodafone and Airtel and Intelenet, the Center Stage Mall and the Spice World Mall, and the call centers of the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA). It's Chinese workers who fill the shelves at Walmart with Christmas tree ornaments and socket wrench sets, but it's Indian workers in places like this who answer those phone queries about your credit card bill or your airline reservation, each call helping to build India's $11-billion-a-year outsourcing industry.

  In this new India, faucets run all day. Lights burn all n
ight. Shiny new cars zip into the center of Delhi on the DND Flyway. Water, energy, mobility: three defining elements of the escape from poverty. Such modest goals, but for most Indians still so painfully hard to achieve.

  Looking out at NOIDA, at the towers and the smog, I wondered whether India could have it both ways. Could more than a billion people have the prosperity without the environmental havoc, in a country that is already struggling with the impact of a changing climate? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had seemed to suggest as much in a speech launching India's National Action Plan on Climate Change in June 2008. Rapid economic growth was nonnegotiable, Singh said, if people were "to discard the ignominy of widespread poverty." At the same time, he promised that India would follow "a path of ecologically sustainable development." In seeking to reconcile these two goals, he pointed to the country's "civilizational legacy, which treats Nature as a source of nurture and not as a dark force to be conquered and harnessed to human endeavour."

  What did that have to do with NOIDA? Perhaps one hint lay in a passage from Aravind Adiga's best-selling novel, The White Tiger, which won the Man Booker Prize four months after Singh's speech. The sardonic antihero writes to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao: "Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them."