ALTERNATIVE FUELS: Green Crude

A one year-old company in San Diego, Sapphire Energy, uses algae, sunlight, carbon dioxide, and non-potable water to make "green crude" that it contends is chemically equivalent to the light, sweet crude oil.

Chief Executive Jason Pyle said that the company's green crude could be processed in existing oil refineries and that the resulting fuels could power existing cars and trucks. It has the potential to be the great 'silver bullet' that creates the environmental paradigm shift that many people claim will be required to combat global warming.

Sapphire Energy expects to introduce its first fuels in three years and reach full commercial scale in five years.

While each acre of corn produces around 300 gallons of ethanol per year and an acre of soybeans around 60 gallons of biodiesel, EACH ACRE OF ALGAE THEORETICALLY CAN PRODUCE 5,000 GALLONS OF BIOFUEL EACH YEAR!

The company's Chief Executive wouldn't cite the price tag for producing a barrel of green crude, but he described the expected cost as competitive with extracting oil from deep-water deposits and oil sands. In other words, it won't be cheap - but they expect it to be clean in the refining process and cleaner from the tailpipe. Independent studies on the content of its emissions are ongoing.

There are plenty of companies working toward producing oil from algae. The idea isn't new, but interest and research have grown so significantly that websites such as Oilgae.com are devoted to the topic.

City dwellers produce less carbon, report suggests

While cities are hot spots for global warming, people living in them turn out to be greener than their country cousins.

Each resident of the largest 100 largest metropolitans areas is responsible on average for 2.47 tons of carbon dioxide in energy consumption each year, 14 percent below the 2.87 ton U.S. average, researchers at the Brookings Institution say in a report being released Thursday.

Those 100 cities still account for 56 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide pollution. But their greater use of mass transit and population density reduce the per person average. "It was a surprise the extent to which emissions per capita are lower," Marilyn Brown, a professor of energy policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of the report, said in an interview.

Metropolitan area emissions of carbon dioxide are highest in the eastern U.S., where people rely heavily on coal for electricity, the researchers found. They are lower in the West, where weather is more favorable and where electricity and motor fuel prices have been higher. The study examined sources and use of residential electricity, home heating and cooling, and transportation in 2005 in the largest 100 metropolitan areas where two-thirds of the people in the U.S. live. It attributed a wide disparity among the 100 cities to population density, availability of mass transit and weather.

Lexington, Kentucky, had the biggest per capita carbon footprint: Each resident on average accounted for 3.81 tons of carbon dioxide in their energy usage. At the other end of the scale was Honolulu, at 1.5 tons per person.

Click here to read the full CNN article.

Well-Oiled Machine?

The June issue of Time magazine is out and in it an article featuring the petroleum bonanza in Canada's tar sands.

Time is considered to be a credible magazine and readers may deem it forward-thinking. Unfortunately the author of this article is a little too short-sighted for yours truly.

"The mega-projects across Alberta's oil sands rival some of the humankind's greatest engineering achievements, including the pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China," claims Time. "Canada may become the new Saudi Arabia, the last great oil kingdom, right on the U.S. border."

And as for the "chunk of boreal real estate" (did they really print that?!)? The National Resource Defense Council states the following about Canada's boreal forests -- "Like the Amazon, the boreal forest is of critical importance to all living things on earth. It is home to the one of the world's largest remaining stands of spruce, fir and tamarack. The thick layers of moss, soil and peat of the boreal are the world's largest terrestrial storehouse of organic carbon and play an enormous role in regulating the Earth's climate. Boreal wetlands filter millions of gallons of water each day that fill our northern rivers, lakes, and streams. "

A slight disconnect? ......I think so.

Carbon Emissions Increase Again....

The U.S. Energy Information Administration just released preliminary data showing that carbon dioxide emissions from energy sources in the United States grew by 1.6 percent in 2007—the single largest year-over-year increase since Bush took office. This one-year increase of 96 million metric tons is like adding 14 million cars to the road. And if we look at the increase in carbon dioxide pollution from energy sources during the entire Bush administration, that sum rises to 230 million metric tons—a nearly 10 percent increase.

The jump this year comes after a small decline last year that was driven by a mild winter and summer in 2006 that enabled Americans to use less energy for heating and cooling. With weather returning to normal last year, higher electricity use is one of the largest drivers of emissions increases in both the commercial and residential sectors.

Overall emissions from the electric power sector increased by 3 percent in 2007. Coal-fired electric plants were the number one stationary source of emissions last year, accounting for a 35.3 million metric ton carbon dioxide increase between 2006 and 2007. Some utilities have turned to natural gas to try to reduce their emissions. And the increase in natural gas emissions in 2007 slightly exceeded coal—a 35.6 million metric ton increase of carbon dioxide.
Petroleum-related carbon dioxide emissions experienced a tiny decrease in 2007, mostly due to a decrease in emissions from oil-fueled electricity. Nonetheless, petroleum still generates the most emissions of all fossil fuels, surpassing coal in 2007 by 429 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. And emissions from petroleum use have grown the most since Bush took office—4.6 percent since 2001.

Click here for the full article from the Center for American Progress.

Bottlemania - The Continued Debate Over Bottled H2O

Enough already with the constant debate about bottled water. We all know it's unnecessary and frankly buying bottled water these days is more than slightly taboo. Rightly so! Don’t get me wrong, bottled water is essential for emergency circumstances, but on a daily basis it is hardly necessary.

I recently came across and article that highlights some obvious truths….

- From a marketing perspective, you couldn't ask for a more ideal product; imagine owning a commodity that literally everybody not only wants, but actually needs, on a daily basis. You'd be sitting on a $60 billion a year industry--just like the corporations who are in the process of privatizing the world's water supply. (GULP!)

- The bottled water industry has made a fortune playing on our fears about whether the water that flows from our faucets is really safe despite the fact that tap water is held to a higher standard than bottled. With a few exceptions, the quality of our tap water's actually quite high.

I think Kerry Trueman said it best—“At a time when there's less water to go around and more people demanding it, Bottlemania makes the case that it's not in our interests to let private multinational corporations float their boats on our nation's water. That's not democracy, it's dam-ocracy, and it could damn us all if we let their unquenchable thirst for profit take precedence over our right to clean, safe, free drinking water.”

Source: The Huffington Post

Drilling for Defeat?

Nearly two decades ago, Republicans won the West by linking Democrats to environmentalists, who supposedly cared more for the spotted owl and other favored species than they did for the jobs of loggers or miners. But now, as a boom in natural-gas drilling reshapes the region, Western Democrats have found success recasting environmentalism as a defense of threatened water supplies, fishing spots and hunting grounds. As a result, the party may hold the advantage this fall in the region’s key Congressional races. The simultaneous rise of Western energy production and the Western Democrat is no coincidence.

The Rocky Mountain drilling boom has been aided by the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which was once considered a partisan political masterstroke. In providing incentives for energy development, Republicans delivered a profitable gift to an industry that directs most of its campaign contributions to G.O.P. candidates. That gift was sweetened by the Bureau of Land Management, which, under President Bush, has expanded the amount of federal land open to energy development and increased the number of drilling permits.

But the acceleration of energy exploration has split the national Republican Party from local Republicans upset by the downsides of the energy boom. “Republicans created a monster for themselves,” said Rick Ridder, a Colorado-based Democratic consultant. “They put public policy in direct conflict with their base voters.”

In Wyoming’s Upper North Platte Valley, Jeb Steward, a Republican state representative, helped lead the successful 2007 opposition to the B.L.M.’s proposed sale of 13 oil and gas parcels. “We have customs and cultures that have developed over a hundred years based on the utilization of multiple renewable resources — agriculture, tourism, wildlife, fisheries,” Steward said. “When B.L.M. proposed issuing the leases, residents were asking, ‘What does this mean to the lifestyles that we’ve all grown accustomed to?’ ”

Click here for the full NY Times article.

The Polar Bear Is Made a Protected Species

The polar bear, whose summertime Arctic hunting grounds have been greatly reduced by a warming climate, will be placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced on Wednesday.

The polar bear is being stressed by melting sea ice but scientists say the species would not vanish entirely for a century or more. But the long-delayed decision to list the bear as a threatened species may prove less of an impediment to oil and gas industries along the Alaskan coast than many environmentalists had hoped. Mr. Kempthorne also made it clear that it would be “wholly inappropriate” to use the listing as a tool to reduce greenhouse gases, as environmentalists had intended to do.

While giving the bear a few new protections — hunters may no longer import hides or other trophies from bears killed in Canada, for instance — the Interior Department added stipulations, seldom used under the act, that would allow oil and gas exploration and development to proceed in areas where the bears live, as long as the companies continue to comply with existing restrictions under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Click here to read the full NY Times article.

With low-carbon diets, consumers step to the plate; total energy used in food production.

Not every student in line at the University of Redlands cafeteria was ready for self-sacrifice to save the planet. "No hamburger patties?" asked an incredulous football player, repeating the words of the grill cook. He glowered at the posted sign: "Cows or cars? Worldwide, livestock emits 18% of greenhouse gases, more than the transportation sector! Today we're offering great-tasting vegetarian choices."

The portabello burger didn't beckon him. Nor the black-bean burger. "Just give me three chicken breasts, please," he said -- and with that, swaggered off to pile potato wedges onto his heaping plate. Although this perhaps wasn't the most accepting reaction, it resulted in the desired dietary shift as Bon Appetit Management Co. rolls out its new Low Carbon Diet in 400 cafes it runs at university and corporate campuses around the country. Chicken, it turns out, has a lower carbon footprint than beef.

Conscientious consumers who want to tread lightly are increasingly concerned about their own carbon footprints. They've changed lightbulbs. They covet a Prius more than a Porsche. Now their anxiety over global warming has shifted to the supermarket and dinner table. The global food and agriculture system produces about one-third of humanity's contribution to greenhouse gases. So questions about food are shifting from the familiar "Is this good for me?" or "Will it make me fat?" to "Is it good for the planet?"

But what's the right thing to do? It's not just paper versus plastic anymore. Is throwing out leftovers better than taking them home in a plastic container? Is refrigerated better than frozen? A French brie sandwich or chicken salad? Sensing this, the country's major food service companies are talking about energy efficiency, waste reduction and, now, how to reduce carbon emissions associated with the food they serve.

Changing the meaning of "carb" in "low-carb" has been kicking around for years. Those who preach eating local, such as the locavores, have hogged much of the attention with a focus on "food miles," the distance that food travels from farm to fork. Food science has begun to look beyond transportation, to the smorgasbord of contributors to carbon dioxide and other gases with even greater atmospheric warming potential, such as methane.

Researchers tally emissions related to each of hundreds of steps in the life cycle of various foods, from the energy-intensive process of manufacturing fertilizer for crops to the leftovers scraped from plates that end up rotting in a landfill, burping methane. As they perfect these life-cycle assessments, scientists are ready to answer the question raised by a cartoon-book character in a Roy Lichtenstein-inspired poster outside the university cafe: "Is my cheeseburger causing global warming?" It was a sparkling spring day at the Getty Center in the Brentwood hills. Instead of heading into the sunshine for their lunch break, museum staffers filed into a darkened auditorium to hear a lecture: "Play With Your Food."

The crowd appeared to be a thoughtful bunch, many of them foodies, and more receptive than a famished football player to weighing the environmental and social consequences of their food choices. Helene York took the stage with her PowerPoint slides, fulfilling the directive of Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appetit's blunt-talking chief executive: "Customers make choices for us. We need to educate them."

York, who directs the Low Carbon Diet initiative, explains that the diet is to slim down the company's greenhouse gas emissions by 25%, beginning by changing the 80 million meals it serves a year.

"That sounds like a lot," she said. Yet it's nothing compared with what can happen if Bon Appetit persuades its parent company, Compass Group, to follow suit, as it did with the switch to sustainably caught seafood. Compass Group is the largest food-service company in North America, with 8,000 accounts including sports arenas, hospitals and Chicago's public schools. Other food service companies, such as Sodexo (Marriott), are also considering menu changes.
To start, Bon Appetit has targeted those items with the biggest impact. That means reducing the amount of beef and cheese.

"Inherently, beef and lamb are worse than every other form of animal protein," York said. The reason? These ruminants incessantly belch methane gas. She points out that methane has 23 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Vegetarians think they get a free ride, she said. Yet if they nibble on a grilled cheese sandwich, they buy into the same industrialized system, which is fertilizer-intensive. Overuse of fertilizer releases nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, a gas that has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.

"Does your sushi get more frequent-flier miles than you do?" another poster flashes on the screen. It draws a laugh from the audience -- until York explains that Bon Appetit is phasing out fresh seafood brought in by air freight.

About 80% of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported, and nearly all of it takes to the skies. That means delicate slabs of fresh halibut and salmon carry a long contrail of aircraft exhaust to the table. Bon Appetit is setting up supply lines to buy Alaskan salmon fillets and other fish frozen at sea. York said top chefs swear that diners cannot tell the difference if fish is properly prepared. Bon Appetit, which long ago joined the buy-local movement, is slowly eliminating out-of-season produce flown from Chile and other Latin American countries and cutting by half its imported tropical fruit, such as bananas, pineapples and papayas.
It has also phased out imported bottled water, she said. No more San Pellegrino. No more Perrier.

"Voss water, what's that? It's water that comes in a fancy glass bottle from Norway, of all places," York said, revealing her Brooklyn accent. "Don't we have enough water here?"
York told the group that plastic packaging, despite its bad reputation, is only a minuscule part of the carbon footprint. So if it's a question of taking leftovers home in plastic containers or leaving the food to be thrown away, she said, take it home.

"The food with the highest carbon footprint is the food we don't eat," she said, explaining that 3% of America's energy use is tied up in food trucked to the dump. Although Americans are piling more food onto their plate than ever, studies show that not all of these extra calories are expanding waistlines. As much as 25% of those leftover peas and carrots and gristle ends up buried in the landfill. Deprived of oxygen, the mash of rotting food produces methane gas. Bon Appetit has begun to reverse the trend of super-sized meals. Burgers on many college campuses, for instance, have been downsized from one-third to quarter-pounders, with prices adjusted accordingly.

York, a Harvard- and Yale-educated MBA, is part carbon cop -- "I spent a lot of time beating up our suppliers" -- and part mom, reminding customers that their mother was right: You should eat more vegetables. You shouldn't waste food. She's also a food detective. She leads the company's effort to track the origins of Bon Appetit's food purchases to assess carbon emissions.
That's not always easy. She has found confounding things, such as San Joaquin Valley-grown tomatoes that get shipped to Massachusetts and back because of the peculiarities of the nation's food distribution system.

She isn't the only one who's frustrated. The Tesco supermarket chain in England wants to affix a carbon score to each item on its shelves but has been bogged down in the complexity of the task.

The U.S. Congress in 2002 took a step toward unmasking food supply lines by passing a law requiring meat and produce to carry a label revealing the country of origin. But under pressure from food suppliers and grocery chains, legislators have repeatedly postponed the law's implementation for all but seafood.

That leaves supermarket shoppers staring at well-stocked shelves from around the globe without any sure way to tell where the food is from. Bon Appetit has brought together a group of scientists to help consumers sort through the thicket with an online carbon calculator at http://www.eatlowcarbon.org/.

Later in the week, York is off to Redlands to train the Bon Appetit managers from various university campuses about today's national rollout of Low Carbon Diet day. The University of Redlands cafe is the test case. A poster invites students: "You've changed your light bulbs, now change your lunch. Find out how food choices affect climate change."

Source: LA Times

Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit

With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead.Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.

“In almost every transit system I talk to, we’re seeing very high rates of growth the last few months,” said William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association.
“It’s very clear that a significant portion of the increase in transit use is directly caused by people who are looking for alternatives to paying $3.50 a gallon for gas.”

Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges — of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year — are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited. In Denver, for example, ridership was up 8 percent in the first three months of the year compared with last year, despite a fare increase in January and a slowing economy, which usually means fewer commuters. Several routes on the system have reached capacity, particularly at rush hour, for the first time.

“We are at a tipping point,” said Clarence W. Marsella, chief executive of the Denver Regional Transportation District, referring to gasoline prices.

Click here for the full NY Times article.

FOOD: Vertical Farming!

When a region starts to run out of space for their people, they go vertical. Considering the recent concern over food supplies and prices, partially caused by increased use of food for fuel, it makes sense that someone thought of 'vertical farming'! That someone is Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University.

His class experiment's conclusion is that growing food in a 30-story building — one square New York City block — could supply a balanced diet for 50,000 people. One building could supply the same amount of food as 588 acres of land. One hundred and ten buildings could feed New York City.

The goal: Replace all traditional, horizontal farming including plowing, planting and harvesting with a vertical greenhouse that grows every crop including grains (ie., wheat, rice, barley), vegetables, fish (salt and freshwater, crustaceans), poultry and pork (not cows).

The farms would be supplied with renewable energy and the crops would be watered and fertilized with treated waste material. The carbon footprint savings would be substantial because most products would be distributed locally!

Michael Pollan, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that for every calorie of food, we burn 10 calories of oil! That means a head of lettuce that costs $1.49 a head has 75 cents of oil in it. If I don't have to transport it, store it or even wrap it in cellophane, I can sell it for half price and still make a lot of money.

According to professor Despommier, there will be a vertical farm within the next four years.

Should the U.S. Invest In Tar Sands?

A year ago, Congress agreed that the federal government shouldn't be in the business of investing money into alternative fuel projects that produce fuels more polluting than oil and gas.
The provision prevents federal agencies from buying liquid coal, or oil from tar sands and oil shale projects, like the Alberta tar sands in Canada, which has been called "the most destructive project on Earth."

The government has already invested in coal-to-liquids technology, oil shale exploration and development and other suspect fuel sources. When most people hear "alternative fuel," they think of plant-based oils or hydrogen fuel cells, not coal or oil melted out of rock.

Congress is considering a repeal of that ban, known as Section 526, and environmental groups from across North America have sent letters to members of Congress urging them not to invest in dirty fuels.

Source: The Daily Green - Click here for the full article.

Masdar Initiative: A Green Powerhouse in the Desert

MASDAR

Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company is a multi-faceted,multi-billion dollar  investment in the development and commercialization of innovative technologies in renewable,alternative,and sustainable energies and sustainable design. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is the CEO and in charge of implementing the vision. Masdar is a highly strategic initiative with four primary objectives. The first is to help drive the economic diversification of Abu Dhabi. The second is to maintain,and later expand ,Abu Dhabi's position in evolving global energy markets. The third is to position their country as a developer of technology. The fourth is to make a meaningful contribution towards human development. A message from the Chairman " A new era is now upon us, challenging us to venture beyond the achievements of the past and lay ground work for the next 50 years of progress."

I maintain it is the forward thinkers of the world that look at visions 50 to 100 years out  will do more to sustain our way of living for us and the children of the world. History, has always been a gauge to not repeat mistakes. It is time we put forward thinkers in charge of  global companies not just people who watch the next quarter results on wall street.

Budman

San Fran: A City Committed to Recycling

SAN FRANCISCO officials and residents found out a few weeks ago that they were keeping
70 % of the disposable waste out of local landfills. The mayor embraced the statistic the way other mayors embrace winning sports teams, improved test scores or declining crime rates, but the city wants more.

So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended. “Without that, we don’t think we can get to 75 percent,” the mayor said of the proposal. His aides said it stood a good chance of passing.

With the exception of Chicago, which boasted a 55% rate in 2006 — the most recent year for which national comparisons are available — Eastern and Midwestern cities lagged well behind their California counterparts. According to the most recent annual survey of the trade magazine Waste News, in 2006 New York City was at 30.6%, Milwaukee at 24%, Boston at 16% and Houston at 2.5%.

San Francisco’s system is being noticed overseas. Mr. Blumenfeld’s calendar is full of meetings with officials from Germany and China, most of whom visit Norcal’s facilities, including the food-waste composting centers.

Click here to read the full NY Times article.

E.P.A. Proposes New Limits on Lead in the Air, the First Revision in 30 Years

For the first time in 30 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a new limit for lead concentrations in the air. The agency is under court order to complete a new rule by Sept. 1, because of a lawsuit brought by environmentalists.

Air, however, is no longer the most common source of major exposure to lead, which can cause I.Q. loss, kidney damage and other serious health problems. In most places, water and lead paint are more troublesome sources.

Lead emissions in the air have dropped by more than 97% in the last three decades, because the U.S. has banned lead as an additive in gasoline. That step was taken to allow cars to have catalytic converters, which cut the ingredients of smog, and reduced lead in the air as a side benefit.

Click here for the full NY Times article.

The "Green" and "Renewables Energy" Push

With the "green" and "renewables energy" push in full steam, the conversion of landfill gas into power now even makes its way into GQ Magazine: The bioconversion of trash into renewables such as landfill gas (LFG) is an industry which has been around since the 1970s. Much of the initial work was simply performed to collect the landfill gases (mainly methane and carbon dioxide) to control odors, and then subsequently for health and regulatory compliance reasons (methane in air at >5% is explosive). But in recent years, with the realization that landfills located in and around major metropolitan areas, are a renewable power source with as much as a 50 year gas collection lifetime, the landfill gas to power business is booming. This article in GQ, describes a trip to the Puente Hills Landfill in Los Angeles. A large fraction of LA's trash goes there every day, and the operation is immense.
Project Navigator is very familiar with Puente Hills Landfill and found the article to be interesting, informative and well written.

GQ Magazine article: May 2008:
At dawn The landfill looks nothing like what most people picture when they imagine a landfill. Nothing messy, nothing gross, nothing slimy, no trash anywhere at all. It looks, perhaps disappointingly, like an enormous, lonesome construction site, a 1,365-acre expanse of light brown dirt filling canyons reaching innocently toward the horizon—buried trash from yesterday and several thousand other yesterdays. The scale of the thing alone boggles the mind, and to stop and ponder the fact that forty years of trash forms a foundation 400 feet deep is to simply grow fretful with some unnamed woe about America’s past and the planet’s future.

The first truck to arrive is no. 4272, a seventy-three-foot-long tractor-trailer, driven by Herman Snook, 67 years old, wiry, chewing a toothpick. He is quick to point out that he, too, thinks the landfill looks nothing like a landfill, and he believes it doesn’t smell like one, either. He allows that he may have just gotten used to the odor. (He has.) When fellow truckers arrive, pulling up next to Herman, the ground—so deep with trash—is so soft it bounces.

At six o’clock, the truckers are allowed to start dumping, and so Herman pushes a red button inside a panel on his cab. The back end of the trailer rises obediently and 79,650 pounds of debris comes thundering out, most of it wood and plaster and nails and shreds of wallpaper. Beside him a truck is dumping decidedly more organic garbage, pungent indeed, and way down the row, off¬ to the side, a guy is pouring a truckful of sludge, sterilized human waste, black as ink.

The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, serves 5 million people in seventy-eight California cities, one of six landfills operated by the Sanitation Districts of L.A. County. Every day 13,200 new tons of trash are dumped here. That’s enough to fill a one-acre hole twenty feet deep.

In five years, on November 1, 2013, the landfill will be out of room, and all that trash will have to go somewhere else.

Herman gets a broom, sweeps his trailer clean, then heads back to South Gate Transfer Station, twenty miles away, for another load. He will make five trips in a day, stopping only once to eat Oodles of Noodles and cheese crackers and a cookie. On the ride home, he eats a green apple. He is careful to note that he is just about the only one of his entire eighth-grade graduating class of 1954 who has not yet retired. “Why would anyone retire from a place like this?” he asks. “I enjoy the sunrise. I enjoy being part of nature.” Having spent more than a week at the landfill, by now I am getting used to hearing workers here, from the highest to the lowest ranks, speak like this. Concerning the landfill, they are all pride and admiration and even thanks. It seemed, at first, like crazy talk.

A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie Fries, piled up right here o¬ the 605 freeway. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we toss out a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack-cake wrapper, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for o¬ffending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures, remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.

In America we produce more garbage per person than any other country in the world, 250 million tons a year. In urban areas, we are running out of places to put all that trash. Right now, the cost of getting rid of it is dirt cheap, maybe $15 a month on a bill most people never even see, all of it wrapped into some mysterious business about municipal tax revenue. So why think about it?

Electricity used to be cheap, too. We went for a long time not thinking about the true cost of that. Same with gas for our cars.

The problem of trash (and sewage, its even more offensive cousin) is the upside-down version of the problem of fossil fuel: too much of one thing, not enough of the other. Either way, it’s a matter of managing resources. Either way, a few centuries of gorging and not thinking ahead has the people of the twenty-first century standing here scratching our heads. Now what?

The problem of trash, fortunately, is a wondrous intellectual puzzle to scientists and engineers, some of whom lean, because of the inexorability of trash, toward the philosophical. The simple conundrum—the intrinsic disconnect between human waste and the human himself—becomes grand, even glorious, to the people at the dump.

“nobody knows we’re even even here,” Joe Haworth is saying, as we make our way around the outside of the landfill, winding up and up past scrubby California oaks, sycamore trees, and the occasional shock of pink bougainvillea vine. He is driving his old Cadillac, a 1982 Eldorado, rusty black with a kerry-edwards sticker on the bumper. He wears a Hawaiian-print shirt, a straw hat, and wire-rimmed glasses, and the way he leans way back in the driver’s seat suggests a simple, straightforward confidence. “People driving by on the highway think this is a park,” he says.

Click here for the remainder of the GQ article.

It's a Tidy Answer to Global Warming

The LA Times has reported on a air CO2 "scrubbing" system which would process the air's CO2 and then store it underground. Seems like the technology works on a bench scale in Tucson warehouse, but scale up will be EXPENSIVE. the article optimistically reports that to remove all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year, would require spreading machines over a land area the size of Arizona. Then there's the expense...estimated at $200 a ton, which equates to an annual vacuuming bill of $5.6 trillion....hmmmm!

Here is the Los Angeles Times, 2008-04-29 article by Alan Zarembo:

Here's a simple solution to global warming: vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air.
Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world's atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine.

After a decade of work, his shower-sized prototype whirs away inside a Tucson warehouse, each day capturing about 10 pounds of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas as air wafts through it.
Only a few billion tons to go. In the battle against global warming, technology has long been seen as the ultimate savior, but Lackner's machine is a clunky reminder of how distant that dream is.
He estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of trillions of dollars a year.

The orchards of filters would have to be powered by complexes of new nuclear plants, dams, solar farms or other clean-energy sources to avoid adding more pollution to the atmosphere.
Despite the scope of the proposal, the allure of high technology is irresistible for modern humans. Salvation has arrived again and again over the last century: the automobile, the jet, the Internet, the iPod.

That dream has pushed scattered groups of scientists to work on massive schemes to reengineer the planet. One idea is to block sunlight, either by constructing artificial volcanoes to blast sulfur particles into the atmosphere or by launching millions of tiny satellites into space and arranging them into a giant mirror.

Another concept is sprinkling iron over the oceans to nurture plankton colonies that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air and transfer it to the depths.

But while the science of dialing back the planet's thermostat is straightforward, the execution is fabulously expensive, complex and grandiose on a scale that boggles the mind. Nobody doubts it is possible to take CO2 out of the air," said David Keith, a professor of engineering and economics at the University of Calgary in Canada and one of several scientists around the world working on the problem. "The issue is, 'What does it cost?' "
Some policy experts argue that blind faith in technology is a harmful distraction from the hard sacrifices needed to control global warming.

"The temptation is to say, 'Let's get John Wayne on horseback or Bill Gates . . . and solve this problem,' " said Dale Jamieson, director of environmental studies at New York University.
But some scientists say that the potential of such ideas cannot be ignored given the world's political paralysis on controlling emissions and its myopic addiction to cheap and dirty coal. "There are not that many alternatives," Lackner said.

The attraction of a technological silver bullet lies in the failure of the world to solve global warming through the obvious solution: reducing emissions. The 1997 Kyoto accords were supposed to bring the world together to address the problem, but the two biggest polluters, the United States and China, have refused to cap their emissions, and Europe is failing to meet even its modest targets.

Worldwide annual emissions of carbon dioxide -- the main culprit in global warming -- have climbed 28% over the last decade, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The rise has been largely driven by industrializing countries, such as China and India, which argue that they have the right to exploit their coal reserves to catch up with the West.
It is clear that cheap energy is a drug that civilization will not give up. But big technological solutions could allow society to keep its drug.

Among the options, carbon filtering is the most direct and best understood. If industrialization is a process of transferring carbon stored in the earth to the atmosphere, filtering seeks to put it back. The technology is decades old. Bottled oxygen used in hospitals started out as plain air before nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases were filtered out. Space capsules and submarines extract carbon dioxide to maintain breathable air for crew members.
The process for removing atmospheric carbon involves putting one compound, usually a hydroxide, in contact with the air, setting off a reaction that grabs CO2 and incorporates its carbon atoms into a carbonate compound.

Then, in a reaction that requires a large input of heat, the carbonate compound is broken apart, reconstituting and trapping the carbon dioxide. Researchers propose pumping the captured CO2 into the ground, a practice already used to increase the pressure in oil wells. Geologists say there is room in subterranean rock formations to lock it away forever.

The beauty of carbon capture is that it scrubs the planet without intruding on it, unlike artificial volcanoes and sun reflectors, which could cause enormous planetary damage in the form of acid rain or giant shadows that stunt crops. The filters could be placed anywhere in the world, since carbon dioxide disperses throughout the atmosphere.

For all its appeal, the process is hideously inefficient. Carbon dioxide makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere, and removing climate-changing quantities of it requires filtering massive amounts of air. Lackner calculated that sucking up all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year would require spreading out his machines over a land area the size of Arizona.

That seems like a reasonable sacrifice to save civilization, until you consider the expense.
Experts estimate that it would cost up to $200 a ton to filter and store carbon dioxide from the air. That means the yearly vacuuming bill could reach $5.6 trillion. Even filtering the greenhouse gas from smokestacks, where it is hundreds of times more concentrated and thus much cheaper to capture, is still deemed too expensive for commercial use.

The enormous cost raises the question: Who would pay?

It is the same impasse that has stymied efforts toward a global agreement to reduce emissions. China argues that the West should foot the bill because it created the problem over the last two centuries. The United States says China must accept its share of responsibility as the world's new top polluter.

The cost of the technology will surely fall over time, but without government action that is unlikely to happen soon enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
Without at least a 50% cut in emissions by mid-century, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the temperature rise will exceed 2 degrees, resulting in worsening drought, a dangerous sea level rise and widespread extinction of species.
Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, said that the failure to cut emissions might force the world to reshape the environment through drastic use of technology. The risks could be enormous, but the risks of failing to reduce emissions could be greater, he said.

Crutzen said that only out of a "sense of despair" had he come to favor the last-ditch option of spewing more than a million tons of sulfur a year into the air. It's a dirty proposition that, in some ways, is its own environmental crime. But it works, as shown by the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which temporarily cooled the planet by almost 1 degree Fahrenheit. "It might be the last escape route from the problem," he said.

The power to reengineer the planet raises another question: Who gets to control the thermostat? Despite the perception that climate change is a global problem, it is in reality a series of regional transformations that benefits some places and harms others.
Countries in the far northern latitudes have less incentive than tropical countries to counteract the warming. Russia has already laid claim to the North Pole in hopes that the arctic thaw will open access to new oil reserves. Canada is pondering the possibility of its vast expanse of tundra becoming a breadbasket.

With enough carbon filters, a single country or even several rich individuals would have the power to set the world's temperature. "No matter how you go about it, there will be a lot of politics," Lackner said. For now, his machine, a solitary prototype, continues to hum away in the Tucson warehouse. With no good place to store the carbon dioxide it traps, the gas is simply released back into the air.