Energy and Environment - Green Blog

November 27, 2012, 2:20 pm

On Our Radar: Is Canada Retreating From Climate Action?

Climate researchers, many of whom are losing the jobs they once held with the Canadian government, say the conservative government pays lip service to climate change’s dangers while gutting the programs that try to observe and mitigate its effects. [Inside Climate News]

The fossil fuel boom lifts rural incomes at a faster clip than those in urban America, reversing a decades-old trend in the opposite direction. North Dakota’s Bakken shale counties leadi the way. [USA Today]

Mysterious white growth is killing coral reefs in a Hawaiian bay. [Los Angeles Times]

Republican senators, on a procedural vote Monday evening, blocked legislation sponsored by Jon Tester, the newly re-elected senator from Montana, to expand hunting and fishing opportunities on public lands and while increasing protections for wildlife habitat and ecologically valuable areas. The opponents argued that the bill violated budget guidelines. [Associated Press]

Pine beetle infestations are not only causing trees to die in Canadian forests, they are causing temperatures to rise. [Environment 360/Yale University]

The European Space agency’s multiyear budget, just approved by member states, is $2.6 billion less than originally proposed — a shortfall which could end plans for a mission intended to pinpoint the nature and structure of the little-understood carbon sinks that slow the rise of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere [Nature]

November 27, 2012, 4:01 am

Grappling With the Permafrost Problem

By JUSTIN GILLIS

When frozen hard, permafrost supports the ground surface the way a concrete pillar supports a building. When permafrost thaws, the ground can turn mushy and collapse, leading to the formation of a bog or lake that is likely to give off methane. This collapsing ground, known as a thermokarst, can cause trees to lean at crazy angles, as they do at this site near Fairbanks. The results are called “drunken forests.”

Josh Haner/The New York Times When frozen hard, permafrost supports the ground surface the way a concrete pillar supports a building. When permafrost thaws, the ground can turn mushy and collapse, leading to the formation of a bog or lake that is likely to give off methane. This collapsing ground, known as a thermokarst, can cause trees to lean at crazy angles, as they do at this site near Fairbanks. The results are called “drunken forests.”

The greatest single uncertainty about climate change is how much the warming of the planet will feed on itself.

As the temperature increases because of human emissions, feedbacks could cause new pools of carbon to be released into the atmosphere, magnifying the trend. Other types of feedbacks could potentially slow the warming. Over all, climate scientists have only best guesses about how these conflicting tendencies will balance out, though most of them think the net result is likely to be a substantial rise in the planet’s average temperature.

As I reported last year, one of the most worrisome potential feedbacks involves the permafrost that underlies a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. Buried in that frozen ground is a lot of ancient organic material, containing twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere. The permafrost is starting to warm and the carbon to escape.

A new report, released Tuesday morning by the United Nations Environment Program, warns that scientists do not have a sufficient handle on the situation. It calls for new monitoring efforts and for a formal assessment of the permafrost feedback by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body that periodically reviews and summarizes climate science.

The report will be considered in the next few days at a climate negotiating session in Doha, Qatar. If current estimates about the potential for carbon release from permafrost are correct, they mean that tackling climate change is going to be even harder than it once seemed. That is because the long-running global negotiations over emission limits do not take much account of the potentially large carbon release from permafrost.

In essence, the permafrost feedback is a big new emissions source that makes the math of controlling climate change harder than ever.

The new report is available here.

November 26, 2012, 3:22 pm

On Our Radar

By EMMA BRYCE

In advance of the climate talks that opened today in Doha, Qatar, the European Union hedged on whether it would renew climate funding that will run out by the end of this year, drawing waves of criticism from interested nongovernmental organizations.
[Euractiv.com]

A weekend of torrential rains in Britain’s southwest caused devastating flooding, as shown in this slide show, as several rivers burst their banks, flooding fields, towns and homes. [Guardian UK]

Changing climate conditions have allowed the Ob River tanker, which carries liquefied natural gas, to shave about 20 days off its regular route, as it is expected to become the first tanker to cross the Arctic — from Norway to Japan — arriving early next month. [BBC]

Vancouver has begun combining asphalt and plastic to create “recycled” sidewalks, as part of its stated effort to become the world’s greenest city by 2020. [Inhabitat]

Tuesday morning, Saturn and Venus will seemingly cross paths and create a startling contrast, forming what astronomers call a conjunction. [Mother Nature Network]

November 23, 2012, 9:58 am

Another Path to Biofuels

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Last week I wrote about two companies that are racing to be first in commercial-scale production of motor fuel from nonfood sources. A large group of other companies is pursuing various other strategies, one or two steps behind. One of those companies is planning to use algae.

SEE AlgaeAfter its water is removed, this algae is destined to excrete biofuels.

The company, SEE Algae Technology of Austria, is building a 2.5-acre factory on a sugar plantation near Recife, Brazil, that will use genetically modified algae that can eat carbon dioxide from the sugar. Adding urea and some nutrients, the algae excrete ethanol.

The path to profitability, according to the company, is raising the amount of algae produced per unit of area. Algae grows in ponds, but that turns out to require a lot of space: sunlight does not penetrate more than a couple of inches, so the ponds must have big surfaces. The problem is that the carbon dioxide injected to promote algae growth tends to escape from a big surface.
Read more…

November 23, 2012, 8:26 am

The Worldwide Vulnerability of Forests

By JUSTIN GILLIS

A warming climate creates summertime water stress for trees like these mountain pines in Montana, making them more vulnerable to attack by beetles. The gray trees above probably died several years ago.

Josh Haner/The New York TimesA warming climate creates summertime water stress for trees like these mountain pines in Montana, making them more vulnerable to attack by beetles. The gray trees above died several years ago.

One of the great scientific tasks of the day is to understand how and why trees die. It may seem like a question that would have been answered many decades ago, but it was not — at least not at a detailed physiological level. Now, amid growing signs worldwide that forests are at risk as the climate changes, scientists are trying to catch up to events.

Lately, more and more evidence is pointing toward a mechanism known as hydraulic failure as the culprit in many large-scale forest die-backs. This occurs when drought reduces the flow of water into tree roots. The trees take measures to limit the loss of water through their leaves, but trees need water flowing through them as much as humans need blood. Eventually, if the drought is bad enough, the tiny tubes that carry water up the trunk of the plant can fill with air bubbles.

Detailed understanding of this mechanism may still be developing, but anybody who has forgotten to water a house plant has seen the consequences. The flow of water through the body of the plant is interrupted, and unless moisture is restored to the soil, it can droop and eventually die.

Now comes a surprising new paper from an international research team presenting ominous findings about the risks to forests from global warming and its accompanying water stress.
Read more…

November 22, 2012, 8:14 pm

Did You Save Some Turkey Fat? Other Oils?

By EMMA BRYCE

What could be more heartwarming than the sight of a table groaning with glistening Thanksgiving turkey, candied yams and buttery brussel sprouts or green beans? Still, all of that succulence is balanced by chaos and mess in the kitchen, where towers of plates, pans, and pots also glisten with the day’s accumulation of oil and grease. After an afternoon sweating over turkey and plying argumentative relatives with food and drink, you find your sink strainer or your garbage disposal doing double duty.

Most of us tend to pour the oil directly down the drain. A quick wash with dish liquid convinces us that we’re breaking down the fat sufficiently.

Unfortunately, that’s when the work might begin for the plumber. Fat, oil and grease (FOG) poured down a drain will eventually cool, clinging to the sides of pipes and making it harder for water to flow through the vast arterial networks underground. Soap doesn’t help to fully break down the sludge either, because fat, oil, and grease like to regroup further down the pipe.

Ultimately, this can burden the city’s sewer system, leading to overflows that have environmental impacts on streets and rivers further down the line.

But some people are aware that our Thanksgiving effluent has potential as biofuel. And as it turns out, several cities across the United States are running public or privately run fat, oil or grease — referred to as FOG — recycling drives.
Read more…

November 21, 2012, 3:25 pm

Q. and A.: In a Blackout, Solar Exceptions

By DIANE CARDWELL

Solar arrays and a diesel generator at Midtown Community School in Bayonne, N.J., allowed it to operate as an overnight shelter after Hurricane Sandy knocked out power from the grid.

Advanced Solar ProductsSolar arrays and a diesel generator at Midtown Community School in Bayonne, N.J., allowed it to operate as an overnight shelter after Hurricane Sandy knocked out power from the grid.

As I reported this week in The Times, many homeowners with solar panels on their roofs found themselves without electricity along with their conventionally powered neighbors when Hurricane Sandy knocked out power along the coasts of New Jersey, Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island. But in Bayonne, N.J., a school with an unusual coupling of a solar array and a backup diesel generator found itself chugging along through the storm and its aftermath, allowing more than 50 residents to spend the night that Sandy hit on cots in a heated, dry and well-lighted community room.

At the heart of the system, designed and installed by Advanced Solar Products at the Midtown Community School, a designated evacuation center, is a special inverter with software that allows electricity from the panels to stop flowing out into the grid when it goes down.

It’s a standard safety mechanism that protects line workers from electrocution during repairs. But in this case, the electricity goes to fuel critical systems in the building. The inverter keeps the emergency generator humming at a much lower level while the sun is shining and brings it back up to the necessary level when it is too cloudy or when night falls.

The set-up has its own vulnerability in that if the generator runs out of diesel, the whole system shuts down, a weakness that the company is addressing with a new design that incorporates batteries as well.

“We already have residential-sized solar systems that can incorporate solar panels, batteries and generators, all in a single inverter, but that has not existed in commercial-sized systems until now,” said Lyle Rawlings, chief executive of the company, based in Flemington, N.J..

That approach, one of many that various designers and companies are pursuing, is helping to light a path toward a more resilient energy future, one in which relationships between consumers and the grid are more dynamic. My own house, a tiny bungalow built in the 1910s near the ocean in Rockaway Beach, took a beating along with the rest of my neighborhood, where many of us were flooded and are still without power.

But we were lucky on my block to get a solar charging station in the community garden through Solar One, a nonprofit and educational group, and Power Rockaways Resilience, a group that is raising money to bring more mobile solar generation to the area.

I was curious to learn more about how people in the Northeast and elsewhere in the United States might be better prepared for disasters like Sandy — or run-of-the-mill summer blackouts. I asked Mr. Rawlings to explain how new and developing technologies, especially batteries and inverters, are being put to use and how they might help ease growing strains on the grid going forward. Following are excerpts from our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

What kind of solar system might homeowners want to install if they were clobbered by Sandy and are thinking, “I don’t ever want that to happen to me again”?

If you’re building PV [photovoltaics] for the first time, it’s pretty simple: you choose an inverter that’s capable of working with batteries and you’re putting in the batteries. And you would take your critical loads and put them in a separate panel, an emergency panel. The bad news is that this is fairly costly — anywhere from $7,000 to $12,000, and that’s a very rough estimate. That’s on top of the cost of a typical PV system, which is probably at this time maybe $22,000 to $30,000. It’s quite an add-on.

But, on the other hand, that’s going to operate reliably and silently during a storm. People aren’t going to have to wait in line to fill up their gas cans and listen to a generator all night, and the cost of an automatic permanently installed generator is probably as much or more than that. It might cost a bit more to do it as a retrofit, but it should be close to the same.
Read more…

November 21, 2012, 12:06 pm

Droopy Flowers and Their Wiles

By EMMA BRYCE

Some flowers ply the art of seduction, dressing in showy colors, flouncing their petal skirts and grinning up at the sun, seemingly enthralled by their own attractiveness. But what about the ones that droop? Can they attract enough pollinators to thrive in a garden filled with extroverts?

A study published in the British journal Functional Ecology shows that rather than being at a disadvantage, such flowers are masterminds at managing pollinators to their benefit. And that’s where the hummingbird comes in.

The gleaming creature with a long sickle-like beak is often associated with bright tubular flowers. But Nir Sapir, an avian ecologist who works with the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology and a co-author of the paper, said that ornithologists have long been aware that hummingbirds feed from flowers that of varying shapes and colors, often those that are oriented downward. Dr. Sapir and his co-author and postdoctoral adviser, Robert Dudley, who specializes in animals’ flight mechanics, set out to examine the relationship between the hummingbird and the drooping bloom.

An Anna’s hummingbird feeding from a horizontal feeder, a tilted one and a vertical one. The last requires expending the most energy of all. But when it's a real vertical flower, more nectar will be there.

Nir SapirAn Anna’s hummingbird feeding from a horizontal feeder, a tilted one and a vertical one. The last requires expending the most energy of all. But when it’s a real vertical flower, more nectar will be there.

For their muse, they chose the Anna’s hummingbird, a species with iridescent olive-green feathers (and, in the male’s case, a magenta ruff) that is common on the campus of University of California, Berkeley, where their research took place. After catching the birds, Dr. Dudley and Dr. Sapir placed them in an airy Plexiglas cube that was large enough to allow flight and contained artificial flowers into which nectar-filled syringes had been inserted. The flowers were oriented to point either horizontally, at a 45 degree downward angle or directly facing the floor.

Some of the flowers had a mesh-like mask that measured the bird’s uptake of oxygen as it closed in on a bloom. The researchers anticipated that this would demonstrate that hummingbirds breathe more slowly and use up less energy when supping nectar from lower-hanging flowers, which could explain the attraction to blooms oriented this way.

Instead, they discovered the opposite. Energy-wise, “it doesn’t pay off for the hummingbirds to feed from these flowers,” Dr. Sapir said. Using the oxygen measures and a high-speed camera to record in-flight motion, the researchers noticed that the drooping flowers required the birds to feed by pulling their bodies upright and jerking back their heads, which requires more energy than feeding from flowers that don’t droop.
Read more…

November 21, 2012, 9:56 am

Help for Small Nuclear Reactors

By MATTHEW L. WALD

The Energy Department, seeking to promote the development of a small modular reactor that could be factory-built and cheaply installed, on Tuesday chose a consortium consisting of Babcock & Wilcox, the Tennessee Valley Authority and Bechtel International to receive a dollar-for-dollar cost match in the creation of a prototype.

Babcock & WilcoxAn earlier modular reactor developed by Babcock & Wilcox.

The department said the amount of money involved had yet to be negotiated. But the Obama administration has been seeking $500 million to spend over five years on two projects.

Two other initiatives are in the wings, including a team-up of Westinghouse and Ameren Missouri. Ameren has discussed the possibility of small reactors that could be installed on the sites of 1950’s-era coal plants as those are retired, possibly reusing some assets. Ameren and Westinghouse held a “supplier summit” last month in St. Louis attended by nearly 300 businesses.

The Energy Department said it would solicit additional applicants.

The T.V.A. has discussed placing a modular reactor at a site where the government once planned to build a breeder reactor that would make plutonium faster than it consumed uranium, adding to the stock of reactor fuel. It is one of a number of reactor concepts in Tennessee that did not reach fruition.

The idea behind small reactors is that they could be built in a factory that would allow for lower costs through serial production, if not actual mass production. Factory fabrication would also make quality control easier. The reactor would be shipped by barge or rail car, and modules could be added as demand grew.

Small reactors could be easier to cool if an accident occurred. And some analysts say that they could make good export products for use in countries with weak grids that would be destabilized by huge reactors.

King Coal, Alive and Kicking

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

World Resources InstituteThe lion’s share of new coal plants planned worldwide would be built in China and India.

Some 1,200 new coal-fired power plants are being planned across the globe despite concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from such generating stations, the most polluting type, the World Resources Institute estimates. Two-thirds of them would operate in China and India, it says. [World Resources Institute]

The United States and Mexico will share in both surpluses and water shortages under an accord overhauling how the two countries manage water from the Colorado River. The river provides water to more than 33 million people in seven states and in Mexico. [The New York Times]

Greenpeace looks into the use of hazardous chemicals in the production of global fashion brands, testing 141 items of clothing that it purchased last spring. Nonylphenol ethoxylates, or NPEs, were found in nearly two-thirds of the items, it says. [Greenpeace].

Early indications suggest that the World Trade Organization has problems with Ontario’s clean energy program, which requires that at least 50 percent of the materials in wind and solar projects initiated this year be made in the province. [CBC]

Why wait for Christmas? Green gifts for your harried Thanksgiving host. [Treehugger]

November 20, 2012, 3:48 pm

California’s CO2 Now Has a Price, but a Low One

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Getty ImagesThe Conoco Phillips refinery in Rodeo, Calif.

A free-market auction has established a price for pollution in California: for each metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted, businesses, utilities and industries that bought allowances last week will pay just $10.09.

The results of the first auction, announced on Monday, came as both a relief and a bit of a disappointment, although state officials put the best face of it. In a statement, Mary D. Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, said, the auction was “a success and an important milestone for California as a leader in the global clean-tech market.” She added, “By putting a price on carbon, we can break our unhealthy dependence on fossil fuels.”

Among traders and regulators, there was relief that all of the 23.1 million allowances covering 2013 emissions that were up for auction were sold. The number of bids exceeded the total allowances by about 3 to 1. Polluters do not have to submit the allowances to cover their emissions until November 2014.

“Given the lack of short-term requirements to purchase anything, I would say market participants that we spoke to were surprised that the full volume cleared and that it was three times oversubscribed,” said Lenny Hochschild, the managing director of global carbon markets for the advisory and brokerage firm Evolution Markets.

And Thad Huetteman, the president of Power and Energy Analytic Resources, said: “It closed close to the minimum, but clearly there was demand for the allowances. Since we defeated that expectation — that the market would be undersubscribed — that caused a sigh of relief.”

But some analysts had expected a higher final price — at least between $11 and $12, not a bare nine cents above the $10 floor.
Read more…

November 20, 2012, 1:39 pm

C.I.A. Closes Its Climate Change Office

By JOHN M. BRODER

The Central Intelligence Agency has disbanded its Center on Climate Change and National Security, a unit formed in 2009 to monitor the interplay between a warming planet and intelligence and security challenges.

The creation of the office drew fire at the time from some Republicans, who said it was an unnecessary expense and a distraction from the agency’s focus on terrorism and other more immediate threats. The agency did not say whether the closing was related to budget constraints or other political pressures.

Todd Ebitz, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency would continue to monitor the security and humanitarian challenges posed by climate change as part of its focus on economic security, but not in a stand-alone office.
Read more…

November 20, 2012, 1:23 pm

Q and A: Slaughter and Trade, Through an All-Seeing Lens

By EMMA BRYCE

A mutilated white rhino cow, left, grazes with a bull that has become her companion since a poaching attack in KwaZulu-Natal Province in South Africa. Using a helicopter, a gang tracked her and her four-week-old calf, shot her with a tranquilizer dart and cut off her horns with a chain saw. Rangers found her a week later, searching for her calf, which had died.

Brent Stirton/Reportage by Getty ImagesA mutilated white rhino cow, left, grazes with a bull that has become her companion since a poaching attack in KwaZulu-Natal Province in South Africa. Using a helicopter, a gang tracked her and her four-week-old calf, shot her with a tranquilizer dart and cut off her horns with a chain saw. Rangers found her a week later, searching for her calf, which had died.

Brent Stirton, a South African photographer who roams the globe for Reportage for Getty Images, has often borne witness to elemental conflicts between humans and nature, including violence against wildlife.

In 2007, he documented the mysterious massacre of nine endangered gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing global attention on the country’s war-torn conservation zones.

Reportage for Getty ImagesBrent Stirton

More recently, Mr. Stirton has explored the illegal trade in rhino horns on a semi-undercover basis, photographing the wounded animals in South Africa and an affluent woman in Vietnam merrily grinding the horn into what she considered a medicinal powder. (Mr. Stirton posed as a Canadian interested in setting up an illicit business as a horn dealer.) For those images, he was named runner-up for the 2012 Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year, an award sponsored by Britain’s Natural History Museum and BBC Worldwide.

Mr. Stirton’s latest body of work, “Blood Ivory,” focuses on the slaughter of thousands of elephants for the illegal ivory trade, especially the sale of venerated religious objects. The images have drawn enormous attention, as has an article they accompanied in National Geographic that quotes clerics and other locals in the Philippines, Thailand and China freely discussing their efforts to secure illicit objects.

We chatted with Mr. Stirton last week about his recent adventures, his photographic subjects and the strains involved in documenting wildlife carnage. Following are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity.

It seems that you’re really drawn to animals.

I’m not an animal photographer; I’m trying to illustrate the interconnectivity of all these things, because that’s definitely what I’m seeing in the field. I see animals as a metaphor for diminishing resources. If you look at the rhino for example, that’s a Big Five animal – tourism exists in Africa largely because people can come and see animals.

The more you diminish their viewing opportunities, the greater the impact on unemployment. If there is greater unemployment, there’s more insecurity in the country. When I’m working on ivory, or what’s happening with rhino horn, or with tigers, lions, or if I’m working on gorillas – it’s not just about the animal. It’s very myopic for us to look at it like that.
Read more…

November 20, 2012, 10:36 am

Methane Is Popping Up All Over Boston

By JOANNA M. FOSTER

Kaiguang ZhaoMethane leaks around the Bunker Hill Monument in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, measured in parts per million.

Natural gas has been hailed by some as a crucial bridge fuel to a cleaner energy future. But how much cleaner is burning natural gas than burning oil or coal?

Concern over water contamination from fracking for natural gas aside, some argue that the much-advertised climate advantage of natural gas may be all but offset by the steady release of methane during its long journey from the well to the 65 million American households that depend on natural gas. Molecule per molecule, methane has more than 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Now researchers in Boston have given skeptics of the at-least-natural-gas-is-better- than- coal argument some additional ammunition.

In Boston and many other aging cities in the Northeast, a maze of underground low-pressure natural gas pipelines are riddled with leaks. The research team, led by Nathan Phillips, an associate professor of earth and environment at Boston University, measured atmospheric methane concentrations along all 785 miles of road within Boston’s city limits with a highly sensitive device known as a cavity-ring-down mobile CH4 analyzer.

They discovered 3,356 leaks of methane whose isotopic characteristics indicated that they originated in fossil fuel rather than microbial sources. Some leaks clocked in at more than 15 times the global background methane level, the researchers write in the journal Environmental Pollution.

“There are two ways to get a sense of the leak rate of methane,” Dr. Phillips said. “You can go out to the leaks on the ground and put chambers over them and measure how much is coming out, but that is incredibly tedious with over three thousand leaks in the city. Or, you can use the integrating power of the atmosphere itself.”

With the data, the team has created the first comprehensive and publicly available map of leaks in any city.
Read more…

November 20, 2012, 7:38 am

On Our Radar: Cuba’s Oil Hunt

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

ReutersThe Scarabeo oil rig, glimpsed off the coast of Havana earlier this year.

Cuba’s third attempt to drill a deepwater oil well has ended without success. Underlining the dimensions of the country’s energy challenge, the $750 million oil rig that spent much of this year plumbing the Straits of Florida and Gulf of Mexico was the only deepwater platform in the world that can drill in Cuban waters without running afoul of American sanctions. [National Geographic]

Chasing a nascent market that could be worth billions of dollars, companies race to find ways to recycle the water used in hydraulic fracturing. While the recycled water so far cannot be cleaned sufficiently for drinking or irrigating crops, it could be reused to frack additional wells, reducing the costs of securing and disposing of water for drilling companies. [The Wall Street Journal]

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide — reached a record high in 2011, the World Meteorological Organization reports. The warming effect increased 30 percent between 1990 and 2011, it adds. [World Meteorological Organization]

Arctic melting: imagining a “northern coast” of the United States. [Grist]

The University of Buffalo shuts down a controversial fracking institute that has been faulted for its research and its members’ ties to the natural gas industry. [The New York Times]