Nanoparticles the new asbestos?

Overheard this morning on The Marketplace morning report…

“The use of scrubbers have made coal fired power plants much cleaner”

Umm, this only refers to the scrubbing of particulate matter and sulfur dioxide. Unless some marvelous scrubber has been invented and perfected (top secret, the coal fired power plants don’t want you to know about all the good things they do!) that picks up all the CO2 belching out of those smokestacks, no claim can be made that coal is cleaner.

Dear Marketplace, your own website says the following:

KAI RYSSDAL: And it’s official. Carbon dioxide is a pollutant. The Supreme Court says so. The Bush Administration had been arguing the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases

To argue this from a strictly legalistic standpoint, coal is dirtier now than it has ever been because we finally count CO2 as a pollutant (Yes, I know, Supreme Court only ruled on automobile emissions because that was the case in front of it, but gas is gas!).

Dear Marketplace, please stop using the words clean and coal in the same sentence unless and until CO2 emissions from coal are scrubbed!

Update 30Aug07: Apparently (see comments!), NPR does not like the use of the word NPR in the blog title because (and I quote)

“Marketplace” is not an NPR show. It is produced by American Public Media, a separate company, and has its own news operation”

True, so it’s not dear NPR anymore, it’s “dear American Public Media”. There, that takes care of that. My point obviously stands, coal is not clean!!

Premier Gordon Campbell says he won’t bend to northern concerns about his carbon tax, but avoided saying so yesterday in a keynote speech to a meeting of northern B.C. communities, who have challenged him to revise the tax.

reportonbusiness.com: ‘We are not changing the carbon tax. No,’ B.C. Premier says

One of the loudest arguments being made against BC’s pioneering carbon tax proposal is that communities in Northern BC, much colder and much more rural than Vancouver and Victoria, will pay an “unfair” share because they need more carbon to heat their homes and drive their cars/trucks longer distances. The weather and lack of density ensure that they will pay higher carbon taxes, so it is unfair.

Well, sorry! Victoria and Vancouver have been paying a fair weather premium for years in higher home prices, higher property taxes, higher prices on lots of things because that’s what city dwellers do without complaint. You can buy an average single family home in Prince George for $125,000, which may get you a garage in Vancouver!

Cities are more efficient, and use far less energy per capita because of the density and transit options. Pricing carbon starts bringing some of these efficiencies to the forefront and that is a good thing.

BC’s carbon tax is not perfect by any means. But, it is a start and it gets people thinking about consumption. Believe me, carbon’s on a lot of people’s minds here in BC. There’s tons of talk about carbon sinks and sources in the media. The carbon tax has definitely contributed to an increase in conversation about choices and their consequences. The funny thing is that the proposed carbon tax on gasoline has been dwarfed by actual market driven increases in gasoline prices. The important difference is that a carbon tax is a revenue stream that goes to funding carbon free energy sources. So, a tax, however small, is still preferable to the profits going to companies that deal in carbon.

Hurray for BC and its carbon tax attempts. It is a decent start and one that I hope will be adopted by the rest of Canada and that wee country south of the border!

As part of blog action day, today’s a day when every blog features a post about the environment. Turns out that this is an environmental blog where most of the posts are about the environment. But nothing like a deadline for a noble cause to make me blog, so here goes…

What the rich use and throw away, the poor are reduced to scavenging to earn a meager living. Yes, while climate change rightly takes up a lot of attention, more mundane problems including landfills in poor communities, the export of waste from the first world to the third world, and the “shocking” poverty that drives this export of waste all deserve their fair share of attention.

U.N.: ‘Shocking’ conditions at Kenya dump – World Environment – MSNBC.com

“Willis Ochieng, 10, scavenges through smoking refuse piled as high as a house at one of Africa’s biggest rubbish mountains, his friends sitting nearby sucking on dirty plastic bottles of noxious yellow glue.

Located near slums in the east of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, the open dump receives some 2,000 tons of garbage daily. A U.N. study published on Friday says it is seriously harming the health of children and polluting the city.”

And boy, do the people there suffer. Asthma, anemia, high levels of lead in the blood, chronic cough, and a smorgasbord of other acute and chronic conditions.

This dump is not alone, of course. Landfills are a feature of every country, and in my current home state of North Caroiina, are located with disproportionate frequency in African American communities. the free market advocate would say that this represents an opportunity for the people in the community to gain some employment and make some money. The truth of the matter, however, is that we do not pay the right price for waste generation. The people who live near, and make a living off the “dump” subsidize our profligate selves.

I don’t quite know how to react.

Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News – Support Voiced For Geo-Engineering Research To Combat Global Warming

The call to at least consider audacious geo-engineering steps that would fill the stratosphere with globe-cooling aerosols to check global warming got louder last week. In Science, Tom M. L. Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., writes that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the long-term solution to global warming but that nearer term engineering of the atmosphere might provide “additional time to address the economic and technological challenges faced by a mitigation-only approach” (DOI: 10.1126/science.1131728). Last month, Nobelist Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in Mainz, Germany, made headlines with an essay in the journal Climatic Change calling for more research into the pros and cons of injecting sulfate-based aerosols into the stratosphere as a sunlight-reflecting, cooling foil to global warming (C&EN, Aug. 7, page 19).

The paper is still not out for public consumption, because “YOUR INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION DOES NOT INCLUDE THIS ITEM:” (How an organization that is funded wholly by government (taxpayer) money can publish in journals that make you pay to read their contents is the subject of a different rant). Nevertheless, this modeling effort builds on Crutzen’s earlier essay which I just finished reading.

Sulfate particles reflect incoming solar radiation, reducing the amount of light incident on earth and lowering the average temperature. This has been known for years, and I am sure every aerosol scientist has thought “Well, if there was some way of putting particles in the atmosphere to reflect more light, this whole global warming thing would just go away”. But the obvious issue with this approach is that sulfates in the troposphere are nasty, they cause acid rain, haze, increased mortality, etc. Crutzen expands on this further.

The great advantage of placing reflective particles in the stratosphere is their long residence time of about 1–2 years, compared to a week in the troposphere. Thus, much less sulfur, only a few percent, would be required in the stratosphere to achieve similar cooling as the tropospheric sulfate aerosol (e.g., Dickinson, 1996; Schneider, 1996; NAS, 1992; Stern, 2005). This would make it possible to reduce air pollution near the ground, improve ecological conditions and reduce the concomitant climate warming. The main issue with the albedo modification method is whether it is environmentally safe, without significant side effects

Which I guess is the key question, let alone the practicalities of introducing and maintaining 5.3 Tg (terra grams or million metric tonnes) of sulfur in the stratosphere successfully. This is a 10% increase from the current emissions of 55 Tg/year, so I guess it is not a terribly large number. Crutzen estimates that it will cost 25-30 billion dollars per year to have a loading of 1-2 Tg (to combat the most optimistic global warming scenario), though he cites a personal communication with someone at the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. This number is bogus, how do you know what something will cost if you don’t know how you’re going to do it? Crutzen has some ideas…

Locally, the stratospheric albedo modification scheme, even when conducted at remote tropical island sites or from ships, would be a messy operation. An alternative may be to release a S-containing gas at the earth’s surface, or better from balloons, in the tropical stratosphere

In other words, speculation at this point in time. The bottom line is this, the idea is not revolutionary, heck, even I thought of this in the mid 90s when I was doing sulfate aerosol work. The mechanics of how this will be done without causing some unforeseen other major issue is the real question that will take years to answer. Meanwhile, this silly personal virtue called conservation still works, look at this graph (from an NY Times article through the Washington Monthly), if Cali can do it, so can you.

the national science academies of the 13 most important countries release a landmark strong statement about the state of the world’s energy crisis? According to the grist, nobody listens. Well, here’s to my 10 or so readers (self deprecation is the best deprecation!), the rant!

Bad news re: good news about bad news | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist

The bad news is that we are in quite a pickle.

The good news about the bad news is that the national science academies of the G8 countries, along with those of Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, China, and India, have issued a unanimous and remarkably strong statement about our global energy quandary.

The bad news about the good news about the bad news is that the press is almost totally silent about it, at least in English-speaking countries.

Among the crucial statements in this document (PDF):

• “Our present energy course is not sustainable.”
• “Responding to this demand while minimizing further climate change will need all the determination and ingenuity we can muster.”
• “The problem is not yet insoluble but becomes more difficult with each passing day.”
• “G8 countries bear a special responsibility for the current high level of energy consumption and the associated climate change. Newly industrialized countries will share this responsibility in the future.”

Let me be as polite as I can stand about this. Where in the @$#! is the press?

And it goes on in similar vein…

If you read the pdf, you will note that it has the obvious solutions (obvious to the half alive, that is)

1. Set standards and promote economic instruments for efficiency, and commit to promoting energy efficiency for buildings, devices, motors, transportation systems and in the energy sector itself.
2. Promote understanding of climate and energy issues and encourage necessary behavioural changes within
   our societies.
3. Define and implement measures to reduce global deforestation.
4. Strengthen economic and technological exchange with developing countries, in order to leapfrog to cleaner and more efficient modern technologies.
5. Invest strongly in science and technology related to energy efficiency, zero-carbon energy resources and carbon-removing technologies.

Nothing new here, just a very easy policy framework under which every major action taken by every one of these countries (and others) needs to work. Of course, planning, evaluation, implementation, etc. are difficult, especially on the technology transfer, behavioral change, and deforestation, but evaluate every major decision under this framework. You will see that things like corn ethanol (promotes deforestation, carbon intensive, not energy efficient), coal to liquid technology (carbon intensive, polluting, inhibits behavioral change), suburban sprawl (energy inefficient, inhibits behavioral change, etc.), excessive patent protection and intellectual property rights (inhibits technology transfer), war (well, everything on the list, really!), and I can keep going on, are just plain stupid, irresponsible and will lead the world to ruin.

just print that framework out (or better still, put it in your PDA) and evaluate every thing you read about energy policy using it. You’ll see why I beat my head against the wall a lot!

Also, note this simple two sentence evisceration of the “China and India are not doing it, so we won’t” argument…

G8 countries bear a special responsibility for the current high level of energy consumption and the associated climate change. Newly industrialized countries will share this responsibility in the future

I would add, of course, that G8 countries bear both current, and historical responsibility, other than that, well said.