BlogTogether
Thanks for a kickass conference, Anton, Bora, Brian and The real Paul Jones, thanks so much for the great program and getting all these people together. Everything worked, wifi, lunch, dinner, all the projectors, all the microphones, the swag, wow! It was great to put faces to people, make connections, etc.
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It’s clean air vs. TV in poor India village – International Herald Tribune
Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China and elsewhere have become a favorite way to make electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world.
The headline sucks, clean air vs. TV is not really the choice here. Is the implication that third worlders somehow need to make this a “choice”? It’s not as if the rest of the world has to make this “choice”! They do seem to have both. This is a situation where poor choices are made because of poor infrastructure. Other than the headline, it is a good article because it makes all the right points:
Biomass burning as an alternative to diesel?
Given the popularity of generators, perhaps the most promising alternative is a new type like the one at the edge of the village that contributes much less to air pollution and global warming. It burns a common local weed instead of diesel, costs half as much to operate, emits less pollution and contributes less to global warming.
The main material is dhaincha, a weed commonly grown in India to restore nitrogen to depleted soils. The dhaincha grows 10 feet tall in just four months, with a three-inch-thick green stalk. Wood from shrubs and trees is used when there is not enough dhaincha.
I am not a big fan of biomass burning, but using a weed that can be replanted repeatedly seems fairly harmless, especially compared to burning diesel.
The project has succeeded partly because it has the active backing of one landlord family, the Sharans. Family members have gone on to successful business careers in big Indian cities and in Europe, and have dedicated themselves to helping their home village.
Local involvement, especially by authority figures goes a long way in rural India.
China does suggests another way forward.
China has tried another approach: supplementing an expansion of electricity from coal-fired power plants with cheap rooftop solar water heaters that channel water through thin pipes crisscrossing a shiny surface.
Close to 5,000 small Chinese companies sell these simple water heaters, and together they have made China the world’s largest market for solar water heaters, with 60 percent of the global market and more than 30 million households using the systems, said Eric Martinot, a renewable energy expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Not so hot during the monsoon, I guess! I remember a friend of mine having a solar heater in their home in the 1980’s. Their company used to make them, so it is old technology, with price being the prime barrier. It will work as a supplemental source, not as the prime source.
Clearly, the wider availability and ubiquity of consumer electronics, and electricity-dependent agriculture has outpaced India’s, and to a lesser extent, China’s power infrastructure. It is easy to make a billion television, it’s not quite so easy to keep them powered!
This story in the Indian Express talks about unusually warm February weather affecting wheat yields in Punjab and Haryana (India’s breadbasket, BTW). This will become more and more common as average temperatures rise from Global Warming. From Lester Brown’s most informative book Plan B 2.0:
Two scientists in India, K.S. Kavi Kumar and Jyoti Parikh, assessed the effect of higher temperatures on wheat and rice yields. Basing their model on data from 10 sites, they concluded that in north India a 1-degree Celsius rise in mean temperature did not meaningfully reduce wheat yields, but a 2-degree rise lowered yields at almost all the sites. When they looked at temperature change alone, a 2-degree Celsius rise led to a decline in irrigated wheat yields ranging from 37 percent to 58 percent. When they combined the negative effects of higher temperature with the positive effects of CO2 fertilization, the decline in yields among the various sites ranged from 8 percent to 38 percent. For a country projected to add 500 million people by mid-century, this is a troubling prospect
We might as well accept that this is going to happen and plan
accordingly. I guess changing the variety would help, so would shifting the growing season a little (I am no crop scientist, so I need to read about this).
Well, not the least bit surprising, sea turtles have always been very difficult to track, and we’re finally getting verification that, gasp, turtles’ lives cannot be described in simple juvenile = open sea, adult = coast behavior.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Fishing ‘major threat’ to turtles
Until now scientists have believed that young turtles live in the open ocean, but change to a coastal habitat when they reach a certain size.
But researchers working in Cape Verde found that most adults nesting there retain their open water behaviour, with the attendant risk posed by longline boats.
“The bottom line is that we thought juveniles experienced this risk out in the open ocean with longline fisheries,” said Brendan Godley from the University of Exeter.
“We thought that if you got them past that, then unless they’re being taken by inshore fisheries, you’re OK,” he told the BBC News website.
“But now you’ve got adults exposed to longline fisheries, which is very worrying.”
Congress weighs coal fuels, carbon questions linger – Apr. 23, 2007
The technology, developed in coal-rich Germany in the 1920s and used heavily by the Nazis in World War II, involves partly burning coal to turn it into a gas, then using a catalyst, usually a metal, to make it a liquid.
The basic premise of liquid coal (using the wonderful Fischer-Tropsch Reaction) is that “plentiful and easily available” coal is converted into diesel that can be used for automobiles. Liquid coal is yet another wonderful distraction in the quest for clean energy sources.
The attraction of using a plentiful domestic energy source is obvious. It would help cut our reliance on oil, about a quarter of which comes from the Middle East and Venezuela.
It also keeps money stateside, flowing to coal miners instead of countries with links to terrorists, which explains why the coalition’s members include several labor unions.
You mean, you willl do this to every coal mining town just so you don’t have to increase fuel efficiency by 25% and avoid “terrorist” oil? Jeez, and this casual assumption of “if we don’t buy their oil, terrorism will decrease”. Patriotism and blatant fear mongering can be used to sell anything, apparently. Coal mining is one of the most destructive and harmful operations you can imagine. Here’s a short summary (LINK)
It is difficult to explain the scope and impact of mountain top removal to people who have not seen it. Some sites cover three and four thousand acres. Millions of cubic feet of land are blasted away by explosive charge to get at the thin seams of coal underneath the mountain tops. Trees, rocks, soil-in short, everything but the coal-is considered “overburden.” Land is devastated, and afterwards the ground must be compacted so hard to stabilize it that nothing but scrub grasses will grow. Rains rush off the denuded mountain tops at an alarming rate.
Of course, like all other carbon rich fuel sources, carbon sequestration remains a must for any possibility that we can see a decrease in carbon emissions coupled to an increase in carbon fuel use.
Henry said that “carbon storage” – an untested technology where about half the carbon dioxide in coal is removed and injected underground – can make liquid coal so that it emits 60 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline.
“This statement is total garbage,” said Pete Altman, coal campaign director at the National Environmental Trust, saying the study Henry was referring to compared a hybrid diesel engine to a gasoline engine
So we’re willing to go to greatly increased carbon emissions, devastated country side, increased water pollution, air pollution, mining deaths, etc. just so we don’t increase fuel efficiency by 25%? Wow, priorities!!
The bill is expected to make it to the Senate floor in the next few weeks, and both Democrat and Republican staffers say a Republican sponsored amendment allowing for liquid coal is likely.
Other bills provide loan guarantees for companies building coal-to-liquid plants, which typically cost $3 billion to $5 billion apiece, as well as guaranteed price support if oil falls below $40 a barrel.
It seems clear the industry needs government help to succeed. Lawmakers have to decide if they are willing to fund a fuel that appears to do little to cut greenhouse gases.
I am sure lawmakers will make it happen as long as their lobbyists want to make it happen, if it means subsidies, relaxation of pollution rules, and other such shenanigans, so be it.
Note: the blog Environmental Action follows the liquid coal story very closely and had a post on this very article. Reading this blog, you will find that the great savior Barack Obama is also a liquid coal acolyte (It’s that whole midwestern pandering to coal and ethanol!)
Meanwhile, the Conservative party received an F+ because it has chosen a "completely inadequate" target for reducing greenhouse gases and because it is relying on intensity targets to meet its goals.
Greens tops, Tories flops in Sierra Club climate-change report card.
So, all the other parties get at least a B grade. The conservatives are relying on so called greenhouse gas intensity targets, or emissions/dollar of GDP, which is a meaningless statistic. As many have pointed out previously, greenhouse gas intensity is a meaningless statistic and decreases naturally as processes grow more efficient and economies transition from a manufacturing to a service oriented economy. The GHG intensity dodge was invented by the Bush administration and the conservatives were happy enough to follow along.
So, as Harper turns his high profile and the utter fragmentation of centre/left of centre vote into an opinion poll lead, a reminder that ever other party in this race has at least a half way realistic climate policy.
Canada can’t really wait too long to get in front of this problem. I believe that the US will have something proposed/in place by 2010 and as Canada’s biggest trading partner, will be in enforce a carbon regime on Canada, so this may be moot.
Long-term, the story is the same, if not worse, for investors. A new report released by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors says that even with a recovery in oil prices, tar sands projects will not be economically viable. It's an analysis that has left investors surprised and perplexed, according to Yulia Reuter, author of the report, who presented it last week at the annual Riskmetrics Canadian Proxy Season Briefing in Toronto.
The idiocy of burning large amounts of clean natural gas to make large amounts of dirty oil in a way that leads to terrible water pollution, air pollution and habitat destruction simply blows the mind.