Ethanol significantly worse than gasoline for air pollution

Opus Comics, by Bloom County’s Berkeley Breathed – Salon

A little simplistic, perhaps, but plugin hybrids need to get here soon. I want my next car to be a plugin hybrid. Hell, I would even buy an ugly ass GM car if it turns out to be as good as advertised, 65 km without gas. Note also the cool solar panels and power inverter.

Can I get a compact plugin hybrid instead of this behemoth two door, or is the size due to battery storage?

Photo courtesy Corvair Owner Flickr photstream, used under a creative commons licence.

Who would have thunk it, turns out that uranium mining and nuclear waste storage result in significant carbon emissions…
New Debate Over Nuclear Option

Now, some scientists and other experts are beginning to raise a different question about nuclear power: Is it really as clean as supporters contend? A report, released on Mar. 26 by a British nongovernmental organization called the Oxford Research Group, disputes the popular perception that nuclear is a clean energy source. It argues that while nuclear plants may not generate carbon dioxide while they operate, the other steps necessary to produce nuclear power, including the mining of uranium and the storing of waste, result in substantial amounts of carbon dioxide pollution. “As this report shows, hopes for the climate-protecting potential of nuclear energy are entirely misplaced,” says Jürgen Trittin, a former minister of the environment in Germany and a contributor to the report. “Nuclear power cannot be promoted on environmental grounds.”

The report, called “Secure Energy? Civil Nuclear Power, Security and Global Warming,” examines a number of risks from nuclear power development, including concerns over the disposal of radioactive waste and the threats from terrorist groups. But its most novel component may be the quantitative examination of carbon emissions on a comprehensive basis. “Carbon emissions are a global problem and it’s time to look at the carbon released by nuclear power globally,” says Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, author of the report’s chapter on carbon emissions. “The assumption has long been that the [greenhouse] effect is zero, but the evidence shows otherwise.”

“Novel component”?, well, I would not go that far, it appears that the authors performed a carbon footprint analysis and concluded that the carbon footprint of nuclear fission energy production was somewhere between renewables and fossil fuel power generation, which is not entirely surprising. Coupled with all the other issues facing nuclear energy, and the obvious environmental justice issues that impact the siting of any new plant or waste repository, nuclear energy should not be a very serious option at all. Unfortunately, it’s a great boondongle for the developers of the plants because the subsidies and power pricing mechanisms ensure profits for the developer at the expense of the general public, and waste disposal issues can forever be postponed, eventually leaving governments (and tax payers) to pick up the tab.

By the way, go read Jamais Cascio’s interesting post about the carbon footprint of a cheeseburger. The “nutrition like label” shown here is something I wish to see in almost every product used! It would make the regulation of carbon a lot less complicated. It appears that England will take the lead on this concept, see Carbon Labelling (yes, 2 L’s, the “correct” spelling!).

Interesting side note about the spinach E-Coli outbreak

Leafy Green Sewage – New York Times

Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It’s not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms.

Well, talk about unforeseen consequences, cows really should not eat grain. Go watch my favorite food cartoon ever, the Meatrix, and its most excellent sequel, The Meatrix 2: Revolting for more.

When cows were switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold. This is good news. In a week, we could choke O157 from its favorite home — even if beef cattle were switched to a forage diet just seven days before slaughter, it would greatly reduce cross-contamination by manure of, say, hamburger in meat-packing plants.

Seems easy enough to implement, if impossible to enforce.

Update

A more nuanced look, if not a debunking of the above theory can be found on this scienceblogs page.

Cleaner Coal Is Attracting Some Doubts – New York Times

Within the next few years, power companies are planning to build about 150 coal plants to meet growing electricity demands. Despite expectations that global warming rules are coming, almost none of the plants will be built to capture the thousands of tons of carbon dioxide that burning coal spews into the atmosphere.

This is batshit insane and irresponsible. The US of A does not have a carbon policy (other than use as much as you possibly can!), and, only in the last few months have phrases like cap and trade and carbon taxes been used in respectable society. I am not going to get into the policy solutions here, there are much better discussions going on elsewhere.

My question is this. When you know that 150 coal fired power plants are going to have a significant effect on the carbon emissions, how can you even think of approving them unless you have a carbon emissions mitigation policy in place already? If you let them be built, they will somehow grandfather themselves out of the controls. The power of existence is a big deal. Will anyone dismantle one of these once they’re operational? Think of the children!!

There needs to be a moratorium on any large new power plants and other global warming sources until this country has figured out what emission targets it’s going to meet, how it’s going to meet them, and when it is going to meet them. Only then can the market decide which choices are feasible and which ones just don’t make sense. How will I know whether gasification or conventional burning/sequestration is better unless I have the metrics to measure them by? Depending on the emission reduction targets, they could both be economically viable, or neither.

Something tells me that the word “moratorium” and the phrase “coal fired power plant” will never be uttered in the same sentence.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Asias brown clouds warm planet

Clouds of pollution over the Indian Ocean appear to cause as much warming as greenhouse gases released by human activity, a study has suggested. US researchers used unmanned aircraft to measure the effects of the “brown clouds” on the surrounding area. Writing in Nature, they said the tiny particles increased the solar heating of the lower atmosphere by about 50%.

The warming could be enough to explain the retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas, the scientists proposed. The clouds contain a mixture of light absorbing aerosols and light scattering aerosols, which cause the atmosphere to warm and the surface of the Earth to cool.

Wow, I’ll have to read the paper later today to confirm, but when I was doing aerosol work in India back in the mid ’90s, the Indian Ocean cloud was unknown. 1995 through 1998, there was an experiment called INDOEX (my thesis advisor in Bombay participated in the later phases) which first observed this brown cloud. At that time, it was assumed that the light scattering (hence “cooling”) effects of this aerosol would dominate the absorbing (or “heating”) effects, and initial model estimates seemed to agree.

Turns out that it has a significant warming effect because the soot particles (dark, therefore heat absorbing) predominate. And, you had to measure it.

For their study, the team of researchers used three unmanned aircraft, fitted with miniaturised instruments that were able to measure aerosol concentrations, soot amounts and the flow of energy from the Sun.

The crafts flew over the polluted region of the Indian Ocean at varying heights between 500m (1,640ft) and 3,000m (9,840ft).

“During 18 flight missions, the three unmanned aerial vehicles were flown with a separation of tens of metres or less and less than 10 seconds (apart), which made it possible to measure the atmospheric solar heating rates directly,” they wrote.

If true, we can reduce the size of this “cloud” by reducing biomass combustion, installing particle controls on power plants, cleaning up other combustion sources, etc, and reduce global warming effects without worrying that this cloud was somehow mitigating temperature rise as previously thought. So, a win-win!