Archive for the ‘solutions’ Category
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Energy breakthrough? Have fuel cells for the masses finally arrived?
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Huff Post is running a story on a recent 60 Minutes piece about a new kind of fuel cell—the “Bloom Box” —that is already powering companies like Google, Fed Ex, and EBay (click on the link for video of this story).
It runs on natural gas, and two of these little boxes (about the size of a shoe box combined) could conceivably power your entire home.
Estimated cost: $3,000 for off-the-grid electricity.
It will be interesting to see if these are commercially viable and what else Silicon Valley has in store over the next five years. Along with electric cars, which roll into showrooms in a matter of months, we are on the cusp of some pretty big technology transformations.
Update: An educated guess from one of my colleagues, Andy Price, in the energy business:
I hope I am wrong, but the Bloom Box looks like it suffers from the same problem that all fuel cell companies are suffering from: their systems are really expensive per KW.
If Ebay paid $700,000 to $800,000 per unit for 5 units, as was suggested in the story, this would be $3.5 to $4 million. If they saved the stated $100,000 in 9 months this would be a 26 to 30 year payback – and with a fuel cell using natural gas you still need a natural gas pipe and have associated carbon emissions.
If Bloom can somehow deliver the dramatic cost reductions that they claim
this could start to look more attractive but until Bloom provides additional
details, it looks like more hype than substance. Many other well funded
companies including UTC, Honda and GE are working on similar technology and none have been able to deliver the big breakthrough. Yet.
Update 2: Wired comes to a similar conclusion–too pricey.
Tags: fuel cell
Posted in energy, solutions, sustainability, technology | No Comments »
Science Magazine considers whether decreasing meat consumption can increase global food security
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
In this week’s special issue devoted to food security, Science asks what it will take to feed 9 billion people by mid century.
Food insecurity—the inability of people to feed themselves—may rise if food supply cannot keep pace with population. This is a concern that goes back over 200 years to Thomas Malthus.
One theme shows up in a few articles: Can reducing meat consumption help in the battle to feed more people?
Erik Stokstad’s news feature (subscription required)1 provides a nice lead:
The United States, for instance, has just 4.5% of the world’s population but accounts for about 15% of global meat consumption. Americans consume about 330 grams of meat a day on average—the equivalent of three quarter-pound hamburgers. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that most people consume just 142 to 184 grams of meat and beans daily. In the developing world, daily meat consumption averages just 80 grams. Those numbers suggest that people living in the United States and other wealthy nations could increase world grain supplies simply by forgoing that extra burger or chop.
However, he interviews researchers and cites studies that raise a number of issues potentially complicating this story…
Tags: meat and diet
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, population, solutions | 1 Comment »
The humanities are key to environmental messaging
Friday, February 12th, 2010
It’s been an incredibly busy week, which explains the dearth of posts. But good things are happening, which I look forward to sharing.
As most of you know, there’s an energetic, ongoing debate about environmental messaging. With polls showing waning interest in climate warming as a serious issue, there’s a sense that the battle is being lost.
I mentioned in an earlier post that it’s often assumed that climate change science speaks for itself. All we have to do is publish good science and show the public a bunch of data, and this will lead to a collective consciousness demanding action on climate warming.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
One main problem is the failure to connect with people on a personal level. Thinking about the environment is not just about climate or wild nature; it’s about human nature, human experience, the intersection of nature and culture, how we interact with one another—things squarely in the domain of the social sciences and humanities. In order for society to connect with contemporary environmental issues, it’s critical that these voices become part of this conversation.
Yesterday, we brought back to campus Bowdoin alum Paul Miller (a.k.a., DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) to perform his major work, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.
Paul’s work is a beautiful illustration of how one artist has been able to put a human touch on climate warming. His show was packed with a hyped-up audience that cut across a wide swath of young and old.
Try doing that with a science seminar.
Amanda Little reminds us that there are no silver bullets for solving climate warming, only silver buckshot. Paul’s work (and the work of other popular artists like him) is a great example of one of those buckshot.
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Photo Credit: Tiffany Gerdes, Bowdoin Orient
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, nature and culture, polar ice, solutions | 2 Comments »
Is a post-Copenhagen roadmap emerging?
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Over the past few years, there have been a couple of major approaches for dealing with climate change:
- Use political tools to set emissions targets (e.g., 80% reduction by 2050);
- Invest heavily in green technology to drive green energy prices lower. Only then will these technologies take hold. Carbon reductions are an important byproduct but not the main goal.
Of course these are not mutually exclusive, but they might as well be given the way they have played out on the political stage.
With a lot of people down on political solutions to deal with climate change, strong advocates of the latter approach may now gain the upper hand. Folks like Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been arguing that green energy needs to be produced as quickly and cheaply as possible—forget all of the games with cap and trade or carbon taxes. Tom Friedman has also argued the need for swift action on energy, while also endorsing political solutions like carbon taxes.
If you look for areas that are gaining or have the potential to gain traction, there seem to be two levers that may work:
- the link between fossil fuel dependency, climate change, economic stability, and national security;
- the fact that China is eating our lunch with respect to clean energy development.
Both of these general concerns have attracted Republican support for green energy and climate change mitigation, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
This may be a signal of potential game changers and the clearest path forward that we’ve seen in awhile.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Tags: Copenhagen
Posted in climate economics, conflict, energy, policy, risk analysis, solutions | 1 Comment »
Can we alter climate by installing white roofs?
Monday, January 11th, 2010
When reviewing the most popular words of 2009, I was surprised to see that “albedo” didn’t crack the top 5—Tweet, Obama, H1N1, Stimulus, and Vampire. I bet you were equally shocked.
Albedo is a simple concept—the reflectivity of a landscape—but it’s hugely important in understanding how the surface of the Earth impacts climate. As we saw in a recent post, things like thawing sea ice, northward advancing treeline, and asphalt paving all darken landscapes, causing more solar radiation to be absorbed and temperatures to climb—one of the reasons for the so-called urban heat island effect.
So what would happen if we were to install white roofs? In a forthcoming article1 in Geophysical Research Letters (subscription required), Keith Oleson and colleagues use biophysical models to address this.
Their answer: White roofs reflect more sunlight and cool buildings. Averaged over all urban areas in the world, the urban heat island effect declines by 33%, causing maximum and minimum daily temperatures to decrease by 0.6 and 0.3 degrees C, respectively.
At face value, this sounds great. But, there’s a potential hidden cost of cool buildings—heating. Interestingly, they found that white roofs caused space heating to increase more than air conditioner use declined, suggesting that energy use might actually increase with white roofs!
1Oleson, K. et al. (in press) The effects of white roofs on urban temperature in a global climate model. Geophysical Research Letters.
Related post: New ideas about how changing vegetation at high latitudes can cause climate warming to accelerate
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: albedo
Posted in behavior, climate adaptation, climate change science, energy, solutions, sustainability, technology | No Comments »
This week’s good ideas in campus sustainability: 1/11/10
Monday, January 11th, 2010
This week’s spotlight is on the University of Minnesota and the University of Florida. Also, sustainability education makes USA Today and the NY Times.
1. U of M Energy Conservation Campaign Collects 10,000 Energy Pledges
Growing sustainability from the bottom-up in any community is challenging. Here’s one way that the Golden Gophers are working on it:
Getting 10,000 people at the University of Minnesota to agree on any one subject is difficult. But 10,000 students, faculty and staff do agree on one thing: saving energy on campus is important.
The U of M has just met its goal of collecting 10,000 energy conservation pledges from students, faculty and staff as part of the It All Adds Up campus energy conservation campaign. The 10,000 pledge marked was topped early Thursday after a flurry of pledges came in response to a university-wide e-mail from President Robert Bruininks asking the Twin Cities Campus to take the pledge.
The university rolled out It All Adds Up last spring in an effort to increase campus awareness about how each person at the U could play a part in saving energy. The energy conservation pledge asks individuals to take seemingly small actions – like turning off lights or powering down computers at the end of the day – with the understanding that if each member of the 80,000 person campus community did those small actions, it would all add up.
2. One Less Car Wraps As Alternative Transportation Increases
Here’s another bottom-up approach, and the FL Gators get a gold star for doing it with one of the hardest behavioral modifications—driving:
The second annual One Less Car challenge was a success, with nearly 1,000 people participating. More than 100 teams represented students, faculty, and staff from departments and units across campus. Together, One Less Car participants avoided over 260,000 miles of driving during the challenge. Through alternative transportation commutes, such as busing, biking, and walking, approximately 246,370 pounds of carbon dioxide were kept from entering the atmosphere.
The teams that used alternative transportation for the most miles were: The Office for Student Financial Affairs, The Florida Museum of Natural History, and The College of Dentistry. Final prizes were awarded to the teams with the highest average points per member: Extreme Backroads, Los Tamales Calientes, Radical Gainesville, Geography, and No glass on the bike lanes. Individuals also earned prizes for logging the most trips and avoiding the most miles of driving. Final prizes included: lunch from Satchel’s Pizza, bike tune-ups, Hippodrome Tickets, Gator Dining meal coupons, and tickets to the Butterfly exhibit at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
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For more information: AASHE bulletin 1/1/10
Posted in behavior, higher education, solutions, sustainability, transportation | No Comments »
How do I find a green job?
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
That’s the title of a column over at Grist by Bowdoin alum, Auden Schendler.
What I like about it is Auden’s emphasis on not waiting for sustainable jobs to slap you in the face. Rather, work to turn any job—your life—into a greener enterprise. Those entrepreneurial skills are tremendously important (Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever).
His book, Getting Green Done, is a case study on his doing just that at the Aspen Skiing Company.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/18767293@N00/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Posted in behavior, solutions, sustainability | No Comments »
The promise and perils of algae-based biofuels
Monday, December 28th, 2009
In a forthcoming article1 in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Val Smith and colleagues describe why biofuels produced from algae have many benefits:
- The current production of biodiesel (~2 billion gallons in 2006) is far lower than annual consumption of diesel fuel (44 billion gallons per year). Simply put, biodiesel crops can’t keep pace with demand. We would have to grow significantly more biofuel crops, which would affect land use by reducing the acreage of food crops or natural habitats.
- Algae fats (lipids) can serve as the feedstocks for many types of fuels, including aviation fuel, which would be a major benefit because airline travel is a huge part of most people’s carbon footprints. Algae fuels are potentially carbon neutral. Making air travel carbon neutral would be a game changer.
- Algae grow extremely fast—much faster than terrestrial plants (which are made into biodiesel or ethanol). They lack anatomical parts like roots, flowers, and woody stems that don’t help plants photosynthesize (making them more productive than plants).
- One of the most amazing statistics in this paper is how much less land it would take to make algae based fuels compared to terrestrial plants because of the increased productivity of algae. To produce an amount of fuel equivalent to the global demand for oil, we would only need an area of land equivalent to 3-20% of current croplands. If we were to use biofuel plant crops instead, we would need about 2-8 times the amount of current global cropland. That’s so amazing I did a double take when I read it.
- Algae can be grown in tanks on lands that are marginally useful for crops so that we don’t have to sacrifice croplands.
- They can serve double-duty by removing excess nutrients from wastewater, thereby linking energy production and wastewater treatment.
- Algal production virtually eliminates the use of herbicides and insecticides and uses much less water than growing crops for fuels.
They also point out an interesting pitfall:
- Bioreactors containing algae are often unintentionally invaded by zooplankton that eat the algae. This can lead to predator-prey-type cycles in algae biomass, which is not good when you want to maximize algal biomass production.
- The solution? Add fish that eat the zooplankton. This would cause “top-down” pressure on the zooplankton, keeping their populations in check.
1Smith, V. et al (in press) The ecology of algal biodiesel production. Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandialabs/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Posted in biofuels, energy, solutions, sustainability, technology | 3 Comments »
Copenhagen post-mortem and analysis roundup
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Food for thought—today’s latest on what happened at Copenhagen, what it might mean, and where we go from here:
1. SLATE: The Party’s Over Why Copenhagen was the climate conference to end all climate conferences.
2. NY TIMES:
3. TREEHUGGER:
- The Copenhagen Accord: A Beginning
- What’s Missing in the Copenhagen Accord?
- Why is Everyone so Pissed at Obama?
4. GRIST:
- Copenhagen: a look back at the most striking narratives
- All over the map: Rounding up editorial reax to Copenhagen
- Letter to Bill McKibben: don’t blame Obama for Copenhagen
- A preliminary assessment of the Copenhagen Accord
- What’s missing in the Copenhagen accord?
5. WSJ: Climate Chaos: Is There a Silver Lining to the Copenhagen Fiasco?
6. PIELKE, JR: Post-Copenhagen: More questions than answers
7. BREAKTHROUGH INSTITUTE: BBC World Service: Who is to Blame at Copenhagen?
8. MONBIOT (GUARDIAN): If you want to know who’s to blame for Copenhagen, look to the US Senate
9. NISBET: Schwarzenegger Says It’s Time to Regionalize the Climate Change Debate
10. MCKIBBEN:
11. ROMM (CLIMATE PROGRESS)
12. MOTHER JONES: Obama’s Copenhagen Deal
13. THE VINE (NEW REPUBLIC):
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miltoncorrea/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tags: Copenhagen
Posted in policy, solutions, sustainability | No Comments »
Progress and the good life
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
The cover story of this week’s The Economist, The idea of progress—Onwards and upwards: Why is the modern view of progress so impoverished?, examines an issue central to this blog: What does/should the good life look like?
Excerpts:
In the rich world the idea of progress has become impoverished. Through complacency and bitter experience, the scope of progress has narrowed. The popular view is that, although technology and GDP advance, morals and society are treading water or, depending on your choice of newspaper, sinking back into decadence and barbarism.
….The Economist puts more faith in business than most. Yet even the stolidest defenders of capitalism would, by and large, agree that its tendency to form cartels, shuffle off the costs of pollution and collapse under the weight of its own financial inventiveness needs to be constrained by laws designed to channel its energy to the general good.
Nor does economic progress broadly defined correspond to human progress any more precisely than does scientific progress. GDP does not measure welfare; and wealth does not equal happiness. Rich countries are, by and large, happier than poor ones; but among developed-world countries, there is only a weak correlation between happiness and GDP. And, although wealth has been soaring over the past half a century, happiness, measured by national surveys, has hardly budged.
….And it is not just that material progress does not seem to be delivering the emotional goods. People also fear that mankind is failing to manage it properly—with the result that, in important ways, their children may not be better off than they are. The forests are disappearing; the ice is melting; social bonds are crumbling; privacy is eroding; life is becoming a dismal slog in an ugly world.
….Such values are the institutional face of the fundamental engine of progress—“moral sensibility”. The very idea probably sounds quaint and old-fashioned, but it is the subject of a powerful recent book by Susan Neiman, an American philosopher living in Germany. People often shy away from a moral view of the world, if only because moral certitude reeks of intolerance and bigotry. As one sociologist has said “don’t be judgmental” has become the 11th commandment.
But Ms Neiman thinks that people yearn for a sense of moral purpose. In a world preoccupied with consumerism and petty self-interest, that gives life dignity. People want to determine how the world works, not always to be determined by it. It means that people’s behaviour should be shaped not by who is most powerful, or by who stands to lose and gain, but by what is right despite the costs. Moral sensibility is why people will suffer for their beliefs, and why acts of principled self-sacrifice are so powerful.
People can distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Torture was once common in Europe’s market squares. It is now unacceptable even when the world’s most powerful nation wears the interrogator’s mask. Race was once a bar to the clubs and drawing-rooms of respectable society. Now a black man is in the White House.
There are no guarantees that the gap between is and ought can be closed. Every time someone tells you to “be realistic” they are asking you to compromise your ideals. Ms Neiman acknowledges that your ideals will never be met completely. But sometimes, however imperfectly, you can make progress. It is as if you are moving towards an unattainable horizon. “Human dignity”, she writes, “requires the love of ideals for their own sake, but nothing requires that the love will be requited.”
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/ / CC BY 2.0
Posted in environmental ethics, environmentalism, nature and culture, solutions, sustainability | No Comments »
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