Archive for the ‘sustainability’ Category
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Al Gore weighs in on the state of climate change
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
…in an op-ed piece in today’s NY Times.
Excerpts (links his):
[T]he scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
….The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.
….Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.
But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically….Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach.
Updates: There is a wide range of opinion on the IPCC these days:
- Union of Concerned Scientists weighs in on climate warming and the criticism of the IPCC.
- Roger Pielke, Jr. has been writing a lot about the IPCC recently (here, here, here)
- Joe Romm at Climate Progress
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adc/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: Al Gore
Posted in climate change science, climate economics, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, communication and framing, energy, policy, sustainability | No Comments »
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 »
Marine protected areas help coral reefs too
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
As mentioned in an earlier post, marine protected areas (or MPAs) are a great idea for eliminating fishing pressures and allowing fish stocks to recover.
It’s less well known whether these underwater reserves help preserve reef-building corals, which most fish and other critters depend on one way or another—for habitat or food.
In today’s online issue of PLoS ONE (open accress), Elizabeth Selig and John Bruno conduct an analysis of MPAs worldwide and conclude that these areas are able to stem the loss of corals.1
That’s good news.
However, they offer this conclusion in the context of several important caveats:
MPAs can play a critical role in the protection of coral reef ecosystems, particularly fisheries. Our results suggest that MPAs are also generally effective in reducing or preventing coral loss. Nonetheless, we were not able to assess their effects on other metrics of reef health including changes in other key taxonomic species, coral composition, richness, reef heterogeneity and other factors that could also indicate that there has been a decline in reef health. MPA benefits may appear modest in the short term, but over several decades could lead to large and highly ecologically significant increases in coral cover as the cumulative importance of small annual effects becomes more important and the number of years of MPA protection increases. However, it remains to be seen whether the observed benefits of MPAs are sufficient to offset coral losses from major disease outbreaks and bleaching events, both of which are predicted to increase in frequency with climate change. Given the time lag for maximizing MPA effectiveness, implementing new MPAs and increasing enforcement should help maximize the ability of MPAs to prevent future coral loss.
Who cares? Lots of reasons:
- Coral reefs are incredible ecosystems. If you have never dived or snorkeled on a healthy coral reef, put it on your list of 10 things to do before you die. My recommendations are the Great Barrier Reef (Australia), the Cayman Islands, Hawaii, and the islands of the Netherlands Antilles. We owe it to future generations to preserve these ecosystems in the wild rather than in books and aquaria.
- Reefs are incredibly species rich. Protecting them protects a significant fraction of coastal marine biodiversity.
- Reefs are very productive ecosystems that provide a food source and habitat for thousands of species. Protect the corals, and you end up protecting many other species.
- Many coastal communities depend on reefs for their livelihoods (e.g., seafood harvesting and tourism). This makes reef management critical for economic as well as ecological sustainability. But, as this article suggests, local management is challenged by the fact that global threats, such as ocean acidification, disease, and rising temperature impacts on coral bleaching, may trump what local people can control.
1Selig ER, Bruno JF, 2010 A Global Analysis of the Effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas in Preventing Coral Loss. PLoS ONE 5(2): e9278. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009278
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Photo credit: One of my photos that you can see at my flickr site.
Tags: coral reef
Posted in biodiversity science, nature and culture, sustainability | 2 Comments »
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 »
Small green behaviors: Encouraging or distracting?
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
There’s been some debate over the past month as to whether small green behaviors, such as changing out compact fluorescent lightbulbs, spur people to take bigger steps—say, buying a hybrid car, weatherizing a home, or commuting to work.
One camp says no. In a blog post, We cannot change the world by changing our buying habits, George Monbiot argued (links his)
I’ve never been convinced by this argument. In my experience, people use the soft stuff to justify their failure to engage with the hard stuff. Challenge someone about taking holiday flights six times a year and there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll say something along these lines:
I recycle everything and I re-use my plastic bags, so I’m really quite green.
I wasn’t surprised to see a report in Nature this week suggesting that buying green products can make you behave more selfishly than you would otherwise have done. Psychologists at the University of Toronto subjected students to a series of cunning experiments (pdf). First they were asked to buy a basket of products; selecting either green or conventional ones. Then they played a game in which they were asked to allocate money between themselves and someone else. The students who had bought green products shared less money than those who had bought only conventional goods.
The researchers call this the “licensing effect”. Buying green can establish the moral credentials that license subsequent bad behaviour: the rosier your view of yourself, the more likely you are to hoard your money and do down other people.
Then they took another bunch of students, gave them the same purchasing choices, then introduced them to a game in which they made money by describing a pattern of dots on a computer screen. If there were more dots on the right than the left they made more money. Afterwards they were asked to count the money they had earned out of an envelope.
The researchers found that buying green had such a strong licensing effect that people were likely to lie, cheat and steal: they had established such strong moral credentials in their own minds that these appeared to exonerate them from what they did next. Nature uses the term “moral offset”, which I think is a useful one.
More recently, Mike Tidwell had a column in the Washington Post, To really save the planet, stop going green, in which he argued
December should be national Green-Free Month. Instead of continuing our faddish and counterproductive emphasis on small, voluntary actions, we should follow the example of Americans during past moral crises and work toward large-scale change.
….So what’s the problem? There’s lots of blame to go around, but the distraction of the “go green” movement has played a significant role. Taking their cues from the popular media and cautious politicians, many Americans have come to believe that they are personally to blame for global warming and that they must fix it, one by one, at home. And so they either do as they’re told — a little of this, a little of that — or they feel overwhelmed and do nothing.
However, a few days ago, Margaret Southern posted a column, Stop ‘Going Green’ to Save the Planet?, on TNC’s website in which she argued that there are data to back up the notion that small changes do spur us to make bigger ones (emphasis and links hers):
According to Professor Michael Vandenbergh of Vanderbilt University, co-author of “Household Actions Can Provide a Behavioral Wedge to Rapidly Reduce U.S. Carbon Emissions” (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), there is no research to support the assumption that if someone does one good thing (say, bike to work) they would be less likely to do another good thing (support climate change legislation).
In fact, Professor Vandenbergh told NPR that behavior change is contagious:
There are a number of psychological phenomena that suggest that we might actually induce more support for behavior change. When someone becomes committed to a certain behavior, they’re more likely to follow through in other areas as well.
So, those already concerned about conservation might become even more concerned about it as time goes on.
So, while I agree with Tidwell that the conservation-concerned should turn up the heat on Congress and other decision-makers on creating real climate change policies, we don’t have to set aside our green habits — even temporarily — to do so. I don’t think that setting a good example for personal changes that people can make (that collectively would make a huge difference) is confusing people that either don’t know how to change or don’t care to change.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/guillermoduran/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, environmentalism, nature and culture, sustainability | No 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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