greenswitch – climate change and cleantech solutions

Turn garbage into oil

Another source for biomass energy: leftover from your last Thanksgiving. Even more interesting than the article itself are the reactions from readers in the forum, especially the one on the economics of such a solution. In general, it’s easy to crush new ideas and visions when it comes to short-term roi — but then, we all have to start somewhere, right?

Garbage Into Oil The recipe for making crude oil is relatively simple: combine the remains of ferns, jellyfish, and dinosaurs; cover with sediment; bury deep in the earth’s crust; and apply pressure for millions of years—give or take an epoch. Or if you’re pressed for time, run some turkey parts or used tires through the thermal process owned by Changing World Technologies of West Hempstead, NY. The system uses water, pressure, and heat to convert organic material into clean fuel gas, absorbent carbon (like that used in water filters), minerals for fertilizer, and a crude oil that is chemically similar to a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline; this oil can be sold to refineries and converted into fuel. The system produces no polluting emissions, and the only by-product is water.

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In April 2003, the first commercial thermo-depolymerization plant opened in Carthage, MO. Every day, the plant handles 200 tons of unused turkey parts produced by ConAgra’s Butterball turkey plant. Such waste is now typically reprocessed into animal feed, but this practice may not be allowed much longer in the United States: Britain has already outlawed it in the wake of hoof-and-mouth and mad-cow disease outbreaks traced to reconstituted animal feed.

I can fly, I can fly…

Forget your SUV — soooo uncool! The next choice of transportation is the ‘aircar’ which travels at the height of 9 kilometers at the speed of 480 kilometers an hour. Read the entire article. Technology review has the tendency to block the articles after a while. Fascinating and scary at the same time. What the article doesn’t tell us: What’s the milage and environmental impact of such Peter Pan(ish) car and transportation model?

An Aircar in Every Garage? An Aircar in Every Garage?

The fantasy of a personal flying machine is lurching toward reality, as companies ready vertical-takeoff aircraft for market, and information technology endows planes with the ability to fly themselves.

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This vision could be realized sooner than you think. The technology of personal VTOL transportation is “expanding and will soon be exploding,” says Bushnell, with at least a dozen individuals and groups in the United States now competing to produce a safe, dependable aircar. The U.S. Army and Navy are developing aircar-type vehicles for military applications, and a NASA researcher has also been working on a design. Most of the action seems to be in the United States, though at least one foreign company—Urban Aeronautics in Israel—is also in the race. These aircraft, Bushnell contends, are “not only feasible but inevitable.”

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A system that could serve as the starting point for controlling personal VTOL aircraft is the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS). A joint project between NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, SATS aims to outfit a nationwide system of more than 5,000 small airports connected by virtual—yes—“highways in the sky” for the use of a new generation of small, safe, easy-to-fly, and inexpensive airplanes. NASA and the FAA expect the system to be fully operational after about 2015.

very interesting article in Mother Jones on Bush’s “fuel cell strategy”. Who is going to benefit from the “Freedom car initiative” — again his friends in the oil and natural gas business?

MotherJones.com | News President Bush promises that fuel-cell cars will be free of pollution. But if he has his way, the cars of tomorrow will run on hydrogen made from fossil fuels.

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But instead of investing in developing those sources, the budget that Bush submitted to Congress pays scant attention to renewable methods of producing hydrogen. More than half of all hydrogen funding is earmarked for automakers and the energy industry. Under the president’s plan, more than $22 million of hydrogen research for 2004 will be devoted to coal, nuclear power, and natural gas, compared with $17 million for renewable sources. Overall funding for renewable research and energy conservation, meanwhile, will be slashed by more than $86 million. “Cutting R&D for renewable sources and replacing them with fossil and nuclear doesn’t make for a sustainable approach,” says Jason Mark, director of the clean vehicles program for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The oil and chemical industries already produce 9 million tons of hydrogen each year, most of it from natural gas, and transport it through hundreds of miles of pipelines to fuel the space shuttle and to remove sulfur from petroleum refineries. The administration’s plan lays the groundwork to expand that infrastructure — guaranteeing that oil and gas companies will profit from any transition to hydrogen. Lauren Segal, general manager of hydrogen development for BP, puts it succinctly: “We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas business.”

Abrupt climate event: every 1.470 years?

This is a pretty densely written research paper [pdf] by Stefan Rahmsdorf with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He argues that many paleoclimatic data reveal a 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin — a supposedly extraterrestrial origin . In this report he tries to explain how stable and regular this cycle is. What he doesn’t mention: When’s the next cycle going to end and are we (as in ‘human mankind’) going to speed it up?

Mysterious Climate Cycle Dansgaard-Oeschger-(or DO-)events are the perhaps most dramatic climate shifts known: starting from frosty Ice Age conditions, they involve sudden warmings of up to ten degrees Centigrade within a decade or two. The anomalous warmth then typically lasted for several centuries. The leading theory to explain these warmings involves a northward push of warm Atlantic waters towards the Arctic, into the Greenland and Norwegian Seas (see press releases of 5 January 2001 and 18 January 2002). But the ultimate trigger of such changes in ocean currents remains unknown.

In a new study of Greenland ice core data, Rahmstorf has now unvailed an intriguing clue: the warm events appear to be paced by an extremely regular cycle of 1,470 years duration. This cycle does not trigger a DO event each time; in 23 investigated cycles only 13 events were triggered. The existence of such a cycle had been noticed before, yet the high regularity revealed by the new analysis came as a surprise. The length of the cycle is maintained constant within a few percent of 1,470 years over a time interval of at least 35,000 years. Such regularity points strongly to an extraterrestrial origin of this cycle – perhaps an orbital cycle.

((What does that mean? Are aliens in charge of our climate, or what?! I already see the big headlines of the yellow press “Please, Blue Mork, stop global warming; so we don’t have to sell our SUVs!”…))

Activists are going (soy)nuts in Brussels

Soya & Oilseed Industry News About 50 Greenpeace protesters Thursday occupied the Brussels offices of U.S.-based agribusiness major Monsanto Co. (MON).

Meanwhile, a European Parliament committee approved strict rules on labeling genetically modified food products.

Monsanto was targeted because it’s the world’s leading producer of genetically modified crops, Greenpeace says. Their sit-in came on the same day the European parliament passed strict new labeling laws and just days before European governments are scheduled to discuss potential penalties against farmers who use GM seeds.

It also comes at a time of heightened transatlantic tensions over biotech crops. Earlier this month, the U.S. decided to sue the European Union for barring GM products.

The activists entered the offices around 0700 GMT and left about 1330 GMT. Several scaled a roof and hung a five-by-six meter banner reading

Economist.com | Miniature fuel cells Will tiny versions of the fuel cells now being developed for cars soon power laptop computers too?

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Report: Emissions Trading in the U.S.: Experience, Lessons and Considerations for Greenhouse Gases Emissions Trading in the U.S.: Experience, Lessons and Considerations for Greenhouse Gases

Prepared for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change

May 2003

TONIGHT: Don’t forget to watch the lunar eclipse!

Earth’s shadow to cause lunar eclipse When Thursday turns to Friday this week, the full Moon will appear to much of the world as a copper orb against a darkened sky. This lunar eclipse will be the result of the Moon, Earth and Sun lining up, plunging our satellite into our shadow.

GM trade war

It’s not about General Motors, it’s about ‘genetically modified food’, stupid! Also, check out this interesting article in Mother Jones on the same issue.

BBC NEWS | Business | US launches GM trade war Washington has brought a complaint against the European Union for refusing to allow the sale of genetically modified (GM) food or crops, escalating trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economic blocs.

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The EU is unlikely to lift the block on GM food imports, which is widely supported by European consumers, and is also developing tough new labelling regulations which worry US farmers.

World gets better — and also worse

Very interesting story in Orion magazine. Read the whole article, it will give you a bigger perspective. Will we ever learn from history?

Orion > Discourse and Dissent> Rebecca Solnit History is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That’s why you can’t save anything. Saving is the wrong word. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. We never did save the whales, though we might’ve prevented them from becoming extinct. We will have to continue to prevent that as long as they continue not to be extinct. Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor dust doth corrupt, and this model of salvation is perhaps why Americans are so good at crisis response and then going home to let another crisis brew. Problems seldom go home. Most nations agree to a ban on hunting endangered species of whale, but their oceans are compromised in other ways. DDT is banned in the US, but exported to the third world, and Monsanto moves on to the next atrocity.

The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime, and if you’re lucky you don’t know how long that is. The future is dark. Like night. There are probabilities and likelihoods, but there are no guarantees.

European expansion: Is “New Europe” going to drag down old Europe environmentally?

The upcoming expansion of the European Union in 2004 will have many political and economic impacts. At the same time, environmental impacts are going to be even more drastic. Environmental standards and policies are quite different from current EU standards – how to harmonize them with the ‘new European countries’? In this German press release, Dr. Felix Christian Matthies with German Öko-Institute has identified several issues to be brought to attention. Here they are in a nutshell:

Not specifically mentioned in this press release but also of relevance: Other topics to be discussed will be GHG emission trading systems, clean air initiatives and in general: Who’s going to pay for this? Germany still hasn’t recuperated from the German reunification and the closing down of dirty coal mines in Eastern Germany. In most parts of Eastern Germany the unemployment rate is at 20 percent or higher.

State of denial: Special Report on Environment. Check it out!