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Is using trees for biomass a good idea?

I point this out not because I'm in favor of it, but because I think it's a trend worth watching: the Klamath Falls, Ore., newspaper, The Herald and News is reporting on a project to use biomass--namely, thinned trees--to generate electricity.

Here's what the article has to say about the greenhouse gas effects of the project:

A major wildfire would release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. But the controlled use of that same wood for lumber or electrical production would be positive in terms of "greenhouse gas" emissions. Future fires would not release the same amount of carbon dioxide, the wood that goes into building products stores carbon, and the biomass that goes into power production offsets the need to produce that energy from fossil fuels.

To be clear, I remain skeptical -- but since I don't really know anything about the specifics I'll keep my mouth shut, and let wiser or more informed people speak.

But over the long term -- and if future prices for natural gas are as high as they're expected to be (link goes to natural gas futures contract prices) -- I can't help but think that the pressure for this sort of project will intensify. And that seems to be a cause for concern. Deforestation rates over the past 30 years have been high enough just to deal with demand for timber and wood pulp; adding electricity to the mix is, well, troubling.

Hosted on the wind

Starting a green business with a website? Check out wind-powered web hosting. Neat.

Oil pumping capacity

Don't miss Part 4 of Kevin Drum's ongoing series on peak oil. It's about pumping capacity, or the lack thereof.

This is what peak oil has brought us to. The actual peak may happen this year or it may not happen for a couple of decades, but just the fact that we're close means that we've already hit the point in the curve where spare capacity is a luxury of the past. The result will be increasing global instability caused by a turbulent economy held permanent hostage to terrorists, unstable dictatorships, resource wars, and natural disasters.

He promises Part 5, on sane energy policy, tomorrow.

California solar roofs on the way

FYI: The California Senate just passed the Million Solar Roofs bill (SB 1). It now goes to the Assembly, for a hearing later in June. Momentum is on its side. For more on the bill, check Environment California's rundown.

Radiohead singer called out for hypocrisy.

Thom Yorke, leader of the critically-revered rock band Radiohead, has this to say:

"Climate change is indisputable and we have to do something dramatic. You have a certain amount of credit you can cash in with your celebrity and I'm cashing the rest of my chips in with this. ... The music industry is a spectacularly good example of fast-turnover consumer culture. It is actually terrifying. Environmental considerations should be factored in to the way the record companies operate."

Well, the Sunday Times went and hired the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to do an environmental audit of the band.

It found that 50,000 trees would need to be planted and maintained for 100 years in order to offset the amount of CO2 produced by Hail to the Thief, the group's last album and tour.

These figures, said the Times with poorly concealed condescension, "highlight the complexity of seemingly simple arguments on protecting the planet."

Craigslist Foundation turns its energy to green networking

Today: the personals. Tomorrow: the world? Since its founding in 1995, Craigslist has gained a devoted following in cities around the world. As filmmaker Michael Ferris Gibson showed in his recent documentary “24 Hours on Craigslist,” the online community board brings strangers together for all sorts of transactions and revelations. Now the website’s namesake foundation […]

Bye Bye Nukie

Sweden starts shutting down nuke plants, despite some reservations At midnight last night, technicians at Sweden’s Barseback-2 nuclear reactor hit the off button (or something), shutting down the country’s oldest nuclear power plant for good. Vattenfall, the state-owned company that operated the facility, will now funnel $1 billion toward building northern Europe’s biggest wind farm. […]

NextBillion goodies

Like everyone else in the sustainable blogosphere, I've been digging on NextBillion.net, the newly launched blog from the World Resources Institute. They sent me to Fast Company's "Change Masters" awards for businesses that do good, which are cool. Then there's this great post on the three steps the business world can take to lead globalization on a more sustainable path.

Best of all, there's this op-ed by Ian Davis in The Economist (cited here) about the silly conflict between two contrasting points of view: corporate social responsibility (CSR) on one hand, and "the business of business is business" -- a mindset that rejects all social concerns as extraneous -- on the other.

Davis argues that both perspectives are limited and slightly naive, and lays out a path to a more integrated perspective through which activists recognize the social goods proffered by business, and businesses recognize the crucial ways that social concerns are already integral to their financial well-being.

I can't do it justice in this hasty post, but do give it a read. It's enlightening.

Washington Monthly considers peak oil.

Blogger Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly has a well-written, informative, and balanced set of posts of the so-called "Peak Oil" theory -- the idea that, while the world may not be running out of oil, exactly, we may be fairly close to the practical limit of how much oil can be squeezed out of the ground in any given year.  After the peak, goes the theory, oil production gradually declines, no matter how high the price might go. 

(By the way, oil production in the United States peaked in 1970.  Even with new production in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, and billions of dollars invested in domestic oil production since then, the US still produces about a third less oil per year than it did at the peak.  The Peak Oil theory is basically the hypothesis that the entire world is about to do the same thing that the US did in 1970 -- reach a physical maximum of production, after which oil supplies gradually and continually decline.)

I've posted on the topic before, and have nothing new to add.  But I think it's definitely something worth familiarizing yourself with -- at a minimum, to put the recent rash of media stories on the subject in context.  The Washington Monthly series is a pretty good place to start.

Moving Picture

A review of award-winning documentary Oil on Ice The Green Screen Environmental Film Festival will get rolling in San Francisco on Wednesday, alongside festivities for U.N. World Environment Day. Leading off the festival is Oil on Ice, an award-winning documentary about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the many attempts to open it for oil […]