Climate Climate & Energy

‘Biodiesel’ is looking worse and worse

An example of a long-lived and wildly successful marketing scheme is the station wagon with oversize tires and a four-wheel drive transmission, repackaged as the Sport Utility Vehicle. The only significant difference between these and the cars our parents drove is the mental image planted in our heads by marketing. And the real beauty is that you get to pick from two images:

1. People envy you for having enough disposable income and leisure time to use your car for sport, skiing in the mountains or driving down the middle of your favorite trout stream to do a little fly-fishing.
2. People envy you for owning such a utilitarian vehicle, one befitting a rugged individualist who hauls tools and supplies to job sites (the Marlboro Man).

The glue that binds all this together, of course, is status-seeking behavior -- a genetic propensity for most social primates.

Another wildly successful recent marketing scheme is the word biodiesel. Bio is the Greek root for life: biosphere, biodiversity, and biology. Let's see how well this image of preserving life holds up against the reality of biodiesel.

You take a habitat filled with biodiversity, a forest (temperate/tropical) or grassland (Cerrado/Conservation Reserve), bulldoze and burn all vegetation, plow up the soil, sterilize it with herbicides and insecticides, and finally plant a single genetically modified crop on it. You now have a large flat expanse of land devoid of all life save a single species -- as I have said before, a mall parking lot plus one. The process used to produce the crop is by any definition industrial.

Doing this to produce food is one thing; doing it to feed our cars borders on immoral.

A new subculture has recently sprung up based around biodiesel use. It is a badge of honor (a status symbol) to own a car that runs on biodiesel in this circle, just as a Prius is in other circles. Devotees believe they are sticking it to the man (oil companies). Never mind that oil companies (or companies that look very much like them) will eventually own all biofuel production. As with the SUV, it is based on false marketing from industry televangelists, propagated by believers devoid of critical thought.

Time to cut through the marketing crap and give this fuel a more accurate label: Industrial agrodiesel. We need a new bumper sticker: "Biodiesel: feeding the planet to our cars." And no, I'm not a shill for the bumper sticker oligarchy.

The coming nuclear expansion in Ontario is absent from election debate

There's a bit of a, whatchamacallit, an election coming down in Ontario. So far a number of issues have come up (e.g. schools), but the governing Liberals' plan to increase nuclear power construction in Toronto isn't one of them. It's a shame, because a number of recent articles in the Toronto Star show how this plan is being undermined before it's even gotten off the ground.

First of all, there's the problem that the existing reactors are delivering sub-par performance this summer. The reactors at both Pickering and Bruce have been shut down unexpectedly, leading to a double-digit increase in coal generation. Yech. The plan has been to run the existing reactors to the end of their lives and refurbish or replace them, but with the existing problems it may be necessary to do so early -- or, if replacement is impossible, shut them down and rely more on ... what, coal?

Thoughts on the GISS temperature adjustment

There has been a lot of blogging recently about the problem with the temperature record for the continental U.S. RealClimate described the problem thusly:

Last Saturday, Steve McIntyre wrote an email to NASA GISS pointing out that for some North American stations in the GISTEMP analysis, there was an odd jump in going from 1999 to 2000. On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of US temperature data. There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched, but that turned out not to be the case. ...

The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area).

A few comments about this:

MTR activists don’t expect progress until the Bush administration is gone

((mtr_include))

This week, Gabriel Pacyniak and Katherine Chandler are traveling throughout southern West Virginia to report on mountaintop removal mining (MTR). They'll be visiting coalfields with abandoned and "reclaimed" MTR mines, and talking with residents, activists, miners, mine company officials, local reporters, and politicians.

We'll publish their reports throughout the week.

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As we wind down our trip, news breaks that the federal Office of Surface Mining has issued new rules that will gut the already weak protections against burying streams during the course of mountaintop removal mining. The change would make it even more difficult, if not impossible, for residents of affected hollows like the Branhams to challenge MTR sites and the accompanying valley fills that threaten their homes.

Mountaintop removal site impacting residents below in the valley. (photo: Katherine Chandler)

The rule change will be a substantial setback, but not a surprise, to people like Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. When we talked to him by phone earlier during the trip, Joe sounded somber. He has been pressing lawsuits against MTR for years, mostly based on the impact of MTR on stream valleys. Although he has won several promising cases, he doesn't believe anything can change under the Bush administration. "The Bust administration will do whatever it takes to get around any court order that we win," he says. "[They] will just not tell the coal industry, 'Enough is enough, no more valley fills'."

A blast across coal’s bow in the Washington Post

When it comes to battling the Coal Empire, I am merely a Padawan. Jeff Goodell is the Jedi master. In Sunday’s Washington Post, he unleashes a full frontal attack.

Why does everyone assume that coal mining in Appalachia must continue?

One other thing I wanted to point out from the NYT piece on Bush’s new mountaintop removal mining rule: A spokesman for the National Mining Association, Luke Popovich, said that unless mine owners were allowed to dump mine waste in streams and valleys it would be impossible to operate in mountainous regions like West Virginia […]

DIY renewable energy projects

So you want some do-it-yourself climate solutions. Popular Science is the place to go.

The magazine details how, for $300, you can build a vertical wind turbine (pictured below) for your home in about three days. It will generate 50 kilowatt-hours per month, which might be about 10 percent of your electricity use, depending on the size of your house and how efficient you are. You can also download plans at windstuffnow.

Or maybe you want something a tad bit easier to make, something to "keep your gadgets powered even when the grid fails you." Follow these instructions, and for a mere three hours in work and $150 in parts, you'll have your very own solar charger (pictured below).

The magnitude of drought and floods will increase with climate change

A very good article in the Washington Post lays out the problem we face.

"Global warming will intensify drought, and it will intensify floods," explains Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Why?

As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That's settled science ... You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.

The droughts will be especially bad. How bad?

Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

Enter a climate video contest, win a Toyota hybrid

Watch this quickie eco-video, then make your own and enter it to win cool prizes.

(Having trouble viewing the video? Download the latest version of Flash.)

Injecting CO2 into oil wells is not real carbon sequestration

Capturing CO2 and injecting it into a well to squeeze more oil out of the ground is not real carbon sequestration. Why? When the recovered oil is burned, it releases at least as much CO2 as was stored (and possibly much more). Therefore, CO2 used for such enhanced oil recovery (EOR) does not reduce net carbon emissions and should not be sold to the public as a carbon offset.

Yet a company, Blue Source, LLC, proposes to do just that: to capture the CO2 from a fertilizer plant, pipe it to an oil field, and inject it into wells for EOR :

The company hopes to profit from the project by earning credits for the carbon reductions in voluntary carbon markets and by selling carbon dioxide to energy companies.

The deal will cut CO2 from the plant by about 650,000 tonnes per year by permanently storing the emissions in the oil fields, he said. The U.S. Department of Energy says that capturing CO2 from power plants for enhanced oil recovery could greatly boost U.S. oil reserves while permanently keeping CO2 from reaching the atmosphere.

Uh, no. To repeat, if the captured CO2 is used to extract oil that releases CO2 when it is burned, then how is that offsetting anything?