15 Green Buildings

Green building has grown up, from a tiny movement of hands-on idealists to an increasingly mainstream business sector that erects...

Arguments supporting government subsidies of agrofuels are getting polished

This is my formal rebuttal to David Morris's "case for corn-based fuel." I'm using my access to the bully pulpit to pull it out of the comments field.

How did the use of ethanol end up alongside tyranny and torture as an evil to be conquered?

That's easy. A whole lot of real smart people have been giving corn ethanol a lot of thought and have found that "an evil to be conquered" isn't a bad description. In smaller quantities, it does smaller amounts of damage, but as quantities increase, so does the damage. I mean, what's not to like about a fuel that milks billions from taxpayers, increases the cost of food all around the world, exacerbates the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, and returns no more energy than it produces?

Emphasis on the ‘rare’

Trees are terrific in every way but one: they make lousy carbon offsets. That was the point of the "First rule of carbon offsets." But a number of comments and some media queries have led me include two rare exceptions: certified urban trees and certified tropical forest preservation. The word "certified" is key in both cases.

For these two rare cases, I would allow trees to comprise no more than 10 percent of an overall offset portfolio (which should be heavily weighted toward efficiency, renewables, fuel switching, and perhaps carbon capture and storage). Also, their offset value should probably be discounted over time (because urban trees are unlikely to be permanent and tropical forest accounting is quite uncertain).

New company says it can make better, cheaper biofuels

Picture a liquid fuel that is derived from the same feedstocks as cellulosic ethanol (switchgrass, sugar cane, corn stover) but...

A package of good stories

Rolling Stone has a package of stories on Al Gore’s climate crusade in the current issue. First up is a...

Depends on how it’s made

It depends on the fuel used to drive the conversion process -- according to a new study:

In particular, greenhouse gas emission impacts can vary significantly -- from a 3% increase if coal is the process fuel to a 52% reduction if wood chips are used.

These results come from the energy life-cycle wizards of Argonne Lab, who have published a new study, "Life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas emission impacts of different corn ethanol plant types," in the open-access Environmental Research Letters.

Here is a figure showing "well-to-wheels greenhouse gas emission changes by fuel ethanol relative to gasoline":

Do parents lose or gain by taking kids outdoors?

I'm a little bitter about not playing soccer.

Or softball. Or piano. I did take dance lessons, but the name "Klutzy Chrissy" didn't happen by accident.

My parents preferred to send me outside. Even in our Detroit neighborhood, which developed a reputation during the last 30 years of offering a wide assortment of crack houses, my friends and I explored the alleys while making sure to wear shoes as protection from broken bottles.

Ah, nature.

WTO talks could end fishing subsidies

Most ocean conservationists are on pins and needles in anticipation of the results of this week's International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting. But I'm also thinking about another three-letter acronym and how much good may be coming out of it. W-T-O. That's right, the World Trade Organization.

In Geneva (and at the current Doha round) there's serious talk of cutting government subsidies for commercial fishing -- the fundamental driver for the unsustainable exploitation of the oceans. I just returned from there, where I met with Pascal Lamy -- head of the WTO -- and, together with Professor Rashid Sumaila of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, briefed a large number of the delegates.

Information is power

The day is sweltering, air conditioners are cranked up, and the power grid is straining to meet demand. Today is a "needle peak" day -- on the annual power demand chart, it shows up as a spike. Out of the year's 8,760 hours, needle peaks will occupy 200 hours or less. An extreme day like this is why the grid maintains roughly twice as much power generating and transmission capacity as it uses on an average day. Even though power plants and lines are idle most of the year, this costly overbuilding is needed to cover all contingencies. The grid is built to be there "just in case."

But what if another power resource were available that could dramatically reduce that peak demand, one that involved generating and transmitting no power at all? No, this isn't some weird "zero energy" thing. The paradoxical sounding resource I'm talking about is already in use. It's the demand, also known as the load, itself. The basic idea is that the grid can meet overall needs not only by supplying power, but by adjusting power use. The word for this is demand response, and it's a fundamental aspect of the smart grid.