A traveling exhibition about the sounds and songs of life
by Randy Rieland.
What a week. While scientists testifying on Capitol Hill trashed the government’s estimates on how much oil lingers in the Gulf, sound-sensitive munchers everywhere trashed the new compostable Sun Chips bag because it’s louder than a New York subway train. Really. But here’s some under-the-radar items that will provide even more snappy repartee fodder for your weekend social soirees:
The wheel deal: Hybrid bikes may soon be getting a lot cooler. Using a principle from Formula 1 racing, a team from MIT’s SENSEable Cities Lab is moving forward with an invention they call the Copenhagen Wheel. It’s a device that uses a battery to capture the kinetic energy created whenever you apply the brakes. It then uses that energy to give you a needed surge, say, when you’re pedaling uphill. But the Copenhagen Wheel does more than provide a power boost. Sensors and a Bluetooth connection can tell you, through your iPhone, your speed and distance and even the pollution levels, if you really want to know. Named in honor of the bike-friendly city, the Copenhagen Wheel won the American round of the 2010 James Dyson Award given to top design engineers. The next phase of the competition is next week. David Teeghman shares the details and a video at Discovery News.Related Links:
Why our railways suck (in two graphs)
Wonder why climate bills stall in the Senate? Follow the money
Gloom alert: Fossil fuels and climate change still suck
by Todd Woody.
It’s been a crappy week—and I mean that in a good way.
On Wednesday, I wrote about the California egg farm that bought a 1.4-megawatt fuel cell powered by biogas produced from chicken poo. (Forget free-range eggs; carbon-free could become all the rage with fashion-forward foodies.)
Now the company that makes the fuel generator, FuelCell Energy, said it has signed a deal to provide two 300-kilowatt fuel cells to a Southern California water district that will install the devices in wastewater treatment plants. These fuel cells will also be powered by biogas derived from wastewater—i.e. what swirls down your toilet.
You get the picture.
An anaerobic digester at the Perris Valley Regional Water Reclamation Facility in Riverside County will remove methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the, er, “biosolids,” which will provide the fuel for the fuel cells.
Heat produced by the fuel cells will be used to help power the digester, creating what engineers call a closed-loop system. That will take pressure off the power grid and help California utilities meet a mandate to obtain a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
“We installed our first fuel cell power plant about two years ago and have been very pleased with the reliability of the system,” Ron Sullivan, president of the board of the Eastern Municipal Water District, said in a statement. “We operate around the clock and value the energy security that an on-site fuel cell provides, which is about 40 percent of our total electrical demand at that plant.”
Gordie Hanrahan, a spokesperson for FuelCell Energy, said he could not comment on the costs of the Riverside County fuel cells. But he noted that a 600-kilowatt system installed for a farm customer in California last year cost $9.5 million and had a projected annual energy savings of $700,000. When various incentives and other savings are taken into account, the payback time is estimated to be six years.
A big benefit of fuel cells in smoggy Southern California is that besides emitting virtually no carbon dioxide they also produce nearly zero nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter—all of which are strictly regulated by the state and pose a health hazard.
“The ultra-clean power generation by the fuel cell power plant was an important aspect of our purchasing decision,” noted Sullivan.
Priming the pump was a $2.7 million grant that the state of California awarded to the water district for the purchase of the fuel cells.
Now that’s money that won’t go down the drain.
Related Links:
A global shift to renewable energy: But will it be fast enough?
Gloom alert: Fossil fuels and climate change still suck
Mystery island, magical bikes, and 8 other green stories to keep you in the loop
by David Roberts.
I’ve been doing a series of posts on the U.S. power sector and the new regulations it will soon face. If you missed it:
A brief overview of the U.S. power sector. Why America still has a large fleet of filthy old coal plants with no modern pollution controls. The two new EPA rules that most threaten old coal plants. The other new EPA rules that could threaten coal plants. Coal utilities are telling Congress that disaster looms.———
As we saw, coal utilities are trying to scare Congress into thinking that if EPA follows up with its planned regulations, electricity rates will soar and there will be reliability problems in the electricity grid. Is it true?
According to a comprehensive new analysis, no. It’s not true.
The report was commissioned from M.J. Bradley & Associates (MJBA) by a group of electric companies. MJBA recruited Susan Tierney to coauthor the report, which is pretty significant. Tierney is a widely respected expert on these issues who worked under governors of both parties in Massachusetts, in the Energy Department under Clinton, and on Obama’s Energy Department transition team. She’s the real deal. The report is called “Ensuring a Clean, Modern Electric Generating Fleet while Maintaining Electric System Reliability” [PDF].
I won’t test your patience with too many details. The basic conclusion is that, yes, utilities can achieve the health and social benefits of new EPA regulations without sacrificing electrical reliability. The report acknowledges that some power plants will retire rather than face the cost of pollution controls, but the electricity system as a whole won’t be compromised “if the industry and its regulators proactively manage the transition to a cleaner, more efficient generation fleet.”
A few reasons for confidence that grid reliability can be maintained through the transition:
1. Remember that huge buildout of new natural-gas power plants in the early 2000s, which I mentioned in my first post? Turns out it was a bit of an over-build, based on temporarily low gas prices. Partly as a consequence, the country has tons of slack generating capacity, around 100 GW worth.
According to MIT [PDF], that big fleet of natural-gas plants runs, on average, 38 percent of the time. If they were run modestly more often—say, 10 percent more—they alone could compensate for lost coal capacity in most regions of the country. This graph from NRDC’s Samir Succar lays it out (click for larger version):
2. There’s lots of new capacity in the pipeline. According to the “Edison Electric Institute Preliminary Reference Case and Scenario Results” [PDF], there’s about 55 GW of generation in advanced development, sitting in the transmission queue for 2013. “Although not all of these plants will be built,” says the MJBA report, “strong market incentives and signals from regulators that new capacity will be needed will promote generation development proposals beyond those announced to date.”
3. The recession has suppressed demand growth. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), in its “2009 Long-Term Reliability Assessment: 2009-2018” [PDF], notes that the projected rate of growth in energy use has been revised downward every year for the last five, from 18.2 percent projected annual growth down to 14.5 percent.
4. Utilities have more and more demand-side options, including smart-grid technology, energy-efficiency programs, and what the wonks call “demand response” (DR), which amounts to moving energy consumption out of peak-use hours.
A report [PDF] from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) shows that demand response alone can crank down peak electricity demand by as much as 20 percent. Meanwhile, according to the MJBA report, utility energy-efficiency programs ...
.... resulted in savings of almost 105,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity in 2008—the equivalent of the total electricity consumption in Tennessee in the same year. By 2018, new EE programs alone are expected to reduce summer peak demands by almost 20,000 MW (a full year’s growth).
In many regions, energy efficiency alone can compensate for the loss of old, coal-fired generation. Here’s another illustrative graph from NRDC (click for larger version):
With demand-side options, you are replacing coal generation, which costs money and pollutes a lot, with efficiency, which saves money and is 100 percent pollution-free. Pretty nifty!
5. From MJBA: “Industry data counter concerns that it will cost the industry too much to comply with EPA’s proposed air regulations, that pollution controls cannot be installed soon enough, or that the EPA regulations will lead to the closure of otherwise economically healthy power plants.”
This bit gets slightly technical, but to cut to the chase, the technology to reduce pollutants is available (65 percent of coal plants have already installed it) and utilities have demonstrated their ability to phase it in quickly, without service disruptions. The power plants that will get shut down instead of upgraded will already be the oldest, dirtiest, and least economically viable.
6. From MJBA: “EPA, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and state utility regulators, both together and separately, have an array of tools to moderate impacts on the electric industry.”
This gets a bit technical too, but the gist is that even if everything goes as horribly as utilities predict, federal agencies have plenty of tools at their disposal to head off reliability problems. EPA can grant case-by-case extensions; EPA or DOE can issue consent decrees; FERC can adjust market rules. If we see trouble developing, nothing in EPA regulations locks us in.
———
It’s clear from the MJBA report that utilities can comply with new EPA regulations without undue threat to the electric system or electric ratepayers. The combination of excess existing capacity, new capacity in the pipeline, and demand-side programs can compensate for the loss of old coal-fired generation capacity.
While the switch from grandfathered, filthy old coal to newer natural gas and wind will raise electricity rates, demand-side programs can lower electricity bills. Even if there’s a modest net rise in electricity prices, ratepayers will be paying a little to get a lot. According to EPA, when fully implemented its impending regulations on mercury and other hazardous air pollutants ...
... would yield combined health benefits estimated at $18 to $44 billion annually. These benefits include preventing between 2,000 and 5,200 premature deaths, and about 36,000 asthma attacks a year. Estimated annual costs of installing and operating pollution controls required under these rules would be $3.6 billion.
[See update below.]
Of its new Clean Air Transport Rule, EPA says [PDF]:
The proposed rule would yield more than $120 to $290 billion in annual health and welfare benefits in 2014, including the value of avoiding 14,000 to 36,000 premature deaths. This far outweighs the estimated annual costs of $2.8 billion.
Add these two rules together and you get annual costs of $6.4 billion in exchange for annual benefits between $138 and $334 billion. Not a bad deal! And that’s to say nothing of the additional health benefits from the coal ash, particulate matter, and CO2 rules.
Phasing out the oldest, dirtiest coal plants can be done safely and quickly. The public welfare benefits are enormous. Justice and equity demand it. So why not do it?
———
[UPDATE: A sharp-eyed reader notes that the first cost-benefit analysis above is for the hazardous pollutant regulations for industrial, institutional, and commercial boilers—not for power plants. The parallel regulations for power plants (NESHAPS won’t be released until next year and so EPA has not yet released a cost-benefit analysis for them. Their benefits are expected to be huge—along the lines of the benefits for CATR. The basic points stands, though: the benefits of these regs wildly outweigh the costs.]
Related Links:
Wonder why climate bills stall in the Senate? Follow the money
Gloom alert: Fossil fuels and climate change still suck
The U.S.-China three legged race
Rhizome-commissioned artist Tristan Perich celebrates the release of his 1-Bit Symphony on Cantaloupe tonight at Roulette with a special concert at 7pm. Daniel Wohl's "Glitch," Shawn Greenlee, Michael Gordon's "XY" and Steven Reich's "Violin Phase" are also scheduled. A "circuit album," 1-Bit Symphony performs a composition in five movements which have all been programmed onto a single microchip. Perich talks about the process in the clip above, and provides a sample of the work. I-Bit Symphony is an continuation of Perich's interest in 1-bit electronics, realized in previous projects such as in 1-Bit Video (2006-Ongoing) and his other circuit album 1-Bit Music (2004-2005).
We did a "1-Bit" interview with Perich on the occasion of his exhibition at bitforms gallery last Fall, check that out here.
Fellow art blog Art Fag City is ringing in their 5 year anniversary with a project called The Sound of Art and they are seeking submissions. For The Sound of Art, they are asking for "documentation of the sounds heard in galleries, museums, and project spaces in New York over the past five years in the form of a DJ battle record, CD, and MP3 recording." These recordings will be pressed into a record mastered by Matt “Madly” Azzarto at Think Tank Studio with cover art designed Phillip Neimeyer. A public program and a launch party at Santos Party House are also in the works. Details and info here.
by Terry Tamminen.
In the past few weeks, how many of us have seen (or participated in) that summer staple, the three-legged race? Two people stand side by side, each placing one leg into a gunny sack, then trying to coordinate movements to stay upright while running to a picnic table at the finish line. Visualize the U.S. and China similarly tethered together, but each trying to beat the other to a prize more valuable than hot dogs and potato salad—economic dominance in the 21st century.
The two superpowers are clearly joined at the hip economically, because so much of China’s production is shipped to U.S. consumers. Although each nation may have one leg apiece this common sack, make no mistake, they are competing to get ahead in at least one crucial area—to be the most energy-efficient, because energy resources enable economic growth and using those resources efficiently drives higher profits, employment, and tax revenues.
China has overtaken the U.S. this year as the world’s largest emitter of carbon pollution (a measure of inefficiency) and the number one consumer of energy, according to the International Energy Agency. But according to the World Bank, China uses 20-100 percent more energy per unit of industrial output than the U.S. or Japan.
So last week, the Chinese central government ordered the closure of 2,000 highly polluting and energy-inefficient plants within 60 days. Eighteen industries were affected, including the building blocks of any economy—steel, paper, and cement. China is committed to improve energy efficiency some 20 percent by the end of this year (compared to 2005 levels) and is already about three quarters of the way to that goal. These closures—and shifting production to more efficient factories—will help it get the rest of the way.
Meanwhile, U.S. authorities may not have the power to simply close inefficient, polluting factories, but regulators are using other methods to keep up in the efficiency race. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced limits on mercury pollution from cement plants, for example, effectively saying the same thing to that industry as China did—become more efficient or shut down. In a few months, the EPA will expand these limits to the largest source of carbon pollution in America—coal fired power plants. These rules are added to the EPA’s recently proposed reductions in carbon emissions and, while limiting mercury and carbon not only creates environmental and public health benefits, it forces factories to become more efficient by eliminating those wastes.
The race is also on for securing energy resources. We hear stories almost daily about China’s global buying spree of oil and gas reserves, but this year China overtook the U.S. as the world’s leader in wind power production too. The U.S. invaded Iraq to secure oil reserves and spends well over $100 billion annually on defending oil around the globe, ensuring that our two nations will continue to trip over each other and drive up both prices and political tensions.
The lesson of the three-legged race is that cooperation pays bigger dividends than competition. Given how tied together we are, China and the U.S. might consider sharing energy efficiency and low carbon technologies to make sure that scarce energy resources are maximized for everyone. We should agree on reductions of carbon emissions over time and help each other to achieve those goals—technologically, politically, and financially—and mutually become more efficient and profitable in the process.
Related Links:
A global shift to renewable energy: But will it be fast enough?
Wonder why climate bills stall in the Senate? Follow the money
Gloom alert: Fossil fuels and climate change still suck
by Christopher Mims.
First things first: Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research Programme and World Meteorlogical Organization, is the most prominent climate scientist to declare the seemingly unmitigated disaster in Pakistan—one-fifth of the country is now under water—a consequence of climate change. After explaining the proximate causes (weather) that precipitated the event, he concluded:
The connecting factor is that clearly the warming is a driver for all these events.
Other climate scientists spoke in terms of warming increasing the odds of Pakistan’s floods, rather than direct attribution, but everyone seems to agree that it foreshadows more, and worse, weather-related disasters to come. (The New York Times also tied all the past week’s extreme weather up in a climate change-shaped package.)
As the full impacts of the flood begin to play out—including displacement and disease—NYT speculated that it would further weaken not only the Pakistani economy but also ability of President Asif Ali Zardari to respond effectively.
Coal, climate skepticism, and apple pie: A number of GOP candidates are testing a new (old) message—that even if climate change is happening, it’s not due to human activity. Pat Michaels, climatologist at George Mason University and the CATO institute, chatted with an all-star cast of pundits about the the political viability of the scale of proposed emissions targets.
Grist did a roundup of the biggest non-CO2 threats to coal from the EPA, implying a bleak future for coal, while the AP did some enterprise reporting indicating that “Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry’s standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.” Similar expansions of coal-fired power are set to go forward in the U.K.
Perhaps that’s why clean coal remains a priority for the Obama administration, even as it continues to focus on jobs and ‘clean’ energy rather than climate. At present, clean tech is still only 0.6 percent of the U.S. workforce.
The Illinois town that was to be the home of the country’s first clean coal plant backed out of the deal.
In the wake of Federal inaction, states are looking to the EPA for guidance in constructing individual carbon caps. A Federal task force declared a price on carbon “necessary” in order to realize Carbon Capture and Storage, a.k.a. Clean Coal, which was followed shortly by a be-careful-what-you-wish-for essay by the CEO of one of the few recycled energy companies in the U.S., which argued that the regulatory monopolies that we call electricity markets could prevent a carbon price from working.
Activists gearing up for the battle over California’s emissions cap-killing Proposition 23 are casting it as California clean tech vs. Texas big oil, amidst calls for environmentalists to try being more like the NRA or at least less like eggheads.
Back on the Hill, green groups launched a website showing how much oil money all our politicians get and a consortium of environmentalists and unions declared war on GOP “obstructionism.” Al Gore urged readers of his blog to take to the streets.
Death and energy transitions: The leading science journal in the U.S. devoted a significant part of an issue to a package on the spectacular challenges of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, including a paper on the possibility of nuclear power plants with all-new designs. Bill Gates, who recently said that when it comes to this energy transition, “We’ve all been spoiled and deeply confused by the IT model,” happens to be an investor in TerraPower, one of the companies pursuing these new nuclear technologies.
The Obama administration is being sued over secrecy surrounding its subsidies of the nuclear power industry, and Forbes explores the reasons that Iran is now more likely to build a new nuclear plant than the U.S. The Guardian argues that talk of a renaissance or no, nuclear power is being phased out world-wide, new plants planned for the U.K. and Egypt not withstanding.
States’ Renewable Energy Standards deserve credit for nearly tripling the amount of installed renewable power in the U.S. between 2000 and 2008. Worldwide, emissions of greenhouse gasses were down 1.3 percent in 2009 thanks to reduced economic activity.
Consumers taking matters into their own hands: Most Americans are clueless about energy efficiency, yet 750,000 of them already live off the grid, and a new plug-and-play solar panel system purports to make producing your own solar power a contractor and electrician-free affair.
Europe’s Desertec consortium proposes to produce a significant portion of the E.U.‘s energy from solar arrays in the deserts of North Africa, something Algeria is already working on. The world’s largest solar power plant, which was to be built by a U.S. company in China, probably won’t happen and may be an object lesson for other firms trying to crack that market.
Hybrid retrofits are coming to fleet vehicles. California wants to pay large customers who can switch off their power consumption at a moment’s notice as if they were actual power producers.
Lessons for the present from 450 million years ago: Scientists announced that the Ordovican, a period spanning 460 to 445 million years ago, had CO2 levels comparable to those we see today, considering that era’s dimmer sun. It’s a finding with significant implications given that the end of the Ordovican (and Permian) saw the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Greenland is now losing 350 cubic kilometers (84 cubic miles) of ice per year, “more than twice the ice in all the glaciers in the Alps.”
On the other pole, increased snowfall is projected to offset the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, but the process will reverse near the end of the 21st century as precipitation over the Southern Ocean turns to rain.
Some good news: the loss of phytoplankton in the world’s oceans could reduce hurricane activity. The bad news is that the same phytoplankton are the base of the marine food chain and produce half the planet’s oxygen.
This week’s quote comes to us from the former editor in chief of Harper’s:
Most of the journalism debate is really a narrow arc. I don’t find much difference between the opinions on the left and the opinions on the right. They’re both kind of worrying to death some fairly obvious fault in mankind.
Bonus, from Scientific American‘s environment editor:
Can we drink enough scotch to make biofuel from its byproducts viable? I don’t know, but I’m willing to try. Who’s in?
Related Links:
Are the floods in Pakistan and the wildfires in Russia related? [AUDIO]
Gloom alert: Fossil fuels and climate change still suck
Scientists keep raising estimates of how much oil is still in the Gulf
by Jennifer Prediger.
SunChips’ biodegradable bag hit snack shelves this past Earth Day and has been making a lot of noise ever since. Literally. The excessively loud crackle of the new packaging has inspired a rash of less-than-chipper-sounding YouTube videos and Facebook pages. People have compared the bag sound to sirens, and an Air Force pilot said it’s louder than the cockpit of his airplane.
Watch the Today Show—and me!—break down the issue of the biodegradable bag:
The new chip bag is made from plant material instead of plastic polymers but clocks in at 95 decibels (about the same as a New York subway). The loudness is a trade-off for the fact that it decomposes in 14 weeks in industrial compost settings. The average chip bag could take over 100 years to degrade.
In the months since its launch, there have been a lot of people hating on the bag. Is it green backlash? Who knows. The good news here, backlash or not, is that people may be increasingly skeptical of products. We’re not just buying anything anymore. That kind of healthy skepticism is just the thing the sustainability movement needs.
All change—sustainable change included—involves a period of adjustment. We need voices that are heard inside and outside of the sustainability movement. Hopefully more of us will follow in this bag’s footsteps and get loud about green. But we also hope new innovations will help quiet down the bag itself.
Related Links:
Jimmy Fallon sings about tarballs in your mouth [VIDEO]
In today’s weather forecast, we’ll be seeing high-pressure areas of climate skepticism
Grist editor talks childfree living and population on MSNBC [VIDEO]
by Agence France-Presse.
WASHINGTON—Experts said Thursday they have mapped a 22-mile-long underwater plume of oil that spewed from BP’s ruptured Gulf of Mexico well, seeming to challenge U.S. government assertions that most of the oil has disappeared.
The oily underwater cloud measured two kilometers wide and 200 meters (650 feet) thick and was drifting through the Gulf at a depth of at least 2,952 feet, according to the paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) marine biologists, published in the journal Science.
The plume was not dissipating as rapidly as experts had expected, the researchers said, despite widespread use of dispersants, which the government has insisted have been vital to the breakdown of vast amounts of oil.
The observations were made in late June, several weeks before the ruptured wellhead was capped, and about two months after an explosion sank the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, triggering the largest ever maritime oil spill.
The new report raises questions about U.S. government estimates, which are based on the belief that natural processes are rapidly dissipating the toxic crude. The authors said deep-sea microbes were degrading the plume only slowly and predicted the oil would endure for some time.
“We’ve shown conclusively not only that a plume exists, but also defined its origin and near-field structure,” said lead author Richard Camilli.
The oil already “is persisting for longer periods than we would have expected,” he added. “Many people speculated that the sub-surface oil droplets were being easily downgraded. Well, we didn’t find that. We found that it was still there.”
U.S. and BP officials earlier this month proclaimed that about three-quarters of the oil that gushed into the Gulf had been cleaned up or dispersed through natural processes.
Around 4.9 million barrels of oil are believed to have spewed from the fractured wellhead before it was capped last month. U.S. officials say that of that amount, 800,000 barrels were contained and funneled up to ships on the surface.
The leak not only threatened livelihoods of fishermen and tourism businesses along the U.S. Gulf coast, but also stoked fears of long-term ecological damage.
On August 4, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the “vast majority” of oil had been evaporated, removed by cleanup teams or was dispersing naturally. The remaining 26 percent—or about 1.3 million barrels of oil—was classified as “residual oil” and “is either on or just below the surface as residue and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments,” NOAA said.
The Woods Hole team used a robotic submarine equipped with an underwater mass spectrometer to detect and analyze the plume, making repeated horizontal sweeps to ascertain its size and chemical composition.
They followed the “neutrally buoyant” cloud as it migrated slowly, at 0.17 miles per hour, southwest of the leaking well.
The plume was then tracked for a distance of about 22 miles before the approach of Hurricane Alex forced the scientists to turn back.
The spectrometer found petroleum hydrocarbons at concentrations of more than 50 micrograms per liter, a level that meant the samples had no smell of oil and were clear. The impacts on biodiversity remain uncertain, though.
“The plume was not a river of Hershey’s Syrup,” said Christopher Reddy, a marine biochemist. “But that’s not to say it isn’t harmful for the environment.”
The damaged well was capped on July 15. Earlier this month, BP engineers plugged the site with heavy drilling fluid and then sealed it with cement.
The company aims to permanently seal the well in the second week of September, a U.S. official said on Thursday.
Related Links:
Wonder why climate bills stall in the Senate? Follow the money
Gloom alert: Fossil fuels and climate change still suck
Mystery island, magical bikes, and 8 other green stories to keep you in the loop
by Randy Rieland.
We’re making progress. The big question about the BP leak is no longer the lame “Where’s the oil?” Now it’s “How much oil is still out there?” The answer? Well, pick a number.
Crude math: Today, we have a new estimate, this one from Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer from Florida State University. He told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that only 10 percent of the oil that gushed out of the Deepwater Horizon well was “actually removed from the ocean.” MacDonald’s assessment is even more pessimistic than the estimate a team of Georgia scientists offered earlier this week. And it’s wildly at odds with what the feds have been saying—that as much as 75 percent of the oil is gone. MacDonald points out that the government’s calculations included the 800,000 barrels that were captured and never actually leaked into the sea. In his testimony [PDF] the middle-aged MacDonald also said:
Judging from past spills in the Gulf, this material will remain potentially harmful for decades. I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life. The oil is not gone and is not going away anytime soon.
Another expert witness at the hearing, Lisa Suatoni, senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the feds also have some explaining to do on exactly how they’re testing the seafood coming out of the Gulf:
Much of the data on contamination in Gulf seafood are not publicly available, so scientists cannot independently review the findings. NOAA has released data on less than 100 samples out of thousands that they say they have, and only on finfish, not shrimp.
Oil’s well that ends well: The good news for the Obama administration is that out of sight is out of mind for the American public. The latest AP-GfK poll [PDF] finds that 60 percent of the people surveyed last week think the BP leak is extremely or very important, down from 87 percent in mid-June. The poll also suggests that support for off-shore drilling is climbing again—now at 48 percent compared to 45 percent in June. Even BP’s stock is on the rise—about one-third of those surveyed actually say the oil giant is doing a good job. That’s twice as many fans as two months ago.
But Barack Obama doesn’t want people to forget everything about the BP leak. He’d especially like voters to remember Rep. Joe Barton’s (R-Texas) apology to BP earlier this summer. Which is why the president keeps bringing it up when he’s out stumping for endangered Democratic candidates.
Another politician playing up images of oily water is California Sen. Barbara Boxer. As Maeve Reston points out in the Los Angeles Times, Boxer’s been pounding Carly Fiorina, her Republican rival, for Fiorina’s support of off-shore drilling, and reminding constituents about the environmental and economic consequences of a similar spill along the California coast.
Just our luck: The summer of living dangerously goes on, with more violent storms and landslides in China. Andrew Revkin, in his Dot Earth blog, shares this different and disturbing take on the extreme weather from Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist in Sydney, Australia:
The “loading the dice” analogy is becoming popular but it misses something very important: climate change also allows unprecedented (in human history) things to happen. It is more like painting an extra spot on each face of one of the dice ... This increases the odds of rolling 11 or 12, but also makes it possible to roll 13. What happens then?
Bill McKibben, writing in The Guardian, weighs in on the stunningly tepid political response to the havoc this summer’s unprecedented weather is wreaking around the world:
... but this is no longer an environmental battle. As this summer demonstrates, if you’re concerned about development, climate change is issue No 1 (how much development is going to go on in Pakistan, now that its bridges are all gone?). If you’re concerned about war and peace, climate change is issue No 1 (when Russia stops sending grain to Egypt and Nigeria, and when wheat prices start to rise, what do you think comes next?). If you’re concerned about the future, then climate change is issue No 1—because this summer is a tiny taste of what the future is all about.
Does green beer count? Okay, so it won’t impress high school seniors as much as making the Top Party Schools list, but let’s give it up for the colleges that made the Sierra Club’s list of America’s Greenest Campuses. Greenest of all is, aptly named, Green Mountain College in Vermont. The school gets power and heat from biomass and biogas and plans to be carbon-neutral by next year. Rounding out the top five are Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College, Evergreen State College in Washington, the University of Washington, and Stanford.
Of course, everything changes once we can harness the incredible power of beer pong.
Related Links:
Wonder why climate bills stall in the Senate? Follow the money
Are the floods in Pakistan and the wildfires in Russia related? [AUDIO]
A global shift to renewable energy
by Agence France-Presse.
WASHINGTON—BP aims to permanently seal the ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well in the second week of September, a U.S. official said Thursday, as pressure concerns further delayed final “bottom kill” operations.
“We should be looking somewhere in the week after Labor Day,” U.S. spill chief Thad Allen told CNN.
The ruptured Macondo well was capped on July 15, and earlier this month BP engineers performed a “static kill” that plugged it with heavy drilling fluid and then sealed it with cement.
However, there is an area behind the well and the outer well bore called the annulus which must still be sealed off from the reservoir miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
A relief well has been drilled and is poised to intercept the stricken well, but experts are concerned that drilling into the annulus could lead to pressure problems at the top of the well.
After days of tests, Allen told CNN they had agreed the best course of action is to replace the giant blowout preventer valve with a new one. Allen said BP would start by “flushing out the current blowout preventer.”
“Then [we will] actually move to put a new blowout preventer on, and then do the ‘bottom kill.’ This will ensure that we can withstand any pressures that may be generated,” he said.
Allen and BP had originally pointed to mid-August as the target date for shutting down the Macondo well once and for all, although Allen had until Thursday declined to give a new timeline as that deadline passed.
Two storms in the Gulf—one in late July and another in mid-August—delayed by several days the drilling of the relief well.
Allen vowed to finish the job, telling MSNBC television, “We’re making sure that we put a stake in the heart of this monster.”
“We’ve been working a week and a half with BP on a way forward,” he continued, “and I have been equivocating on the timeline for a good reason, because we needed to take concrete steps to kill this well.”
The spill began after an April 20 explosion on the offshore Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 workers. The BP-leased rig sank two days later, causing a pipe to rupture and oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Some 4.1 million barrels of oil spewed into the water before BP could fully cap the ruptured well 5,000 feet below the surface and 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
Hundreds of miles of fragile coastal wetlands and once-pristine beaches stretching from Texas to Florida were sullied and the region’s multi-billion dollar fishing and tourism industries were crippled.
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by Anna Lappe.
A few years ago, I stumbled on a United Nations study that transformed how I think about the climate crisis. In the report, researchers pegged greenhouse gases from the livestock sector at 18 percent of total global emissions. Combine this with other aspects of our food chain—from agricultural chemical production to agribusiness driven deforestation to food waste rotting in landfills—and food and agriculture sector is responsible for nearly one third of the planet’s manmade emissions. Move over Hummer; it’s time to say hello to the hamburger.
It doesn’t take high-level math to realize if we’re serious about averting the climate crisis, we need to add the food chain to our conversation. (Of course, we should be talking about agriculture’s impact on the environment for a host of other reasons, too. Agriculture is the world’s single largest user of land and water, using up 70 percent of the world’s freshwater resources every year. Agriculture is also responsible for widespread air and water pollution and agricultural chemical runoff that causes aquatic dead zones around the world. At last count, there are more than 400, including one in the Gulf of Mexico that swells every year to a size three times larger than the BP oil spill.
Climate-friendly food means more than just following a “green” checklist; it means considering the values underpinning our food system.
So what can we do? Thankfully, we’re learning every day about the power of sustainable food systems to help reduce emissions from the food chain and mitigate the climate crisis.
Now, the “food system” may sound (and feel) like an abstract concept that has nothing to do with the sandwich sitting on your desk for lunch, but it’s all related. And that sandwich you’re about to eat connects you to the livelihoods and fates of farmers and food workers around the world. It also connects you to the climate.
We can, with every food choice we make, align ourselves with a “climate-friendly diet” by choosing to eat sustainably raised food and steer clear of feedlot meat and industrial dairy, for instance. A climate-friendly diet also means going for fresh, whole, real foods, not the processed victuals so typical in our supermarkets, and limiting food packaging and food waste. But a climate-friendly food system means more than just our following a “green” checklist; it means considering the values underpinning this kind of food system, foremost among them ecology, community, and fairness.
That values “frame” is critical, now more than ever. As the food industry catches on that more and more of us care about the climate impacts of our food and that we’re asking more questions about the provenance of what we eat, they’ve stepped up their green marketing messages. McDonald’s recently launched an “Endangered Species” Happy Meal, “to engage kids in a fun and informative way about protecting the environment,” explains project partner Conservation International. A far cry from their GM partnership several years back, which launched the Hummer Happy Meal and ended only after 42 million toy Hummers had been given away. Earlier this year, Sara Lee unleashed with much fanfare a new line of “Earth Grains” bread that promotes “innovative farming practices that promote sustainable land use” as part of what the company calls its “Plot to Save the Earth.”
This new wave of food industry marketing is creating a green-tinged fog for some of us who are trying to sort out what’s truly green and what’s just spin. But, I believe, if we frame a climate-friendly system in core values, we can see more easily through the fog. By shifting the conversation to core values, it’s much harder for the message to be co-opted, no matter the savvy of the marketers.
1. Ecology
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, for house or dwelling, and logia, for the study of, draws attention to the relationships between living things and their environment. Coined in the 1870s, the term took root in the United States in the 1960s as environmentalists strove for a way of emphasizing the importance of these relationships. As we struggle to understand the role that food plays in the climate crisis (both its power to harm and to heal), the value of agroecology is key to our understanding.
Perhaps the clearest case for the need for agroecological systems was expressed in a ground-breaking study released in April 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa by a consortium of more than 400 scientists from around the world. The report—with the tongue-twistingly long name the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)—stressed in no uncertain terms the importance of agroecology and small-scale farming and the need for sustainable management of livestock, forest, and fisheries. The IAASTD, as it is known, urges a transition to “biological substitutes for agrochemicals” and “reducing the dependency of the agricultural sector on fossil fuels” to foster a healthy food system and one that will help us mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.
“We don’t need a single super gene or a super variety that somehow will
be a silver bullet approach to climate change. It’s a technological
engineering approach to a biological problem.”
—Molly Anderson
Understanding ecology allows us to poke holes in the quick-fix solutions to climate change we’re hearing from agribusiness, like Monsanto’s promotion of genetically engineering seeds to withstand drought. (The company’s recent ad campaign—“How can we squeeze more from a raindrop?”—seems to be in every magazine I’ve picked up lately.) But as Molly Anderson, an expert on agroecology and an author of the IAASTD says: “Climate change is not something you can engineer a gene into a plant for. Climate change is a really complex set of processes. We don’t need a single super gene or a super variety that somehow will be a silver bullet approach to climate change. It’s a technological engineering approach to a biological problem.”
When we talk about our ecological food values, we’re focusing on the importance of interconnections and of the complexity of a truly sustainable food system. As agroecological farmers like to remind us, sustainable food is not just defined by the absence of chemicals—it’s about the creation of a healthy ecosystem, especially healthy, carbon-rich soils.
2. Community
Once a week, my one-year old daughter and I stroll the 12 blocks from our apartment to a towering church in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood to gather our fruit and vegetable “share.” My daughter has had her first taste of raspberries, green beans, basil, plums, peaches, summer squash, and more, thanks to the Green Thumb Farm. As “shareholders” in this community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, we invested at the beginning of the growing season—along with 222 other families—and we all benefit from it weekly. We also share the risk. With the mercury at record highs this summer, the tomatoes have been thriving. Says farmer Bill Halsey of Green Thumb Farm: “Maybe the best of the century, if not longer!” But the lettuce? For the first time in 15 years: Nada.
Today, advocates say there are between 3,000 and 4,000 CSA programs connecting families directly with farmers across the country. (In the latest agriculture census [PDF], the USDA estimates there are even more: 12,549). Of course, CSAs are just one piece in a patchwork of solutions to reknit regional foodsheds, but more importantly they exemplify the value of community that undergirds a climate-friendly food system. The relationship between farmer Bill and us eaters upends a fundamental principle of the market: that producers and consumers are necessarily opponents.
I got another taste of this profound shift when I traveled to South Korea a few years ago. While there I met with leaders in the consumer cooperative movement. I thought our local Park Slope Food Co-op was impressive with more than 14,000 members. Try 150,000. That’s the membership of just one of several consumer co-ops I met with.
When I sat down with Seong Hee Kim, a leader of the Hansalim co-op, he described its programs connecting farmers with consumers: summer camps on farms for city kids, workshops on sustainable food production, investments in bakeries stocked with local food. The core business of the co-op is the direct sale of hundreds of food items, the prices of which are mostly decided at their annual meeting. When the farmers’ reps and consumer reps sit down together, the conversation always ends in a fight—just not the kind of fight you might imagine. Rice is the most contentious, Kim explains: Without fail, the consumers insist they should support the farmers by paying more than the market price for the rice. The farmers insist that, no, consumers should actually pay less than the market price, since the cost of production is lower than what the market charges.
“And then, they get into a big argument!” said Kim, laughing.
How did Hansalim achieve this shift—from producers and consumers seeing themselves as competitors to seeing themselves as on the same team? The answer, Kim explained, has to do with values—community values. “Our producers see themselves as responsible for the health and well-being of the consumers. And the consumers, they know the farmers and see very clearly how they’re responsible for their well-being,” he said.
3. FairnessFairness in the food chain means ensuring that all the workers, farmers, food producers—everyone along the food chain—is treated fairly and gets a fair wage. It also means ensuring all consumers, no matter where they live or what tax bracket they’re in, have access to affordable healthy food.
In 2006, consumer behemoth Wal-Mart, and the nation’s largest grocer, made headlines when it announced its move into organic foods: “Wal-Mart Eyes Organic Foods,” declared The New York Times. Within a year, some of the country’s biggest organic food providers were on board, including the farmer-owned co-op Organic Valley. But as the co-op’s Wal-Mart business grew, it began to short its other customers—and the co-op’s board and CEO, George Siemon, started questioning their decision. Said Siemon in an Inc. Magazine article: “All of a sudden it hit us: What are we doing? [... We’re] treating everybody poorly, and damaging our reputation. We need to decide what’s most important.” Siemon’s biggest concern was that Wal-Mart would become the co-op’s biggest customer, causing Organic Valley to lower its labor and production standards to meet Wal-Mart’s demand for lower prices. For Siemon, the decision to break away from Wal-Mart was clear: “Eventually, Wal-Mart could consume so much milk that the co-op could become beholden to one client and vulnerable to pressure to lower prices—violating its fundamental mission of providing fair prices to farmers.” And so Organic Valley walked away, returning its focus to the mainstay of its business since the mid-1980s: natural foods stores across the country.
Plus, no matter how much Wal-Mart says it’s benefiting the planet and farmers by purchasing organic foods—and the origins and true sustainability of those items have been rigorously questioned—we can remain critical of the company’s flagrant disregard for workers’ rights. Wal-Mart recently admitted to failing to pay overtime, vacation, and other wages totaling $86 million to 232,000 California workers. A host of other class action lawsuits are pending.
An organic peach and the climate crisis
By considering the values of ecology, community, and fairness as a lens through which to understand the connections between food and climate, we can perceive the need to go beyond our plate. We aren’t going to bring these values to life solely by filling our (reusable) shopping bags with real food from farmers we know and workers who were paid a good wage, though that is certainly a good start.
Once we better understand and embrace these three values in relation to the food system, we can see clear ways work to protect—and advance—them. One powerful way to do that is through policy, such as promoting access to healthy foods and making it easier for everyone to connect to farmers. We can see, too, the power of developing uniform, and trusted, product standards such as the organic certification. And finally, we can see the role the government should play in regulating marketing through bodies like the Federal Communication Commission, which has historically created limits to fraudulent green claims on products.
With historic floods devastating as many as 20 million people in Pakistan, a chunk of glacier four times the size of Manhattan breaking free from Greenland, and temperatures from Moscow to New York City hitting historic highs and leaving us all roasted, more and more people are starting to feel the direct impact of what may very well be the signs of climate chaos to come.
In order to get back to the level of greenhouse gas emissions we need to be to stabilize the climate, every sector must play a role. Now, nearly five years after I read that United Nations report about livestock and the climate crisis, it’s ever more visible the role that food systems plays, not only in exacerbating the crisis, but also in helping address it.
Now, I know, with stakes so high, suggesting that a local, organic peach can make a difference might feel laughably inconsequential—but if choosing a local peach is a tasty reminder of our growing, unified, powerful vision for shifting our food system toward a more sustainable model, then it might not be so inconsequential after all.
Reposted with permission from an article Anna Lappé adapted for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from a speech she gave for National Cooperative Grocers Association. Anna is the author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen and Hope’s Edge. She is a founding principal of the Small Planet Institute.
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