A team of researchers has come up with a simple plan to halt global warming: All we need to do is turn both the Sahara and the Australian outback into vast, shady forests.
While that might sound so ambitious as to be absurd, the climate scientists say the project would be no more expensive or technologically challenging than some of the other geoengineering schemes that are currently under discussion. And researcher Leonard Ornstein says it would certainly get results. Ornstein says that if most of the Sahara and Australian outback were planted with fast-growing trees like eucalyptus, the forests could draw down about 8 billion tons of carbon a year–nearly as much as people emit from burning fossil fuels and forests today. As the forests matured, they could continue taking up this much carbon for decades [ScienceNOW Daily News].
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It would be funny if it weren’t so serious: While some skeptics are still ignoring the scientific evidence and insisting that global warming is a hoax, engineers and scientists are already looking for the best “plan B” that can help out humanity in the likely event that the world’s governments can’t agree to cut carbon dioxide emissions fast enough to prevent serious global consequences. Just last week Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers released their picks for the most realistic geoengineering tactics, and now the Royal Society, Britain’s top science academy, has weighed in with its suggestions.
A 12-member working group of scientists, engineers, an economist, a social scientist, and a lawyer spent nearly a year examining technologies, such as fertilizing the oceans to suck down atmospheric carbon dioxide or orbiting giant mirrors to deflect sunlight [ScienceInsider]. The subsequent report (pdf) argues that many of the most-hyped geoengineering ideas are simply too risky, including the proposal to fertilize the ocean to create carbon-absorbing algae blooms. “Most of the things that have gone wrong in the past have happened when we’ve tampered with biological systems” [New Scientist], says John Shepherd, who chaired the report committee.
The report separates geoengineering tactics into two basic approaches: those that reflect sunlight back into space to cool down the planet, and those that remove the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide from the air. Of the two strategies, the report concluded that those involving the removal of carbon dioxide were preferable, as they effectively return the climate system closer to its pre-industrial state. But the authors found that many of these options were currently too expensive to implement widely. This included “carbon capture and storage” methods, which require CO2 be captured directly from power plants and stored under the Earth’s surface [BBC News]. Yet carbon capture and storage projects have been touted as an important response to global warming by power plants and governments alike.
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Watermelons could do more than grace the tables at picnics across the land: They could also serve as a source of biofuel. Researchers fermented watermelon juice to produce ethanol, according to a study published in Biotechnology for Biofuels, and while the melons aren’t likely to become a primary biofuel crop, the process could help out farmers.
Nearly one-fifth of the watermelon crop grown in the United States is left in the fields after harvest because of defects on the melons’ rinds. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the melon on the inside, but our only method of judgment is the outside,” said [lead author] Wayne Fish [Greenwire]. Although farmers often till the abandoned melons into the soil, the value of the nutrients provided by this practice is much less than the overall cost to farmers of losing so much of their crop.
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The most practical and immediate steps we can take to slow global warming may be lining roadways with towering “artificial trees” and covering buildings with algae bioreactors, argues a new report from Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers. The group believes that geoengineering (a broad term for climate-altering technologies) may be necessary to reduce carbon dioxide levels immediately, while governments continue to bicker about how to transition to a low-carbon future. “Geo-engineering is no silver bullet, it just buys us time,” said Tim Fox of the IME, who led the study [The Guardian].
Fox says the study (pdf) looked for techniques that could be rolled out with existing technology. The IME’s first suggestion is to construct hundreds of thousands of “artificial trees”, essentially building- or goalpost-sized structures through which the wind blows. As air passes through them, the “trees” extract CO2 from it for later sequestration [The Register]. The fake trees are intended to be much more efficient at absorbing CO2 than real, biological trees, with current designs estimated to remove one ton of CO2 from the air daily. But even if the devices could be made ten times more efficient, the study found that 100,000 fake trees would be required to absorb the CO2 emissions from all the cars and trucks in the United Kingdom.
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When a small coal-fired power plant opened in northern Germany last September, it was heralded as the first example of a technology that could save us from the ravages of global warming, while allowing us to keep burning cheap and plentiful coal. The demonstration plant, built and operated by the Swedish power company Vattenfall, was designed to capture its carbon dioxide emissions and to pump them deep underground in a process called carbon capture and storage (CCS). But the project has thus far been a victim of “numbyism” – not under my backyard [The Guardian].
The plant’s managers say they’ve captured about 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide, but they haven’t been able to pipe it underground to the selected underground zone, where scientists say the atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide would instead be trapped in the rocks. Locals, apparently, aren’t so sure about the technology. “It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical” [The Guardian].
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A startup biotechnology company unveiled its grand plans for a new energy source yesterday–although it didn’t share a few crucial details. The company, Joule Biotechnologies, says it has genetically engineered an organism that can efficiently produce unprecedented amounts of liquid fuel. However, chief executive Bill Sims will not reveal what that marvelous organism is. “If I tell you what the organism is, I’m inviting everyone else to take part in a transformational, evolutionary, game-changing technology” [Boston Globe], he says.
The company’s announcement comes soon after both ExxonMobil and Dow Chemical announced their investments in algae-derived biofuel production, and Joule’s technology has some similarities with those two projects. Like both those algae projects, Joule says it won’t be harvesting a plant and squeezing the oil out of it; instead the organism will secrete the fuel. But Sims says his organisms aren’t algae. In addition, Sims said the organisms do not need fresh water but can be grown in both brackish water or graywater, which is nonindustrial waste water from sources like baths and washing machines [Reuters].
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To stop the spread of the Sahara Desert, one innovative thinker has proposed a bold plan: a wall along the southern border of the desert that would hold back the advancing dunes. Swedish architect Magnus Larsson says the wall would effectively be made by “freezing” the shifting sand dunes, turning them into sandstone. “The idea is to stop the desert using the desert itself,” he said. The sand grains would be bound together using a bacterium called Bacillus pasteurii commonly found in wetlands.” It is a microorganism which chemically produces calcite – a kind of natural cement” [BBC News].
Larsson is already well-known in the field thanks to his proposed Great Green Wall, a 4,349 mile line of trees stretching across Africa to stop desertification [Fast Company]. The sandstone wall could compliment the green wall, Larsson says, because if people chopped down the trees for firewood the sandstone wall would still remain.
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Just two months ago, we reported that the federal government’s hydrogen car program was going down like the Hindenburg, as the Department of Energy announced that it would slash research funding. At the time, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that after years of research, hydrogen-fueled cars were still years away from commercial viability. “We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no,’” Chu said in May [CNET].
But the program has proven harder to take down than the flammable zeppelin: Both houses of Congress seem inclined to restore funding. The House of Representatives voted on an energy package on Friday that includes $153 million for hydrogen and fuel cell research, and the parallel bill that will go before the Senate currently includes $190 million for the program.
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Earlier this week, the oil giant ExxonMobil announced a significant shift in direction: Rather than drilling ever downward in an attempt to find more oil, the company will invest heavily in green, growing things that can manufacture biofuel. Exxon plans to put $600 million into the production of algae-based biofuels, and will partner with the genetics company Synthetic Genomics run by genomics pioneer Craig Venter. The announcement came just a week after another industrial giant, Dow Chemical, declared its own investment in algae technology.
The biofuel industry is currently facing a shift from first-generation biofuels to so-called advanced biofuels as evidence mounts that corn-based ethanol and soybean biodiesel are not as ecologically, socially or economically sustainable as many first thought…. Algae have been touted as a better organic material for producing biofuel by many researchers and entrepreneurs. It does not take up any arable land and can be grown in controlled conditions; at a basic level algae only needs water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and some nutrients to grow [CNN].
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Five patent applications for technology that aims to control the weather bear the signature of a man who knows how to think big: Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The applications made public by the U.S. Patent Office last week describe floating devices that could reduce the strength of hurricanes by drawing warm water from the ocean‘s surface and channeling it down to the depths through a long tube. A second tube would reverse the process and bring deep, cold water up to the surface.
The applications were filed by an entity called Searete, which is part of the company Intellectual Ventures that was founded by former Microsoft executives as an “invention business;” Bill Gates is an investor in the company. Gates is listed as one of the inventors on each hurricane-quelling patent application, along with scientists like the geoengineering expert Ken Caldeira. One of the patent applications describes how part or all of the cost of building and maintaining the hurricane-killer ships could be raised by selling insurance to coastal residents whose risk would be reduced by using the new system [New Orleans Times-Picayune].
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What a difference a year makes. In July 2008, Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens offered up the “Pickens Plan” to end U.S. dependence on foreign oil by producing more electricity from huge wind farms, and running vehicles on natural gas instead of gasoline. To kick-start the transformation, Pickens announced that he would construct the biggest wind farm ever in Texas. Pickens announced that his company, Mesa Power LP, would order 687 wind turbines, or 1,000 megawatts of capacity, from GE for about $2 billion. By 2014, he expected to expand the Panhandle wind farm to 4,000 megawatts. That’s a massive amount of wind power. One nuclear power reactor is typically about 1,000 megawatts of capacity. Most wind farms offer only a few hundred megawatts [Dallas Morning News].
Now, one year later, Pickens has declared that he’s canceling the enormous Texas wind farm for the foreseeable future, and is scrambling to figure out where to place the 687 wind turbines that he already ordered. (He may end up establishing five or six small wind farms in the Midwest, Pickens suggested.) The project was largely done in by major problems with electricity transmission. Wind farms and other forms of clean energy are usually located in remote locations and require huge new transmission lines to carry the electricity to cities. Mr. Pickens initially hoped to finance the construction of his own transmission lines but was unable to secure funding [The Wall Street Journal].
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At a Texas industrial site, the vats of chemicals may soon stand adjacent to long tubes filled with algae. Industrial giant Dow Chemical today announced a new partnership with startup company Algenol Biofuels to build a pilot plant, which will use algae to convert carbon dioxide emissions into ethanol. That ethanol could be used either as a biofuel or, eventually, as an ingredient for Dow’s plastics.
Pond scum is one of the hottest trends in green technology, and a few dozen companies are racing to bring algae-based biofuels to the market. But one prominent algae company, GreenFuel, went out of business just a few months ago, leading some commentators to believe that we are a longer way off from commercialization than claimed by breathless algae start-up press releases [Greentech Media]. If Dow and Algenol can bring their plans to fruition, it will be the most compelling argument yet that the renewable energy source does have the potential that its supporters say.
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When Chicago’s Sears Tower was completed in 1973 the 110-story building was the tallest in the world, and it offered a bold example of the human potential to build towards the clouds. Now, although the tower lost the title of tallest building to other skyscrapers in the 1990s, the tower hopes to dazzle the world anew with a fresh vision of urban architecture: The building will soon receive a $350 million environmental retrofit, with wind turbines, solar panels, and gardens all added to the building’s staggered rooftops.
The 5-year project would reduce the tower’s electricity use by 80 percent and save 24 million gallons of water a year, building owners and architects said…. “Our plans are very ambitious,” said John Huston of American Landmark Properties, who represents the building ownership. “Our plans to modernize and transform this icon will re-establish Sears Tower as a leader, a pioneer” [AP].
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Sleek, streamlined wind turbines have become the icons of the green movement, but for all the growth in wind power — it accounted for 42% of all new electricity generation added to the U.S. grid last year — wind still makes up less than 3% of America’s total electricity generation [Time]. Its marginal role has led many to wonder whether the technology is worth investing in, and whether wind power is capable of supplying enough electricity to meet our needs. To answer those questions, researchers analyzed wind patterns around the world and found that wind power could theoretically supply the entire world with energy, and then some.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, isn’t being presented as a realistic plan to achieve a renewable energy nirvana; it’s simply an attempt to provide a sense of what’s possible [Ars Technica]. But the researchers’ reckoning of what’s possible is quite impressive: maxing out deployment of current-generation technology could produce five times the total energy used in the world today, and 40 times the electricity [Ars Technica].
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The Department of Energy is handing out nearly $8 billion in loans today, and $465 million of the funds will go to Tesla Motors to produce its Model S electric sedan, the company’s first attempt at a mass-market car. The company already manufactures the Roadster, a high-performance electric sports car. Nissan and Ford Motor Company will receive the other loans; they’ll get $1.6 billion and $5.9 billion, respectively, to help produce fuel-efficient cars.
Nissan will use the funds updating a plant in Tennessee to produce the company’s upcoming electric sedan, and Ford’s loan will help expedite production of cars that go farther on less fuel. Tesla was perhaps the wild card in the funding equation because it is a small startup. The company has delivered slightly more than 500 Roadsters to customers, and the government loan will help pay for a Southern California manufacturing plant for the Model S sedan, due in 2011. A second plant in the Bay Area will make battery packs and electric drivetrains [The New York Times].
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