carbon mitigation

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We Must Reduce Energy Use, Not Just CO2 Emissions, To Prevent Catastrophic Global Warming

July 15, 2009 in analysis, carbon mitigation, energy generation, solar electricity, solar thermal by nils | 1 comment

playing with fire

Playing With Fire (image by charles chan, CC 2.0 license)

An article in Sunday’s Science Daily reports on research showing that more than half of the Earth’s warming since the dawn of the industrial age is due to the heat released from our energy use, not atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect.

While the greenhouse effect is still a significant contributor – and will become more so as GHG levels in the atmosphere rise – simply the heat released when burning fuels is also being stored in the atmosphere, as well as in the earth, sea, and arctic ice.

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China’s Coal Plants Getting Less Dirty, How To Rebuild The Built Environment, Who To Follow on Twitter

May 11, 2009 in analysis, carbon mitigation, energy generation, green building by nils | 2 comments

industry

Smokestacks (image by shoothead, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some good news from China this week, and a blueprint for addressing the huge amount of energy used, and GHG’s generated, by the built environment:

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No Manhattan Project, But Don’t Say No To Breakthrough Innovations

April 10, 2009 in accelerating change, analysis, carbon mitigation, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, opinion, technology by nils | 1 comment

a polar bear and her baby

The polar bears say "keep the innovations coming - it's getting warm out here!" (image by Just Being Myself, CC 2.0 licensed)

While I agree with Joseph Romm on Climate Progress that we can’t count on a “Manhattan Project”-style endeavour to engineer our way out of the climate crisis in the short term, nonetheless, I think it’s reasonable to have a certain expectation that technology will improve over the right timescale, so we can be ready to take advantage of it.

A few weeks ago Martin Brown had a great post on his Fairsnape blog on Recession Thoughts and Tips. One of his many excellent suggestions was

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Menlo Park Climate Action Plan Research

March 2, 2009 in carbon mitigation, energy efficiency, green building, policy by nils | Add your comment

Menlo Park Train Station

Menlo Park Train Station

Just about two weeks ago, my friend Matt Harris, an architect with a green building practice, sent me an email:

The City of Menlo Park has this Climate Action plan and they are looking for community input. Would you be interested in formulating some kind of response that would of course include our plug for passive house initiatives. Maybe we can get them to include some passive home or even passive building information or plans or guidelines in the Climate action plan. They have already cited “commercial buildings” as a target energy hog in the city for action in the action plan.

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Ten Energy Predictions For The Next Decade

January 5, 2009 in accelerating change, carbon mitigation, economy, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, green building, integrative design, opinion, solar electricity, transportation by nils | Add your comment

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1)

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1, CC 2.0 license)

On December 30 of last year (six days ago), my wife and I were in Pasadena, CA visiting the Greene and Greene exhibit at the Huntington Library. It was one of those glorious and rare smog-free days in the LA basin. The air sparkled, you could see for miles in every direction, and mountain range after mountain range was visible – all the way out to the snow-covered San Gabriels. Nowadays, the air is only ever this clear around the Christmas holiday, when the freeway traffic is substantially reduced and a lot of factories shut down for the week. It got me thinking about how the future – say ten to twenty years hence – may be unrecognizable in both dramatic and mundane ways. For example, smog-free days may no longer be rare in LA, once the economy has shifted off fossil fuels. (I suspect the traffic will remain, unfortunately!)

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The Answer Is Blowing In The Wind

December 12, 2008 in analysis, biofuels, carbon mitigation, energy generation, transportation by nils | Add your comment

Windmill and old houses in Schipluiden

Old Windmill (image by waterwin, CC 2.0 license)

The results of this study on solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, by Stanford professor Mark Z. Jacobson, are somewhat surprising, given the drumbeat from many areas on both nuclear and biofuels as necessary for the salvation of the world.

Jacobson analyzes 12 energy sources for their beneficial impact on global warming, air pollution, and energy security – the ten electricity sources are solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology; the two liquid fuel options are corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85.

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Encourage Obama To Name a Secretary Of Food

December 11, 2008 in agriculture, carbon mitigation, economy by nils | Add your comment

Kale

Beatiful kale,not from a factory farm (photo by terren in Virginia, CC 2.0 licensed)

Nicholas Kristof in his NY Times op-ed today urges Obama to appoint a Secretary of Food:

A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.

The interests of big agriculture – the “factory farmers” – are really opposed to the interests of people. The “food” they raise wastes energy, causes huge environment damage, makes us unhealthy, and even leads to antibiotic resistant diseases.

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Watch Out For Unintended Consequences

November 17, 2008 in carbon mitigation, energy generation, policy by nils | Add your comment

Mojave Desert scene in Joshua Tree National Park.

Image via Wikipedia

In their editorial Green Energy vs. Actual “Green” Energy Basin and Range Watch point out that there are lots of opportunities for making a big mess of the environment while trying to save it. The focus of this site is the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts in Nevada and California, the targets of many new solar projects. “There are over one million acres of public land in the six states that are being considered for sacrifice.”

Most of these projects require a lot of water, and all require “clear cutting” the desert to prevent weeds and pests.

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What’s My Car’s CO2 Footprint In Units of Newly Planted Trees?

October 9, 2008 in carbon mitigation by nils | Add your comment

Nurse log, spruce or fir, central Colorado, wi...

Image via Wikipedia

Did you ever wonder what reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 1 million metric tons means in everyday terms? The EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator can help you understand just that.

It can be difficult to visualize what a “metric ton of carbon dioxide” really is. This calculator will translate rather difficult to understand statements into more commonplace terms, such as “is
equivalent to avoiding the carbon dioxide emissions of X number of cars annually.”

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Biofuels: Balancing The Equations

September 15, 2008 in biofuels, carbon mitigation by nils | Add your comment

mostly-hidden frog grendelkhan

Algae-covered Frog

The biggest energy stories in August were about fuel cell-related breakthroughs and big solar projects. But the world of biofuels had some big news percolating as well. The beauty of biofuels, of course, is that they provide us with that extremely energy-dense liquid that we already know how to use (that is, gasoline, diesel, and ethanol), by sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere using solar energy.

In this post I highlight some of the biofuel-related items that caught my eye in the past few weeks, from algae that make diesel from atmospheric CO2 and sunlight, to harnessing bacteria and microbes as our refineries. This is just a small slice of the activity going on in biofuels, of course. Just as in solar PV, and batteries, and fuel cells, and wind, and alternative energy investing, there’s an ever-increasing flood of news every week. If I’m missing one of your favorites, please let me know in the comments!

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