Climate Lameness

by: Jill Richardson

Fri Aug 20, 2010 at 22:13:38 PM PDT

Check this out. Virginia's climate crisis denying Attorney General is pursuing legal action against a climate scientist, alleging fraud for using government grants to do his climate crisis research. (This is, of course, not unusual behavior for current Republican Governor-AG team in Virginia, who also rescinded the state's protections against discrimination for gays and lesbians.)

And, remember about a year ago when the House passed a cap and trade climate bill? (One that left agriculture entirely out of it, I might add.) Well, lame and watered down as it was, 44 Democrats voted against it anyway. Now, many of their Republican opponents are attacking them for supporting cap and trade, even though they didn't. Moral of the story for Democrats: Vote the right way, because the Republicans will just make up whatever they want to say about you anyway.

I hate politics.

New cookstove also makes electricity

by: mental_masala

Sun Mar 28, 2010 at 10:51:38 AM PDT

Yet another cookstove piece appeared in my Google News alert, this one from Science Alert. It's tightly focused on a particular technology and is written in an over the top style, sprinkled with "brilliant", "genius" and other superlatives in so many places that it could have been written by one of the subjects' mothers. Anyway, the point of the article is to describe a stove that burns rice husks and its developers. And this is quite interesting, as it involves some clever engineering.

One of the fuels the stove can burn is rice husks, which are plentiful in many developing nations. Husks are often burned in the field as a way of reducing their volume and helping the soil, but this leads to air quality problems, both locally (toxins) and globally (black carbon). With this stove, the ash remaining from the husks can then be spread on the fields, giving the same result as if they were burned in situ.

The stove's efficiency is greatly enhanced by a small electric fan that drives fresh air across the burning biomass, providing a steady stream of oxygen for the combustion process. But wait a second, you might think, many villages don't have electricity, so how will this work? Steve Garrett of the Pennsylvania State University has a solution: thermo-acoustics, in which heat is converted to sound, which is then converted to electricity. Garrett is a specialist in thermo-acoustics and has designed these generators for such clients as NASA (for use on spacecraft) and Ben and Jerry's (ice cream freezers).

Cookstoves and climate change

by: mental_masala

Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 22:53:06 PM PDT

New articles about cookstoves seem to be appearing weekly. Here's one from Yale's E360 blog by Jon R. Louma that looks at how cookstoves represent an intersection of climate change and human health. The big picture:

Some two billion people around the world, [Lakshman] Guruswami [professor of international law at the University of Colorado] notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass - dried dung, wood, brush, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher - about three-fourths.

"Think about that," says Guruswami , who directs his university's Center for Energy and Environmental Security. "Two billion people, one-third of the people on Earth, are caught in a time warp, with no access to modern energy. They got energy from Prometheus a long time ago, and that was it."

One of the emissions from these primitive stoves is something called "black carbon," which is a component of smoke that is almost completely made up of elemental carbon. The carbon is aligned into agglomerations of tiny particle in such a way that it has a deep black color (recall that glittering diamonds are also made up of carbon, but the atoms are organized in a significantly different way than the carbon atoms in black carbon). In recent years, black carbon has been receiving more and more attention from the climate change research community, with some estimating that black carbon is the second most important climate change agent after carbon dioxide (see, for example, a report from the Pew Center on Climate Change or one from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University , PDF).

The piece looks at the effect of black carbon on the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau (it reduces the reflectivity of the snow, leading to faster melting) and the work of non-governmental organizations like Envirofit (a stove-designing nonprofit); Trees, Water, and People (which focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti); and Project Surya in India.

Whereas much of the climate change discussion is about carbon dioxide and avoiding major calamity in the future, black carbon is a "now" and "here" issue:  reductions in the emission of the pollutant would lead to immediate health benefits in the developing world (e.g., around cookstoves) and the industrialized world (diesel engines emit black carbon), while also helping to defuse the climate crisis, giving us a little time to get our carbon dioxide emissions under control.

Building a better cookstove

by: mental_masala

Sat Mar 13, 2010 at 09:14:11 AM PST

In the March 2010 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, Tina Adler takes a look at cookstoves in the developing world, their tremendous health toll and new approaches to providing cleaner alternatives. This article has several important differences from the New Yorker article that I wrote about a few months ago: it focuses more on health effects and distribution challenges and less on engineering, has some photographs and is freely available to all.

A summary of the article is below the jump.

Book Recommendation: Diet for a Hot Planet

by: Jill Richardson

Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 14:15:21 PM PST

Grass-Fed vs. Grain-Fed Beef

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Jan 28, 2010 at 16:49:42 PM PST

   * Grass-fed cows produce more greenhouse gas than grain-fed.
   * Critics point out that the pasture used to raise grass-fed beef offers a carbon sink.
   * Experts point out that eating vegetarian is far better from a carbon point of view.

Cookstoves are a hot topic

by: mental_masala

Sun Dec 27, 2009 at 09:43:08 AM PST

If you were to list the top causes of death and sickness in the developing world, cooking would probably be in the top tier (I'd guess that lack of clean water is at the top). In villages and cities across the world, millions cook their food while engulfed in plumes of toxic gases and particulate matter (smoke and soot). Women and children bear the brunt of these toxins: women most often do the cooking and children are often nearby. The source of these toxins is the fire that is burning wood, kerosene, dung, or another material underneath their cooking pots. In addition, gathering the fuel can be risky business, exposing the gatherer to bandits and other nefarious people. One study (PDF) estimates that there are 1.6 million premature deaths and 3.6% of the global burden of disease due to indoor air pollution caused by the use of solid fuels.

This toxic burden has been receiving a lot of attention recently, including a long article in the December 21 & 28 issue of The New Yorker. When the issue arrived a few days ago, I made my usual scan of the table of contents to see what was inside. "A stove to transform the developing world"— the subtitle of an article called “Hearth Surgery” by Burkhard Bilger — caught my eye because I've long had an interest in domestic combustion devices.* So excited was I to see such an august publication covering something as humble as the cookstove that I immediately turned to the article and started reading.

In the first paragraph, I saw the name "Dale Andreatta" and just about fell over. Dale, it turns out, was one of my research colleagues during graduate school in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Even back then Dale had an interest in using engineering to solve difficult problems of the developing world. One project that I remember was solar water pasteurization with low-cost materials — some black trash bags, some sand, a hose, and a temperature switch.** I helped out on a few occasions, but at that time in my life I hadn't yet picked up experimental skills (I was into numerical modeling, the serious experimental work would come a few years later).

World farm voices, Mozambique: peasants of the world unite.

by: Natasha Chart

Tue Dec 22, 2009 at 13:33:16 PM PST

Renaldo Chingore João works a 5-7 acre farm with his family. There, they grow maize, beans and vegetables, keeping 15 cows for meat and milk, as well as draft labor. Though it's a small farm, João and his family don't face the world alone.

They're part of a community that's organized itself for advocacy and mutual support, both within Mozambique and the larger global community of peasant farmers.

Smallholder Farmers Speak Out Against Copenhagen

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Dec 19, 2009 at 21:43:26 PM PST

Copenhagen: All Done and Totally Sucky

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Dec 19, 2009 at 17:35:51 PM PST

USDA's Report on the Impacts of the House Climate Bill

by: Jill Richardson

Fri Dec 18, 2009 at 17:13:42 PM PST

The Most Recent Copenhagen Draft for Ag

by: Jill Richardson

Fri Dec 18, 2009 at 11:13:32 AM PST

In addition to this, there's the issue of ag offsets, which Annie Shattuck of Food First writes about, saying:

This comes at the same time that radical proposals to subsidize soil carbon storage (likely through 'biochar', RoundUp Ready GM crops and industrial tree plantations) with carbon offsetting schemes made it back into the draft after having been presumed dead. The proposals would allow wealthy countries to buy carbon credits through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) instead of reducing emissions at home.

The inclusion of agriculture in the CDM is extremely problematic - transaction costs to participate in the program are high, giving structural advantage to large-scale industrial technologies like GM monocultures. Moreover, a recent civil society study of CDM projects found that 75% did not provide any emissions reductions whatsoever.

All in all - with this along with the bombshell dropped yesterday that the U.S. is shooting for a 3 degree Celsius global temperature increase and 550 ppm CO2 - this is very bad. (Developed countries were previously talking about a 2 degree increase, which Africa was calling a death sentence and developing nations were advocating "1.5 to stay alive." And, of course, the science says we need 350 ppm, NOT 550!)

I've heard via Amy Goodman's show Democracy Now that the U.S. is more or less trying to bribe their way into getting what they want by calling for very lax carbon limits and then offering up $100 billion in aid to developing nations. Developing nations all want a stronger agreement BUT with $100 million per year at stake, they also fear that those who give into the U.S. will get the money - and those who don't, won't.

Worldwatch Report: Roadmap to Low-Carbon Energy by 2030

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Dec 17, 2009 at 16:00:00 PM PST

Between 1990 and 2007, world gross domestic product increased 156 percent while global energy demand rose 39 percent, pushing up
global CO2 emissions by 38 percent. Were it not for advances in energy efficiency - gains achieved without aggressive policies - the increase in energy use and associated emissions would have been much greater. Even so, more than half of the energy that we consume does not provide us with useful services, and there is enormous potential for improvement in all sectors of the economy.

In 2007, renewable energy provided more than 18 percent of total final energy supply. Solar energy, wind power, and other renewable technologies have experienced double-digit annual growth rates for more than a decade. The renewable share of additional global power generation (excluding large hydropower) jumped from 5 percent in 2003 to 23 percent in 2008, and this ratio is significantly greater in many individual countries.

A recent study revealed that there is an enormous gap between the nation's most and least efficient states and that by simply closing that gap, up to 30 percent of U.S. electricity consumption could be curtailed, displacing more than 60 percent of the nation's coal-fired generation and dramatically reducing national CO2 emissions.

Below you'll find the press release announcing the publication of this report along with a link to download it.

New International Ag-Climate Alliance Formed

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Dec 17, 2009 at 12:00:00 PM PST

Bad News from Copenhagen

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Dec 17, 2009 at 10:25:26 AM PST

The news from a press release I've included below is that Copenhagen is paving the way for carbon offsets (called CDMs or Clean Development Mechanisms in the language of the agreement) that are totally bogus. This is very bad.