Climate Change Reaches Marketplace – Come Listen

The articles on carbon capture and sequestration led to a LIVELY discussion at our last meeting. It was a good reminder that taking science in a “greener” direction means taking science into the human arena. What kind of technologies will people accept?

This week’s meeting, 12 PM, Thurs (Nov 5), Chemistry student lounge, will take us into the land of the podcast. The NPR show, Marketplace, ran a series of episodes last week on “The Climate Race” and I hope to download some of these segments and play them at our meeting. If you can’t make the meeting, but would like to see/listen to the segments, follow these links:

• Tues, Oct 27 – Climate change in our own backyards. Beetle infestation is killing large numbers of trees in Helena, Montana
• Wed, Oct 28 – The planet will survive, but will we? The Earth’s climate has changed many times. What do these changes look like?
• Th, Oct 29 – Is there energy to slow climate change? How will tackling climate change create winners and losers in the energy sector?
• F, Oct 30 – How do we live with a warmer planet? The planet has already begun warming. More warming is in store.

Meeting notes – Th, Oct 1

Present: Claire, Paul, Josh, Julie, Alan

All kinds of ideas were kicked around at our lunch meeting. I was shocked when I finally looked at the clock and saw how quickly the hour had passed. Some of the topics that we picked up:

• Organic farming – is it better than conventional farming?
• Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. According to the Old Testament, Ishmael is the half-brother of Isaac, the favored son of Abraham. In Daniel Quinn’s novel, Ishmael is a gorilla, a “half-brother” to the human narrator. Follow the link to learn more, or better yet, read the book.
• What is the world’s carrying capacity? According to the folks at www.myfootprint.org humans are generally consuming the Earth’s resources for supporting life and then some. Try taking the (short) quiz at their web site and see what your footprint comes out to be (you can also learn ways to shrink your footprint – which ways seem to have the greatest appeal?). Our lunch discussion led to a discussion of “footprints” of various sorts and how a footprint is affected by a society’s technological capacity, e.g., how we can grow much more food from an acre of land today than we could before we started using fossil fuels. I encourage everyone to read the letter that a retired chemist, William Garwood wrote in 2003, titled “Why I Studied Chemistry” (reprinted at the department’s web site with the author’s permission).
• Toxic chemicals. We began by reviewing the article on e-waste being shipped to China for recycling. Discussion then took off in several directions. One direction was the process by which toxic materials and unsafe disposal sites become identified and dealt with. Students were unfamiliar with the case of Love Canal, one of the most famous episodes in recent American history of improper waste disposal. (I strongly recommend reading “Happy Birthday, Love Canal” in Environ. Sci. Technol., 2008, 42(22), 8179-8186.) Another direction involved how toxic chemicals ever get approved for commercial use in the first place. Different countries use different rules and the Precautionary Principle is a rule that has gained favor in Europe, but not in the USA. Why do you suppose this is? Finally, as time ran out, we considered the role that good design might play in preventing toxics from finding their way into commercial products in the first place. Can synthetic chemistry ever mimic Nature’s ability to work with inherently degradable, reusable materials? Some of you might find inspiration in the book, “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.

Next Meeting – Th, Oct 1, noon

We’ll meet again on Thursday in the Chemistry student lounge to share lunch and ideas.

I just read an interesting article about electronics waste being shipped to China and poisoning the inhabitants. See “Confronting a Toxic Blowback from the Electronics Trade” (Science, 28 August 2009, p. 1055). This follows up on a story that is covered in the book, “High Tech Trash” (the Reed library owns a copy, but I have borrowed it – come see me if you want to read it – AJS). While googling “high tech trash”, I also came across a recent article in National Geographic (Jan 2008).

What have you been reading lately?

Meeting notes (9/10): biochar and CO2

Present: Mariah, Josh, Erin, Claire, Julie, Alan

Alternate meeting times were briefly discussed. The Doodle poll had produced a couple of alternatives to Thursday at noon, with Wednesday noon and several times on Friday looking about as promising. Because of some schedule disruptions in coming weeks (see below), we won’t do anything about our meeting time for now.

Julie called two upcoming seminars in environmental chemistry to our attention.

• Prof. Lynn Russell, Scripps Institution of Oceanography & UC San Diego, will be speaking on Thursday, September 15, 4:15 PM.
• The following week, Prof. Kris McNeill (Reed ’92), U. Minnesota (but soon-to-be ETH in Switzerland) will be featured as the Thomas Dunne lecturer on Thursday, September 22, 4:15 PM.

Since each seminar offers an opportunity to meet with prominent environmental scientists on the same day that the Green Science Project would normally meet, we decided to cancel our Sept. 15 and 22 meetings in order to encourage group members to attend events connected with the seminar. Students can go to lunch with Dr. Russell (and the chemistry department will foot the bill) by showing up in the chemistry lobby at 11:50 AM. A similar encounter with Prof. McNeill will also be available and possibly a chemistry-sponsored dinner as well. Contact Julie for more details.

Finally, we turned to a discussion of some newsworthy stories. Claire alerted us to an article in The Economist (Tuesday, Sept 15, 2009) “The Virtues of Biochar”. Biochar is a substance produced by pyrolysis of agricultural materials, e.g., corn stover, that enhances the fertility of soils and also absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. Next, Alan took us through his “high-carbon” lifestyle and sorted out the CO2 emitted by a year’s use of natural gas and electricity around the house, gasoline from his car, and jet fuel from airplane trips. The details are intricate so they will be presented in a separate post.

Costs of Climate Change

The Jan 9, 2009 issue of Science contains a paper (p. 240) and a commentary (“Higher Temperatures Seen Reducing Global Harvests”, p. 193) on the effects of climate change on agricultural yields. An atmospheric scientist, David Battisti (U. Washington, Seattle), and an economist, Rosamond Naylor (Stanford U., Palo Alto), analyzed predictions from 23 climate models used by the IPCC to figure out what might happen to agricultural yields by the end of this century.

“Their conclusions with regard to agriculture are sobering. “In the past, heat waves, drought, and food shortages have hit particular regions,” says Battisti. But the future will be different. “Yields are going to be down every place.” Heat will be the main culprit.” (emphasis added) Additional support comes from past observations. A heat wave struck France in summer 2003 and “the country’s corn and fruit harvests fell more than 25%.”

At the same time that agricultural yields might be falling, scientists expect to see a rise in global populations, a rise in demand for meat, and a rise in demand for water. If all of these trends collide, food costs could eat up a much larger fraction of the average person’s paycheck in developed countries, and food scarcity will affect many more people in developing countries.

To avoid these problems, we need to act now. Scientists need to develop new heat-resistant crop varieties and citizens, politicians, and scientists need to figure out ways of limiting the degree of climate change.

California leads the way towards green chemistry

“California launches nation’s first green chemistry program,” writes Env. Science & Technology. “With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (R-CA) signature on September 29, California became the first U.S. state to approve two laws that will move its regulatory scheme toward a comprehensive chemicals policy. The legislation is intended to improve public and environmental health protection and encourage green chemistry−the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances.”

The Nov. 19 ES&T article describes the California program, its supporters and detractors, and how it compares to the innovative REACH program being implemented by the EU for chemical manufacture. While the impact of the California program won’t be known for some time, the establishment of a state-wide green chemistry program could encourage other states to do adopt similar programs.

Journal of Renewable & Sustainable Energy

The American Institute of Physics has launched a new journal devoted to new energy sources. The Journal of Renewable & Sustainable Energy will be published online every two months during its first year and hopes to become a monthly afterwards. JRSE is free to the public so dig in and see what’s going in this area. Maybe share your treasures with the group? Too busy to read? Listen to a Science Friday interview with a JRSE editor (Nov 7, 2008).

Some article titles from the inaugural issue:

• Fabrication of organic solar array for applications in microelectromechanical systems
• Flexible Cu(In,Ga)Se₂ solar cells fabricated using alkali-silicate glass thin layers as an alkali source material

• Geothermal Energy: Harnessing the Heat Beneath Your Feet

Buddha Goes Green

In a beautiful and rather stunning climax of the green movement, the Wat Pa Maha Chedio Kaew temple in Thailand surfaced through the news media today. The Buddhist temple is constructed almost entirely or glass bottles, totaling an estimated 1.5 million bottles used in the construction of everything from the crematorium to the toilets.

As a building material, the bottles are free, don’t fade, are easy to maintain, and allow natural light to pass through into the temple. On the interior, bottle caps were also used to make mosaics to decorate the space. While this likely isn’t going to become as popular a building method as earthships, it certainly demonstrates that recycling has few limits.

More on the temple here.

What Drives the Cost of Oil?

When petroleum prices soared last summer to over $140 a barrel, Americans began changing their daily routine, their car buying habits, and their political preferences. Now, only a few months later, the price has crashed.

Watching prices posted at Portland gas stations has been instructive. Prices were well over $4/gallon last summer. This weekend I passed a station on Highway 26 that was selling gasoline for just under $3/gallon.

It is tempting to approach this as a resource issue. How much petroleum is still in the ground? How much is being pumped out? Who wants it and what are they willing to pay for it? But before we travel down the road of supply-and-demand with the oil companies and their political friends (drill, baby, drill!), we should realize that it is highly unlikely that either supply or demand has varied all that much in the last 10 weeks. Something else might be driving the price shifts.

Living on Earth’s Bruce Gellerman reports that “hedge fund manager, Michael Masters, told a Senate subcommittee that supply and demand can only explain a part of the volatility. Masters says the real reason is market manipulation, not necessarily by a small group of Dr. No evildoers, but by institutional investors, who funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into what are called commodity index funds.” You can read the entire interview at Living on Earth (Sept 19, 2008) or download the podcast (mp3).

How Much Water and Other Materials are in Your…

Coffee? Bacon? Cheese? Steak?

Check out the selection at the Greenhome Huddle.

6 pounds of grain are used to make 1 pound of boneless pork.

I for one account for 36 coffee trees and almost 60,000 gallons of water, just to make me functional in the morning. On the upside, for each thing aptly criticized Greenhome suggests a way or two to ‘green’ it.