To learn more, take a look at This Much Mercury … How the coal industry poisoned your tuna sandwich by Dashka Slater (Sierra Magazine, Nov/Dec 2011). And, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys a tuna sandwich or sushi several times a week, spend a little time studying the But What Fish Can I Eat? graphic to find fish with lower mercury loads. The full-size image is a PDF and can be printed. Your brain will thank you.

But what if you are a civil engineer and it’s your job to dig up your city’s streets and replace the storm drain pipes? Can scientists tell you how big the new pipes should be in order to handle the rain water that you are likely to see over the next 75 years? According to “Vital Details of Global Warming Are Eluding Forecasters” (Science, 14 October 2011, p. 173) the answer is no. Making detailed forecasts for a city as large as Seattle, a region as large as the Pacific Northwest, “or even the western half of the United States,” appears to be beyond the abilities of current simulation programs. Or is it?

Read the article to see just how controversial regional climate modeling can be.

The “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” graphic in the July/August 2011 issue of Sierra Club magazine makes the same point. The picture (see below) comes from Mike Berner-Lee’s book, How Bad Are Bananas? (Greystone, 2011). Even if some of these figures are off by a whopping factor of two, you can see that a few hours spent on vacation air travel can wipe out a thousand intelligent decisions about plastic bags, bananas, and paperback books. What was it my Dad used to say, ‘penny wise, pound foolish’?

Many of these people find themselves in a situation not unlike that of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, surrounded by abundant seawater, but with limited or no access to freshwater (the poem says, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”) . The dream for them is to convert seawater into fresh water through “desalination,” the removal of dissolved salts. “The Future of Seawater Desalination” describes the best practices for doing this (reverse osmosis), its energy requirements, possible enhancements through the development of new membrane materials, and whether desalination can ever be made sustainable.

That’s about to change. According to the Mother Nature Network (August 8, 2011, “EPA takes on obscure chemicals in consumer products”), the EPA is about to crack down on these widely used, but seldom recognized, toxic solvents.

Studies in rodents have shown that all three solvents can cause abnormalities in developing animals. Some of these glymes also cause reproductive problems. A 1995 study funded by the Semiconductor Industry Association and published in a full issue of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine reported a pattern of increased miscarriages among women workers exposed to mixtures of ethylene-based glycol ethers including diglyme.

Glyme solvents are widely used in manufacturing, and their uses are not limited to semiconductor and electronic products. When the EPA rules go into effect, 14 different members of the glyme family will be controlled.

See the winners of Multnomah County’s Climate Short Film Contest plus a new documentary, Deep Green – Solutions to Stop Global Warming Now at 6 PM, Sun, July 31, McMenamin’s Bagdad Theater (SE 37th and SE Hawthorne). Doors open at 5 PM. The movies are free. The beer is (probably) not.

Lithium, however, is only half the story as far as lithium batteries are concerned. When a lithium battery discharges (or charges), electrons move between lithium and some other substance, and there’s the rub, finding a companion substance with all of the right properties, including light weight. “Getting There” (Science, 24 June 2011, p. 1494) reports on the latest research advances in “lithium” battery technologies (from 4th Symposium on Energy Storage: Beyond Lithium Ion held at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, June 7-9), including “lithium ion”, “lithium sulfide” and “lithium air” batteries.

The sidebar on Battery FAQs makes for some interesting reading:

“Why is lithium so often used in batteries?

Lithium is the lightest metal and has the highest energy density for its weight.

Is there enough lithium to make batteries for millions of cars a year?

in 2005, roughly 21,000 tons of lithium was produced worldwide. More than 6 million tons of lithium reserves are thought to be economically viable to recover. Twice that amount exists in forms not economically viable to recover today. An analysis presented at the meeting by Paul Albertus of the Robert Bosch Research & Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, suggests there will be plenty of lithium over the near term, through the next 15 years. It’s only in the long term, 40 to 50 years from now, that the lithium supply could get tight. Other elements, such as cobalt, could pose a bigger problem, depending on the chemistry of the batteries produced.

How will widespread adoption of electric vehicles affect CO2 emissions and possible climate change?

It won’t, unless the electricity used to power those cars is generated by renewable energy sources. But even if the electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants, many of which exist in rural areas, urban emissions of smog-forming particles could still drop dramatically.”

Regulations like these seem like a no-brainer, but predictably enough, the coal-burning industry is fighting back.

Note to students: Whenever a government agency steps forward with a regulation, regardless of its benefits to society, the regulated industry protests. Sometimes actual companies protest, but it is far more common for an advocacy group with some friendly, but misleading, name to carry the fight forward. In this case, a group called American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (which actually turns out to be a front organization for coal-burning utilities) says the regulations will cost a lot, are being implemented too fast, and will endanger jobs and the economy.

But what kind of economic activity justifies 34,000 extra deaths, 15,000 extra heart attacks, and hundreds of thousands of extra asthma cases? Why should these coal-burning utilities get to treat extra medical costs and lives lost as “externalities”? Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA sorts it out correctly when she says, “No community should have to bear the burden of another community’s polluters, or be powerless to prevent air pollution that leads to asthma, heart attacks and other harmful illnesses.”

And what about those unaffordable costs? According to another utility front group, the Clean Energy Group (does every utility group work “Clean” into its title?), most of the affected utilities have already installed the equipment needed to meet the new standards.

So what about coal? Did you know that when it comes to generating electricity, coal (not oil) is king? Since 1995, coal-burning power plants have provided roughly 50% of the energy needed to drive electrons through the nation’s power grid. Turn on your computer, click the remote on your TV, text a friend, flick on the lights – 50% of the power (on average) comes from the burning of coal. And did you know about the greenhouse gases produced by coal? 41% of worldwide CO2 emissions in 2005 were attributed to coal burning.*

But CO2 is only part of the Coal Problem. A new article from the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1219, 73-98, reports on the “Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal”. There is pollution, waste, and hazard at every stage, and the coal industry doesn’t have to pay for most of it. You and I do. As the authors put it, “Each stage in the life cycle of coal—extraction, transport, processing, and combustion—generates a waste stream and carries multiple hazards for health and the environment. These costs are external to the coal industry and are thus often considered “externalities.”We estimate that the life cycle effects of coal and the waste stream generated are costing the U.S. public a third to over one-half of a trillion dollars annually.Many of these so-called externalities are, moreover, cumulative. Accounting for the damages conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated, making wind, solar, and other forms of nonfossil fuel power generation, along with investments in efficiency and electricity conservation methods, economically competitive. We focus on Appalachia, though coal is mined in other regions of the United States and is burned throughout the world.”

*If one factors in the CO2 released by mining, processing, and transporting coal, the amount of CO2 released per unit coal burned is even higher.

One article, “Whither Sustainable Development” (p. 39) describes how U.N.-sponsored negotiations fell apart in mid-May over the definition of “green economy”. That issue, plus failing to agree on the responsibility of industrialized (“rich”) countries to provide financial and technical assistance to developing (“poor”) nations, stopped talks cold. Negotiators walked away from their tables and a number of agreements were left in limbo. Cross your fingers that the delegates will find a way to resolve their differences before next year’s U.N.-sponsored conference on sustainable development.

A second article, “Resources: Boosting Efficiency While Curbing Environmental Harm” (p. 40),  describes a new report on “Decoupling” from the U.N. International Resource Panel (IRP). Bottom-line: the entire world needs to “decouple”, that is, learn how to create products and services while consuming a lot less material. Otherwise we’re screwed. Industrialized countries like the U.S. should lead the way in this effort, of course, because our citizens consume the largest quantities of natural resources per capita. However, as the populations of less affluent countries grow, it will be just as daunting to figure out how to provide for the material needs of their citizens. You can read the full report, a fact sheet, an English-language summary, and a PowerPoint presentation for free.