I just received an email advertising the debut of a new journal, Solutions: For a Sustainable and Desirable Future. The email puts it this way:

An interesting idea, but I haven’t had a chance to look beyond their home page yet. If you have some time, check out this journal and post a comment here to let us know what you think.

As nations dither, and the prospects of a Copenhagen deal on controlling greenhouse gases skate off into the distance, its important to remember that there is plenty of activity going on right now to address global warming. These activities are taking place on many fronts, small and local, and large and global.

Of course, one of the players in the global arena is former Vice President and Nobel laureate Al Gore. He has recently published a new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, that examines what can be done now about climate problems and he will be in downtown Portland on Wednesday night, Nov 18, speaking at the Keller Auditorium at 7:30 PM, to promote his ideas. If you have the time and money (tickets are $45 and $65 + service fees through Ticketmaster and include a copy of the book), come see the lecture.

Strapped for time and cash? Maybe your interests are broader than climate change? Gore’s book costs only $15-20 through Amazon (paperback), which is pretty reasonable, but if you would like some impressively good free stuff on resource issues and what we can do about them (includes book, summary PowerPoint slide show), check out Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization from the Earth Policy Institute. Lester Brown, the long-time director of the Institute has plenty of worthwhile things to say on topics ranging from climate change to water to food to poverty. Finals approaching and no time to read? Just download a chapter and read it in the airport during Thanksgiving Break.

BPA, or bisphenol A, is one of the most hotly debated compounds of the 21st century. Our group has discussed this substance before (Sept 26, 2008), but we are going to take another look in light of some recent articles in the NY Times and Consumer Reports that show how amazingly widespread BPA appears to be.

I’ll be emailing copies of these reports to folks on our email list and we’ll discuss them at our next meeting on Thursday, Nov 12, noon in the Chemistry lounge. For those of you looking for links to the original articles, follow these:

• “Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies” by Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, Nov 8, 2009
• “Concern Over Canned Foods”, ConsumerReports Health.org, December 2009
  • Overview
  • Deciding on a safe level
  • What we found
  • Alternative packaging
  • What should be done

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.

We will be meeting in Rm. 402, the chemistry student lounge, at noon on Thursday this week (Oct 29).

The main topic: carbon dioxide capture and sequestration. Julie has sent around two graphics from the Sept 25 “special issue” of Science magazine that is devoted to carbon capture and sequestration. One graphic shows a global map of carbon sequestration projects (p. 1644-5). The other shows how the carbon cycle works (p. 1642-3). Paul also sent in a link to a Daily Show interview of Energy Secretary Steven Chu on some of these same topics from July 21. (C’mon, Paul – the Daily Show is not a news source!)

As usual, we will have a chance to talk about other issues of interest, e.g., the events sponsored by 350.org last weekend, and anything else that pops up.

We skipped our lunchtime meeting last Thursday to free up some time to take in a movie on Friday night.

10 of us (Julie, Claire, Emily, Rhiana, Kassandra, Josh, Paul, Dave, Gwen, and Alan) gathered in the lobby of the Northwest Film Center at 7:30 PM to await the Portland premiere of Crude: The Real Price of Oil, a documentary film by Joe Berlinger. While we waited, we had a chance to people watch as members of the Portland elite who were attending the opening night gala for China Design Now, a new exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, streamed through the lobby.

Crude tells a gripping story about a David-and-Goliath struggle between natives of Ecuador’s Amazon region and multi-national oil companies (Texaco, and then Chevron after they purchased Texaco) over who would be held legally responsible for the destruction of the natives’ habitat, livelihood, and health. The natives’ suffering was documented extensively and the movie also included a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes footage of the environmental and human rights NGO personnel who have taken up the natives’ cause. While we usually focus on fossil fuels from where they enter our lives at the gas pump and exit our cars at the tailpipe, this movie showed us an entirely different set of costs that must be paid in order to feed our addiction to cheap imported oil.

After the movie was over, we walked over to Julie and Dave’s for late-night refreshments and more conversation. Which brings me to an idea that has been suggested before, would anyone like to arrange the rental and screening of other environmentally focused movies? Maybe do this on campus after Fall Break? Any volunteers?

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.

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?

Two environmental chemists have visited campus in the last two weeks to present seminars.

Prof. Lynn Russell of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography came on Sept. 17 and spoke about “Organic Functional Groups in Marine and Continental Atmospheric Particles“. Her research involves collection of aerosols at different locations around the globe and then characterizing the molecules that make up these aerosols using spectroscopic techniques. Her work shows that aerosols vary greatly in their composition. Some aerosols arise mostly from natural products while others arise from factory and car emissions.

The following week, Sept. 24, saw a return to campus by Prof. Kris McNeill (Reed ‘92) of the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland (formerly of the U. Minnesota) who spoke about “Incineration or liquid handsoap: Which is the larger source of dioxins to the aquatic environment?“. His presentation, which was given in honor of emeritus professor Tom Dunne, showed how scientists are tracking what happens to triclosan, the “anti-bacterial” ingredient in anti-bacterial soaps, when it enters the environment. His research shows that triclosan decomposes to form dichlorodioxins. More worrisome is his recent research which  shows  that triclosan (and the dioxins derived from it) can become further chlorinated when it flows through a water-treatment plant that uses chlorination technology.

If these projects are typical, it appears that graduate students in environmental chemistry can expect to combine field work (ocean cruises, mountain hikes, and river paddles) to collect samples and lab measurements to solve a research problem.

Several Reed students were able to have lunch with the speakers (courtesy of the Chemistry department) including members of the Green Science Project. This “lunch with the speaker” tradition applies to all department seminars, so please take advantage of this opportunity.

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.