carbon - Taryn . on Diigo

GOOD Sheet - CO2 World

Tags: carbon, emissions, energy, reference on 2008-10-31 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Superstrong 'Buckypaper' Could Be Dream Material

Tags: chemistry, physics, carbon, technology, nanotechnology, innovation on 2008-10-20 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Carbon Commentary · Biochar can sequester carbon cheaply

Organic matter, such as agricultural waste, heated in the absence of oxygen splits into two types of material: a charcoal (biochar), and hydrocarbon gases and liquids. When added to soils, the charcoal can provide a powerful fertiliser. The hydrocarbons can be burnt, either to generate electricity or to power an internal combustion engine.

Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, agriculture, biochar on 2008-10-09 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Carbon Pricing and Driving - Ezra Klein

Tags: climate_crisis, transportation, oil, coal, taxes, carbon on 2008-10-09 -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromwww.prospect.org

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Wine in a Box Protects the Environment and Saves You Money - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Tags: wine, food, agribusiness, environment, sustainable, carbon, opinion on 2008-08-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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No left turns is right on

Tags: automobile, transportation, fuel, efficiency, carbon, emissions on 2008-04-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Green Issue:Build

Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, garden on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Green Issue:Move

Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, automobile, transportation, wind_power on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Green Issue:Live

Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, urban, farming, agriculture, religion on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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people think that environmental living is hard or deprives you, but we need
to change the system so that it supports environmental choices. The fact is,
I liked living in a more durable way
“People are starting to realize that they
can’t just blame the government and corporations, that it comes down to
their own behavior.” We’ve reached a point where a quotidian activity
like bagging groceries raises existential questions about our ecological footprint.
The six stages of the Waking-Up Syndrome sound a lot like the stages of grief.
URBAN FARMING: Jules Dervaes and three of his adult children live on
one-fifth of an acre in Pasadena,
Calif., a block away from a multilane highway. On this tiny sliver of land,
they manage to be mostly self-sufficient. “This is our form of protest,”
says Dervaes, who is 60, “and this is our form of survival.” The
family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits,
vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers
the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little
as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence.
Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden
waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden. Dervaes’s
father worked for Standard Oil, but his son took a markedly different path.
Dervaes moved into his current Pasadena home in 1985 — temporarily, he
thought. As the years passed and his hopes of relocating to the country were
delayed, he “decided that he wanted to see how much we could grow here,”
says his 33-year-old daughter, Anais. The family generates cash for their limited
expenses by selling produce to local restaurants. Though Dervaes and his children
are accustomed to the neighbors’ strange looks at their crowded lot, the
local chefs don’t seem to share the skepticism. “They’ll call
me in the morning and pick the amount that I need for that night,” says
Jim McCardy, who owns Marstons, a restaurant in Pasadena. “The flavor
is just incredible.” CHARLES WILSON
Approximately 60 million Americans live in homeowner
and condominium associations, and those sometimes have covenants banning clotheslines
on the assumption that they look tacky and bespeak poverty, threatening both
views and property values.
Sinclair says he believes that the “doom-laden
apocalyptic narrative” favored by the mainstream environmental movement
can paralyze rather than motivate necessary lifestyle adjustments. Conversely,
he says religion — which has been “in the behavioral-change business
for 3,000 years” — offers a distinct message of hope and boasts an
impressive track record of moral persuasion: “There have been watershed
moments when religion has barged into public life, blown away the windbaggery
of politics-as-usual and declared with irresistible force, ‘This must
change now!

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The Green Issue:Invent

Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, nuclear, infrastructure on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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for environmentalists, an increasing number of whom support nuclear power.
Pebble-bed reactors don’t solve every problem; they still produce small
amounts of nuclear waste. But they have other benefits. Pebble beds produce
very little of the weapons-grade fissile material that spooks terrorism experts.
Unlike the hulking, 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants of the 1970s and ’80s,
they do not require emergency water-cooling towers; small pebble-bed reactors
could be located in urban downtowns or rural communities
Our infrastructure now loses about
8 percent of the electricity it transports from power plants to our homes and
businesses. Superconducting cables, by contrast, lose almost nothing (though
they do require some energy to keep them cold). More intriguing, superconducting
cables could eventually bring renewable power from remote places where it is
abundant —the windy plains of the Dakotas or the sun-drenched deserts of
Nevada
— to populous coastal cities. In theory, long distances mean nothing to
superconducting cables, and each superconducting cable can carry about five
times the current of a copper conduit
Recent tests in Columbus,
Ohio,
and upstate New York have proved that superconducting wire can actually work
in urban power grids. An installation is planned for
Long
Island
this year and for Manhattan
in 2010.
a fleet of unmanned,
wind-powered, satellite-controlled oceangoing vessels that will spray precisely
calibrated droplets of seawater into the sky, so that stratocumulus clouds reflect
more solar radiation from the earth’s surface. He says that the idea of
“tarting up clouds” probably originated decades ago when he and
his 10-year-old son watched a sunset from a mountaintop in Wales
and peered down on quicksilver clouds over the Irish Sea. His son said the clouds
looked like “soggy mirrors.”
Critics
deride sequestration as pie in the ground: ruinously expensive for the amount
of carbon being kept out of the atmosphere.
microgenerators

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The Green Issue:Eat

Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, wine, agriculture, farming, hudson_valley on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Napa winemakers agree that 10-year averages are the hottest in memory.
Too often, a result has been overripe grapes, and the cooked flavors and throat-searing
alcohol that accompany them.
Those cabernet clones imported from Bordeaux because they ripen so easily? Rip
them out and plant something more reluctant. Vines positioned near the ground
to soak up radiant heat? Install a trellis system and pull them higher. Wineries
have started planting vineyards on a northeast-southwest axis, which minimizes
strong afternoon sunlight. They add cover crops — clover, bell bean —
to compete with the vines and prolong the fruit’s maturation process.
And they’re removing fewer leaves
grape varieties that do better in hot weather, like Grenache
and Syrah
carbon farming, which operates partly on the principle that proper livestock
management leads to the rapid development of topsoil and increased plant growth
high concentration of manure serves
as fertilizer, while complete plant regrowth allows for creation of the healthy
root clusters needed to build soil. And drought-prone regions benefit from the
clustered hoof prints, which capture what meager moisture falls from the sky.
Charles Rice, a soil microbiologist at
Kansas
State University
, says the potential is vast. “With proper land
management, we could sequester an additional 160 million metric tons of carbon
annually.” That’s about 10 percent of total U.S. emissions. Collins
isn’t just promoting a new climactic model; he wants a new agricultural
paradigm, whereby farmers are paid for “eco-system services” and
beef and dairy livestock shed the stigma of environmental evildoers for a new
identity as a tool in the war on global warming.
First, break
the packaging habit: “It’s not uncommon for food packaging to use
more energy in production than the food it contains,” she says. Next,
make it a goal to eat foods that are at once organic, local, seasonal and low
on the food chain. Local keeps down the transportation miles. Organic eliminates
the high energy costs of pesticides
and fertilizers. Seasonal foods do not need greenhouses or long periods of refrigeration.
And she notes that the food chain matters, carbon-wise: the CO2 impact of a
pound of beef can be 250 times as great as that of a pound of carrots. (Of course,
even the most sustainably raised legume racks up carbon points in an inefficient
refrigerator.) Lastly, some of the most troublesome aspects of the food cycle
occur in disposal. Rotting food is itself an ecological concern, because methane,
a byproduct and a greenhouse gas, has an enormous impact on global warming.
“Compost and advocate for compost,”
livestock production
accounts for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions —
more than all forms of transportation combined. Meat’s supersize impact
comes from fuel- and fertilizer-intensive agricultural methods of growing feed,
all the power needed to run slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants and the
potent greenhouse gases produced by decomposing manure. Pork, lamb and poultry
all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate.

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The Green Issue:Act

Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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for every minute you walk, you live about three minutes
longer. “You’re not using time,” Durning argues; “you’re
generating time.
The infamous Northeastern blackout in August 2003 cost an estimated $7 billion.
aste is basically stupid.” Theirs is a business-friendly
credo. Corporate growth isn’t in itself problematic; nor should sustainability
mean getting by with less. Rather, the firm endorses rethinking the way products
are designed and manufactured. To get a C2C seal of approval, a product needs
to be made from components that are either “technical nutrients”
(which can be recycled or repurposed) or biological nutrients (which can degrade
naturally, like compost). “Instead of saying zero waste, we say let’s
just eliminate the concept of waste,
Werbach is sympathetic to the assumption that he is selling out.
But Werbach counters that when the environmental movement defines sustainability
myopically (by focusing on ecology to the exclusion of social, cultural and
economic health) and relies on scare tactics to change behavior, it accomplishes
little more than choir preaching. “I was the captain of the ship driving
straight into the iceberg,” he says of his tenure as an activist. Now,
he suggests, it’s time for a change. “We’ve spent too much
time saying, ‘Do this because the polar bears are dying,’ ”
he says. “Instead, we need to say, ‘Do this because it brings about
success and happiness in our businesses and families.’
exclude airlines from its socially responsible funds
because they contribute to global warming. The move puts airlines in the same
category as tobacco companies, pornographers and arms dealers.
getting on a plane “is
the most environmentally damaging thing you as an individual can do, other than
setting a forest fire.” Airplanes account for only about 3 percent of
the world’s carbon emissions, but their impact is augmented because they
emit other global warming gases and produce contrails, or plumes of ice crystals,
that trigger the formation of heat-trapping cirrus clouds.
Adapt while renovating, in other words,
rather than retrofit after a walloping coastal storm. City hospitals
should plan for more frequent heat waves (they’ll occur four times as
often by midcentury), and
Hudson
Valley
farmers may need to consider planting warmer-weather fruits.
the United
States economy needs a big, bold green-jobs program — perhaps even what
Hillary
Clinton
was calling a “green collar” revolution.
Green-collar jobs wouldn’t
only be for engineers or Ph.D.’s; they would also include organic-food-industry
workers, solar-panel installers, wind-turbine repairmen and green-home retrofitters.
“This isn’t just the most important environmental question facing
the country, it’s the most important economic question facing the country
The green economy is nothing
more than positive intentions interlocking with traditional economics

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Energy Efficiency - Consumption - Cars

Tags: energy, carbon, transportation, automobile, insurance, climate_crisis, dubner_and_levitt on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) insurance
carbon emissions from driving impose a societal cost of about $20 billion a year. That sounds like an awful lot until you consider congestion: a Texas Transportation Institute study found that wasted fuel and lost productivity due to congestion cost us $78 billion a year. The damage to people and property from auto accidents, meanwhile, is by far the worst. In a 2006 paper, the economists Aaron Edlin and Pinar Karaca-Mandic argued that accidents impose a true unpaid cost of about $220 billion a year. (And that’s even though the accident rate has fallen significantly over the past 10 years, from 2.72 accidents per million miles driven to 1.98 per million; overall miles driven, however, keep rising.) So, with roughly three trillion miles driven each year producing more than $300 billion in externality costs, drivers should probably be taxed at least an extra 10 cents per mile if we want them to pay the full societal cost of their driving.
Progressive, the huge Ohio-based insurer that has long prided itself as an innovator, will first offer the plan in six states, having run a similar pilot in three other states. Drivers who sign up for MyRate will install a small wireless device in their cars that transmits to Progressive not just how many miles they drive but also when those miles are driven and, to some extent, how they are driven: the device measures the car’s speed every second, from which Progressive can derive acceleration and braking behavior. Which means that Progressive will not only be able to charge drivers for the actual miles they consume but will also better assess the true risk of each driver.

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Can you buy a greener conscience? - Los Angeles Times

Tags: carbon, carbon_offsets, climate_crisis, electricity, emissions, energy on 2007-09-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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people should first reduce their energy consumption and waste, and then buy offsets -- "the only way to really get to zero unless you stop driving, stop traveling."

But the industry is clouded by an approach to carbon accounting that makes it easy to claim reductions that didn't occur. Many projects that have received money from offset companies would have reduced emissions by the same amount anyway.

The growing popularity of offsets has now prompted the Federal Trade Commission to begin looking into the $55-million-a-year industry.
Native Energy had contributed just over 1% of the total cost of the project yet claimed 100% of its carbon reductions.

"If you look at the costs of these projects, it's a tiny, tiny fraction," said cooperative president Meera Kohler. The payment did "not determine whether those blades turn or not."
About 30 years ago, the U.S. government began fostering emissions markets that allowed industrial polluters to buy offsets for such gases as nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides. One of their successes has been in reducing acid rain in the Northeast.

The Europeans have recently adopted a similar model to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, allowing the continent's dirtiest industries to buy and sell rights to spew greenhouse gases.

The key to these regulated markets is a gradually falling cap on total emissions, forcing factories to either reduce their own emissions or buy someone else's reductions at increasing prices.
Offsets are so convenient that they may foster a false sense that global warming can be easily solved when the hard and expensive work remains undone.

A United Nations panel recently concluded that actually reducing emissions to avoid the worst perils of global warming would cost trillions of dollars a year over the next several decades.

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Planes, brains and automobiles

Tags: agriculture, carbon, farming, food, fuel, locavore, sustainable, transportation on 2007-09-08 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated - By Freeman Dyson

Tags: carbon, climate_crisis, freeman_dyson, alarmism on 2007-09-07 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.edge.org

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.
Consider a possible future, with China continuing to develop an industrial economy based largely on the burning of coal, and the United States deciding to absorb the resulting carbon dioxide by increasing the biomass in our topsoil. The quantity of biomass that can be accumulated in living plants and trees is limited, but there is no limit to the quantity that can be stored in topsoil. To grow topsoil on a massive scale may or may not be practical, depending on the economics of farming and forestry. It is at least a possibility to be seriously considered, that China could become rich by burning coal, while the United States could become environmentally virtuous by accumulating topsoil, with transport of carbon from mine in China to soil in America provided free of charge by the atmosphere, and the inventory of carbon in the atmosphere remaining constant.
The physical effects are seen in changes of rainfall, cloudiness, wind-strength and temperature, which are customarily lumped together in the misleading phrase “global warming”. In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor. The effect of carbon dioxide is important where the air is dry, and air is usually dry only where it is cold. Hot desert air may feel dry but often contains a lot of water vapor. The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in mountainous regions rather than in lowlands, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime. The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter. To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading.

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GOOD Sheet - CO2 World

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