belated Earth Day

Here are a few interesting articles I found this past week:

• The Next Generation of Biofuels (Scientific American) and California Takes on King Corn (The Daily Climate) talk about alternatives to corn-based ethanol
• How to Fix a Climate Emergency (Newsweek) is a pretty interesting look at some radical ideas about slowing down global climate change (and it makes a good point about how this shouldn't be a replacement for cutting emissions)
• and Wil Wheaton found a cool video of Earth rising over the moon's horizon (must have been taken near new moon)
  

bad news for iron fertilization

I follow a few environmental blogs, and for a while I was occasionally seeing posts about the possibility of using iron fertilization for carbon sequestration. The idea (as I understand it) is that scientists would dissolve a bunch of iron near the ocean surface, phytoplankton would consume the iron (causing the phytoplankton to flourish), the phytoplankton would inhale a bunch of carbon dioxide, and the phytoplankton would sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the CO2 with it, forever.

So they tried it.

They dumped a bunch of iron in the ocean, and the phytoplankton dutifully multiplied (and presumably inhaled a lot of CO2). But before the phytoplankton could sink, it ended up at the bottom of the food chain of a series of increasingly large sea creatures that live near the surface.

Nice try.

Satellite imagery of post-cyclone Myanmar

Estimates of the death toll in Myanmar have gone up and up over the last few days, and a Dot Earth post showing satellite images before and after the cyclone illustrate why.

Light bulb comparison

Yesterday Neutral Existence published an interesting comparison of incandescent, compact florescent (CFL), and LED light bulbs. Looks like CFLs come out on top, with incandescent in last place. The blog post also points out that LED bulbs have less mercury in them than CFLs, and that LED bulbs may get cheaper over time.

I've never tried LED light bulbs (and only recently bought my first CFLs), but I have an LED flashlight, and I like it. It doesn't seem to focus light as well as a traditional (incandescent) flashlight, but it's pretty bright, and I never have to worry about replacing the bulb. And the batteries seem to last a long time.

Recent energy-related developments

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article about how the idiots we elected to Congress are bickering about energy standards. Sometimes I'm amazed Congress ever gets anything done at all.

In happier news, the Energy Blog has a post about a new CO2 sequestration technique developed by Global Research Technologies (GRT). CO2 sequestration is the process of putting CO2 into storage (typically underground), instead of releasing it into the atmosphere: for example, future coal-burning power plants would point their smokestacks down, rather than up (that is a gross oversimplification).

But this GRT technique is a little different: instead of grabbing CO2 as it is produced (which I suppose can only level off greenhouse gas emissions), this method would be able to pull CO2 out of thin air (which could potentially reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases).

There is mention of the GRT technique on the wikipedia page for the Virgin Earth Challenge, Richard Branson's $25 million prize for atmospheric scrubbing of greenhouse gases.

Alternative Energy Sources

In the past few weeks, I've started reading about the environment and alternative energy sources. I'm starting to see that this is a very complicated issue with potentially far-reaching consequences.

An article came out yesterday which gives a very interesting summary of the current state biofuel production. It's a pretty long article, but I would recommend it to anyone who is interested. It paints a rather grim picture.

According to the article, a significant portion of US government funding into alternative energy is directed at the production of ethanol from corn. Although I'm pleased to see the US government taking an interest in alternative energy, corn-based ethanol is arguably not the best solution. There's probably not enough cropland on Earth to grow enough corn to rival the energy produced by burning fossil fuels. More importantly, using so much corn to generate ethanol takes away (and drives up the price of) an important source of food: this may begin to deprive many people in poor nations of a staple of their diet. I was especially appalled to read this in the article: "...filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV
with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year."

There is also evidence that using corn-based ethanol has only a small benefit over fossil fuels in the creation of greenhouse gases: "The full cycle of the production and use of corn-based ethanol releases less greenhouse gases than does that of gasoline, but only by 12 to 26 percent."

But the US government seems somewhat fixated on corn-based ethanol, due in part to the lobbying efforts of companies like the Archer Daniels Midland Company (adm). I don't like criticizing adm, because they're a big supporter of public television. But they make a lot of money turning corn into ethanol, and they carry a lot of clout in Washington.

The environment has gotten a lot of press lately, and I'm glad that awareness of these issues is increasing. But I'm starting to think that it's just not happening fast enough. I think we should all try to find ways to conserve resources and to help our governments find ways to better prepare for the future. I think the US and Chinese governments should start pouring money into researching and developing solar power, wind energy, and cellulosic biofuels (which is made from wood chips, trash, and other stuff no one wants).

This has turned into more of a rant than I intended, so I'll end with the addresses of a few interesting Web sites I've recently discovered (they all have RSS feeds):

• Ecoworld
• Grist
• The Energy Blog