Going to Baltimore, Wrecking the Planet

Oh, we're living in a green time alright. Which is why I'd like to know why one of the very best things we could all do to promote greenness can't seem to get any traction. I'm talking about this nonsense whereby we all fly around the country to sit at meetings where our presence isn't truly required - where we smile at all the right times, make a few pertinent remarks, and otherwise sit pondering the only question we really care about, which is how soon we can get back to the airport and then back home.

According to Native Energy, a website that calculates the amount of greenhouse gases various kinds of travel emit, a flight I took this week from Boston to Baltimore contributed, if that's the word, .288 tons of C02 to the atmosphere.

This is how the site says it calculates this number:

Shorter flights are more fuel intensive because of the significant amount of altitude gain relative to the length of the flight itself. On a short trip, a large portion of the energy per mile is devoted to climbing and landing, compared to cruising. That means shorter trips are more carbon intensive.

Depending on whether your travel fits into the short, medium or long haul category, we apply a CO 2 emissions factor of 0.64, 0.44 or 0.40 lbs of CO 2 per passenger mile, respectively. This gives us the direct CO 2 emissions from your flight. [These factors are from the GHG Protocol Commuting Emissions Tool v 1.2]

In addition, we apply an RFI (radiative forcing index) of 2.0 to the direct CO 2 emissions from air travel, resulting in total CO 2 equivalent emission factors of 1.28, 0.88 or 0.8 for short, medium and long haul flight segments. By doubling the direct CO 2 emissions, our goal is to account for the overall global warming impact of air travel for all air emissions - not just the CO 2 - such as the warming effect of contrails.

I don't fly all that much, but even so, a "carbon footprint" quiz I took recently tells me that if everyone on earth lived the way I did, we'd need four and a half planets to sequester all the C02 we'd produce.

So why in the world aren't we simply talking on the phone with one another instead of rushing compulsively to these face-to-face meetings that cost us a fortune, exhaust us, eat up productive work hours at our offices, and - this is the kicker - ruin the planet? Anyone? Chime in. I'd love to hear.

Al, Lardbutt Yanks, and a Hillary Preview

As the rabid haters of liberals gear up for open season on Hillary, it's useful to consider the reaction of one English columnist to another famous liberal in the news. I have to wonder what our British friend would prefer - no efforts on global change at all? Or one undertaken by, say, an Aborigine from the Outback, whose mansion doesn't emit greenhouses and who therefore has earned the right to speak up?

From The Telegraph:

So Al Gore is the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Admittedly, he has to share it with the United Nations’ climate change panel - but, even so, I think we need to declare an international smugness alert.

The former US Vice-President has already taken over from Michael Moore as the most sanctimonious lardbutt Yank on the planet. Can you imagine what he'll be like now that the Norwegian Nobel committee has given him the prize?

More to the point, can you imagine how enormous his already massive carbon footprint will become once he starts jetting around the world bragging about his new title? Just after Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth - in which he asked American households to cut their use of electricity - the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research took a look at Al's energy bills.

It reckoned that his 20-room, eight-bathroom mansion in Nashville sometimes uses twice the energy in one month that the average American household gets through in a year. The combined energy and gas bills for his estate came to nearly $30,000 in 2006. Ah, say his defenders, but he uses rainwater to flush his lavatories. Is there enough rainwater in the world, I wonder?

I'm not saying that these are trivial questions. They're fairly trivial, given that individual uses of energy are absolutely nothing compared to energy policies of nations. But I get it. And you know what? I say, why not - let's put Al on the hot seat and make him explain himself. (Oh, wait, he already has. Check this out.)

But need you be quite so petty? We got it - you hate liberals, and the more praise they earn, the more you hate them. If one saved your child from drowning, you'd denounce him as an attention-seeker with a hidden agenda. Liberals think they're so perfect. But they're just the opposite. We hear ya.

Well, all that said, let's give Al Gore some credit: he's done a good thing for the world, lardbutt or no. More than our British reporter here will ever do, I dare say.

"What Did Al Gore Do for World Peace?" That was headline over this column in The Telegraph. If you haven't given it any thought at all - and this writer obviously hasn't, probably because he doesn't want to - you'll realize that global warming has quite a bit to do with peace. Doubt it? Read "Collapse," Jared Diamond's book on why societies like Easter Island, Greenland and Haiti fell apart. His thesis - that marginal human habitats that become stressed by overdevelopment and climate change fall like houses of cards, frequently after fierce factional warring over dwindling resources - should be a warning bell to us. Does anyone really imagine that the peaceful nations of the world couldn't easily be incited to war over water, arable land, food, migrating populations?

Biofuels. Let's Get Serious.

From Grist, the environmental blog. This is worth reading.

Biofuel: Is it a greenhouse gas, gas, gas?

By all accounts, biofuels deliver startlingly modest reductions in greenhouse gases. In a relatively generous assessment of the environmental benefits of ethanol and biodiesel released last year, University of Minnesota researchers credited corn-based ethanol with 12 percent less net greenhouse-gas emissions than gasoline, while finding that soy-based biodiesel emits 41 percent less.

But here's the catch: It takes so much corn to produce a gallon of ethanol, and so much soy to produce a gallon of biodiesel, that the net GHG advantages are likely to be almost nil.

And that's just what we already knew. Now comes a new study that says that simply growing the crops that become biofuel is dangerous - more dangerous than using gasoline in the first place.

(The study) claims that biofuel production emits far more nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas some 296 times more potent than carbon dioxide, than has normally been assumed. The source is artificial fertilizer, a potent source of nitrogen. When farmers apply it to soil, a certain amount of it -- between 3 percent and 5 percent, according to the study -- enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide.

But despite all this, corn farms are going gangbusters, getting top dollar from the market, which seems to think biofuel is going to the great and profitable environmental savior, and from the government, through automatic annual subsidies to farmers. To feel sort of sick about the whole thing, read this article from today's Washington Post.

So where are we in our lackluster quest to save our planet as painlessly as possible? Nowhere, it appears. Maybe we're like alcoholics who have to hit bottom before we realize that, hey, there's really no easy way out of the mess we've made. We're going to have suffer, a little or maybe a lot. We're going to have to give up some stuff. Is there anything idea in the world that Americans resist more vigorously? Without real, evangelizing leadership, we're doomed.

The Renewables: Solar, Wind and ... Landfill Gas

An interesting bit of local news with broader implications. Check out Environmental Valuation and Cost-Benefit News for more on this topic. Hey - isn't this sort of thing exactly what universities should be doing? Given that we have virtually no political leadership on the urgent matter of saving our planet and ourselves from seems-to-be certain doom, academics and entrepreneurs are obviously going to have to take the lead.

DURHAM, N.H. – The University of New Hampshire, in cooperation with Waste Management of New Hampshire, Inc., has launched EcoLine, a landfill gas project that will pipe enriched and purified gas from a landfill in Rochester to the Durham campus. UNH is the first university in the nation to undertake a project of this magnitude.

The renewable, carbon-neutral landfill gas ... will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel in UNH’s cogeneration plant, enabling UNH to receive 80-85 percent of its energy from a renewable source.

Construction is set to begin immediately ... on the the 12.7 mile underground pipeline, which will transport the gas from the plant to the university’s Durham campus. UNH is expected to fuel its cogeneration plant with landfill gas by the fall of 2008. Estimated cost of the project, including the construction of a second generator at UNH, is $45 million.

At UNH, landfill gas will replace commercial natural gas in UNH’s cogeneration (co-gen) plant, the primary source of heat and electricity for the five million square-foot Durham campus. The co-gen plant, which began operations in 2006, captures waste heat normally lost during the production of electricity and uses this energy to heat campus buildings, making more efficient use of energy resources.

The landfill gas will stabilize the university’s fluctuating energy costs, which have doubled in the last five years and grown at an annual rate of 18.9 percent. EcoLine will also have a major impact on UNH’s carbon dioxide emissions. It will reduce the university’s greenhouse gas emissions an estimated 67 percent below 2005 levels and 57 percent below 1990 levels.

Landfill gas is a naturally occurring by-product of landfill decomposition. Waste Management has a state-of-the-art gas collection system consisting of over 300 extraction wells, miles of collection pipes, and compressors to capture the landfill gas.

Nuclear Power's Imperfect, but It's Less Deadly than Coal

David, who works as an engineer at a nuclear power plant - that's a conversation-stopper at dinner parties, we've found - came home today with news of a presentation he'd just attended at work. The featured speaker had been a control room operator at Three Mile Island on the day in 1979 when one unit's reactor core partially melted down. This man, just short of retirement, was in his '30s then, and ever since the accident, he's been travelling to nuclear power plants around the country explaining how events unfolded that day, and warning a younger generation of workers not to let improved technology and more rigorous oversight make them complacent. Despite all the improvements in the industry prompted by the accident, bad things can still happen.

It was a great presentation, apparently, and as David told me about it, he handed me a fact sheet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had issued about the accident. (The former control-room operator estimated that roughly 600 investigations had been conducted since 1979.)

I looked through the NRC report. It's written simply, in layman's terms. Its lead sentence reads:

"The accident at Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear power plan near Middletown, Penn., on March 28, 1979 was the most serious in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history, even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community."

The report goes to explain precisely what happened. In the end, the NRC determined that the accident resulted from a "combination of personnel errors, design deficiencies, and component failures."

In the aftermath of the accident, several federal and independent studies were conducted to determine what, if any, health consequences the people around the plant had suffered due to the small amounts of radiation released from the plant.

"Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a full set of chest x-rays is about 6 millirem. Compared to the natural radioactive background dose of about 100-125 millirem per year for the area, the collective dose to the community was very small. In the months following the accident, although questions were raised about possible adverse effects from radiation on human, animal, and plant life in the TMI area, none could be directly correlated to the accident."

Bottom line: Although the reactor was seriously damaged, the effect of the radiation release on life and the environment was "negligible."

I'm a recent convert to nuclear power, and I'm certainly not downplaying its risks. It's imperfect, to be sure.

But, here's the thing with risk. In just the past several days, six coal miners and three rescue workers have died in this country, and almost 200 coal miners have died in China. Yet the public will soon dry its tears, if indeed it ever really shed any, and we'll continue burning coal as if nothing ever happened.

My question is this: Why do we accept these deaths as tragic but unavoidable, while continuing to wring our hands about nuclear power, which, even in its worst US accident, has yet to harm a single person in this country?