Author: admin

Farmers win changes to carbon scheme

A spokeswoman for Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says farmers will be allowed to generate carbon credits.

Negotiations are continuing between the Government and Coalition for amendments to the legislation as Parliament resumes on Monday and the Government pushes for a vote in late November.

Both sides say the talks are progressing but Senator Wong says an agreement will be “difficult”.

The Opposition are pushing for several changes but are likely to have some knocked back due to budget restraints.

“What I’ve made clear is we’re not able to accept the entirety of what they’ve put forward – it would be fiscally unsustainable,” Senator Wong said.

She says the Government made the backdown because it wants the scheme agreed to this year.

She told ABC 1’s Insiders program this shows the Government is serious about the scheme passing Parliament by the end of the year.

“We’re moving forward. We are absolutely committed on this side of the table to doing what we are able to, to get a deal,” she said.

“That’s why we announced this offer on agriculture, that’s why we’ll continue to move forward on these negotiations. This is in Australia’s national interest, we need to get this reform through.”

The Government had wanted to include farmers in the scheme from 2015.

Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner told Channel Ten negotiations are continuing to secure the Coalition’s support.

“We’ve prepared to accede to the Coalition’s request on this front,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say now it’s a done deal.”

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull welcomed the concession, but he says the Coalition will keep pushing for further changes before it decides if it will support the emissions trading scheme.

“There are a range of very important matters raised in the amendments,” he said.

“I’ve made a deliberate decision not to say what’s a deal breaker, what’s more important, what’s less important.

“The negotiations are being conducted constructively and I might say confidentially and they’ll reach a conclusion and then we will make a decision.”

‘Merely a gesture’

The National Farmers Federation lobbied for the amendments, putting it in conflict with the National Party and climate change sceptics within the Liberal Party.

The National’s Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce says the exemption of farmers from the emissions trading scheme (ETS) is merely a gesture.

“The ETS is still a massive tax and we’ve got the problem that once the ETS starts, there is nothing in the future to stop it including agriculture,” he said.

“It’s still a tenuous proposition and still means the only smart thing to do is block this massive new tax.”

Senator Joyce says the scheme will not change global temperatures.

“It’s like saying, ‘ah well, we’re only going to burn down a quarter of your house’. I don’t want you to burn down any of it,” he said.

“Why are we proceeding down this path of a massive new tax when the reason that’s put forward, to change the temperature of the earth, is not possible?”

The Opposition also wants more free permits for heavy polluters and more compensation for electricity generators.

Mr Turnbull and emissions trading spokesman Ian Macfarlane will also struggle to get any agreed changes through the party room, which has to approve them before the Coalition decides on its final position.

He has said that if the majority of amendments are accepted he would recommend the scheme be passed, but others such as Senator Nick Minchin say an agreement does not guarantee support for the scheme.

Mr Turnbull has staked his leadership on the issue after declaring he could not lead a party that would not act on climate change

15 November, 2009
(Partly) Renewable Ethanol
Judging from a range of recent studies, corn ethanol is about one quarter renewable. Even by the most optimistic estimate — the one the Renewable Fuels Association repeatedly cites — corn ethanol is only 40% renewable.* The US may have displaced 4% of its gasoline use with energy from ethanol in 2008, but less than 2% of that energy came from sunlight captured on those 21 million acres of corn. Most of it came from the natural gas and coal used to make fertilizer and run ethanol plants.

A cursory comparison of study results emphasizes the differences between them. Delving into the data a little further shows that there is actually a remarkable degree of consistency between the studies, despite the different figures they come up with in the end. All agree that ethanol processing is by far the most energy-intensive component of the lifecycle, consuming nearly two-thirds as much energy as we get from burning the fuel. Growing the corn requires the next biggest energy investment: Most conclude that farming requires about a third as much energy as is available from the ethanol (Pimentel and Patzek’s estimate is higher; Kim and Dale’s is lower). All agree that transporting the corn and distributing the ethanol are pretty minor components of the energy investment.

So if ethanol processing takes almost two-thirds as much energy as ethanol delivers, and farming takes almost a third, how can there be any net energy benefit to making corn ethanol?

The answer lies with the co-product. For every three truckloads of corn that go into an ethanol plant, about one truck comes out full of dried distiller’s grain, a protein-rich animal feed. Since the byproduct is useful, each of the studies assigns a “co-product” credit to the process. A certain proportion of the energy that went in to the process is subtracted because the distiller’s grain co-product is assumed to have saved energy needed to grow animal feed.

Without the co-product credit all of the studies agree that corn ethanol would be less than 15% renewable.* Among the five studies that conclude there is an energy return to making corn ethanol, the co-product credit accounts for most of the benefit reported.

The size of the co-product credit is what really distinguishes the six studies. Those that assign a larger proportion of the energy investment to the co-product conclude that there is a greater energy return to ethanol production.

Obviously, how the co-product credit is calculated is important. Since dried distiller’s grain is a high protein feed that can substitute for soybean meal, most of the studies use an estimate of the amount of energy needed to produce the soybean meal equivalent of the distillers grain that comes out of the ethanol plant. This seems logical, but Kim and Dale point out that a sure way to improve the energy return from corn ethanol is to reduce the efficiency of soybean production (!).

The most optimistic numbers come from Shapouri et al. (2004), who calculate a credit based on the proportion of energy used to make dried distillers grain in a typical ethanol plant. They consider the amount of energy used to dry distiller’s grain an energy credit, because it is used to make the co-product, not ethanol. The net energy calculated using this method is equivalent to the net energy from a plant in which the distiller’s grain drying phase is omitted completely and animals are fed wet distiller’s grains.

Ethanol promoters understandably wish that any discussion of net energy associated with ethanol production would simply go away. This spring an advocacy group called Ethanol Across America issued a brief headlined with a statement fashioned to end all debate:

Study after study after study confirms that ethanol production from corn produces more energy than it takes to make it, period. End of story. So why is this still an issue? When you look at the facts, it simply isn’t.

The problem is, of course, that corn ethanol is being billed as a renewable fuel when it is currently mostly non-renewable. It’s true that most studies say corn ethanol does better than break even from a net energy perspective, but not much better. Calling ethanol 25% renewable (or 75% non-renewable) just doesn’t have the same ring as calling it renewable. Honesty and good policy require that we tell it like it is, though. For ethanol and other “renewable” fuels, I think we’d be well served to abandon the convenient renewable/non-renewable dichotomy, and start qualifying renewable claims with a percentage.

If you’ve read this far, you might have me pegged as an opponent of first generation (sugar and starch-based) ethanol. I’m not. Many such opponents (e.g. zFacts.com) argue that this is a mature technology, it’s already as good as it’s likely to get, and we should spend our time and resources on other pursuits, like learning to make ethanol out of cellulose. I disagree.

I think there’s plenty of room to improve first generation ethanol production. Here are some ideas:
1. Learn to grow feedstock crops without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. By using biologically-fixed nitrogen, instead of synthetically fixed nitrogen we can cut the amount of energy that goes into grain production by 30-50%. That’s huge. Study after study after study after study confirms that corn yields will not fall by an equivalent amount. If we’re concerned about net energy, then low-input farming is the way to go.
2. Learn to use other feedstock crops. American farmers are very good at growing corn, but there are plenty of other crops that can produce lots of sugar and starch for conversion to ethanol. India and China have recognized that sweet sorghum and sweet potato can probably out-perform corn, particularly in low-input systems. America’s single minded focus on corn has led an increasing proportion of corn farmers to grow corn after corn, which is a poor management practice that ultimately compromises yields and demands more agricultural inputs. Diversifying feedstock demand can help restore crop rotations to American farms.
3. Re-integrate crop, animal, and fuel production systems. Drying distiller’s mash down into dried distiller’s grain is one of the most energy intensive operations at an ethanol plant. Distiller’s mash makes a fine animal feed, but it doesn’t ship or store well. The extra energy investment to dry it is unnecessary if the plant is linked to an animal-based farm with a local and immediate demand for feed. Organic waste products from the animals and the ethanol plant can be digested anaerobically to make methane for renewable energy, and the material left over after digestion can be recycled back onto the crop land as fertilizer. A study published earlier this year by Liska et al. concludes that a closed-loop corn ethanol plant like this reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 67% and increases the net energy ratio to 2.2, making corn ethanol that’s 55% renewable.* I suspect that closed-loop plants will work better on a small scale than a large scale: Here, in Kentucky, the move to drying distiller’s mash began when bourbon distilleries got too big for the farms that once were coupled with each distillery.
4. Stop using nonrenewable fuels for fermentation and distillation. All of the studies that conclude that cellulosic ethanol plants will offer a better energy return than first generation ethanol plants assume that the energy the cellulosic plants use for fermentation and distillation will come from plant matter, not from natural gas and coal. This difference accounts for almost all of the anticipated energy benefit expected of cellulosic ethanol. We don’t need to wait for advanced technology to become available to start converting first generation plants to draw their heat from renewable sources, like wood or crop residues. Brazilians have known this for years: Most of the energy that drives their ethanol production comes from sugarcane residues left over after sugar extraction.
By combining tactics I suspect it’s possible to make first generation ethanol competitive with cellulosic ethanol in terms of net energy return, and to move in this direction immediately, rather than waiting for the expensive and experimental enzyme technology that seems to be holding up development of the cellulosic ethanol segment. The only way that either will ever replace a substantial portion of our gasoline consumption, though, is if we can dramatically reduce our consumption. Over the past two years Americans have done just that, reducing oil use by 9%. That’s a much bigger bite out of the energy pie than we got by turning 21 million acres of corn into ethanol
14 November, 2009

Researchers: “Upconversion” Creates “Super-efficient” Solar Cells

The work, published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, aims to increase efficiency in crystalline and amorphous silicon solar cells through application of synthesized sensitizer and emitter molecules. Such “single-threshold” materials “produces voltage by promoting electrons above this threshold upon absorption of light,” explained paper co-author Tim Schmidt; photons with energy below that threshold can’t be harvested, and any energy above that threshold is lost through heat, he added.

Maximum efficiency of single-threshold PV converters is about 30%, the group notes. One proposed way to improve that is to place an upconverting material behind the cell, to convert low subthreshold photons into usable light; such a cell would have an efficiency limit of >50%, though best-recorded efficiency has been ∼ 10 ^-6. Their work specifically focuses on using “triplet-triplet annihilation” in organic molecules. When two triplet emitter molecules encounter each other, the result is either a singlet, triplet, or quintet spin state; if a singlet (1:9 chance), it converts to a lower energy state and fluoresces, yielding “upconverted” light.

Applying this “upconversion” method, the group says, results in striking improvements: efficiency limit “under the standard solar spectrum” of over 50%, and up to 63% under 100-fold solar concentration. From the paper abstract:

Emitter triplet states are produced through triplet energy transfer from sensitizer molecules excited with low energy photons. The triplet emitter molecules undergo triplet-triplet annihilation to yield excited singlet states which emit upconverted fluorescence. Experiments comparing the 560nm prompt fluorescence when rubrene emitter molecules are excited directly, using 525nm laser pulses, to the delayed, upconverted fluorescence when the porphyrin sensitizer molecules are excited with 670nm laser pulses reveal annihilation efficiencies to produce excited singlet emitters in excess of 20%. Conservative measurements reveal a 25% annihilation efficiency, while a direct comparison between the prompt and delayed fluorescence yield suggests a value as high as 33%. Due to fluorescence quenching, the photon upconversion efficiencies are lower, at 16%.

(Read more from Photovoltaics World at electroIQ.com)

13 November, 2009

A terrifying vision of a world devastated by climate change

Oxfam’s remarkable new online interactive documentary – Gabura, from daily life to disaster – launched in conjunction with the Guardian yesterday, allows you both to bear witness to the impact of climate change and to choose your own journey through the story.

We enable you to see vividly how livelihoods have been ruined, crops destroyed, and families torn apart. To step into their shoes, and see where they go, how they live, and the hardships they suffer from the impact of climate change.

Why have we chosen this medium to talk about climate change? Because, ahead of crucial talks this December in Copenhagen, we need our message to get out there in as many different ways as possible.

We wanted to show some of the many stories about the devastating impact of climate change. After all, it is the people in poorer communities whose voices are all too often drowned out in the drumbeat of reports, debates and summits.

There is Abdus, a farmer whose crops were lost after a bad harvest, who fears he cannot feed his family. There is Hosne Ara Khatun, a young widow too traumatised to speak after her husband was mauled to death by a tiger, starved as its natural habitat has disappeared due to rising sea levels. And there is the young father left to weep over the loss of his wife and young children after the community of Gabura was lashed by the devastation of cyclone Aila.

They may seem thousands of miles away, but their troubles are real, they are growing worse, and they could soon happen to us unless we take action now.

So while we show you – and allow you to choose – the images of devastation caused by climate change, we are also letting you know what you can do to stop the damage.

The UK is currently preparing for its biggest ever climate change demonstration in support of action against climate change, The Wave, on 5 December in London.

The march is one of scores of events by Oxfam and its partners ahead of the talks in Copenhagen, as we urge world leaders to forge a safe and fair climate deal to halt dangerous global warming and protect those most at risk, such as those living in Gabura.

By calling on our leaders to act on climate change this December, we help the people of Gabura, and we help ourselves.

• Barbara Stocking is the chief executive of Oxfam

Are your emissions ‘survival’ or ‘luxury’?

Daniel Scharf

11th November, 2009

A runner-up in the Ecologist/nef essay competition, Daniel Scharf suggests that the whole concept of a carbon ‘market’ is radically flawed…

How do you price the extra tonne of carbon that, once burned, tips the balance and triggers potentially catastrophic, irreversible global warming?

The answer is 42 Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Yen or Yuan or in whatever currency we will be pricing the meaning of human life when it comes to an end.

Meanwhile, the question is how we can continue to contemplate quantifying, or placing a monetary value on the infinite. Global warming is the greatest ever market failure says Lord Stern, so fix the market and the error will be corrected?

Since the Stern Review was published in October 2006 the whole concept of the ‘market’ has been discredited in almost every area in which it has been applied. While the banks are being trusted to reform their ways and to continue to fuel most areas of economic life, the credit crunch might have come at the right time to spread the sense that the marketeers should not be trusted to commodify; that is, to price and trade in carbon. If market economics or capitalism are unlikely to save the whale, the rain forest, or the atmosphere, will it be down to the command economy – discredited during the last century – to ride to the rescue?

Ditch discounting

Suppose that we have ten years to reverse the trend of adding carbon to the atmosphere, ten years before the tonne of greenhouse gas that broke the camel’s back is emitted from a power station chimney or the back of a camel: the mechanism of control has to be capable of dealing with both carbon and methane (and possibly account for water vapour).

The value must be applicable to the producer and the sequesterer, to the fossil fuel burner and to owners of flatulent beasts. In ten years – and the earlier the better – the market economist has to revisit the rule of discounting whereby the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and whereby future benefits are given less value due the uncertainty of their manifestation.

It is true that a tonne of carbon saved today is worth very much more in terms of reducing global warming than the same tonne saved ten years down the line. However, the tonne that needs to be saved in ten years to prevent irreversible global warming would actually have an infinite value if oblivion is to be avoided. So much for economics as we know it, putting a price on everything and knowing the value of nothing.

Few would dissent from another homily: that the best things in life are free to acquire and enjoy, and most if not all are free of or low in carbon content. That being the case, it should not be too difficult to see that pricing or regulating carbon so that its use is largely out of reach will not deprive people of those things that they value most. Whether it is through price or regulation, access must be given to ‘survival emissions’: those we need to subsist in both developed, over-developed and under-developed countries. On the other hand, through price or regulation it should be made universally difficult to emit ‘luxury emissions’: those attributed to the excesses of modern life that show no benefit in human welfare.

A third category of carbon emissions are those associated not with survival or luxury, but with the alleviation of poverty, hunger and disease in all parts of the world. These could only be delivered, through a world carbon bank and national agencies, according to need, and not the ability to pay.

What price a Bengali mother?

Thus we have the carbon ‘market’ cut in three, where access to, and consumption of, these distinctive tonnes of carbon and their subsequent emissions is the different between life and death.

Perhaps there are clever bankers in city towers even now being offered bonuses to work out the formula that would put a value on a tonne of carbon that would be considered fair by a Bengali mother whose home will be flooded and a Sudanese farmer whose pasture will be wasted at, say, 3 degrees of warming that might, at the same time, provide warmer winters to a Muscovite family and improve the crops of an arable farmer in Alberta?

Bankers need to be dissuaded from widening the ‘market’ to embrace the emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases. If the tonne of carbon that pushes the climate over the edge is a ‘luxury emission’ then it should logically have a value close to infinity such that the market would prevent it from being emitted.

Unfortunately it could be a tonne of emissions relating to the survival of the 9 billionth inhabitant of this crowded planet, by denying them the benefits of an item of energy, water or food. A Malthusian revenge. This outcome being within the realms of possibility, if not probability, should suggest to the market economist that a price should be put on the process of procreation, if the existence of more souls to be fed, sheltered and watered is causing both intolerable carbon concentrations, and death would arise from their prohibition.

Or would the market economist rather work at the other end and calculate the scale of bribe that would attract volunteers for an early but very green funeral? Economists will soon find that some of the externalities to which significant carbon effects can be attributed are not just hard to quantify but are taboo subjects. Would they want to be the ones responsible for a revised concept of human rights?

No, Lord Stern, climate change has not been a failure of markets. Global warming is no more and no less than a failure of global governance, and a measure of general deference to economists and reliance on markets. Economists have drawn the net around what to value and include on balance sheets too narrowly. But the answer is not to always try to include externalities, but to acknowledge that some goods are beyond quantification, atmospheric carbon being one of them. The quicker we abandon the concept of placing a price on carbon the better. The use and access to goods that cannot be traded needs instead to be regulated, allocated or rationed.

To read the winning entry to the Ecologist/nef essay competition, click here

Author: admin

Farmers win changes to carbon scheme

‘Merely a gesture’

(Partly) Renewable Ethanol

Researchers: “Upconversion” Creates “Super-efficient” Solar Cells

A terrifying vision of a world devastated by climate change

Are your emissions ‘survival or ‘luxury’ ?

Are your emissions ‘survival’ or ‘luxury’?

A runner-up in the Ecologist/nef essay competition, Daniel Scharf suggests that the whole concept of a carbon ‘market’ is radically flawed…

Antarctic iceberg found floating near Macquarie Island

Antarctic iceberg found floating near Macquarie island