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  • Renewable energy agency proposed

    At the invitation of the German Federal Government, representatives from more than 60 countries met in Berlin earlier this month to discuss the founding of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental organization that will exist to exclusively promote the adoption of renewable energy worldwide.

    Participants expressed a sense of urgency to begin a swift transition to a more secure, sustainable renewable energy economy with the assistance of an international body.  A variety of countries have expressed support for IRENA, including Spain, India, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Portugal and South Africa.

    During the Berlin meeting on April 10th and 11th, government representatives met to discuss and hone the objectives, activities, finances, and organizational structure of IRENA. A common point of discussion during the workshops was the relationship between IRENA and other existing international bodies that deal with energy issues. Some countries expressed concerns over the duplication of activities or unecessary competition with organizations such as the International Energy Agency.

    While there were concerns over how IRENA would work alongside other bodies, it was made clear by participants that a strong, independent force for supporting renewables is necessary to realize the full social, economic and political benefits of clean energies. It was generally agreed that most of the existing initiatives lack a focal point. With limited mandates and capacities, current international renewable energy associations, networks and UN bodies cannot fill the institutional gap that IRENA plans to fill, said Bianca Jagger, Chair of the World Future Council.

    “Promoting renewables must now become a global and universal priority, and IRENA is a necessary condition for that goal. If we intend to embark on the renewable energy revolution, we cannot do it without IRENA,” said Jagger in a speech.

    “IRENA will work toward improved regulatory frameworks for renewable energy through enhanced policy advice, improvements in the transfer of renewable energy technology; progress on skills and know-how for renewable energy; it will be able to offer a scientifically sound information basis through applied policy research; and better financing of renewable energy,” she continued.

    Although the International Energy Agency (IEA) established an advisory board on renewables in 1982, the world has yet to see a breakthrough in renewable energy adoption. This proves the need for an exclusive focus on creating the structural changes needed to ensure widespead adoption of renewable energy, said Hermann Scheer, founder of the European Association for Renewable Energies and member of the German parliament.

    “The IEA will have to compensate for all of the current energy problems and won’t have time to push for new forms of energy,” said Scheer.

    The IEA deals with questions of supply security and the needs of energy markets. This is reflected in its allocation of votes, which are based mainly on the oil consumption of different countries. As a result, it doesn’t cover in great detail the economic, political, and social aspects of renewable energy. In its in-depth country reviews, the IEA analyzes the energy policies of member states without fully recognizing the potential renewable energy, say some critics. The agency’s focus remains on primarily on large-scale energy supply and therefore does not offer much needed advice on how to adapt energy markets towards more decentralized energy sources such as renewables. Further, in contrast to IRENA’s proposed global approach and diverse membership, the activities of the IEA are largely limited to countries involved with the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).

    According to conference organizers, IRENA will work alongside the IEA and other international bodies in areas of renewable energy research, similar to the relationship between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the IEA. One of the major reasons for the foundation of the IAEA in the 1950s was the desire to exploit the opportunities offered by what was then a new energy source. The same attention needs to be given to renewables, said Jose Etcheverry, a chair of the World Council on Renewable Energy.

    “The world sorely lacks innovative economic, social and political institutional frameworks to provide strong support for renewable energy development worldwide,” said Etcheverry. “Conventional energy sources such as fossil fuels and nuclear power have incredibly powerful lobbyists to ensure that their interests are provided with preferential treatment over the more socially desirable options of renewable energy and efficiency.”

    IRENA will address several critical barriers that are preventing the full-scale adoption of renewable energy. It will provide informed policy advice and assistance to national governments that are currently lacking the means and capacity to develop effective regulatory frameworks for renewable energy adoption.

    To strengthen technology transfer IRENA will combine the various independent projects and optimise synergies between them, focus on knowledge exchange, integrate technical, administrative and financial actions, and create suitable incentives for industry to engage in developing countries. Of course, none of these tasks can be fully accomplished without adequate human capacity. IRENA will provide an inventory of current training activities and provide courses for policy-makers and regulators on how to overcome administrative barriers to renewable energy adoption.

    The time to create IRENA is now, said supporters. Indeed, as organizers learn from the decades of experience of other international agencies, they believe they can create of the most innovative, streamlined agenices in the world while helping usher in a new era of clean, sustainable energies.

  • Aussie drought contributes to food crisis

    An expert in science communication says the drought in Australia is one of the reasons world grain prices are increasing.

    International prices of some grains, including rice, have reached record levels.

    Professor Julian Cribb from Sydney’s University of Technology says a dramatic rise in demand for food in places like China and India is also to blame.

    “Over the last eight years the world has eaten more food every year than it has produced, that’s the bottom line, that’s why prices are going up,” he said.

    “One of the factors that has come in is that Australia, a significant grain trader, has had a drought and has not produced much grain.”

  • Greenland lake melts through ice

    Some scientists have suggested that an increased number of similar events could spur a collapse of much of Greenland’s islandwide ice sheet, leading to sudden rises in sea level. But new analyses hint that the overall effects of an increase in such subglacial lubrication, while possibly substantial, would not be catastrophic. All ice on Greenland eventually flows to the sea, with that in glaciers and fast-moving ice streams outpacing the languid flow of most parts of the ice sheet.

    The lake that suddenly disappeared in 2006, one of many such melt ponds that form atop Greenland’s ice sheet each summer, began accumulating in early July of that year, says Sarah B. Das, a glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. By the morning of July 29, the lake covered 5.6 square kilometers and was in some places more than 12 meters deep.

    At that time, instruments show, the lake level began to drop slowly but steadily, about 1.5 centimeters each hour for the next 16 hours. Then, literally, the bottom dropped out: Over about 84 minutes, the lake drained completely, losing on average about 8,700 cubic meters of water each second, she and her colleagues report online and in a paper to be published in Science.

    That water quickly accumulated at the base of the underlying ice sheet, forming a subglacial lake that drained away during the following 24 hours. During that brief period, the seaward flow rate of the overlying ice sheet approximately tripled, then dropped back to its normal speed of 25 centimeters per day.

    Analyses of space-based radar images of western Greenland suggest that the flow speed of the ice sheet increases, on average, between 50 and 100 percent during the summer — a phenomenon probably linked to increased amounts of meltwater reaching bedrock, says Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. He and Das collaborated on the new report and, along with another group of researchers, also analyzed satellite observations of the region that were gathered from September 2004 to August 2007. That report, too, will appear in an upcoming issue of Science.

    In regions of Greenland where large glaciers dump ice into the sea, the effect of summer meltwater seems to be less pronounced, says Joughin, perhaps because the flow of subglacial water out of the glaciers is already brisk.

    “For huge ice streams, the effect isn’t terribly significant,” says Waleed Abdalati, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Nevertheless, he notes, the new findings have widespread implications for the Greenland ice sheet as a whole and

  • Scientests bury carbon tests

    One morning each week, a scientist takes a stroll on the barren upper slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, a basketball-sized glass sphere in hand. At some point, the researcher faces the wind, takes a deep breath, holds it and strides forward while twisting open a stopcock. With a whoosh lasting no more than a few seconds, 5 liters of the most pristine air on the planet replaces the vacuum inside the thick-walled orb.

    Once every couple of weeks, a parka-clad researcher at the South Pole conducts the same ritual. At these remote sites and dozens of others, instruments also sniff the air, adding measurements of atmospheric chemistry to a dataset that stretches back more than 50 years. The nearly continuous record results from one of the longest-running, most comprehensive earth science experiments in history, says Ralph F. Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. He carries on the effort his father, Charles Keeling, began as a graduate student in the 1950s.

    Possible solutions range from boosting natural forms of carbon capture and storage, or sequestration – fertilizing the oceans to enhance algal blooms, say, or somehow augmenting the soil’s ability to hold organic matter – to schemes for snatching CO2 from smokestacks and disposing of it deep underground or in seafloor sediments.

    Success in sequestering carbon comes down to meeting two challenges: How to remove CO2 from the air (or prevent it from getting there in the first place) and what to do with it once it has been collected.

    Read the rest of the article on Science News

  • Extinctions related to previous warmings

    Oceans losing oxygen

    During the Jurassic, abrupt global warming of between 9 and 18 Fahrenheit (5 and 10 degrees Celsius) was associated with severe environmental change. Many organisms went extinct and the global carbon cycle was thrown off balance. One of the most intriguing effects was that the oxygen content of the oceans became drastically reduced, and this caused many marine species to die off.

    These intervals of reduced oxygen content in the oceans are now known as oceanic anoxic events, or OAEs. OAEs are associated with periods of global warming and have occurred a few times in Earth’s history. In the recent study, researchers focused specifically on the Toarcian OAE, a well-documented OAE from the early Jurassic.

    During OAEs, the remains of dead organisms and other organic matter accumulate on the ocean floor and became layers of organic-rich sediments. Today, scientists are examining the chemical and isotopic compositions of these sedimentary deposits in order to determine the actual extent to which the oceans became anoxic. By doing so, they have been able to draw connections between oxygen-depleted oceans and the disruption of Earth’s carbon cycle.

    The carbon cycle on Earth is one of the most important cycles for life as we know it. Carbon is a primary building block of life and is present in every living organism. In order for life to survive on our planet, carbon must cycle between the atmosphere, geosphere (land), hydrosphere (water) and biosphere (life). If the carbon cycle were to suddenly become disrupted, many forms of life on Earth would not survive. Even minor disruptions in the carbon cycle can have profound consequences for living organisms.

    By studying organic-rich marine deposits from the Toarcian OAE, the Open University researchers were able to compare the oxygen levels of ancient seawater to the oceans of today. The sedimentary rocks contain molybdenum, whose isotopic composition is altered depending on how oxygenated the seawater was when the sediments formed. By studying how the isotopic composition of molybdenum changed during the Toarcian OAE, scientists have developed a unique way to trace fluctuations in the oxygen content of Earth’s oceans.

    The Open University team determined that major disruptions in the global carbon cycle during the Jurassic period were intimately linked with the development of anoxic oceans and with global warming. Ultimately, this ties global warming to the demise of numerous life forms on Earth millions of years ago. Additionally, the research is providing insight into how the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere evolved over time.

    Our climate in the balance

    Modern studies of global climate change on Earth usually rely on computer modeling techniques. However, studying the history of our planet through geology can provide information on actual occurrences of climate change in the past.

    Dr. Anthony Cohen, a member of the research team, commented: “The use of current computer models to try to predict the course of climate and environmental conditions in the longer term is uncertain because of our relatively poor understanding of the great complexity of the Earth’s behaviour.  In contrast, marine sedimentary records can provide quantifiable information about precisely how the Earth has responded to severe environmental change in the past. Therefore, these records may also provide valuable constraints for testing the reliability of predictions about environmental change that will continue to occur in the future as a result of man’s activities.”

    Although the Toarcian OAE occurred roughly 183 million years ago, the findings of the recent study have important implications for our understanding of climate change today. The rates and magnitude of environmental change during ancient OAEs appear to have been similar to what we see occurring in modern times.

    By studying OAEs, scientists are able to gain important clues about how climate change might impact life on Earth in the in the coming centuries. Hopefully, their work will lead to scientific solutions that could prevent the same devastating affects on the Earth’s carbon cycle — and life itself — that were caused by global warming during the Jurassic period.

  • Timeline: The Frightening Future of Earth

  • Waste Not: A steamy solution to global warming

    Report May 2008 Atlantic Monthly by Lisa Margonelli

     

    Forty years ago, the steel mills and factories south of Chicago were known for their sooty smokestacks, plumes of steam, and throngs of workers. Clean-air laws have since gotten rid of the smoke, and labor-productivity initiatives have eliminated most of the workers. What remains is the steam, billowing up into the sky day after day, just as it did a generation ago.

    The U.S. economy wastes 55 percent of the energy it consumes, and while American companies have ruthlessly wrung out other forms of inefficiency, that figure hasn’t changed much in recent decades. The amount lost by electric utilities alone could power all of Japan.

    A 2005 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that U.S. industry could profitably recycle enough waste energy—including steam, furnace gases, heat, and pressure—to reduce the country’s fossil-fuel use (and greenhouse-gas emissions) by nearly a fifth. A 2007 study by the Mc­Kinsey Global Institute sounded largely the same note; it concluded that domestic industry could use 19 percent less energy than it does today—and make more money as a result.

    Economists like to say that rational markets don’t “leave $100 bills on the ground,” but according to McKinsey’s figures, more than $50 billion floats into the air each year, unclaimed by American businesses. What’s more, the technologies required to save that money are, for the most part, not new or unproven or even particularly expensive. By and large, they’ve been around since the 19th century. The question is: Why aren’t we using them?

    One of the few people who’s been making money from recycled steam is Tom Casten, the chairman of Recycled Energy Development. Casten, a former Eagle Scout and marine, has railed against the waste of energy for 30 years; he says the mere sight of steam makes him sick. When Casten walks into an industrial plant, he told me, he immediately begins to reconfigure the pipes in his head, totting up potential energy savings. Steam, of course, can be cycled through a turbine to generate electricity. Heat, which in some industrial kilns reaches 7,000F, can be used to produce more steam. Furnace exhaust, commonly disposed of in flares, can be mixed with oxygen to create the practical equivalent of natural gas. Even differences in steam pressure between one industrial process and another can be exploited, through clever placement of turbines, to produce extra watts of electricity.

    By making use of its “junk energy,” an industrial plant can generate its own power and buy less from the grid. A case in point is the ArcelorMittal steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana, where a company called Primary Energy/EPCOR USA has been building on-site energy plants to capture heat and gases since 1996. Casten, Primary Energy’s CEO from 2003 to 2006, was involved in several proj­ects that now sell cheap, clean power back to the mill.

    As a result of Primary Energy’s proj­ects, the mill has cut its purchases of coal-fired power by half, reduced carbon emissions by 1.3 million tons a year, and saved more than $100 million. In March, the plant won an EPA Energy Star award. Its utilities manager, Tom Riley, says he doesn’t foresee running out of profitable proj­ects anytime soon. “You’d think you might,” he says, “but you can always find more … Energy efficiency is a big multiplier.”

    Casten wants to help everyone see such possibilities, so he’s been combining EPA emissions figures with Google Earth images to let investors “peer” into smokestacks and visualize the wasted energy. Recycled Energy Development recently received $1.5 billion in venture funding, which should enable it to expand its reach greatly. Casten gives a whirlwind tour of the targets: natural-gas pipelines, he says, use nearly a tenth of the gas they carry to keep the fuel flowing. Capture some of the heat and pressure they lose, and the U.S. could take four coal-fired power plants offline (out of roughly 300). Another power plant could be switched off if energy were collected at the country’s 27 carbon-black plants, which make particles used in the manufacture of tires. And so on through facilities that make silicon, glass, ethanol, and orange juice, until, Casten hopes, he has throngs of competitors. “I always thought that if we were successful, people would emulate us and I’d be happy at the end of the day. I just didn’t think it would take 30 years.”

    Yet in fact, Casten still has few competitors, and the improvements he’s made remain rare in American industry. With pressure growing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the age of recycled steam may seem closer now than it has in the past, but because of a variety of cultural, financial, and—especially—regula­tory barriers, its arrival is no sure thing.

    The first barrier is obvious from a trip through ArcelorMittal’s four miles of interconnected pipes, wires, and buildings. Steel mills are noisy, hot, and smelly—all signs of enormous inter­dependent energy systems at work. In many cases, putting waste energy to use requires mixing the exhaust of one process with the intake of another, demanding coordination. But engineers have largely been trained to focus only on their own processes; many tend to resist changes that make those processes more complex. Whereas European and Japanese corporate cultures emphasize energy-saving as a strategy that enhances their competitiveness, U.S. companies generally do not. (DuPont and Dow, which have saved billions on energy costs in the past decade, are notable exceptions. Arcelor­Mittal’s ownership is European.)

    In some industries, investments in energy efficiency also suffer because of the nature of the business cycle. When demand is strong, managers tend to invest first in new capacity; but when demand is weak, they withhold investment for fear that plants will be closed. The timing just never seems to work out. McKinsey found that three-quarters of American companies will not invest in efficiency upgrades that take just two years to pay for themselves. “You have to be humbled,” Matt Rogers, a director at McKinsey, told me, “that with a creative market economy, we aren’t getting there,” even with high oil prices.

    Some of these problems may fade if energy costs remain high. But industry’s inertia is reinforced by regulation. The Clean Air Act has succeeded spectacularly in reducing some forms of air pollution, but perversely, it has chilled efforts to reuse energy: because many of these efforts involve tinkering with industrial exhaust systems, they can trigger a federal or local review of the plant, opening a can of worms some plant managers would rather keep closed.

    Much more problematic are the regu­lations surrounding utilities. Several waves of deregulation have resulted in a hodgepodge of rules without providing full competition among power generators. Though it’s cheaper and cleaner to produce power at Casten’s proj­ects than to build new coal-fired capacity, many industrial plants cannot themselves use all the electricity they could produce: they can’t profit from aggressive energy recycling unless they can sell the electricity to other consumers. Yet by­zan­tine regulations make that difficult, stifling many independent energy recyclers. Some of these competitive disadvantages have been addressed in the latest energy bill, but many remain.

    Ultimately, making better use of energy will require revamping our operation of the electrical grid itself, an undertaking considerably more complicated than, say, creating a carbon tax. For the better part of a century, we’ve gotten electricity from large, central generators, which waste nearly 70 percent of the energy they burn. They face little competition and are allowed to simply pass energy costs on to their customers. Distributing generators across the grid would reduce waste, improve reliability, and provide at least some competition.

    Opening the grid to competition is one of the more important steps to take if we’re serious about reducing fossil-­fuel use and carbon emissions, yet no one’s talking about doing that. Democratic legislators are nervous about creating incentives for cleaner, cheaper generation that may also benefit nuclear power. Neither party wants to do the dirty work of shutting down old, wasteful generators. And of course the Enron debacle looms over everything.

    Technocratic changes to the grid and to industrial plants don’t easily capture the imagination. Recycling industrial energy is a solution that looks, well, gray, not green. Steel plants, coated with rust, grime, and a century’s worth of effluvia, do not make for inspiring photos. Yet Casten, pointing to the 16 heat-recycling contraptions that sit on top of the coke ovens at the East Chicago steel plant, notes that in 2004 they produced as much clean energy as all the grid-connected solar panels in the world. Green power may pay great dividends years from now. Gray power, if we would embrace it, is a realistic goal for today.

    Lisa Margonelli is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, just published in paperback.