Eighteen percent of your body and mine is carbon. Eighteen percent. That tree outside your door is made of 50 percent carbon. In fact, the weight of that tree doesn’t come as much from water and fertilizer as it does from the carbon it sucks out of the air -- stuff you can’t even see, the evil carbon dioxide (CO2).
So, why has the element that is prized on earrings and rings (diamonds are a girl’s best friend, the saying goes) become so reviled?
"Anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make airborne carbon a material in the wrong place, at the wrong dose and wrong duration. It is we who have made carbon a toxin—like lead in our drinking water," McDonough wrote earlier this month. "In the right place, carbon is a resource and tool."
McDonough insists businesses, institutions and policymakers are all led to believe that shrinking our carbon footprint will “bring down the carbon enemy.” And he thinks terms like low-carbon, zero-carbon, decarbonization, negative carbon, neutral carbon, and a war on carbon are part of the problem.
In reality, McDonough says carbon is an asset and “the life-giving carbon cycle could be a model for human designs.” He argues for a new language that will shape how we think about carbon that identifies three strategies for carbon management and climate change:
Unveiled at the COP22 climate talks in Marrakech, Morocco, McDonough says the carbon positive city “transforms fugitive carbon into durable carbon, such as plastics and building materials, and into living carbon, such as healthy soils, gardens, crops and landscapes.” In his vision, “sewage treatment plants become fertilizer factories and intensive integrated agriculture systems.” He calls these systems “solar orchards” that provide clean energy, clean food, clean water and jobs simultaneously.
The concept endured, and the firm began to imagine building and city designs as “photosynthetic and biologically active, accruing solar energy, cycling nutrients, releasing oxygen, fixing nitrogen, purifying water, providing diverse habitats, building soil and changing with the seasons,” he said.
Current projects include:
While McDonough is an acknowledged thought leader on sustainable design who has put his thoughts into action, the question becomes how widely will his concepts or similar designs be implemented by others? In answer, McDonough’s website points to the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) a membership group of more than 135 sustainability directors from municipalities in the U.S. and Canada with more than 70 million people in their jurisdictions. USDN is “dedicated to creating a healthier environment, economic prosperity, and increased social equity.” The organization’s network “shares best practices and accelerates the application of good ideas across North America.”
One of USDN’s projects is the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, “a collaboration of international cities committed to achieving aggressive long-term carbon reduction goals.”
The project web site says that cities must cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050 because urban areas product nearly three quarters of anthropogenic emissions. The project recognizes that “reaching this goal will depend in large part on our ability to re-imagine and reinvent cities.” McDonough’s work is an important example of the thinking required to reach carbon emissions goals.
Image credits: 1) Pixabay 2) McDonough Innovations; 3) McDonough + Partners
President-elect Donald Trump ran his campaign on the unlikely promise of bringing coal jobs back to the U.S. Fulfilling that promise is growing unlikelier by the day.
In the latest development, a multinational research team has unlocked one of the mysteries behind plants' natural ability to "split" water. The discovery provides foundational support for efforts to produce renewable hydrogen fuel with low cost, high efficiency water-splitting systems.
In Europe, for example, rail transport company Alstom introduced a fuel cell train that appears to leverage a recently formed relationship with the sustainable hydrogen company Hydrogenics.
Fuel cell electric vehicles have been slow to hit the open road here in the U.S. But hydrogen fuel cells are rumbling into niche markets, such as in the logistics industry and seaports.
This growing market makes it imperative to transition out of the primary source for hydrogen -- natural gas -- and into more sustainable alternatives.
The new breakthrough could help accelerate that trend by providing a helpful course-correction for renewable hydrogen research.
The Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory spearheaded the project. It provides the first atomic-scale visualization of the protein complex that plants deploy during photosynthesis.
Named photsystem II, this protein is the nexus where energy from sunlight splits water to create oxygen along with protons and electrons -- useful bits of energy that are later used to transform carbon dioxide into solid plant material.
How important is this breakthrough? Co-principal investigator Vittal Yachandra offers this take:
“We have been trying for decades to understand how plants split water into oxygen, protons and electrons. Understanding how nature accomplishes this difficult reaction so easily is important for developing a cost-effective method for solar-based water-splitting, which is essential for artificial photosynthesis and renewable energy.”
Next steps for the team include deploying the process of elimination to gain a more accurate understanding of the actual mechanism at play.
That may be true in some areas of research, but when you get down to the primary or financial level, market incentives practically evaporate. For example, the Internet as we know it today is the product of a Defense Department research program, for which each taxpaying member of the public can claim some credit. That kind of high-risk, high-reward investment requires a measure of time, human resources and dollars that are difficult if not impossible to assemble in the private sector.
The new Berkeley project is a good example: The team deployed publicly-owned equipment to create the new image.
"The images ... provide the first high-resolution 3-D view of photosystem II in action, a feat accomplished by using unimaginably fast X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) pulses from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science User Facility."
In short, LCLS does this:
"With X-ray pulses a billion times brighter than predecessor X-ray sources that last for just femtoseconds, or million-billionths of a second, LCLS can measure the properties ultrafast processes at the scale of atoms and molecules."
Another angle that would be difficult to engineer on private-sector dollars alone is the international cooperation that takes place at the level of foundational research. The Berkeley research team included representatives from Germany's Humboldt University, Sweden's Uppsala University and England's Oxford University, as well as compatriots from Stanford University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
If President-elect Trump can use his powers of persuasion to get private dollars to fill in for this kind of operation, good luck.
Meanwhile, another XFEL is up and running in Europe, so at least hydrogen stakeholders have another place to go if Trump decides to pull the rug out from under hydrogen research in the U.S.
Image: by Johannes Mssinger via Eurekalert.org, "...structure of the oxygen evolving complex in photosystem II in a light-activated state. Water molecules are shown as blue spheres, the four manganese ions in purple, the calcium ion in green and the bridging oxygen ions in red. The blue mesh is the experimental electron density, and the blue sticks are the protein side chains holding the catalytic complex."
While many fret over whether Donald Trump will or will not shred the United States’ commitment to the global climate deal, market forces may very well help mitigate climate change risks in the long run. We will certainly see the global transportation energy mix shift over the next few decades.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the sun is already setting on gasoline. In its 2016 World Energy Outlook, the Paris-based intergovernmental agency projects an eventual decline in demand for gasoline over the next 25 years. The IEA says global demand for oil will remain steady until at least 2040, due to the lack of alternatives for truck and aviation fuel. But the agency expects electric vehicles to increasingly displace gasoline cars that run on gasoline.
The agency expects the number of all-electric cars worldwide to surge from the current estimate of 1 million to 150 million by 2040, Executive Director Dr. Fatih Birol told Bloomberg last week. So, even if the number of passenger cars on earth double over the next quarter century – a daunting statistic by any measure – global gasoline consumption has already peaked, the group estimates.
Recent events suggest this trend is already irreversible. The Government Fleet Declaration, for example, commits some of the world’s wealthiest countries to increasing the percentage of electric cars within their governments’ automobile fleets. Such policies could have a huge impact in the U.S. alone: Estimates suggest about 400,000 electric vehicles drive on U.S. roads; and the size of the U.S. federal government’s fleet totaled over 640,000 last year, so there is a huge opportunity for automakers to rapidly increase EVs’ market share.
On the consumer side, if GM succeeds with the launch of its mid-range priced, all-electric Chevy Bolt, other automakers will ramp up their efforts while Telsa is poised to disrupt the market with next year’s release of its Model 3.
While energy companies such as Shell have been far more dramatic than the IEA in predicting when society will reach peak oil, the reality is that other petroleum derivatives will continue to experience growth over the next several years. A booming global middle class and the expansion of more emerging economies means those middle distillates such as jet fuel and diesel will still have a large role in the global transportation energy mix. Ongoing demand for petrochemicals also suggests that petroleum will not recede as quickly as its detractors would like.
The IEA believes consumer acceptance of electric vehicles must increase rapidly if the world will come even close to becoming carbon neutral and limiting the earth’s warming to another 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. We'd have to put 700 million electric cars on global roadways by 2040, which would offset 6 million barrels of oil consumption daily, for such a scenario to become reality.
Cleaner sources of power are quickly transforming the world’s grids; the next frontier is to have clean technology become the reality in transportation as well as industry.
“Renewables make very large strides in coming decades but their gains remain largely confined to electricity generation,” Dr. Birol wrote in the IEA’s most recent report. “The next frontier for the renewable story is to expand their use in the industrial, building and transportation sectors where enormous potential for growth exists.”
Image credit: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr
Taking a cup of java to-go is the daily morning routine for millions of workers worldwide. But the problem with takeaway coffee, popularized by chains such as Starbucks, is those pesky disposable cups.
Most of them are made of paper with a thin layer of plastic, which succeeds quite well in keeping beverages warm and cups unsodden. But the result is that recycling these cups is almost impossible in most municipalities, as the paper-plastic combination makes them very difficult to reprocess into new materials. The amount of single-use cups that end in landfills depends on the source cited, but CNN suggested as many as 60 billion are thrown away each year.
For years, coffee chains like Starbucks declined to take responsibility for this problem, saying the patchwork of recycling solutions from town-to-town and state-to-state is the issue.
A company in the United Kingdom, however, says it has a solution to the disposable coffee cup conundrum. And a trial run of its products in Australia may reveal the answer for waste diversion efforts worldwide.
Simply Cups designed a single-use cup that still uses the paper-plastic combination. But the difference is that the company says it has two methods of treating these used cups. Either the paper fiber and polyethylene lining can be separated, or the entire cup can be completely reprocessed into a polymer for use in products such as trays and coasters. Simply Cups also operates a used cup collection service, giving customers and businesses an opportunity to be part of a closed-loop system.
According to Singapore-based Eco-Business, the outcome of a four-week pilot project suggests that such a closed-loop system could scale in Australia. Led by the waste management consultancy Closed Loop Environmental Solutions of Melbourne, the project involved placing special bins at office buildings in three large Australian cities to collect used coffee cups.
The program gathered over 12,000 coffee cups. For now, the pitched cups are being displayed in order to impart the value of recycling. The cups will eventually be recycled; in the meantime, Closed Loop’s team and municipal officials will complete further study on how to make the economic case for a dedicated recycling facility. Closed Loop says the four-week pilot shows consumers are willing part of a zero-waste system if given a dedicated bin for disposable coffee cups.
The pilot in Australia mirrors similar efforts worldwide to divert more coffee cups from landfill. This summer, companies including McDonald’s, KFC, Starbucks, and the British coffee chains Caffé Nero and Costa announced a “paper cup manifesto” that promised to increase paper cup recycling rates.
One company seizing opportunity from this pledge is Frugalpac, which manufactures paper cups with easily-removable plastic liners inside. After the liner is removed during processing, the paper can be recycled up to seven times, mostly to create newsprint, the company says. Meanwhile, coffee chain Costa says it will accept coffee cups at any of its U.K. locations in order to boost recycling efforts.
Certainly, there is nowhere for these cups’ recycling rates to go but up: The Times of London suggested earlier this year that only 1 in 400 coffee cups is recycled.
Image credit: David Atkinson/Flickr
By Brian Collett — Hundreds of Alaskan fishermen have taken action to safeguard their salmon grounds against environmental contamination.
Altogether 93 per cent of 513 interviewed salmon fishermen participated in environmental activity last year, the 2016 Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle, Washington, was told.
The fishermen were worried that onshore mining, pollution and the resulting climate change were affecting their salmon habitat and the quality of their catches.
Their actions, reported in a survey presented to the conference by the United Fishermen of Alaska, the industry’s professional body, included donating money and time to the cause, signing petitions, lobbying decision-makers, including politicians, and informing other fishermen about conservation and environmental issues.
Alaskan fishermen land about three million tons of fish and seafood annually. This figure is roughly the same as Norway’s tally, three or four times the amount caught by UK fishermen and approximately 2 per cent of the entire world catch. Fish and seafood comprise Alaska’s biggest export, though little is sold to Britain.
Commercial fisherwoman Melanie Brown, who took part in the conference presentation, emphasised that Alaskan fishermen feel deep personal connections with the profession and the protection of the salmon fishery.
She said: “Salmon and the environment are wrapped up in our identity. We believe it’s essential to maintain the health of the salmon and preserve the fishery for the generations to come.”
Lindsey Bloom, a board member of the professional body, said the survey responses showed Alaskan fishermen were “a pretty significant force to be reckoned with”.
