Inconvenient Truths About "Renewable" Energy

Inconvenient Truths About 'Renewable' Energy By MATT RIDLEY--Wall Street Journal What does the word "renewable" mean? Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a thousand-page report on the future of renewable energy, which it defined as solar, hydro, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal and biomass. These energy sources, said the IPCC, generate about 13.8% of our energy and, if encouraged to grow, could eventually displace most fossil fuel use. [Ridley energy] John S. Dykes It turns out that the great majority of this energy, 10.2% out of the 13.8% share, comes from biomass, mainly wood (often transformed into charcoal) and dung. Most of the rest is hydro; less than 0.5% of the world's energy comes from wind, tide, wave, solar and geothermal put together. Wood and dung are indeed renewable, in the sense that they reappear as fast as you use them. Or do they? It depends on how fast you use them. One of the greatest threats to rain forests is the cutting of wood for fuel by impoverished people. Haiti meets about 60% of its energy needs with charcoal produced from forests. Even bakeries, laundries, sugar refineries and rum distilleries run on the stuff. Full marks to renewable Haiti, the harbinger of a sustainable future! Or maybe not: Haiti has felled 98% of its tree cover and counting; it's an ecological disaster compared with its fossil-fuel burning neighbor, the Dominican Republic, whose forest cover is 41% and stable. Haitians are now burning tree roots to make charcoal. You can likewise question the green and clean credentials of other renewables. The wind may never stop blowing, but the wind industry depends on steel, concrete and rare-earth metals (for the turbine magnets), none of which are renewable. Wind generates 0.2% of the world's energy at present. Assuming that energy needs double in coming decades, we would have to build 100 times as many wind farms as we have today just to get to a paltry 10% from wind. We'd run out of non-renewable places to put them. You may think I'm splitting hairs. Iron ore for making steel is unlikely to run out any time soon. True, but you can say the same about fossil fuels. The hydrocarbons in the earth's crust amount to more than 500,000 exajoules of energy. (This includes methane clathrates—gas on the ocean floor in solid, ice-like form—which may or may not be accessible as fuel someday.) The whole planet uses about 500 exajoules a year, so there may be a millennium's worth of hydrocarbons left at current rates. Contrast that with blue whales, cod and passenger pigeons, all of which plainly renew themselves by breeding. But exploiting them caused their populations to collapse or disappear in just a few short decades. It's a startling fact that such "renewable" resources keep running short, while no non-renewable resource has yet run out: not oil, gold, uranium or phosphate. The stone age did not end for lack of stone (a remark often attributed to the former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani). Guano, a key contributor to 19th-century farming, was renewable fertilizer, made from seabird dung harvested off Peruvian and Namibian islands, but it soon ran out. Modern synthetic fertilizer is made from the air and returns to the air via denitrifying bacteria, yet few would call it a renewable resource. Even fossil fuels are renewable in the sense that they are still being laid down somewhere in the world—not nearly as fast as we use them, of course, but then that's true of Haiti's forests and Newfoundland's cod as well. And then there is nuclear power. Uranium is not renewable, but plutonium is, in the sense that you can "breed" it in the right kind of reactor. Given how much we dislike plutonium and breeder reactors, it seems that the more renewable nuclear fuel is, the less we like it. All in all, once you examine it closely, the idea that "renewable" energy is green and clean looks less like a deduction than a superstition.

Nice Quote

"Water - the ocean - is our most natural environment. We are born naked from the miniature ocean of the mother's womb." Jacques Mayol, 1927-2001

Alien attack leaves 500 dead in Fort Worth

This was just too newsworthy not to post, even though it's not directly important to the environment.

Thoughts on Sharks Dying

This story caught my eye. Sharks are such timeless creatures and have existed for so many millions of years and yet, mortality catches up with them just like it does us. Of course, with sharks, most die at the hands of humans that want their fins or meat, not from mysterious diseases. Even in their evolutionary mastery, the shark remains a vulnerable life form. Was this pollution, some form of red tide phenomena? If so, it's new. Shark deaths from water quality are rare.

From the Oakland Tribune

Dead sharks found in Redwood Shores were suffering from internal bleeding, necropsy shows

By Bonnie Eslinger

Daily News Staff Writer
Posted: 05/12/2011 12:17:37 AM PDT
Updated: 05/12/2011 06:48:52 AM PDT

Officials have completed a necropsy on one of the dozens of leopard sharks found dead in Redwood Shores last month but aren't any closer to pinpointing the cause of the sudden die-off.

The necropsy performed by a California Department of Fish and Game pathologist found "inflammation, bleeding, and lesions in the brain, and hemorrhaging from the skin near vents." Bleeding was also detected around the female shark's internal organs.

Additional tests, such as a bacterial study and microscopic tissue analysis, may provide an answer, according to a statement released by Redwood City. Results could be available by the end of the week.

"The ... pathologist is not drawing any conclusions until more examinations and all tests are performed," the statement said.

About 50 leopard sharks have been found dead in Redwood Shores since mid-April, according to the city.

Hundreds of the creatures have washed up on the shores of other Bay Area communities in recent weeks, said Sean Van Sommeran, executive director of the Santa Cruz-based Pelagic Shark Research Foundation. They have been reported in Foster City, Tiburon and as far north as Marin, but the highest concentration has been in the waterways of Redwood City.

"I suspect we're only seeing a tiny fraction of what's going on," he said.

Van Sommeran called the Department of Fish and Game's necropsy results "startling." He suspects a change in water quality may be to blame, but there
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has been no evidence of a large toxic spill in the area.

Tests of the Redwood Shores lagoon waters have revealed nothing unusual, according to Redwood City spokesman Malcolm Smith. The city is paying for the additional tests to determine the cause of the die-off.

Redwood City resident Catherine Greer was one of the first people to discover the dead sharks. She and her 13-year-old son Lorenzo Fernandez were fishing April 18 at the Redwood Shores lagoon when they spotted several of the creatures beached.

"I was really concerned to see one dead shark on the side of the water," she said. "Then what really concerned me is when I saw many more."

Greer said she and her son tried to push some of the sharks back into the water, "and they'd swim right back, thrashing their heads against the shore ... as if they were trying to commit suicide."

"I go fishing with my son," Greer added. "I know what their normal behavior is like, and what I saw was generally alarming."

According to Van Sommeran, the slender-bodied leopard shark, which typically grows to about four feet long, is a "pretty resistant" species.

Email Bonnie Eslinger at beslinger@dailynewsgroup.com.

Rachel Graham Honored for Whale Shark Conservation!

Scientist awarded for helping to make people love sharks
A scientist who has saved whale sharks in Belize from extinction has been honoured by the Princess Royal as the third woman in a row to win a prestigious prize for conservation.

Louise Gray
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent 8:30PM BST 11 May 2011


Dr Rachel Graham was awarded the Whitley Gold Award by Her Royal Highness Princess Anne at the Royal Geographic Society in central London.

The £60,000 award, supported by Sir David Attenborough and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), will go towards further conservation work to try and save sharks and rays from overfishing off the coast of the Central American country.

Dr Graham has dedicated 20 years of her life to saving endangered species like the whale shark, a ‘gentle giant’ measuring up to 40ft long that feeds mostly on plankton.

The 43-year-old Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Gulf and Caribbean Sharks and Rays Programme, has won legal protection for the species in Belizean waters.

She also led innovative schemes to encourage people to protect rather than fear sharks by letting schoolchildren, students, planners and decision-makers see the gentle animals in the wild.

Dr Graham’s success is a further boost for women conservationists with last year’s Gold Award having gone to Angela Maldonado of Colombia for saving night monkeys and the 2009 prize to Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka of Uganda for her work with gorillas.

The same ceremony also saw the presentation of Whitley Awards worth £30,000 each in project funding to six other conservation leaders from Argentina, Croatia, India, Indonesian Borneo, Russia and Uzbekistan.

A short video about the work of each winner has been made with voice over from Sir David.

Georgina Domberger, Director of the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN), the UK-based charity behind the international awards scheme, said an increasing number of conservation projects in Eastern Europe are being rewarded for their efforts to help protect animals as the area develops.

Cave systems in Croatia, saiga antelopes in Uzbekistan and bats in Russia are being protected thanks to the award.

"The aim of the Whitley Awards is to identify and applaud inspirational conservation leaders, and support their efforts to make even greater use of their scientific expertise and local knowledge to deliver real and lasting benefits for people and wildlife and the places both share,” she said.

The Whitley Awards scheme is an annual competition, first held in 1994. In the 18 years since the scheme began, it has given grants worth more than £6m to support the work of conservation leaders in 70 countries.

The Gold Award 2011 is, for the first time, being sponsored by WWF-UK to celebrate its decade of support for the Whitley Awards, and acknowledge the golden jubilee of WWF-UK’s formation in 1961.

Complete story here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8508097/Scientist-awarded-for-helping-to-make-people-love-sharks.html

Nutrients in Mississippi is a Complex Subject--Not All Just Fertilizer

Our environmental problems are frequently complex and recalcitrant to simple solutions. It's not as simple as sinking the Japanese whales ships in "Saving the Whales--A Bwana Doc Adventure. How do you save the Gulf of Mexico and stop the growth of the dead zone?

Study Probes Sources Of Mississippi River Phosphorus; Don't Blame Cow And Over-Fertilization
by Underwatertimes.com News Service - May 9, 2011 17:13 EST

MADISON, Wisconsin -- In their eagerness to cut nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, people have often sought simple explanations for the problem: too many large animal operations, for instance, or farmers who apply too much fertilizer, which then flows into waterways.

But according to new modeling research that examined phosphorus loading from all 1768 counties in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB), the true causes aren't nearly so straightforward. Livestock manure is widespread in many MRB counties, for example, but it shows little relationship to water quality, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Cornell University in the May-June 2011 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality.

Moreover, areas that load the most phosphorus into the Mississippi are also places where farmers add less phosphorus to the soil than they remove each year in crop harvests, suggesting that overzealous fertilizer use is not the issue.

"If it were that, it would be easy to solve. But it's not that," says Mark David, a University of Illinois biogeochemist who led the research. "It's much more complex. So I think in that sense addressing the problem is harder."

Soil erosion and tile drainage contribute large amounts of phosphorus to the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico each year, helping fuel a "dead zone" of oxygen-starved water in the Gulf that reached near-record size last summer. Local water quality may also decline due to phosphorus-driven algal blooms.

In an effort to pinpoint the most important sources of phosphorus across the entire MRB, David's team calculated the yearly phosphorus inputs and outputs for every county in the basin from 1997 to 2006. After aggregating these and other data within 113 watersheds throughout the MRB, they then estimated the river load of phosphorus from every county between January and June for the same time period.

Not surprisingly, counties with intensive row crop agriculture, such as those in the Upper Midwest Corn Belt states of Iowa, Illinois and Ohio, contributed the most phosphorus to rivers. However, these same counties often showed negative phosphorus balances, meaning that phosphorus outputs in crops exceeded inputs by farmers.

In other words, farmers in these regions are actually mining stored phosphorus from the soil, rather than putting more into the system, David says. "But that negative balance doesn't have much to do with the phosphorus that gets in the river." Instead, the overall intensity of agriculture seems to matter most. "When I'm sitting here in Illinois in a watershed that's 95% corn and soybeans, it's going to lose some phosphorus," he says, "whether the balance is negative or positive."

In addition, although animal manure is considered a major phosphorus source to streams and rivers, it was relatively unimportant to phosphorus loading across the entire MRB. David suspects the reason is that most large-scale animal farms have moved to western states in the basin, such as Colorado, where there's less precipitation to carry manure nutrients into the Mississippi.

Phosphorus from human waste did prove significant. Counties encompassing Chicago and other major metropolitan areas "showed up as hot spots," David says, because most municipalities don't remove phosphorus from the otherwise clean sewage effluent they discharge into streams. The team further found that about half of the variation in phosphorus loadings was not explained by their models, suggesting that other factors also contribute, such as stream bank erosion and phosphorus deposits in river sediments.

Overall, the findings suggest that reducing phosphorus pollution will require broad adoption of practices that limit nutrient runoff, such as cover crops, buffer strips, and incorporation of fertilizers. It will also require limits on phosphorus discharge from cities.

Achieving these objectives across the entire MRB won't be easy, but David hopes the study helps people move beyond common assumptions about causes to focus on the real issues.

"To me the value of the study is that it helps shift the debate," David says. "The problem is not as simple as two things. It's not as simple as too much fertilizer or manure."

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation's Biocomplexity in the Environment/Coupled Natural-Human Cycles Program.

Thoughts on Bin Laden's House and Environmental Consciousness

I was struck by how dingy and colorless Bin Laden's supposed "mansion" was. A grimmer house one could not imagine. Gray, no paint, no stucco, only his marijuana plants were green. I was struck by the similarity to the old Soviet Zone in East Berlin. In West Berlin there were lights, colorful billboards, painted buildings--in the East-everything was gray. People that rejoice in life like color. It makes us feel alive. People that appreciate the natural world and respect it likewise rejoice in color. The green of the forest, the many blues and grays of the seas, the extravagant palettes of animals and flowers. When people don't appreciate nature, everything is gray in their souls. Just like Bin Laden's house.