Climate Change

If you want to step back and look at some of the basics, here are some good sources: 

This from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report from the Fourth Assessment Report.

From the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Feeling the Heat.

You can also go to the BBC Weather Centre’s site on climate change for some clear, simple basics.  

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank devoted to “issues of particular concern to African Americans and other peoples of color,” recently launched the Commission to Engage African Americans on Climate Change (CEAC).  “There is a fierce urgency regarding climate change effects on the African American community,” according to the CEAC’s President and co-chair of the Commission, Ralph B. Everett.

At the commission launch event, the results of a new survey revealed a striking belief in the seriousness of the problem of climate change in the African American community and a “… a strong consensus (81 percent) among African Americans that the federal government should take strong action.”  Congresswoman Carolyn C. Kilpatrick, Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said “Across the country, African Americans are recognizing the urgency of encompassing environmental issues in our global fight for parity and comprehensive energy legislation.”  See also US Blacks Face Harsher Climate Change Impact from Reuters. 

Members of the commission come from a broad range of organizations including the Environmental Justice & Climate Change Initiative, the American Association of Blacks in Energy, the Sierra Club, and the American Public Health Association.

I’ve written about the importance of the involvement of religious communities, most recently here.  One of the largest and most important church coalitions in the US, the National Council of Churches, a broadly ecumenical group, with some of the most important Black churches as members (African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church), operates the Eco-Justice Program.  They have an active initiative on climate change.  You can receive their new report, “Climate and Church: How Global Climate Change Will Impact Core Church Ministries,” by registering here.  The UCC is an integral member of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a critical and a powerful voice.

Here’s the UCC’s video. 

I’m bullish on algae. I’ve written about it here, here and here since April. According to Valcent, you get 18 gallons of biofuel from one acre of corn per year, 700 to 800 gallons per acre per year from palm, but up to 20,000 gallons from algae – and that’s in an open-pond system. It’s much more efficient in terms of volume and other factors if you are in a closed-loop bioreactor. This also gives you the hugely added benefit of sequestering captured carbon dioxide. Valcent CEO Glen Kertz says “If we took one tenth of the state of New Mexico and converted it into algae production we could meet all the energy demands for the entire United States.”

Download

People say that you can’t rely on solar because it doesn’t run at night, besides how are you going to store energy that you don’t need at a given time? Well the folks at MIT seem to have come up with what amounts to all the answers. “With today’s announcement,” reads the press release, “MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.”

The key to the breakthrough is “… a new catalyst, consisting of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode. When the catalyst is placed in water and electricity runs through the electrode, oxygen gas is produced. When another catalyst is used to produce hydrogen gas, the oxygen and hydrogen can be combined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power a house or an electric car, day or night.” (For an abstract of the paper in “Science,” go here.)

“With Daniel Nocera’s and Matthew Kanan’s new catalyst, homeowners could use their solar panels during the day to power their home, while also using the energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for storage. At night, the stored hydrogen and oxygen could be recombined using a fuel cell to generate power while the solar panels are inactive.”

(Graphic/Patrick Gillooly, MIT)

Here’s a video of Daniel Nocera, the lead researcher on this.

Download

James Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London and one of the world’s leading experts on photosynthesis, was over the moon: “This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind. The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem.”

Right up there with algae, I’m loving electric cars these days. See several recent posts here, here, here, here, and here. Now let’s get a look at some news from Spain and France. Spain Sees 1 Mln Electric Cars in Energy Plan is the arresting headline from Reuters’ PlanetArk service. When? By 2014! See also this from BusinessGreen. Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian said that electric vehicles represented the future of transport.

Meanwhile, up north from Spain, in the City of Lights, following on the smashing success of a citywide bike-sharing program, Paris is going to put 4,000 electric cars at the disposal of residents in the city and suburbs. See this from the A.P. The ambitious program hopes to launch in late 2009 or early 2010. Obviously, the French want to encourage mass transit and bicycling – and never forget that Paris is one of the great walking cities of the world – but the rationale here is that if people must drive, they should borrow a ZEV. Sweet.

I’ve been a fan of Stan Ovshinsky and the company he founded, Energy Conversion Devices, for some time. Some people have compared Ovshinsky to Edison. Among his many inventions, the most ubiquitous must be the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery. In a recent paper, he was to be found touting the hydrogen economy. For a significantly less technical look at his vision, see this from CarbonFree. The article says “Reversible storage of hydrogen in a solid hydride permits the entire loop of hydrogen generation, storage and use, to be carried out now, rather than at some distant point in the future.”

Hydrogen and fuel cells are not something that we’ve looked at a lot here, I find somewhat to my own surprise. Here’s a special issue of “E/The Environmental Magazine” which includes an interview with Amory Lovins, and also an article on the Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin. (We need to look at fuel cells more. I’ll get on it.)