As nonstop flights between the U.S. and E.U. increase, what will be the effect on climate?

Throw open the skies and get your passports ready! You may have heard by now that the proverbial jump across...

Mississippi town not enthusiastic about storing strategic petroleum

Richton, Miss., is the lucky town picked as the fifth storage site for the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. To create...

An interview with author Bruce Barcott

Bruce Barcott. In his new non-fiction book Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, environmental journalist Bruce Barcott follows Sharon Matola...

The WSJ on fertilizer markets so manipulated, they might make a Saudi prince blush

For all the misery it has caused, the global food-price crisis has at least forced people to think more seriously...

The Clorox Co. leverages sustainability for growth

More green biz reporting from the Sustainable Brands ’08 Conference. Even the Clorox Company, with $4.8 billion in sales last...

Maine becomes third state to pass tough coal law

Yesterday, Maine Gov. John E. Baldacci signed LD 2126, "An Act To Minimize Carbon Dioxide Emissions from New Coal-Powered Industrial and Electrical Generating Facilities in the State." The law, which was sponsored by Rep. W. Bruce MacDonald (D-Maine), requires the Board of Environmental Protection to develop greenhouse gas emission standards for coal facilities. It also puts a moratorium in place on building any new coal plants until the standards are developed.

Three states (Calif., Wash., and Maine) as well as New Zealand now have laws effectively blocking new coal plants that don't meet a carbon dioxide emission standard roughly equivalent to that of a combined cycle gas plant (i.e., 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour). That standard could be met with even a moderate level of sequestration, but so far no utilities have stepped to the plate. As a result of Washington state's standard, Energy Northwest's proposed Pacific Mountain Energy Center in Kalama was rejected by regulators in November because its plans for carbon capture and sequestration were judged to be merely "a plan to make a plan."

Laws such as Maine's LD 2126 are valuable in blocking plants that merely declare themselves "carbon capture ready." As NRDC's David Hawkins told Congress (PDF): "A 'carbon sequestration optimized' coal power plant is not defined and could mean almost anything, including a plant that simply leaves physical space for an unidentified black box. If that makes a power plant 'capture-ready' Mr. Chairman, then my driveway is 'Ferrari-ready.'"

How three Southeast cities are changing

For more on Southeast cities, see our full feature on sustainability initiatives underway in Atlanta. With rapid population growth and...

More than half of today’s electricity, more than 16 percent of today’s energy

Enough sunlight strikes unshaded U.S. rooftops to replace all the coal and some of the natural gas we use to make electricity. Backup via ground source heat pumps, and smart grid technology would allow this variable energy source to displace base-load coal with today's technology. Whether this is the most cost effective way to displace coal is another question. Also rooftop solar is a silver BB rather than a silver bullet: Even after massive efficiency improvements we will need to get many times the power from non-rooftop sources than from rooftops.

According to a 2003 study by the Energy Foundation (PDF), solar PV that converts 15 percent of sunlight to electricity could produce 710,000 Megawatts on rooftops that will be available in 2050. Doug Wood thinks that with concentrating PV using advanced aerospace quality cells we could convert solar at 30 percent rather than 15 percent efficiency. Scaling back to rooftops available today (using 2003 numbers from the same study and extrapolating forward) we could produce around 1.05 billion megawatts today. We normally assume 22 percent capacity factor (PDF) for PV. So that would give us about 2.3 billion megawatt hours, or around 56 percent of today's electrical production -- more than coal provides.

Further, waste heat from this process could provide much of our heating and cooling needs as well. The EF study I cited suggests that about 65 percent of commercial roof space is unshaded compared to about 22 percent of residential roof space. Since some commercial scale chillers run on low to medium temp heat today, with enough storage solar CHP could provide close to 100 percent of commercial heating and cooling. But that much storage takes a lot of capital for a small incremental gain. So more realistically, we would put 16 to 24 hours of low temp Phase Change Material storage and use ground source heat pumps to provide the other 15 percent of low temp needs. As a side effect, the overnight storage would let us run those heat pumps when the electricity was cheapest -- which will prove more important than it might appear at first glance.

If biofuels are sustainable, we should be able to show it

A friend recently sent me a one-page press release from an ethanol lobby group that purported to debunk "myths" of biofuels. Our ensuing discussion helped me clarify why even people who once were excited and optimistic about biofuels (like me) are now so opposed to production subsidies (as opposed to R&D).

My friend asked (paraphrasing), "If not biofuels, then what?" and noted that what we're doing now -- "squeezing oil out of rocks" -- is not exactly good for the planet.

For me, the bottom line is simply this:

Ethanol is no more a renewable fuel than hydrogen is.

Rather, ethanol is a way for us to consume natural gas, diesel oil, and coal (not to mention a huge volume of water and vast acreage of cropland) to make motor fuels. All this is on top of serious problems raised by studies about land diversion for carbon emissions and food availability.

It's important to remember that fossil fuels are biofuels (fuels made from once-living matter), so using that term alone isn't helpful.