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Eat Green for World Vegetarian Day

by Hedrick Lepsch Posted on October 1, 2013

Vegetarians can use protein sources like almonds and walnuts to maintain a balanced diet. Photo: Cindy Baldhoff

When Christina Coley became a vegetarian 25 years ago, she did it as a personal, moral choice.

“I was actively involved in animal rights and didn’t think [eating meat] was a good way to live,” she says. But now the mother of three, who lives in Idaho, says she and her husband also appreciate the environmental benefits of vegetarianism.

“We have learned in the recent past that raising animals purely for food has a big impact on global warming, ozone issues and the like,” she says. “I believe that by not eating meat, I am helping preserve the environment a little bit.”

She says a vegetarian lifestyle is more sustainable, because she can easily choose to buy food that is grown locally. “I can even grow it myself,” Coley adds. “I’m not sure you can do that with meat very easily, if at all.”

A 2006 study by the University of Chicago backs up Coley’s statement. In “Diet, Energy and Global Warming,” researchers found that the average American diet gets about 47 percent of its calories from animal sources, which results in a carbon footprint of 2.52 tons annually. When red meat makes up about 50 percent of a diet’s calories, that number jumps to 3.57 tons. However, when just 25 percent of the calories come from fish, but no other meat sources, the carbon footprint drops to around 1 ton.

As World Vegetarian Day is observed on Oct. 1 — kicking off Vegetarian Awareness Month — it’s a good time to reassess what you’re eating and look at the effect it’s having on the planet. While many people are conscientious about recycling, using less electricity and composting, they may not be aware just how big of an effect their diet has on the environment.

According to the Vegetarian Society, livestock farming accounts for almost 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions created by human-related activities, and the United Nations claims that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than the world’s transportation sources combined. (Much of that comes from the nitrous oxide found in manure.)

Another environmental effect comes from the fossil fuels used to transport animals for slaughter and for delivery after being processed, and to power the production of their feed. Any way you crunch the numbers, it all adds up to a significant contribution to greenhouse gases, and lowering meat consumption is an important tool in furthering environmental sustainability.

Next page: Easy ways to “go vegetarian”

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Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

by Natalia681 Posted on September 20, 2013

Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

By

Aaron Hockley

Coal is going off the tracks.

From a failed coal auction in Wyoming to slowing demand in China, times are tough for the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel. And that’s before we even get to EPA’s new proposed power-plant rules.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management held an auction Thursday for the right to mine 167 million tons of coal from the 1,254-acre Hay Creek II coal tract in Campbell County, Wyo. The highest bid of $35 million, by Kiewit Mining Properties, was so low that the bureau rejected it. From Bloomberg:

The company’s offer was less than one-fifth what mining companies paid for similar deposits last year, and the lowest amount per ton since 1998. It didn’t meet the government’s estimate of fair value, the bureau said in a statement.

“The bottom has just dropped out of the market,” Mark Northam, director of the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources, said by telephone. “This represents a high degree of uncertainty about whether coal will stay robust in the future.”

The remarkably low bid followed a similar auction last month, held by the same BLM office in Wyoming, in which not a single company bid on the right to mine a 316-million-ton coal reserve.

Meanwhile, controversial plans to build new coal export terminals on America’s West Coast are flailing. From a New York Times report last week:

United States coal exports this year are expected to decline by roughly 5 percent from last year’s record exports of 125 million tons, and many experts predict the decline will quicken next year.

At the beginning of 2012, the coal industry had plans to expand port capacity by an additional 185 million tons. But those hopes have faded this year.

“Global coal prices right now are not supportive of large-scale U.S. coal exports,” said Anthony Yuen, a Citigroup energy analyst.

The AP has more on coal’s troubles around the world:

Economic forces, pollution concerns and competition from cleaner fuels are slowly nudging nations around the globe away from the fuel that made the industrial revolution possible.

The U.S. will burn 943 million tons of coal this year, only about as much as it did in 1993. Now it’s on the verge of adopting pollution rules that may all but prohibit the construction of new coal plants. And China, which burns 4 billion tons of coal a year — as much as the rest of the world combined — is taking steps to slow the staggering growth of its coal consumption and may even be approaching a peak.

Michael Parker, a commodities analyst at Bernstein Research, calls the shift in China “the beginning of the end of coal.” While global coal use is almost certain to grow over the next few years — and remain an important fuel for decades after that — coal may soon begin a long slow decline.

With coal on the downslide, who do we need to talk to about getting our mountains back?

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Delaying climate action will triple costs

by hanhuogekennog Posted on September 19, 2013

Delaying climate action will triple costs

By

Shutterstock

We can pay now, or we can pay later — with interest.

If the world puts off cooperative efforts to fight climate change until 2030, they will be more than three times as expensive as they would be in 2015.

That’s according to a study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters. A team of researchers modeled the economic impacts of possible international climate agreements and found that if the world starts in 2015 to take the difficult but necessary steps to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, then international economic growth would be crimped by 2 percent. But delaying those steps until 2030 would mean growth is curtailed by about 7 percent. (Those figures refer to the effect of climate policies during the first decade, not sustained impacts.)

In the following graph from the paper, the y-axis shows the reduction in worldwide economic growth, while the x-axis shows temperature rise. The bars on the right reference four scenarios: one in which the world starts taking action today to reduce emissions under a meaningful global agreement, and others in which action doesn’t start until 2015, 2020, or 2030.

Environmental Research LettersClick to embiggen.

When it comes to saving the planet, a penny saved is not a penny earned. Rather, a penny spent is nearly a nickel earned.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Wasted food is a huge climate problem

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on September 16, 2013

Wasted food is a huge climate problem

By

Shutterstock

Global warmer.

If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.

The results, published in a new report [PDF], were as nauseating as a grub-infested apple:

Without accounting for [greenhouse gas] emissions from land use change, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated to 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent: as such, food wastage ranks as the third top emitter after USA and China. Globally, the blue water footprint (i.e. the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage is about 250 km3, which is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva. Finally, produced but uneaten food vainly occupies almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; this represents close to 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land area.

In the West, most of our food waste occurs because we toss out leftovers and unused ingredients — and because stores won’t sell ugly produce. The FAO found that some farmers dump 20 to 40 percent of their harvest because it “doesn’t meet retailer’s cosmetic specifications.” In developing countries, by contrast, most of the wasted food rots somewhere between the field and the market because of insufficient refrigeration and inefficient supply chains.

The FAO estimates that when we throw away more than 1 gigaton of food every year, we are throwing away $750 billion with it — an estimate that doesn’t include wasted seafood and bycatch.

“All of us — farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers — must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement. “We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Is this a La Niña or El Niño year? Try La Nada

by deqc16rl Posted on September 11, 2013

Is this a La Niña or El Niño year? Try La Nada

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Shutterstock

C’mon Pacific Ocean, heat up or cool down. All this average crap is making us nervous.

Meteorologists base a lot of their long-term weather projections on temperatures in the globally influential Pacific Ocean. But for more than a year the world’s most expansive ocean has been devoid of its famed El Niño and La Niña patterns — anomalously higher-than-average or lower-than-average bands of sea-surface water that help govern major weather events.

For now, the Pacific is stuck in a stubborn La Nada state: near-normal surface height and temperatures. Scientists say it could last into the spring, but that’s not so unusual: La Nada rules the Pacific about half the time. But it makes life difficult for weather forecasters, and it threatens to ignite unpredictably extreme weather. From NASA:

“Without an El Niño or La Niña signal present, other, less predictable, climatic factors will govern fall, winter and spring weather conditions,” said climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Long-range forecasts are most successful during El Niño and La Niña episodes. The “in between” ocean state, La Nada, is the dominant condition, and is frustrating for long-range forecasters. It’s like driving without a decent road map — it makes forecasting difficult.”

Patzert noted that some of the wettest and driest winters occur during La Nada periods.

“Neutral infers something benign, but in fact if you look at these La Nada years when neither El Niño nor La Niña are present, they can be the most volatile and punishing. As an example, the continuing, deepening drought in the American West is far from ‘neutral,’” he said.

NASANASA uses satellite data to measure Pacific Ocean sea levels. Because warm water expands, that data helps scientists gauge the water temperature. All the green in this latest image means a whole lot average sea temperatures. And that means that La Nada is in town.


Source
‘La Nada’ climate pattern lingers in the Pacific, NASA

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The Green Traveler’s Guide to Victoria

by arielbangkok Posted on September 9, 2013

Victoria, B.C., offers more than pretty scenery — eco-minded travelers will find plenty to make them happy. Photo: Tourism Victoria/Deddeda Stemler

On the southern tip of Vancouver Island, the provincial capital of British Columbia beckons visitors with historic architecture, plentiful water and mountain views, and activities fit for a queen (afternoon tea and gardens are among the highlights of this former Hudson Bay Company trading post).

Western Canada’s oldest city, Victoria is progressive when it comes to being environmentally friendly. Consider that 5.9 percent of metro commuter travel is done by bike, making it the top bike-commuter city in all of Canada (they’re safe when it comes to cycling, too, with 92 percent donning a helmet, more than anywhere in the world).

The city’s also home to the LifeCycles Fruit Tree Project, which coordinates the picking of apples, cherries, pears and other fruit from privately owned trees that would otherwise go to waste. Last season, the group collected and redistributed more than 39,000 pounds of fruit to community centers, food banks, tree owners and others. Local businesses like The Marina Restaurant and Sea Cider also participate by processing some of the fruit into products such as jams, pastes, sauces, dips, cider, liqueur, vinegar and ice cream.

Want to check out the city for yourself? Here are some of the greenie hot spots in Victoria:

Next page: Accommodations and Activities

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David and Goliath – Malcolm Gladwell

by Myrna Posted on August 18, 2013

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

David and Goliath

Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell

Genre: Psychology

Price: $12.99

Expected Publish Date: October 1, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


Malcolm Gladwell, the #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, offers his most provocative—and dazzling—book yet. Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient , a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and a sling, and ever since then the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David's victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn't have won. Or should he have? In David and Goliath , Malcolm Gladwell challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks. Gladwell begins with the real story of what happened between the giant and the shepherd boy those many years ago. From there, David and Goliath examines Northern Ireland's Troubles, the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, murder and the high costs of revenge, and the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms—all to demonstrate how much of what is beautiful and important in the world arises from what looks like suffering and adversity. In the tradition of Gladwell's previous bestsellers— The Tipping Point , Blink , Outliers and What the Dog Saw— David and Goliath draws upon history, psychology, and powerful storytelling to reshape the way we think of the world around us.

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Ozone hole could be making global warming worse

by Arkady549e Posted on August 12, 2013

Ozone hole could be making global warming worse

By John Upton

NASA

A record-breaking hole in the ozone layer in September 2000.

It’s like Lord Voldemort joining forces with The Penguin.

Two of the globe’s most epic environmental threats appear to be ganging up on us: The hole in the ozone layer could be hastening global warming.

Yes, the hole in the ozone layer. It still exists, though it has been getting smaller because the world rightly panicked and began phasing out the use of CFCs in the 1980s. It was previously thought that the hole was helping to slow down global warming, but new research published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests the opposite. From Nature:

The team’s models predicted a shift in the southern-hemisphere jet stream — the high-altitude air currents flowing around Antarctica — as a result of ozone depletion. This produced a change in the cloud distribution, with clouds moving towards the South Pole, where they are less effective at reflecting solar radiation. …

The extra net energy absorbed by the Earth would be 0.25 watts per square metre, or roughly a tenth of the greenhouse effect attributed to CO2, [says Kevin Grise, the study’s lead author and an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University]. The result could be a small but non-negligible contribution to global temperature rise.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb?

by Myrna Posted on August 8, 2013

Recent warnings that this greenhouse gas could cost us $60 trillion have received widespread publicity. But many scientists are skeptical. Wikimedia Commons It was a stunning figure: $60 trillion. Such could be the cost, according to a recent commentary in the journal Nature, of “the release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia…a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012.” More specifically, the paper described a scenario in which rapid Arctic warming and sea ice retreat lead to a pulse of undersea methane being released into the atmosphere. How much methane? The paper modeled a release of 50 gigatons of this hard-hitting greenhouse gas (a gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons) between 2015 and 2025. This, in turn, would trigger still more warming and gargantuan damage and adaptation costs. The $60 trillion figure went everywhere, and no wonder. It’s jaw dropping. To provide some perspective, 50 gigatons is 10 times as much methane as currently exists in the atmosphere. Atmospheric methane levels have more than doubled since the industrial revolution, but this would amount to a much sharper increase in a dramatically shorter time frame. According to the Nature commentary, that methane “is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly.” Such are the scientific assumptions behind the paper’s economic analysis. But are those assumptions realistic—and could that much methane really be released suddenly from the Arctic? A number of prominent scientists and methane experts interviewed for this article voiced strong skepticism about the Nature paper. “The scenario they used is so unlikely as to be completely pointless talking about,” says Gavin Schmidt, a noted climate researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Schmidt is hardly the only skeptic. “I don’t have any problem with 50 gigatons, but they’ve got the time scale all wrong,” adds David Archer, a geoscientist and expert on methane at the University of Chicago. “I would envision something like that coming out, you know, over the centuries.” Still, the Nature paper is the most prominent airing yet of concerns that a climate catastrophe could be brought on by the release of Arctic methane that is currently frozen in subsea deposits—concerns that seem to be mounting in lockstep with the dramatic warming of the Arctic. That’s why it’s important to put these fears into context and try to determine just how much weight they ought to be accorded. To keep reading, click here. Visit site: How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb? Related Articles Is Keystone XL a Distraction From More Important Climate Fights? Keystone Light: The Keystone XL Alternative You’ve Never Heard of Is Probably Going to Be Built Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the 2nd Quarter—Thanks to the Government

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INEOS Bio Begins Commercial Production of Cellulosic Ethanol

by Posted on July 31, 2013

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INEOS Bio Begins Commercial Production of Cellulosic Ethanol

Posted 31 July 2013 in

National

This morning, there’s a lot of good

news

for second generation biofuels, starting with a significant milestone: At 10am,

INEOS Bio

announced that is it producing the nation’s first commercial volumes of cellulosic ethanol out of its Vero Beach, FL facility. Made from wood waste, this clean burning, environmentally friendly fuel is proof positive that the RFS is working. We are lessening our dependence on oil, diversifying our fuel supply, and reducing our carbon emissions.

 

From the INEOS Bio press release:.

 

The biofuels produced in Florida will anchor the new production of cellulosic ethanol under the U.S. Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS). INEOS Bio is working with other companies and cities globally to use this technology as a new direction for waste disposal and the production of advanced biofuels and renewable power.

 

This news comes on the heel of other excellent news in the world of advanced renewable fuel.

Sapphire Energy

, which uses algae to make fuel,

announced yesterday

that they were paying back their $54.5 million dollar loan from USDA ahead of schedule. On top of this,

Zeachem

, which produced cellulosic ethanol at its demonstration facility earlier this year, announced today that their facility has been approved by the EPA under the cellulosic renewable fuel portion of the RFS, moving them one step closer to commercial cellulosic production as well.

 

An exciting two days for advanced renewable fuel, it is becoming more and more clear that the RFS is doing exactly what it set out to accomplish.

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