Energy from Waste

Enviropundit has a selection of links on the subject.

Technorati tag: Energy, Waste

Stealing energy from passing traffic

If I lived on a busy through road I'd definitely want one of these outside my house. A metal ramp is moved by vehicles passing over it and generates electricity. Tests have shown that they can generate between 5 and 50kW depending on the weight of the vehicle passing over them.

We discussed this and, strictly, it's reducing the efficiency of the cars by stealing kinetic energy generated by their engines. However the generation of that energy is producing pollution in the neighbourhood, so the drivers should pay a little back. The best locations would obviously be roads that are already due to have speed bumps installed, making the traffic calming pay for itself.

Technorati tag: Traffic, Speed bump

Welsh wave power

West Dale Bay near Milford Haven is to get a rather appropriately named Wave Dragon tidal power station.

The floating units are moored to the sea bed but are able to adjust their position to the on-coming wave direction.

Water is channelled into a reservoir above sea level. It is then released through a number of turbines to generate electricity in the same way as hydro-electric power plants work.

Technorati tag: Wave Power, Tidal Power, Wales

D1 Oils and Jatropha biodiesel

Another link I found whilst surfing the Co-op's intranet.

D1 Oils want to generate biodiesel from the seeds of the jatropha tree, a hardy shrub that can be grown all over the developing world.

Because it requires minimal rainfall, jatropha can be grown successfully on marginal, degraded, or even desert land. The trees also help prevent soil erosion. In addition to yielding oil for refining into biodiesel and glycerol for use by the cosmetics industry, the residual oil cake is excellent organic fertiliser. Research is underway into alternative uses for the residual seedcake, such as animal feed, briquettes for power generation and nutraceuticals.

Technorati tag: Biodiesel, Jatropha

FTSE4Good

The FTSE4Good Index Series has been designed to measure the performance of companies that meet globally recognised corporate responsibility standards, and to facilitate investment in those companies. Transparent management and criteria alongside the FTSE brand make FTSE4Good the index of choice for the creation of Socially Responsible Investment products.

I've been reading up on the Co-op's environmental guidelines on the intranet, which is where I found out about FTSE4Good. I need to find out who to suggest green roofs to in the corporation.

Technorati tag: FTSE, Socially Responsible Investment

Ethanol from Shitake

An enzyme in Shitake mushrooms is particularly efficient at breaking down dead wood into sugars. So scientists are working on an enhanced version of the enzyme to make the production of ethanol more efficient.

Called Xyn11A, the gene carries the instructions that the mushroom uses to make an enzyme known as xylanase. The researchers want to see if a ramped-up version of the gene could be put to work digesting rice hulls or other harvest leftovers.

If enzymes can do that quickly and efficiently in huge vats, or fermenters, at biorefineries, they could help make ethanol and other products a practical alternative to today's petroleum-based fuels, for example. That's according to Charles C. Lee, an ARS research chemist.

via Treehugger

Technorati tag: Biofuel, Shitake

Mapping Pollution from Space

Dutch scientists are putting together remarkable maps showing pollution over Europe and other regions of the globe.

Using the US space agency's Aura satellite, the team can look right down to the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere where we all live.

The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (Omi) and other key equipment on Aura can build a daily picture of air quality.

The pollution maps, which can see detail at the city scale, will be used to identify problem hotspots.

via Warren Ellis

Technorati tag: Pollution

Bush 'isolated in US' on climate

George Bush and his government are now isolated in their own country on climate change, ex-Cabinet minister Stephen Byers has said.

Mr Byers is speaking for the International Climate Change Task Force at the UN summit on the issue.

He said the UK must engage with the US to persuade it to adopt climate change targets once George Bush leaves power.

And the US refusal to agree the Kyoto treaty should not stop other nations agreeing further targets, he said.

Mr Byers argued the US should be encouraged to tackle emissions in other ways before taking on targets at a later date.

Technorati tag: Bush

Cameron vows 'tough' green action

Conservative leader David Cameron has set up a policy group on the environment to pave the way for "tough decisions" on cutting greenhouse gas.

The group, chaired by ex-Environment Secretary John Gummer and environmentalist Zac Goldsmith, will look at "quality of life" issues.

Mr Cameron says he will finalise policies in 18 months' time following the group's recommendations.

Labour said policies, not "platitudes", were needed to help the environment.

Someone in the LAbour party doesn't understand irony.

Technorati tag: Conservative Policy, Environment

The Case Against Clarkson

Earlier this year Jeremy Clarkson received an honorary degree for services to engineering or something. Coming the week after he'd written that he wanted to run over cyclists, presumably because he's jealous that we use the road more effectively than he, there were calls that he shouldn't get the award and a thoroughly deserved flanning.

It's true, the award should be taken off him. But not for the fatwa on cyclists, or the equally dumb comments on environmentalism. No, he should lose the degree because his comments display an appalling lack of understanding of what engineering is, and should be, about.

Engineering is about solving problems, preferably as simply and elegantly as possible. In aesthetic terms a hand built single speed bike is worthy of inclusion in the finest galleries amongst the masters. A Ferrari is that picture of the tennis girl hitching up her skirt.

Levelling the playing field a little, to give cars some chance, the best engineered car of all time has to be the Beetle. There have been more efficient cars, faster cars and (arguably) better looking cars, but none of them is such a simple statement of car-ness in its most basic form (four people and their luggage to their destination as simply and reliably as possible).

Since the Beetle cars have just been getting more complicated. They're not good, innovative engineering any more. The modern auto designer is little more than a hot rodder, forever fiddling with the details and introducing more gimmicks. It's very easy, relatively, to build the sort of super car Clarkson salivates over. The real automotive challenge lies with the sorts of vehicles he mocks, hybrids, Smarts and low energy town cars.

What about the Industrial Revolution, that great age Clarkson likes to hark back to. He'd tell you that the machine age couldn't have started with the sort of health and safety rules that exist nowadays. But that's a non argument, easily ignored. The Industrial Revolution was about increased efficiency. Cheaper products meant more people could afford them and the quality of life rose. Who, these days, are the greatest proponents of increased efficency? You can bet it's not Clarkson's favourite car makers, desperate to sell soft roaders for the school run and condemn a generation to obesity and early heart attacks.

And finally, what would Clarkson's hero Brunel make of all this. Brunel tackled the problems of the day in the most audacious ways he could imagine. He wouldn't be chasing diminishing returns with ever more pointless supercars. He'd be building offshore wind farms or solving congestion by hanging monorails above pedestrianised city centres.

Clarkson glorifies past triumphs of engineering, which isn't such a bad thing. But he can't recognise great contemporary engineering and belittles the area in which the discipline's next great achievements will be made. As such he is doing it great harm and should have his honorary degree rescinded.

Technorati tag: Jeremy Clarkson, Cars

Customers Who Care

The co-op runs a campaign called customers who care, on a different issue every year. For 2006 it's combatting climate change

www.co-operativebank.co.uk/cwc

Technorati tag: EcoHouse

Biodiesel's big bad

Biodiesel could be more carbon intensive than the fossil fuels it replaces. Specifically if it's made from palm oil, the most popular source at present.

Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they've cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.

Technorati tag: Biodiesel

Scientist hopes for CO2 storage

Mankind's only hope of staving off catastrophic climate change is burying CO2 emissions underground, says the UK's chief scientist.

Sir David King told the BBC carbon capture and storage technology was the only way forward as China and India would inevitably burn their cheap coal.

This would be disastrous unless they were persuaded to put CO2 from power stations into porous rocks, he said.

It is thought carbon capture and storage would add 10-15% to fuel bills.

Technorati tag: Carbon, CO2 Storage

Nations shamed with fossil award at climate talks

In the environmental equivalent of name and shame, countries making what environmental groups call the silliest or most backward comments at climate change talks in Montreal are being awarded toy dump trucks filled with coal.

In a gathering where solar, wind and geothermal power are being touted as ways of saving the planet from global warming, green groups are using the fossil-of-the-day award to take the sting out of talks that aren't making much progress.

Technorati tag: Global Warming, Montreal

'Biggest wind farm' postponed

The planned construction of Wales' biggest wind farm in the Bristol Channel has been postponed for at least two years.

Work on 30 turbines, each 400ft tall, at Scarweather Sands off Porthcawl, was due to start in 2006.

But developers E.ON UK and Energi E2 said on Monday that the project was currently not financially viable.

Technorati tag: Wind Power

Story of a badge

The BBC traces the history of the Nuclear Power? No Thanks! badge

Technorati tag: Nuclear Power

Street level carbon trading

Personal carbon quotas could be one of the ways to cut CO2 emmissions.

Domestic Tradable Quotas are in effect personal allowances to pollute.

In Europe, about 12,000 big companies and institutions already have such allowances, regulated by the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Pollution has become a commodity with a price determined by the market, which will ensure that emissions are cut in as cost-effective a manner as possible.

DTQs would simply extend this concept to the public.

Technorati tag: Carbon trading

Climate change 'will dry Africa'

Two new studies predict that climate change will make dry regions of Africa drier still in the near future.

Computer models of the global climate show the Sahel region and southern Africa drying substantially over the course of this century.

Sahel rainfall declined sharply in the late 20th Century, with droughts responsible for several million deaths.

The research comes just after the latest United Nations summit on climate change opened in Montreal.

with that and the mini Ice Age in the North we're going to end up cramming most of humanity into a thin strip around the Mediterranean and hoping it can support us.

Technorati tag: Climate Change

Science faces 'dangerous times'

Fundamentalism is hampering global efforts to tackle climate change, according to Britain's top scientist.

In his final speech as president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will say scientists must speak out against the climate change "denial lobby".

He will warn core scientific values are "under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East".

Technorati tag: Science, Fundamentalism

US rejects Blair's climate hopes

The US has dismissed a suggestion from UK Prime Minister Tony Blair that it may be prepared to sign up to binding targets to tackle climate change.

Speaking at UN climate talks in Canada, the US chief negotiator said his nation would not enter talks about fixed curbs on emissions of greenhouse gases.

Mr Blair told UK business leaders on Tuesday that he believed all major nations would support new targets.

Is there a way we can do this without them. No malice to the millions of US citizens who are trying to make a difference, but the world will be a better place after their leaders' stupid policies cause the country's economy to collapse and force a low energy rebuild on it.

Technorati tag: Climate Change

'Climate threat badly understood'

Public understanding of climate change and what people can do to help tackle the problem is very weak, the environment secretary has said.

Margaret Beckett was launching a new campaign to persuade people global warming needs to be tackled now.

Under the banner of "Tomorrow's Climate, Today's Challenge", ministers want to recruit local groups to take the message to new audiences.

The government says its usual campaigns will not change public attitudes.

I still reckon you should appeal to peoples' wallets, as the title of How to Save the World for Free alludes to. Let them see a cut in energy bills and then they'll be ready to listen to you about all sorts of other stuff.

Technorati tag: Climate Change

Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age

The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.

The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

For those who laughed, this was the plot to The Day After Tomorrow

Technorati tag: Ice Age, Global Warming