We’re moving, but we’ll only be a mouse-click away.
Please watch for environmental policy news on the Caucus blog and energy technology news on the Bits blog.
You can also follow many of us on Twitter:
Felicity Barringer @felicitybarr
John Broder @JBrodernyt
David Jolly @davjolly
James Kanter @jameskanter
Clifford Krauss @ckrausss
Mireya Navarro @MireyaNYT
Elisabeth Rosenthal @nytrosenthal
Matthew L. Wald @MattWaldnyt
Bettina Wassener @BWassener
The Times is discontinuing the Green blog, which was created to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas. This change will allow us to direct production resources to other online projects. But we’ll forge ahead with our aggressive reporting on environmental and energy topics, including climate change, land use, threatened ecosystems, government policy, the fossil fuel industries, the growing renewables sector and consumer choices.
Thanks to all of our readers.
High-altitude dust blown thousands of miles across the Pacific from Asian and African deserts can cause it to rain and snow in the Sierra Nevada, new research shows. [The Los Angeles Times]
The Department of Agriculture is expected to approve the opening of a horse slaughtering plant in New Mexico that would allow equine meat for human consumption to be produced in the United States for the first time in six years. [The New York Times].
Energy consumption relative to the nation’s gross domestic product will decline steadily over the next three decades, the Energy Information Administration projects. Residential “energy intensity” alone is expected to register a 27 percent decline by 2040 from 2005 levels. [Energy Information Administration]
The deadly bat fungus known as white nose syndrome has spread to Illinois, state officials report. It is the 20th state where bats have been found to be afflicted with the fungus since it was first detected in New York in 2006. [Associated Press]
The just-concluded annual meeting of ARPA-E, an agency founded to nurture interesting energy ideas that may or may not work, featured an exhibition hall with scores of displays staffed by hopeful entrepreneurs.
Many of them seemed to be Ph.D. engineers; in some cases, you needed a Ph.D. yourself to understand what was being presented. But here are three simpler ones that seemed enticing, even if their practicality has yet to be demonstrated.
Some bacteria and algae turn sunlight into oils that can be burned in a car engine or used as raw material at a refinery in place of crude oil. Yet production of reasonable quantities at a reasonable cost has so far been elusive. Tobacco, meanwhile, is easy to grow but has no healthy use. Can the two be merged?
The research consortium Folium (from the Latin word for leaf), which includes the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Kentucky, has taken genes from those types of bacteria and algae and inserted them into tobacco plants. In the first year of work, it produced a crop and then used organic solvents to extract the oils out of the leaves. (Check out the video above.)
Further work on the project, which received $4.8 million from ARPA-E, will determine whether the oils can be used directly as fuel or must go to a refinery. But the tobacco is already yielding one product that could substitute for diesel oil, said Peggy G. Lemaux, a researcher at Berkeley.
Making these oils from tobacco, as opposed to some other crops, would not interfere with food production, Dr. Lemaux noted. And tobacco is already in surplus because of the decline of the cigarette market, so
a large infrastructure is already in place, she said.
Read more…
The American program to dispose of spent nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive wastes is at a standstill for a variety of reasons. First-of-a-kind efforts tend to be technologically difficult, but the real problems are not hardware issues, according to a new book, “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste.”
“The technical characteristics of nuclear waste make the disposal problem difficult, yet it is the human factors that have made it intractable,’’ the authors, William M. and Rosemarie Alley, a husband-and-wife team, write.
Those include “unrealistic demands for earth-science predictions far into the future, eroding confidence in government and institutions, confusion about which ‘experts’ to trust, and the ever-present NIMS [not-in-my-state] and Nimby,’’ they report.
Since the Obama administration killed a plan to build a repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, some supporters of nuclear power have fallen back on a rather simple view of the problem: if politics
had not killed Yucca, it would be well on its way today towards operation.
Read more…
In what might prove to be his last public appearance as energy secretary, Steven Chu delivered a pep talk of sorts on Wednesday to hundreds of entrepreneurs, researchers and others at the ARPA-E conference on energy innovation in suburban Maryland.
Toward the outset, Dr. Chu, a key creator of ARPA-E, which stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, ticked off a list of historical predictions about new technology that turned out to be wrong.
Among them was one by the head of the British post office in 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell received a patent on the telephone. “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not,”
the postal official reportedly said. “We have plenty of messenger boys.’’
Read more…
Thousands of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered in a suburban Washington convention center on Monday for the annual three-day meeting of Arpa-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy. It wasn’t quite the Oscars. At the registration desk, attendees received a goody bag that included a report on clean energy from the Pew Charitable Trusts and a refrigerator magnet that showed the periodic table of the elements.
But the breakout sessions held true to Arpa-E’s tradition: there were lots of swing-for-the-fence ideas. These included finding a high-efficiency, low-cost way to turn surplus natural gas into liquid fuel for cars and trucks, and identifying something to burn other than hydrocarbons so that carbon dioxide is not one of the byproducts.
One researcher proposed burning aluminum instead. One challenge is that the ashes, or oxidized metal, would be hard to recycle back into aluminum without big releases of carbon dioxide.
Read more…
As has often been noted here on the Green blog, one of the biggest uncertainties humanity faces regarding climate change is the potential effect on the world’s food supply.
If there is a risk that global warming and related changes could hit much sooner and much harder than scientists are expecting, agriculture could be the crucial realm where that occurs. In fact, we have already entered an era of sharply higher global food prices, with climate change as one of the likely causal factors.
A new paper from researchers associated with Tufts University puts the overall risk in perspective. It is billed as a working paper, meaning it has not gone through formal scientific review, but it strikes me as worth highlighting nevertheless. The findings pretty closely match the conclusions presented in some of my reporting from 2011.
The authors, Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, point out that in the 1990s, research suggested that climate change would be fairly benign for agriculture. The first few degrees of warming would help agriculture expand in chilly regions, the thinking went, and the rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide would act as plant fertilizer, increasing crop yields. More recent science has cast sharp doubt on some of those conclusions. Read more…
In the unending quest for effective ways of adapting to climate change, it seems that musk ox and caribou may have some of the answers.
According to a study published this week, the large herbivores that inhabit Greenland and other regions in the far north can play an important role in maintaining biodiversity in a warming climate.
In the course of a 10-year Arctic field experiment, the Penn State biologist Eric Post found that the animals held back the growth of some plant species that would otherwise be likely to dominate the local ecosystem as temperatures rose.
Beginning in 2002, Dr. Post simulated a warmer environment in the remote community of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, by building 8,600-square-foot “warming chambers” – cone-shaped hollow structures in which the animals were allowed to graze on the plants that grew under the new conditions.
The musk ox and caribou were excluded from separate areas of the same size that were also subjected to a rise in temperature of 1.5 to 3 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), a level of warming that
scientists project will occur over the next century.
Read more…
Among the most striking elements of the catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan were the hydrogen explosions that destroyed the upper parts of some of the reactor buildings. The hydrogen was released by a metal called zirconium in the overheated core.
Since that accident, whose second anniversary falls on March 11, researchers have been looking at a variety of ways to prevent a repetition. At the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility consortium, scientists think they have zeroed in on one strategy: replacing some of the zirconium with a ceramic.
Zirconium is used not for its strength or for its resistance to heat or its price but because it is nearly transparent to neutrons, the subatomic particles that are released from the nucleus when an atom is
split and go on to split other nuclei in a chain reaction.
Read more…
A new report from the Government Accountability Office elevates the problem of looming gaps in satellite weather data to a “high risk” concern for the federal government
The G.A.O.’s high-risk report, updated every two years to coincide with each new Congress, focuses on federal programs that provide essential public services, often at great cost, but operate with a pronounced ineffectiveness or inefficiency.
Areas like Medicare, military contracting and tax law enforcement have resided on the list continuously since its inception in 1990. The relatively low-profile addition of weather satellites last week underscores growing concerns about short-term and midrange satellite weather observations and forecasts in the United States and across the globe. Read more…
Nutrient pollution is a growing problem along the Upper Mississippi, where water rich in nitrogen and phosphates from crop fertilizer flows directly into the river without the benefit of wetland filtration.
The problem is particularly acute in the levee region of southern Iowa, where farmers are groping for a remedy. The polluted water eventually reaches the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone that now spans 6,700 square miles and costs fisheries $2.8 billion per year.
Environmentalists have filed lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency to press for tighter standards for nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. Worried that the agency might step in with new mandates, farm groups are weighing a temporary solution: floating islands that could process the nutrients before they reach the river.
Built from recycled soda bottles and seeded with native plants, the islands could mimic the role that wetlands once played in assimilating sediment from local agriculture, said Charles Theiling, a hydrological
specialist for the Army Corps of Engineers in Davenport, Iowa.
Read more…
The thick haze of outdoor air pollution common in India today is the nation’s fifth-largest killer, after high blood pressure, indoor air pollution (mainly from cooking fires), smoking and poor nutrition, according to a new analysis presented in New Delhi by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute. In 2010, outdoor air pollution contributed to over 620,000 premature deaths in India, up from 100,000 in 2000.
‘’It’s not just breathing bad air,’’ said Aaron Cohen, the principal epidemiologist at the institute. A host of diseases is related to air pollution, like cardiovascular diseases that lead to heart attacks and strokes, respiratory infections and lung cancer.
The new analysis was drawn from “The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study” for 2010,
a sweeping worldwide study published in December involving 450 experts. The report found that outdoor air pollution in the form of fine particles contributed to 3.2 million deaths globally in 2010, up from
800,000 just 10 years earlier.
Read more…
In his State of the Union message on Tuesday night, President Obama proposed the creation of an “Energy Security Trust” to find alternatives to dependence on oil for the nation’s transportation needs. The trust would be financed from revenue from oil and gas royalties that the federal government collects from companies that drill on federal land.
As is customary in State of the Union speeches, Mr. Obama did not give much detail, but plenty of other voices were happy to fill in the blanks on Wednesday morning. The idea has obvious political appeal – using oil revenues to wean the country from oil – but it has a way to go before reaching fruition.
Securing America’s Future Energy, or SAFE, a group comprising retired admirals and generals and chief executives of major American companies, pointed out that it had recommended such a fund in December. Finding a stable long-term source of revenue would help address the need for funds for research and development, the group said.
Among the details unmentioned in Mr. Obama’s speech was money. SAFE said that $500 million would be a nice number but that it would settle for anywhere from $200 million to $500 million a year. Royalty revenues last year were around $5 billion, the group said.
But nobody seems clear on how much is spent on research on transportation alternatives now. Last year the government spent about $2.9 billion on energy research and development, SAFE said, but that sum includes nontransportation uses.
4:13 p.m. | Updated
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that the administration would ask Congress to direct
$200 million a year to the fund for 10 years. That would be added to a existing research and development program at the Energy Department; in recent years the administration has been asking for $300 million
for that program. While the money would be raised from oil and gas revenues and be spent to reduce oil use, the official said, some of it would be spent to increase natural gas use in vehicles.
A deadly bat fungus has spread to three caves in Cumberland Gap National Historic Park in Virginia, park officials have confirmed.
The fungus, known as white nose syndrome, has killed millions of bats in the Northeast and Midwest since it was discovered in a cave in New York State in 2006. Late last month, it was confirmed to have spread as far west as Onondaga Cave State Park in Missouri
Meanwhile, it it is turning up in additional caves to the east as well. At Cumberland Gap, “three out of 30 caves in the park tested positive for the disease, and we know that bats travel between all
of the caves, so that’s not good,” said Carol Borneman, a ranger at the park, which straddles parts of Kentucky and Tennessee as well as Virginia.
Read more…
