"Being bored is the only time you are creative."

Dyson Freeman is probably the only climate change denier I genuinely admire. [Via The New York Time Sunday Magazine]

Fungus Genome May Be The Key To Cellulosic Ethanol

So:

By decoding the genome of a green fungus with a hunger for fibrous plants, scientists hope to boost the supply of cellulose-based ethanol, leaving more food for consumption and driving down transportation costs.

By way of background:

The high cost of cellulose-based ethanol comes from the expensive enzymes, derived from the fungus Tricoderma reesei, which are used to break down trees, corn stalks, paper, and other wood or pulp-based items.

For years, scientists have tried to economically produce enough enzymes to break cellulose down into simple sugars that can then be fermented into ethanol, but to no avail.

Having the genome of T. reesei "gives you a tool kit with all the tools, where before you were trying to blindly match things up," said Jason Stajich, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley,

[Via Discovery News]

Wax Attack to Hold EPA Admin Johnson in Contempt

He won't stop. This Wax burns at both ends:

In letters to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and White House official Susan Dudley, Chairman Waxman announces that the Committee will consider holding them in contempt for their repeated refusal to provide subpoenaed documents to the Committee. The subpoenaed documents involve the White House role in EPA’s ozone standards and rejection of California’s motor vehicle emission standards.

Pepsi Introduces Carbon-Neutral PepsiFLAT

From

PURCHASE, New York — Soft drink giant Pepsi unveiled their new "environmentally sustainable" beverage PepsiFLAT today, at a press conference outside the company's world headquarters. The drink is not carbonated, substituting the recognized greenhouse gas with a proprietary chemical that simulates the sensation of carbon dioxide bubbles by selectively attaching to nerve cells on the surface of the consumer's tongue, gums and throat.

Due to recent legislation emphasizing the reduction of carbon emissions nationwide, the new chemical qualified for fast-tracking under guidelines administered by the FDA. "The average liter of soda contains 6 grams of CO2," Pepsi CEO Eric Foss told journalists at the PepsiFLAT product launch, adding, "That's roughly 389,000 tons of CO2 released nationally each year prior to consumption and in the form of burps." [Link]

Beet Pulp For Pet Food To Be Used For Bioplastics Instead

This Dog Says, "No Way."



Despite healthy suspicions that we in the developed world are robbing global food resources for the manufacture of "sustainable" bioplastics and biofuels, our research communities soldier on.

Chemists Victoria Finkenstadt and LinShu Liu of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service have been working since 2004 on a method for transforming beet pulp into what Science Daily describes as a "specialized filler material for polylactic-acid-based plastics [PLA]"—and they seem to have had a breakthrough.

Unfortunately, the beet pulp, which is traditionally only marketable as a component in livestock feed or pet food, would be going to make exactly the bioplastic that releases methane (a potent greenhouse gas) while rotting in landfills, according to this report in the London Guardian. The PLA-based plastic containers further don't appear to decompose quite the way people expect them to in that, to fully biodegrade (a primary benefit they have over traditional petrol plastics), they have to be composted in anaerobic digesters of which there are precious few (in Britain) and which traditionally don't accept plastic containers.

SO: Without a better alternative (going back to regular plastics isn't exactly productive), maybe just getting more municipal anaerobic digesters is the solution. (How expensive are they, anyway?) With the beat pulp filler lowering the cost of PLA-based bioplastics, maybe it's worth still considering these. I feel slightly inhuman asking this, but why are we blaming food shortages on biofuels and bioplastics, when climate change-induced drought and exponentially increasing population growth deserve their fair share of the blame? This goes out to our domesticated pet populations too: Don't hate the bioplastic, dog. Hate the game.

[Link to the Science Daily article; Proposal for the USDA's research project "Valuable Polysaccharide-Based Products from Sugar Beet Pulp and Citrus Peel"]

Depressing Alert: Worldwide Food Shortage Leads To Riots

Australia's ABC (like the BBC) reports that in "the past week alone there have been violent, food-related riots in Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cameroon." Frankly, I've already read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, so I'd like to be exempt from this upcoming apocalypse. [Link]

Protestifying From the Rooftops, Sometimes

• The Daily Record reports that Plane Stupid protesters crept onto the roof of Scottish Parliament to protest expansions of Glasgow and Edinburgh Airports — a sequel to their recent protest of a third runway at Heathrow whilst atop the Palace of Westminster. With their mole outed, enemies of Plane Stupid are probably asking, "Which government building will these two 23-year-old ferrets climb next!?"

• Also in Scotland, vandals armed with heavily-symbolic mung beans are deflating the tires of gas-guzzlers by placing the legume on the tire valve and screwing the cap back on. According to the Edinburgh Evening News, commenters on IndymediaScotland "point out that their actions lead to rescue vehicles going to the cars affected and owners using engine-powered pumps to re-inflate tyres."
  

• Japanese anti-nuclear protesters hassled French Prime Minister Francois Fillon's tour of a new nuclear power plant that was jointly built by Japan Nuclear Fuel and French nuclear giant Areva. According to AFP, "critics charge that it poses an environmental safety risk and could also be vulnerable to an earthquake." The critics did not climb a government building.

• Police arrest a 73-year-old nun and a 47-year-old college instructor for protesting nuclear weapons development outside the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, TN. No government buildings were scaled in the incident. [via Knoxnews]

Here Comes Everybody, (to Protest'n'stuffs or whatevs)

• According to the Los Angeles Times, the Sierra Club is getting all Clay Shirky up in this piece, organizing hyper-local protests against new coal-firing power plants "every time" a new one is proposed "anywhere in the United States." The project is so cleverly decentralized that some industry lawyers have suggested "bringing conspiracy charges against the environmentalists if they can find instances in which the national groups recruited locals to allow them to file legal papers that they couldn't have filed otherwise."

• Dubai-level development hubris in Calverton, NY as creepy-looking Suffolk County legislator, William J. Lindsay, pleads with the new state governor to consider the positive “social, political and economic impacts” of the proposed $1.5 billion indoor snow center; not just the plight of the short-eared owl, local protests and living with moral culpability for expediting the arrival of a Road Warrior-style postapocalypse. [via skirebel, for some reason]

EPA Administrator Bucking the Wax Attack

God Damn, I will miss this House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

As Kurt Davies of Greenpeace said to me the other day, "You really don't want Henry Waxman (D-CA) as your enemy." The 17-term (!!!) congressman's absence of further political ambitions and unflinchingly liberal base (his district includes West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica) have afforded him the opportunity to investigate all the dirt he sees fit. And currently, the man who the Nation once called the "Eliot Ness of the Democrats" sees fit to drop three subpoenas on Bush's EPA in three months ("Boo Yah!!!")—all in a pitched battle for the internal documents pertaining to the agency's refusal to accept California's petition to set its own standards on automotive greenhouse gas emissions.

But EPA administrator Stephen Johnson will not budge. In the two weeks between the Uncanny Waxman's second and third subpoenas, the agency head has:

1. requested that Special H's Oversight Committee instead give him their documents detailing the closed-door interviews with seven senior EPA officials, heavily referenced in Wax's first subpoena
2. shelved his agency's findings that greenhouse gases are a danger to the public, telling Congress that he will initiate a lengthy public comment period about whether such emissions are a risk
   
3. initiated preparations for a two-week trip to Australia for the purposes of discussing "shared environmental goals and challenges with our global partners" — leaving him unable to testify before Senator Barbara Boxer's environmental committee until he gets back, and
   
4. released a lot of heavily redacted bullcrap.

It's no secret that Wax—an ardent Israel supporter who keeps kosher—has been practicing his own style of reform Judaism all up and down the politicized science of Bush's EPA. The Beverly Hills Cop has fired off a letter questioning them for excessive legal fees spent in the name of avoiding "action that differs from the Administration's policy preferences"; he's uncovered a clear attempt on EPA administrator Stephen Johnson's part to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling that it must regulate CO2; and he's on the hunt for any documents related to Johnson's rejection of expert recommendations for new limits on ozone pollution.

I still haven't gotten someone from the Oversight Committee to tell me what they plan on doing if the administration tries to just ride this out until next January, but I expect it's gonna be a fun ride. Heads will role when you drop the Wax!

Carbon Dioxide: Let's Put It Under Stuff!

With nearly carbon-negative alternatives, like GreenFuel's Emissions-to-Biofuels technology, it's slightly painful to see well-meaning scientists and organizations like Bruce Yardley and the Natural Resources Defense Council still arguing in favor of "carbon capture and storage (CCS)," a process by which carbon dioxide is "caught" from coal- or natural gas-fired power plants and then "stored" in (wait for it...) caves.

Since Yousif Kharaka's study (.pdf file) for the U.S. Geological Survey revealed that leaking CO₂ from CCS could acidify surrounding water, leach metals, and endanger both wildlife and public health—all before escaping back into the atmosphere anyway—there really isn't too much to recommend this new research. From Discover:

[A] British geologist’s study suggests sandstone could rapidly absorb [CO₂] potentially providing a safe, leakproof reservoir. Last year, Bruce Yardley, a professor at the University of Leeds in England, was monitoring oil extraction at a BP oil field in the North Sea. To speed the oil’s flow to the surface, seawater had been pumped to the bottom of the wells. When Yardley analyzed a sample of the injected water, he found it rich in silica. That signaled that the water and minerals in the surrounding sandstone had reached a chemical equilibrium with the injected seawater far more quickly than anticipated—in two years rather than a century.

Past studies had shown that when carbon dioxide is injected into sandstone, it dissolves common carbonates in the rock, changing the chemistry of sitting water and making a carbonic acid that eats holes in the rock. This can lead to CO₂ leakage. Based on the speed of the silicates’ reaction with seawater, Yardley believes that when CO₂ is injected into high-silicate minerals like feldspar, it too will quickly react, making clays and carbonates that clog the pores of the rock and trap the gas.

This, incidentally, is basically a radically less energy-intensive version of mineral storage techniques, which is good. However, you don't get biofuels out of it, so WGAF?

[Link to the Discover magazine article; Related a neat MSNBC video of MIT's Isaac Berzin who came up with GreenFuel's method for making both ethanol and biodiesel from CO₂-fed algae]

New Process Will Transform Nigeria's Flare Gas Nightmare Into Useful Plastics

Which Will Then Become Someone Else's Problem

Nigeria's natural gas reserves are the tenth-largest in the world and, to date, a byproduct of the region's oil industry that has been largely squandered in the horrifically dumb practice of gas flaring.

Now, according to statements made this week by Honeywell Company UOP LLC, Viva Methanol Ltd. will be licensing UOP's proprietary methanol-to-olefin (MTO) and olefin cracking technologies to transform that previously wasted natural gas into an annual 1.3-million metric tons of ethylene and propylene for the plastics industry.

It's hard to argue that this isn't great news, or that making plastics from the pockets of natural gas that escape when drilling oil isn't better than making a hellscape of gigantic flames and clouds of toxic black smoke. As an industrial practice, gas flaring contributes approximately 390-million tons of carbon dioxide annually according to research released last year by the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration; and as you can well imagine based on their eerily beautiful satellite image above, NOAA ranks Nigeria as second only to Russia in active gas-flaring facilities.

Let's ask a naive question: Why did it take until the 21st century to start looking into ways of using this natural gas? The answer seems that merely recovering it for—Oh, I don't know—the energy market somehow wasn't cost effective and that the recent movement on this stems largely from UOP's marketable new processes (co-owned by Norsk Hydro ASA and Total Petroleum) which create "high-value polyethylene and polypropylene."

So, basically, what the global economy is saying to Nigerians (like the Ogoni pictured above) is, "We know you spent much of the early 90's protesting the gas-flaring practices of Shell and that the corrupt Nigerian government hung nine of your political activist leaders with the tacit approval of Shell's then-chief executive, Brian Anderson, but because it wasn't sufficiently profitable to correct the issue at that time we won't. But: over a decade later, we figured out how. Good reactions, etc.?"

To make matters worse, the Nigeria plant—supplied with basic engineering, catalysts, adsorbents, specialty equipment, and technical support from UOP—is expected to finish construction in the in the country's "Lagos Free Trade Zone" (ugh!).

And then of course all that plastic will end up floating in the Pacific Trash Vortex.
The End.
Who wants a beer?

[Link to the bone-dry UOP BusinessWire release; Photos taken from the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program via NPR and the University of Michigan via their apparently sloppy and underfunded Environmental Justice Group case studies]

Terrifying Bulk Chemicals Firm: We Now Manufacture Styrofoam Insulation Without Depleting The Ozone Layer

I think it was Royal Tenenbaum who asked, "Can’t someone be a shit their whole life and want to repair the damage?" ("I mean, I think people want to hear that.") Chemical giant Dow today poses a variation on the same question, with "someone" being replaced by "a theoretically immortal legal entity driven entirely by self interest and free under a vicious misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment to exercise the same freedoms as Mortal Americans."

Its "Building Solutions" division announced today the development of a new foaming agent technology capable of manufacturing their STYROFOAM™ R5/inch insulation without the release of ozone-depleting chemicals. The process is also expected to halve their carbon emissions in North America. From their press release:

The proprietary formulation substitutes the hydrochloro-fluorocarbon (HCFC) 142b, an ozone-depleting compound that US and Canadian regulations under the Montreal Protocol require be phased out by January 1, 2010 in North America, with a non-ozone depleting compound. It enables Dow’s North American customers to continue receiving STYROFOAM insulation with the same product performance and cost-leadership position, and reflects Dow’s commitment, as part of its 2015 Sustainability Goals for Addressing Climate Change, to significantly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

This is another serious step forward for the company, formerly the sole manufacturer of napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, a majority supplier of silicone breast implants and stakeholder in approximately 96 Superfund sites (Thanks, Wikipedia!) If I trusted this administration's EPA at all, I'd be very enthusiastic about Dow being their 2008 Energy Star Partner of the Year for excellence in energy management and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. [Link to press release]

Mexico City to Convert 1000 Goverment-Use Nissans to HEV/EV Drive Trains

From the Press Release:

Azure Dynamics Corporation (TSX: AZD) (LSE: ADC) ("Azure" or the Company") a leading developer of hybrid electric and electric powertrains for commercial vehicles, today announced it has signed a supply agreement with Electro Autos Eficaces of Mexico ("EAE").

The initial order is for 1,000 drive systems for integration into the Nissan Tsuru platform, which is commonly used in the municipal fleet of Mexico City. The Tsurus are being converted from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles as part of Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard's initiative to improve air quality and general health and quality of life in the city. Mayor Ebrard will drive the first converted vehicle to the International Electric Vehicle Forum on May 8, 2007 in Mexico City. The balance of the 1,000 vehicles will be converted over the following 18 months. Azure's scope of supply for the 1,000 drive systems includes the motor, controller, gearbox and DC-DC converters and is valued at more than CDN$7.0 million.

Campbell Deacon, Azure's CEO said, "We are very pleased to have our product chosen for this program. EAE's business has been established to deliver electric vehicle transportation to both the public and private sectors in Mexico City with a goal of expansion throughout all of Mexico. We believe our technology, cost competitiveness and reliability have factored into EAE's selection of Azure Dynamics for this program."

[Link]