Tropical Forest Loss , Following on my last post (see below) about the destruction of hugely productive carbon sinks for conversion to cropland for the production of biofuel feedstocks, it is relevant to see the testimony from three very worthy leaders in the fight against rainforest loss. The House of Representatives' Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing last week, Fire and Rain: How Destruction of Tropical Forests is Fueling Climate Change, in which Thomas Lovejoy (Heinz Center), Stuart Eizenstat (Sustainable Forestry Management), and Stephanie Meeks (Nature Conservancy) all gave expert testimony.
Nuclear Waste , I wrote about Nukes last month and thought you should see this article, As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises, by the excellent "NY Times" reporter Matt Wald. Wald has been on the nuclear power beat, among others, for many years, and always has an important story to tell. Yucca Mountain, the government's proposed repository for the long-term storage of radioactive waste, is decades behind schedule. (See the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management [OCRWM] for more on Yucca Mountain.) Aside from the dangers of storing waste in temporary storage at 122 sites in 39 states, there's the cost owing to the fact that the federal government has to pay the utilities for its not receiving the waste long-term as it had promised to do years ago.
Carbon Dioxide to Gasoline , Scientists Would Turn Greenhouse Gas Into Gasoline is the headline for this "NY Times" article about how two Los Alamos alchemists, I mean scientists, would make gold from lead, I mean gas from carbon dioxide. "The idea is simple," we are told. "Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel: methanol, gasoline or jet fuel." The energy demand for this process, perhaps not surprisingly, would be enormous. There is an interesting post and some useful comments at "Dot Earth," the fine blog by "NY Times" reporter Andrew Revkin. One of the comments seems on the mark: "We would get a lot more bang from just using the electricity their system requires to directly power vehicles than using that electricity to make a liquid fuel." And we could do it without coal or nuclear power plants. I've heard Jim Gordon, Cape Wind's developer, say that, on a good day, not only would the wind farms produce enough electricity for all of Cape Cod's and the Islands' needs, but that there would be excess to power electric vehicles. I have been dreaming about precisely this since the first Earth Day.
Smart Grid , "The Toronto Star" had a thoughtful column on this yesterday. (I wrote about smart grids here in December.) With the burgeoning of wind and solar projects in Ontario, there's a move to get the grid there, as well as in North America and the rest of the world for that matter, more responsive to renewable energy projects. As the article notes, "Managing the power coming from a dozen or so massive plants is relatively easy compared to a "distributed generation' model that essentially involves thousands of mini power plants contributing electricity to the grid at different times of the day." As one consultant is quoted: "Any kind of distributed energy needs some kind of connectivity and two-way communications." (For more on DG, see this from the DOE.)
