Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Reversing global warming in your backyard?

I believe in all the big solutions to global warming - really I do - but what gets me truly excited is finding really effective solutions that will work on a local scale. And by really effective, I mean stuff that's a lot more dramatic than switching to fluorescent light bulbs. (Even though all the bulbs in my house are indeed fluorescent.) God knows I've written enough stories touting the virtues of this and other tiny steps, because those are the stories that popular media outlets want to buy. But although in one way it's true that every tiny step makes a difference, in another way it's fundamentally dishonest. If we don't take some really major steps soon, it's not going to matter what kind of light bulbs we use.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the subject of biochar. And what, you may ask, is biochar? Charcoal, basically - but charcoal made in such a way that it captures, and holds, a lot of carbon. According to the International Biochar Initiative, biochar production is not just carbon-neutral, but carbon-negative; its production and use actually decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

But the really neat thing about bio-char is that you can make this stuff at home - at least according to Organic Gardening. All you need is some dry organic material, a steel pot with a loose lid and a source of heat.

Now, most of us (including me) aren't going to be making backyard biochar anytime soon. (Our neighbors are antsy enough about the bees.) But there's something enormously appealing about a product that produces fuel and fertilizer, removes CO2 from the atmosphere, and can be made on an extremely small scale. In fact, a Brooklyn start-up company, re:char, is hard at work on a unit that small farmers (and community gardens?) could use to turn waste plant material into biochar to nourish the soil, and biofuel to produce electricity.

And what could be niftier than that?

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posted by AM at 3:23 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Why You Shouldn't Take an Empty Bus, and Other Anomalies

Groovy Green's got a link to a fascinating cradle-to-grave study of vehicle energy use and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger kilometer traveled. And the winner is? An urban diesel bus - at peak hours only. During non-peak hours, the same bus is just about the worst offender in both categories.

Urban light rail and commuter trains stack up a lot better than off-peak buses, but I wonder whether the same kind of on-peak/off-peak difference applies; the study doesn't differentiate. (Of course in many cities there are no off-peak trains - just try getting into Boston by commuter rail on a Sunday morning.)

Surprisingly, given the vilification air travel gets these days, the PKT emissions for a jumbo (I assume a full jumbo, which most of them are) stack up just about as well as those for light rail. The operating emissions are higher by far, but building and operating the infrastructure for light rail is responsible for a much higher level of emissions than building and operating airplane infrastructure.

The vehicle-building emissions aren't so startling - the emissions from building cars and trucks (again per passenger kilometers traveled) are more than double those of building aircraft and many multiples higher than those of building rail cars. But because even gas guzzler engines emit fewer greenhouse gases than bus engines, the total PKT emission load of a near-empty bus is almost double that of a conventional gasoline sedan.

The lesson that Groovy Green's Eric Spitzfaden takes from the study is that sharing rides - or, I would think, vehicles - is a real plus. (To your Zipcars, city dwellers!). Another - and the one that surprised me, though of course it makes sense when you think about it - is that mass transit, often cited as a panacea, might not be. It all depends on ridership. In other words, if it doesn't attract riders, the Obama high-speed rail plan we're all so ecstatic about will do a lot more to create jobs than it will to make us a greener country.

Meanwhile, if you're going to DC from New York, you might do less harm to the planet taking a packed plane than a near-empty train.

Weird, huh?

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posted by AM at 1:26 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

 

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