Amplified Green

Much more than food will be at stake at next Thursday’s vote in the EU parliament for a resolution on food prices. Food shortages in the Third World are increasingly linked with the EU’s biofuel crops - that’s why.

Whether or not that link is justified is for the time being hard to establish. What is certain is that food prices in the Third World are rising and that anything to stop this obviously is of massive importance.
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If you hadn’t cottoned on to the idea that the planet might be in trouble, you now can see for yourself on Google Earth. If you click on the link, you’ll land on a project by Google and the British government aimed at showing you and millions of internet users what the planet will look like if future predictions about melting ice caps come true.

The project is aptly called Climate Change in Our World, and adds two ‘layers’, or animations to your Google Earth program. It was unveiled officially only a few days ago by the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Google Zeitgeist UK conference. Brown heralded the tool as a valuable contribution by the IT industry to the global economy. “I think this will be a huge tool for making everybody aware of the huge climate changes of our time,” he said.
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Solar energy is child’s play. Just use a magnifying glass in the sun and you’re generating energy in a jiffy. It’s what scientists at IBM are doing. They’ve launched what they claim to be breakthrough solar energy which is among the cheapest solar solutions around.

The scientists say they create five times more energy by concentrating the sun’s power through a lens. One square centimeter of solar cell produces as much as 230 watts of energy, the most ever in solar techology.

Having only just pioneered the technology, IBM says it will now focus on commercializing it at an installation cost of less than two dollars per watt. The company believes that it should be possible to produce systems even cheaper than that. The reason that IBM is so confident about this is pure maths; by using a much lower number of photovoltaic cells and concentrating more light onto each cell, they’ll ultimately need less total materials than your average solar farm.

One major hurdle that IBM scientists have yet to tackle is temperature control. Due to the high sunlight concentration - light of the equivalent of 2,000 suns are concentrated- temperatures are also going to be extremely high. The scientists say they will borrow innovations from other IBM R&D staffers specializing in cooling computer chips.

This post also appeared on Triple Pundit, the new blog by Treehugger, to which I contribute freelance articles about the environment and business.

There is a lot of confusion over company carbon trading largely because this market runs mostly on a voluntary basis. It’s only in Europe that large companies in specific sectors are mandated by law to buy carbon offset credits if they exceed legal pollution limits. Yet the notion is growing among business leaders around the globe that going green is not an unbearable plight but rather a win-win situation. Voluntary sustainability inducing efforts are beginning to be a hot trend in the corporate sector. Now two top finance names, Merrill Lynch and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) are getting in on the act.

Merrill Lynch and the IFC recently announced they’ve started a carbon consultancy targeting the voluntary carbon trading sector. The consultancy’s launch follows Merrill’s last February decision to become involved in the creation of an expected 100 million of tonnes of carbon offsets in Aceh, Indonesia over a period of 30 years.
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An organization called the European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST) invites scientists from around the globe to submit proposals for projects contributing to the scientific, technological, economic, cultural or societal development of Europe. Proposals playing a precursor role for other European programmes and plans initiated by early-stage researchers are especially welcome.

The deadline for preliminary proposals is 26 September 2008 and reviewing the material takes around six months, the organizers say. COST aims to bring together researchers and experts in different countries by setting up networks of nationally funded research projects. COST financially supports the networking activities (not the research itself). For more information, visit the organization’s website.

Commercial hemp is a plant that scientists tout as having wonderful capabilities to combat climate change. The plant is outlawed in most countries including the US, but the EU subsidizes industrially grown hemp.

Commercially grown hemp has less than 1% tetrahydrocannabinol (THD), the psychedelic substance in ‘real’ cannabis. Most countries that shy away from growing it say they are fearful that farmers will also start growing the THD rich cannabis. Other than in the EU, the crop is grown in Canada, China, Russia and Australia.

Hemp takes in more carbon dioxide than any other plant and what’s more, hemp grows at an amazingly rapid speed. Wood made from hemp has 3-4 times the productivity of trees for paper manufacturing. And because it grows so fast, hemp can be used to solve the large-scale clearing of land and forests around the globe.

Various activists in the US are lobbying to get the crop reinstated. It was outlawed in the 1950s but Henry Ford ran his first car on hemp based fuel. Perhaps soon the activists will have their way. Already, the controlled substances act was amended last year to exclude industrial hemp from the legal definition of marihuana. The Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp informs farmers and interested parties about the positive effects hemp has.

The applications of the crop for the energy industry are manifold and hemp is a way more powerful crop than rapeseed and other ethanol producing crops, without producing any harmful effects for the environment. Only one acre of hemp yields 1,000 gallons of methanol. Also, hemp can be used to create alternatives to coal, fuel oil, acetone, ethyl, tar pitch and creosote.

In the food sector hemp is also in strong demand. In 2004, the US alone imported $12 million worth of the stuff for the food sector. And the US healthcare market used $30 million worth of hemp.

The ongoing food crises in 36 countries around the globe are a cause of worry for major institutions such as the World Bank because the problems signal profound problems of disbalance in the world economy. The main reasons behind the high food prices in poor countries are the high oil price and market liberalization shocks. Biofuel crops are hardly a factor. Climate change is something that has played a role for as long as everyone can remember and it’s only being recognized now.

In recent months, the world has witnessed various food riots in poor countries around the globe and the general conclusion bankers in their dossy offices have drawn are that some countries apparently really don’t have much of a buffer zone left - hence the upset.

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The European car industry is going to be heavily impacted by regulations on pollution limitations and tensions are rising between German manufacturers on one side and the French and Italian car industry on the other. Reason? German cars are much heavier than those made by the French and the Italians and the Germans fear that they will be penalized by new pollution regulations.

New cars by 2012 can only emit 120 grams of CO2 per kilometer at max. Most European cars average 160 grams per kilometer at the moment. The new rules are expected to transform the look and feel of all European cars. Even the smallest and most energy efficient cars are required to undergo design changes so the sector as a whole can reach the new goals.
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Scientists at UK’s Newcastle University developed an energy efficient way to create a chemical reaction between epoxy and CO2. Big deal, you might think, but the resulting cyclic carbonates are estimated to cut Britain’s greenhouse gas by 4%!

The way it works is that cyclic carbonates are in high demand in the paints, petrol refining and biodegradable packaging industry, but until now the chemical component has been too expensive to create to consider it as a CO2 cutting agent. The process to create the chemical reaction required high temperatures and was therefore highly costly.

But in recent months, the Newcastle scientists found that using aluminum would create the chemical reaction at room temperature. They are now busy devising the most optimal ways to create the commercially very viable cyclic carbonate and the plan is to open a production plant that will manufacture the component for industrial supplies.

As much as 4% of the entire UK’s carbon dioxide can be ‘recyled’ this way, the Newcastle team claims. Professor Michael North who heads up the team says the technology has the potential to use up to 48 million tonnes of waste CO2 per year.

Writers at Carbon Balance and Management have published a study which shows just what happens as the cycle of carbon emissions and climate change reaches its saturation point.

We all know the theory underlying the global warming threat; landmass and oceans contain carbon and exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. As our climate changes, the amount of CO2 absorbed by the land or the oceans changes. The link between the carbon cycle and CO2 emissions might very well only be relevant for the next ’several centuries. After that, there is no longer a connection between the two.

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