Un Petit Pois

“EMISSIONS of greenhouse gases from the 27 countries of the European Union fell by 1.2% in 2007 compared with the year before, according to new data released before UN climate-change talks beginning in Bonn on Monday June 1st. Warmer weather and higher fuel prices were the main reasons for the drop. At the current rate, the EU will achieve its target of a 20% cut from 1990 levels by 2020; emissions are already down by 9.3% since 1990. Emissions have increased most in poorer countries with rapidly expanding economies; Spain is pumping out over 50% more greenhouse gases than it did in 1990.”

June 22, 2009, 8:59pm

Why isn't the brain green?

spaceships:

On how social science research can be used to frame policies to make them more appealing:

David Hardisty, a student of Weber’s, led an experiment in which a 2 percent fee added to an airline ticket was described to various subjects as either a carbon “tax” or a carbon “offset.” The subjects were told the fee would finance alternative-energy and carbon-reduction technologies. Hardisty predicted he would get different results from Democrats and Republicans, and that was indeed the case. Democrats were willing to pay a fee for an offset or a tax; Republicans were willing to pay for an offset but not a tax.

… Weber and her husband, Eric Johnson, a professor at Columbia’s business school theorize that we “query” ourselves, mustering evidence pro and con from memory as we clear a path to a decision. The order of the thoughts matters — early thoughts seem to sway our opinion, biasing subsequent thoughts to support the early position… In a follow-up study by Hardisty, merely asking people to list their thoughts about the fee in one order or another (pros first or cons first) affected their preference, regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans.

April 25, 2009, 9:10pm

Seeing the Light on Darkness: Studies Link Light Pollution and Cancer

” recent study done in Israel headed by Richard Stevens, a professor and cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, and published in Chronobiology International, has shown some disturbing trends between women exposed to large amounts of artificial night light and breast cancer.

Stevens’ team overlaid satellite photos to measure nighttime artificial light levels with a map detailing the distribution of breast cancer cases. Those women living in the brightest areas (as defined by being able to read at outdoors at midnight) had a 73% higher risk of developing breast cancer than those living in areas with the least outdoor lighting.

These results correlate with an earlier study done in 2005 that showed women who worked night shifts in hospitals also had higher incidences of breast cancer. The report, published in Cancer Research, suggests that melatonin-or rather the lack of it-may be the cause. Melatonin is an essential hormone that our bodies make at night while we sleep. It requires darkness and plays a critical role in regulating our internal clocks. For women, the light-sensitive hormone is particularly important since scientists suspect that melatonin helps to reduce estrogen levels—higher estrogen levels being a factor in developing breast cancer. And melatonin levels drop precipitously in the presence of artificial light.”

April 01, 2009, 10:43am

'Alarming' Use Of Energy In Modern Manufacturing Methods

“Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes.

Overall, new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers.

Professor Timothy Gutowski, of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, notes that manufacturers have traditionally been more concerned about factors like price, quality, or cycle time, and not as concerned over how much energy their manufacturing processes use. This latter issue will become more important, however, as the new industries scale up — especially if energy prices rise again or if a carbon tax is adopted, he says.

Solar panels are a good example. Their production, which uses some of the same manufacturing processes as microchips but on a large scale, is escalating dramatically. The inherent inefficiency of current solar panel manufacturing methods could drastically reduce the technology’s lifecycle energy balance — that is, the ratio of the energy the panel would produce over its useful lifetime to the energy required to manufacture it.”

March 31, 2009, 9:50am

Shampoo in the water supply triggers growth of deadly drug-resistant bugs

“Fabric softeners, disinfectants, shampoos and other household products are spreading drug-resistant bacteria around Britain, scientists have warned. Detergents used in factories and mills are also increasing the odds that some medicines will no longer be able to combat dangerous diseases.

In their study, the scientists looked at quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs) that are used in many household cleaning goods. Every day, huge volumes of these chemicals are flushed from homes and factories into sewers and rivers. In high concentrations, QACs kill bacteria. However, in sewage, these chemicals become diluted and bacteria have evolved resistance to them.

“The inference is clear,” added Gaze. “We are producing sewage and river water that have more and more drug-resistant bacteria in them and that these are now poised to enter the food chain.”

Wellington added: “Once they are in the land, these bacteria will get into the bodies of agricultural workers or people who use the land recreationally and will form reservoirs of drug-resistant microbes that could pose all sorts of problems. This is going to need a great deal of monitoring.”“

March 31, 2009, 9:46am

Bad News: Scientists Make Cheap Gas From Coal

“Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives.

If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science,  could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that’s bad news for the fight against climate change.

The new process could cut the energy cost of producing the fuel by 20 percent just by rejiggering the intermediate chemical steps, said co-author Ben Glasser of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. But coal-derived fuel could produce as much as twice as much CO2 as traditional petroleum fuels and at best will emit at least as much of the greenhouse gas.

“The bottom line is that there’s one fatal flaw in their proposed process from a climate protection standpoint,” Pushker Karecha of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “It would allow liquid fuel CO2 emissions to continue increasing indefinitely.”“

March 27, 2009, 1:24am

A brief history of wind power | Wind of change | The Economist

March 26, 2009, 2:47am

The Economist - "Wind of Change"

Case history of wind power in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly, Dec. 4th 2008.

March 26, 2009, 2:45am

50% of Denmark’s electricity is created using a decentralised system, and 40% of the Netherlands’. In Finland, 98% of Helsinki is heated by community heat networks. (source)

March 24, 2009, 12:55am

• PollutionWatch’s 2007 report found that Suncor was the 6th worst greenhouse gas producer in Canada at about 7.6 M tonnes
• along with some of its contractors, it faces charges of illegally dumping waste water into the Athabasca river in 2008.
• Alberta regulators had previously instructed it to cap production at one site due to the high emission of hydrogen sulphide in 2007.

March 23, 2009, 11:02pm