Greencarbon Articles

See my submission to NASA Sustainable environment innovations entry;

By, masso

November 14 2007

October 14 2007

NYTimes October 4 2007

July 30 2007

Human Powered Electricity Re Generators. HPERG
By Masso
One great idea maybe is to convert excessive energy stored in human body to usable energy, possibly to electricity.
At the end of the day, there is always unused energy that goes to waste or turns into toxic fat if we don’t use it. Some of us go to gyms and work it out while paying for a membership as well.

Why not turn that energy to electricity using efficient sports equipment and feed it back into the city’s hungry electrical grid.

Can you visualize a mega metro city or a large campus with all of its sports centers, many people in any given time, producing mega watts of electricity ?
Sometime ago I read that in India , Africa and few other places, conversion of human kinetic energy to electricity, using pedal operated devices such as stationary bikes that turn small generators have become very common. These devices may operate refrigerators, small TVs, radios, etc., and charge batteries for later use.
In most countries there maybe a need for dirty chemical storage devices since reverting back to the electrical grid, if there is any grid at all, is a very difficult task.
However this matter in advanced industrial societies such as Europe and United States is solved by existence of electrical grids thus reverting the generated electricity back into the grid by producing consumer without a battery storage is a possibility.

This practice can also add an additional benefit to exercise. Participant can feel his/her energy is not wasted and can be used to reduce electricity bill, a financial reward.
Technology is a bit complicated though. We need sophisticated and expensive inverters to connect to city grid and supply our own feed.

Presently the cost of this inverter is in thousands and cannot justify the small, amount of electricity generated by few inefficient generators attached to a stationary bike in a house. However, this feed can significantly increase if other generators such as solar panels, wind turbine generators, methane collectors from house trash or toilet, hydro power from house plumbing etc.. were added to the collective.

Further, availability can be boosted by advancement in inverter technology and cheaper device production. Goverment's support can create a positive start and continuance of such programme in large scale.

I imagine residential houses where residents exercise regularly, dorms, university and institutional sports centers, commercial sports facilities, cruise ships, military barracks, facilities, prisons, etc..all can produce huge amounts of electricity by utilizing human kinetic energy thus reducing the need for hydro, oil, coal, nuclear and other environmentally destructive energy sources.

Additional to grids, cars, busses and other electrical devices can be charged using this method. Devices can be installed in public transportation to enable public to contribute while exercising.

Can you visualize several riders in the back of the electrically powered bus pedaling?
Saving electrical bill and adding to comfort of living as well as health benefit can be a great motive for families and individuals to come together and exercise in energy producing machines.

It will provide grounds for pride and feeling of accomplishment any time a feel of deficit and debt to family or collective rises, thus providing a healthy emotional service as well.

Considering all these stationary bikes, sport equipments rolling in sport facilities at all hours and time, aren't we frivolously wasting huge amounts of energy that is being produced by sweat of millions of humans.

We can harness this energy and I don’t know why this is not being done already. Do you ?

masso

Finding Liberté on Two Wheels
By ERIC RAYMAN
Published: October 14, 2007
MY plane landed at Charles de Gaulle airport. I took the RER train into Paris, dropped off my bag and, two hours after landing, I was riding a bicycle down the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
No, I'm not in training for the Tour de France and, no, I do not travel with a bicycle or for that matter any other sports paraphernalia. I was just participating in the latest craze that has swept Paris. I was on a Vélib.
Beginning on July 15, thousands of bicycles became available in Paris at hundreds of self-service docking stations installed around the city by J. C. Decaux, an outdoor advertising company. Anyone, even fresh-off-the-plane Americans, can stroll over, swipe a credit card and ride away on a sturdy, well-maintained three-speed bike, a “vélo” in French. Access to the bikes is available all of the time; it's liberating, as in “liberté,” so the “Vélib” was born.
Twelve weeks after the introduction of the Vélib, 15,000 bikes have been put into service at more than 1,000 stations. In that time Vélibiens (or Vélibeurs or perhaps Vélibistes) have checked out bicycles almost six million times and ridden them an estimated 7.5 million miles.
The Vélib system is simple. You swipe a credit card in a kiosk that is located beside a row of parked bikes and purchase a one-day, one-week or one-year subscription. (The system also takes a 150-euro deposit authorization to ensure the bike's safe return.) The machine prints out a card with your code number and you enter a personal password. You tap in this code and password to unlock a bike and ride off.
When you've reached your destination, you look for the nearest Vélib station, click your bike into an empty dock, watch a light change from yellow to green to acknowledge that you've returned your bike, and you're done. The first half-hour is free, after that the cost is 1 euro, or about $1.45, for the second half-hour, 2 euros for the third half-hour and 4 euros for each half hour after that.
The Métro stops running around 1 a.m., but the Vélib kiosks are open all night, solving one of the city's most frustrating transportation problems.
If out of curiosity you want to see how much you were charged, or just how far you've gone, tap in your code on the Vélib Web site, www.velib.paris.fr, and your Parisian biking history appears. There's a catch, of course. When I first tried to check out a Vélib, my Francophile wife asked, “Does your credit card have a puce?”
I knew what that meant. I had been to the Marché aux Puces. My card had no fleas. In Europe, however, a tiny computer chip, a puce, that contains security data about the card holder is embedded in the plastic and triggers the kiosk's release mechanism. Only some American cards have this smart chip, which is usually visible as a small gold or silver circuit board on the face of the card. Without a puce, I might not have been able to rent a Vélib.
In what might be seen as a turning point in the warming of Franco-American relations, a J. C. Decaux representative recently advised me that the kiosks now accept American Express cards issued in the United States as well as international JCB cards, even if the cards do not contain chips.
The French have embraced communal bike ownership, according to my informal survey of my fellow Vélibiens, as have other Europeans. A culture of Vélibistes is emerging. The camaraderie — a French word that seems to have been invented in anticipation of this new cult — among the riders is entrancing. Riders advise one another on where to find the nearest Vélib docking station, where to park if one is full, and how to find the best routes around the city. When they speak of Vélibs, Parisians smile, even those like a waiter who admitted not having ridden one.
Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, has just declared his intention to run for re-election, and the French newspapers, which are known to mix their opinions with their news to a degree that The New York Post would envy, have already pronounced him unbeatable.
And why not? To explore Paris by foot, by Métro or by taxi is not like embracing it on a bicycle. As I peddled around the glass pyramid at the Louvre, I was struck by the strobelike reflections from the royal buildings around it. Then I swung over the Pont du Carrousel and stole a glance at the ripples of light shimmering along the Seine in the shape of the arches of the Pont Neuf. I turned on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and discovered to my mild distress that it was a long climb. I heard the delighted laughter of a young Frenchwoman on her Vélib schussing by in the opposite direction.
There are, of course, the fossil fuel vehicles to contend with. Trying to cross the Place de la Concorde, I was dizzy just looking at the kaleidoscope of cars and tour buses. I felt like the young chef Linguini on his bicycle in the movie “Ratatouille.” But there are also well-marked bike lanes along many streets. Bicyclists share some of these lanes with buses and taxis, which at first seemed to me to be a dangerous combination, but as I raced along them I became more comfortable with my lane. Bus and cab drivers are professionals, at least, and, particularly at night, are much more likely to be sober than those in the adjacent lanes.
A helmet is rarely seen on any Parisian bicyclist. I asked an American friend living in Paris about the bareheaded cyclists. “Just wait,” he said, “until the first reports of accidents come out. In the fall when it's cold and slippery and business traffic really picks up, it's going to be a disaster. It will be the Waterloo of the Vélibs.”
I'm not so sure.
The Vélibs are solid road bikes with wide wheels and fenders, which keep your cuffs out of the chains. The bikes have baskets and kickstands. They are not designed for the Spandex racing crowd. Riders must follow the rules of the road. No running red lights. No riding on sidewalks.
Are accidents going to derail this emerging bicycle city? The French gave us another word for it. Insouciance. I asked a petite middle-age woman with short curly hair, the image of Edith Piaf, whether she ever wore a helmet. As she tapped in her code, she smiled at me, “Pas encore.” Not yet, she said.
VISITOR INFORMATION
The bikes are one-size-fits-all, with adjustable seats. Children under 14 are not allowed to use the bikes. Maps showing the locations of the Vélib stations throughout Paris are available for free at the mairie, or city hall, in each of Paris's 20 arrondissements
Daily and weekly Vélib subscriptions are sold at the kiosks; annual subscriptions are also available online at www.velib.paris.fr. The site has other useful information about the program, only some of which is available in English.
A Decaux representative said a plan to sell shorter term passes in locations like hotels in order to make rentals more convenient for tourists is under consideration.

Arctic Meltdown
Jon Han
THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.

A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.

The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice’s total area a little more, and each winter the ice’s recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn’t disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.

But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.

The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t be the last abrupt change in earth’s climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate’s most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.

There are other destabilizing feedbacks in the carbon cycle that involve the oceans. Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.

Scientists have done a good job incorporating some feedbacks into their climate models, especially those, like the ice-albedo feedback, that operate directly on the temperature of air or water. But they haven’t incorporated as well feedbacks that operate on the atmosphere’s concentrations of greenhouse gases or that affect the cycle of carbon among air, land, oceans and organisms. Yet these may be the most important feedbacks of all.

Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).

Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.

This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.

When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.

In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal

Week of July 28, 2007; Vol. 172, No. 4 , p. 52

Science news

Ozone will trim plants' carbon-storing power
Sid Perkins

Increases in low-altitude ozone predicted for the upcoming century will stifle the growth of vegetation in many regions, causing planet-warming carbon dioxide to build up in Earth's atmosphere more quickly than had been expected, a new model suggests.
Estimated increases in ozone could suppress vegetation and thereby exacerbate global warming.
Sitch et al.
Low-altitude ozone—as opposed to the planet-protecting layer of the gas in the stratosphere—forms when the sun's ultraviolet radiation stimulates reactions between gases such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and methane. Preindustrial concentrations of ground-level ozone typically ranged between 15 and 30 parts per billion (ppb), says Stephen Sitch, an ecologist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Wallingford, England. Now, emissions from cars, power plants, and other industrial sources routinely boost ozone in many regions of the world to well over 40 ppb.

Such ozone concentrations could easily damage a plant's leaves and stifle its growth, says Sitch. Most current climate models include the planet-warming effect of low-altitude ozone, a relatively weak greenhouse gas, he adds, but previous predictions haven't included warming due to ozone stifling the growth of vegetation. In an upcoming Nature, he and his colleagues attempt to calculate that effect. They also improved on current estimates of ozone damage to plants by including the effect of ozone concentrations below 40 ppb, says Sitch.

"I totally agree with this concept," comments David F. Karnosky, a plant geneticist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. "This [new technique] is a large improvement over previous [climate-change] models," he adds.

According to some current projections, low-altitude ozone will exceed 40 ppb in almost all areas of the world by 2100, says Sitch. Moreover, many regions—including western Europe, eastern North America, Brazil, and southeast Asia—will see ozone concentrations above 70 ppb, he notes.

The researchers simulated the climate from 1901 to 2100, using data from the 20th century to calibrate the model. In 1901, the world's plants absorbed enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year to store about 115 billion metric tons of carbon, Sitch and his colleagues estimate. A simulation with rising carbon dioxide but unchanging ozone concentrations predicted that plants would soak up about 200 billion metric tons of carbon annually by the year 2100.

When the researchers allowed ozone concentrations to rise as expected, however, the projected damage to vegetation reduced carbon absorption to only about 170 billion metric tons each year. The warming due to ozone-reduced plant growth would thus rival the warming from ozone's greenhouse effect, says Sitch.

The team's new simulations are "a useful start," says Mike Ashmore, an environmental scientist at the University of York in England. However, he notes, scientists have only limited data about how various plants—especially tropical ones—are damaged by ozone exposure.

July 30 2007

Myths about E85 and environment

by, Masso

Science News May 5 2007 reports what I susdpected all along.. "Switching the nations' vehicles from gasoline to mostly ethanol will not reduce air pollution, a new study finds".

A scientific model created at Stanford University takes into account how the chemicals emitted in car exhaust, transforms through reactions in the atmosphere .

Combination of residual chemical emissions profiles with population and health effect data, compared E85(%85 ethanol+%15 gasoline blend), considered potentially large scale replacement for gasoline dominating roadways by 2020, compared with carcinogenic attributes of 'all gasoline engines', proved to be up to and exessive in some aspects.

E85 may increase asthma, hospitalization, and death due to ozone exposure compared to gasoline, by about %9 in LA areas via larger releases of two ozone precoursers, acetaldehyde and formaldehyde, also considered two of the four major carcinogens in exhaust fumes.

However there are reductions in of the two other exhaust carcinogens, benzene and butadiene compared to gasoline use.

The study results regarding cancer seem to cancel each other so there are not much differences or gains between gasoline and E85 powered vehicles.

This study appears online under Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford University.

Please note also the wast amount of lands and chemical fertilizers that will be used to produce E85 crops.

Presently , there are no viable accesible energy sources provided for wide public use.

All electrical cars and the notion that they are environmental energy safe is also a false dream.

How this 'clean electrical energy is generated and stored?

Present electricity generating and storage technologies are one of the dirtiest environmentally most harmful processes.

And forget about cheap. Where do you think you plug these cars into ? A free cheap electrical outlet connected to an unkown source? Cost of running an all electrical car is more expensive than a gasoline powered engine.

So far the best practical solution seems to be hybrid cars and preferably HPV (human powered vehicles), including bi-ped systems.

August 12 2007

March 31 2008

17% Perils of Domestication.

by masso

In June, Science magazine published an article called “Domesticated Nature,” which noted that by 1995, “only 17% of the world’s land area had escaped direct influence by humans.” The article was accompanied by one map showing the enormous “human footprint” on Earth and another showing in a thicket of red lines the tangle of road networks and shipping lanes across the globe. That 17 percent figure is now certainly smaller, and that thicket of transport networks gets a little more tangled every day. The article takes as a working assumption what is obviously true: “There really is no such thing as nature untainted by people.”
I’ve been thinking about that 17 percent ever since. What does it mean to go from a humanly ancient world in which, say, only 17 percent of nature had been “tainted” to a world in which only 17 percent remains untainted? It’s also tempting to wonder where that remaining 17 percent is and how to protect it.
It can’t be far away, which, of course, makes it all the harder to protect. But the point, for the authors of this article, isn’t to grieve over the loss of wildness. It is to take the domestication of all of nature as inevitable, a natural part of human behavior. What I find most worrying here is the emergence of a world in which “nature” means little more than the ramifying consequences of human decisions.
That world has been emerging for a long time. Humans first arose in an alien world, alien in the sense that almost nothing we saw around us had been made or shaped or influenced by us. We are who we are, as a species, in part because of the natural intricacy in which we emerged. It may sound like folly to talk about the wisdom of nature. But it is wisdom in the sense that it does not simply show us ourselves.
I am oversimplifying, of course. But consider where we are now. Everything is different. The authors of the Science article stress the importance of stewarding “nature in perpetuity for people, as opposed to simply trying to protect nature from people.” The difference between a managed forest, for instance, and wilderness. But they have more faith in people than I do — both in our ability to steward nature and to decide what stewarding it “for people” really means.
It is certainly possible to make wiser and wiser decisions about how to live, but what if the world we make our choices in becomes, in natural terms, steadily poorer and less diverse? More and more, we find ourselves choosing only among the consequences of regrettable choices we made before.
Humans are competent to do many things. But I do not think we are competent to run a global ecosystem. Something has been irretrievably lost by the time we begin to believe that we can manage nature for people. The essence of nature is that it is not “for people.”
My lack of faith in humans as global managers isn’t just a philosophical conclusion. It is based on the sorry, sorry evidence. The fact is that we have begun to run the global ecosystem already and are doing a terrible job of it. What we will never be able to provide on our own is feedback from a world that is not human — that remaining 17 percent. The authors of this article are right to ask environmentalists to think of their main business as managing nature rather than protecting it from humans.
But it is not good enough. We love the hidden metaphor in domestication — the idea that we are making the world more homelike for our species. But without that feedback from the natural world, which enriches and outstrips our imagination, we will find ourselves less and less at home on this planet.

BioFuels Good or bad

by Aubrey Belford
Mon Mar 31, 2008 11:42 PM ET

JAKARTA (AFP) - Once a golden promise in the fight against climate change, biofuels are fast losing their lustre as high demand for essential crops drives land clearing and pushes up the price of food.

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Biofuels made from food crops such as corn, sugar, soybeans and oil palm burn cleaner than fossil fuels, but experts say high demand is sending ripples through the world economy, and could be doing the environment more harm than good.

Rudy Gosal, a 36-year-old courier who queued with hundreds of others in Indonesia's capital in March to buy government-subsidised cooking oil, is one of millions feeling the pinch of the push towards biofuels.

After the latest rise earlier this year, the cost of cooking oil in Jakarta jumped a massive 70 percent, to around 12,000 rupiah (1.31 dollars) a litre.

Cooking oil in much of the world comes from palm oil. And, in recent years, mostly European demand for biodiesel has helped push the price to record highs.

Gosal is relatively lucky -- he supports his wife and three children on 1.6 million rupiah a month, nearly twice the minimum wage here.

But the latest price increase still meant he could afford less tofu to go with his family's rice. Another likely rise could mean doing without a twice-monthly luxury: meat.

"If there's a price rise, our salaries don't go up but the cost jumps. It's out of balance," Gosal said.

Demand for palm oil has also been a major source of land clearing here.

The spread of palm oil plantations into forests and highly sensitive peatlands on Sumatra and Borneo islands have helped make Indonesia the world's third-highest greenhouse gas emitter.

The peatlands are a swampy store of semi-decomposed vegetation up to several metres (yards) deep, and clearing and draining them releases massive amounts of carbon.

A study published in the journal Science in February found it would take around 86 years for biodiesel made from palm oil grown on cleared tropical lowland forest to repay the "carbon debt" generated from clearing the land.

For biodiesel from cleared peatlands, the study found, the debt would take more than 840 years to repay.

"Certainly the carbon debt from converting peatlands is far and away larger than in any of the other ecosystems we considered," said Jason Hill, an economist at the University of Minnesota and study co-author.

But Indonesia appears intent on running up that debt. Already at least 10 million of its 22.5 million hectares (55.6 million acres) of peatland have been cleared, according to the Centre for International Forestry Research, and the clearing shows no sign of slowing.

Shifting crops over to biofuels can also have environmental and social consequences that cross borders, said Timothy Searchinger, an environmental law expert from Georgetown University in the United States.

"Whenever cropland in some countries is diverted to fuel, the price goes up and farmers in other countries produce more, in significant part by expanding into forest and grassland," he said.

In the United States, for example, government subsidies for corn ethanol have pushed up global corn prices to levels unseen in decades, spurring a 15 percent growth in land planted with the crop last year.

Less land devoted to crops like soybeans has led to higher global prices that may spur farmers in Brazil to clear more of the Amazon to take advantage of the windfall -- thus increasing carbon emissions, said Joe Fargione, another author of the Science study.

Meanwhile, in Jakarta's side streets, it's not only cooking oil that is becoming more expensive. Record global corn prices mean high prices for livestock feed, making protein sources such as eggs -- and Gosal's family's twice-monthly meat -- an increasingly rare luxury.

Siegfried Falk, an analyst with German-based consultancy Oil World, said that despite the hype, palm oil only makes up between 10 and 20 percent of biodiesel used in the European Union, the largest market for the fuel.

Most European biodiesel comes from rapeseed oil which is less efficient to produce but is protected by tax incentives, Falk said.

Despite this, he said, palm oil prices are rising as investors react to high oil prices by bidding up palm oil futures as a possible alternative.

"A lot of people in the market are hoping that (expensive fossil fuel) creates substantial demand in palm oil, and oils in general," Falk said.

As a result, biofuel producers are struggling with the increased cost of their raw material.

Indonesian producers are currently only making a fraction of the one million tonnes (1.1 million short tons) of biodiesel they have capacity for, said Yohan Soelaiman, a manager at local producer Eterindo.

"Our capacity at the moment is 240,000 tonnes per year and we're only running 20,000 tonnes," he told AFP.

"We cannot export now because the price (of palm oil) is so high."

Yoga for Mind , Body, Environment