Turning to Biomimicry To Meet Our Energy Needs

Could termites help save humanity from global warming?

It turns out that in the quest to figure out how to cheaply convert wood and other fibrous materials, including agricultural waste, into ethanol, the answer may lie with figuring out how termites do it so effectively.

This article gets into the story:

With present technology, it takes so much energy to convert plant material to ethanol that many scientists wonder if it's worth it. If they were as clever as termites, it would be a piece of cake. And wouldn't termites be a surprising ally? According to Ohio State University, termites cause about $2 billion in damages across this nation every year. It's about time they came to our aid.

So Scharf and his colleagues have spent a lot of time over the past five years picking termites apart to see exactly what's involved in their dietary process. It turns out that it's a lot. And learning about it is a bit challenging.

"First, you have to be really good at pulling out their guts so you can isolate them from the rest of the body," Scharf said in a telephone interview. "Their gut is about the size of half of our eyelash. So you work under a microscope and you get really good with your hands." After that, it's all biochemistry and molecular biology.

The Florida researchers have isolated 6,555 genes involved in the digestive process of more than 2,500 worker termites. So they now know which genes are important in converting wood's cellulose and lignin into sugar, which can then be converted into ethanol. But the termites can't do it alone.

The article goes on to reveal how special symbiotic relationships with bacteria in termites' guts are key to converting the wood into sugars and ethanol.

Will scientists find the magical key that unlocks the potential of cellulosic ethanol to help us fuel our vehicles?  It seems that this technology is always a few years away...

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How to Seal Up Your House On the Cheap - To Save Money and Guilt

Is your home full of air leaks that cause your heating bills to rack up, but you don't have the thousands of dollars needed to install new insulation and double-paned windows?

The Oregonian does a great job of summarizing your options for you.  They are nice and cheap options that you can complete in a single weekend...

See, reducing your household's greenhouse gas emissions isn't gonna wreck the economy.  It's actually going to save you bundles of money!

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Study: Green Building Can Provide 8 Million U.S. Jobs in 4 Years

More good news on the promise of Green Economy solutions:

Despite a challenging economic outlook, green building will support 7.9 million U.S. jobs and pump $554 billion into the American economy – including $396 billion in wages – over the next four years (2009-2013), according to a new study from the U.S. Green Building Council and Booz Allen Hamilton. The study also determined that green construction spending currently supports more than 2 million American jobs and generates more than $100 billion in gross domestic product and wages.

The study also assessed the U.S. Green Building Council’s 19,000-plus member organizations and found that they generate $2.6 trillion in annual revenue, employ approximately 14 million people, come from 29 industry sectors and include 46 Fortune 100 companies.

The full report can be downloaded at www.usgbc.org/greeneconomy

Wait, you mean that the proliferation of green buildings that both help solve global warming and slash our energy bills isn't going to wreck the economy?!  Where did Senator James Inhofe, former VP Dick Cheney, and (fill in the blank in the comments below) go so wrong..?

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The Merida Message: A Call for Increased Wilderness Protection to Combat Climate Change

From Mongabay:

Meeting this week in Merida, Mexico, the 9th World Wilderness Congress (WILD9) has released a declaration that calls for increasing wilderness protections in an effort to mitigate climate change.

Entitled the Merida Message, the declaration put forth by the Chairman and Executive Committee of WILD9, describes the humanity's current situation as such:

"runaway carbon emissions are driving the climate towards irreversible tipping points; we are contaminating our planet with pervasive toxicity, destroying the diversity of life on our planet, exhausting freshwater supplies and causing acidification in our oceans, and over-exploiting our oceans, causing fisheries to collapse. As a result, we are deepening poverty, weakening social structures and threatening global security."

   
The declaration states that protection of critical wilderness areas will help alleviate these global problems and combat climate change. While reducing fossil fuel emissions is a must, WILD 9 points out that approximately 30 percent of emissions over the past 250 years has come from deforestation and land-use change. Therefore the Merida Message calls for new protections of forests, wetlands, grasslands, and peatlands, all of which store large amounts of carbon.

I almost went to this conference.  Reading this declaration sure makes me wish I could have made it -- sounds like it was an inspiring gathering...

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Read more coverage of Merida's accomplishments - North American governments agree to protect wilderness>>
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Boreal Forests Ignored in Climate Change Fight

With all the talk of stopping tropical deforestation as a means of slowing global warming, CBC reminds us of the climatic importance of the boreal forests of the great north:

When climate change negotiators consider forests' carbon storage potential, they usually look at tropical forests because they are being logged at a faster rate than the northern boreal, said ecologist and report co-author Jeff Wells.

But soil in boreal forests — like those found in Canada's north — is much deeper than in tropical forests and hence stores much more carbon, said Wells, a visiting fellow at Cornell University.

Yet scientists have only recently taken into account the boreal's deeper soils and slower rate of decay of leaf litter, which also stores carbon.

"There were a series of estimates around 2000, 2001 that put the amount of carbon in boreal regions at between about 400 and 700 gigatonnes. And in the last year, the published estimates place it at two to three times that," said Wells. "But those 2000 to 2001 estimates have been what people have been using."

Oh boy...  Well, all that unaccounted for carbon might help explain why as the northern latitudes warm, accelerating decomposition rates (which rise with rising temperatures), climate change is happening faster than expected... 

You know how sometimes, I write that when it comes to destabilizing the biosphere, we really have no idea what we're messing with?  It's stories like this that provide an example of why I say that.

Will the earth's current advanced primate populations human civilizations learn to live more sustainably the easy way or the hard way?  That's essentially the question we're dealing with in Copenhagen.

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Read Mongabay's take>>
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Air Pollution Takes a Toll on Young Lungs

Here's some lovely news from Discovery for new parents:

New parents already have plenty of potential hazards to worry about, from flame-retardants in footed pajamas to hormone-disruptors in breast milk. A new study now adds air to the list of environmental concerns.

Chronic exposure to air pollution, the study found, increases a baby's chance of developing bronchiolitis -- a lung infection that is the most common cause of hospitalizations in the first year of life.

The findings suggest that parents and pediatricians need to work together to reduce infants' exposure to traffic and other sources of dirty air, said study author Catherine Karr, an academic pediatrician at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Please repeat after me:

• Solving our energy and Peak Oil crises via a clean energy and transport revolution will help solve the crisis of our skyrocketing health care insurance costs.  
• Solving our energy crisis will help solve our economic crisis by creating millions of jobs, and will help solve climate change.  
• Solving our energy and health care crises with clean energy and transport technologies will revitalize our economy and help solve climate change. 

Get the drift? 

We've cataloged -- both here on this blog and on CVI's online library of sustainability -- overwhelming evidence in support of these ideas, which has lead us to these conclusions.  Please send us your favorite supporting details -- we always love to learn more about how sustainability is benefiting people!

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Food: Is Monsanto the Solution or the Problem?

Reuters has a very interesting article exploring the role of Monsanto -- and its opponents -- in solving the global food crisis.

In this new paradigm, traditional plant breeding is giving way to the high-tech tools of rich corporations like Monsanto, which are playing an increasingly powerful role in determining how and what the world eats. It is also generating controversy, as critics continue to question the safety of biotech crops, and fear increasing control of the global food supply by giant corporations.

Still, few dispute that something needs to be done. The United Nations has said that food production must double by 2050 to meet the demand of the world’s growing population and that innovative strategies are needed to combat hunger and malnutrition that already afflict more than 1 billion people.

Jump right in>>
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Energy Secretary Steven Chu Talks Bold Climate Change Solutions

It's comforting to know that at a time of great energy and climate challenges, we have a Nobel Prize-winning physicist heading up the U.S. Department of Energy.  Writing for ClimateBiz, Marc Gunther reports on a recent PowerPoint presentation in which Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, outlines his approaches to solving climate change:

He argued for three broad approaches to the climate crisis – a major commitment to energy efficiency requiring government regulations and financing, changes in forestry and agricultural practices and still-to-be-discovered breakthroughs in clean energy technology. Some highlights:

Energy efficiency: Chu said market failures –- among them lack of knowledge and lack of financing – stand in the way of efficiency to commercial and industrial buildings and to homes which deliver relatively quick paybacks.

"How many University of Chicago economists does it take to change a light bulb?" he asked.
"None," he replied. "If the light bulb needed changing, the free market would have done it."

Calling himself "an energy conservation nut," Chu displayed a chart showing that efficiency standards for refrigerators adopted years ago in California had reduced annual energy costs, on average, from $1272 to $462 a year. "Even though refrigerators have gone up in size, energy usage has gone down by 70%," he said.

The simple step of painting roofs white could cut air conditioning costs by 15% in warm weather regions, he noted.

Forestry and agriculture: Together, deforestation and agriculture account for about 31% of annual greenhouse gas emissions, Chu (and his pie chart) said. "To achieve our energy and climate goals," he said. "We've got to solve deforestation and change our agricultural practices."

Some of this can be quite complicated: Rich countries, rather than cutting their own emissions, could finance alternative livelihoods for people in the tropics so they don't cut down trees. Other ideas are simpler: If you provide poor people in the global south with solar or highly-efficient cook stoves, then they don't have to burn as much wood to heat their homes or cook food. An efficient stove avoids the equivalent of two tons of carbon emissions, about half the amount emitted by a typical car in a year.

Protecting forests is "the least expensive way to decrease carbon emissions," Chu said.

Technology breakthroughs: The energy department recently announced $151 million in grants for transformative technology under a program called ARPA-E, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, and is modeled after the federal defense spending project that led to the invention of the Internet. "We don't have all the technologies we need," Chu said.

Interestingly, I listened to Chu chat with several venture capitalists just before the dinner in Union Station and he asked them how they thought his department was doing at reviewing grant applications from startup firms. He said he had a feeling that the DOE staffers who review the grants might be too conservative and risk-averse, and that he intended to urge them to take more chances on long-shot ideas that could deliver big breakthroughs.

I really liked the end of this article.

Only near the end of his talk did Chu revealed a bit of the passion that he brings to the topic of climate change.

The costs of enacting climate-change legislation, he said, are about 45 cents a day for a family of four.

And the cost of doing nothing?

One is that the U.S., which recently fell behind China in high-tech manufacturing, will fall even farther behind. "Very recently, China turned a corner," he said. "China and other countries will pass us by."

"And the other cost," he said, "is that we will expose our children and grandchildren to unconscionable risk."

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Is The U.S. News Media Failing to Do It's Job on Global Warming?

Is the U.S. Media failing America on global warming and Peak Oil, potentially causing us to miss our window of opportunity to solve these urgent problems before they become civilization-destabilizing crises?

We've said as much in some recent posts, and now ClimateBiz weights in:

It sure seems that America is out of touch with the rest of the world regarding global warming, and that the world is slapping us in the face to awaken us from our stupor.

Delegates at last week's Barcelona climate talks were frustrated that U.S. negotiators came to the table unable to commit to concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to our seized legislative engine.

The notion that the U.S. is out of touch also was borne out by the Pew Research Center survey that was widely reported on in the past few weeks. Pew found that fewer Americans (57 percent) believe that the earth's atmosphere is warming versus two years ago (77 percent).

That statistic for many validates the view that we are in denial. But there was another statistic in that study that may suggest WHY the U.S. may be so out of touch. Pew also found that a majority of Americans -- 55 percent -- have heard nothing at all about the proposed cap-and-trade policy to establish limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

Come AGAIN?

That's right, 55 percent of U.S. citizens have heard NOTHING AT ALL about cap and trade. With a jaw-dropping statistic like that we must ask ourselves this question: Is the U.S. news media adequately doing its job as regards global warming?

At a time when climate science is urgently screaming to the American news media to mediate coverage of climate change in a way that will mobilize society, at a time when it's telling us that we just have a few short years to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions or we seriously threaten the planet with chaos, misery, death and extinction, at a time when climate science warrants that we create an atmosphere of grave threat and crisis, and at a time when it tells us that, in the words of Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, "…we need emergency action all around the world to curb (greenhouse gas) emissions" -- our delegates in Barcelona couldn't commit to any kind of plan just a month before Copenhagen, and the Pew Center has found that only 57 percent of Americans, down from 77 percent, believe that global warming is occurring, and that 55 percent have never heard anything about cap and trade. This suggests that the news media is not doing what it could and should be doing to keep us focused with the clarity and urgency that global warming requires, and that our global neighbors demand of themselves. 

Many are acknowledging that the media has cooled on global warming in the past year or more. A common refrain echoed recently is that the recession and healthcare reform have crowded out coverage of global warming.

For example...Juliet Eilperin, who covers the environment for the Washington Post, in her September 17 appearance on The Diane Rehm Show's "Preparing for Copenhagen" segment, said "… in the immediate past we've seen such a focus on healthcare you haven't seen as much altitude to those (climate change) stories."

But we should be seeing serious altitude on climate change stories. The lives of our children, and our children's children, are threatened. We can't wait until healthcare and the economy have become memories to return to climate change; we know that we have a few short years to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Regardless of what other issues enter and exit our realm of concern, global warming must remain the dominant central issue. Therefore, the U.S. News media should step up and mobilize the nation to take dramatic action on global warming. To that end the media should do the following:

1. Dramatically increase the frequency and extent of coverage of climate change; fill the papers, websites, airwaves and television with lots and lots of coverage of climate change every single day;
2. Fill the content of that coverage with current climate facts, suggest the future implications of those facts, including their social and economic consequences, and illustrate how those consequences will impact us at a personal level;
3. Deliver that content with a grave tone of crisis and emergency;
4. Institutionalize coverage of climate change by creating standard, daily news sections and departments in our print, radio, television, Internet and other media.

To blame issues like health care and the economy for pushing climate change coverage to the side is not an adequate justification.  Rather, it is a lame and shallow excuse that reflects an utter lack of critical thinking about how to accurately educate the public about the benefits of solving climate change.

Something this ClimateBiz piece misses out on completely is that the media is failing to make key connections for the American people.  For example, as we point out here time and again, the sources of pollution that cause climate change are also making millions of people sick, driving up health care costs.  By transitioning to a clean energy-powered economy, including electric vehicles, we will save billions of dollars on our nation's health care costs.

Similarly, much has been written about how our transition to a clean technology economy will spur the growth of whole new economic sectors and create millions of new jobs.  In addition, more efficient energy technologies and vehicles will help save Americans hundreds of billions of dollars on our energy and transport costs each year -- freeing up that money (which is now just going to energy companies) to be spent widely throughout diverse sectors of the economy (clothing, travel, restaurants, hotels, electronics, recreation, music -- you name it!)

Similar connections can be made on the national security front and fight against terrorism, where our dependence on oil helps fund regimes that strongly dislike America, compromises our foreign policy stances, and overall threatens our economic security.

The media is, in our opinion, failing miserably to relay these types of key linkages between solving climate change and solving other key challenges of our day.  Invite us on to your program and we'll be glad to tell your audience all about them.

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Solving Global Warming to Avoid a Global Food Crisis

It's pretty clear that more and more people are realizing the crisis in the global food supply that is coming down the pipe compliments of global warming.

Here, Lester Brown lays out how the upcoming Copenhagen climate change treaty negotiations will impact global food security for decades to come (for better or for worse):

It is the disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau that are of most concern, because their ice melt sustains the flow of the major rivers of India and China—the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers—during the dry season. This ice melt thus also sustains the irrigation systems that depend on these rivers.

Yao Tandong, one of China’s leading glaciologists, who predicts that two thirds of China’s glaciers could be gone by 2050, says “the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau region will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”

It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world’s leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (The United States is third.) In contrast to the United States, most wheat grown in China and India is irrigated. With rice, these two countries totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these mountain glaciers in Asia represents the most massive threat to food security the world has ever seen.

The prospects for the harvests of wheat and rice, in these two countries, each with over a billion people, are of concern everywhere. We live in an integrated world food economy, one where harvest shortfalls anywhere can drive up food prices everywhere.

It's not just the melting of glaciers that are the source of Asia's agricultural and drinking water that we have to be worried about.  It's also the impacts of rising temperatures:

Rising temperature also directly affects crop yields. In a study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an international team of scientists confirmed the rule of thumb emerging among crop ecologists that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, we can expect a 10 percent decline in wheat and rice yields. In a world with limited grain stocks—a world that is only one poor harvest away from chaos in grain markets—a crop-shrinking heat wave in a major grain-producing region could lead to politically destabilizing food shortages.

Does anybody still have any doubt that our transition to a Green Economy powered by clean energy technologies (not to mention transition to a more sustainable food supply and other land uses) is crucial for maintaining our economy, health, security and quality of life?

Food security is right up there at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so hopefully this line of messaging helps us gain some traction on solutions...

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