Burner Trouble- global warming and climate change from a personal perspective

“The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer’s battery store about the same amount of energy, said John S. O’Donnell, executive vice president of a company in the solar thermal business, Ausra. The thermos costs about $5 and the laptop battery $150, he said, and “that’s why solar thermal is going to be the dominant form.”

As oil prices skyrocket and technology makes breakthroughs, our ability to generate clean, sustainable energy becomes more and more viable. However the big roadblock to technologies like solar and wind is that they do not run 24/7 like water or nuclear, meaning they are an undependable source unless we can find ways to store the energy during those cloudy, windless days and dark nights. Battery tech has been a major stumbling point because of costs and inefficiency (much of the energy is lost during storage). As the above quote from today’s excellent NYTimes coverage of storage challenges notes, there are entirely new ways to look at storage that, in turn, have made new energy sources viable. One example is the focusing of solar heat by a field of hi-tech mirrors onto a tower full of water and heavy salts. During the day this heat powers steam turbines, during the night the stored heat in the tower keeps those turbines turning.

Read the article- it is easy to be a doomsayer during this rapidly expanding crisis but there are truly great things coming out of this scenario, great in the long term.

As expected the primary (red) areas are cities including my fair city of Rochester, NY. There is also a video which shows the paths the emissions take, though I’m not certain why this matters- it is a global problem, not a regional one.

The Chinese had to cancel the Olympic torch run in Paris today because of thousands of pro-Tibet protesters. I don’t see how they can continue this thing through to August given the protests that have dogged it so far. China’s leaders are displaying a profound misunderstanding of the depth of feeling about this issue and others like their support of Darfur. When people start talking about a global boycott of Chinese goods (which is now in the wind) they may finally understand that they can no longer control the flow of information regarding their internal policies.

This is only the beginning of their troubles. Their horrendous pollution problems are going to be spotlighted as athletes start to wonder whether it is safe to compete in a place where people routinely wear masks when they go outside. Despite plans to virtually halt traffic weeks before the game and stop all polluting industries temporarily I doubt the skies will clear and the water miraculously become clean.

Again, this is a control issue. China can’t control their environment any better than they control information. The world is watching and China invited us.

I have a three year-old Honda Accord that is about to come off of a lease. I have three options: Turn the car in, lease another on very favorable terms or buy the car, again on favorable terms (it’s very low mileage). All three probably cost me a similar amount. I either continue making a payment for a new car or for the existing one. Most leasees would go for the new car.

In the Marcc 2008 issue of Metropolis magazine (sorry no link that I can find) Roberta Gratz has an essay on the environmental impact of historical renovation as opposed to tearing down and building a new ‘greener’ building. She notes that:

” The greenest building is one that’s already built”

The struck me as being very relevant to two themes of this blog and my life these days: The hidden carbon cost of apparently environmentally-friendly products like organic produce (shipped how far to reach a wintry city like Rochester?) and the fact that when I buy something used I’m keeping its materials out of landfills and eliminating the need to make something new.

So I decide to buy the car I have already rather than buy a new one and thus add a carbon-intensive new motorized object to our collective environment. And while I have a dream to build a contemporary urban living space, I think I have to find a building and reuse it rather than build new. The ‘cost’ of tearing down and recycling or landfilling the building would far outweigh the advantages of ‘green’ new construction.

We cannot think about environmental issues the way we did in the past. Food that is grown without pesticides and fertilizers is great until you ship it a thousand miles to the consumer. That shipment just wiped out any advantages from an environmental perspective (the health advantages are also offset by the emissions associated with the travel). There is no free lunch for those who believe that they do right by buying this stuff.

Economically, with a recession upon us, the current administration’s solution is to hand out money and tell people to go forth and consume. This will allegedly stimulate the economy by increasing demand which in turn increases manufacturing. There’s only one problem with this: We live in a world that has fundamentally changed. If we all keep consuming at some point we turn all the raw materials of the planet into manmade objects. Not a pretty picture.

I saw a headline today that there are worldwide grain and food shortages because of American farmers growing corn for ethanol, a fuel most of us cannot use or afford if not subsidized by the government. The complexity of the idiocy behind this is mind-boggling.

The point here is that you cannot take a short term, simplistic approach to any purchasing decision these days. Do I buy a Prius to get an extra 20 MPG when that decision pushes a car somewhere into a landfill and adds another, albeit efficient, car into our global inventory? That’s the kind of question we have to ask ourselves in an environmentally damaged world.