Burning Oil to Stay Cool

As the summer's first heat wave sets in on the Northeast, and millions of A/C units start cranking in synchrony, the east coast's electric utilities are firing up every power plant they have at their disposal in order to meet demand.

That includes some of our dirtiest, oldest, most inefficient power plants, smoke-belching relics that are only used on days like these when there's absolutely no better alternative available to keep the lights on.

We're beating the heat by incinerating vast amounts of fuel in thousand-degree infernos. And to make matters worse, forecasters are also expecting unhealthy levels of ozone and particulate air pollution all along the eastern seaboard today.

Wyman Station, a 1970s-era oil-burning power plant on Cousins Island in Casco Bay.
Photo by Bryan Bruchman.

The upshot of this is that any conservation efforts will make a bigger difference today than any other time of year. If a few of us shut down our workstations for the lunch hour and find some unplugged work to do during the hottest part of the day, then they'll burn fewer BTUs at the power plants and send less smoke into our hot, haze-saturated atmosphere.

Side bonus: your office will also be cooler with fewer machines generating heat indoors.

Alternatively, immersing yourself in 65 degree ocean water at the beach is another good way to not burn fossil fuels today. It's bad business for me to say so, but it just isn't a good day to read blogs.

Related: Hot Days Incinerate Oil, from July 7, 2010.

"Environmentalism" fiddles while the planet burns

In case you missed it, the United States Senate has given up on trying to pass a law that would slow down the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Even after the nation's worst oil spill in history and scorching heat waves worldwide, Democrats failed to gain any Republican support for their proposals.

So we'll just have to let the planet stew in its own juices and wait until the next time progressive lawmakers with a 60-vote majority in Washington might be compelled by a massive environmental emergency to do something. But who wants to bet that can happen before our modern society and political institutions melt away in the heat?

In the last few days, there's been a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing from pundits and politicians. But I think that one of the best responses came from David Roberts at Grist, in a post headlined 'Environmentalism' Can Never Address Climate Change.

Roberts writes:

Environmentalism has a well-defined socioeconomic niche in American life. There are distinct cultural markers; familiar tropes and debates; particular groups designated to lobby for change and economic interests accustomed to fighting it; conventional methods of litigation, regulation, and legislation. Environmental issues take a very specific shape.

The thing is, that shape doesn't fit climate change. Climate change -- or rather, the larger problem of which climate change is a symptom -- isn't like the issues that American environmentalism evolved to address.

He goes on to make the point that the environmental establishment had its genesis in, and grew from, its battles against industry. Early environmental activists shut down factories that were dumping sludge into rivers and lakes and rammed their boats against whaling ships. Later environmental activists took industry to court over more abstract environmental problems like mercury emissions and underground groundwater contamination.

Those big problems have been largely addressed: by most measures (if you leave out greenhouse gas pollution), our American physical environment has less pollution to deal with now than we've had since the industrial revolution took hold.

So: can the same environmental establishment that gave us the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts save us from global warming? The recent failure in Washington does not inspire confidence, and Roberts makes a compelling case for why that is:

The entry of the problem [climate change] into American politics via environmentalism has set it on a certain cultural and political trajectory that is both inadequate and extremely difficult to escape.

Addressing the climate challenge will crucially involve restraining industry emissions (the vaunted "cap"). But that is only one of myriad strategies and changes that will be necessary. The environmental advocacy community has tried, of late, to reshape itself to the contours of the problem before it. It has tried to act with a more singular focus, in a more unified way, and to bring other interest groups (military, religious, etc.) into the fold. It has tried to reorient around a more forward-thinking, positive agenda ("clean energy"). Contrary to a lot of the sniping you hear these days, the efforts of those involved have been heroic.

But it's an impossible task. There is no siloed progressive interest group that can engineer the wholesale reindustrialization of the United States. Period. No amount of clever framing or thoughtful policy proposals can overcome the basic limitations of interest group politics.

Many green leaders are now saying that what's missing is a climate movement. That's obviously true in some sense; this will be the work of generations. But the question is whether "the environmental movement" can catalyze a big enough movement to be effective on this problem.

What needs to happen is for concern over earth's biophysical limitations to transcend the environmental movement -- and movement politics, as handed down from the '60s, generally. It needs to take its place alongside the economy and national security as a priority concern of American elites across ideological and organizational lines. It needs to become a shared concern of every American citizen regardless of ideological orientation or level of political engagement. That is the only way we can ever hope to bring about the urgent necessary changes.

To put it another way: this can not be a traditional environmentalist battle against industry, because nearly everyone agrees that industry - and the entire economy - is what needs to be reinvented in order to stop burning fossil fuels and start finding more innovative, efficient forms of energy.

I have worked for years inside and in league with a number of old-line environmental groups, and from that perspective, I unfortunately have to agree with Roberts's diagnosis. "Environmentalism" carries too much baggage from the baby-boom generation whose suburban-back-to-the-land, materialist lifestyle has done so much climate damage.

For many people my age, it's extremely frustrating to see dominant "environmental" organizations behave as though the most productive thing we can do is to buy up lots of land for conservation reserves. Or worse, when we pour thousands of dollars' worth of nonprofit resources to file injunctions against the "scenic impacts" of clean energy projects.

Sure, these things satisfy the comfortable baby-boomers who want to have a nice view outside the picture windows of their ski condos.

But these kinds of actions, and their funders, are calcifying the environmental establishment into something that's demographically old and elite, and politically out-of-touch and ineffective.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned; the environmental establishment fiddles while the entire planet burns.

That Fresh Forest Air

There's a faint smell of smoke hanging in the hazy air this morning here in Portland. I went to a local diner for breakfast and asked if there had been a fire somewhere in the city overnight, but nobody knew of one. Besides, it doesn't have the harsh, metallic odor of a burning building; it's a more woody smell, like a brush fire.

And indeed, that's what it appears to be. This morning's northwesterly winds seem to be carrying a plume of wood smoke across hundreds of miles, from forest fires in the boreal woods of Quebec and eastern Ontario.

Maine's Air Quality Forecast is predicting "Moderate - Limited Health Notice" levels of particulate pollution statewide today, with this explanation:

"Particle pollution values are very high this morning from smoke due to fires in the Province of Quebec. A number of these fires continue to burn out of control. Brisk northwest winds will be directing the smoke and particle pollution toward Maine today. Normally brisk winds cause a lot of mixing and the pollution levels lessen. However, the levels are so high that this turbulence will not be able to completely drop particle pollution levels. In addition, these brisk winds could easily cause these fires to burn more strongly."

As of 9 am, though, particulate pollution levels in Portland had exceeded 50 micrograms per cubic meter - a reading that far exceeds "Moderate" levels and approaches the code-red "Unhealthy" status in the federal Air Quality Index.

It's just my luck that I came down with a serious sore throat yesterday - this morning's bad air isn't helping matters.

Elsewhere in the nation, smoke from agricultural burns in the Mississippi River valley and the upper midwest is also blowing into cities across the southeast and midwest. At right is a snapshot of surface smoke in New England at 11 am today, courtesy of the National Weather Service's excellent Air Quality forecasting site.

Visit this link watch the smoke creep towards the ocean over a 12-hour loop of satellite images (choose "1 hour average surface smoke" from the drop-down menu).

Using Bikes, and the Social Web, for Environmental Monitoring

MIT's Senseable City Lab has a lot of great projects loosely organized around the idea that a proliferation of cheap sensors, hand-held electronics, and mobile networks offers people more ways to collect and interpret data about their city.

So, for instance, you can embed a cheap radio beacon into a piece of garbage and learn about your city's waste-handling practices (something that city governments rarely like to talk about publicly). The Senseable City Lab did it.

The Lab has a new project they're launching in Copenhagen now, in conjunction with the global climate suicide pact treaty negotiations.

Copenhageners love riding their bikes: it's the dominant mode of transportation in the city, and how 57 percent of workers and students commute. The Senseable City Lab designed a new bicycle wheel (pictured at right) that includes a small electric motor and a 3-speed internal hub, which can transform any bike into a hybrid human-powered/electric bike.

But the hub also includes a GPS unit and an array of environmental sensors that measure levels of pollutants like carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides, plus temperature and weather conditions. As users ride through the city, they can share their data online with others, and offer real-time environmental transects on a daily basis.


As more users use the wheel and share their data, the city can get a bigger, more complete sense of environmental hotspots, how pollutant levels change over the course of a day, and how to better-manage pollution sources.


I want one. Imagine being able to do your environmental ground-truthing on a leisurely bike ride, or a crowd-sourced revelation of the embarrassing hotspot of volatile organic compounds (from the basement laundry) next to the luxury hotel downtown. I'm hoping these come to the mass market soon.

The Skies of L.A.

Last month in Houston I met the author of L.A. Places, a blog about the city's most interesting buildings, public art, hikes, and parks. It makes me want to visit southern California again.

I really liked her photos of these murals inside the public transit agency's headquarters building. They are titled "Los Angeles Circa 1879, 1910, 1950, and after 2000," respectively, by James Doolin.

"Los Angeles, Circa 1879":

"Los Angeles, Circa 1910":

Los Angeles, Circa 1950:

"Los Angeles, Circa After 2000":

What I really like about these murals is how LA's atmosphere is as much of a character as the city itself. As the city grows from a landscape of farms to a landscape of freeways, the sky above it transforms from a pristine blue to a smoggy, orange blanket of haze. The last mural - depicting the city as it is today - looks like something out of Blade Runner.

You can see more murals from LA's transit stations, and lots of other awesome things in Los Angeles, at Vanessa's blog.

Making C02 Visible

This morning, a huge new billboard went up near Penn Station in New York, devoted to keeping track of how many metric tons of greenhouse gases are in our atmosphere at any given moment. The clock started this morning at 3.64 trillion metric tons, based on estimates and reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

You can track the clock online here, at the Deutsche Bank's website. As I write this, another 1,000 tons are being added into the atmosphere every second. The billboard doesn't say so, but the survival of civilization and most life on earth relies on stopping this clock and beginning to turn it backwards in the next ten to twenty years.

Anyhow, as I've said before, one of the biggest hazards of climate change is the fact that it's hard to perceive: unlike other pollutants we've dealt with, CO2 is invisible and odorless, and you can't feel the effects of a multi-trillion-ton blanket in the atmosphere until a category four hurricane is at your doorstep.

The carbon counter helps with that problem. I'm also encouraged by the fact that the billboard's being paid for by a major global bank: as Mindy Lubber wrote today in the Huffington Post, the costs of greenhouse gas emissions aren't on anyone's balance sheet, which makes them a huge financial loophole in the global economy. Tallying greenhouse gases on a huge billboard in the world's financial capital is a step in the right direction (and it gives Deutsche Bank a measure of credence in the carbon accounting and trading businesses that are expected to emerge once the United States passes a climate bill).

This is just a couple of blocks away from the well-known "debt clock," which hasn't been successful enough to forestall the addition of another digit when the debt went over $10 trillion last fall. This counter will never need another digit: if our atmosphere accumulates that much carbon, there won't be anyone around to keep the lights on.

Clouds scribe global commerce

Tracking the radio pings of ship transponders is one way to watch the intricate dance of global shipping patterns.

Another, less practical, but far prettier way is to look in the clouds:

Image from Wikipedia.

 
Ship tracks are clouds that form in calm, humid conditions at sea, when water vapor condenses around the exhaust from ships' smokestacks. The phenomenon was first noted in the 1960s, when the first satellites began photographing Earth's atmosphere from above. Above is the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States, between Chesapeake Bay and Cape Cod. Below is an image of the ocean off the western coasts of France and Spain in 2003:

Image: NASA Earth Observatory

Explaining the second images, NASA writes that:

These images reveal an important difference between clouds formed from natural cloud condensation nuclei (like dust or sea salt) and those formed from particles in ship exhaust. First, the ship track clouds contain greater amounts of smaller liquid water particles (shown in yellow) than surrounding natural clouds (shown in red). The optical thickness of the ship track clouds is different as well, showing up as dark orange streaks.

Why are these characteristics important? A cloud’s optical thickness determines how much sunlight reaches the Earth’s surface and how much is reflected or absorbed by the clouds, factors that influence global temperatures. The size of cloud particles is important, too. In general, smaller particles [like those in ship tracks] produce brighter, more reflective clouds, which bounce light from the sun back into space and cool the planet. If that sounds like a good way to combat global warming, consider this: when particles are small, they are less likely to collide with one another often enough to produce raindrops. Indeed, in some parts of the world, increasing, persistent air pollution appears to be contributing to drought.

Climatologists are keen on ship tracks because it offers a controlled, isolated way of studying how air pollution from an individual source can affect cloud formation and climate - the same way that millions of cars, power plants, homes and businesses do over land.

Cloud tracks came to my attention via Nova's "Dimming the Sun" program, which documents various ways that humans are blotting out the sun with air pollution. Nova offers these satellite images of airline contrails over Georgia, Alabama, and northern Florida:

Airline contrails are harder to study, since there are so many of them crisscrossing each other. But in the days following September 11, 2001, scientists had a rare opportunity to make some broad observations about their effects: "from roughly midday September 11 to midday September 14," according to the Nova website, "the days had become warmer and the nights cooler, with the overall range greater by about two degrees Fahrenheit."

The satellite image below is from September 12th, 2001. A sky normally crowded with contrails only has a few parallel tracks in this photo: they are the tracks of former-President Bush's plane and several escort fighters, returning to Washington from the undisclosed location in Nebraska.

Cubicle Symbiosis

A new office building in Delhi proposes to use 60,000 indoor plants in lieu of building ventilation. "By 'growing' fresh air indoors," write the project's developers, "we can reduce the supply of external fresh air needed by air-conditioned buildings, while still meeting industry standards for healthy indoor air."



The fresh-air garden concept has been in use for 15 years at Delhi's Paharpur Business Centre, a 20 year-old building that houses over 1,200 plants for 300 workers. Years of data collection have demonstrated that the building's workers suffer fewer respiratory ailments and headaches, and are more productive. You can check on the PBC's indoor air quality, and compare it against outdoor air in Delhi, here on their web site.

Additionally:

"We conducted another experiment and sealed all fresh air and exhaust from the building for 6 weeks and found that that the air quality inside the building was better than outdoors."

As it happens, a lot of the research on house plants and air quality has been conducted by NASA, in anticipation of the day when astronauts will need to grow their own fresh air on the moon and other places where the outdoor air just won't do.

The houseplants pictured above are GreenSpaces' top recommendations for a cubicle fresh-air garden. The Areca Palm filters out dust, humidifies the air, and removes volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde. The Mother-in-law’s Tongue plant converts C02 into oxygen at night, and is recommended for bedrooms. And the Money Plant is another good scrubber of volatile organic compounds.

More info at greenspaces.in/blog/ted09

The Black Cloud: Citizen air-quality monitoring in south central LA

A typical black cloud sensor, sniffing VOCs from a marker.

Over the past summer, high school seniors at L.A.'s Manual Arts High School pored over graphs from environmental sensors like the one above as part of the "Black Cloud Citizen Scientist League," a game designed by Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer.

Niemeyer and teacher Andy Garcia hid these sensors in various places inside the students' neighborhood where they expected to find big difference in pollution levels: a dry cleaner's, a gas station, a nail salon, and inside the classroom itself. The object of the game, for the students, was to discover where the sensors were - mostly by analyzing the data from the sensors and learning about the factors that influence air quality in their neighborhood.

Sensor output from an Echo Park drycleaner business, showing data on light levels, temperature, noise, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and carbon dioxide. Image courtesy of Planetizen.

Some of the project's outcomes were surprising. On his blog, Niemeyer writes that the gas station's VOC levels were relatively low: the sensor was placed inside, next to an ice cream freezer, and gasoline vapors rarely reached it. But students also learned that their neighborhood's carbon dioxide levels, at 600 parts per million, were almost twice as high as most places.

Most disturbingly, students learned that their own classroom had CO2 levels around 3,000 parts per million - high enough to cause fatigue and poor attention span in most people. Students responded by opening doors and windows to improve ventilation, and they watched the CO2 levels decline. But the lessons of the classroom's conditions can be applied to the whole city, according to Neimeyer in a blog post he wrote at the project's conclusion:

After 6 weeks of tracking Black Clouds in LA, our observation is that in some places the air recovers, and in others, it gets worse. Recovery happens either because powerful HVAC systems run all night to clear the air, say, in the Metro Transit Authority office building, or because someone put many plants in their space, such as at Machine Project. In places like the Manual Arts High School room p74, pollutants concentrate throughout the week and get barely a chance to clear up during the weekend. If we scale these observations up to the whole city, well, LA’s air does not recover because it moves offshore at night just to move onshore again the next morning. Our conclusion is that we must find ways to let the air recover. We call it eco-fasting. How about not using the car every other day, voluntarily? How about growing plants indoor to clear the air while we’re at work? How about using no electricity all weekend?

The Black Cloud sensors are now monitoring conditions at various locations in Los Angeles's Echo Park neighborhood and around the UC Berkeley campus. Visit the Black Cloud website to look at graphs of current conditions.

You can also read more on Planetizen, where I learned about this project.

Oceans and atmosphere: a perspective view

Here's a neat visualization from Dan Phiffer, seen on Grist:

"Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth."

The baby boomers are going to love this.

The nexus of ridiculous wealth and ridiculous immaturity in this second gilded age has had its share of problems - broken marriages, Hummer sales, SEC investigations, and global environmental destruction, among them - but if you're willing to do the heavy lifting to assuage bourgeois guilt pangs (case study: WhoFooMa), there are some tremendous business opportunities. Like this one:

Want to make a purchase? Visit cheatneutral.com.

Previously on The Vigorous North: Carbon Indulgences

The People's Car

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."
- Henry David Thoreau, 1856

Environmentalists worldwide have been wringing their hands this week with the introduction of the new Tata Nano, a $2500 "people's car" intended to make car ownership affordable to India's burgeoning middle class.

So will 1 billion new motorists in India push the world's carbon-soaked atmosphere over the brink? How could those third-world nations be so inconsiderate?

I'm actually not that concerned about the Nano. I do think that this car is going to cause big problems in India: as thousands of new and inexperienced drivers take to streets that are already congested to the point of uselessness, and as those thousands of newly-minted members of the middle class sink a huge portion of their incomes into cars - a depreciating asset - instead of into their homes, education, medicine, or even safe drinking water.

But who are we to say that India shouldn't drive? Their middle class is merely following the lousy example we've set. We should actually be heartened by the fact that the Nano is remarkably fuel-efficient, and its engine will generate less pollution than most of the three-wheeled rickshaws and two-stroke motor scooters it's intended to replace.

In fact, as this NY Times article attests, the Nano is actually a model of automotive efficiency and frugality: no power steering, no power windows, no air bags or antilock brakes, one windshield wiper instead of two. Stripping out everything they didn't need allowed Tata's engineers to reduce material costs and build a car light enough to run on a tiny 35 horsepower engine (by comparison, this American couch-potato lawnmower runs on a 25 horsepower engine). This is almost the platonic ideal of an automobile: a car stripped down to its barest essence.

So as world environmental crises go, the Nano has got nothing on the hundreds of new coal power plants that China is building to keep our Wal-Mart shelves full of cheap plastic crap. Even if millions of people do embrace the Nano, India will have to respond with even tighter pollution rules (in fact, new auto regulations are already on their way), congestion charges for crowded city streets, and other measures to reduce driving.

Plus, like their Chinese counterparts, new Indian motorists are likely to drive up the global price of gasoline even further - and that should help the developed world trade in our own autos for something a little more frugal.

Exporting pollution to Dixie

As someone who lived (happily) in Houston, Texas for a year, it kind of gets on my nerves when northerners pick on the South - Houston or LA or the sprawl around Pheonix and Atlanta - as being the cause of the nation's environmental ills. It's true that these cities have big environmental problems - especially air pollution. But these problems are largely caused by industries that Northerners don't want in their own backyards, although we don't mind buying their products.

Skyline and Ship Channel from the San Jacinto Monument
Originally uploaded by j-a-x.

Let's start with Houston's ship channel (photo at right), home to the largest concentration of oil refineries in the United States. These refineries produce tons of air pollution and greenhouse gases daily and are largely responsible for Houston's notoriously poor air quality. Because of the refineries, Texas's per-capita greenhouse gas production is nearly double that of most northern states.

But we in the northern states are still buying and using those refineries' products. In fact, in the last year that data was available, the average Maine motorist drove 11,348 miles: over 1,000 miles MORE than the average six-shootin', hollerin' Texan (source). Back-to-the-land Vermonters drive even more on a per-capita basis. So not only are we actually responsible for more pollution, we're also doing the dishonorable deed of producing that pollution in a poorer part of the country where more minorities and immigrants live. How could anyone possibly be self-righteous about that?

Similarly, Los Angeles is well known as the smog capital of the nation, but that's largely because of its port, where millions of containers from China get transferred from diesel-burning ships to diesel-burning trucks to supply stores and warehouses all over the country. Without the Port of Los Angeles and its pollution, it would be a lot harder to come by your organic pears from New Zealand, or any of the thousands of other things you buy from across the Pacific.

The Port of Long Beach is starting to assert itself, though. As detailed in this article from the Times, California is placing new regulations on the shippers and truckers who converge on LA to move Asian products to American store shelves.

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster said, “We’re not going to have kids in Long Beach contract asthma so someone in Kansas can get a cheaper television set.”

Actually, Mayor, that's been our arrangement for decades now. But best of luck to you, from a well-wisher in the vigorous North.

Santa Ana Winds

Those hot dry winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.

-Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

Those hot, dry Santa Ana winds are back this week, up to no good as usual.

The Santa Anas are similar to the föhn winds of the Alps: high pressure inland sends air speeding over the mountains, where the winds cool down and lose their capacity to hold moisture. Then, forced downhill again towards the coast, the winds gain heat adiabatically in increasing atmospheric pressure. At the same time, the winds gain speed as they funnel through narrow mountain passes. The hot, dry, moving air creates perfect conditions for wildland fires, which is why southern California is burning.

In some areas, the winds are blowing at hurricane speeds, sending smoke and dust hundreds of miles out over the Pacific Ocean...


Image: NASA's Looking at Earth site (thanks for the tip, widgery!)

The carbon cube

The Carbon Cube is a striking reminder of how much CO2 we produce for each mile we drive.

The Cube consists of one pound of solid graphite, which represents the amount of carbon dioxide the average car emits every mile.

Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, impossible to handle or to see. I've always thought that this was a big reason we have such a hard time dealing with greenhouse gas pollution. People who would never think of dumping five pounds of untreated sewage into a river habitually send literal tons of greenhouse gases and other airborne toxics into the atmosphere for their daily commute.

But the Cube changes that with its tangible and surprising heft. Put one on your dashboard and think of sending one more of its clones into the clouds with every click of your odometer. I'll bet you'd become a more efficient driver.

Learn more or order your own cube here.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Mars Hill wind turbines behind an International Appalachian Trail shelter

It's an environmental problem so old that it's named for a relic of medieval agriculture, and now, the age-old "tragedy of the commons" is keeping us from building renewable energy projects.

When farmers of the Middle Ages left the village to tend their fields every day, they typically left their livestock on a publicly-owned patch of grass near the center of town.

But since these "commons" were owned by everyone, taking care of them was typically left to an inadequate collection of do-gooders who received little in return for their work. Meanwhile, everyone in town had an incentive to put as much of their livestock as possible on the common - it was free, and if their animals didn't eat all the grass, someone else's would. As a result, the Common pastures quickly became desolate patches of dirt, at least until City Beautiful movements closed them to livestock and resurrected them as public parks like the one in Boston.

Since the Middle Ages, the "tragedy of the Commons" has afflicted everything from fisheries to dorm-room kitchens. Right now, it's being felt most keenly on a global scale with the global warming crisis.

Here in Maine, we have a promising way to slow down climate change by developing our state's wind resources into a source of electricity. But an article by John Richardson in today's Portland Press Herald cites a brand-new tragedy of the commons, in the state's failure to approve new wind power developments:

"A study completed this year by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, found conflicts like those in Maine are widespread because of a fundamental reality of wind power. The environmental costs -- visual impacts, noise, landscape and wildlife disturbances -- are primarily felt by those near the wind farm. The benefits, however -- reduced global warming emissions and other air pollution, less dependence on foreign oil and less mining and drilling -- are felt more on the global scale."

The people who live near and object to proposed wind turbines are a lot like the medieval villagers who sent their cows overgrazing. They hold their own self-interest high above the interests of everyone else (only now, they use the mantle of "environmentalism" to justify it).

Meanwhile, the rest of us who "own" the atmosphere would collectively benefit a lot more from having the windmills built, but it's hard for any single one of us to justify the travel and effort involved in supporting these projects.

As a result, a few people whose delicate aesthetic sensibilities cause them to "suffer" from wind farms have a stronger incentive (not to mention lower travel costs) to complain at local planning hearings than the 6 billion people who will share the benefits of healthier lungs and reduced greenhouse gases. The tragedy continues...

'Clean' Coal, Conventional Coal, and Shinola: A Comparative Study

A few years ago, a millionaire from New York came into South Portland, Maine and proposed to build 41-story twin towers on top of a convention center/plastic surgery hospital. The complex also would have included an aerial tram over the harbor to downtown Portland, and an extended-stay luxury hotel in one of the towers where plastic surgery patients would recover. Like many of his colleagues, this developer was wealthy in cash and ego and bankrupt in taste.

Now another strange and unlikely plan is taking shape further north, in the quaint seaside town of Wiscasset. A cadre of Connecticut real-estate developers are proposing a new coal gasification power plant just north of the shuttered Maine Yankee nuclear reactors.

Coal gasification is a process that's been around for decades now: it bakes coal at high temperatures to break the stuff down into energy and component chemicals, some of which can be synthesized into diesel fuel or natural gas (wikipedia has the chemistry lesson). Compared to a conventional coal plant, there are, indeed, some significant advantages: sulfur and mercury in the coal gets baked out and separated instead of going up the smokestack. The gasification process is also more efficient, using less coal to produce more energy. And a byproduct is syngas, which can be converted either into natural gas or diesel fuel (the gasification process was used extensively in Germany during WWII due to oil and gas shortages).

The Connecticut real estate developers are proposing to manufacture synthetic diesel fuel, which will also have some marginal pollution benefits over typical diesel, from the new plant in Wiscasset.

Sounds good, right? The developers also claim that the plant will "support... the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)... to reduce overall carbon emissions" and that it "bolsters Maine's self-reliance by reducing transportation fuel imports." These and other "top ten local and regional benefits" can be found on the Twin River Energy Center web site.

But the gee-whiz attitude is either misleading or misguided - probably some combination of both. There are some glaring instances of bad math and bad science in the developers' "fact" sheets. Here's a gem: "Diesel engines are 26% more fuel efficient than gasoline engines and therefore emit 26% less CO2." In fact, the cetane molecules in synthetic diesel contain a lot more carbon per gallon than gasoline's isooctane, and diesel emissions include heat-absorbing soot particles that are extremely powerful greenhouse pollutants.

If they were better at math, the developers would avoid the carbon question like the plague, because there's no denying that this proposed plant would convert millions of tons of coal (carbon) into global-warming CO2. This plant would only "support" RGGI insofar as it would have to buy up literal tons of carbon-pollution credits on the regional market.

Now, theoretically, the plant might at some point be able to "sequester" the greenhouse gases it produces them and, I don't know, shoot a rocket full of its CO2 to the moon, or something. The technology doesn't exist yet, but our friends in the coal lobby assure us that they're working on it.

As for other pollutants, gasification removes most mercury and sulfur from the smokestack emissions, but there's still enough left coming out of the tailpipe to make this proposed plant one of the biggest, if not the biggest single source of mercury and acid rain pollution in Maine. At least the prevailing winds will blow it down into the wealthy lungs in the midcoast region, and not into mine.

Finally, Maine is not a coal mining state, which undermines the idea of rugged "self-reliance". Coal would have to be imported, and most of it would probably come from mountaintop removal strip mines in impoverished regions of southern Appalachia (see photo above).

There are shadowy economic problems as well. Most of these gasification plants still require huge government subsidies, even with demand for their natural-gas and diesel byproducts at an all-time high. The industry argues that a few early subsidies will reduce technology costs to the point where all new coal plants can adopt the gasification process in the future. But this argument presumes that we'd want to build new coal plants, which seems like a foolhardy assumption in the face of imminent climate disaster. At the very least, carbon taxes and regulations like RGGI will make any kind of coal power more and more expensive... so why not save our subsidies for unambiguously clean technologies?

In short, all of the "advantages" of "clean" coal only look good when you compare the idea against the extremely bad example of a conventional coal plant. Otherwise, "clean coal" looks like... well, it's definitely not shinola.

An opposition group has already emerged in Wiscasset, but judging by the developers' amateurish pitch and the inherent lousiness of the idea, they shouldn't have to work very hard.

You can't breathe easy

During the airborne toxic event two weeks ago, I'd noticed that I couldn't take a deep breath without coughing. I thought that I'd outgrown the exercise-induced asthma that I sometimes got when I was a kid, but a day of record-breaking air quality violations brought me a wheezing blast from the past.

An article in today's NY Times doesn't help me feel any better:

[Cardiology professor] Dr. [David] Newby has seen, in action, the effects of [fine particulates] on active people. In 2005, he and his colleagues had 30 healthy volunteers ride exercise bikes inside a laboratory for 30 minutes, while breathing piped-in diesel exhaust at levels approximately those along a city highway at rush hour.

Afterward, the researchers did a “kind of stress test of the blood vessels” in the participants’ forearms, Dr. Newby said, and found that the vessels were abnormally dilated, meaning blood and oxygen could not flow easily to the muscles. At the same time, levels of tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, a naturally-occurring protein that dissolves blood clots, had fallen.

“Those are ideal conditions for a heart attack,” Dr. Newby said.

Those fine particulates also happen to collect heavy metals and other toxics from engines and fuel and deliver them into the bloodstream when we inhale them. Athletes are particularly susceptible because they can take in 10 to 20 times as much air pollutants as sedentary people, although anyone who walks or bikes regularly near automotive traffic is at risk.

Nevertheless, even the doctors who are experts on how unhealthy our air can be warn that exercising still beats the alternative. "The bottom line is that running and cycling are healthy and, over all, good for the heart," says Dr. Newby. "I ride my bike back and forth to work every day," he said. "If everyone else did that, too, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all, would we?"

Red-tailed hawks are awesome

This is a red-tailed hawk that lives in Washington Square Park, in the middle of New York City's Greenwich Village. It is eating a pigeon on top of the New York Daily Photo blogger's air conditioning unit.

Red-tailed hawks are doing quite well in Manhattan: they have nests in Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of the island (where I worked last summer) and in Bowling Green Park near the Battery, as well as in many places in between. They feast on the city's bounty of fat pigeons and nest either on the ledges of high-rise buildings or in dense tree canopies in city parks.

I had the good luck to witness a red-tailed hawk hunting high above Broadway last summer. I was walking down the street towards the subway station when I heard a red-tail's scream above me. I looked up just in time to see an explosion of feathers burst from the middle of a panicked mob of pigeons, and the burdened hawk coasting out from the middle of it and into the trees in Isham Park.

I've lived in the New Hampshire wilderness, hiked at the edges of the Tibetan plateau, skied down volcanoes, etcetera, etcetera, but watching a red-tail eviscerate a pigeon a hundred feet above Broadway in New York City ranks among the most amazing spectacles of nature I've ever witnessed.

Scenic Coast, Toxic Air

43.57 -70.21

Casco Bay haze
The harbor, a ferry, and oil tanks.

Mercifully, a cold front finally came through Maine last night and cleared away the humid blanket of polluted air that had been smothering us for most of the week.

On Tuesday, the ozone monitoring station at Two Lights State Park in Cape Elizabeth recorded the season's first violation of federal air quality standards, and on Wednesday, recorded levels of ground-level ozone went even higher, edging into the code-red "unhealthy" zone. We can't blame midwestern power plants for this one: ozone pollution is a local product of our own tailpipes and gas-fired power plants.

Strangely enough, this all happened just a few days after the Bush administration came out with a rare proposal to strengthen pollution regulations: specifically, to reduce acceptable levels of ozone from 80 parts per billion (where we were on Tuesday) to 70 parts per billion. This would have significant ramifications for Maine: Portland is just barely in compliance with the current limits, which are based on a three-year moving average, but the entire Maine coast usually has three or four days a summer when ozone exceeds 70 ppb - and we've already had three of those days so far in 2007, with the summer smog season barely underway.

When the new standards take effect and we start breaking them, the federal government isn't going to send in agents to arrest O3 molecules. Instead, they'll place restrictions on Maine industries, reduce our share of highway funding, and force gas stations to sell more expensive, cleaner-burning varieties of gasoline. This will improve air quality, in theory, but it will also put a substantial ball and chain on the Maine economy.

What's the Maine Turnpike Authority, which oversees our state's largest single source of air pollution, doing to help Maine avoid this unpleasant situation? Well, those traffic engineers are in estrus over plans lay down an expanded six-lane freeway just upwind of us, but they can't be bothered to build a sidewalk around the edge of their new Portland headquarters building. But that rich topic deserves an entire post of its own.