Thanks to Joyce Tarnow for this article from the Traverse City Record-Eagle in Michigan.
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Biomass? Try “biomess.”

That’s the message Rachel Smolker had for a large crowd gathered to explore the local and statewide ramifications of a wood-burning power plant in Traverse City.

Smolker, a forest researcher and climate advocate, came as a guest of the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council to speak about Traverse City Light & Power’s biomass plans.

About 100 people gathered in a conference room at the Traverse Area District Library Monday night as she expressed her concerns. Biomass plants pollute no less than coal facilities, she said, and their proliferation is a significant threat to the nation’s forests.

For full article, visit:
http://www.record-eagle.com/local/local_story_054074604.html

Thanks to Fred Stanback for this article.
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The promise of biofuels like ethanol is that they will someday help the world grow its way out of its addiction to oil. Nine billion gallons of corn ethanol were produced in the U.S. in 2008, while countries like Brazil have already widely replaced gasoline with ethanol from sugar cane and countless start-ups are working to bring cellulosic and other second-generation biofuels to market. The reasoning is that if we use greener biofuels in place of gasoline, it will significantly enhance our effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

But the question is, Are biofuels really green? A pair of new studies in the Oct. 22 issue of Science damningly demonstrate that the answer is no, at least not the way we currently create and use them. In the first study, a team of researchers led by Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., projected the effects of a major biofuel expansion over the coming century and found that it could end up increasing global greenhouse-gas emissions instead of reducing them.

For full article, visit:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1931780,00.html

Thanks to Fred Stanback for this article.
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One of the most cherished articles of faith of the green movement – that wood-fuelled power stations can help save the planet – is being increasingly challenged by campaigners and conservationists around the world.

Electricity generated by burning woodchips is on the verge of a global boom. America is planning 102 power stations fuelled by woodchips in the next few years. Europe is reported to be planning a similar, if yet unquantified, expansion. And in Britain, the next three years will see wood-fuelled power station capacity increase sevenfold, requiring, according to the campaign group Biofuelwatch, so much timber that it would need an area 12 times the size of Liechtenstein to grow it.

For full article, visit:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment

Many thanks to Fred Stanback for this article.
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Despite the nuclear industry’s lavishly-funded propaganda, which claims that nuclear power is at least a partial solution to the climate crisis, there are plenty of reasons why nuclear power cannot, should not and ultimately will not be part of a climate change solution.

For all its other shortcomings, at least the House-passed Waxman-Markey ACES climate bill recognized this, and offered little for nuclear power other than the benefits a price on carbon provides to any low-carbon electricity source. But as the Senate prepares to take on its climate bill, there is substantial industry pressure for still more taxpayer giveaways to the nuclear power industry, ostensibly as a means to bring some more conservative Senators over to vote for a final bill.

For full article, visit:
http://nirsnet.dailykos.com/

“Theoretically, it seats 6.75 billion,” the ad for the new Honda Insight hybrid car states.
My first thought when encountering this ad in TIME magazine was that it plays to a pretty narrow demographic: people who know that this big number is the current population of the world. Then I read the ad copy.

Honda’s ad evokes one thought that ought to dominate the discussion at the international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December: Global development is inequitable. Some of us worry about the mileage our car gets. But most people don’t own, drive, or ride in any car, let alone a hybrid.

For full article, visit:
http://www.worldwatch.org

Thanks to Lester Brown for this article.
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The past two years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States. Initially led by environmental groups, both national and local, it has since been joined by prominent national political leaders and many state governors. The principal reason for opposing coal plants is that they are changing the earth’s climate. There is also the effect of mercury emissions on health and the 23,600 U.S. deaths each year from power plant air pollution.

Over the last few years the coal industry has suffered one setback after another. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 123 plants have been defeated, with another 51 facing opposition in the courts. Of the 231 plants being tracked, only 25 currently have a chance at gaining the permits necessary to begin construction and eventually come online. Building a coal plant may soon be impossible.

For full article, visit:
www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2010/pb4ch10_ss3

Two items follow. Thanks to Jeff Ramsey for the link to a recent paper by Jennifer Ellis on the effects of subsidies for fossil fuels and the need for reform. See www.globalsubsidies.org/files/assets/effects_ffs.pdf where you can download the report. In this report, Jennifer Ellis provides a detailed literature review, focusing on the six modeling studies in the last 20 years that have attempted to analyze global impacts of subsidies for all fuels. The studies mostly considered effects on greenhouse gas emissions and gross domestic product, but very little of the work has considered other environmental impacts or social impacts. The paper highlights a number of areas where further research should be undertaken but concludes that there is already enough evidence to demonstrate the significant environmental and economic benefits of phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies, and recommends that policy-makers do not delay in beginning the reform process.

Continue Reading »

Geothermal energy usually gets relegated to the back burner in a myriad of alternative energy choices. In the past few years, we’ve seen hybrid cars become trendy, ethanol’s fate rise and then fall, and a rather heated debate on the merits of clean coal. Now, it seems, geothermal energy may be emerging as practical source of clean energy. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are making leaps and bounds on extracting energy from low-temperature geothermal sources. The lab is receiving $1.2 million as a part of the Department of Energy grants for renewable energy.

The new method, which is safer and more economically feasible than previous procedures, would generate electricity with virtually no pollution. “By the end of the calendar year, we plan to have a functioning bench-top prototype generating electricity,” said Pete McGrail, a scientist working on the project. “If successful, enhanced geothermal systems like this could become an important energy source.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?4784

Thanks to Fred Stanback for this article.
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In April 2007, a helicopter landed in a backyard in Johnson Valley, California, a desert hamlet of 440 residents on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. “One of the neighbors went out and asked them what they were doing just a few hundred feet from his house,” Jim Harvey, a local landowner, recalls. “They said, ‘We’re the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and congratulations! You’re the lucky lottery winners of a brand new power line that’s going to come right through the middle of your town.’ ”

That power line is called Green Path North — an 85-mile-long high-voltage transmission wire from Los Angeles through public and private lands, connecting the city to potential geothermal and solar-thermal resources, with the whole shebang to be owned by the LADWP and paid for over the next decade by ratepayers. The cost: up to $1 billion just for the transmission line, plus untold billions for the not-yet-planned power plants themselves. Some 2,000 acres of desert would be sacrificed for a project that would, if it ever gets built, carry about 800 megawatts of renewable electricity — enough for 600,000 homes.

For full article, visit:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/137/beyond-the-grid.html

Many thanks to Massimo Ippolito for this article from the Oil Drum.
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Why should there be an energy problem? After all, there is plenty of energy around us. The sun beams on the earth’s surface a daily amount of energy that corresponds to almost ten thousand times the primary energy we generate – mainly – from fossil fuels. And that doesn’t include geothermal energy nor the perspectives of nuclear energy, especially in terms of fusion power. Just tap a small fraction of this energy bonanza that surrounds us and we can have more than we need.

But, of course, things are not so simple. We still rely heavily on fossil fuels for our needs and switching to alternative sources is proving to be a very slow and difficult process. Production from traditional nuclear plants is going down (WNA 2009) and fusion power remains far away in the future.

For full article, visit:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5538