Tag: biofuels

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Already getting a fifth of its power from the wind, wants to kick that number all the way to half by 2020, and completely eliminate fossil-fuel sources by 2050, according to Reuters.

Denmark had enough sense to abandon its plans for nuclear power in 1985, before actually building any (though a portion of the power it imports is undoubtedly nuclear).

However, don’t break out the champagne just yet. Denmark plans to replace coal and oil with a large percentage of biofuels. While biofuels are renewable, they are not always clean. Wood-burning, in particular, can contribute massively toward pollution and carbon emissions (and thus toward catastrophic climate change, a/k/a global warming).

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

In the South Bronx, once a deeply distressed urban area of New York City that the cops had dubbed “Fort Apache” because it had been so dangerous, a lot of the comeback has been around sustainability (thanks in no small measure to years of terrific organizing by Majora Carter and Sustainable South Bronx). A new initiative I just learned about creates three wins at once:

  • Cleans up polluted water
  • Creates clean and usable biofuel that doesn’t sacrifice agricultural land
  • Creates jobs and a general economic boost in a depressed area

Read about this triple win here. More and more, I think we’ll be seeing development projects like this. (I know of many others around the country and around the world.) The key is to look at waste from one process and see how it could be used as an ingredient for the next process. Another great example is The Intervale, in Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont, where beer waste becomes a growing medium for mushrooms, which in turn feeds fish. This thinking shift is one of the major principles of true sustainability.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics: General, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , ,

I got a call tonight from a survey company asking me questions about my views on various candidates for Massachusetts Governor, and then about various energy alternatives, and then the obvious real purpose: questions about my views on the large-scale wood-burning biomass projects proposed around the state (including three locations fairly close to me: Russell, Greenfield, and even densely populated Springfield), and a proposed bill to count only solar, wind and hydro as Green projects, excluding nukes and biofuels.

I think this gets an “award” for the most biased survey I’ve ever taken. First, the questioner determined that I was strongly opposed to the biomass plants—which are very bad on carbon footprint, not only from the burning of wood but also the massive deforestation and the huge amount of truck traffic they will generate. Wood is, indeed, a renewable resource. But it sure isn’t a clean one!

Then he asked questions like

  • Would it change your vote if you knew that although the Sierra Club and [I think] the Massachusetts Medical Society support the bill, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Associated Industries of Massachusetts, and AFL-CIO oppose this bill? [Very clever of them to throw in the environmental groups on the other side; my suspicions were not yet aroused. Later, I Googled and could find no such endorsement from UCS, although their research is cited by another group, here]
  • Would it change your vote if you knew that wood-biofuel plants are carbon neutral? [absolutely NOT true!]
  • Would it change your vote if you knew that Massachusetts has more forested land now than it did 100 years ago?

    • After these three biased questions that were clearly tilted toward counting me as an opponent of the bill, I stopped the guy and said I thought this was a survey, and not a blatant attempt to feed misinformation to me in an attempt to change my opinion. He said, “hey, I’m just reading the questions!” I said I understood that, but I didn’t appreciate being manipulated like this, and I ended the interview. My caller ID told me he had a 609 area code (New Jersey), incidentally.

    I am totally sure this so-called survey will be used to trumpet the citizens of Massachusetts’ supposed stance in favor of biofuels and against the proposed law. While the law’s definitions could be sharpened, I actually feel that eliminating nuclear power and large-scale wood-burning biomass plants from being counted in the progress toward a Green economy is a GOOD thing. And I’ll be directing my friends who are active in the anti-biofuel campaigns to this blog, so they can see exactly what their opponents are up to—sleazy and easily discredited “surveys” like this.

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    By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

    Remember that old bumper sticker, “Trees are America’s Renewable Resource”? It’s true. You can regenerate a harvestable forest in 20 years or so: a nanosecond compared to the millions of years necessary to create fossil fuels.

    However, and it’s a BIG however—biofuels such as timber or scrap wood, or for that matter, corn-based ethanol, are for the most part not sustainable. They are far from carbon-neutral, and in fact generate large amounts of carbon and other pollutants. Think about it: coal and oil are fossilized carbon that originated from plants and animals; wood and corn haven’t fossilized the carbon, but they are very much carbon-based life forms, and we add a lot of carbon back into the air when we burn them.

    So the effect of these fuels on climate change is negative: they push us more in the direction we DON’T want to go.

    Add to that such effects as habitat destruction from clear-cutting, food shortages resulting from diversion of protein crops into energy that powers machines instead of humans and animals, and toxicity from burning chemically treated wood scraps, and it’s pretty clear that this path isn’t sustainable.

    Are there biofuel technologies that actually are sustainable? Maybe. The Q microbe certainly seems to have promise. As a non-scientist, I leave that answer to those who know more than me.

    In the meantime, let’s focus on those technologies that clearly ARE sustainable. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that we could easily save 70 to 80 percent of our energy by simply designing for maximum energy utilization and eliminating the considerable waste of our present systems. Beyond that, truly sustainable technologies such as small-scale solar, wind, and hydro generated at or very near the point of use hold out a lot more promise than either biomass plants or centralized coal, oil, and nuclear.

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