Council for Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD

A group of SCAD Historic Preservation students urged shoppers to spend their money locally over the Labor Day Weekend with a Web site and merchant outreach program that garnered plenty of attention from local media. A Savannah Morning News story described the sustainability angle at work in Savannah’s Shop Local Challenge:

“The benefits of shopping in locally owned stores are highlighted in the student campaign and include local character and well-being, environmental sustainability by providing walkable town centers that reduce automobile use and suburban sprawl.”

A second Savannah Morning News story is here.

Photo credit: Elizabeth Patterson

From the Savannah Morning News:

When Scott Boylston began hearing about nuclear power as a clean, safe and cheap solution to global warming, he knew it was a great topic for his graphic design students.

“Poster design is all about generating a public dialogue,” said Boylston, professor of graphic design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. “Every project in the class focuses on socially relevant material.”

Making the subject even more pressing locally is a plan to expand the nuclear power plant closest to Savannah - Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River near Augusta.

In Alison Johnson’s poster, poker chips stack up in the shape of cooling towers. The poster reads: “Nuclear bets … the risks aren’t worth it.”

Read more of Mary Landers’ story here.

MIT just announced what may be one of the most important breakthroughs of all time in the field of alternative energy. They have demonstrated how to use solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen to be stored inside a fuel cell:

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan’s new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

This process (known as electrolysis) is normally very expensive and thus is not useful for home storage of solar energy. If this pans out, Al Gore’s vision will become a reality. It is now distinctly possible that within 10 years time all residential electricity in the U.S. could be generated using this method. If our cars were all electric or electric/solar fuel hybrids (totally speculating on that latter part), there’s the other part of the equation.

Check out the video on MIT TechTV.

Biodiesel is often touted as a green alternative to gasoline. I was curious how green it really is, so I did a little investigating. This article from the Union of Concerned Scientists (a pro-green site) provided some helpful information. At the most fundamental level, there is this:

According to a model developed by the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), neat (100%) biodiesel from soybeans can cut global warming pollution by more than half relative to conventional petroleum based diesel. The emissions benefits are higher for canola oil.

Sounds like we are off a good start. There are a couple things to keep in mind as we proceed, though. Biodiesel produces greenhouse gases. If you convert to biodiesel and increase the amount you drive, thinking “it’s all good’” you have made an error in judgment. Also, and we’ll get back to this in a moment, these comparisons are being made to petroleum diesel, not conventional gasoline engines.

Much of the world’s biodiesel is being produced from food crops, which involves either using existing crop land for fuel production or clearing of forests for planting. If forests are cleared for planting, we lose the carbon sequestration those trees would have provided. It is possible that the entire life cycle of carbon emissions created by producing biodiesel in this way is greater than that for petroleum. Now, the good news: “When biodiesel is made from recycled food oil or other waste products these land use considerations do not apply.” The problem is that while you might think that using waste would be the obvious way to go, there are still a number of issues with using it on a large scale. In the mean time, the soybean biodiesel industry is growing.

So, if you are running your car off of waste oil you collect from restaurants, you are indeed cutting greenhouse gases. Same if you are converting waste oil to biodiesel in your backyard. But as we press forward in our search for alternative fuels, we need to keep in mind that most people will be using commercial fuels produced from food crops, which to reiterate, may give no lifecycle benefit at all. However, there are couple of future technologies that could change the equation dramatically. One is “biomass gasification [which] may allow the use of other waste streams to be converted to synthetic diesel fuels, expanding the pool of potentially low carbon diesel.” Another is “non-conventional sources like algae [which] may have the potential to provide dramatic (90%) reductions in global warming pollution.” But those are not going to be happening any time soon.

There is one more issue, and it’s one that often seems to get little airtime these days. Remember when environmentalism was mainly about pollution—clean air, clean water, and all that. Well, when comparing biodiesel to petroleum diesel, the effects on pollution are mixed:

biodiesel can offer distinct environmental advantages over petroleum diesel fuel. … the use of biodiesel blends in an existing diesel vehicle can reduce the emissions of the tailpipe pollutants associated with conventional diesel including particulate matter (PM or soot) and hydrocarbons (HC). However, using biodiesel may result in greater emissions of smog-forming nitrogen oxides than using conventional diesel.

So, some good and some bad news there. But here’s the thing though, all diesels (bio and petrol) are bad for the environment in terms of emissions other than greenhouse gases relative to gasoline-powered vehicles:

Gasoline-powered models are better than traditional diesel and biodiesel vehicles on toxic soot and smog-forming emissions. Diesels can produce as much as 10 to 20 times more toxic particulates than their gasoline counterparts, more than can be made up for with the use of biodiesel. Diesels fair even worse when it comes to smog-forming nitrogen oxide emissions, with greater than 20 times the emissions of a comparable gasoline vehicle.

So, while biodiesel is better than petrol diesel in some ways and worse in others, both are far worse than gasoline in this regard. In the rush to slow global warming, we can’t forget about the devastating effects of other emissions on the environment. And while global warming is a long term threat to our planet, these other emissions can cause very serious short term harm (as well as long term harm). You are thus doing a better thing for the planet if you buy a gasoline car that’s gets 40 mpg than you are if you convert an older diesel that gets 20 mpg to run on 100% biodiesel. (Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that. The best cases scenarios for biodiesel assume you are using 100% of the fuel to run your vehicle. However, petrol diesels need to be converted to do this. That’ll cost you about $2,000. One more thing: I just noticed that sites that are touting biodiesel and selling related products have a decidedly different analysis of the carbon emissions related to biodiesel—in fact, calling it carbon neutral.) For now, I am going to trust a non-profit group of scientists who are concerned with the overall issues over companies trying to make a buck.

With high gas prices on everyone’s mind, Friday, June 20 is a great time to Dump the Pump, again! While Dump the Pump continues to promote the use of all forms of alternative transportation (bikes, scooters, feet) this month’s event focuses on encouraging people to leave their cars at home and ride public transportation to save money, conserve gasoline, and help reduce traffic congestion.

Chatham Area Transit Authority offers an extensive system of routes throughout the Savannah/Chatham County community, free downtown shuttles as well as ferry service across the Savannah River to Savannah Harbour. Bus, shuttle and ferry schedules are available on CATs website at catchacat.org or by calling 912-233-5767. Once in downtown, three free shuttle routes are available. To encourage increased bus ridership, the Savannah Mall continually offers parking for commuters choosing to access bus routes at the stops located at the mall.

Recognizing that public transportation may not be a feasible option for some commuters, those who want to participate in Dump the Pump are encouraged to find carpool partners through Coastal Commuters. Dump the Pump also encourages commuters to take advantage of the connectivity offered by Savannah and walk or bike to their destinations.

And finally, remember to take the pledge to Dump the Pump at savannahtransit.com.

Dump the Pump is a collaborative effort of the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority (SDRA), Chatham Area Transit Authority (CAT), the City of Savannah, Coastal Commuters, Council for Sustainability and Eco Practices at SCAD, the Savannah Bicycle Campaign and the Pedestrian Advocates of the Coastal Empire.

Click here to download a .pdf of the Dump the Pump poster to post in your workplace. To download a map of free downtown shuttle routes, click here.

Carbon offsets are payments made to companies that can more easily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, thus allowing the buyer to continue producing the amount of emissions that are “offset.” Sometimes, this is more cost-effective than the buyer reducing their emissions. Say, for example, one company would have to spend $1,000 to change some process to reduce emissions by X number of units, but another company can do the same thing for $500 because whatever process they are going to change just costs less to implement. The key is that the seller of the carbon offsets must be doing something other than business as usual to achieve the reductions. Well, it turns out there are issues that have to be carefully considered if and when we put this option on the table.

There has been a lot of hub-bub in the news about carbon trading these days. For advocates of carbon trading as part of the solution to global warming, it was a major disappointment when the Senate republicans used procedural rules to effectively kill the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. However, there is apparently some controversy over this approach. I had read an recent article in Mother Jones called “Turning Carbon Into Gold.” MJ is a highly regarded progressive magazine known for its investigative journalism. As such, they are not cheerleaders for the left and have been known to write many articles over the years that really annoyed the progressive crowd. As such, they are considered a pretty reputable source of information. According to the article:

[P]rominent environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are resisting the inclusion of offsets in the bills. “We feel that offsets are very suspect,” says Shawnee Hoover, legislative director for Friends of the Earth. “The whole system is just rife with the potential for corruption.”

Opponents cite the perverse incentives that have been created under Kyoto’s CDM, which last year authorized hundreds of offset projects to be converted into $1.2-$1.8 billion worth of carbon credits. At the heart of their concerns is the question of whether these projects are “additional”—in other words, do they create new emissions reductions, or simply bankroll endeavors where carbon credits are incidental, yet profitable, byproducts? A 2006 United Nations investigation found that a third of CDM-approved offset projects in India would have happened even without Kyoto funding. In China, almost every new hydroelectric and natural-gas-fired power plant has applied for CDM money, casting doubt on whether they really require the offset revenue to be built. “It looks like the CDM is just turning into a production subsidy,” says Stanford University climate policy expert Michael Wara, “and that’s not a good way to spend our money.”

It seems to be a clever idea to use market incentives to reduce carbon emissions. After all, we live in a world where corporations often do as they please unless they are restrained by the government. However, corporations are pretty good at preventing government from doing things they don’t want or mitigating the true effects in some way. In this case, selling carbon offsets has created a very lucrative market. Thus, an opportunity arose for money to be made in one market while money was lost in another. However, the amount lost to the carbon buyers was not near as much as if they had been forced to clean up their acts. It was a compromise that managed to get a law passed in Europe regulating carbon trading. However, the results are questionable. Consider one out outcome of Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM):

In total, CDM-approved offsets have captured or destroyed the equivalent of 135 million tons of CO2 emissions worldwide, slightly more than the annual emissions of Pakistan. Yet an astounding 51 percent of those offsets have been generated by paying refrigerant manufacturers to incinerate HFC-23, an industrial byproduct and potent greenhouse gas, instead of spewing it into the atmosphere. The price of HFC-23 offsets can be worth more than twice the market price of the refrigerants themselves, which has had the unintended effect of encouraging refrigerant companies to produce (and then destroy) even more greenhouse gases in the name of eliminating them. The 43,000 tons of HFC-23 incinerated between 2003 and 2012 will generate $6 billion worth of carbon credits, but cost just $150 million to destroy, according to Wara. He describes the practice as “an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of resources.”

Now, just because the system has been abused does not mean it cannot be properly regulated. There are already agencies and mechanisms in place to prevent this type of thing from happening. John Bennett has an informative post on this subject on his Sustainable Savannah blog. This part seems to be the key:

If you are interested in purchasing carbon offsets to mitigate airline travel, car travel, all those burgers you’ve been eating, etc. make sure that the company you are purchasing them from VERIFIES and VALIDATES their greenhouse gas reduction projects using an independent standard (TerraPass uses the Voluntary Carbon Standard). Verification and Validation ensure that offsets are producing authentic benefits that are “additional” to business-as-usual activities, measurable, permanent and unique.

My sense is that this is potentially a viable approach, but the current system used in Europe has already been corrupted. That is probably the reason that while the EU claims to be on target for their emissions reductions goals, the details of their own report suggest it has little or nothing to do with carbon trading. As reported on the Breakthrough Blog (a site run by two progressive environmentalists):

When you take out the UK and Germany, whose emissions decreased due to factors exogenous to Kyoto or EU climate and energy policies (UK emissions declined precipitously after Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners union in the 1980’s and the UK switched over to North Sea natural gas. German emissions declined by similarly after reunification, when East German heavy industry collapsed), the remaining advanced developed economies in the EU (call them the EU 13) saw their emissions increase by almost 12 percent between 1990 and 2005. With full implementation of existing policies, projections for 2010 are in fact marginally worse among these nations, exceeding 1990 emissions by over 12 percent.

Even under the best case scenario in the report for EU 15 emissions, which projects an 11 percent reduction in GHG from 1990 levels, over 70 percent of that reduction can be accounted for solely by the reduction in actual emissions in the UK and Germany between 1990 and 2005 (put another way, the 8 percent reduction required by Kyoto can be almost entirely accounted for by the reduction in emissions in the UK and Germany since 1990).

The guys who run this site are not a couple of hacks or trolls. They have written a best-selling book on the subject, which got rave reviews from major liberal and mainstream publications. Since the CDM does not seem to have accomplished much in its present form, it might be a mixed blessing that Lieberman-Warner failed. So, what’s to be done? Well, we are going to have to wait until the next administration, that’s for sure. Luckily, for the greens among us, both of the presidential candidates have green leanings. If I recall correctly, both of them also supported this bill.

Scott Boylston, Professor of Graphic Design, has created a pretty comprehensive outline of the steps necessary to make SCAD a more sustainable campus. While I have been lingering on my pet ideas for the last two posts, it’s time to get down to business. Scott recommends a series of incremental steps to get us where we need to go. Like all good plans, it begins not with a series of random moves, but rather the laying of some important foundations.

STEP ONE
Join American College & University Presidents Climate commitment (ACUPCC)
Within 1 year — complete a comprehensive Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory
Within 2 years — develop an institutional action plan for becoming climate neutral
— initiate 2 or more of the tangible actions recommended by ACUPCC
Institute action plan according to our own goals and objectives.

While there are any number of things we could do now to make SCAD more sustainable, a careful analysis will be necessary to determine which of the myriad things we could do, we should do. Once we determine what our level of emissions is, we will then need to determine the primary causes, the corrective actions we can take, and the strategy to get them accomplished.

Joining the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment sounds easy enough. I am not sure if we have already done this, but I’ll look into it. Doing a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory sounds trickier as there is a lot of data to gather and I am not quite sure where to access it off hand. However, that is a question that can probably be answered easily enough once we have the right heads together. It may sound a little bureaucratic to some out there on the green scene who might think we should just take action now, but in order to get all the vested parties on board, we have to plan something that is actually manageable and affordable. A little analysis will go a long toward identifying the most cost-effective way to achieve the council’s goals.

District TV News, the television news arm of SCAD’s student newspaper, produced a nice profile of Jason Dean. In it, he describes his role in recycling efforts at the Oglethorpe House residence hall. Watch it here.

Meghan Woodcock, an interior design M.F.A. candidate at SCAD, was awarded Best of Competition for the 2008 Student Sustainable Design Competition, sponsored by the International Interior Design Association. Woodcock will receive $1,000 and a complimentary IIDA student membership for the 2008-09 school year for her “Disaster Relief Transportable Schools” design. Read more here.

I was going to write on another issue, but then I saw this op-ed piece in USA Today titled “Want to save the planet? Stay home.” Since my last post, I have become even more convinced that allowing some degree of telecommuting might be the single easiest thing an institution could do to become greener. As the columnist states:

…every morning, 76% of America’s commuters drive, alone, an average of 25 minutes to their workplaces. Many of these people then proceed to e-mail or call people in other places. Indeed, about 40% of the U.S. workforce has jobs that, largely, do not need to be done from a central location. If the millions of Americans who never work from home, but could, stayed in their PJs, this would save a sizeable chunk of our oil imports from the Persian Gulf.

“This takes windmills and all the other alternative fuels combined and tops them,” says Kate Lister, founder of the telecommuting research company Undress4Success.

Switching to alternative fuels to such an extent that they will actually have short-term impact on greenhouse is just unfeasible. The technology and infrastructure do not currently exist and most people are unwilling or unable to pay the added costs at this time. Contrast to telecommuting. The technology exists; it reduces costs, and the typical worker would absolutely buy in wihtout a second thought. As mentioned previously, the oft-stated concern has to do with worker productivity:

“Management still thinks people need to be in the office for eight hours a day in order to be productive,” says Makower. “Anyone who works in an office eight hours knows that probably three hours and 45 minutes are spent being productive.” (Are you reading this at work?)

However, a rather large body of peer-reviewed research shows overwhelmingly that this belief is just dead wrong:

Partly because people waste so much time commuting, and waste so much time at work while consuming electricity and office space, companies that have implemented telecommuting programs have seen economic benefits — rather than productivity losses — from this decision. A meta-analysis of 46 studies, published in the November Journal of Applied Psychology, found that telecommuting was associated with higher supervisor performance ratings, increased job satisfaction and a reduction in intent to leave the company.

The abstract from the actual study lends support to my previously stated position about partially telecommuting being the most beneficial arrangement for the workplace:

What are the positive and negative consequences of telecommuting? How do these consequences come about? When are these consequences more or less potent? The authors answer these questions through construction of a theoretical framework and meta-analysis of 46 studies in natural settings involving 12,883 employees. Telecommuting had small but mainly beneficial effects on proximal outcomes, such as perceived autonomy and (lower) work–family conflict. Importantly, telecommuting had no generally detrimental effects on the quality of workplace relationships. Telecommuting also had beneficial effects on more distal outcomes, such as job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and role stress. These beneficial consequences appeared to be at least partially mediated by perceived autonomy. Also, high-intensity telecommuting (more than 2.5 days a week) accentuated telecommuting’s beneficial effects on work–family conflict but harmed relationships with coworkers. Results provide building blocks for a more complete theoretical and practical treatment of telecommuting.