The Council for Sustainability at SCAD

An article in the Oct. 19 New York Times surveys what colleges and universities are doing to encourage bicycle use. Some of the benefits of bicycle programs are neatly summarized in this snip from the article:

“The goal, college and university officials said, is to ease critical shortages of parking and to change the car culture that clogs campus roadways and erodes the community feel that comes with walking or biking around campus.”

While students are the focus of many of these efforts, faculty and staff are also being encouraged to leave their cars at home by programs that incentivize bicycle commuting, coupled with disincentives to discourage single occupant motorvehicle commutes. The objective is to increase the percentage of college employees who arrive by bike. Obviously the number of employee bicycle commuters will be affected by a variety of factors that vary from institution to institution including bicycle infrastructure (both on-campus and in municipalities), terrain and weather.

What kinds of percentages are attainable? Consider a recent US News and World Report story that suggests less than 1 percent of trips in the United States are made by bike. By this measure, Keys Hall’s bicycle commuting rate is an astronomical success.

Home to the communications and student media departments at SCAD, around 55 full-time employees work in Keys Hall. From my observations, at least 10 of my coworkers commute by bike at least occasionally. If my math is correct, that means that around 18 percent of Keys Hall employees arrive at work on a bicycle at least once a week. At least half of these are daily bicycle commuters. Consider that in Portland, the city that boasts our nation’s highest bicycle commuting rates, 3.5 percent of trips to work are made by bike. Keys Hall clearly leaves Portland in the dust. If Keys Hall were a nation, it would be tied with Denmark for the percentage of its population that gets to work via bicycle.

Can any other SCAD building top Keys Hall’s bicycle commuting percentage? What can be done to increase employee bicycle commutes to other college facilities? Please discuss in the comments section.

I realize it’s not even close to Valentine’s Day , but I feel it’s time for me to be upfront and admit that I’m in love with Skidaway Island State Park. That being said I have to add the caveat that the course of this love, like most affairs of the heart, hasn’t exactly run true. Some of the bumps are pretty big, too, like the attempt to kill my dog, Rico, but then love is never rational.

It was a hot September evening when I first stood on a wooden walkway overlooking slow-moving muddy stream that wound through a jumbled landscape of palms, live oaks and slash pines. The scene reminded me of nothing less than the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks in the nineteen nineties.

A botanist could point out that that the greenery in the Okavango would be entirely different, but to my untrained, artist eyes it looked a lot like Africa. Of course even I could see that the bird life was different, but I could half close my eyes and the egret would become a sacred ibis, the grey heron would become a marabou stork, the American black vulture wheeling above me would become a bateleur eagle, and I could almost be back in Botswana. In fact Skidaway Park looks so much like Botswana that I could recommend sitting on a bench and reading Alexander Chancellor’s “The Number One Ladies Detective Agency,” which is set in that country

Don’t sit too still for too long though. That log-like item floating just below the surface of the muddy swamp water—and somehow not quite drifting with the current like a bona-fide log—may not be a swift and deadly Nile crocodile, but it is still a creature worthy of respect. The non-swift and timid Mississippi alligator may be horribly afraid of humans, but its fear might not prevent it from doing some violence with the intent of putting its tiny but unsettled mind at rest.
The adjective “swift” is something of a relative term. One evening the water of a pretty, tree-lined pond exploded, and a five foot long alligator charged at Rico the dog with its jaws wide open. Luckily the alligator had no chance of catching the dog, a lean-limbed shepherd-mix, who can leap a ten-foot ditch when chasing some morsel or plaything such as a cat, and possibly an even wider span when escaping an alligator

Once at a safe distance Rico turned and barked at the reptile. The alligator itself, perhaps feeling a little silly, lowered its upper jaw as slowly as a drawbridge after the ship has passed, and slunk back into the primaeval ooze. It was only when the excitement had drained away that it dawned on me that the alligator could easily have charged out of the opposite bank of its dew pond, where I was standing. I cannot leap a ten foot ditch, whether in pursuit of a cat or anything else, and the end of this story could well have been very different.

Now we walk the paths of Skidaway Park, an older and wiser dog and his older and wiser human. The alligator incident now a little spice of apprehension on a country walk that I hope we will take together for many years to come.
Or perhaps not. Nothing makes you feel more alive than a brush with death, and an alligator attack is a thrilling reminder of mortality, but the appearance of bulldozers near the entrance to Skidaway Park is a different kind of reminder that nothing lasts forever. The bulldozers are there to remove several hundred ancient oak trees along Route 204. Initially I thought they were there to widen the road, but I’ve asked around and as yet I’m not sure what the work is about, nevertheless the loss of the trees on the edge of the park will continue the process of shrinking the buffer zone around the park, and my artistic imagination will have to work harder, not just to turn black headed vultures into bateleur eagles, but also to make the newly-visible rows of trophy homes vanish.

So visit Skidaway Park and maybe you’ll fall in love with it too, and maybe, just maybe, if the park gets a lot of visitors, then someone high up might think it’s important enough to preserve.

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.

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.