Can plankton help save the planet?

The New York Times published an article about us today. The article focuses on questions about plankton sequestration, ranging from profitability of carbon credits to effectiveness of iron fertilisation. These issues are clearly important, but in the end, it may not really matter.

Global warming is a problem that needs to be fought now - not later. And ocean sequestration is one of few strategies that can correct for our dirty past on a large scale. Even if iron fertilisation fails to lower carbon dioxide concentrations, having that information is invaluable. Someone needs to figure out what CO2 mitigation strategies are going to work, and we can't wait for a hundred different studies to be conducted before going into the oceans.

We're taking our chances on this one, hoping "save the planet, and make a little money of the side"(as our CEO likes to say). If things go as planned, we'll have taken millions of pounds of carbon out of the atmophere and begun to restore ocean ecosystems by the end of the year. The upswing is, even if things fail completely, then we'll still have obtained priceless information about our oceans, and our fight against global warming. And we're going to do it without burning a single tax dollar.

The New York Times raises some important questions, but in some ways misses the point. What really matters is that we're doing something, and that's a lot more than most people can say.

Carbon Bartering

Since Planktos was the official carbon neutralizing agency of the Chicago Green Festival, Russ George (our CEO) was asked to give a public speech at the event.

On the way back to the aiport after the festival, Russ told his taxi driver about the trip. Moved by our company's mission, the taxi driver accepted payment of the cab fare in the form of carbon offsets for the taxi.

I find this wonderfully hilarious. And good for the jolly green cabbie.

Buy one pound, get one free!

Today, I purchased a package of grapes. On the label of the grapes, it says that the fruit was “grown in Chile.”

This doesn't surprise me. In my birth-given rights as a wealthy American, I deserve to consume any piece of food I feel like consuming at any given point in time, even if this requires shipping the piece of food halfway around the world for my personal self enjoyment. Obviously.

So, how much CO2 is produced by shipping grapes around the world? Let’s find out.

Some rough estimates:
The middle of Chile is about 5270mi from the middle of the US.
A 747 cargo plane uses about 6.8 gal/mi. Yikes.
At full capacity, a 747 can carry an impressive 450,000 pounds of cargo.

So, we use a little math magic and we get
(6.8 gal/mi x 19.4 lbs of CO2/gal gasoline x 5270 miles) / 450,000 lbs cargo =
1.5 pounds CO2 per pound of fruit

This is actually much less than I had expected. To put this number into perspective, the average American produces a whopping 122 pounds of CO2 daily. Although, eating grapes in April is rather unnecessary, and every pound I can keep out of the atmosphere makes a difference.

I’ll make up for myself at the farmer’s market this weekend, to free myself of liberal guilt.

Carbon Credit Card?

One day, your wallet might hold not just your credit, debit and department store loyalty cards. It might also hold a carbon card. One day, you might be worrying not just about how much money is in your bank account, but also how much is in your carbon account.

Every time you fill up at a petrol station, every time you pay your electricity bill, you will be grumbling not just about the price of fuel or power, but about the price of carbon.

In this future world carbon will be the currency you need to pay for your contribution to greenhouse gas pollution.

You will be allotted a "free" amount of carbon to spend on electricity, petrol or air travel. If you exceed your account you will have to buy carbon from someone else or go without.

Radical though it might sound, it is a concept being taken seriously in Britain by both the Labour Government and the Tory Opposition as they try to outbid each other in the climate change stakes.

The British Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband - tipped by some to be the country's next prime minister - wants to test a scheme under which all British citizens would be issued an identical annual carbon allowance, stored as points on an electronic card. Points would be deducted at the point of sale for every purchase of non-renewable energy, according to reports in the British media.

If holders do not use their full carbon allotment - say, because they used public transport instead of a car or took domestic holidays instead of flying overseas - they would be able to sell their leftover points.

The idea of individuals being held directly responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions is being taken so seriously in Britain that the Conservative Opposition wants to apply it to the airline industry. It has proposed a series of taxes on flights, including a fuel duty.

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Green is good in any shade

‘Green’ is not synonymous with ‘elite.’ It’s not a club, it’s not exclusive, and there are no rules to being green. Every person who ever recycled a bottle or rode a bicycle is helping to some degree, and any shade of green is better than none at all.

The reason I say this is because recently, I have witnessed environmentally conscious people criticizing one another for the way they practice their beliefs. I heard a bicyclist talk down to a carpooler. I saw a vegetarian sneer at a meat-eater… in an organic restaurant. Even Al Gore is being criticized for using too much electricity, as if his impact as a public speaker does not do enough for the planet.

This phenomenon is especially confusing to me. I’m sure Snoop Dogg uses just as much energy as Al, and he’s not getting criticized for it. Even President Bush gets by without having his energy bill scrutinized. If Al is a bad person for heating his swimming pool, then I am a better person than my vegan friend, because she once killed a mosquito while we were camping. (Even though I was eating a hamburger.)

When it comes down to it, we are fighting a difficult battle, and we are going to have moments of frustration. Let us channel that frustration into warmth and encouragement, instead of separating into Yankees and Dodgers. With a little love, we can inspire a Hummer-driver to stop at the local farmer’s market. And that is a good first step.

(And while we’re at it, let’s make sure Snoop Dogg keeps his tires properly inflated.)

Watt's your problem?

Sometimes people ask me why global warming focuses on CO2 instead of heat. When I burn gasoline, doesn’t it produce heat? Isn’t heat responsible for global warming?

When you drive your car, fuel gets burned and a lot of heat is produced. In order to keep your engine cool, this heat gets sent through the radiator, where it gets released into the atmosphere. This warms the air around your car and keeps your car cool.

Despite this, the amount of heat released into the atmosphere while driving is very small when compared to the amount of heat trapped by carbon dioxide. Let’s look at some numbers to make sure.

World-wide, we are using somewhere around 6 x10^12 (6 million million) watts of energy at any point in time. That’s a whole lot of light bulbs. Since burning fuel usually makes more heat than useful energy (about 3 times as much), we’ll estimate that 18 million million watts of heat are being produced at a time. Yikes!

Now let’s compare that to the amount of heat being trapped by greenhouse gases. According to the most recent IPCC report, the atmosphere captures 1.6 watts/square meter more heat than it did before the industrial revolution. That means for every square meter of space on our planet, 1.6 extra watts of sunlight are warming the atmosphere. How much heat does that produce? Well,

1.6 watts/sq meter x 510 trillion square meters on our planet =
816 million million watts of heat trapped by greenhouse gases

That’s a whole lot more than we calculated for burning fuels.

Maybe heat produced by a car engine or a power plant is enough to warm the earth, but I am pretty sure that greenhouse gases are responsible for our hyper-speed climate change. At this very moment, greenhouse gases are warming our planet 45 times more than the burning of fuels.

Global Warming May Transform Southwest United States Into Dustbowl

Global warming will permanently change the climate of the American Southwest, making it so much hotter and drier that Dust Bowl-scale droughts will become common, a new climate report concludes.

Much of the nation west of the Mississippi River is likely to get drier because of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but the greatest effect will be felt in already arid areas on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. By the end of the century, the climate researchers predict, annual rainfall in that region will have decline by a worrisome 10 to 20 percent.

A similar drying-out of the "subtropical" belt above and below the equator will hit the Mediterranean region and parts of Africa, South America and South Asia, the report said, as the overall warming of the oceans and surface air transforms basic wind and precipitation patterns around the Earth.

The prediction of a drier Southwest was made by 16 of 19 climate computer models assembled for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international scientific effort to assess the impact of global warming, which is releasing a new report today. The drought results were analyzed separately in a paper published online yesterday by the journal Science, which also predicted that regions outside the drying belt will get more rain.

"It's a situation of the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer when it comes to rainfall," said Yochanan Kushnir of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, one of the paper's authors. "From a climate perspective, these changes are quite dramatic."

He said that the paper's authors have a high level of confidence that droughts will develop, and that they will result from increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases created through burning fossil fuels and other human activities.

The researchers said droughts in the affected regions will be different from those in the past, which were caused by local weather conditions and the effects of El Ni?o and La Ni?a ocean-temperature variations. The Southwest has had significantly below-average rainfall since 1999, and preliminary information suggests that global warming is already playing a role in the current drought.

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Emissions Already Affecting Climate, Report Finds

Published: April 6, 2007

BRUSSELS, April 6 — Earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being affected, for better and mostly for worse, by the atmospheric buildup of smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, top climate experts said today.

And while curbs in emissions can limit risks, they said, vulnerable regions must adapt to shifting weather patterns and rising seas.

The conclusions came in the latest report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has tracked research on human-caused global warming since being created by the United Nations in 1988. In February, the panel released a report that for the first time concluded with 90-percent certainty that humans were the main cause of warming since 1950. But in this report, focusing on the impact of warming, for the first time the group described how species, water supplies, ice sheets, and regional climate conditions were already responding.

At a news conference capping four days of debate between scientists and representatives from more than 100 governments, Martin Parry, the co-chairman of the team that wrote the new report, said widespread effects were already measurable, with much more to come.

“We’re no longer arm waving with models,” said Dr. Parry, who identified areas most affected as the Arctic, Sub-Saharan Africa, small islands and Asia’s sprawling, crowded, flood-prone river deltas. “This is empirical information on the ground.”

The report said that climate patterns were shifting in ways that would bring benefits in some places — including more rainfall and longer growing seasons in high latitudes, opening Arctic seaways, and reduced deaths from cold — but significant human hardship and ecological losses in others.

The panel said the long-term outlook for all regions was for trouble should temperatures rise 3 to 5 degrees fahrenheit or so, with consequences ranging from the likely extinction of perhaps a fourth of the world’s species to eventual inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people.

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Supreme Court Says EPA To Regulate Vehicle Emissions

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY

By a bitterly divided vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the Environmental Protection Agency has authority to regulate vehicle emissions that cause global warming.

In a major victory for environmentalists, the justices rejected the Bush administration arguments that any limits on new cars and trucks would be incremental at best and not help solve the nation's pollution problems related to increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

"Today's ruling is a watershed moment in the fight against global warming," said Carl Pope, Sierra Club's executive director.

"The ruling is a total rejection of the Bush administration's refusal to use its existing authority to meet the challenge posed by global warming. … It also vindicates the leadership that California and other states have taken on this issue," he said.

The overall tone of the 5-4 decision, written by the liberal wing of the court, showed concern for global warming and respect for the worries voiced by Massachusetts and other states about diminished coast line and other atmospheric problems associated with warmer temperatures.

The Bush administration had said that those concerns — brought before the justices by 12 states, three cities and several public health and environmental groups — did not merit federal court intervention. The administration also argued that the agency lacked the authority to regulate air pollutants associated with climate change under the Clean Air Act.

"The EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

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